#fuck apple their products suck man

[azurine-cryptid]

watching linux videos because i really wanna use linux when i get myself a new laptop

kind of still dont really understand cause I've never been computer smart but i like the sound of it

[toytulini]

"why are people mad about AI being pushed on them when they SHOULD be mad about all the privacy erosion??"

1) plenty of us bitches are mad and annoyed about both, actually.

2) the privacy erosion has become the normalized state of existence for the average person for the last 10 fucking years at least, its snuck in, they disguise it as Convenient Features to Help You Shop Better, and thats IF they bother telling you theyre doing it, instead of just opting all your shit in without asking, its so fucking normalized that yeah, a lot of people do not bother to question it, they just sigh in resignation and go, yeah, i guess, do i even have other options? and they do, but theyre an investment of learning and time you dont have capacity for at the moment, or maybe you do but you feel like you dont bc it feels like a bigger hurdle than it is, and computer stuff is already kind of intimidating, cos man, what if you hit the wrong thing and brick your expensive ass machine? easier to just let it data harvest, you guess, it cant be THAT bad, can it? plenty of people live like this, put up with this, seek this out, its easier not to resist the privacy erosion. fucking whatever, i guess. yeah, i guess twitter i mean X, or walmart, or facebook, can just have all of my contact info and my phone number and my birthday and phone contacts and bank information and fuck it, give them my ssn while im at it. less effort later. this is just how tech has been for the last 10 yrs. no one can effectively get rage clicks on this topic anymore bc we all fucking know. it sucks and we know. what do you want me to fucking do about it? i have other shit to deal with more urgently. etc

3)

you cant turn anything on or log onto anything or go anywhere without hearing about whatever new shit theyre throwing AI at for no real reason, no one will fucking Shut Up about AI, and its Annoying, man

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“Disenshittify or Die”

I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).

Last weekend, I traveled to Las Vegas for Defcon 32, where I had the immense privilege of giving a solo talk on Track 1, entitled "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification":

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861

This was a followup to last year's talk, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification," a talk that kicked off a lot of international interest in my analysis of platform decay ("enshittification"):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4

The Defcon organizers have earned a restful week or two, and that means that the video of my talk hasn't yet been posted to Defcon's Youtube channel, so in the meantime, I thought I'd post a lightly edited version of my speech crib. If you're headed to Burning Man, you can hear me reprise this talk at Palenque Norte (7&E); I'm kicking off their lecture series on Tuesday, Aug 27 at 1PM.

==

What the fuck happened to the old, good internet?

I mean, sure, our bosses were a little surveillance-happy, and they were usually up for sharing their data with the NSA, and whenever there was a tossup between user security and growth, it was always YOLO time.

But Google Search used to work. Facebook used to show you posts from people you followed. Uber used to be cheaper than a taxi and pay the driver more than a cabbie made. Amazon used to sell products, not Shein-grade self-destructing dropshipped garbage from all-consonant brands. Apple used to defend your privacy, rather than spying on you with your no-modifications-allowed Iphone.

There was a time when you searching for an album on Spotify would get you that album – not a playlist of insipid AI-generated covers with the same name and art.

Microsoft used to sell you software – sure, it was buggy – but now they just let you access apps in the cloud, so they can watch how you use those apps and strip the features you use the most out of the basic tier and turn them into an upcharge.

What – and I cannot stress this enough – the fuck happened?!

I’m talking about enshittification.

Here’s what enshittification looks like from the outside: First, you see a company that’s being good to its end users. Google puts the best search results at the top; Facebook shows you a feed of posts from people and groups you followl; Uber charges small dollars for a cab; Amazon subsidizes goods and returns and shipping and puts the best match for your product search at the top of the page.

That’s stage one, being good to end users. But there’s another part of this stage, call it stage 1a). That’s figuring out how to lock in those users.

There’s so many ways to lock in users.

If you’re Facebook, the users do it for you. You joined Facebook because there were people there you wanted to hang out with, and other people joined Facebook to hang out with you.

That’s the old “network effects” in action, and with network effects come “the collective action problem." Because you love your friends, but goddamn are they a pain in the ass! You all agree that FB sucks, sure, but can you all agree on when it’s time to leave?

No way.

Can you agree on where to go next?

Hell no.

You’re there because that’s where the support group for your rare disease hangs out, and your bestie is there because that’s where they talk with the people in the country they moved away from, then there’s that friend who coordinates their kid’s little league car pools on FB, and the best dungeon master you know isn’t gonna leave FB because that’s where her customers are.

So you’re stuck, because even though FB use comes at a high cost – your privacy, your dignity and your sanity – that’s still less than the switching cost you’d have to bear if you left: namely, all those friends who have taken you hostage, and whom you are holding hostage

Now, sometimes companies lock you in with money, like Amazon getting you to prepay for a year’s shipping with Prime, or to buy your Audible books on a monthly subscription, which virtually guarantees that every shopping search will start on Amazon, after all, you’ve already paid for it.

Sometimes, they lock you in with DRM, like HP selling you a printer with four ink cartridges filled with fluid that retails for more than $10,000/gallon, and using DRM to stop you from refilling any of those ink carts or using a third-party cartridge. So when one cart runs dry, you have to refill it or throw away your investment in the remaining three cartridges and the printer itself.

Sometimes, it’s a grab bag:

You can’t run your Ios apps without Apple hardware;

you can’t run your Apple music, books and movies on anything except an Ios app;

your iPhone uses parts pairing – DRM handshakes between replacement parts and the main system – so you can’t use third-party parts to fix it; and

every OEM iPhone part has a microscopic Apple logo engraved on it, so Apple can demand that the US Customs and Border Service seize any shipment of refurb Iphone parts as trademark violations.

Think Different, amirite?

Getting you locked in completes phase one of the enshittification cycle and signals the start of phase two: making things worse for you to make things better for business customers.

For example, a platform might poison its search results, like Google selling more and more of its results pages to ads that are identified with lighter and lighter tinier and tinier type.

Or Amazon selling off search results and calling it an “ad” business. They make $38b/year on this scam. The first result for your search is, on average, 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The first row is 25% more expensive than the best match. On average, the best match for your search is likely to be found seventeen places down on the results page.

Other platforms sell off your feed, like Facebook, which started off showing you the things you asked to see, but now the quantum of content from the people you follow has dwindled to a homeopathic residue, leaving a void that Facebook fills with things that people pay to show you: boosted posts from publishers you haven’t subscribed to, and, of course, ads.

Now at this point you might be thinking ‘sure, if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.'

Bullshit!

Bull.

Shit.

The people who buy those Google ads? They pay more every year for worse ad-targeting and more ad-fraud

Those publishers paying to nonconsensually cram their content into your Facebook feed? They have to do that because FB suppresses their ability to reach the people who actually subscribed to them

The Amazon sellers with the best match for your query have to outbid everyone else just to show up on the first page of results. It costs so much to sell on Amazon that between 45-51% of every dollar an independent seller brings in has to be kicked up to Don Bezos and the Amazon crime family. Those sellers don’t have the kind of margins that let them pay 51% They have to raise prices in order to avoid losing money on every sale.

"But wait!" I hear you say!

[Come on, say it!]

"But wait! Things on Amazon aren’t more expensive that things at Target, or Walmart, or at a mom and pop store, or direct from the manufacturer.

"How can sellers be raising prices on Amazon if the price at Amazon is the same as at is everywhere else?"

[Any guesses?!]

That’s right, they charge more everywhere. They have to. Amazon binds its sellers to a policy called “most favored nation status,” which says they can’t charge more on Amazon than they charge elsewhere, including direct from their own factory store.

So every seller that wants to sell on Amazon has to raise their prices everywhere else.

Now, these sellers are Amazon’s best customers. They’re paying for the product, and they’re still getting screwed.

Paying for the product doesn’t fill your vapid boss’s shriveled heart with so much joy that he decides to stop trying to think of ways to fuck you over.

Look at Apple. Remember when Apple offered every Ios user a one-click opt out for app-based surveillance? And 96% of users clicked that box?

(The other four percent were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees.)

That cost Facebook at least ten billion dollars per year in lost surveillance revenue?

I mean, you love to see it.

But did you know that at the same time Apple started spying on Ios users in the same way that Facebook had been, for surveillance data to use to target users for its competing advertising product?

Your Iphone isn’t an ad-supported gimme. You paid a thousand fucking dollars for that distraction rectangle in your pocket, and you’re still the product. What’s more, Apple has rigged Ios so that you can’t mod the OS to block its spying.

If you’re not not paying for the product, you’re the product, and if you are paying for the product, you’re still the product.

Just ask the farmers who are expected to swap parts into their own busted half-million dollar, mission-critical tractors, but can’t actually use those parts until a technician charges them $200 to drive out to the farm and type a parts pairing unlock code into their console.

John Deere’s not giving away tractors. Give John Deere a half mil for a tractor and you will be the product.

Please, my brothers and sisters in Christ. Please! Stop saying ‘if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.’

OK, OK, so that’s phase two of enshittification.

Phase one: be good to users while locking them in.

Phase two: screw the users a little to you can good to business customers while locking them in.

Phase three: screw everybody and take all the value for yourself. Leave behind the absolute bare minimum of utility so that everyone stays locked into your pile of shit.

Enshittification: a tragedy in three acts.

That’s what enshittification looks like from the outside, but what’s going on inside the company? What is the pathological mechanism? What sci-fi entropy ray converts the excellent and useful service into a pile of shit?

That mechanism is called twiddling. Twiddling is when someone alters the back end of a service to change how its business operates, changing prices, costs, search ranking, recommendation criteria and other foundational aspects of the system.

Digital platforms are a twiddler’s utopia. A grocer would need an army of teenagers with pricing guns on rollerblades to reprice everything in the building when someone arrives who’s extra hungry.

Whereas the McDonald’s Investments portfolio company Plexure advertises that it can use surveillance data to predict when an app user has just gotten paid so the seller can tack an extra couple bucks onto the price of their breakfast sandwich.

And of course, as the prophet William Gibson warned us, ‘cyberspace is everting.' With digital shelf tags, grocers can change prices whenever they feel like, like the grocers in Norway, whose e-ink shelf tags change the prices 2,000 times per day.

Every Uber driver is offered a different wage for every job. If a driver has been picky lately, the job pays more. But if the driver has been desperate enough to grab every ride the app offers, the pay goes down, and down, and down.

The law professor Veena Dubal calls this ‘algorithmic wage discrimination.' It’s a prime example of twiddling.

Every youtuber knows what it’s like to be twiddled. You work for weeks or months, spend thousands of dollars to make a video, then the algorithm decides that no one – not your own subscribers, not searchers who type in the exact name of your video – will see it.

Why? Who knows? The algorithm’s rules are not public.

Because content moderation is the last redoubt of security through obscurit: they can’t tell you what the como algorithm is downranking because then you’d cheat.

Youtube is the kind of shitty boss who docks every paycheck for all the rules you’ve broken, but won’t tell you what those rules were, lest you figure out how to break those rules next time without your boss catching you.

Twiddling can also work in some users’ favor, of course. Sometimes platforms twiddle to make things better for end users or business customers.

For example, Emily Baker-White from Forbes revealed the existence of a back-end feature that Tiktok’s management can access they call the “heating tool.”

When a manager applies the heating toll to a performer’s account, that performer’s videos are thrust into the feeds of millions of users, without regard to whether the recommendation algorithm predicts they will enjoy that video.

Why would they do this? Well, here’s an analogy from my boyhood I used to go to this traveling fair that would come to Toronto at the end of every summer, the Canadian National Exhibition. If you’ve been to a fair like the Ex, you know that you can always spot some guy lugging around a comedically huge teddy bear.

Nominally, you win that teddy bear by throwing five balls in a peach-basket, but to a first approximation, no one has ever gotten five balls to stay in that peach-basket.

That guy “won” the teddy bear when a carny on the midway singled him out and said, "fella, I like your face. Tell you what I’m gonna do: You get just one ball in the basket and I’ll give you this keychain, and if you amass two keychains, I’ll let you trade them in for one of these galactic-scale teddy-bears."

That’s how the guy got his teddy bear, which he now has to drag up and down the midway for the rest of the day.

Why the hell did that carny give away the teddy bear? Because it turns the guy into a walking billboard for the midway games. If that dopey-looking Judas Goat can get five balls into a peach basket, then so can you.

Except you can’t.

Tiktok’s heating tool is a way to give away tactical giant teddy bears. When someone in the TikTok brain trust decides they need more sports bros on the platform, they pick one bro out at random and make him king for the day, heating the shit out of his account.

That guy gets a bazillion views and he starts running around on all the sports bro forums trumpeting his success: *I am the Louis Pasteur of sports bro influencers!"

The other sports bros pile in and start retooling to make content that conforms to the idiosyncratic Tiktok format. When they fail to get giant teddy bears of their own, they assume that it’s because they’re doing Tiktok wrong, because they don’t know about the heating tool.

But then comes the day when the TikTok Star Chamber decides they need to lure in more astrologers, so they take the heat off that one lucky sports bro, and start heating up some lucky astrologer.

Giant teddy bears are all over the place: those Uber drivers who were boasting to the NYT ten years ago about earning $50/hour? The Substackers who were rolling in dough? Joe Rogan and his hundred million dollar Spotify payout? Those people are all the proud owners of giant teddy bears, and they’re a steal.

Because every dollar they get from the platform turns into five dollars worth of free labor from suckers who think they just internetting wrong.

Giant teddy bears are just one way of twiddling. Platforms can play games with every part of their business logic, in highly automated ways, that allows them to quickly and efficiently siphon value from end users to business customers and back again, hiding the pea in a shell game conducted at machine speeds, until they’ve got everyone so turned around that they take all the value for themselves.

That’s the how: How the platforms do the trick where they are good to users, then lock users in, then maltreat users to be good to business customers, then lock in those business customers, then take all the value for themselves.

So now we know what is happening, and how it is happening, all that’s left is why it’s happening.

Now, on the one hand, the why is pretty obvious. The less value that end-users and business customers capture, the more value there is left to divide up among the shareholders and the executives.

That’s why, but it doesn’t tell you why now. Companies could have done this shit at any time in the past 20 years, but they didn’t. Or at least, the successful ones didn’t. The ones that turned themselves into piles of shit got treated like piles of shit. We avoided them and they died.

Remember Myspace? Yahoo Search? Livejournal? Sure, they’re still serving some kind of AI slop or programmatic ad junk if you hit those domains, but they’re gone.

And there’s the clue: It used to be that if you enshittified your product, bad things happened to your company. Now, there are no consequences for enshittification, so everyone’s doing it.

Let’s break that down: What stops a company from enshittifying?

There are four forces that discipline tech companies. The first one is, obviously, competition.

If your customers find it easy to leave, then you have to worry about them leaving

Many factors can contribute to how hard or easy it is to depart a platform, like the network effects that Facebook has going for it. But the most important factor is whether there is anywhere to go.

Back in 2012, Facebook bought Insta for a billion dollars. That may seem like chump-change in these days of eleven-digit Big Tech acquisitions, but that was a big sum in those innocent days, and it was an especially big sum to pay for Insta. The company only had 13 employees, and a mere 25 million registered users.

But what mattered to Zuckerberg wasn’t how many users Insta had, it was where those users came from.

[Does anyone know where those Insta users came from?]

That’s right, they left Facebook and joined Insta. They were sick of FB, even though they liked the people there, they hated creepy Zuck, they hated the platform, so they left and they didn’t come back.

So Zuck spent a cool billion to recapture them, A fact he put in writing in a midnight email to CFO David Ebersman, explaining that he was paying over the odds for Insta because his users hated him, and loved Insta. So even if they quit Facebook (the platform), they would still be captured Facebook (the company).

Now, on paper, Zuck’s Instagram acquisition is illegal, but normally, that would be hard to stop, because you’d have to prove that he bought Insta with the intention of curtailing competition.

But in this case, Zuck tripped over his own dick: he put it in writing.

But Obama’s DoJ and FTC just let that one slide, following the pro-monopoly policies of Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, and setting an example that Trump would follow, greenlighting gigamergers like the catastrophic, incestuous Warner-Discovery marriage.

Indeed, for 40 years, starting with Carter, and accelerating through Reagan, the US has encouraged monopoly formation, as an official policy, on the grounds that monopolies are “efficient.”

If everyone is using Google Search, that’s something we should celebrate. It means they’ve got the very best search and wouldn’t it be perverse to spend public funds to punish them for making the best product?

But as we all know, Google didn’t maintain search dominance by being best. They did it by paying bribes. More than 20 billion per year to Apple alone to be the default Ios search, plus billions more to Samsung, Mozilla, and anyone else making a product or service with a search-box on it, ensuring that you never stumble on a search engine that’s better than theirs.

Which, in turn, ensured that no one smart invested big in rival search engines, even if they were visibly, obviously superior. Why bother making something better if Google’s buying up all the market oxygen before it can kindle your product to life?

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon – they’re not “making things” companies, they’re “buying things” companies, taking advantage of official tolerance for anticompetitive acquisitions, predatory pricing, market distorting exclusivity deals and other acts specifically prohibited by existing antitrust law.

Their goal is to become too big to fail, because that makes them too big to jail, and that means they can be too big to care.

Which is why Google Search is a pile of shit and everything on Amazon is dropshipped garbage that instantly disintegrates in a cloud of offgassed volatile organic compounds when you open the box.

Once companies no longer fear losing your business to a competitor, it’s much easier for them to treat you badly, because what’re you gonna do?

Remember Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator in those old SNL sketches? “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”

Competition is the first force that serves to discipline companies and the enshittificatory impulses of their leadership, and we just stopped enforcing competition law.

It takes a special kind of smooth-brained asshole – that is, an establishment economist – to insist that the collapse of every industry from eyeglasses to vitamin C into a cartel of five or fewer companies has nothing to do with policies that officially encouraged monopolization.

It’s like we used to put down rat poison and we didn’t have a rat problem. Then these dickheads convinced us that rats were good for us and we stopped putting down rat poison, and now rats are gnawing our faces off and they’re all running around saying, "Who’s to say where all these rats came from? Maybe it was that we stopped putting down poison, but maybe it’s just the Time of the Rats. The Great Forces of History bearing down on this moment to multiply rats beyond all measure!"

Antitrust didn’t slip down that staircase and fall spine-first on that stiletto: they stabbed it in the back and then they pushed it.

And when they killed antitrust, they also killed regulation, the second force that disciplines companies. Regulation is possible, but only when the regulator is more powerful than the regulated entities. When a company is bigger than the government, it gets damned hard to credibly threaten to punish that company, no matter what its sins.

That’s what protected IBM for all those years when it had its boot on the throat of the American tech sector. Do you know, the DOJ fought to break up IBM in the courts from 1970-1982, and that every year, for 12 consecutive years, IBM spent more on lawyers to fight the USG than the DOJ Antitrust Division spent on all the lawyers fighting every antitrust case in the entire USA?

IBM outspent Uncle Sam for 12 years. People called it “Antitrust’s Vietnam.” All that money paid off, because by 1982, the president was Ronald Reagan, a man whose official policy was that monopolies were “efficient." So he dropped the case, and Big Blue wriggled off the hook.

It’s hard to regulate a monopolist, and it’s hard to regulate a cartel. When a sector is composed of hundreds of competing companies, they compete. They genuinely fight with one another, trying to poach each others’ customers and workers. They are at each others’ throats.

It’s hard enough for a couple hundred executives to agree on anything. But when they’re legitimately competing with one another, really obsessing about how to eat each others’ lunches, they can’t agree on anything.

The instant one of them goes to their regulator with some bullshit story, about how it’s impossible to have a decent search engine without fine-grained commercial surveillance; or how it’s impossible to have a secure and easy to use mobile device without a total veto over which software can run on it; or how it’s impossible to administer an ISP’s network unless you can slow down connections to servers whose owners aren’t paying bribes for “premium carriage"; there’s some *other company saying, “That’s bullshit”

“We’ve managed it! Here’s our server logs, our quarterly financials and our customer testimonials to prove it.”

100 companies are a rabble, they're a mob. They can’t agree on a lobbying position. They’re too busy eating each others’ lunch to agree on how to cater a meeting to discuss it.

But let those hundred companies merge to monopoly, absorb one another in an incestuous orgy, turn into five giant companies, so inbred they’ve got a corporate Habsburg jaw, and they become a cartel.

It’s easy for a cartel to agree on what bullshit they’re all going to feed their regulator, and to mobilize some of the excess billions they’ve reaped through consolidation, which freed them from “wasteful competition," sp they can capture their regulators completely.

You know, Congress used to pass federal consumer privacy laws? Not anymore.

The last time Congress managed to pass a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988: The Video Privacy Protection Act. That’s a law that bans video-store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS cassettes you take home. In other words, it regulates three things that have effectively ceased to exist.

The threat of having your video rental history out there in the public eye was not the last or most urgent threat the American public faced, and yet, Congress is deadlocked on passing a privacy law.

Tech companies’ regulatory capture involves a risible and transparent gambit, that is so stupid, it’s an insult to all the good hardworking risible transparent ruses out there.

Namely, they claim that when they violate your consumer, privacy or labor rights, It’s not a crime, because they do it with an app.

Algorithmic wage discrimination isn’t illegal wage theft: we do it with an app.

Spying on you from asshole to appetite isn’t a privacy violation: we do it with an app.

And Amazon’s scam search tool that tricks you into paying 29% more than the best match for your query? Not a ripoff. We do it with an app.

Once we killed competition – stopped putting down rat poison – we got cartels – the rats ate our faces. And the cartels captured their regulators – the rats bought out the poison factory and shut it down.

So companies aren’t constrained by competition or regulation.

But you know what? This is tech, and tech is different.IIt’s different because it’s flexible. Because our computers are Turing-complete universal von Neumann machines. That means that any enshittificatory alteration to a program can be disenshittified with another program.

Every time HP jacks up the price of ink , they invite a competitor to market a refill kit or a compatible cartridge.

When Tesla installs code that says you have to pay an extra monthly fee to use your whole battery, they invite a modder to start selling a kit to jailbreak that battery and charge it all the way up.

Lemme take you through a little example of how that works: Imagine this is a product design meeting for our company’s website, and the guy leading the meeting says “Dudes, you know how our KPI is topline ad-revenue? Well, I’ve calculated that if we make the ads just 20% more invasive and obnoxious, we’ll boost ad rev by 2%”

This is a good pitch. Hit that KPI and everyone gets a fat bonus. We can all take our families on a luxury ski vacation in Switzerland.

But here’s the thing: someone’s gonna stick their arm up – someone who doesn’t give a shit about user well-being, and that person is gonna say, “I love how you think, Elon. But has it occurred to you that if we make the ads 20% more obnoxious, then 40% of our users will go to a search engine and type 'How do I block ads?'"

I mean, what a nightmare! Because once a user does that, the revenue from that user doesn’t rise to 102%. It doesn’t stay at 100% It falls to zero, forever.

[Any guesses why?]

Because no user ever went back to the search engine and typed, 'How do I start seeing ads again?'

Once the user jailbreaks their phone or discovers third party ink, or develops a relationship with an independent Tesla mechanic who’ll unlock all the DLC in their car, that user is gone, forever.

Interoperability – that latent property bequeathed to us courtesy of Herrs Turing and Von Neumann and their infinitely flexible, universal machines – that is a serious check on enshittification.

The fact that Congress hasn’t passed a privacy law since 1988 Is countered, at least in part, by the fact that the majority of web users are now running ad-blockers, which are also tracker-blockers.

But no one’s ever installed a tracker-blocker for an app. Because reverse engineering an app puts in you jeopardy of criminal and civil prosecution under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with penalties of a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.

And violating its terms of service puts you in jeopardy under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which is the law that Ronald Reagan signed in a panic after watching Wargames (seriously!).

Helping other users violate the terms of service can get you hit with a lawsuit for tortious interference with contract. And then there’s trademark, copyright and patent.

All that nonsense we call “IP,” but which Jay Freeman of Cydia calls “Felony Contempt of Business Model."

So if we’re still at that product planning meeting and now it’s time to talk about our app, the guy leading the meeting says, “OK, so we’ll make the ads in the app 20% more obnoxious to pull a 2% increase in topline ad rev?”

And that person who objected to making the website 20% worse? Their hand goes back up. Only this time they say “Why don’t we make the ads 100% more invasive and get a 10% increase in ad rev?"

Because it doesn't matter if a user goes to a search engine and types, “How do I block ads in an app." The answer is: you can't. So YOLO, enshittify away.

“IP” is just a euphemism for “any law that lets me reach outside my company’s walls to exert coercive control over my critics, competitors and customers,” and “app” is just a euphemism for “A web page skinned with the right IP so that protecting your privacy while you use it is a felony.”

Interop used to keep companies from enshittifying. If a company made its client suck, someone would roll out an alternative client, if they ripped a feature out and wanted to sell it back to you as a monthly subscription, someone would make a compatible plugin that restored it for a one-time fee, or for free.

To help people flee Myspace, FB gave them bots that you’d load with your login credentials. It would scrape your waiting Myspace messages and put ‘em in your FB inbox, and login to Myspace and paste your replies into your Myspace outbox. So you didn’t have to choose between the people you loved on Myspace, and Facebook, which launched with a promise never to spy on you. Remember that?!

Thanks to the metastasis of IP, all that is off the table today. Apple owes its very existence to iWork Suite, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote are file-compatible with Microsoft’s Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But make an IOS runtime that’ll play back the files you bought from Apple’s stores on other platforms, and they’ll nuke you til you glow.

FB wouldn’t have had a hope of breaking Myspace’s grip on social media without that scrape, but scrape FB today in support of an alternative client and their lawyers will bomb you til the rubble bounces.

Google scraped every website in the world to create its search index. Try and scrape Google and they’ll have your head on a pike.

When they did it, it was progress. When you do it to them, that’s piracy. Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

Because this handful of companies has so thoroughly captured their regulators, they can wield the power of the state against you when you try to break their grip on power, even as their own flagrant violations of our rights go unpunished. Because they do them with an app.

Tech lost its fear of competitin it neutralized the threat from regulators, and then put them in harness to attack new startups that might do unto them as they did unto the companies that came before them.

But even so, there was a force that kept our bosses in check That force was us. Tech workers.

Tech workers have historically been in short supply, which gave us power, and our bosses knew it.

To get us to work crazy hours, they came up with a trick. They appealed to our love of technology, and told us that we were heroes of a digital revolution, who would “organize the world’s information and make it useful,” who would “bring the world closer together.”

They brought in expert set-dressers to turn our workplaces into whimsical campuses with free laundry, gourmet cafeterias, massages, and kombucha, and a surgeon on hand to freeze our eggs so that we could work through our fertile years.

They convinced us that we were being pampered, rather than being worked like government mules.

This trick has a name. Fobazi Ettarh, the librarian-theorist, calls it “vocational awe, and Elon Musk calls it being “extremely hardcore.”

This worked very well. Boy did we put in some long-ass hours!

But for our bosses, this trick failed badly. Because if you miss your mother’s funeral and to hit a deadline, and then your boss orders you to enshittify that product, you are gonna experience a profound moral injury, which you are absolutely gonna make your boss share.

Because what are they gonna do? Fire you? They can’t hire someone else to do your job, and you can get a job that’s even better at the shop across the street.

So workers held the line when competition, regulation and interop failed.

But eventually, supply caught up with demand. Tech laid off 260,000 of us last year, and another 100,000 in the first half of this year.

You can’t tell your bosses to go fuck themselves, because they’ll fire your ass and give your job to someone who’ll be only too happy to enshittify that product you built.

That’s why this is all happening right now. Our bosses aren’t different. They didn’t catch a mind-virus that turned them into greedy assholes who don’t care about our users’ wellbeing or the quality of our products.

As far as our bosses have always been concerned, the point of the business was to charge the most, and deliver the least, while sharing as little as possible with suppliers, workers, users and customers. They’re not running charities.

Since day one, our bosses have shown up for work and yanked as hard as they can on the big ENSHITTIFICATION lever behind their desks, only that lever didn’t move much. It was all gummed up by competition, regulation, interop and workers.

As those sources of friction melted away, the enshittification lever started moving very freely.

Which sucks, I know. But think about this for a sec: our bosses, despite being wildly imperfect vessels capable of rationalizing endless greed and cheating, nevertheless oversaw a series of actually great products and services.

Not because they used to be better people, but because they used to be subjected to discipline.

So it follows that if we want to end the enshittocene, dismantle the enshitternet, and build a new, good internet that our bosses can’t wreck, we need to make sure that these constraints are durably installed on that internet, wound around its very roots and nerves. And we have to stand guard over it so that it can’t be dismantled again.

A new, good internet is one that has the positive aspects of the old, good internet: an ethic of technological self-determination, where users of technology (and hackers, tinkerers, startups and others serving as their proxies) can reconfigure and mod the technology they use, so that it does what they need it to do, and so that it can’t be used against them.

But the new, good internet will fix the defects of the old, good internet, the part that made it hard to use for anyone who wasn’t us. And hell yeah we can do that. Tech bosses swear that it’s impossible, that you can’t have a conversation friend without sharing it with Zuck; or search the web without letting Google scrape you down to the viscera; or have a phone that works reliably without giving Apple a veto over the software you install.

They claim that it’s a nonsense to even ponder this kind of thing. It’s like making water that’s not wet. But that’s bullshit. We can have nice things. We can build for the people we love, and give them a place that’s worth of their time and attention.

To do that, we have to install constraints.

The first constraint, remember, is competition. We’re living through a epochal shift in competition policy. After 40 years with antitrust enforcement in an induced coma, a wave of antitrust vigor has swept through governments all over the world. Regulators are stepping in to ban monopolistic practices, open up walled gardens, block anticompetitive mergers, and even unwind corrupt mergers that were undertaken on false pretenses.

Normally this is the place in the speech where I’d list out all the amazing things that have happened over the past four years. The enforcement actions that blocked companies from becoming too big to care, and that scared companies away from even trying.

Like Wiz, which just noped out of the largest acquisition offer in history, turning down Google’s $23b cashout, and deciding to, you know, just be a fucking business that makes money by producing a product that people want and selling it at a competitive price.

Normally, I’d be listing out FTC rulemakings that banned noncompetes nationwid. Or the new merger guidelines the FTC and DOJ cooked up, which – among other things – establish that the agencies should be considering whether a merger will negatively impact privacy.

I had a whole section of this stuff in my notes, a real victory lap, but I deleted it all this week.

[Can anyone guess why?]

That’s right! This week, Judge Amit Mehta, ruling for the DC Circuit of these United States of America, In the docket 20-3010 a case known as United States v. Google LLC, found that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," and ordered Google and the DOJ to propose a schedule for a remedy, like breaking the company up.

So yeah, that was pretty fucking epic.

Now, this antitrust stuff is pretty esoteric, and I won’t gatekeep you or shame you if you wanna keep a little distance on this subject. Nearly everyone is an antitrust normie, and that's OK. But if you’re a normie, you’re probably only catching little bits and pieces of the narrative, and let me tell you, the monopolists know it and they are flooding the zone.

The Wall Street Journal has published over 100 editorials condemning FTC Chair Lina Khan, saying she’s an ineffectual do-nothing, wasting public funds chasing doomed, quixotic adventures against poor, innocent businesses accomplishing nothing

[Does anyone out there know who owns the Wall Street Journal?]

That’s right, it’s Rupert Murdoch. Do you really think Rupert Murdoch pays his editorial board to write one hundred editorials about someone who’s not getting anything done?

The reality is that in the USA, in the UK, in the EU, in Australia, in Canada, in Japan, in South Korea, even in China, we are seeing more antitrust action over the past four years than over the preceding forty years.

Remember, competition law is actually pretty robust. The problem isn’t the law, It’s the enforcement priorities. Reagan put antitrust in mothballs 40 years ago, but that elegant weapon from a more civilized age is now back in the hands of people who know how to use it, and they’re swinging for the fences.

Next up: regulation.

As the seemingly inescapable power of the tech giants is revealed for the sham it always was, governments and regulators are finally gonna kill the “one weird trick” of violating the law, and saying “It doesn’t count, we did it with an app.”

Like in the EU, they’re rolling out the Digital Markets Act this year. That’s a law requiring dominant platforms to stand up APIs so that third parties can offer interoperable services.

So a co-op, a nonprofit, a hobbyist, a startup, or a local government agency wil eventuallyl be able to offer, say, a social media server that can interconnect with one of the dominant social media silos, and users who switch to that new platform will be able to continue to exchange messages with the users they follow and groups they belong to, so the switching costs will fall to damned near zero.

That’s a very cool rule, but what’s even cooler is how it’s gonna be enforced. Previous EU tech rules were “regulations” as in the GDPR – the General Data Privacy Regulation. EU regs need to be “transposed” into laws in each of the 27 EU member states, so they become national laws that get enforced by national courts.

For Big Tech, that means all previous tech regulations are enforced in Ireland, because Ireland is a tax haven, and all the tech companies fly Irish flags of convenience.

Here’s the thing: every tax haven is also a crime haven. After all, if Google can pretend it’s Irish this week, it can pretend to be Cypriot, or Maltese, or Luxembougeious next week. So Ireland has to keep these footloose criminal enterprises happy, or they’ll up sticks and go somewhere else.

This is why the GDPR is such a goddamned joke in practice. Big tech wipes its ass with the GDPR, and the only way to punish them starts with Ireland’s privacy commissioner, who barely bothers to get out of bed. This is an agency that spends most of its time watching cartoons on TV in its pajamas and eating breakfast cereal. So all of the big GDPR cases go to Ireland and they die there.

This is hardly a secret. The European Commission knows it’s going on. So with the DMA, the Commission has changed things up: The DMA is an “Act,” not a “Regulation.” Meaning it gets enforced in the EU’s federal courts, bypassing the national courts in crime-havens like Ireland.

In other words, the “we violate privacy law, but we do it with an app” gambit that worked on Ireland’s toothless privacy watchdog is now a dead letter, because EU federal judges have no reason to swallow that obvious bullshit.

Here in the US, the dam is breaking on federal consumer privacy law – at last!

Remember, our last privacy law was passed in 1988 to protect the sanctity of VHS rental history. It's been a minute.

And the thing is, there's a lot of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden? Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google? Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics? Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms? Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?

A federal privacy law with a private right of action – which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy – would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems

There's a pretty big coalition for that kind of privacy law! Which is why we have seen a procession of imperfect (but steadily improving) privacy laws working their way through Congress.

If you sign up for EFF’s mailing list at eff.org we’ll send you an email when these come up, so you can call your Congressjerk or Senator and talk to them about it. Or better yet, make an appointment to drop by their offices when they’re in their districts, and explain to them that you’re not just a registered voter from their district, you’re the kind of elite tech person who goes to Defcon, and then explain the bill to them. That stuff makes a difference.

What about self-help? How are we doing on making interoperability legal again, so hackers can just fix shit without waiting for Congress or a federal agency to act?

All the action here these day is in the state Right to Repair fight. We’re getting state R2R bills, like the one that passed this year in Oregon that bans parts pairing, where DRM is used to keep a device from using a new part until it gets an authorized technician’s unlock code.

These bills are pushed by a fantastic group of organizations called the Repair Coalition, at Repair.org, and they’ll email you when one of these laws is going through your statehouse, so you can meet with your state reps and explain to the JV squad the same thing you told your federal reps.

Repair.org’s prime mover is Ifixit, who are genuine heroes of the repair revolution, and Ifixit’s founder, Kyle Wiens, is here at the con. When you see him, you can shake his hand and tell him thanks, and that’ll be even better if you tell him that you’ve signed up to get alerts at repair.org!

Now, on to the final way that we reverse enhittification and build that new, good internet: you, the tech labor force.

For years, your bosses tricked you into thinking you were founders in waiting, temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs who were only momentarily drawing a salary.

You certainly weren’t workers. Your power came from your intrinsic virtue, not like those lazy slobs in unions who have to get their power through that kumbaya solidarity nonsense.

It was a trick. You were scammed. The power you had came from scarcity, and so when the scarcity ended, when the industry started ringing up six-figure annual layoffs, your power went away with it.

The only durable source of power for tech workers is as workers, in a union.

Think about Amazon. Warehouse workers have to piss in bottles and have the highest rate of on-the-job maimings of any competing business. Whereas Amazon coders get to show up for work with facial piercings, green mohawks, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don’t understand. They can piss whenever they want!

That’s not because Jeff Bezos or Andy Jassy loves you guys. It’s because they’re scared you’ll quit and they don’t know how to replace you.

Time for the second obligatory William Gibson quote: “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” You know who’s living in the future?. Those Amazon blue-collar workers. They are the bleeding edge.

Drivers whose eyeballs are monitored by AI cameras that do digital phrenology on their faces to figure out whether to dock their pay, warehouse workers whose bodies are ruined in just months.

As tech bosses beef up that reserve army of unemployed, skilled tech workers, then those tech workers – you all – will arrive at the same future as them.

Look, I know that you’ve spent your careers explaining in words so small your boss could understand them that you refuse to enshittify the company’s products, and I thank you for your service.

But if you want to go on fighting for the user, you need power that’s more durable than scarcity. You need a union. Wanna learn how? Check out the Tech Workers Coalition and Tech Solidarity, and get organized.

Enshittification didn’t arise because our bosses changed. They were always that guy.

They were always yankin’ on that enshittification lever in the C-suite.

What changed was the environment, everything that kept that switch from moving.

And that’s good news, in a bankshot way, because it means we can make good services out of imperfect people. As a wildly imperfect person myself, I find this heartening.

The new good internet is in our grasp: an internet that has the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the greased-skids simplicity of Web 2.0 that let all our normie friends get in on the fun.

Tech bosses want you to think that good UX and enshittification can’t ever be separated. That’s such a self-serving proposition you can spot it from orbit. We know it, 'cause we built the old good internet, and we’ve been fighting a rear-guard action to preserve it for the past two decades.

It’s time to stop playing defense. It's time to go on the offensive. To restore competition, regulation, interop and tech worker power so that we can create the new, good internet we’ll need to fight fascism, the climate emergency, and genocide.

To build a digital nervous system for a 21st century in which our children can thrive and prosper.

Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear RIDA QADRI and me talk about how GIG WORKERS can DISENSHITTIFY their jobs with INTEROPERABILITY, VOTE FOR THIS ONE!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

Image: https://twitter.com/igama/status/1822347578094043435/ (cropped)

@fak3r@mastodon.social (cropped)

https://mamot.fr/@fak3r@mastodon.social/112963252835869648

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.pt

[wonjns]

alright i have a kinda (maybeeee a little) whoreknee thot🤭🤭

so like maybe a fic of seventeen and their 14th member go to a hot springs to relax. the reader (bottom male reader of course) and whatever member you choose for the story end up fucking in the hot springs but try to be sneaky with it because the other members are also still in the hot springs too 🤭👀

also can i be ♾️ anon? have a great day lovelyyyy

ok so i actually had this req before my mingyu one and im surprised at all the sudden hot springs/sauna thots but i’m open cuz it’s hot asf hdjsjsheh — and ofc you can be ♾️ anon!! <33

so for this one i’m actually thinking hoshi or dino 🫣 for obvious bias reasons imma elaborate on hoshi because one,, have you seen those abs …… mouth watering. imagine having him all dripping wet and sweaty and shirtless,, all to yourself. the video below sends my mind reeling everytime i see it!€\£{€

hoshi totally strikes me as someone who would bring his boyfriend to his favorite hot springs, especially if you were the 14th member, with the sole intent on having sexy time. he would purposefully convince you to go on a day that they aren’t too occupied, or simply use his connections (his fat wallet) to get you a private area.

things would start off wholesome enough, you guys soaking in the relaxing warm water just like you did during the full group outings after a long productive day of rehearsal. but something about it being only the two of you filled the tiger’s tummy up with a heat that rivaled the steam rising from the springs.

having the freedom to just take in your shirtless body and soaked skin, watching small sweat beads form along your hairline while you softly moaned sinking deeper into the warm water had him straining his swim shorts in record time. screw this man and his ridiculously high sex drive.

you’d be no better, never being one to hide your ogling over hoshi even out in broad daylight. something about him and the way he moved always had you under his spell, consistently growing more and more desperate for him throughout the days after you finally started hooking up.

your eyes would snap open at the sound of water being tread, only to find hoshi offering you one of those signature smirks while situating himself between your legs. he’d wrap those biceps around your waist and pul you closer onto him, causing your light giggle to turn into a bold moan when you felt his hard-on.

one thing lead to another and to no one’s surprise you and hoshi would be having a steamy making out session right there in the middle of the body of water, swallowing each others moans and stroking each others cocks fervently.

imagine hoshi eventually reached his limit with the foreplay and just pulled you onto his lap against the rocks, sloppily sucking all kinds of marks onto your adams apple while stripping you of your swim trunks.

the bountiful waterfall from the hot springs would do very little to mask the sounds of your gutter al moans resonating through the chambers while an enthusiastic hoshi held you down onto his thick cock while rutting up into your needy ass, your salty tears of pleasure mixing in with the sweat and spring water all around you.

it’d be messy, chaotic, and loud - just how hoshi likes it. his mind would haze over watching how your eyebrows furrowed in pleasure while you felt all along his chiseled forearms and biceps. imagine your nails digging into his toned back when his tongue teasingly taunted your exposed nipples, blooming them into full hardness before sucking on them like a starved calf.

i just know his dancer hips would prove his skill time and time again, his cock kissing that perfect little spot inside of you while he stroked your pulsing dick under the water — all until you were climaxing all over him and those ridiculously sexy abs.

oh god, hoshi would be so lost in the moment that as soon as he rode his high out, he’d pull you off his dick and plant you right on the ramp, eager to clean up the mess he made by licking and sucking both of your cum dry off your dampened skin. you’d be sensitive, and that would only make him love it more, egging on his talented tongue.

the dazed and fucked out look in your eyes as you glanced down at his actions while mindlessly carding your hands through his dripping wet locs would prompt him to make a mental note for himself to bring you to the springs 1 on 1 much more often.

[leifygreeens]

hello! ^_^ can i ask for the bachelors/ettes love languages both giving and receiving thank you! <3

(Gary Chapman, the man who came up with this theory, is a Not Great™ person, and his theory is filled with justification for misogyny and other general weirdness. The podcast If Books Could Kill did a fantastic episode on it in April of 2023, you can find it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts under The 5 Love Languages.)

I had a lot of fun with this! I will admit I kinda ditched the OG categories, but I did stick with the theme and overall you can probably figure out where everyone would land anyway. But MORE IMPORTANTLY, thank you for your request, anon. I appreciate you and I hope you enjoy this! Also this is really fucking long!! Almost 5k words!!! Holy fuck!!!!

Everyone say thank you to my best friend and editor in chief @lendelleaves for helping me with this. (I love you! <3)

Sam is a very tactile person, and I’ve said this before, but like a giant puppy who does not know he is giant, Sam likes sprawling himself all over you, no matter where you are. If you’re lounging anywhere together, his head is in your lap and his thumb is rubbing back and forth over your thigh. There have been many times when he nearly knocked out on top of you on the couches at the saloon, but his favorite place to sprawl all over you is at home.

He often traps you on the couch, and it’ll take a lot of bargaining and bribing to get him up—make no mistake though, he knows when not to push it. Sam is so observant when it comes to family, and he learns to read you quickly. He knows when you’re lying, or when you might be pretending to be okay, and is quickly able to discern whether you need support, or some space. 

When you don’t need space, Sam talks. And talks. And talks. He’ll fill up a silence like nobody’s business, or drag you out to exist in the world when you’re feeling like abandoning everything. When things are really bad though, Sam takes the reins and runs things for you. In the early stages of your relationship, he wasn’t very confident helping around the household, but he’s stepped up, and he’s gotten quite good at it.

Growing up with Jodi as a mother allowed him the space to dick around and act like a slob, and he’s a little ashamed of the way he took advantage of her. You try to remind him he was a teenage boy for a lot of that time, but he’s determined not to continue that cycle, and so his favorite part is cleaning—yes, you heard me right. He loves cleaning, because it makes him feel responsible, and it also lightens your load. When the dishes are cleared after meals, or when he’s taken care to sweep and steam the floors, he adores the feeling of productivity and accomplishment afterward. While he doesn’t expect any praise or compensation for it, he does cherish the moment when you realize you have time to relax (in a clean home, no less). He doesn’t ever want to sense the same regret from you that he did from his mother.

Sebastian struggles with verbal shows of affection, and tends to express his love with actions rather than words, but he’s kind of subtle about it. It took you a while to figure out what he was trying to say when he did these kinds of things. Sebastian is the type to cut up a plate of fruit for you after a long day working on the farm, and hand it to you wordlessly. He’ll help you unlace your work boots, rub any aches or cramps out of your feet, and make you a cup of tea—anything that could help you unwind. 

He loves taking you on dates! He’s taken you quite a few places on his bike, and while he’s not a huge fan of overcrowded places, he can handle them a little more easily with you by his side. You’ve gone bowling, to the arcade, mini-golfing (which he was surprised to find he absolutely sucked at), and to a few theme parks as well. He feels braver with you around, and his confidence has definitely improved since you met. He’s not concerned with the people that stare at you while you’re in public, because he knows without a shred of doubt that you’re not interested. Especially when you buy a funnel cake to share and wipe chocolate from the corner of his lips, or win him cheap plushies at a festival. He’s got a little collection of those going, by the way (and he’s named them all after fantasy characters, obviously).

When you’re not around, Sebastian likes to play some of the voicemails you’ve left him. He never clears them from his inbox, just so he has something to remind him of you when he’s lonely, and it may or may not have resulted in his inbox being completely full more than a few times. In a similar vein, his favorite messages from you are videos and voice notes, and whether you’re telling him about your day, showing off a successful harvest, or just popping in to say hello, he replays every message at least four times before melting into a puddle. 

Sebastian worried you might think it’s creepy, but he has a folder on his computer just dedicated to you, full of photos, videos, and voice recordings. He also has a candid photo of you in his wallet and refuses to talk about it, but one time you showed up at his place and found him sitting on his bed staring at it. You still don’t know how long he was like that for, and he adamantly refutes your claims of seeing him doing it at all. The walls of Seb’s office are covered top to bottom in pictures of you, and you’re pretty sure that all of his devices have you as the homescreen. It’s terribly endearing.

Alex likes spending time with you. Whether it be brushing your teeth together, doing the laundry, or loading up the shipping bin with your products and produce for the day, he’s calm as long as you’re nearby. He likes the physical reminders of your presence as well—stained coffee mugs sitting in the sink after you leave to work in the fields, the residual smell of you clinging to his clothing after you steal it, your personal items scattered around the living room, and anything else you leave in your wake. He wants to spend time with you constantly, but when that isn’t realistic, he walks into the bedroom and flops onto your side of the bed, just to shove his face into your pillow and inhale the smell of you.

When you are together, he’s always holding you. Whether it’s excitedly swinging you around in a circle in the entryway after you get back from work, gluing himself to your back while you waddle around the kitchen making dinner, or even walking through town together, he’s got to have his arms around you in some way. Granted, he’s not huge on PDA, unless someone stares at you too long and he wants to make a point, but he loves hugs, and especially playing with your hands! Rubbing his thumbs over the backs of your hands, threading and rethreading your fingers together, swinging your hands back and forth while walking through town, and making sure to remind you about the existence of hand cream when it’s the thick of winter.

Granny Evelyn was always very pointedly teaching him how to take care of his personal hygiene, so you can trust that he learned from the best of the best. When he is messing with your hands, you often find him admiring your calluses. He loves how strong your hands are; he says it’s a testament to your hard work and dedication. 

His life is so much better with you in it, and he’s finally comfortable just existing. Of course he still cares about gridball, but the guilt he felt about never going pro has dissipated, and he’s perfectly content in his life with you. He does wish he could’ve properly introduced you to his mom, but when you smile down at him in the morning, he likes to think the sunlight kissing the top of your head through the window is his mother’s way of showing her approval.

Elliott has a wonderful way with words, but if you want my professional opinion, this man gets tongue tied whenever you’re too forward with him. The more blunt you are, the more red in the face he gets. He’s always up in the clouds, and having someone like you there to ground him so solidly in reality switches his entire perception of love and attraction. It’s such a strong juxtaposition, against what he thought he liked, that many tropes within the romance genre have actually started to irritate him—love at first sight is probably the worst offender—and it affects the way he writes his own characters as well. 

Make no mistake, he’s still very much head-over-heels for you, but he doesn’t idolize you the way he did when you first met. There’s something so overwhelmingly human about you, to him, and he loves every part of it. 

So, he compliments you constantly—but almost always about something mundane or silly. The way your eyes look all droopy and clouded with sleep in the mornings, the way toothpaste surrounds your mouth while you’re brushing your teeth, or when you occasionally get your jacket pocket caught on a door handle and get jerked back with the force of hurricane level winds—and once, when you were struggling to put on your boots before a full day of work, and you tripped and toppled over in the entryway. You made the silliest sound as you went down, and even though he was quick to help you up and check you over for any potential bumps or bruises, he was laughing fondly to himself for the rest of the day. 

Even the way you look rumpled and filthy after a long trip in the mines makes him soft, and he always makes sure to tell you how wonderful you are. With your influence, he’s allowed himself to abandon his forced persona of perfection, and he’s never felt so authentic and comfortable in himself. He’s free to just be, and he’s eternally grateful to you, because you’ve shown him what love is supposed to be.

Shane always checks on the animals with you in the mornings, and he likes the physical labor that comes with repairing things or clearing debris from the farm on the first day of a new season. He’ll happily repair a fence or pathing, and he’s becoming more of a DIY expert himself the longer he lives on the farm with you. Shane is aware of how overworked you were when it was just you running the farm, and taking half of the shit off your plate makes him feel productive and useful—it gives him a little more purpose. He feels guilty about some of the habits he’s still holding on to, sometimes, but waking up next to you every day reminds him just how much makes life worth living. 

He gets a little down when there’s nothing to do on the farm, so if you want him to have a little more pep in his step, you know to ask him to do the usual chores while you dive down into the mines for the day. You do this the most often in winter, when the crops in the greenhouse aren’t ready for harvesting. He’s grateful for the work, and the knowledge that you trust him to take care of things while you’re fighting monsters makes him feel fulfilled. 

After a long day in the fields and with the animals, he likes lounging around before bed with you. His cheeks get so pink when you rub his back and give him massages, and when you shove a hand under his shirt while cuddling to rub his belly. He enjoys talking to you about anything and everything, and there have been a few late mornings because the two of you stayed up past midnight talking. 

He’s gotten pretty good at cooking, too! With all the extra time and a lot more of a sense of purpose in his life, he’s allowed himself to build interest in things he didn’t used to have the energy or time for, and that includes cooking. Make no mistake, he’s still comfortable with popping a frozen dinner in the microwave when neither of you have the time or energy to make a meal from scratch, but he’s become quite the chef! He tries to cook dinner for the two of you at least a few times a week, and he melts a little inside when you do the food dance after trying any of his recipes. He’ll smile so wide, and the tips of his ears will turn peachy-pink if you dare compliment his cooking, so you make sure to do it as often as possible. 

Harvey is always feeding you and making sure you’re dressed appropriately for the weather. He will absolutely run out the door after you in his robe and slippers if you forget a scarf, and a portion of your backpack space is reserved for the lunchboxes he makes you in the mornings. When you come back from the mines, regardless of how well it went or not, you have to let him give you a mini-checkup. He will not be able to sleep soundly if you don’t let him look you over, and he will nag you the entire time. He’s never mean about it, and he doesn’t treat you like a child, but it typically lasts fifteen to twenty minutes, and he might get weepy if he finds out you’ve been hurt. 

He’s just afraid for your safety, and he doesn’t want his life to go back to the dull and lonely repetitiveness it was before. Despite all of that, though, he’s calmed down quite a bit. He still has anxiety, but he’s no longer choked by it, and he’s relieved to have someone in his corner who can help ground him when his brain gets a little too ramped up.

He’s still totally socially awkward, though. He loves to hold your hand, but can’t do much more than that in public, because all of his blood rushes to his face and it makes him dizzy. He loves taking walks on the beach with you, and is the type to draw a heart in the sand with a stick and put your initials in it, but he’ll immediately scribble it out if you make a big deal out of it. 

In private, Harvey is a huge fan of parallel play activities; if you’re at the dining table reading a book, he’s probably going over medical papers or reading about fighter planes beside you. He doesn’t usually speak during these quiet moments, but occasionally he’ll reach over to grab your free hand and pull it up to his lips for a quick kiss. If you whine about needing your hand back, he purposely tickles your hand with his mustache and won’t let you pull away until he gets a real, full smile out of you. Since being with you, his life has become more rich and lively, and he gets more excited about things that would’ve gotten nothing more than a mild smile out of him in the past. You really have changed his whole life.

Maru pays really close attention to anything you express the slightest interest in. If you mention a particular candy that you’ve become obsessed with, she buys a full box the next day. If you mention liking a particular recipe, she’ll make it as often as possible until you get sick of it, and then she’ll move onto the next interest. The few times you took her to the city to visit your family, she made sure to take note of anything you looked at twice in any shop so she could buy it for you later. She’s surprised you with plenty of gifts this way, but there have also been a few times where she made the thing herself, and was very proud to say that her version was both better and worked smoother. 

Your farm has become a lot more automated, due to the sheer amount of tech and machines she’s built. She wants to make the harvesting process as smooth and as light in labor as possible, so that you have more time for yourself and your interests. She watched her mother’s physical state deteriorate over the years due to how often she’s lugging giant logs around, and doesn’t want the same thing to happen to you, so she’s constantly looking for new ways to lighten your load. 

She loves info dumping about her newest inventions or discoveries, and her favorite shared activity is stargazing. You commissioned Robin for a rooftop deck shortly after moving in together, and there have been many nights spent up there, with you pointing out different stars to Maru and allowing her to go on and on about nebulae, star systems, and giant interstellar clouds. She loves answering all of your questions, and never belittles you for not knowing something, or for asking an “obvious” question. It helps her brush up on her own knowledge as well! 

Beyond that, she likes roping you into shitty movie marathons. She’ll pop a few bags of popcorn and get out several bowls of snacks, and maybe if you’re feeling frisky she may just bust out a bottle of wine to enjoy between the two of you. She doesn’t think the movies are fantastic, but that’s the point! Her favorite parts are when she looks over at you after a particularly ridiculous scene, and she gets to watch you go through the five stages of grief in as many seconds. You’ve created a fair amount of inside jokes through this little ritual of yours, and it always makes her laugh, no matter how ridiculous the references are.

Penny takes immense care of the farmhouse, and loves decorating and redecorating your spaces. She’s always looking for the coziest pillows, or the prettiest wallpaper, and she includes you in every step of the process. If there’s anything you don’t jive with, or something you want to get done on the house but can never get to with all the other work you’re constantly doing, have no fear, because Penny will either find a contractor (Robin) to complete the project, or she’ll pick up a hammer and do it herself. 

She likes being a homemaker, and she’s good at it, and seeing you enjoy or react positively to any renovations and additions will make her whole month. You especially enjoy the home library she’s curated, because it’s by far the coziest room in the house, and because that’s where she loves to read to you—it’s something of a nightly routine for you both. After you’re finished getting ready for bed, she’ll sit on the thrifted chaise she restored, wait for you to get comfortable against her shoulder, and she’ll read until you’re sleepy enough to go to bed. (Sometimes you do pass out in there though.)

Your library is full of annotated books she’s given you, though she uses sticky notes to avoid writing directly on the pages, she will write an inscription inside the front cover with a short address to you about why she thought you’d like it. It’s pretty sweet, especially when she gives you romance books and explains with bright red cheeks that the main love interest reminded her of you. That’s always a cute moment, even though you’re a little shit sometimes and will quote the love interest in private moments, just to fluster her.

Penny secretly likes it, though—especially when you try to woo her. Whether it be with roses, dates, gifts, or flowery words, she loves every bit of it. Even though you’re together and she isn’t going anywhere, you don’t abandon those habits later on, and it reassures her. She initially figured the effort would be too much for someone as busy as you, but you always make time and plan romantic things for her, and she’s happy to know that her romance novels aren’t wholly fictional. You’re living proof of that.

Abigail has softened up quite a bit during her relationship with you. Don’t get me wrong, she’s still pretty passionate and bullheaded, but overall, she’s much calmer. She’s comfortable being herself and doesn’t feel the need to get defensive about who she is or what her interests are anymore, and it’s opened up a lot of avenues of self expression for her. She tries new things all the time, and she’s never shy about sharing her experiences or the results of them, because she knows you’re not going to judge her for it.

But because she feels so secure with you, she’s much more comfortable showing affection without fear of rejection or humiliation. That said, she stares at you a lot. Before you may have gotten a pillow launched at your face for bringing it up, but now she’s perfectly okay with being caught. She actually uses it to her advantage most of the time, and will take the opportunity to compliment you, like, “What, I can’t stare at the love of my life?” 

She loves flustering you. It’s mostly genuine, but she does do it just to be a little shit sometimes. When you play video games together (especially ones where you’re competing), she’ll grab your face and pull you into a kiss just to get ahead. It works 90% of the time, even when you know what she’s trying to do. She thinks it’s really cute, and loves seeing you get all worked up when she messes with you like that, but sometimes she does get lost in it and will abandon the game entirely.

On a more serious note, Abigail never lets you go down into the mines without her. She hates having to hear from Harvey, and she’d rather be there with you to prevent any accidents or injuries. It’s easier to get through the shafts with a second pair of eyes and another sword handy, so you’re alright with it—and another upside is that you’re never short on ore and coal anymore. When you get out of the mines afterward, she always suggests a dip in the spa. It helps you both relax and recuperate after a lengthy trip, and she gets to see you in a swimsuit. She may like the second part more, but hey, can you blame her? She thinks you’re hot, let her stare a bit more.

Haley is extremely tactile with her affection—she was pretty embarrassed about it at first, and tried to keep it at bay initially, but it caused some problems early on and that talk was not fun, so she doesn’t repress it anymore. If she wants to kiss you, she’ll ask for it, and the same can be said for any other physical affection. She wants you as close as possible a lot of the time, and when you do meet her need for touch, she all but turns into a cat.

She’ll push her face as far into your chest as it’ll go, latch herself onto your torso with all her strength, and if she’s feeling particularly goofy, she’ll jump into your arms like a koala. It’s very silly (and incredibly endearing), and she always giggles uncontrollably when you drop everything you’re doing to support her weight. She always warns you beforehand, and she does know when it isn’t safe or appropriate, so rest assured nothing goes wrong when she does decide to launch herself at you. Her favorite part about those moments is when you finally get a good grip on her. Again, she’s a tactile lover first and foremost, so your touch is going to make her happy no matter what. 

Besides touch, she likes how little you care about her appearance—make no mistake, she does appreciate when you take notice of all the effort she puts into her appearance—but she loves it when you wake her up in the mornings with a kiss, uncaring of her morning breath and eye crust. Like, sure, she grew up attractive and wealthy, and that meant she was popular, but it also meant she was highly criticized for everything she did. She could never have a blemish, a single hair out of place, or an embarrassing moment, and if she did, she’d be verbally torn to shreds. Always the topic of gossip, she learned to close herself off and pretend, pretend, pretend; but with you, she doesn’t need to.

She doesn’t feel the need to go to sleep with a full-face of makeup on, the way she did when she spent the night at her previous boyfriends’ places, and she’s perfectly content lounging around the house with a bare face and a tangled bun piled on top of her head. She can make all the hideous faces she needs to when applying her makeup and not agonize over whether you’ll still love her afterward. You’ve allowed her the space to let loose and let herself be imperfect, and it’s comfortable. She’s happier than she’s ever been, and a lot of it is thanks to you.

Leah is an artist, and it permeates her entire life—including the ways she loves you. She wants to make art out of you in a million ways, especially tactile ones, like braiding your hair or helping you dress yourself. She frequently stops you at the door before you head out for work, and she’ll fix your shirt collar or put your hat on for you, and adjust your hair until it lays perfectly.

She has paintings of you scattered around the house, but they aren’t always portraits. If you look hard enough, you can find hints of her love for you in all the art she creates; a canvas covered in your favorite flowers, a picture painted only with your favorite color, or subtle snapshots of your life together. She does have a portrait of you above her work desk, though, and it is by far her favorite piece. (She has rejected multiple offers for it, and she always will.)

She loves working on her art projects while you watch, and it’s become something of an inconsistent routine for the both of you. It started after dinner one night, when she was cracking down on a deadline for a commission, but you still wanted to keep her company. Not wanting to leave you hanging, she grabbed two glasses of wine, and you sat comfortably on her studio couch while she painted the piece for her client. She never demands silence from you in these moments, but when you are quiet, it’s easier for her to fall into the cozy atmosphere. Her work often feels less stressful with you watching, because if she gets overwhelmed or irritated with stubborn mediums, she can just flop next to you and take her mind off of the problem.

When you’re not home and she has no immediate commissions, she paints tiny hidden meadows on your furniture: on the bottom leg of your dining table, the inside door of a dish cabinet, the underside of your desk, the top of your front door, and even around the farm as well. She’s always so excited when you find another mini-meadow, and it’s like a special treasure hunt for the two of you. She’s gotten pretty good at hiding them, and she’s quite sneaky about it—except for the one time she fell into the pig pen trying to paint on the rafters in the barn—but that’s neither here nor there. (Don’t let her find the picture on your phone!)

Emily is like a crow. You’ve developed a mini collection of random trinkets, rocks, sea glass, shells, and feathers over the course of your relationship, all found and gifted to you by Emily. She sees a pretty shiny thing and immediately thinks of you. Sometimes she follows you around during your daily errands, just to keep you company. She absolutely steps in to lighten your load when you need it (or rather, when you let her), but usually she’s fine just listening to you talk, and vice versa.

She also likes taking care of you. Emily makes her own homemade soap and body oils, and if you’re ever worn out after a particularly long day, she’ll set up a mini-spa for you, and pamper you for however long it takes to wring out any lingering aches and pains. She’ll bust out dried flower petals and draw a bath for you, making sure to light candles and turn on a diffuser filled with calming oils to help you relax while you bathe. She doesn't want you to lift a single finger, and she may go so far as to dress and feed you after a bath; she likes to use warming oils and massage your entire body before bed. It’s both very vulnerable and incredibly relaxing—but that is her goal, after all—and she always finishes off her pampering with a healthy dose of kisses pressed all over your face.

While not everyone has as strong a connection to the spiritual side of the world, Emily does—and she likes sharing that with the people she cares about. Regardless of whether or not someone believes in the same things she does, she likes to look over your birth chart and horoscopes together, and sometimes she’ll do a tarot card reading for you, just for fun. She’s aware that people think she’s weird for being into these things, but you’ve never shut her down or made fun of her for her interests, and she’s both grateful and overwhelmed by how it makes her feel. No one else has taken such care to understand her, and she feels safe enough to be her most authentic self when you’re around each other. 

It’s also why she likes to dance with you! Whether it be a little dance-off in the kitchen while you’re preparing dinner together, or a slow dance in the living room, or even acting like nutcases at the saloon after a few too many drinks, she’ll have fun as long as it’s with you. She always has fun when it’s with you.

[doubleddenden]

The topic of Palworld is pretty charged, but often times I see people be shamed for liking it because the CEO tweeted stuff about NFTs and the company using AI art in a separate game. Acting as if that's the most damning thing ever for a gaming company in an industry filled with similar people.

Make no mistake, I dislike both AI art and nfts, but do you realize how many gaming companies have involvement with that?

To begin with, Pokémon used AI art in a promotional piece for Pokémon Go in September, and nobody gave a shit because uwu Pikachu. The Pokémon Company also put a job listing some months back seeking an expert in NFTs. That's not quite damning evidence, but if I were a betting man, no "NFT expert" will willingly say "yeah nfts suck are bad for the environment, man, I'll take my paycheck and fuck off now." There's also a strong argument to be made that Pokémon has stolen ideas from fakemon artists (Finizen and Palafin, Scovillain, Dipplin, etc) and other franchises (kaiju movies, Dragon Quest, Megaman, final fantasy, western cartoons and food mascots, etc), a dubious legal statement that claims they own all fan art from the remixes and fakemon made on youtube to the pikachu your kid drew at breakfast; they have yet to apologize for the state of Scarlet and Violet while charging full price to millions of paying customers for a clearly unfinished and barely functioning game (which i did enjoy, but you can't tell me it was finished baking when it struggles not to shit itself just to run), and a bunch of other things people shit on Palworld for, but A. It's Pokémon so people don't care and think it's fine, and B. That's not the point of this post.

You know who else does NFTs and AI art? (Yes I heard Muscle Man from Regular Show in my head just now, too, moving along)

Square Enix sold several of their IPs for NFTs and claims to have used AI art "a minimum amount" in Foam Stars, yet I see nobody yelling for boycotts of Final Fantasy 14, 16, Kingdom Hearts, Dragon Quest, Life is Strange, etc etc etc.

Sony has invested in both, they want to implement AI into gaming, and has a patent for nfts to be used in games and consoles, yet there's no movement to throw out your playstations.

Bandai Namco- you know, that company with a hand in pretty much most anime games on the market and popular games such as the Dark Souls games? They have a game called RYU that's essentially a virtual pet game that uses the blockchain, and its AI driven, among other projects. Yet there's no outcry to stop playing the many, MANY games they brand with. This also includes quite a few Nintendo games (btw they just partnered together to form a special studio quite recently) like Smash Wii U/3ds and New Pokémon Snap. Nobody gives a shit though.

Android, Microsoft, Google, Apple- I don't even need to explain those, they have whole teams dedicated to both. Even popular VPN companies accept crypto.

I'm just saying an awful lot of you guys that scream and shit bloody murder about Palworld's company being involved with that shit are either the biggest "It's okay when my favs do it" type of hypocrites, or you're sorely ignorant to just how evil and greedy most corporations are. You'll be hard pressed to find a game company with popular AND fun games that DOESN'T have some interest in either, let alone movie and show studios. That's the awful reality we live in.

You have 2 options

1. You basically stop doing anything involving most modern tech, including throwing out your pc and smart phone. You could probably live a comfortable life with tech circa 2010, but you have to be aware that any thing you buy may go towards a cause you don't like.

2. You accept that people can enjoy a product while not necessarily agreeing with the CEO of said product. Most CEOs tend to be jackasses anyway, that's kind of the shared trait they all have. You can also discourage companies from using them while understanding it is everywhere.

Palworld at the end of the day is just a toy, that's it. From the looks of it, it's not even actually hurting anyone, and it seems like the company at least treats their employees pretty decently- at least according to a few things I've seen here and there that seems rather progressive for a Japanese studio (with room for doubt obviously, it's a company after all and as we've established, they're all evil). At the least its not like when people supported Hogwarts Legacy and directly put money into JKR's wallet so she can openly hurt more Trans women. In fact, the only people seemingly hurt in all of this Palworld drama are obsessed Pokémon stans that can't accept a parody, or the Pokémon Company themselves, who rightly deserve some punching up tbh.

You can just say you dislike the game, that's fine, I totally get that. Even though I personally think The Pokémon Company deserves a few nut shots after the way they've treated fans these last few years with the state of their games (and you know, stealing ideas from fans without credit), I can see why someone would be turned away from a parody that's literally meant to be Pokémon with guns. I can totally understand all of that, personally I'd prefer if the game was MORE like Pokémon with turn based combat.

But if you're going to defend Pokémon because you think its perfectly innocent because of Wooloo or something like that, just be sure you're aware you're defending the World's Richest Franchise and their own attempts at AI and NFTs while calling out an indie company (a real one thats learning as they go, not the fake "We're totally indie" franchise that hasn't been indie since gen 3) for having a ceo that also seems interested in the same stuff. And remember, you don't become number 1 without hurting people somehow (we could dig up receipts about certain partners Pokémon has teamed up with, such as Tencent with Unite, but I'd rather not right now.)

Just saying. I don't think you're an irredeemable person for still liking Pikachu, cuz I do too believe it or not. I've been a life long fan and still have fun with the games despite the clear scummy business practices towards their paying customers. Just maybe extend that courtesy to the millions of players just trying to have fun in this awful, putrid, shithole planet that just keeps getting worse and worse with each passing day.

Plus... you know, think about it. Do you think Pokémon would ever get around to making a gunless Palworld? Probably not. Do you think Palworld would exist if The Pokémon Company and Nintendo were the slightest bit chill about Pokémon fan projects like SEGA is with Sonic? Also probably not. From what I've read, the devs just wanted to make a fun game that happens to mostly be ARK with Pokémon adjacent monsters. That's not really a bad thing, all things considered, and it seems like the worst they've done is reference official Pokémon when making their own models.

Palworld being successful is actually beneficial to Pokémon fans, as well. It'll never really truly compete, but it has outsold Legends Arceus in terms of units sold (not as much financially because Palworld was only $30 plus a sale recently, but still impressive), and it is enough that Game Freak is aware of its existence. Let Palworld light a fire under their ass, and maybe GF will actually finish their next game before releasing it for full price (and no, we're not bringing up the tired imaginary ball and chain game devs, game freak owns 1/3rd lf the franchise and can easily take methods to get more dev time, they just haven't because money). Just saying, at least the Paldevs were honest enough to sell it in early access for half the price.

[friendlylocalwhumper]

“Yes.” | “Kneel.” | Best of Three | Correspondence | Appraisal | Collapse | Cupcake | Foggy | Cracking | Just Breathe | Urge | Trim | Stupid | Upkeep | Old Defeat | Watching | Simple Loyalty | Overreaction | Set Up for Failure | Burning | Healed Wrong | Haunted | Boxes Buried | Heavy Blow | Loneliness

This beating isn’t too bad. The iron, last time, was too much. Major survived, and all, he just… really can’t handle burns. But this time it’s just fists, and he can handle those.

He tries to tank all the hits, at first. Simon’s leather gloves split at the knuckle before he starts rolling his head away from the blows for some relief from the impact.

He’s not giving it up right, though. Somehow. Simon wants something more, Major can see it in his eyes. Simon’s hair is falling from its bun. His eyes are hungry.

Lying on his back, Major blinks blearily up at the ceiling fan. The blows have stopped for a minute. Here comes the checking - leather-clad hands press at his wrist, his throat, his ribs, checking for damage. For signs that they need to stop. Apparently, his heart is still beating just fine, and his ribs aren’t crunched, because another freight train blow to the side of his head comes. Major grunts out some kind of sound about it, head rolling to the side. Now, instead of the ceiling fan, he watches the TV that has gone to a commercial about a hair product.

Other shampoos are $12.99, apparently, but this one is only $8.99, and you get a second one half off if you buy before the weekend. The numbers slide through Major’s head without any resistance whatsoever. If he was given a twenty dollar bill to go buy that stupid shampoo, he has no idea how much change he’d get back. How many bottles he’d walk out with, even. Would he be able to get two? He’s never had a head for numbers. Some dumb bitch is flipping her hair around to show how bouncy it is, or some shit, and Major squints in confusion about what her fucking point is.

He’s punched in the throat, this time. Or at least he thinks so. There is an impact, pressure there, and in a mindless frenzy, Major snaps his hands up to clutch at his throat and relieve the lingering feeling from the blow.

But instead of finding only his own Adam’s apple, he finds Simon’s hands. Dragging his eyes from the TV he finds Simon’s face looming above, still searching for something.

He’s being choked. Fine, that’s whatever, he’s had it a hundred times before. Major hums a sound that doesn’t escape. He can take this. Challenge accepted.

~

“...There, there.” Simon frowns, his hand irritated by the awkward rubbing in circles over jagged scars. Major lies hunched over himself, drooling and coughing on his sobs. “Just breathe.”

White hair billows out with a sharp scoff from the trembling man. He is breathing, he never wanted to stop breathing. But he doesn’t curse Simon out about it, just stays on his hands and knees sucking down air and choking it back up.

“We got there, after a while. Got what I wanted. So we’re good, we’re done. Let’s go, Cupcake, have some lunch.”

Simon groans with the effort of standing, rubbing his back in complaint.

Major is still on the ground, flopping down to rest his face on the carpet, now, shoulders low and rocking with muted sobs.

“Uh. Cupcake, come on.” It’s awkward, being demanding so soon after finishing a session. Feels like putting on a mask. But he doesn’t want to wait all day for the guy to calm down. “Up,” He snaps, more firmly.

Suddenly, Major is clambering to his feet, wiping under his nose and mouth with the sleeve of the hoodie that Simon gave him to wear.

“There you go,” Says the owner, smiling once again now that he’s got a less inconsolable punching bag to contend with. His hand finds the small of Major’s back to guide him. The light pressure over the bandaged burns there seems to motivate him well enough to get moving. “Let’s get you some of those meds, get some food in you. You’ll feel better.”

taglist: @morning-star-whump , @lthrboy, @apokolyps, @paperprinxe , @vampiresprite, @wollemi-whump

[randomtheidiot]

What the Norse gods probably smell like.

NOTE: I AM NOT A NEOPAGAN. I’M JUST A NERD. PLEASE DO NOT TAKE MY DERANGED RAMBLINGS AS RELIGIOUS GOSPEL, I WILL ULTIMATELY USE ALL THAT POWER AND INFLUENCE FOR EVIL.

This is a comprehensive list of what I think all the Norse gods smell like. Do not ask me why I wrote this down, why I wanted to post this on the internet or why I even asked the question in the first place. Everything can be explained by mental illness and sleep deprivation.

If your favorite deity isn’t on here, it’s because they suck.

-Óðinn (Odin): A mix of beer, sausage and that old man sweater smell.

-Þórr (Thor): Alcohol, body odor and an inordinate amount of Worcestershire sauce. The smell is strong enough to knock small birds straight out of the air.

-Loki: Fireplace soot and the kind of mulling spices you’d use in apple cider. You’d think it’d smell good, but the sooty smell kind of ruins it. A bath would definitely help.

-Frigg: Some sort of strong perfume, along with cheap wine and potpourri. She just kinda does, I don’t know why.

-Freyja: She has that cat scent. I don’t know if any of you know what I’m talking about, but she smells like a cat.

-Freyr: Apple scented shampoo. This is a conscious choice on his part.

-Baldr: Flowers. Real ones, too. Not the fake perfume shit. I suppose now he smells like a corpse that was burnt on a pyre, but when he was alive, he smelled like flowers.

-Höðr: Wintergreen mouthwash… for some reason.

-Nanna: Fruit preserves like jam and shit.

-Hœnir: He smells like a dad. Whatever you think a dad smells like is what Hœnir smells like. He smells fatherly.

-Skaði: Pine sap. She is covered in pine sap and if you look closely, she probably has some pine needles glued to her hair.

-Sif: The bread aisle in a grocery store.

-Iðunn: Apple based food products. She’s not exactly running low on apples.

-Sigyn: Olive Garden. She smells like the inside of an Olive Garden. Do not question me on this.

-Mímir: Very strong incense to cover up the corpse smell. It is nearly impossible to breathe around him.

-Týr: Go up to a man. Any man, doesn’t have to be a specific kind of man. Now smell him. That is it. Týr smells like a man.

-Heimdallr: Piss and vinegar from all the hate in his soul. There’s a million goddamn signs of Ragnarök and his dad still has him keeping watch like he’s a fucking security robot. That horn ain’t gonna do shit and he knows it.

-Njördr: He smells bad, but it’s not really clear what’s on him. It could be anything from tacky deodorant to motor oil and judging by his general weirdness, I’m not sure I wanna find out.

-Ægir: Alcohol. He practically wears Heineken as a cologne and it smells fucking terrible. Add on his natural ocean smell and it’s just fucking unpleasant to be around him.

-Rán: Fish, and not for the reason you might be thinking!

-Jörð: She’s a fucking earth goddess. Stick your face in the dirt. That’s what she smells like. Don’t ask me this again. Fuck you.

-Laufey: Tree. :)

-Njörðr’s unnamed sister-wife: The nursing home.

-Lofn: Shitty rose flavored Turkish delight that I got from one of those generic ass Marshall’s stores that white moms really seem to like. It was only slightly better than the lemon one.

-Forseti: That incense they use at Catholic Churches. I don’t know why, he just does.

-Hermóðr: Sweat and various other body fluids, as well as traces of whatever menial task Óðinn last assigned to him.

-Ullr: Tobacco. On his breath. Staining his beard. It’s horrible.

-Sól: Orange juice and sunscreen.

-Máni: Grape scented for unclear reasons. Probably nefarious ones.

-Bragi: Bragi smells like a disappointment of a child. His siblings are Þórr, Baldr and Týr and he’s just there with his stupid poetry and shit. He smells like those stupid Yankee Candle candles that never actually smell like what’s on the label. When I see “tropical seabreeze” on a label, I don’t expect it to smell like dishwashing liquid, but it always does. Bragi is tropical seabreeze candles. Bragi is dishwashing liquid.

-Hel: BAD. BAD SMELL. THAT IS NOT A GOOD SMELL.

-Angrboða: Plums.

[redshiftsinger]

Wednesday sucked in so many ways, please go off about it

OK I HAVE BEEN INVITED TO INFODUMP AND I'M GONNA CRASH THROUGH THAT OPEN DOOR LIKE THE KOOLAID MAN. Now on a separate post where it won't derail the other thing I was trying to talk about!

ANYWAY

So you know how that "nightshade poison" that glows blue and makes people foam at the mouth and get hyperactively erratic/aggressive or whatever is a pretty major plot point?

Well, that's cool and all, except that "foaming at the mouth and erratic behavior" are NOT symptoms of nightshade poisoning. Like, at all.

Look. I have personally experienced (mild!) nightshade poisoning. I've also been intentionally dosed with scopolamine for good medical reasons (said reasons mostly coming down to: scopolamine patches are the only anti-nausea option that actually works for me). And you know what atropine and scopolamine, the main alkaloid poison compounds in nightshade, very emphatically do NOT do? Increase saliva production leading to "foaming at the mouth". The dry-mouth side effect of scopolamine patches is no fucking joke. I'm pretty sure it works as an anti-nausea med by magicking all the moisture out of your entire digestive tract from mouth to anus so there's nothing to throw up (this is mild hyperbole but seriously. The dry-mouth is BRUTAL, I'd almost rather hurl. Maybe not immediately after surgery to have a piece of my rib removed, though).

Nightshade poisoning also does not lead to erratic behavior. It has sedative effects, with fatigue/lethargy (loss of consciousness in severe cases) also being a major symptom. The dry-mouth and fatigue go along with headaches, dilated pupils, and irregular breathing, for the most part.

The poison with symptoms that most closely match what's portrayed in Wednesday as "nightshade poisoning" is actually cyanide, which DOES cause increased salivation, restlessness, and confusion instead of dry mouth and lethargy -- and is also named because of some relationship to a blue pigment, etymologically, so it even kinda vibes with that glowy-blue-spooky aesthetic choice. It's not a perfect match and definitely doesn't actually uh, look quite like that (no, cyanide is not actually blue), but one could forgive some cinematic dramatization given that we're already meant to be suspending disbelief to accept the existence of werewolves, witches, sirens, gorgons etc. for the sake of letting them tell a damn fantasy story... if they'd actually bothered matching the poison to the symptoms at the MOST FUCKING SUPERFICIAL GODDAMN LEVEL!

Honestly, I'd have been fine with the remaining poison-symptom inaccuracies if they'd just called it cyanide instead of nightshade, and they would have lost NO plot points because cyanide is also a poison that can be extracted from plants! Cyanide is the reason you shouldn't eat a lot of apple seeds. Or peach pits. Or bitter almonds (that's a species distinction, not "almonds that taste bitter"; the almonds you buy at the store are from a related, but different plant although yes there is still a small amount of cyanide in edible almonds. It's what gives them their distinctive flavor. Cyanide is also why no matter what some dangerous scammy types claim, apricot pits are the opposite of a "healthy superfood snack". You can give yourself cyanide poisoning real fast nibbling on those -- yes, eating apricot fruits or a normal amount of almonds is fine, you'd have to eat a kinda ridiculous amount of almonds to give yourself any problems and apricots don't put cyanide into the fruit, just the seed).

Fuck you, Wednesday writers, and your insistence on cheaply trying to max out your goth points with "ooooh, it's NIGHTSHADE because that sounds more goth" bullshit when cyanide is plenty goth, serves your plot just fine, and actually has symptoms at least REMOTELY FUCKING SIMILAR to what your fantasy poison is supposed to do.

[librarianrafia]

Aug 2024)

Today's links

"Disenshittify or Die": My speech from Defcon 32.

Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.

This day in history: 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023

Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.

Recent appearances: Where I've been.

Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.

Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.

Colophon: All the rest.

"Disenshittify or Die" (permalink)

Last weekend, I traveled to Las Vegas for Defcon 32, where I had the immense privilege of giving a solo talk on Track 1, entitled "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification":

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861

This was a followup to last year's talk, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification," a talk that kicked off a lot of international interest in my analysis of platform decay ("enshittification"):

The Defcon organizers have earned a restful week or two, and that means that the video of my talk hasn't yet been posted to Defcon's Youtube channel, so in the meantime, I thought I'd post a lightly edited version of my speech crib. If you're headed to Burning Man, you can hear me reprise this talk at Palenque Norte (7&E); I'm kicking off their lecture series on Tuesday, Aug 27 at 1PM.

==

What the fuck happened to the old, good internet?

I mean, sure, our bosses were a little surveillance-happy, and they were usually up for sharing their data with the NSA, and whenever there was a tossup between user security and growth, it was always YOLO time.

But Google Search used to work. Facebook used to show you posts from people you followed. Uber used to be cheaper than a taxi and pay the driver more than a cabbie made. Amazon used to sell products, not Shein-grade self-destructing dropshipped garbage from all-consonant brands. Apple used to defend your privacy, rather than spying on you with your no-modifications-allowed Iphone.

There was a time when you searching for an album on Spotify would get you that album – not a playlist of insipid AI-generated covers with the same name and art.

Microsoft used to sell you software – sure, it was buggy – but now they just let you access apps in the cloud, so they can watch how you use those apps and strip the features you use the most out of the basic tier and turn them into an upcharge.

What – and I cannot stress this enough – the fuck happened?!

I’m talking about enshittification.

Here’s what enshittification looks like from the outside: First, you see a company that’s being good to its end users. Google puts the best search results at the top; Facebook shows you a feed of posts from people and groups you followl; Uber charges small dollars for a cab; Amazon subsidizes goods and returns and shipping and puts the best match for your product search at the top of the page.

That’s stage one, being good to end users. But there’s another part of this stage, call it stage 1a). That’s figuring out how to lock in those users.

There’s so many ways to lock in users.

If you’re Facebook, the users do it for you. You joined Facebook because there were people there you wanted to hang out with, and other people joined Facebook to hang out with you.

That’s the old “network effects” in action, and with network effects come “the collective action problem." Because you love your friends, but goddamn are they a pain in the ass! You all agree that FB sucks, sure, but can you all agree on when it’s time to leave?

No way.

Can you agree on where to go next?

Hell no.

You’re there because that’s where the support group for your rare disease hangs out, and your bestie is there because that’s where they talk with the people in the country they moved away from, then there’s that friend who coordinates their kid’s little league car pools on FB, and the best dungeon master you know isn’t gonna leave FB because that’s where her customers are.

So you’re stuck, because even though FB use comes at a high cost – your privacy, your dignity and your sanity – that’s still less than the switching cost you’d have to bear if you left: namely, all those friends who have taken you hostage, and whom you are holding hostage

Now, sometimes companies lock you in with money, like Amazon getting you to prepay for a year’s shipping with Prime, or to buy your Audible books on a monthly subscription, which virtually guarantees that every shopping search will start on Amazon, after all, you’ve already paid for it.

Sometimes, they lock you in with DRM, like HP selling you a printer with four ink cartridges filled with fluid that retails for more than $10,000/gallon, and using DRM to stop you from refilling any of those ink carts or using a third-party cartridge. So when one cart runs dry, you have to refill it or throw away your investment in the remaining three cartridges and the printer itself.

Sometimes, it’s a grab bag:

You can’t run your Ios apps without Apple hardware;

you can’t run your Apple music, books and movies on anything except an Ios app;

your iPhone uses parts pairing – DRM handshakes between replacement parts and the main system – so you can’t use third-party parts to fix it; and

every OEM iPhone part has a microscopic Apple logo engraved on it, so Apple can demand that the US Customs and Border Service seize any shipment of refurb Iphone parts as trademark violations.

Think Different, amirite?

Getting you locked in completes phase one of the enshittification cycle and signals the start of phase two: making things worse for you to make things better for business customers.

For example, a platform might poison its search results, like Google selling more and more of its results pages to ads that are identified with lighter and lighter tinier and tinier type.

Or Amazon selling off search results and calling it an “ad” business. They make $38b/year on this scam. The first result for your search is, on average, 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The first row is 25% more expensive than the best match. On average, the best match for your search is likely to be found seventeen places down on the results page.

Other platforms sell off your feed, like Facebook, which started off showing you the things you asked to see, but now the quantum of content from the people you follow has dwindled to a homeopathic residue, leaving a void that Facebook fills with things that people pay to show you: boosted posts from publishers you haven’t subscribed to, and, of course, ads.

Now at this point you might be thinking ‘sure, if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.'

Bullshit!

Bull.

Shit.

The people who buy those Google ads? They pay more every year for worse ad-targeting and more ad-fraud

Those publishers paying to nonconsensually cram their content into your Facebook feed? They have to do that because FB suppresses their ability to reach the people who actually subscribed to them

The Amazon sellers with the best match for your query have to outbid everyone else just to show up on the first page of results. It costs so much to sell on Amazon that between 45-51% of every dollar an independent seller brings in has to be kicked up to Don Bezos and the Amazon crime family. Those sellers don’t have the kind of margins that let them pay 51% They have to raise prices in order to avoid losing money on every sale.

"But wait!" I hear you say!

[Come on, say it!]

"But wait! Things on Amazon aren’t more expensive that things at Target, or Walmart, or at a mom and pop store, or direct from the manufacturer.

"How can sellers be raising prices on Amazon if the price at Amazon is the same as at is everywhere else?"

[Any guesses?!]

That’s right, they charge more everywhere. They have to. Amazon binds its sellers to a policy called “most favored nation status,” which says they can’t charge more on Amazon than they charge elsewhere, including direct from their own factory store.

So every seller that wants to sell on Amazon has to raise their prices everywhere else.

Now, these sellers are Amazon’s best customers. They’re paying for the product, and they’re still getting screwed.

Paying for the product doesn’t fill your vapid boss’s shriveled heart with so much joy that he decides to stop trying to think of ways to fuck you over.

Look at Apple. Remember when Apple offered every Ios user a one-click opt out for app-based surveillance? And 96% of users clicked that box?

(The other four percent were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees.)

That cost Facebook at least ten billion dollars per year in lost surveillance revenue?

I mean, you love to see it.

But did you know that at the same time Apple started spying on Ios users in the same way that Facebook had been, for surveillance data to use to target users for its competing advertising product?

Your Iphone isn’t an ad-supported gimme. You paid a thousand fucking dollars for that distraction rectangle in your pocket, and you’re still the product. What’s more, Apple has rigged Ios so that you can’t mod the OS to block its spying.

If you’re not not paying for the product, you’re the product, and if you are paying for the product, you’re still the product.

Just ask the farmers who are expected to swap parts into their own busted half-million dollar, mission-critical tractors, but can’t actually use those parts until a technician charges them $200 to drive out to the farm and type a parts pairing unlock code into their console.

John Deere’s not giving away tractors. Give John Deere a half mil for a tractor and you will be the product.

Please, my brothers and sisters in Christ. Please! Stop saying ‘if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.’

OK, OK, so that’s phase two of enshittification.

Phase one: be good to users while locking them in.

Phase two: screw the users a little to you can good to business customers while locking them in.

Phase three: screw everybody and take all the value for yourself. Leave behind the absolute bare minimum of utility so that everyone stays locked into your pile of shit.

Enshittification: a tragedy in three acts.

That’s what enshittification looks like from the outside, but what’s going on inside the company? What is the pathological mechanism? What sci-fi entropy ray converts the excellent and useful service into a pile of shit?

That mechanism is called twiddling. Twiddling is when someone alters the back end of a service to change how its business operates, changing prices, costs, search ranking, recommendation criteria and other foundational aspects of the system.

Digital platforms are a twiddler’s utopia. A grocer would need an army of teenagers with pricing guns on rollerblades to reprice everything in the building when someone arrives who’s extra hungry.

Whereas the McDonald’s Investments portfolio company Plexure advertises that it can use surveillance data to predict when an app user has just gotten paid so the seller can tack an extra couple bucks onto the price of their breakfast sandwich.

And of course, as the prophet William Gibson warned us, ‘cyberspace is everting.' With digital shelf tags, grocers can change prices whenever they feel like, like the grocers in Norway, whose e-ink shelf tags change the prices 2,000 times per day.

Every Uber driver is offered a different wage for every job. If a driver has been picky lately, the job pays more. But if the driver has been desperate enough to grab every ride the app offers, the pay goes down, and down, and down.

The law professor Veena Dubal calls this ‘algorithmic wage discrimination.' It’s a prime example of twiddling.

Every youtuber knows what it’s like to be twiddled. You work for weeks or months, spend thousands of dollars to make a video, then the algorithm decides that no one – not your own subscribers, not searchers who type in the exact name of your video – will see it.

Why? Who knows? The algorithm’s rules are not public.

Because content moderation is the last redoubt of security through obscurit: they can’t tell you what the como algorithm is downranking because then you’d cheat.

Youtube is the kind of shitty boss who docks every paycheck for all the rules you’ve broken, but won’t tell you what those rules were, lest you figure out how to break those rules next time without your boss catching you.

Twiddling can also work in some users’ favor, of course. Sometimes platforms twiddle to make things better for end users or business customers.

For example, Emily Baker-White from Forbes revealed the existence of a back-end feature that Tiktok’s management can access they call the “heating tool.”

When a manager applies the heating toll to a performer’s account, that performer’s videos are thrust into the feeds of millions of users, without regard to whether the recommendation algorithm predicts they will enjoy that video.

Why would they do this? Well, here’s an analogy from my boyhood I used to go to this traveling fair that would come to Toronto at the end of every summer, the Canadian National Exhibition. If you’ve been to a fair like the Ex, you know that you can always spot some guy lugging around a comedically huge teddy bear.

Nominally, you win that teddy bear by throwing five balls in a peach-basket, but to a first approximation, no one has ever gotten five balls to stay in that peach-basket.

That guy “won” the teddy bear when a carny on the midway singled him out and said, "fella, I like your face. Tell you what I’m gonna do: You get just one ball in the basket and I’ll give you this keychain, and if you amass two keychains, I’ll let you trade them in for one of these galactic-scale teddy-bears."

That’s how the guy got his teddy bear, which he now has to drag up and down the midway for the rest of the day.

Why the hell did that carny give away the teddy bear? Because it turns the guy into a walking billboard for the midway games. If that dopey-looking Judas Goat can get five balls into a peach basket, then so can you.

Except you can’t.

Tiktok’s heating tool is a way to give away tactical giant teddy bears. When someone in the TikTok brain trust decides they need more sports bros on the platform, they pick one bro out at random and make him king for the day, heating the shit out of his account.

That guy gets a bazillion views and he starts running around on all the sports bro forums trumpeting his success: *I am the Louis Pasteur of sports bro influencers!"

The other sports bros pile in and start retooling to make content that conforms to the idiosyncratic Tiktok format. When they fail to get giant teddy bears of their own, they assume that it’s because they’re doing Tiktok wrong, because they don’t know about the heating tool.

But then comes the day when the TikTok Star Chamber decides they need to lure in more astrologers, so they take the heat off that one lucky sports bro, and start heating up some lucky astrologer.

Giant teddy bears are all over the place: those Uber drivers who were boasting to the NYT ten years ago about earning $50/hour? The Substackers who were rolling in dough? Joe Rogan and his hundred million dollar Spotify payout? Those people are all the proud owners of giant teddy bears, and they’re a steal.

Because every dollar they get from the platform turns into five dollars worth of free labor from suckers who think they just internetting wrong.

Giant teddy bears are just one way of twiddling. Platforms can play games with every part of their business logic, in highly automated ways, that allows them to quickly and efficiently siphon value from end users to business customers and back again, hiding the pea in a shell game conducted at machine speeds, until they’ve got everyone so turned around that they take all the value for themselves.

That’s the how: How the platforms do the trick where they are good to users, then lock users in, then maltreat users to be good to business customers, then lock in those business customers, then take all the value for themselves.

So now we know what is happening, and how it is happening, all that’s left is why it’s happening.

Now, on the one hand, the why is pretty obvious. The less value that end-users and business customers capture, the more value there is left to divide up among the shareholders and the executives.

That’s why, but it doesn’t tell you why now. Companies could have done this shit at any time in the past 20 years, but they didn’t. Or at least, the successful ones didn’t. The ones that turned themselves into piles of shit got treated like piles of shit. We avoided them and they died.

Remember Myspace? Yahoo Search? Livejournal? Sure, they’re still serving some kind of AI slop or programmatic ad junk if you hit those domains, but they’re gone.

And there’s the clue: It used to be that if you enshittified your product, bad things happened to your company. Now, there are no consequences for enshittification, so everyone’s doing it.

Let’s break that down: What stops a company from enshittifying?

There are four forces that discipline tech companies. The first one is, obviously, competition.

If your customers find it easy to leave, then you have to worry about them leaving

Many factors can contribute to how hard or easy it is to depart a platform, like the network effects that Facebook has going for it. But the most important factor is whether there is anywhere to go.

Back in 2012, Facebook bought Insta for a billion dollars. That may seem like chump-change in these days of eleven-digit Big Tech acquisitions, but that was a big sum in those innocent days, and it was an especially big sum to pay for Insta. The company only had 13 employees, and a mere 25 million registered users.

But what mattered to Zuckerberg wasn’t how many users Insta had, it was where those users came from.

[Does anyone know where those Insta users came from?]

That’s right, they left Facebook and joined Insta. They were sick of FB, even though they liked the people there, they hated creepy Zuck, they hated the platform, so they left and they didn’t come back.

So Zuck spent a cool billion to recapture them, A fact he put in writing in a midnight email to CFO David Ebersman, explaining that he was paying over the odds for Insta because his users hated him, and loved Insta. So even if they quit Facebook (the platform), they would still be captured Facebook (the company).

Now, on paper, Zuck’s Instagram acquisition is illegal, but normally, that would be hard to stop, because you’d have to prove that he bought Insta with the intention of curtailing competition.

But in this case, Zuck tripped over his own dick: he put it in writing.

But Obama’s DoJ and FTC just let that one slide, following the pro-monopoly policies of Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, and setting an example that Trump would follow, greenlighting gigamergers like the catastrophic, incestuous Warner-Discovery marriage.

Indeed, for 40 years, starting with Carter, and accelerating through Reagan, the US has encouraged monopoly formation, as an official policy, on the grounds that monopolies are “efficient.”

If everyone is using Google Search, that’s something we should celebrate. It means they’ve got the very best search and wouldn’t it be perverse to spend public funds to punish them for making the best product?

But as we all know, Google didn’t maintain search dominance by being best. They did it by paying bribes. More than 20 billion per year to Apple alone to be the default Ios search, plus billions more to Samsung, Mozilla, and anyone else making a product or service with a search-box on it, ensuring that you never stumble on a search engine that’s better than theirs.

Which, in turn, ensured that no one smart invested big in rival search engines, even if they were visibly, obviously superior. Why bother making something better if Google’s buying up all the market oxygen before it can kindle your product to life?

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon – they’re not “making things” companies, they’re “buying things” companies, taking advantage of official tolerance for anticompetitive acquisitions, predatory pricing, market distorting exclusivity deals and other acts specifically prohibited by existing antitrust law.

Their goal is to become too big to fail, because that makes them too big to jail, and that means they can be too big to care.

Which is why Google Search is a pile of shit and everything on Amazon is dropshipped garbage that instantly disintegrates in a cloud of offgassed volatile organic compounds when you open the box.

Once companies no longer fear losing your business to a competitor, it’s much easier for them to treat you badly, because what’re you gonna do?

Remember Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator in those old SNL sketches? “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”

Competition is the first force that serves to discipline companies and the enshittificatory impulses of their leadership, and we just stopped enforcing competition law.

It takes a special kind of smooth-brained asshole – that is, an establishment economist – to insist that the collapse of every industry from eyeglasses to vitamin C into a cartel of five or fewer companies has nothing to do with policies that officially encouraged monopolization.

It’s like we used to put down rat poison and we didn’t have a rat problem.Then these dickheads convinced us that rats were good for us and we stopped putting down rat poison, and now rats are gnawing our faces off and they’re all running around saying, "Who’s to say where all these rats came from? Maybe it was that we stopped putting down poison, but maybe it’s just the Time of the Rats. The Great Forces of History bearing down on this moment to multiply rats beyond all measure!"

Antitrust didn’t slip down that staircase and fall spine-first on that stiletto: they stabbed it in the back and then they pushed it.

And when they killed antitrust, they also killed regulation, the second force that disciplines companies. Regulation is possible, but only when the regulator is more powerful than the regulated entities. When a company is bigger than the government, it gets damned hard to credibly threaten to punish that company, no matter what its sins.

That’s what protected IBM for all those years when it had its boot on the throat of the American tech sector. Do you know, the DOJ fought to break up IBM in the courts from 1970-1982, and that every year, for 12 consecutive years, IBM spent more on lawyers to fight the USG than the DOJ Antitrust Division spent on all the lawyers fighting every antitrust case in the entire USA?

IBM outspent Uncle Sam for 12 years. People called it “Antitrust’s Vietnam.” All that money paid off, because by 1982, the president was Ronald Reagan, a man whose official policy was that monopolies were “efficient." So he dropped the case, and Big Blue wriggled off the hook.

It’s hard to regulate a monopolist, and it’s hard to regulate a cartel. When a sector is composed of hundreds of competing companies, they compete. They genuinely fight with one another, trying to poach each others’ customers and workers. They are at each others’ throats.

It’s hard enough for a couple hundred executives to agree on anything. But when they’re legitimately competing with one another, really obsessing about how to eat each others’ lunches, they can’t agree on anything.

The instant one of them goes to their regulator with some bullshit story, about how it’s impossible to have a decent search engine without fine-grained commercial surveillance; or how it’s impossible to have a secure and easy to use mobile device without a total veto over which software can run on it; or how it’s impossible to administer an ISP’s network unless you can slow down connections to servers whose owners aren’t paying bribes for “premium carriage"; there’s some *other company saying, “That’s bullshit”

“We’ve managed it! Here’s our server logs, our quarterly financials and our customer testimonials to prove it.”

100 companies are a rabble, they're a mob. They can’t agree on a lobbying position. They’re too busy eating each others’ lunch to agree on how to cater a meeting to discuss it.

But let those hundred companies merge to monopoly, absorb one another in an incestuous orgy, turn into five giant companies, so inbred they’ve got a corporate Habsburg jaw, and they become a cartel.

It’s easy for a cartel to agree on what bullshit they’re all going to feed their regulator, and to mobilize some of the excess billions they’ve reaped through consolidation, which freed them from “wasteful competition," so they can capture their regulators completely.

You know, Congress used to pass federal consumer privacy laws? Not anymore.

The last time Congress managed to pass a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988: The Video Privacy Protection Act. That’s a law that bans video-store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS cassettes you take home. In other words, it regulates three things that have effectively ceased to exist.

The threat of having your video rental history out there in the public eye was not the last or most urgent threat the American public faced, and yet, Congress is deadlocked on passing a privacy law.

Tech companies’ regulatory capture involves a risible and transparent gambit, that is so stupid, it’s an insult to all the good hardworking risible transparent ruses out there.

Namely, they claim that when they violate your consumer, privacy or labor rights, It’s not a crime, because they do it with an app.

Algorithmic wage discrimination isn’t illegal wage theft: we do it with an app.

Spying on you from asshole to appetite isn’t a privacy violation: we do it with an app.

And Amazon’s scam search tool that tricks you into paying 29% more than the best match for your query? Not a ripoff. We do it with an app.

[christmasintheloonybin]

been seeing a lot of ads for Apple products, are they really doing so badly they have to inform people about iPhones and macs? it seems like for the past decade normies would flock to this shit, I don't remember ever seeing ads, it would just sort of happen, new iPhone or computer drops and they'd make a ton of money. I remember those ads for ipods back in the day, with the silhouettes, but I don't think I've seen an ad like "PLEASE BUY THE NEW IPHONE, IT WILL SELF DESTRUCT SUSPICIOUSLY RIGHT AFTER THE NEXT NEW IPHONE DROPS BUT PLEASE YOU NEED TO SPEND $2000 ON A NEW TOY EVERY YEAR PLEASE."

switched to android damn coming up on two years and haven't had any problems at all, not even any slower than when I first got this phone. an iPhone it's seriously like those plug and play TV games you used to be able to buy at the grocery store and shit, like pac man or whatever. it's like made broken and you can't do anything on it. idk why people buy that shit. when I got this phone the guy at the phone store was seriously like pressing me, "why are you switching to android?" because iphones suck cock, fuck you. I hate the phone store so much.

[toytulini]

"why are people mad about AI being pushed on them when they SHOULD be mad about all the privacy erosion??"

1) plenty of us bitches are mad and annoyed about both, actually.

2) the privacy erosion has become the normalized state of existence for the average person for the last 10 fucking years at least, its snuck in, they disguise it as Convenient Features to Help You Shop Better, and thats IF they bother telling you theyre doing it, instead of just opting all your shit in without asking, its so fucking normalized that yeah, a lot of people do not bother to question it, they just sigh in resignation and go, yeah, i guess, do i even have other options? and they do, but theyre an investment of learning and time you dont have capacity for at the moment, or maybe you do but you feel like you dont bc it feels like a bigger hurdle than it is, and computer stuff is already kind of intimidating, cos man, what if you hit the wrong thing and brick your expensive ass machine? easier to just let it data harvest, you guess, it cant be THAT bad, can it? plenty of people live like this, put up with this, seek this out, its easier not to resist the privacy erosion. fucking whatever, i guess. yeah, i guess twitter i mean X, or walmart, or facebook, can just have all of my contact info and my phone number and my birthday and phone contacts and bank information and fuck it, give them my ssn while im at it. less effort later. this is just how tech has been for the last 10 yrs. no one can effectively get rage clicks on this topic anymore bc we all fucking know. it sucks and we know. what do you want me to fucking do about it? i have other shit to deal with more urgently. etc

3)

you cant turn anything on or log onto anything or go anywhere without hearing about whatever new shit theyre throwing AI at for no real reason, no one will fucking Shut Up about AI, and its Annoying, man

[son1c]

idk man. "be gay do crime" or whatever but i think it's a bit shit to be stealing toys. like, these are made primarily for children. sure, adults can enjoy them too, i know i do. but doing this removes the chance of a child ever getting one of these. no child has 750 USD to spend on a 4 inch action figure of shadow the hedgehog. and no child SHOULD have to spend that much. NO ONE should have to spend that much. don't these people feel bad? stealing toys? they don't appreciate them. they see them as a means for profit and nothing else. liking toys in 2024 is so fucking hard. it sucks. because people like this ruin it. they make it not fun. they make it miserable. and well it just pisses me off. toys? really? why don't you go and steal something valuable like apple products instead. god.

speechless

[devereauxsdisease]

Happy birthday dearest twin o’ mine 🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉 For the ask game: 19. If you could write an ideal fic, what would it include? Also, please accept this classic gif of baby Mads making a fool of himself (ft. hot dogs and ice skates and floppy boy band hair) 🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰🥰

Happy Birthday to you too, birthday twin! I hope you had an excellent day. as for the answer, my ideal fic is almost always one that will live in people's minds. What would it include? For me, I just like writing things that are emotional and funny. I'm out here trying to recreate the feeling I get when I watch The Birdcage for everyone else.

And...you sent me a GIF! So here's a ficlet to go along with it.

Nigel glared at the second hotdog in his hand before taking a huge bite. Fuck Darko and his 'hold my hotdog for one second, fucker' bullshit, Nigel hoped he starved.

The bosses were letting them manage the shipment to New York, the youngest fucking distributors in the history of the group to get that honor. They'd given the product to their American contacts and should have been knee-deep in pussy and coke by now, finding good pizza.

But no, fucking Darko wanted to "see the big apple".

Twat.

Nigel took another bite of both hotdogs. So now, instead of girls and drugs, he was watching his fucking friend, the one he'd seen nearly beat a man to death a week ago, twirling on rented ice skates in the middle of Rockefeller Center. Nigel had fucking refused. He'd put the skates on, he'd taken the disgusting hotdogs Darko had bought them (just floating in water like turds in a toilet), but he'd cut his own balls off before he twirled around an ice rink getting jostled by a group of tourists wearing the same University of Michigan sweatshirts.

"Excuse me."

Nigel turned to tell whoever was bothering him that he would cut their tongue out and use it as toilet paper, but his voice caught in his throat when he saw the most beautiful angel in the world not a foot from his face. The boy had chocolate curls and vivid blue eyes that were darting around as he nervously wrung his little hands together.

It was like the earth moved. In fact, it was just like the earth moved. Nigel didn't realize he was falling until his head hit the ice. Those perfect blue eyes floated over him again as the boy peered at him from the other side of the rink wall.

"Are you OK?"

"Y-yeah, yes, gorgeous I'm fine." He wasn't fine. His fucking head hurt and he was pretty sure he smashed one of those disgusting hotdogs into his last clean shirt. Still, he smiled, trying to look seductive as he struggled to his feet. "What can I do for you darling?"

"Oh, um, your friend over there smacked into me while he was twirling on the ice. He spilled my hot chocolate. He told me to go see you and you'd buy me another or suck my cock..." The boy pursed his lips together. "I'd like a hot chocolate, please."

"You sure you don't want a cock sucking."

"That's not necessary."

"Maybe not, darling, but it's more than welcome."

The boy seemed to consider this. "Maybe after the hot chocolate? It's very loud here, and I find it hard to get aroused when I'm stressed."

"Well let's get you out of here and into some hot chocolate, then, shall we?" Nigel stood. "If you can help me get to that bench, I'll put my shoes on and we can go someplace quiet, drink some hot chocolate and talk about that cock sucking offer."

Nigel held out his arm and to his surprise the boy took it.

"I'm Adam, by the way."

"Nigel. Nice to fucking meet you, Adam."

They toddled toward the skate rental place. Maybe New York wasn't so fucking bad after all.

[dianymphii]

Twst Characters as Music Artists

Riddle: Little Tart

Idk piano music? Asian traumacore (like me!) so maybe he just does piano covers.

Ace picked his name and now he doesnt know how to change it.

It is technically perfect but a soulless perfomance. Sucks to suck kid

Trey: Muffin Man

He is too busy to make music but someone sampled him for an audio clip and named him That as credit. A double betrayal.

alternatively cooking by the book remix ft lil jon vibes but only posts it once, and in a weird stress frenzy.

no he will Not talk about it tyvm

Deuce: 2euce

garageband beat maker, he wanted to do a fun play on his name but ace just calls him Two-ce. deuce does not like this.

Ace: DJ Ace

he doesnt even dj

Cater: Di4mond

lofi beats to shit and piss to

posts guitar covers, really giving softboy, genuinely pretty good but like kind of hates his music.

he is the person who inspired two-ce

Leona: King’s Roar

leona could not be assed to use his creativity to make a name so he looked as his unique magic like. yeah ok.

idk why but i can feel in my soul he could produce some FIRE beats, maybe even like put in joke sound samples of other people but remixes them in a way that sounds fucking good. he only posts like once every 6 months to a year but everyone gets real excited like BITCH I THOUGHT U DIED!!! nah, he was nappin.

he also does not read or respond to comments. he has a vague awareness his music is popular but also does not care. if u bring it up tho he's gonna be real smug about it. fucking asshole.

Jack: Unleash Beats

i could sit here and say i think jack was inspired by leona to play on is UM for a name but honestly i just thought it was so funny i almost crapped my pants.

maybe he raps if he doesnt cringe himself out.

Ruggie: RUGGIE

this is a classic man, no need to get weird he is ruggie and he knows it. actually might have gone by ruggie b on soundcloud, all lowercase, but leona let him be on one of his tracks, promptly forgot the name he used and couldnt be assed to check. typed RUGGIE in caps cuz thats deadass who he is. the song he did with leona was so popular he had to rebrand to keep the hype.

good at freestyle, more rnb vibes

Jade: Nothing (nothing is also not his name)

ok so you know AZARI???? that person with the viral and rather slappin' tunes and has no channel name and no video titles??? its just blank? thats jade. i dont want to imagine what sounds this monster produces but im going to say some words and let you fill in the rest in some lovecraftian horror

contra bass

5 amps

distortion

floyd walking in on him

a car crash

quits after like 3 songs he just wanted to see what would happen, step 293 in his 109283 step plan.

Azul: Over The Sea

idk more piano. chill lounge beats to extort innocents to

floyd's outdoor fit is azul merch

azul did force him to wear it

this means azul's merch is an ajuma visor. pop off king!

Floyd: beneath the waves

u know yuno miles? composer of such hits like dookie on my shoe and lay an EGG? floyd makes That.

someone invites him on stage to freestyle as a joke and he pulls the best freestyle rap you have ever seen. it is so fire the room starts smoking. did we order a fog machine? no? well shit. someone asks him to do it again and he says 'nah'

Kalim: The Sultan. Son of Song

i know he can sing but my mind says vegetales

someone pitches the name to him and hes like haha sounds cool! not slavemastercore at all :D (dont come for me)

Jamil: Viper

another lad who cannot be assed, but viper sounds cool so he wins this round.

makes the most angry diss tracks while making eye contact with kalim. kalim cheers.

Vil: Vil Schoenheit

he is boring and professional and it is the name listed in the credits for his next musical production.

Epel: Big Apple

im sorry about ur name epel

very angry. why is everyone is so angry.

Rook: The Hunter

leans into the french thing. uncomfortable sexual lyrics. not uncomfortably sexual, but like. uncomfortable and also sexual. "I could smell you from across the room The smell of your sweet perfume Your body covered in white lace Compels me to take chase, la chasse" (lyrics by @twsty-mad)

Idia: Gl00my Samurai

steve aoki

will mix orchestral soundtracks into his edm for optimal gaming experience

yes i did rip his gaming handle. i think for all he is people avoidant he would like people to recognize his prowess as an artist of game And song

Ortho: Soundboard

is how idia makes music

Malleus: m.d.

leonacore in that he doesnt post often but when it hits it hits. dark melancholy rap vibes.

uses his initials like when he signed off that christmas card maybe even has a song about that and how he keeps waiting for a reply. add a return address next time

literally No information about him online, gives off mysterious anonymous vibes. who is he! does anyone know his alt accounts! no fool. he doesnt have any. he doesnt even have twitter. i think he is happier for this.

Sebek: Retainer to the Prince of Briar Valley

this man will not relax.

raps but really bad.

classified as screamo on decibel alone

Silver: silver lining

lofi music you can wake up to

"please god let it work this time"

it doesnt

Lilia: D.I.L.F.

Destroy Invalidate Lie and an F or SOMETHING that stands for dilf that isnt dilf just to stress his son out.

gaslight gatekeep girlboss but like idk edgy

makes death metal bagpipe music to surprise to (edited) Made w/ @twsty-mad

[the-iceni-bitch]

Catch that Buzz

Pairing: Drug Lord!Thor x fem!Reader, and a little surprise crime boss!Steve Rogers x fem!Reader x crime boss!Bucky Barnes

Words: ~10.8k (yikers)

Summary: You’re the queen to Miami’s biggest drug lord. He’s got the market on lock but is looking to expand, hopefully with some help from some potential friends from Brooklyn. But he’d never get any of it done without you.

Warnings: explicit language, explicit sexual content (fingering, f and m receiving oral sex, unprotected vaginal sex, titty worship, voyeurism, exhibitionism, sex pollen vibes, mentions of anal sex and tit fucking, tattoo kink, little bit of a knife kink, violence kink, minor praise kink), heavy drug use, slightly above canon level violence,  possessive Thor, hints of dark things to come, SMUT!!!!! 18+ ONLY!!!!!

A/N: I went all out for this one guys, taking a little page out of @stargazingfangirl18‘s playbook by having absolutely no chill when it comes to mob AUs! This 100% got away from me and has a mind of it’s own. I did not at all plan on having any Stucky action but I couldn’t help it! This is gonna be a big ass series with appearances from all our faves and a variety of readers and I cannot even tell you how excited I am about it. Big fucking shout out to @cockslut-padalecki and @afriendlyblackhottie because I don’t know if I would have started writing this without their encouragement. I really hope you all enjoy this insanity!!! 

(Credit for the dividers goes to the amazing @whimsicalrogers)

Check out my masterlist and join my taglist if you want!!!

You were slicing the fruit for your breakfast when he walked into the kitchen, already talking on that fucking phone.

“No, we’re not moving this meeting again.” He already sounded pissed off, but he still wrapped himself around your back and pressed a kiss to your neck before stealing a slice of mango. “If those New York assholes want to move their product through our port it’s tonight or nothing.”

It was upsetting how good he looked, his hair still slightly tousled from sleep and his satin pajama bottoms slung low on his hips as he moved to grab some juice from the fridge. You had a difficult time staying mad at him while you ogled the runic tattoos that ran over his torso and arms.

“Fucking ridiculous. Figure it out Sif, I don’t have time for this shit.” The phone clattered across the counter when he tossed it after hanging up, finally turning to you and smiling. “Morning beautiful.”

“Good morning. Meeting still on?” You grabbed a second bowl for him and scooped some yogurt into it before adding some honey and fruit.

“It better be. I’m sick of these dodgy fuckers.” His ringed fingers ran over his face in frustration as he watched you put everything away before bringing the food over and hopping up to sit on the counter in front of him. “Just want to go on a fucking vacation already.”

“You need to finish this deal if you don’t want a war with New York, honey.” You took a bite of your parfait and leaned back on one arm, swinging your legs lazily. “Then we can take as much time off as you want.”

“You’re telling me things I already know, sweetheart.” He reached out and wrapped his arm around your waist, pulling you closer and nuzzling into your hair.

“Then quit fucking complaining about it.” You scooped a finger through the remains of your yogurt and smeared it on his nose, beaming at him before leaning forward mouth it off.

A low growl rumbled his chest as he slotted himself between your thighs, his hands resting on either side of your hips before he was ducking to catch your lips with his. He started brushing his lips down your neck when you wrapped your legs around his hips, locking your ankles together behind him and scrabbling your fingers over his back when he flicked his tongue out to trace the hollow behind your ear.

“Think I’m just gonna spend all day right here.” He purred, his fingers skimming over your thighs then digging into your hips and dragging your ass to the edge of the counter. “Val can figure out the logistics for the meeting.”

“I’m sure she can handle... fuck... handle it.” Your breath hitched when he knelt in front of you and started kissing the insides of your thighs, occasionally sucking a bruise against your soft flesh.

He breathed against your entrance and you keened, winding a hand through his hair and trying to drive yourself into his face. When he finally flicked his tongue out to taste you, you almost collapsed, a jolt of pleasure shooting through your body from your core. His arms wound around your legs and kept you still as he ate you out like a starving man, his tongue swirling expertly through your folds and lapping up all the evidence of your arousal.

The sound of his phone buzzing across the counter almost broke you out of your blissful haze, blinking slowly as you turned your head to look at the offensive object.

“Don’t you dare.” He mumbled when you reached for the phone, diving back in and sucking at your pussy lips before sliding his tongue inside you.

“Jesus, Thor!” You managed to catch yourself on your elbow when your arm gave out as his nose brushed against your clit.

His grin faded when the phone buzzed again and he growled against your cunt, the vibrations making you clench around his tongue when he curled it inside you.

“Baby, it’s Val.” You’d managed to catch a glimpse of the caller ID. “She wouldn’t be calling if it wasn’t important.”

“I’m busy.” He grunted, pressing soft kisses over your mound to give you a short reprieve before shaking his head to bury himself deeper at the same time he wrapped his lips around your clit.

“Fuck!!” All the muscles in your body seized as your orgasm washed over you, your cum soaking his stubble when you finally released all over his face.

If you thought he was finished you were wrong, screaming when he shoved two fingers inside you while he flicked soft kitten licks against your tiny bundle of nerves. Your pathetic whimpers and mewls filled the silence of the kitchen while he took you apart, scissoring his fingers to stretch you before inserting a third and grinning when you arched into his face.

He ignored the screeching of tires from outside, still fucking you with his fingers when he heard a car door slam and the front door flew open.

“Hey boss, Y/N.” Val had a wicked grin on her face when she sauntered into the kitchen, moving to the fridge and grabbing an apple before turning to watch the two of you. “Hate to interrupt but we’ve got a bit of a problem.”

Thor growled into your pussy and you whined, writhing against his face while he raised his free hand and motioned for Val to continue.

“We found a rat in the shipyard crew.” She pulled out her butterfly knife and flicked it open with a flourish, winking at you before slicing off a chunk of apple and bringing it to her lips.

“Are you fucking kidding me?! Cop?” His fingers were still stroking that sweet spot when he broke away with a scowl, and you swallowed a shriek when he started taking his frustration out on your cunt.

“Don’t think so, he had a lot of money coming in from some West Coast accounts.” She cocked her head and grinned at you when he started mouthing at your sex again, a desperate moan leaving your lips. “Think Stark might be considering making a move.”

“That’s all I fucking need.” He murmured against your pussy. “You stash him?”

“Yeah, at the lab.”

Maybe you should have felt a little demeaned that the two of them were talking like you weren’t even there, but all you could focus on was the warm coil of pleasure that was gathering in your abdomen and the effort you were taking to not black out.

“Good. Lemme finish up here then I’ll head out.”

“Sure thing boss.” She gave you one more smirk and tossed the apple core in the compost bin before turning to leave. “You may want to put down a towel, when she starts breathing like that it usually means she’s about to squirt.”

His dark chuckle against your clit did it, your back arching you off the counter as you let out a wail. He wrapped his lips around your cunt and moaned when your release squirted into his mouth, his tongue laving over your entrance as he swallowed your essence while you vibrated against his face.

It took a few minutes for you to come down, panting breathlessly as he rose to his feet and grinned at you.

“Dunno how I should feel about Val knowing so much about what your body does when you come, love.” He teased, his fingers lightly skimming over your thighs.

“Maybe if you weren’t constantly fucking me in front of her.” Your brain was finally starting to reset, and you started to sit up with a low moan, your thighs quivering with the strain of aftershocks. 

“Right.” He pressed a kiss to your hair before stepping back and running his hand over his mouth. “Go get dressed, you’re coming with me.”

You beamed at him and slowly slid off the counter, your smile slipping slightly when your knees buckled and he had to catch you, pulling you to his chest with a grin.

“You sure you want that, baby?” The weakness in your legs was fading quickly, and you managed to stand on your own to head towards the bedroom. “Last time you almost killed that guy when you though he was looking at me too long.”

“I’m sure, I had big plans for that perfect body today, I’m not putting those off because of some rat.”

“Fuck, that’s it.” His hand gripped your hair painfully when you swallowed around his cock, his head leaning against the seat as the town car pulled up to the lab. “Oh good girl, take all of it.”

You hummed and he let out a hiss when your throat constricted around him at the same time he swelled and shot his release against the roof of your mouth. He held your head down while his hips jerked against your face with a stutter, making sure you’d gotten everything before letting you go to sit back up.

“Feel better?” You teased, grabbing your compact and lipstick from your purse to fix your face.

“For now. That mouth of yours is something else.” He tucked himself back into his slacks with a deep sigh before turning to look at the building you were parked in front of. “But now I gotta deal with this shit.”

“I know, baby.” His breathing relaxed a little when you wound your fingers through his and pressed your lips to his palm. “You want me in the room?”

“Always.” The two of you slid out of the car and started to head inside, separating reluctantly to at least try to appear professional. “Wanna say hello to the big man first though, heard he might have something new for me.”

You perked up at that. Bruce was always a treat to talk to, such an unbelievably sweet and unassuming man. And he was a goddamn genius when it came to drugs.

“Hi there boss. Y/N! What a nice surprise!” That smile was infectious, you couldn’t help but grin back at him while Thor inspected the small collection of parachute papers on the lab table, each one emblazoned with the signature lighting bolt.

“Hiya Bruce.” You gave him a brief hug before following him to where your man was standing. “I heard you’ve been busy.”

“Yeah, been tinkering with the old Mjolnir formula and think I finally hit that sweet spot.” He looked at the small pieces of paper like a proud father before handing one to you for inspection. “I call it Stormbreaker. Extremely fast acting MDMA compound that gives an incredible high while metabolizing in half the time. I think we should be able to roll it out full scale in time for Spring Break.”

Thor nodded appreciatively as you talked with Bruce about the specifics of the chemistry, always eager for the chance to talk to another academic and geek out.

“And it’s more intense than Mjolnir?” You asked, squinting at the tiny piece of paper in your palm.

“Sure is.”

“Half dose, gorgeous.” Thor scolded when you started to bring the paper to your mouth. “Don’t need you passing out on me.”

You rolled your eyes at him as Bruce gave a sheepish grin, taking the paper you were holding and measuring out a smaller dose for you. Thor smirked at you when you waggled the new paper at him before swallowing it.

“Oh, shit.” Warmth bloomed in your core and spread through your body on thin tendrils, snaking through your veins as a low throbbing started between your thighs and your head became instantly lighter. “Fuck, that’s intense. Umm... is this cut with something new?”

“No we just upped the purity, why?”

“No reason.” You gasped, gripping Thor’s forearm tightly as slick flooded your panties.

He was giving you a knowing grin while you leaned into his shoulder, moaning softly when you inhaled the subtle pink pepper and lemon scent of his cologne, quiet notes of orange blossom drifting through as all of your senses ramped up. Poor Bruce just looked at the two of you with confusion when you rubbed your face into Thor’s chest.

“I think we can move to full scale production of this immediately.” Thor knocked his rings against the table twice to show his approval, wrapping his arm around your waist and holding you up when you started to grind against him. “Good job, Banner.”

“Ready for you boss.” Val came striding into the room and laughed when she got a look at you trying resist the urge to hump Thor’s leg. “I see we let Y/N try the big man’s new sex drug. How you feelin’ there sweetie?”

“I feel fucking great Val, what about you?” Maybe if you squeezed your thighs together... oh god. Your legs almost gave out as a shock traveled up your spine and burst at the base of your skull.

“Not as good as you!”

You finally started to equalize and gave Thor a pat on the shoulder to signal you could walk, straightening yourself before the two of you followed after his lieutenant.

The two of you arrived at the side room a little behind Val, Thor releasing you with a hungry kiss that left you breathless before he was slipping out of his suit jacket and tossing over the back of the armchair he’d had brought in for you. You snarled at him for leaving you hanging as you sank into the seat and pouted, admiring the movement of his well muscled back under his shirt as he rolled up his sleeves.

“What’s this asshole’s name Val?” He asked, looking at the tools she had set out on the table with a nod before turning to the man that was strapped to the chair in the middle of the room.

“Fuck if I know.” She said with a snort, grabbing a set of brass knuckles and putting them on as she flexed her hand.

You crossed your legs and reached into your bag to pull out a book, flipping it open to the marked page as you did your best to tune them out, unsuccessfully.

“Right, what’s your name?” Aside from a slightly furrowed brow, he looked remarkably calm, crossing his arms over his chest and leaning against the wall.

“Tim.” The man licked his lips nervously as he watched your man, completely ignoring Val as she prowled towards him.

That was a mistake.

She drew her fist back and drove it into his cheek, grabbing the back of the chair to keep it from teetering over when his upper body snapped to the side. He chest heaved as he took pained breaths, spitting blood down his chest before raising his eyes to watch her warily.

“Tim. I’ve got three questions for you, and you’re going to answer them for me.” He hefted the silver hammer that was laying on the table and rested it against his shoulder. “You get three chances to answer with just Val providing incentive, then I’m gonna take over, and trust me when I say you don’t want that.”

“Ok.” The poor sap kept one eye on Val as he tried to straighten back up.

“Good.” He started tossing the hammer in the air lazily, catching it in one hand like it was the easiest thing in the world and he didn’t know that sort of cocky display was going to turn you into a wet mess. “Who’s paying you? How long have they been paying you? What have you told them?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, I work for you.”

“Oof, wrong answer.”

Val tsked at him mockingly before driving her fist into his ribs, knocking all the air out of him as Thor walked over to stand next to you. You huffed when he pulled your book away and sat on the armrest next to you, your protests dying on your lips when he ran his fingers up your spine and started rubbing your neck, his other hand spinning the handle of the hammer through his fingers.

“Let’s try again. Who’s paying you? How long have they been paying you? What have you told them?”

“I’m not...”

“Hmph, Val?”

She backhanded his unbruised cheek with a smirk, stepping back and shaking the blood off her fingers when she was finished. You barely caught any of it, the drugs still coursing through your system making the feel of Thor’s hands on you so much more intense. When he brought his massive hand up to cup your jaw you whined, opening your mouth just enough to let him slip his thumb between your lips.

“Last chance, Timmy. I gotta tell you I’m torn. As much as I love using this hammer, my girl here took a little something that is gonna make fucking her even better than normal.” He slid his thumb further into your mouth and groaned when you swirled your tongue around it. “So I’d really like to wrap this up. Who’s paying you? How long have they been paying you? What have you told them?”

The man turned his eyes to you and gave you a pleading look. “Please, help me.”

Thor and Val broke down in hysterics, Thor curling over to laugh into your hair while Val doubled over and clutched her sides.

“Ha, oh that’s the wrong move!” Thor was finally able to sit up as his laughter subsided, but tears were starting to leak down Val’s cheeks while she wheezed. “Even if she could help you, she loves on this shit. She probably wants me to start using this hammer, last time she started touching herself before I even finished.”

His hand curled possessively around your throat when you shrugged at poor Tim before flicking your eyes back to Thor’s when he bent to kiss you hungrily.

“Answer the fucking questions, Timmy boy.” Val turned to him with an eye roll while Thor teased you with his tongue until you were moaning.

“I don’t know anything!”

“Goddamn it! Sorry love.” You whined when he disconnected from you and stood up, starting to unbutton his shirt so he could slide it off his shoulders.

Not that you could complain when he was standing there in only his undershirt, rolling his neck as he walked towards the center of the room.

“Bring the table, Val.”

She dragged it over with a grin, dropping it once she reached them and moving to unbind Tim’s right hand. He started spluttering pathetic pleas when she stretched his arm over the table painfully and wrenched his hand open while Thor hefted the hammer with a heavy sigh.

“Thor.” You called out to stop him before he brought the hammer down on Tim’s hand.

“Yeah, what is it honey?” He shot you an exasperated look over his shoulder as he ran his hand through his hair.

“You’ll want to hit the wrist not the palm. More nerve endings.”

His hearty laugh made you smile, leaning back in your seat and curling your legs under you as you settled in to watch.

“Thank you, baby.” He turned back to Tim with a wicked grin. “Isn’t she something special, Timmy?”

“Wait, fuck! I’ll talk!” The man screamed right before the hammer made contact.

“Ohh, nick of time!” Only Val looked a little disappointed, moving to restrain Tim’s hand again. “Who’s paying you?”

“One of Stark’s lieutenants, I think his name is Hogan.”

“Excellent. How long?”

“Six months.”

“Very good Tim. Now, tell Val everything you told that fat fuck and then we’ll let you go.” He nodded to Val before striding towards you and drawing you to your feet, tossing you over his shoulder and slapping your ass playfully as he started heading back to the front of the building. “You got room at the body farm, beautiful?”

“Yeah, let me know when your dropping him so I can make sure I’m working that night.”

He shoved you into the back seat of the town car when it pulled up, grinning when you squealed for him as he crawled in after you.

“How long do we have until the Stormbreaker is out of your system?” He pulled you into his lap and buried his face in your neck as he shoved his fingers under the hem of your skirt.

“Bruce said it metabolizes in half the time so probably 2 more hours.” You sighed when he teased his fingers under the sides of your panties and started sliding them down your legs.

“Perfect, let’s see how many times I can make you come before then.” He turned to drop you against the seat, tucking your panties in his back pocket before moving his hands to undo his fly. “Bet I can make you pass out, you’re already fucking soaked.”

“Don’t you fucking tease me. I’ve been on the edge for the past half hour, I need that cock.”

“God, you know I love when you talk like that.” He growled as he spread your legs wide, hissing through his teeth when he got a look at the wet, throbbing mess between your thighs. “Just look at that. Tell me how much you need it, gorgeous.”

“Fuck, Thor, gimme that cock.” You were burning up, your breath coming in shallow gasps as he teased his tip against your clit. “Need it to split my pussy open.”

“Yeah, she hungry for it?” He groaned as he slid into you, mesmerized while he watched you swallow every inch of him. “Fuuuck.”

“Oh my god, keep going.” You thumped your fist against the door when he started thrusting into you with abandon. “Shit, I’m gonna come.”

“Jesus, that was fast.” He curled over you and swallowed your scream as you fluttered around him. “I’m gonna give Banner a raise.”

“I really think you should.” You murmured, whining into his mouth when you came again almost immediately.

“You’re taking me so good, beautiful.” He purred, grinning when you wrapped your arms around his neck. “Making such a pretty mess for me. You keep this up you’re gonna pass out before we even get back to the house.”

You took a deep breath when he pulled out, grateful for the relief before he was flipping you over and driving back into you hard, ripping another orgasm from you. Your jaw went slack as you pressed your face to the leather seat, drool starting to leak down your chin while you mumbled incoherently.

“Can’t.” Tears were streaming down your cheeks when you fluttered with even more pleasure. “Baby, I can’t.”

“Oh, yes you can, honey. You’re already doing it.” He nuzzled into your hair and pressed his lips to your neck, winding his fingers with yours above your head. “Just gimme one more, I’m so close.”

You choked on a sob and your vision blacked out as you clenched around him one final time, sinking into the seat while he filled you up with a low moan.

“Jesus fuck. You with me love?” He pulled out of you slowly, grinning when he heard you mumble into the seat. “We’re home.”

All you could do was groan when he scooped you up to carry you inside, not able to make yourself care that your skirt was still gathered around your waist and your lower half was completely bare. The sensation of the fresh air on the combination of your releases made you gasp, squeezing your thighs together as even more slick leaked out of you.

“Already?” He teased when you sat up to bury your face in his throat. “That genius is gonna make me so much fucking money.”

It was 90 minutes later and you were finally coming out of your haze, soaking your overworked muscles in your massive tub as you leaned back against Thor’s chest and hummed to yourself while he rubbed the kinks out of your shoulders and arms.

He had spent the past hour and a half wringing every ounce of pleasure from your body, making you come over and over as he fucked every one of your holes. You’d passed out three more times, each time waking up to his face buried between your thighs as he started the whole process all over again.

Taking you apart was his favorite thing, especially when you were on something and extra sensitive. He loved when you were completely fucked out, crying all pretty for him and covered in cum. You were always so needy after, content to let him take care of you while you basked in your post coital glow.

He looked at the clock and groaned, pressing his lips to your hair before rising out of the water. You just sighed, watching appreciatively as rivulets of water ran over the muscles of his back. God his ass was just fantastic.

“Y/N.” His deep voice snapped you out of your little daydream as he ran a towel through his hair, beaming as he turned to look at you. “We need to leave in an hour.”

“Ugh, fine.” You frowned when he wrapped the towel around his hips and started to move to the closet to choose a suit, getting out of the tub with reluctance. “Is this a panties or no panties type of meeting?”

“It’s at Thrudheim.” He called over the blow dryer as you worked on your hair.

“So, no panties.” You sighed, flipping over as you continued the slow process of getting ready.

It was a half hour later when you strolled out of the bathroom, your hair and makeup perfect as you moved to your own closet. Thor was fastening his cuff links when strode into the bedroom, wearing that white suit that he knew was your favorite.

“No, the leather one.” He ordered when you pulled out your go to red mini number.

“Really?!” You put the red dress back and pulled out the black thing he was indicating. “That’s how you want to play this?”

“Absolutely.” He grinned as he watched you slip it on and start to draw the zipper up your front. “That’s far enough, want everyone to see that ink.”

His fingers reached out to trace your tattoo, the handle of the hammer that ran between your breasts before the head spread underneath them. It marked you as his, and fuck if he didn’t start to get hard every time he saw it.

“Nuh-uh, we’re on a timetable.” You chuckled as you moved to pick out some heels, settling on some sparkly stiletto booties. “Are you going to be able to control yourself tonight?”

“I’ll do my best, but you’re so damn distracting.” He wrapped himself around your back and pressed his lips to your shoulder when the two of you started moving towards the stairs.

“That is the idea.” You teased, shoving him off you so the two of you didn’t trip as you walked downstairs.

Val and Heimdall were chatting in the foyer when you arrived, stopping their conversation and turning to face you.

“They’ve been at the club for about 20 minutes, boss.” Heimdall said, holding your door open for you as you climbed into the SUV. “Sif says they’re starting to look a little pissed.”

“Good.” Thor crawled in after you and slammed the door closed, wrapping an arm around your shoulders as Heimdall pulled out after the other SUVs in the caravan. “I’m pissed they’ve been putting this off for the past three months. They can wait an extra hour. I’m guessing that both of them made it out.”

“Yep, Barnes and Rogers both landed this morning.” Val turned in her seat to look at you two, that signature smirk of hers teasing the corners of her lips. “Guess they finally realized there wasn’t some secret port they could sneak their coke through.”

“How many men with them?” Thor started running his fingers over your arm lazily while you leaned against his chest.

“Just three. Romanoff, Barton, and Wilson.”

“Alright, make sure Volstagg, Hogun, and Fandral are in position before we arrive.”

You gave his thigh a squeeze, feeling the nervous energy that was radiating off him in waves. He always got like this before a big meeting. No matter how calm he seemed on the surface, you could always see the thunderstorms of anticipation brewing behind his eyes. It was best to let him think in silence, so you just snuggled against his chest for the rest of the ride, letting your warm presence soothe him as much as possible.

The line of SUVs arrived at Thrudheim in 30 minutes, and you felt Thor take a deep breath before Heimdall opened the door and the two of you stepped out into the night.

You bypassed the massive queue for the door, Val moving in front of you and Heimdall behind as you stepped into the noisy chaos of Thor’s flagship club. It was packed as always, writhing bodies filling the dance floor while other revelers gathered around the multiple bars or in private booths.

Sif moved to join you as you walked past the club’s entrance, leaning close to Val to update her on the situation. You spotted Fandral at the main bar and he gave you a nod as you moved past. Hogun and Volstagg must have been close by, but there was no way to spot them in the press of bodies while you made your way towards the VIP section at the back of the club.

Thor wrapped his arm around your waist as you drew closer, grinning at you when you slapped his chest when he made adjustments to your tits until they were practically spilling out of your dress. That was the game you two played though; him negotiating aggressively and methodically while you distracted his targets by looking like the embodiment of sin. He loved watching the morons he had to deal with look at you like they wanted to eat you alive, knowing all the while that he’d be fucking you until you were screaming as soon as the deal was closed.

You finally arrived at the VIP lounge and started to size up Thor’s potential new partners when you stepped past the velvet ropes. Val and the cute little redhead were giving each other almost identical smirks as the mohawked man she was talking to rolled his eyes. It was hard not to return the charming smile of the handsome man who was leaning against one of the pillars, and when his brown eyes met yours he gave you a wink.

It felt like a punch in the gut when your eyes finally found the two men you were there to meet, and the very unwelcome thought that god gave you three holes for a reason crossed your mind.

You were drawn to the blonde first, his broad shoulders looking like they were about to burst the seams of his well tailored suit jacket. His shirt was unbuttoned enough that you could see lines of ink tracings his chest, matching the scrolls that ran over the backs of his hands and ringed fingers. Even in the dim light of the club, you could make out the deep blue of his eyes, the corners pinched with annoyance. He ran a hand over his perfectly manicured beard in frustration before his movements suddenly stopped when his eyes found you.

The brunette seemed far more relaxed, seated on one of the plush couches with his legs spread wide and a drink in his hand. He didn’t seem to be as tatted up as the blonde, but you still spotted a few swirls of ink under the loosened collar of his shirt. You were surprised when you saw the glint of metal from his left hand, wondering what injury had caused him to lose the arm and also how that neural link must work. His eyes seemed to be twinkling with mischief, and when they followed the blonde’s his face split in a grin after he ran his tongue over his bottom lip slowly.

You did your best to school your thoughts when you turned back to Thor, but the smile he was giving you made you worried he knew exactly what you were thinking. That was either a very bad or very good thing, depending on how the rest of the night went.

“Odinson! Nice to finally put a face to the name.” The brunette stood up and strode towards the two of you. “Bucky Barnes.”

Thor took his hand when he offered, returning the man’s grin warmly as he removed his arm from around your waist.

“Would’ve been nicer to put a face to the name an hour ago.” The blonde growled, his eyes still fixed on you as you finally started to calm down.

“Forgive Steve here, he’s been a little impatient to get things underway.” The two of you followed after Barnes as he moved back to the couches, sinking into the one opposite him as Thor motioned for a waitress.

“Completely understandable. I know I’ve been anxious to get this taken care since we first made contact three months ago.” And the passive aggressive foreplay had begun. Thor ordered ordered a bottle of vodka and a bottle of Aquavit as well as three bottles of champagne for the group, adding a bottle of bourbon when he got a look at the drink in Barnes’ hand.

“I know, I know. We hated having to delay, but there were so many complications with the logistics there was really no choice.” He was a good liar, like you all didn’t know they’d been trying to back door their way into the Miami market without paying their dues. “Stevie, quit being a fucking grouch and come sit.”

You could feel his eyes on you as he moved to join you three, the lieutenants following after and arranging themselves around the couches with a false air of relaxation.

“Now, I think we all know who almost everyone else is, we’ve got our reputations and such that proceed us.” Bucky’s eyes moved back to you when the drinks arrived. “But I got no idea who you are doll, and me and Stevie here aren’t big on surprises.”

You beamed at him, leaning over nice and slow so they had a good view of your tits as you poured yourself some Aquavit.

“I’m Y/N.” You said teasingly, leaning back as you took a sip of your drink and felt their eyes follow you. “I’m just here to look pretty.”

“Well, you’re doing a great job.” Bucky gave you a wink before pouring his own drink.

“Enough fucking small talk, let’s get this over with.” Steve grumbled, his rings tapping against his glass irritably.

“Fine by me.” Thor took the glass of vodka you handed him and tossed it back in one gulp. “You want to move your product into my city, but I’ve got a pretty good corner on the narcotics market out here. Why should I split my profits with you boys?”

“You’ve got the edge on the MDMA market sure, but we’ve heard that your coke is barely above the cut.” He motioned for the redhead to step forward and she deposited a brick of white powder in the middle of the table. “That’s what we offer.”

Thor held your shoulder when you started to lean forward towards the coke, shaking his head with a small smile when you pouted at him.

“And this is supposed to be better than what my boys are already turning out?” He looked skeptical.

“Why don’t you try it and tell us.” Rogers growled, starting to look a little more relaxed as he sipped his bourbon.

“I’m sure you boys are on the up and up, but if you think I’m just gonna take a bump of unopened product from a couple of strangers...”

“Say no more.” Bucky gave him a dismissive wave of his hand before pulling a knife out from under his jacket with a flourish and plunged it into the brick. He scooped a small bump onto the edge of the blade and brought it to his face, inhaling deeply then sinking back into the couch with a satisfied smirk. “See? Nothing to worry about.”

Thor gave a snort before leaning forward and dipping his pinkie into the powder, shoving the coated finger into his mouth and rubbing it over his gums.

“Hmm, that’s fast.” He hummed with appreciation, taking another quick bump before resting his elbows on his knees. “Think we can find a place for this with our distributors.”

“You want a taste, sweetheart?” Rogers’ eyes were dark as pulled his own knife out and offered you a line off the blade.

You turned to Thor and he gave you a small nod, continuing his negotiations with Barnes as you leaned towards Steve. He grinned wolfishly as he watched you snort the powder off the edge of his weapon, sucking his bottom lip between his teeth when he saw your chest heave as the stimulant hit your system.

“Oh, fuck.” Every nerve in your body started buzzing with electricity, your spine shivering as the high took over. “Jesus Christ, that’s good shit.”

Rogers ran the tip of his blade over your bottom lip gently, tugging your mouth open with a low moan before Thor’s voice broke you out of it.

“How you feeling, love?” He wrapped his arm around your waist and pulled you towards him, trying not to give Rogers too much of a shit eating grin when he saw his look of disappointment.

“Like I could fight a rhino.” You hummed, arching your back with pleasure while you leaned against him.

“Yeah? Maybe later.” He pressed his lips to your hair before turning back to his new partners. “So, free use of the ports and our land distribution network, and I get a 25% cut of all Miami profits. We’ll also start moving Mjolnir and Stormbreaker in New York, giving you 15% of those profits.”

“Why should we get 10% less than you, Odinson?” Steve was starting to look pissed again, bouncing the blade of his knife off the palm of his hand. “We’re taking on just as much risk.”

Thor moved his hand down to your hip and tapped his fingers against it, turning his head and giving you a conspiratorial wink. You beamed at him before rotating your body slightly, making sure both men’s eyes were on you before uncrossing your legs. Their reactions were everything you wanted, Steve sucking his breath in a hiss and his knuckles turning white around his glass while Bucky growled and bit his bottom lip. You gave them a few seconds to enjoy the view of the glistening treasure between your thighs before crossing your legs again and resting your head against Thor’s shoulder, a look of doe eyed innocence on your face as you ran your fingers over his chest.

“You’re making less because I am providing all of the infrastructure for shipping and distribution here in Miami, whereas all you can offer me in New York is your established client base.” His hand moved up to cup your breast, smirking as he watched the two men start to squirm when his fingers teased at the edge of your neckline that was barely containing you. “Plus I’ll give you boys some introductions to my international connections, since I know you’ve been looking to spread operations overseas.”

“Qu’en penses-tu?” Barnes eyes were still fixated on you as he started chatting with Rogers in French.

“Je n'aime pas ça.” The blonde growled, his eyes moving to your legs as you started rubbing your thighs together. “Nous en avons besoin, cependant.”

“Il est le seul à avoir accès à elle.” Bucky said with a nod, turning to face Steve with reluctance as they talked things over.

You did your best to act like you weren’t listening, giggling when Thor bent his head to run his tongue over the shell of your ear. He grabbed the bottle of Aquavit and refilled your glass for you before pouring himself another vodka, leaning over the back of the couch to give Val a nod. She grinned back at him before turning away to find Sif.

“We can accept giving you 20% of any Miami profits if you cut us in for 5% of shipping revenue from your ports.” Rogers grumbled with a shrug, the two men turning to face you again.

“Hmm, what do you think, love?” Thor gripped your chin lightly and tilted your head up to look in your eyes.

“I think you should stick to the original offer of 25%, babe. They’re hoping to undercut your dealings with Danvers and edge you out once you make an introduction.”

“What the fuck?!” Steve looked furious, reaching into his waistband for his gun before Thor drew his own first and leveled it at his head.

Bucky and you were the only two who seemed relaxed as everyone drew weapons. The three Lieutenants trained theirs on you and Thor while Heimdall pointed his at Barnes. Val and Sif arrived then and dropped the massive duffel they were carrying, Sif pulling a revolver from her thigh holster while Val drew a pair of desert eagles from under her jacket with an excited grin and aimed at the three who had their guns pointed at you.

You and Barnes looked at each other appreciatively, he was giving you a wicked grin as the tension rose quickly, everyone waiting for someone else to do something.

“Let’s all just take a couple deep breaths and relax.” Bucky clapped Steve’s shoulder until he sat back with a grunt, letting go of his grip on the gun. “So, you’re just here to look pretty, doll?”

“Sorry, I didn’t give you my full name, Bucky, we like to keep things low key. Thor?”

“Meet Dr. Y/N Y/L/N, boys, professor of biological and forensic anthropology at the University of Miami. What are your ph.Ds in again, love?”

“You’ve already mentioned two, but we also have antiquities, art history, archaeology, and the big one, linguistics.”

“She’s a bit of a polyglot.” He gave you a proud grin as he tucked his pistol away and everyone else finally eased up. “That’s why she’s in charge of international relations, and she always comes to negotiations with me. Can’t tell you how many bad deals this girl has gotten me out of.” You beamed when he cupped your cheek lovingly and took another swig of vodka. “She also runs the body farm.”

“That’s not just a rumor?” Everyone on the other side of the table was giving you appraising glances now as Steve whistled through his teeth. “That’s supposedly the whole reason the feds haven’t been able to pin any hits on you.”

“Not a rumor.” You kissed his palm before he removed it and turned back to them. “Listen, I like you gentlemen, even though you tried to pull one over on me. It’s understandable, Carol’s operation is a pie everyone wants their fingers in. So, here’s the new offer, I take 30% of Miami profits, you get 7% of anything I move in New York, Y/N here arranges for some international introductions for you, and I arrange for all of us to have a meeting with Miss Danvers.”

“They’re also having issues with Stark’s attempts to expand, baby.” You leaned forward and took Thor’s knife when he offered it, scooping out more coke and arranging it in a couple of lines before rolling a Benjamin and snorting it off the table.

“God, I forgot about that fucker.” He took the bump you offered him with a scowl. “That asshole giving you boys trouble too?”

“Yeah.” Steve and Bucky both looked pissed now. “He poached our Queens wunderkind a month ago and we’re pretty sure he’s got at least one mole planted.”

“Well, seems that a partnership would be extremely beneficial then. Need to keep that cocksucker on the west coast where he belongs.”

“Agreed.” Bucky sighed, Steve just grunting his acquiescence. “Partners then?”

Thor grinned and offered his hand, finally relaxing when Bucky took it and shook. Steve actually smiled a little bit when he gripped his wrist tightly, the muscles in his neck loosening as he rolled his head from side to side with relief.

“Fantastic, let’s celebrate! Evie, we need champagne flutes all around and tell Mark to bring us the box of Cubans I have in the back office.” The waitress wandered off to do as instructed as Sif walked forward and dropped the duffel next to the opposite couch. “And, because I know it can sting when you think you’re gonna get away with something and the rug gets pulled out from under you, here’s a little signing bonus so there’s no hard feelings.”

Rogers actually grinned when he opened the duffel to piles of cash, turning back to the two of as he handed it off to the charming looking man who had been leaning against the pillar.

“I think this is gonna work out just fine, Buck.”

“Evie, thank you sweetheart.” Thor smiled warmly when the server got back with the stemware and cigars, handing her three hundred dollar bills before she walked off again with a blush. “Let’s drink to getting stupid fucking rich.”

You all tossed back your champagne with a chorus of whoops before diving into the revelry. Thor offered you a few puffs of his cigar before tucking between his teeth and leaning forward to talk with his new partners about all the new things Carol was doing. He squeezed your hand when you pressed a kiss to his shoulder before standing up and stretching, moving away to find Val and Sif.

“You ladies wanna come dance with me?” You asked when you found the two of them chatting with the redhead. “That coke’s got me feeling like I’m full of bees.”

“Let’s do it!” Val said with a grin, leading the four of you out of the roped off section and towards the dance floor. “This is Nat by the way.”

“Hi Nat, nice to meet you!” Val started shoving people out of the way when you reached the floor, making sure you had room to move without getting humped by idiots.

“You too! Sorry I pointed a gun at your head!” She gave you an apologetic shrug as she shouted over the music.

“Please, it happens.” You waved her off and started rolling your hips to the rhythm.

“I got shots!” Sif said, grabbing the four tiny glasses off the tray and proffering them.

You hissed at her after you tossed it back. “Goddamn it Sif, tequila?”

“Yes, tequila!!”

You just shook your head as the four of you started dancing, the rest of the crowd giving you a small circle of space. Even with the extra room, Val and Nat were right against each other, their hips rolling together while they stared each other down. Sif and you just grinned at each other as you watched the two of them.

“Oh my god, just fuck already!” You teased when Nat tucked her face into Val’s neck, earning a glare from her. “There’s no one in the basement office tonight.”

“Unlike you, I don’t have the luxury of getting fucked when I’m in the middle of working, I have to save that shit for my own time. Speaking of which, looks like he wants you back.”

Heimdall gave the four of you a smile when he walked up, cocking his head and tapping his finger against his thigh impatiently as you moved slowly to follow after him with a half hearted pout.

“Sorry, Y/N. You know how he gets once he closes a deal.” He walked behind you back to the VIP section, staring down a few different men who looked like they were thinking of approaching you.

“I know, Heimdall. It’s one of the things I love about him. How much coke has he had?”

“Kjære!!” Thor’s voice boomed over the din of the club when he spotted you, answering your question when he stood on the couch and spread his arms wide with joy.

“Kjæreste!” You beamed at him, yelping when he jumped off the couch and bounded towards you to toss you over his shoulder and carry you back to where his new partners were waiting.

He dropped you on the couch with a small huff before curling over and devouring your mouth with his. Your breath left with him when he pulled away, sinking next to you before pulling your legs over his lap with a happy sound.

“Can’t have a celebration without you love.” He grinned, bending over the table and scooping a good helping of cocaine onto his knife. “These boys got all sad after you left.”

“It’s true, doll.” Bucky said, his eyes blown wide from the drugs while he watched Thor rub some coke over your gums before reaching forward to kiss you again. “You might be the most interesting person here.”

Your light laugh turned into a moan when you felt the cool steel of Thor’s knife drag over your chest slowly, leaving a thin line of powder over the curve of your breast.

“I am pretty fascinating.” You teased, biting your lip when Thor bent forward and snorted the coke off your tit. “Did you have any questions you wanted to ask me?”

“Shit, I did but I can’t remember exactly what they were right now.” He was mesmerized as he watched Thor run another line over the opposite breast. “Steve?”

“I’ve got nothing.” Rogers tugged on the collar of his shirt when Thor uncrossed your legs and drew a line on the inside of your thigh before bending over and inhaling it slowly, moaning when the scent of you filled his lungs and added to his high.

“Fuck, that’s the best way to do lines.” He hissed as he sat back up, sniffling a few times before turning to the men who couldn’t stop staring at you. “You boys really ought to try it.”

A deep laugh rumbled his chest when all three of your heads snapped to him. Thor was extremely possessive, he loved using you to tease whoever he was dealing with, dangling you in front of them like bait before snapping you away and fucking you senseless. There was a meeting three months ago where some idiot put a hand on your leg and Thor had almost beat him to death before Heimdall and Val could pull him off.

You ran your tongue over your bottom lip nervously as you studied his face, trying to determine if he was playing some dangerous game with all of you that was going to end with you stitching someone up.

“I smelled you love.” He purred in your ear, drawing you to your feet and turning you until you were facing the two men, his breath fanning warmly over your neck as he pressed his chest to your back. “I’d love to believe that’s all for me, but you’ve been squirming ever since you set eyes on them.” You moaned when he started walking you towards where Barnes and Rogers were eyeing you hungrily. “But tell me you don’t want it and we can stop.”

“Fuck, you spoil me.” You grinned at him over your shoulder and accepted his soft kiss before moving to sit on the mirrored table. “Go ahead boys.”

Bucky leaned forward first with a deep growl, flipping his knife through his fingers before digging it into the cocaine and moving back to your chest. Your eyes turned to Steve’s as you gasped at the feel of the cold blade dragging over your breasts, grinning when you saw him start to palm his cock through his slacks. A low moan escaped your lips when Bucky leaned forward and inhaled the powder off your skin, his lips ghosting over the swell of your tits before he pulled back with a groan.

“You gotta try that Stevie.” He muttered, leaning back to scoop up more cocaine as his free hand brushed over your thigh, teasing the hem of your skirt up towards your hip as he spread your legs wide.

Steve stood up and prowled towards you as Bucky knelt between your thighs and started drawing lines over them with his blade. Your breath was starting to get shallow, and when Steve curled his hand lightly around your throat at the same time Bucky’s face skimmed over your leg you let out a whine. The blonde slid his jacket off and grabbed his own knife, his thumb tracing the swell of your bottom lip as he collected some powder.

Bucky had run out of blow but kept his face where it was, his lips pressing into your soft skin as he moaned at the smell of you. Steve moved very slowly, his thumb tracing your jaw while he pressed the flat of the knife against your chest.

The throbbing between your legs was starting to get too intense, and when Buck’s breath fanned over your core at the same time Steve pressed his face to your chest, you almost passed out. Steve let out a low moan as he buried his face between your tits, nuzzling them with a growl while you wound your fingers through his hair. He started drawing the zipper at the front of your dress down even further, his lips ghosting over every inch of exposed skin before the dress was completely undone.

”Fuck me.” Steve hissed, stepping back and taking you in with a satisfied hum. “You seeing this Barnes?”

Bucky rested his chin on your thigh for a beat, gazing up at you through his lashes and grinning as his eyes raked over your naked body.

”Yeah I see it. You’re a lucky man, Odinson.”

You turned your gaze over your shoulder and found Thor grinning at you, his bottom lip tucked between his teeth as he squeezed the outline of his cock through his slacks.

”That I am, but so are you boys. This is a one night only deal, and only because she wants it, otherwise I’d have killed the two of you hours ago.” The gleam in his eye was full of danger for a moment before it relaxed into lust. “You get to fuck her however she wants; eat her out, fuck her tits, feel those perfect lips or that tight ass wrapped around your cocks. But that pussy is mine, and if either of you even try to slip it into that pretty little hole, I can’t be held responsible for what I might do.”

”That seems fair to me,” Bucky said with a shrug. “Stevie?”

As soon as Thor had stopped talking Steve’s mouth was on yours, his teeth tugging on your lips until you opened up for him and he could curl his tongue against your own. Barnes just laughed before diving between your thighs, his arms wrapping around your legs as he mouthed hungrily at your sex. You whined into Rogers’ mouth when Bucky’s tongue found your clit at the same time Steve started rubbing his thumbs over your nipples, feeling his grin when you arched into his palms.

The way the two of them were working you over made you think this wasn’t their first time sharing. Every time Steve found one of your zones, Bucky’s tongue was right against your clit, making you want to scream. Steve’s hands were almost lazy in the way they traced your tattoo, the pads of his fingers still skimming over your nipples as he admired the artwork.

”Jesus Christ.” Was the only thing you could think of to say when Bucky’s nose rubbed against your clit at the same time he curled his tongue inside you.

”Not exactly, gorgeous.” Steve’s grin was wicked as he continued to trail his fingers over the ink that swirled between your breasts while you leaned against him. “This ink is fucking impressive, you should let me do a piece for you if you’re ever in New York.”

The answer you were about to give died in your throat when Bucky sucked on your clit and you came without warning, a jolt of electricity traveling up your spine as your release soaked his mouth and chin while you swallowed a shriek. He moaned into your cunt at the taste of your cum before leaning back on his heels and grinning at Steve.

”Your turn Stevie. Dunno if it’s the coke or her but I don’t think I’ve ever come from eating pussy before.”

Your eyes bulged when you saw the wet stain over the shrinking tent in his slacks, your chest swelling at the thought that nothing but the taste of you could make a man come undone.

  The two of them shifted to switch positions, the feel of Steve drawing lines on your thighs sending a small jolt of pleasure up your spine. Bucky tilted your head up so he could kiss you, sliding his tongue between your lips and grinning when you whined at the taste of yourself. You felt Steve’s beard scratching your skin when he pressed his face to your thigh and inhaled, growling when he finally got a close look at the plump and swollen prize between your legs.

”I dunno how he can get anything done with you around, doll.” Bucky purred as he started trailing his lips down your throat.

“We’re very good at multitasking.” You gasped, Bucky’s lips wrapping around your nipple at the same time Steve’s tongue ran over your slit in a heavy stripe.

His low chuckle vibrated your chest and made you keen, arching your back into him when he brought his metal hand up to palm your neglected breast. Steve’s tongue was still swirling lazily through your folds, savoring the taste of you while his cock throbbed against the edge of the couch. He shoved two fingers inside you and you choked on a sob when his lips wrapped around your clit.

Bucky’s tongue had raised your nipple to a sensitive peak, the brush of his lips over it sending a jolt through your body that echoed in your core, making you clench around Steve’s fingers with a gasp. The sensations were too much for you and you collapsed back against the table, Bucky following you and moving his face to your other breast while you wrapped your thighs around Steve’s neck.

You tilted your head back to find Thor, your body relaxing as much as it could when your eyes met his. The anger you were worried you would find wasn’t there, just pure desire as he watched the two men take you apart with lust blown pupils. He was still slowly palming his cock through his pants, and you moaned at the sight of his bulge growing larger while he looked at you.

”Are you close, love?” He grinned when you nodded at him, unable to speak as Steve flicked kitten licks against your clit while Bucky sucked on your nipple. “You go ahead and come for these boys one more time then I’ll fuck you like you deserve.”

It was like his permission was all you needed, your back arching off the table when your body spasmed and your release flowed into Steve’s mouth and over his beard. He and Bucky both groaned as they watched you come down, the occasional aftershock vibrating through your body as they stepped away with reluctance.

“Gentlemen, I look forward to a long a fruitful partnership. Please feel free to use of the lounge for the rest of the night.” Thor only had eyes for you as you slowly rose from the table on shaky legs and drew your dress closed to cover your nakedness. “Would really love to stay but I have some business to attend to in the top office.”

You felt their eyes following you as Thor wrapped his arm around your waist and started to guide you towards the office, Heimdall walking in front of you to clear the crowd out of the way. He stopped at the bottom of the stairs and gave you a knowing grin as Thor started dragging you to the office.

Thor growled once he shoved you inside, slamming the door closed and cutting off the noise from the floor once you were alone in the soundproofed room.

“You did so fucking good baby.” He purred as he stepped into you, his hands roaming all over your body while he started walking you towards the wall of glass that looked out over the club. “Don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“Well, you’d get fucked over a whole lot.” You teased, running your tongue over his bottom lip when he pressed his mouth to yours with a moan.

He chuckled against your lips, keeping your mouth molded to his while he turned the front of your body to press against the glass.

“Those two fuckers got one taste of you and I bet they’ll do anything you ask now.” He scraped his teeth over the curve of your neck towards you shoulder, slowly removing his suit jacket and shirt quickly. “They still watching, love?”

You found the lounge and grinned when you saw the two New Yorkers staring up at you from the floor, fighting the urge to give them a wave.

“Yeah, they are.” HIs hand curled lightly around your throat and you whined as he tilted your head back and started to drag the zipper of your dress down slowly. 

“Good.” He slid your dress off your shoulders and tossed it aside, rubbing his face in your hair as he worked at undoing his belt one handed. “Want them to watch you scream when you come all over my cock.”

He gave you no warning before spearing into you, grinning when you let out a satisfying shriek. You didn’t get a chance to adjust before he was thrusting into you violently, his hips slapping against your ass as he pressed your tits against the glass.

This was different from your slow afternoon lovemaking where he took his time drawing every drop of pleasure from your fucked out body. All he wanted when he was coked up after a deal was to take you fast like a damn animal, claiming you as his for everyone to see.

Fuck if you didn’t love every second of it.

Your legs started to shake as your pussy clenched around him, moaning when he wrapped a hand around your front to dig into your breast, his other hand increasing the pressure on your throat. He growled into your shoulder when you arched into his hand, pressing you even further into the glass while you whined.

“Close, I’m so close. I’m gonna come, don’t fucking stop.” He grinned at your babbling, somehow increasing his pace even more until you were literally bouncing off the glass. 

When he released your breast and hooked his hand under your knee, drawing it up to your waist and opening you up even further so the tip of his cock could kiss your cervix, you lost it. You let out an inhuman wail, tears streaming down your cheeks while your body tried to curl back on itself. He caught you before you collapsed, holding you up while you vibrated around him, your pussy milking his cock in waves as stars exploded behind your eyes.

You felt his cock throbbing inside you and hissed when he sank his teeth into your shoulder, warmth blooming from your core as he coated your satiny walls with thick ropes of spend. He fucked it into with stuttering jabs, his hips jerking erratically until his cock stopped twitching and started to soften. 

The two of you panted against each other, Thor scooping you up and turning you to face him as he slid out of you with a soft wet squelch. You hummed happily when he pressed his lips against yours and nipped at them softly. 

“Herregud, du er jævla perfekt, kjære ” He groaned, holding you close as the two of you sank to the floor. “Jeg lar deg aldri gå, du er min.“

“Jeg er din for alltid.” You murmured as he laid back against the floor, pressing your lips to the tattooed wreath of blåveis and bergfrue over his heart that marked him as yours. “Jeg elsker deg.”

Steve and Bucky turned their attention back to the lounge with reluctance, doing their best to ignore Sam and Clint’s shit eating grins. Rogers took another bump of coke before sinking into the couch and chugging directly from the bottle of bourbon. Barnes just grabbed another stogie, biting the end off and spitting it away before tucking it between his lips.

“Think we may need to get ourselves one of those, Stevie.”

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