#highest paying bank jobs

[walletwingman]

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[ceilidho]

Buttermilk

It doesn't take long to settle into the rhythm of your new summer job. Or: the babysitter x single dad au

Part 1 | masterlist

-

“I’m not looking for a babysitter that can only come by every now and then,” he says sternly and pauses for emphasis, brows furrowing to convey the seriousness of the situation. “I’ve got a busy schedule and his mom isn’t in the picture. I need a real commitment.”

You sit across from him wringing your hands under the kitchen table, wondering again what it is you’re doing here. Babysitting has never been your schtick; you’re somewhere in between too old to do it as a casual gig for extra cash and too young and inexperienced to be considered for a full-time position. 

Yet, it seems like that’s what he’s looking for, based on the information he’s told you and your general impression from having been in his house for less than twenty minutes. The house is a mess—toys strewn across the baby’s bedroom and the living room, dishes crusted with day old food sitting in the sink, the bookshelf in his study covered in a fine layer of dust that tells you that this man spends so little time in his own house that it’s become something of a requiem to single fatherhood. 

“So, a nanny?” you ask.

He hems and haws over that for a bit. “Bit too fancy for my tastes, but that’s more like it. It won’t just be watching the baby—I need someone who can help out around the house as well. ‘Used to run a tight ship before him, but cleaning’s not been my highest priority these days. Sure you’ve picked up on that.” He says the last part wryly, lips curling up into a crooked grin under his mustache. 

“Well…” You trail off while glancing at the mess in the living room out of the corner of your eye, toys and blocks scattered over the playmat. Your own smile is sheepish. 

“I work odd hours, so I’ll be gone a lot; you’ll probably have a few late nights here, but I pay well. Think that’s something you can handle?”

A polite refusal sits on the tip of your tongue until you swallow it back, suddenly conscious again of the dwindling funds in your bank account. It’s not that you don’t think you could handle the job. You’ve babysat before (only preteens, you correct yourself internally, but surely there are some transferable skills there). And, eclipsing all of your arguments in favour of walking out the door right now, is the very salient and pressing need for an actual income. 

“You’re military, you said?” you croak out instead.

He nods, hums. “Bit of a glorified desk job these days. They don’t put the old timers out in the field. Still, keeps me busy.”

You frown at that. “You’re not that old.”

That gets him to cock an eyebrow. “Love, I’m over twice your age, easy. I’m plenty old for a first time father on top of that; should’ve already been an old hand at this, but I’ve been married to the job for too long.”

You don’t ask if the baby was an accident or how it came to be that he chose to raise the baby on his own rather than try to work something out with the mother or give him up altogether. It seems uncouth. Rude. It’s none of your business and, more to the point, hardly relevant to the job. It’s just your own insatiable need to pry and know every little detail raising its head to sniff the air. 

“Well, I think—” You chew on your words and then backtrack. “—I can handle the job. I live nearby, so I can be here whenever you need me. If you need references, I can—”

“No need,” he cuts you off, waving a hand in front of him. “I’m a good judge of character. If you wanna help put the baby to bed, we can talk salary and I’ll go over my schedule this week with you.”

The chair scrapes against the tile floor when he stands up, pushing it out from under him. Standing, he towers over you, a big, fit man despite his protests to the contrary. Hardly out of his prime. You’d put him at forty-five at the latest, and still a work horse of a man at that; broad like a draft horse, like he flips tires and runs marathons for fun. When you push out your chair and stand as well, you’re still forced to look up at him. 

“Sure can, Mister…—?” You realize with a slight start that you only remember his first name, though it hardly feels appropriate to call him by that given the fact that he’s about to become your boss. Already is your boss. 

“Price. But John works just fine,” he corrects, his smile warm, almost paternalistic. 

You ignore the flash of heat up your spine and the way your belly constricts when he reaches across the table to shake your hand. His big, calloused palm dwarfs yours, fingers easily overlapping. You might as well be shaking a mitt. 

“Well, thanks for the job, John,” you say with a smile of your own, ignoring the way yours strains at the end, anxiety already gnawing a hole through the lining of your stomach that your stomach acid will now most certainly leak through. “I won’t let you down.”

“I know you won’t, sweetheart.”

His words seem like a bellwether for something that you can’t yet articulate or even anticipate. Regardless, they make you swallow reflexively when you start salivating out of nowhere. You should probably quit on the spot actually, just out of principle alone, but again you remember the gut-churning sensation of checking your bank balance in the middle of the grocery store the other day before putting half of the contents of your cart back onto the shelf beside you. 

You follow him into the playroom instead, where a fuzzy headed infant gasps up at his daddy, blinking big lovestruck eyes up at him. Your own heart feels like a melted caramel in your chest when John picks his son up, eyes crinkling with affection. The baby is so tiny in his arms.

Any thought of being a good person evaporates from your mind. As if you ever had a chance. 

You don’t know how he found you. Through a friend of a friend of a friend’s dad’s coworker, maybe. Word of mouth. Watercooler conversation and a heaping cup of gossip.

“Did you hear the Captain’s looking for a babysitter?”

“For what? To bang?”

“No, dipshit. He knocked some broad up and she left him with the baby.”

“No kidding. The Captain?”

“Didn’t I just fuckin’ say that?”

“Price, you mean? Captain Price?”

“Are you fuckin’ deaf? Yeah—Price.”

“Christ. Godspeed to him. A baby. Goddamn.”

“Give it a rest, it happens all the time. That’s why you always wrap it up. Anyway, you know of anyone that’d be up for it?”

And then somehow, your name gets mentioned. Much to your relief. Job opportunities don’t knock on your door all that often, and when John finally gets around to telling you your hourly rate, you almost burst into hysterical giggles in front of him. It’s more than you expected. More than you deserve, if you’re being honest. You’re retroactively grateful that he didn’t ask you to name your rate because you wouldn’t have dared propose something anywhere close to what he offers.

It’s a straightforward gig. John doesn’t work the typical nine-to-five, so you show up at the times he made you write down on that first day in his living room after your interview and you leave whenever he comes home. The first week is fairly true to the schedule he laid out for you. He’s only late by around half an hour one evening, but that was another condition that he made you well aware of prior to giving you the job. 

You know better than to put up a fuss. You’re already learning on the job as it is; with your anxiety at a ten at all times, you appreciate the extra half hour to keep googling baby-specific information. What to do during tummy time. The benefits of baby massage. How to change a diaper. You’re learning all sorts of things these days.

To your credit, he could’ve done worse. The day after John hires you, you sign up for an intensive babysitting course over the weekend and read the online manual front to back. Your CPR certificate is still valid, but you book a refresher course as well just to be on the safe side. It’s a bit unbearable to watch the funds drain out of your account before you’ve even had a chance to earn your first paycheck, but it’s worth it for the burgeoning confidence that you bring on your first day.

Babies are fun to be around, you realize, much to your own delight. Babysitting—or rather, nannying, but John still introduces you to the neighbours as his babysitter, plus nannying requires a host of additional accreditations that you simply just do not have—might not have been a job that you ever expected yourself to like, but you find yourself kind of morose at the end of each day when you have to say goodbye to baby, and even going so far as to turn in early when you get home so you’ll be ready bright and early the next morning.

Babies also smell better than anything you’ve ever smelt in your life. You could huff the top of this little guy’s head morning, noon, and night. Milky and clean; it barely takes a few days to become addicted to the smell of his little head. When he’s cradled in your arms, you can’t help but press your nose to the top of his head and take a deep inhale, eyes fluttering shut. It’s some good shit. 

You keep a journal filled with notes to relay to John when he comes home at the end of the night and keep your phone close to you during babytime to film any important moments that John might’ve otherwise missed. 

“He started babbling today,” you tell John the second he walks through the door, the video already pulled up on your phone. You haven’t felt this excited in ages. “Look.” 

He’s still in his fatigues and everything, but he humours you and takes the baby when you pass him over, cooing and tickling his belly until the baby squeals and babbles again for him. 

“See?” you gush, mooning over him. You don’t have the presence of mind to be self-conscious in the moment. 

“Yeah,” John remarks, lifting his son up to blow a raspberry into his belly and grinning at his ensuing peals of laughter. “Ain’t that something.”

If the smile in his voice has anything to do with you, you don’t pick up on it.

On top of everything, John turns out to be a really good boss. Despite his gruff, intimidating exterior, he’s remarkably kind and patient with you. He doesn’t nag you for missing a spot when cleaning the bathroom. He doesn’t scold you the day your car breaks down and you’re forced to take the nearest bus to his place, tacking on an extra twenty minutes to your commute, even though that means that he’s invariably late for work. When you accidentally use scouring powder on the inside of his Le Creuset Dutch oven and scratch off the enamel, he gently talks you out of a sobbing fit, seemingly unbothered by the state of his scratched up crockery.

He shrugs when you bring it up. “It’s got a lifetime warranty anyway. I’ll bring it into the shop over the weekend. No use getting upset about it.”

Unflappable. That’s the word for it. It’s like as long as he’s able to come home to the baby and you in one piece, nothing else matters, and that sense of calm permeates the whole house; for the first time in a long time, you don’t feel like you have to walk on eggshells around someone. 

Your only qualm—and it’s hardly even a qualm, to be honest, more of just an observation—is that John is more of a physical person than you are. 

When he wants to move you, he does—two big hands clamped around your waist and only a fraction of his strength to move you away from the stove so he can take over cooking while you check on the baby, your mouth hanging open, aghast. Fuming at his nerve. The gall of him to manhandle you. 

You don’t hold it against him though. You haven’t spent much time around groups of men, but you’ve seen military movies before and it seems like the status quo for men to grab and push each other around. If anything, he’s gentle with you. 

It’s just that��and again, John’s the first adult man you’ve spent any one-on-one time with, what with it just being the two of you and the baby in his house, so your frame of reference is microscopic—you’re not completely sure whether it’s appropriate for your boss to be so touchy. 

You don’t mean to insinuate that he’s being inappropriate. It’s just that—and again you have to catch yourself before you go making assertions about people because John is honestly such a nice man and he’s done nothing but treat you fairly and made you feel safe and welcome, but…—sometimes he insists on you staying over for dinner after he comes home from work and doesn’t take no for an answer.

You’re never in any rush to leave. There’s not exactly anything waiting for you in your dingy little apartment. So when he asks you to stay, you have no good reason to refuse. It’s nice to get a free meal as well. With the way John gives you unfettered access to the fridge and pantry, you hardly need to buy groceries at all these days. You feel a little guilty about that, but you know what it’s like to go hungry.

Maybe that’s why you stay for supper the first time he asks a couple weeks into you working for him. You’re subconsciously mortified that you’ll eat his food when he’s not gone but not when he offers it to you.

At least dinner feels like something you’ve been given rather than just taking, taking, taking. 

Not to mention you’ve developed something of a rapport. There’s always something to talk about with John: the baby, his work, a show you watched on TV after putting the baby down for a nap, the new big Tesco four blocks from your place, his late teens before joining the military (“back when you weren’t even a thought in your mum’s head,” he jokes, cutting into his steak and something in your brain pops and fritzes out like the static between radio stations). 

The first few suppers are sporadic and never long enough to make you feel like you’ve overstayed your welcome. In all honesty, they’re the few bright spots in an otherwise dull life. Outside of your job and the infrequent dinners, you’re estranged from your family and you’ve only got a few close friends in town that you see maybe once or twice a month. Nothing to write home about. Some Friday nights, the yoga studio near your flat has a five pound community class that you pop in for, but those are infrequent too. 

Then there’s the odd night where he shoos you into the living room to put on a movie while he cleans up after dinner. You stare absentmindedly at his forearms when he rolls up his sleeves and then jump when you find him staring at you expectantly over his shoulder.

“Go put something on,” John tells you, a warning look in his eye. “Don’t make me repeat myself.”

“Sorry,” you whisper before slipping off into the living room.

You can’t relax on the couch while you wait. You flinch when he finally joins you, sitting down on the other side of the couch suddenly. You hadn’t even heard him coming; he’s light on his feet for such a big man. 

The buddy cop comedy you picked barely distracts you from the fact that your boss is sitting on the other side of the couch. You spend the whole two hour run time so nervous that you’re afraid you’ll buzz right out of your skin. 

For absolutely no reason, of course, because all John does is make light conversation with you throughout the movie. Conversation that you respond to in curt, choked whispers. When he walks you to the door after the movie, all you can focus on is how utterly embarrassed you are for being so weird.

Your dreams that night come frantic and heady. Humid under the blanket. The phantom feeling of a body heavier than yours weighing down one side of the couch and you sliding towards it gradually, unable to even cling onto the arm of the couch to keep from falling into his lap. 

Then hands on your belly, cupping and holding. Thick fingers with hairy knuckles. A warm, tobacco smell wafting under your nose, sweet like tonka bean and smoke. Nothing you can do to keep them from travelling down your stomach and thighs and spreading your legs wide, big hands curving around your inner thighs until—

You wake up panting, fingers pressed against your clit in your sleep. It takes nothing to bring yourself over the edge, dark blue eyes swimming on the precipice of your conscious mind. 

“Sleep well?” John asks you the next morning when you show up on his doorstep, handing you the baby before you’ve even said so much as a word. You hold the baby to your chest like a makeshift shield. Anything to put some distance between you and the man who has now taken to starring in your dreams. 

“Not bad,” you squeak. 

You flinch when he guides you in with a hand on your back and shuts the door behind you. Your cunt pulses when his fingers press firm against the small of your back, hand bigger than you remembered from your dream.

As if you were ever going to end up anywhere but here.

[loveindefinitely]

༊*·˚ NEW JOBS AND DEATH THREATS — cod x reader

CRAVE YOU — call of duty x reader CHAPTER ONE

featuring. simon 'ghost' riley + johnny 'soap' mactavish + kyle 'gaz' garrick + john 'bravo six' price + alejandro vargas + rodolfo 'rudy' parra + könig + keegan p. russ

warnings. nsfw, fem!reader, prison au, serial killer au, reverse harem, therapist/patient, medical inaccuracies, graphic violence, depictions of murder, everyone's unhinged, poly tf141, minor ships, threesomes, foursomes, gangbangs, this is not medical advice!!

series masterlist. read on ao3.

Life was hard. That was a fact.

Bills and groceries didn’t pay for themselves. That was also a fact.

Adding these two factors together, the final product will be a high-risk job in one of the highest-risk places on Earth. That’s… not a fact.

And yet, here you are, standing at the visitor entrance of Las Almas Prison, sporting a disgruntled grimace and a new pair of black slacks that you’d splurged on. They, at least, made your ass look good, although that was truly the least of your worries.

No. Your current list of worries looked something like this;

Getting Murdered

Getting Attacked

Vomiting Within The First Five Minutes Of Your New Job?

…Yeah. Something like that.

The early morning sun is blinding where it sits, just off to the side of the giant concrete building that was the main offices and Visitor Centre. The fact that you were standing in front of what was only a small part of the overall prison grounds was… alarming.

You were well aware that this was the largest prison in your country, housing the most lethal and awful of criminals. Some you’d seen either on the news, or heard of in passing conversations.

This was the real deal. And, somehow, you’d managed to find yourself being hired to work here. You. Work with serial killers. The worst of the worst.

With the stress on your bank account, and the endless struggle that was trying to find a stable career in the current job market, you simply had no other choice but to accept the offer. It paid extremely well, had great benefits, and your safety was… fairly considered.

The amount of NDAs, liability clauses and agreements, however?

Not the best at calming your nerves, to say the least.

The biting chill of the winter wind has you wrapping your arms around yourself, leather bag slung over your shoulder as you finally step through the automatic sliding door.

You’re not surprised to find that the chill only deepens inside the concrete walls of the building, with no heaters or air conditioning from what you can see. There is, however, bright white overhead lights that do nothing except aid the throbbing in the side of your head – probably due to the restless sleep you’d had the night before, anticipation and anxiety warring inside of your thoughts.

There’s an office in front of you as you step in, with only a few decades-old couches to your right, in front of a dingy TV that’s turned off. Saving their budget for more important things, you suppose.

The walls are a pale, grimy yellow, with sparse photos hung about, framing newspaper articles that are surely from the last century, and black and white pictures of the prison’s opening.

It’s an unsettling place, that much you’ve already gathered.

You haven’t even actually been inside the prison, you remind yourself, your stomach churning where it now lays at your feet.

Without a second thought, you continue with hurried steps to the front desk, where scratched plastic encases the sole woman inside, sitting behind a monitor. There’s a circle of holes that allow for sound to pass through, but other than that, there’s no way of entering from this room. With a quick study of your surroundings, you see a steel door to the left of where the desk sits, with a small square window covered in iron bars.

…Jesus christ.

“Can I help you?” The woman drawls, sliding her glasses further up her nose. Her voice is nasally, and the words come out in a slow drawl as she looks you up and down, unimpressed.

You give her your best smile, although even you can tell that it’s an uneasy one. “Yes! This is my first day, I think I’m supposed to be meeting Kate Laswell?” You ask, nerves betraying your voice with unsteady breaths.

The woman snaps her gum.

You stand there.

She blows it again.

You continue to stand there.

Her gaze is bored and completely void of any thought, before she nods slowly. “Laswell… I’ll call her.”

Really, you couldn’t be more shocked if you tried. What the fuck was happening? How could one lack so much… professionalism?

“Hi, Kate. Yes, it’s Jenny. I have a new hire who apparently wants to see you…” Her voice remains that unbearably slow, sloth-like delivery, before her eyes unhurriedly meet yours again. “What’s your name…?”

You give it to her, tone only the slightest bit impatient as you roll back on the heels of your feet. You can only hope that your black boots are appropriate; you’d figured that they were safe, closed-toe and still somewhat professional.

Time would tell. Jenny was giving you the impression that they were more than acceptable, because at least they got you to do your job in a timely manner.

Jenny says a few more words to who can only pray is Laswell on the other end of the phone, before she places it back in its holder. 

“Laswell will be here any…” She pops her gum once more, and maybe, just maybe, you can understand the urge to murder. “Moment.”

You give her a tight, painful smile. “Thank you, Jenny.”

She doesn’t respond, and you decide to just stand back and wait. You certainly weren’t complaining – any more conversation with her would’ve ended with a severe lack of hair on your head.

A minute passes, before a buzz in the pocket of your slacks has your throat tightening. 

Pulling out your phone, your next exhale comes out shaky as you read the text.

Charlie: get milk otw home used it all

No ‘good luck’. No… ounce of care for you, or the absolute stress that comes with a new job, let alone one like this.

When you’d told him about the offer, all he’d said was, “It might make you worth something for a change.” Didn’t even question, not for a minute, the risks that came with a job like this. He simply couldn’t give less of a fuck.

“Doctor?” The sound of a door opening, and the kind, almost motherly tone of the voice has you shoving your phone into your pocket once more as you turn to the source of the sound.

It’s a woman, her hair pulled back into a slick bun, one hand holding what seems to be a clipboard. Her other hand rests in the pocket of a white coat, not unlike one a scientist would be fashioning in a lab. Her smile is warm, the corner of her eyes crinkling as you direct a smile of your own her way.

“Kate Laswell?” You ask, extending your hand for her to shake. Taking her hand out of her pocket, she accepts it gracefully, nodding her head.

“The one and only,” she says, before gesturing to the steel door she’d entered through. “Now, today we’ll get you set up with a keycard, general rules, and I’ll have you meet two of your patients.”

You nod, following her as she swipes a card in a black reader, before the red light buzzes green, and she pulls the door open. Right behind her, you take an unstable deep breath as you take in the greyed, jagged walls, a complete contrast to the painted ones of the entrance room.

“We really are so glad to welcome you to our team,” she continues, her black work shoes clicking against the smooth concrete flooring. She doesn’t turn to you as she speaks, but her voice carries around the echoey hallway. “You’ll make a great addition. A necessary one, also. We’ve needed an innovative, young therapist for a while. Most of our… previous hires have held out-dated beliefs, and a lack of humanity for their clientele.”

That makes your brows furrow in confusion. “That’s… odd,” you murmur, before pausing your steps as Laswell stops, swiping her keycard, before entering another room.

As you step into the newly revealed space, your eyes go wide as you take it in. 

It’s a wide, large space, with several floors. Metal staircases sit at either end of the vast space, allowing access to every floor. Guards sit at every level, some walking around the space where you and Laswell stand.

It’s a lot, all at once. You’d never even stepped foot into a prison – not before now.

“Most inmates are at the mess for breakfast,” Laswell supplies, turning to you with a neutral expression. She gestures for you to follow her back out of the space, and you do with hurried steps. “The ones you’ll be dealing with, however… they usually eat by themselves.”

You don’t decide to push that statement, not now, as you continue to follow her down the hallway.

“You won’t be seeing much of the prison,” she admits. “There’s heavily guarded spaces on the top floor for your sessions, both for your protection and for the safety of our staff and other low-risk inmates.”

You nod, humming a sound of affirmation as the two of you start heading up the cleaner steps at the end of the hallway. The staff staircase, you suppose.

“Today, you’ll be meeting two of our more… understanding ambers.”

You raise a brow. “Ambers? What does that mean?”

She turns her head over her shoulder, just enough to shoot you a knowing look. “Ambers are our highest-risk inmates. We house ten of them, and you’ll be dealing with eight as per your contract.”

Your stomach falls. You’d known, of course, that the risks were high when applying for this role. But… this was more than you’d imagined, in a way. Ambers. Huh.

Silence falls over the two of you as you make your way up the never-ending steps, no windows in sight. It’s unnerving, in a creepy, strange way. When you finally reach the top, you try and hide how out of breath you are from that small exertion.

Fucking christ.

Laswell, for her part, looks completely fine in an effortless way. You can’t eve find it in yourself to be envious. The feeling’s closer to admiration.

“Here’s the files on them both. You’ll be seeing Kyle Garrick first,” she hands you the clipboard she’d been carrying, and you accept it with only a slight tremble. She doesn’t comment on it, and you find yourself warming up to her already. “They’ll be restrained, and there is heavy security, so you needn’t worry about that side of things.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” you say earnestly, flipping through the files without reading much of anything, not yet. 

She waves you off with a soft chuckle. “None of that. Kate’s more than fine,” she insists, and you give her a bright smile in return. Maybe this job wouldn’t be so bad – a boss like this was much better than a creepy middle-aged man any day of the week.

You don’t realise you’ve made it to a small room until she stops walking, scanning her keycard and pushing the door open, gesturing you in. “While you have your first two sessions, I’ll sort your keycard and the rest of the processes out. I wish you luck.”

With that, the door shuts behind you, and you’re alone in a small room.

It matches the rest of the hallways you’ve seen – grey concrete walls, grey concrete floors. The only furniture, however, is one metal table drilled into the floor in the centre, one chair on either side. 

…It’s depressing. Not at all like you’d prefer, not for a fucking therapy session, but then again, you hadn’t met your clients yet.

Ambers. High-risk.

With a deep breath, you take a seat at the chair closest to you, finally reading through the top file on the clipboard.

Kyle ‘Gaz’ Garrick. 

You skim over the height, weight, sex – immediately reading the comments made and his sentence.

Mass murderer. Motivated attacks.

Your eyes go wide, almost comically so, as you bite at your lip, folding one leg over the other as you continue to read. 

Of course, you’d prepared, been made aware that you’d be dealing with murderers. But having it in black and white, right in front of you, is a whole other thing entirely. 

Apparently, they were motivated attacks. Targets being large CEOs, specifically those with reported claims of misuse of power, and those against green laws. Anti-environment types.

The motive is… you’re aware killing is bad. You hadn’t spent years studying for a degree in Psychology to think otherwise. But it wasn’t as simple as some made it out to be. You’d done papers suggesting that certain motives implied healthier patterns, healthier outlets.

If you had to choose between him killing pregnant women, and CEOs with broken moral compasses?

It wouldn’t take a genius to figure out your answer.

You’re about to flip the page when there’s a knock on the door on the other side of the room, before it opens.

There’s two guards that walk in, before a man in an olive green jumpsuit follows, hands cuffed tightly together in front of him, head down. Another guard from behind shoves him in, too rough for your liking. You sit up straighter, eyes assessing as you take in the man in the jumpsuit.

He’s forced into the chair opposite you, before one of the guards grabs his cuffed wrists and chains them to a rig in the middle of the table. You’re grateful for the precautions, but there’s a part of you that feels guilty watching the manhandling of the seemingly calm man.

“Half an hour,” the most brutish guard of them all grits out, beer belly spilling out over his belted jeans. He jostles the chain attaching his wrists to the table unnecessarily, and your eyes narrow.

He goes to leave, along with another guard, but one stands to stay in position inside, beside the door.

Your brows furrow, and you speak up before you can stop yourself. “Sorry, sir, but my sessions will need confidentiality, as for the best results. I’m sure that I’ll be safe with his restraints.”

The guard stares you down, seemingly mulling your words over, before shrugging and leaving the room, door shutting behind him.

…Huh. Alright.

You find your posture relaxing, just slightly, which is odd, considering you’re now only a metre or two away from a convicted murderer.

His gaze is trained to the table, left foot tapping incessantly against the concrete floor.

“It’s nice to meet you, Gaz,” you say with a soft tone and a gentle smile. You figure that his nickname is the best bet, not wanting to stir up any possible traumas with his given name during your first session with the man. “I’ll be your new psychiatric evaluator.”

His eyes flick up, meeting yours, and he nods slowly, as if awaiting a punchline. 

“Is it okay for me to call you Gaz?” You ask, tilting your head to the side and flipping to an empty page to take notes on. You’d need to grab a notebook from home, you decide.

He relaxes, only the smallest of movements, and he nods. “Gaz, yeah.”

Your smile widens at the small victory. Any step towards progress was a huge one, in your eyes. You’d be facing a lot of them in the coming days.

“Do you have any advice for this place?” You push, trying to form a bond of trust with the dark-haired man. “I’m gonna be honest, you’re my first patient, and I’ve only met Laswell and… Jenny?”

His mouth quirks at that, a dimple showing to the left of his mouth as he looks back up at you. “Jenny’s a character, ain’t she?”

You laugh, a genuine one, and nod. “She certainly is. You’ve met her?”

He shrugs, shoulders relaxing slightly. “Few times, yeah. She drives me up the fuckin’ wall.” His accent is only minimally apparent, but his voice is of a somewhat humorous tone.

Small victories.

“Well,” he exhales, settling into his chair a bit as he seems to ponder. “Do ya know who else you’re assigned to?”

You’d been sure to thoroughly go over your contract, and you were allowed to disclose your other patients between your others. They’d find out within the day, anyways, so there was no point in being discreet.

“It’s only you and a… John Price? Today. I’m sure I’ll find out the other six over the next few days,” you say, appreciating that he’s starting conversations. It’s more than you’d allowed yourself to hope for.

Gaz’s eyes light up, and even if you hadn’t been incessant in watching him, it’d be an obvious shift in emotions. “Price?”

You nod, quickly making a note on your clipboard, before folding your hands in your lap as you gesture for him to continue with a quick inclination of your head.

“He’s the best. Man’s a legend,” he enthuses. “Love ‘im.”

There’s… a hidden truth to that statement, that you make a mental note to unpack during a later session. Your smile is a natural one as you say, “He’s an amber, correct? Laswell told me I’d been assigned eight out of ten ambers… you’re one of them, right?”

Gaz seems to fold into himself, and you kick yourself for going back to square one. He answers, however.

“...Yeah. Only Ghost ‘nd Valeria are aggressive, though. We’re just… misunderstood,” he murmurs, and in the back of your brain, you find yourself believing his words.

“Thank you,” you smile, and he responds with a sharp one of his own. Maybe you’d covered more ground than you’d expected. “I think it’d been mentioned that I was only assigned men, due to the nature of the job, or something like that.”

Seeming to mull over your words, he starts to slowly nod. “Sounds ‘bout right. As long as you don’t get Graves, you’ll be alright. The others are… fuckin’ weird, but they’re good men. Mostly.”

That’s a lot of information at once, and quite frankly, it takes a moment for you to process. 

“‘Good men’. What do you think it takes to be a good man?” You ask, curiosity laced into your tone. Getting to ask such questions of a convicted murderer, it’s a thrilling, exhilarating task.

His eyes don’t shift as he replies. “Good men do the acts others are too scared to do. They see the evil in the world, and rid of it with their own bare hands. You can be an ethical murderer, Doc.”

Those words, they’re – they’re authentic, and conviction aches in their structure. 

You swallow around a dry mouth.

“You think you’re a good man?” You ask.

His smile would be seen as warm to any who weren’t aware of his acts, but to you – it’s chilling. Haunting in a way you’ve never experienced.

It remains as he answers.

“I think that I’m a man who people wish they had the bravery to be.”

a/n. okay so im really nervous about posting this, cause ITS EIGHT FUKCING LOVE INTERESTS and also im a humanities girl not a science one!! sociology all the way not psych!! so forgive me for all the inaccuracies and legality issues please. im just a girl. hopefully u guys will like this one? i mean, obsessed serial killers cod is smth i need so here we are. all comments and feedback mean so muchhh ty ily mwah mwah mwah

taglist comment/msg to be added. [nothing to see here.]

[tf2incorrectquotes]

The Mercs are visiting Scout's mother:

Scout's Ma: I just discovered that my current husband is cheating on me. I want him to suffer. Any advice?

Most of the Mercs: *offering to torture or kill the guy, before they are silenced by a certain doctor raising his hand*

Medic: First, do you have proof that he is cheating on you?

Scout's Ma: Yes.

Medic: You share an account?

Scout's Ma: Yes.

Medic: *takes a long sip of his coffee* Stay with him-

Most of the Mercs: *start protesting, only to go quiet at Heavy's warning glare*

Medic: -just long enough to drain your bank accounts to buy gold. Take a loan against your house to buy gold. Sell your cars and use the money to buy gold.

Scout's Ma: *nods eagerly*

Medic: Hide the gold. Lease the cars. Confront him and tell him you'll stay if he gets the highest paying job he can. Six months later, then- and only then- you can file for divorce.

Medic: *smiles menacingly* You will deplete your joint assets and prove he can hold a good paying job to produce alimony.

Scout's Ma: *claps joyfully* Wow! Thank you, I'll do that!

Medic: *cheerfully* Trust me. It works like a charm. Oh, I also have a plan for his mistresses, if you're interested?

Demo: *suddenly feeling very uncomfortable* ...have you done this before?

[y3ager]

STORYTIME I (26 F) FUCKED MY SUPERSTAR CLIENT (24 M) AFTER MONTHS OF SEXUAL TENSION!

— ‘i’m a manager for a pretty big music label and my client is the biggest dickhead in the world but i fear i fucked him after one of our usual arguments.. 😵‍💫’

eren y. x black!fem!reader

tags: modern au, smut, porn not much plot, hate(?)sex, cunnilingus, cowgirl, reader gets called ‘mama’ and ‘boss’, unprotected sex, mild choking, musician!eren, manager!reader. minors do not interact.

my first collab entry MAKE SOME NOISE YALL WTF!!! but no seriously thanks so much to @k9nto for letting me join your event i had a blast writing this! hope you all enjoy! 🤭

YOU’VE ENCOUNTERED SOME annoying people in your life. in kindergarten, a boy taunted you by picking up one your fallen hot pink knocker-balls and refusing to give it back to you. in high school, some chick named tiffany ripped down all of your junior class president posters that you spent weeks designing and printing out on the highest quality paper. your college advisor had been completely useless, you’d still be dragging yourself through your bachelor’s degree if you didn’t stay on your toes and realize the classes you were dropped in were a waste of time. but all of these people, and many more that have slipped your mind, shaped and molded you into the woman you were today. strong, tenacious, independent, a go-getter who never gave up and thus was able to reap her hard work, in the form of three nice crisp degrees and a never pitiful bank account.

but eren yeager, grammy award winning singer, songwriter and musician, with multiple weeks spent at the top of the billboard hot 100 and 200 charts, millions of units sold worldwide, and stadiums packed to the brim, took the fucking cake.

you were warned he’d be difficult. every manager he’s assigned quits before one of them ends up in a body bag. none of them have a single nice thing to say about him, and he finds that hilarious.

for better or for worse, you took the challenge because you’re a sucker for them. nothing in life comes easy, and you figured that the managers before just didn’t come hard enough. maybe eren’s fame and status made them falter, but such a fate wouldn’t befall you.

you dragged him to his magazine shoots, you kept his mouth in line during interviews, you kept his socials clean. he was never a second late to rehearsals and recordings. he was a reflection of you, and if you were perfect goddammit he was going to be too.

until today.

“i’m not putting in another extension, eren. the label is starting to get really irritable. we need to go to the studio now.” you furiously swiping along your ipad, pacing around the singer’s deluxe hotel room. while you’re dressed for the day in clean crisp clothes, sharp stilettos, and jet black lace front expertly melted and laid, eren’s still in the bed. the covers are everywhere, his shirt is next to a couple pillows on the floor, and he’s laying on his back eating a croissant from room service, paying you absolutely no mind. it takes everything in you to not chuck your device at his big head. “i’m serious. get. up.”

“and i said i’m not,” he mocks your assertive tone, voice oozing in sarcasm. “going.” he coughs, obviously faking. “my voice hurts. can’t make those greedy bastards money if my vocal chords ache. they’ll live.”

“you are on a strict deadline this era. if you want to catch award season, this album needs to be finished and dropped in the next month. amidst the press tour, your window of recording time is dwindling fast.” dates in your digital calendar glare at you, red and angry. every time you check something off your to do, ten new things pop up. you feel your jaw clenching, teeth gritting together uncomfortably.

“i’ve won enough awards. i don’t care. i’m not getting up.” eren finally raises up from the bed, narrowed green eyes meeting yours. it’s fire against fire, an unstoppable force that is a manager determined to do her job versus an immovable object, a musician who’s not budging from his spot. “it’s my album. it’s my music. i finish it when the fuck i get ready. that label will burn before they drop me.”

“if you don’t follow contract, they will drop you. they put a lot of money into you-”

“money i made back for those dumbasses-!”

“they are your bosses, without them-”

“they need me way more than i need them-!”

“get,” you toss your ipad over to a small couch, storming over to the bed. you snatch the edge of the covers and yank hard. enough is enough. if he won’t get up, you’ll make him get up. “the fuck out of this bed, eren, now!”

“you need,” the cover is yanked back, tugging you forward along with it. you lurch momentarily before righting yourself upwards, leaning back to give yourself more leverage in this childish tug of war you find yourself in. “to calm the fuck down, ___. i’m not going and that’s fucking it.” eren may be lean, but he’s toned like a MMA fighter, muscles rippling under tan skin when he calls upon them. another tug and you topple onto the california king bed, one expensive heel sliding off your foot and falling across the room.

your heads snaps up from the covers, brow furrowed deep in anger. “stop being so fucking difficult, you moron!” emotions welling, you grab one of his arms, preparing to drag him out of this bed. your to do list is a nagging itch on your brain that by the grace of god you are going to scratch. you’re not about to let this bad-with-authority dickhead best you when all he has to do is record a fucking vocal.

“oh, we’re doing this?” easily, too easily, so easily that you register your back hitting the soft bed before you realized he even grabbed you back. he pins you down easily, slightly calloused hands grip your upper arms firmly, pushing them down. he places his legs other either side of your hips so yours are forced in between them, but doesn’t keep you from writhing to free yourself. “whatever fucking—stop doing that—chip you have on your shoulder, you need to fucking solve it because shit’s not going your way today. i’m not going and that is final.”

the tussle leaves you two of you panting, eyes boring into each other’s. eren’s long chocolate brown hair is disheveled not only from a night’s sleep but from this impromptu wrestle. small beads up sweat trickle down his naked chest. your writhe again, and he presses down against you, a synonymous hiss sliding through both of your mouths.

“i hate you, eren.”

“whatever helps you sleep at night, ___. looks like you wanted an excuse to feel up on me.”

“oh, like you wanted an excuse to hump me like a mutt?”

there’s another beat of silence as you two watch each other. eren’s hands tighten their hold just a tad before he presses his hardening length hard against your clothed cunt. against your better judgement, your head tilts back and a small moan fights against your bitten bottom lip.

eren hums lowly, his dick bulging against the constraint of his boxers. “hate me too much to actually fuck me, huh? i’m only worth a dry hump.”

oh how eren frustrates you. how he makes even the simplest things in life painstakingly difficult. how he makes you want to smoke ten packs of cigarettes after a day of dealing with him. but oh, how handsome he looks under the lights at photo shoots. how his deep, smooth voice reverbs in your ears. how his fingers move so deftly on his guitar, as if it’s merely an extension of his body. who wouldn’t fantasize about that late at night, him bending you over and snatching down your pants to fuck the stress out of you, or yourself knocking him down a peg and making him beg to let you cum inside.

“shut-” another roll of his hips makes you gasp. “up..”

“i want you, ___,” eren confesses. his hips don’t falter, his cock becoming hungry for release. “i want that pussy. i wanna fuck that little attitude out of you, can i? i see how you look at me and i stare right back.”

you shiver, hand rushing to undo your dress pants and feel more of eren’s dick against your dampening cunt. his hands work with your perfectly, yanking your pants down. it’s a whirlwind of clothes, your sweater, bra, your other shoe.

eren reaches up to grab your breasts, rolling them in his palms, squeezing the supple flesh, pushing them together. “oh, pretty girl. pretty fuckin’ tits.” leaning down, he kisses down your sternum, stomach, inching closer and closer to your center. he wastes no time grabbing your thighs and licking a nice, long stripe against your drooling cunt and sucking on your clit.

your back immediately arches up and your hands fly to grip eren’s hair, tugging at the locks and pulling him in closer so you can feel everything. “oh my god, eren.” the singer’s not shy at all, audibly sucking at you and reaching up to twist and pinch your pebbled nipples.

with another languid lick eren pulls himself away. he pulls his boxers down on and off, freeing his dick from the constraint. he rubs the thick, weeping tip up and down your slit, staring hungrily at the juices leaking out. the feeling of it makes you shiver in anticipation.

“mmm, mm-mm.” you push yourself up. “let me get ‘n top..” there’s a greedy look in your low eyes as you place your hand on eren’s solid chest and lay him down on the bed.

“take charge here too, huh?” your forwardness makes him chuckle as he watches you straddle his waist. “okay then. ride me.”

you brace yourself on your toes as his hand and yours grasp his shaft, directing it to your pulsing hole. you slide down gingerly onto him, his size quickly stretching you out. “ahh, fuck, eren. fuck…”

“you got it,” he assures you, one hand on your thigh as you sink lower and lower, taking him in inch by inch. he bites his lip at the wet tightness of your walls, squeezing and sucking him in. it makes him throw his head back, a couple of small pants escaping his mouth. “mmhm, fuck that pussy feels so good. take that dick, boss.” his hand raises only to land on your ass check with a sharp slap.

you start out slow at first, letting yourself adjust to the wideness of his dick but that quickly gets old. you’re soon addicted to the feeling of him fitting inside so perfectly. gripping his free hand in yours, you swivel and raise your hips faster and faster, effortlessly, desperate for that feeling of him pounding that oh so sweet spot. your juices slide down his length, the slap slap slap of your ass against his muscled thighs filling the room. “‘s so big, feels so good,” your voice slurs.

eren hisses from his spot under you, eyes trained on where you two connect. mouth slightly agape, he watches your cunt swallow him up and the fluid that leaks out. “yes, mama. keep fucking me just like that. feels.. f-fuckin’ amazin’…” his hands grab your plump ass cheeks, fingers digging in hard as he thrusts his hips up, driving the tip of his cock even deeper inside you and pulling a loud moan from you. “keep goin, mama, ‘m almost there, don’t stop, please..”

his pleading make you clench even tighter around him, and that feeling deep inside your tummy aches for release. you place a hand around his throat to better balance yourself, relishing in his low groan. your thighs quake and tremble, your hips meeting his eager thrust perfectly. “oh, my god; oh my god. i’m— shit!” you throw your head back in ecstasy, cumming hard enough on your client’s dick to leave you numb.

“aw, fuck, boss.” eren thrusts up to push his cum deep inside, holding you against himself to ensure a single drop doesn’t leak. “take it, take it..”

the two of you are left panting hard, bodies sweaty and gleaming with the afterglow of sex. you gingerly pull away, cunt left sore and spent from a round of sex months in the making. eren reaches over to caress your ebon lips, admiring the smooth, wet feeling once you roll onto your back. “no more attitude from you, yeah?”

“no more attitude from the man reduced to calling me ‘mama’ and begging to cum either, i’d assume.” your teasing laughter is cut off by him purposefully sinking three fingers deep inside you. “mmh…”

“mhm, sure.” roles reversed, eren climbs on top of you and stares down with green eyes aflame with lust through his tousled brown hair. “now i want to see what i can make you call me.”

[centrally-unplanned]

So because I tend to be described as "center-left" by the forces of all that is evil and unpure assailed against me in their limitless and merciless cruelty, the way the far-right in the US misuses economic statistics tends to find no sympathy from me - in ways that I find difficult to even engage with. (Also, for balance's sake, true libertarians tend to be the ones who make this mistake the least, a solid W for them - they average the highest on this kind of economic literacy alongside the technocratic left). I am on the other hand more sympathetic to the reasons some on the left have for this mistake - but it is still unproductively misguided.

The idea from far-left is is essentially that the US economy is and must always be broken in all ways, because that is a premise that implies the platform of reform they endorse. This is a stance that, imo, most leftists will have because they want to help the poor. They will discuss child poverty and homelessness in the same breath as "living paycheck to paycheck" and the "immiserated middle class". They see these things as united, both causally but also practically - that the solution for the homeless and for the working class are the same, the bonds that will form a united front strong enough to cut the chains of capital in one fell swoop.

This is not only not true, but it is the opposite of true. A middle class that believes itself immiserated and struggling is one least likely to support the redistributive policies necessary to address chronic poverty because they are in fact very different problems. Those people are going to ask for tax cuts! They have jobs, they don't think they need welfare checks, but they do (correctly!) think lower taxes will help them. Cheaper grocery prices means cheaper wages for workers in the grocery industry, the current economy has been really good for the lower income working classes as the tight labor market has boosted their relative wages. Which middle class white collar people haaaaate, because it raises their prices. And since you want lower taxes but the money has to come from somewhere, you are more willing to cut things like welfare to pay for them.

When the problems are real they can align - like yes the housing market in the US is pretty busted, "everyone" will benefit from just making more houses. But even then, the "everyone" doesn't include all the incumbent upper-middle class housing owners, and it particularly doesn't help new home owners who have a mortgage to pay off that are banking on rising real estate prices. All these policies have real tradeoffs. Opportunities for solidarity do exist, don't get me wrong, but its not the default state. You think America won't raise taxes on the rich just to expand the mortgage tax deduction? In your heart you know we would.

Obviously none of this applies to you if you think the world is corrupted root to stem and only the blood of the capitalist class can water the soil of revolution and birth the flower of a new age, or whatever. But unless you want that you are gonna need accurate policy analysis to actually solve the problems within the system, and they will have tradeoffs. And a middle class that thinks itself too poor to help is not an asset in that.

[ovaryacted]

POOLSIDE || Dieter Bravo

PAIRING: Dieter Bravo x lifeguard! afab reader || WC: 1.8k

SYNOPSIS: You take a job as a private lifeguard for a Hollywood actor. Turns out, you got much more than what you bargained for.

CONTENT/WARNINGS: MDNI/18+. NSFW. Smutty. Drug usage - weed via a joint. Lots of banter and cursing. Ambiguous age gap [Dieter is canon age, Reader is 21+]. Allusions to sex (pussy eating). Dieter may be ooc due to unfamiliarity. He is still: horny, unhinged, and loves drugs. Ending leaves much to the imagination. I don't know how Hollywood agents or lifeguarding work, just have fun with it, it's supposed to be funny.

A/N: Hey there, surprise! This is for the Summer Lovin' Challenge hosted by @pedgito! I got "by the water" for Dieter Bravo with the prompt: you can’t keep distracting me while I work, and this is what I came up with. I will admit, I am fairly unfamiliar with Dieter as a whole, though I had to read a bunch of other fics to get a sense of who he is, so this was a challenge. But I hope this is enjoyable to those who like him cause I had a little fun going out of my comfort zone. This is my first time writing for this character and I am rusty, please be nice. Dividers are by @saradika-graphics. Anyway, likes, comments, and reblogs are greatly appreciated. <3

NAVIGATION | MASTERLIST | AO3

When you signed up for a lifeguard gig from a Hollywood agent, you expected to watch over some celebrities’ kids by their large private pool, racking up hundreds for babysitting spoiled brats and lounging by the best-filtered chlorine available. Yet what you got was the complete opposite. Instead of watching over little kids, you were burdened to monitor an overgrown child in the body of a man.

Dieter Bravo. You’ve heard of him, some veteran actor you never really paid much attention to. The name sounded distantly familiar, remembering him at some award shows like the Oscars and recalling his name popping up in some of the selections. At the end of the day, you didn’t give much of a fuck who he was, but when you could take a job with a stipend large enough it would give you that guaranteed comma in your bank account, you didn’t object.

When you reached his private home in Santa Monica, it was quaint and modern enough not to bore you. You arrived around 11 am before the sun reached the highest point in the sky, setting up your gear and peeling away your baggy t-shirt and denim shorts to reveal the red cheeky one-piece you wore underneath. It’s better to play the part, right? At least, that’s what the agent mentioned.

Unsurprisingly, Dieter was about to step into the pool when you entered his private yard, isolated from the rest of the neighborhood and with a generous view over the hills. He tilted his head to the side as he looked at you, eyebrows lifting at the sight of a new person in his space, in a bathing suit, no less.

“You must be the lifeguard my agent hired.” It was a matter-of-fact statement, yet you didn’t fail to miss how his warm brown eyes landed on your chest before meeting your gaze again. “I don’t need a babysitter, you know.”

“Apparently, you do. Look, I’m doing this for the pay. You stay on your good behavior, and I’ll be out of your hair. Simple as that.” A straightforward agreement, you think, he’s a grown-ass man. Surely, he can listen to the bare minimum of instructions.

“Deal,” Dieter said, leaving you to your own devices. You watched as he materialized a joint from his pocket and planted it between his plush lips, sparking his lighter to inhale a drag. He exhaled through his nose, pungent smoke filling the distance between you two and making you scrunch your nostrils. You eyed him silently, holding your hand out and shaking your head when he gestured the joint in your direction for a pull.

That’s why he needed a lifeguard. Getting high off of god knows what in the pool must have been his favorite pastime before he did something stupid or endangered himself. Figures.

Propping yourself on one of the lounge chairs lined by the side of the pool, you got comfortable, tinted shades sitting on the bridge of your nose. You could lean back for some time and catch a nice tan for the first two hours, giving you something to do. You don’t think the man in question will bother you too much or do something as stupid as to drown on your watch, but you’ll do your best to ensure that doesn’t happen.

To your amazement, Dieter was quiet, humming to himself and enjoying his high as he swam about and floated in the pool. When he wasn’t looking, you’d take a couple of glances just to be sure he hadn’t sunk to the bottom. Those were also the moments when you’d get a good look at him, sneaking peeks of his face and body over the blue water.

In a way, he was handsome, with a rugged charm that brought a level of interest you didn’t initially notice. He had a head of curly brown hair and a patchy beard adorned his jaw. His soft abdomen had a trail of light hair lining from his belly button to his groin. Selfishly, you took in the way his light blue shorts hugged his hips, thick thighs shifting to keep his body upright.

Leaning back into the chair as if you hadn’t been picking apart his appearance for the past 3 minutes, you pretended like somehow this strange man wasn’t sneaking into the recesses of your mind and the depths of your gut.

It helped he was cute—just a little bit.

After lunch and munching on some catered sandwiches, you moved from lounging in the chair to sitting along the edge of the pool, dipping your feet in the water. All things considered, you thought Dieter’s house was nice, probably better than his apartment in New York, but you’d kill to have either.

Setting your sunglasses on the top of your head, you could practically feel this man watching you from the other end of the pool, taking in your movements with unfocused eyes. You ignored him, thinking it was just a coincidence or an outcome of his high. But as the faux obliviousness of his stares continued, his dramatic sighs and tricks in the water came after, squinting in his direction to gauge what he was up to.

He began to swim towards you until his hand gripped the tiled edge, running the other through his wet hair to pull it back. You caught his stare, dilated pupils hazed with a silent question.

“Can I help you, Dieter?” Speaking to him directly now, this was probably the first thing you’ve said to him since your heady warning earlier in the day.

“I’m bored.”

“Not my problem.” You shrugged again, the man groaning like a toddler on the precipice of throwing a tantrum.

“C’mon. There has to be something else we can do while you sit all pretty and shit.” Dieter said out loud, making you raise an eyebrow at the catch of certain words. It must be the weed. Ignore him.

“You can always pay and leave me alone to do anything else.” You replied, your attention drawn to one of his hands gently touching your ankle as your foot pushed against his wrist.

“You’re telling me you’re not bored too?”

“Oh yeah, bored out of my fucking mind. But you can’t keep distracting me while I work.”

“This isn’t work. It’s a babysitting job, a bad one at that.” His fingers ran over the top of your foot absentmindedly, and you had half a mind to kick his hand away. You relented, thinking it’d be worth your time if you played your cards right. 

“Have you seen yourself, Dieter? You need surveillance 25/8. I’ve been counting down the minutes to see when I will find you face down still as shit in the pool.”

You half expected him to curse you out or even be upset with what you said. Instead, he laughed, hearty and loud, bringing a wide grin across his face and giving you a perfect view of his smile. You couldn’t help but chuckle along with him out of ridiculousness.

“If you want to keep me occupied and alive, I have an idea of what we can do.” Dieter’s tone turned suggestive, something you didn’t miss. His strong arms wrapped around both of your legs and you welcomed the contact, wanting to know what he could mean, for research purposes of course.

“What do you have in mind?” You grew curious, almost taking back the words that tumbled from your mouth before his eyes gleamed with mischief.

“Well…we are alone. Nobody’s out here but us.” His thumb teasingly caressed the side of your thigh, doing nothing to quell the warmth bubbling in your core with every stroke against your skin. Suggesting to fuck a client? That wasn’t in the job description, nor was there an NDA.

“You’re joking, right?”

“Am I laughing?” Dieter was closer now, maybe too close, his chin resting on the top of your legs as he looked up at you. He reminded you of a puppy dog waiting for his treat, except you were dealing with a complete horndog with no sense of self outside of LSD and bad actor accents.

“Consider it a bonus for taking such good care of me.”

“What am I? A prostitute?” Your eyes rolled in defiance, brushing off what you think was his terrible flirting if that’s what you would call it.

“For the fucking record, I pay all of my sex workers generously. But no, this is just me showing my appreciation.” Dieter’s lips came down to kiss the newly tanned skin of your knee, prompting you to release the breath you didn’t know you were holding.

“You barely know me.”

“Hasn’t stopped me before. I’m sure you can say the same for yourself.” He couldn’t wipe the smirk from his face, and you don’t think you’d want him to.

“It’ll be much more fun than just watching me for the rest of the day. Don’t even gotta see my dick, I just want to taste you for a while.” He placed another kiss higher on your thigh as his fingers pressed into your calves under the water. “What do you say?”

In silence, you mentally listed the many reasons why this was a bad idea. What would it look like if you fucked Dieter Bravo the first day you were supposed to look after him? A sex addict and drug fiend who somehow still had an acting career despite a change in reputation. Red Flag was written all over his forehead in bright, bold letters.

Yet, those warnings didn’t push you away farther than you needed to be. You were already here, so you might as well leave with something. Besides, it was only 2 in the afternoon, you had some time to spare.

Dieter watched in hunger as your legs parted in front of him, supporting yourself on your arms and you smiled as you did. He was so close he could practically smell you, the stretchy material of your bathing suit hiding the treat he sought after the moment you stepped into his yard. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine the taste of your pussy in the back of his mouth, coating his tongue with your slick to quench his thirst on this hot summer day.

He tried so hard to conceal the moan that slipped between his lips, suppressed by his teeth digging into his bottom lip.

“You better make this worth it, or you’ll find yourself a new lifeguard.” Dieter laughed, thick fingers wrapping around your thighs and hands on your hips. He gave your body a soft tug, bringing you to the pool’s edge and closer to where he could have his mouth on you.

“Promise baby, you’ll be coming back every day this whole summer.”

©️ ovaryacted 2024. Please don’t repost, copy, translate, or feed into any AI. Support your fellow creators by reblogging, commenting, and liking!

[hms-no-fun]

Hi! I just read your post about your opinion on "AI" and I really liked it. If it's no bother, what's your opinion on people who use it for studying? Like writing essays, solving problems and stuff like that?

I haven't been a fan of AI from the beginning and I've heard that you shouldn't ask it for anything because then you help it develop. But I don't know how to explain that to friends and classmates or even if it's true anymore. Because I've seen some of the prompts it can come up with and they're not bad and I've heard people say that the summaries AI makes are really good and I just... I dunno. I'm at a loss

Sorry if this is a lot or something you simply don't want to reply to. You made really good points when talking about AI and I really liked it and this has been weighing on me for a while :)

on a base level, i don't really have a strongly articulated opinion on the subject because i don't use AI, and i'm 35 so i'm not in school anymore and i don't have a ton of college-aged friends either. i have little exposure to the people who use AI in this way nor to the people who have to deal with AI being used in this way, so my perspective here is totally hypothetical and unscientific.

what i was getting at in my original AI post was a general macroeconomic point about how all of the supposed efficiency gains of AI are an extension of the tech CEO's dislike of paying and/or giving credit to anyone they deem less skilled or intelligent than them. that it's conspicuous how AI conveniently falls into place after many decades of devaluing and deskilling creative/artistic labor industries. historically, for a lot of artists the most frequently available & highest paying gigs were in advertising. i can't speak to the specifics when it comes to visual art or written copy, but i *can* say that when i worked in the oklahoma film industry, the most coveted jobs were always the commercials. great pay for relatively less work, with none of the complications that often arise working on amateur productions. not to mention they were union gigs, a rare enough thing in a right to work state, so anyone trying to make a career out of film work wanting to bank their union hours to qualify for IATSE membership always had their ears to the ground for an opening. which didn't come often because, as you might expect, anyone who *got* one of those jobs aimed to keep it as long as possible. who could blame em, either? one person i met who managed to get consistent ad work said they could afford to work all of two or three months a year, so they could spend the rest of their time doing low-budget productions and (occasionally) student films.

there was a time when this was the standard for the film industry, even in LA; you expected to work 3 to 5 shows a year (exact number's hard to estimate because production schedules vary wildly between ads, films, and tv shows) for six to eight months if not less, so you'd have your bills well covered through the lean periods and be able to recover from what is an enormously taxing job both physically and emotionally. this was never true for EVERYONE, film work's always been a hustle and making a career of it is often a luck-based crapshoot, but generally that was the model and for a lot of folks it worked. it meant more time to practice their skills on the job, sustainably building expertise and domain knowledge that they could then pass down to future newcomers. anything that removes such opportunities decreases the amount of practice workers get, and any increased demand on their time makes them significantly more likely to burn out of the industry early. lower pay, shorter shoots, busier schedules, these aren't just bad for individual workers but for the entire industry, and that includes the robust and well-funded advertising industry.

well, anyway, this year's coca-cola christmas ad was made with AI. they had maybe one person on quality control using an adobe aftereffects mask to add in the coke branding. this is the ultimate intended use-case for AI. it required the expertise of zero unionized labor, and worst of all the end result is largely indistinguishable from the alternative. you'll often see folks despair at this verisimilitude, particularly when a study comes out that shows (for instance) people can't tell the difference between real poetry and chat gpt generated poetry. i despair as well, but for different reasons. i despair that production of ads is a better source of income and experience for film workers than traditional movies or television. i despair that this technology is fulfilling an age-old promise about the disposability of artistic labor. poetry is not particularly valued by our society, is rarely taught to people beyond a beginner's gloss on meter and rhyme. "my name is sarah zedig and i'm here to say, i'm sick of this AI in a major way" type shit. end a post with the line "i so just wish that it would go away and never come back again!" and then the haiku bot swoops in and says, oh, 5/7/5 you say? that is technically a haiku! and then you put a haiku-making minigame in your crowd-pleasing japanese nationalist open world chanbara simulator, because making a haiku is basically a matter of selecting one from 27 possible phrase combinations. wait, what do you mean the actual rules of haiku are more elastic and subjective than that? that's not what my english teacher said in sixth grade!

AI is able to slip in and surprise us with its ability to mimic human-produced art because we already treat most human-produced art like mechanical surplus of little to no value. ours is a culture of wikipedia-level knowledge, where you have every incentive to learn a lot of facts about something so that you can sufficiently pretend to have actually experienced it. but this is not to say that humans would be better able to tell the difference between human produced and AI produced poetry if they were more educated about poetry! the primary disconnect here is economic. Poets already couldn't make a fucking living making poetry, and now any old schmuck can plug a prompt into chatgpt and say they wrote a sonnet. even though they always had the ability to sit down and write a sonnet!

boosters love to make hay about "deskilling" and "democratizing" and "making accessible" these supposedly gatekept realms of supposedly bourgeois expression, but what they're really saying (whether they know it or not) is that skill and training have no value anymore. and they have been saying this since long before AI as we know it now existed! creative labor is the backbone of so much of our world, and yet it is commonly accepted as a poverty profession. i grew up reading books and watching movies based on books and hearing endless conversation about books and yet when i told my family "i want to be a writer" they said "that's a great way to die homeless." like, this is where the conversation about AI's impact starts. we already have a culture that simultaneously NEEDS the products of artistic labor, yet vilifies and denigrates the workers who perform that labor. folks see a comic panel or a corporate logo or a modern art piece and say "my kid could do that," because they don't perceive the decades of training, practice, networking, and experimentation that resulted in the finished product. these folks do not understand that just because the labor of art is often invisible doesn't mean it isn't work.

i think this entire conversation is backwards. in an ideal world, none of this matters. human labor should not be valued over machine labor because it inherently possesses an aura of human-ness. art made by humans isn't better than AI generated art on qualitative grounds. art is subjective. you're not wrong to find beauty in an AI image if the image is beautiful. to my mind, the value of human artistic labor comes down to the simple fact that the world is better when human beings make art. the world is better when we have the time and freedom to experiment, to play, to practice, to develop and refine our skills to no particular end except whatever arbitrary goal we set for ourselves. the world is better when people collaborate on a film set to solve problems that arise organically out of the conditions of shooting on a live location. what i see AI being used for is removing as many opportunities for human creativity as possible and replacing them with statistical averages of prior human creativity. this passes muster because art is a product that exists to turn a profit. because publicly traded companies have a legal responsibility to their shareholders to take every opportunity to turn a profit regardless of how obviously bad for people those opportunities might be.

that common sense says writing poetry, writing prose, writing anything is primarily about reaching the end of the line, about having written something, IS the problem. i've been going through the many unfinished novels i wrote in high school lately, literally hundreds of thousands of words that i shared with maybe a dozen people and probably never will again. what value do those words have? was writing them a waste of time since i never posted them, never finished them, never turned a profit off them? no! what i've learned going back through those old drafts is that i'm only the writer i am today BECAUSE i put so many hours into writing generic grimdark fantasy stories and bizarrely complicated werewolf mythologies.

you know i used to do open mics? we had a poetry group that met once a month at a local cafe in college. each night we'd start by asking five words from the audience, then inviting everyone to compose a poem using those words in 10 to 15 minutes. whoever wanted to could read their poem, and whoever got the most applause won a free drink from the cafe. then we'd spend the rest of the night having folks sign up to come and read whatever. sometimes you'd get heartfelt poems about personal experiences, sometimes you'd get ambitious soundcloud rappers, sometimes you'd get a frat guy taking the piss, sometimes you'd get a mousy autist just doing their best. i don't know that any of the poetry i wrote back then has particular value today, but i don't really care. the point of it was the experience in that moment. the experience of composing something on the fly, or having something you wrote a couple days ago, then standing up and reading it. the value was in the performance itself, in the momentary synthesis between me and the audience. i found out then that i was pretty good at making people cry, and i could not have had that experience in any other venue. i could not have felt it so viscerally had i just posted it online. and i cannot wrap up that experience and give it to you, because it only existed then.

i think more people would write poetry if they had more hours in a day to spare for frivolities, if there existed more spaces where small groups could organize open mics, if transit made those spaces more widely accessible, if everyone made enough money that they weren't burned the fuck out and not in the mood to go to an open mic tonight, if we saw poetry as a mode of personal reflection which was as much about the experience of having written it as anything else. this is the case for all the arts. right now, the only people who can afford to make a living doing art are already wealthy, because art doesn't pay well. this leads to brain drain and overall lowering quality standards, because the suburban petty bouge middle class largely do not experience the world as it materially exists for the rest of us. i often feel that many tech CEOs want to be remembered the way andy warhol is remembered. they want to be loved and worshipped not just for business acumen but for aesthetic value, they want to get the kind of credit that artists get-- because despite the fact that artists don't get paid shit, they also frequently get told by people "your work changed my life." how is it that a working class person with little to no education can write a story that isn't just liked but celebrated, that hundreds or thousands of people imprint on, that leaves a mark on culture you can't quantify or predict or recreate? this is AI's primary use-case, to "democratize" art in such a way that hacks no longer have to work as hard to pretend to be good at what they do. i mean, hell, i have to imagine every rich person with an autobiography in the works is absolutely THRILLED that they no longer have to pay a ghost writer!

so, circling back around to the meat of your question. as far as telling people not to use AI because "you're just helping to train it," that ship has long since sailed. getting mad at individuals for using AI right now is about as futile as getting mad at individuals for not masking-- yes, obviously they should wear a mask and write their own essays, but to say this is simply a matter of millions of individuals making the same bad but unrelated choice over and over is neoliberal hogwash. people stopped masking because they were told to stop masking by a government in league with corporate interests which had every incentive to break every avenue of solidarity that emerged in 2020. they politicized masks, calling them "the scarlet letter of [the] pandemic". biden himself insisted this was "a pandemic of the unvaccinated", helpfully communicating to the public that if you're vaccinated, you don't need to mask. all those high case numbers and death counts? those only happen to the bad people.

now you have CEOs and politicians and credulous media outlets and droves of grift-hungry influencers hard selling the benefits of AI in everything everywhere all the time. companies have bent over backwards to incorporate AI despite ethics and security worries because they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, and everyone with money is calling this the next big thing. in short, companies are following the money, because that's what companies do. they, in turn, are telling their customers what tools to use and how. so of course lots of people are using AI for things they probably shouldn't. why wouldn't they? "the high school/college essay" as such has been quantized and stripmined by an education system dominated by test scores over comprehension. it is SUPPOSED to be an exercise in articulating ideas, to teach the student how to argue persuasively. the final work has little to no value, because the point is the process. but when you've got a system that lives and dies by its grades, within which teachers are given increasingly more work to do, less time to do it in, and a much worse paycheck for their trouble, the essay increasingly becomes a simple pass/fail gauntlet to match the expected pace set by the simple, clean, readily gradable multiple choice quiz. in an education system where the stakes for students are higher than they've ever been, within which you are increasingly expected to do more work in less time with lower-quality guidance from your overworked teachers, there is every incentive to get chatgpt to write your essay for you.

do you see what i'm saying? we can argue all day about the shoulds here. of course i think it's better when people write their own essays, do their own research, personally read the assigned readings. but cheating has always been a problem. a lot of these same fears were aired over the rising popularity of cliffs notes in the 90s and 2000s! the real problem here is systemic. it's economic. i would have very little issue with the output of AI if existing conditions were not already so precarious. but then, if the conditions were different, AI as we know it likely would not exist. it emerges today as the last gasp of a tech industry that has been floundering for a reason to exist ever since the smart phone dominated the market. they tried crypto. they tried the metaverse. now they're going all-in on AI because it's a perfect storm of shareholder-friendly buzzwords and the unscientific technomythology that's been sold to laymen by credulous press sycophants for decades. It slots right into this niche where the last of our vestigial respect for "the artist" once existed. it is the ultimate expression of capitalist realism, finally at long last doing away with the notion that the suits at disney could never in their wildest dreams come up with something half as cool as the average queer fanfic writer. now they've got a program that can plagiarize that fanfic (along with a dozen others) for them, laundering the theft through a layer of transformation which perhaps mirrors how the tech industry often exploits open source software to the detriment of the open source community. the catastrophe of AI is that it's the fulfillment of a promise that certainly predates computers at the very least.

so, i don't really know what to tell someone who uses AI for their work. if i was talking to a student, i'd say that relying chatgpt is really gonna screw you over when it comes time take the SAT or ACT, and you have to write an essay from scratch by hand in a monitored environment-- but like, i also think the ACT and SAT and probably all the other standardized tests shouldn't exist? or at the very least ought to be severely devalued, since prep for those tests often sabotages the integrity of actual classroom education. although, i guess at this point the only way forward for education (that isn't getting on both knees and deep-throating big tech) is more real-time in-class monitored essay writing, which honestly might be better for all parties anyway. of course that does nothing to address research essays you can't write in a single class session. to someone who uses AI for research, i'd probably say the same thing as i would to someone who uses wikipedia: it's a fine enough place to start, but don't cite it. click through links, find sources, make sure what you're reading is real, don't rely on someone else's generalization. know that chatgpt is likely not pulling information from a discrete database of individual files that it compartmentalizes the way you might expect, but rather is a statistical average of a broad dataset about which it cannot have an opinion or interpretation. sometimes it will link you to real information, but just as often it will invent information from whole cloth. honestly, the more i talk it out, the more i realize all this advice is basically identical to the advice adults were giving me in the early 2000s.

which really does cement for me that the crisis AI is causing in education isn't new and did not come from nowhere. before chatgpt, students were hiring freelancers on fiverr. i already mentioned cliffs notes. i never used any of these in college, but i'll also freely admit that i rarely did all my assigned reading. i was the "always raises her hand" bitch, and every once in a while i'd get other students who were always dead silent in class asking me how i found the time to get the reading done. i'd tell them, i don't. i read the beginning, i read the ending, and then i skim the middle. whenever a word or phrase jumps out at me, i make a note of it. that way, when the professor asks a question in class, i have exactly enough specific pieces of information at hand to give the impression of having done the reading. and then i told them that i learned how to do this from the very same professor that was teaching that class. the thing is, it's not like i learned nothing from this process. i retained quite a lot of information from those readings! this is, broadly, a skill that emerges from years of writing and reading essays. but then you take a step back and remember that for most college students (who are not pursuing any kind of arts degree), this skillset is relevant to an astonishingly minimal proportion of their overall course load. college as it exists right now is treated as a jobs training program, within which "the essay" is a relic of an outdated institution that highly valued a generalist liberal education where today absolute specialization seems more the norm. so AI comes in as the coup de gras to that old institution. artists like myself may not have the constitution for the kind of work that colleges now exist to funnel you into, but those folks who've never put a day's thought into the work of making art can now have a computer generate something at least as good at a glance as basically anything i could make. as far as the market is concerned, that's all that matters. the contents of an artwork, what it means to its creator, the historic currents it emerges out of, these are all technicalities that the broad public has been well trained not to give a shit about most of the time. what matters is the commodity and the economic activity it exists to generate.

but i think at the end of the day, folks largely want to pay for art made by human beings. that it's so hard for a human being to make a living creating and selling art is a question far older than AI, and whose answer hasn't changed. pay workers more. drastically lower rents. build more affordable housing. make healthcare free. make education free. massively expand public transit. it is simply impossible to overstate how much these things alone would change the conversation about AI, because it would change the conversation about everything. SO MUCH of the dominance of capital in our lives comes down to our reliance on cars for transit (time to get a loan and pay for insurance), our reliance on jobs for health insurance (can't quit for moral reasons if it's paying for your insulin), etc etc etc. many of AI's uses are borne out of economic precarity and a ruling class desperate to vacuum up every loose penny they can find. all those billionaires running around making awful choices for the rest of us? they stole those billions. that is where our security went. that is why everything is falling apart, because the only option remaining to *every* institutional element of society is to go all-in on the profit motive. tax these motherfuckers and re-institute public arts funding. hey, did you know the us government used to give out grants to artists? did you know we used to have public broadcast networks where you could make programs that were shown to your local community? why the hell aren't there public youtube clones? why aren't there public transit apps? why aren't we CONSTANTLY talking about nationalizing these abusive fucking industries that are falling over themselves to integrate AI because their entire modus operandi is increasing profits regardless of product quality?

these are the questions i ask myself when i think about solutions to the AI problem. tech needs to be regulated, the monopolies need breaking up, but that's not enough. AI is a symptom of a much deeper illness whose treatment requires systemic solutions. and while i'm frustrated when i see people rely on AI for their work, or otherwise denigrate artists who feel AI has devalued their field, on some level i can't blame them. they are only doing what they've been told to do. all of which merely strengthens my belief in the necessity of an equitable socialist future (itself barely step zero in the long path towards a communist future, and even that would only be a few steps on the even longer path to a properly anarchist future). improve the material conditions and you weaken the dominance of capitalist realism, however minutely. and while there are plenty of reasons to despair at the likelihood of such a future given a second trump presidency, i always try to remember that socialist policies are very popular and a *lot* of that popularity emerged during the first trump administration. the only wrong answer here is to assume that losing an election is the same thing as losing a war, that our inability to put the genie back in its bottle means we can't see our own wishes granted.

i dunno if i answered your question but i sure did say a lot of stuff, didn't i?

[anemoiashifts]

detachment & attachment in reality shifting

disclaimer !! this account doesn’t not support induced dissociation to shift. if you find yourself unable to tell if something is real or false, that is not good for shifting nor your mental health.

⋆౨ৎ˚⟡˖ ࣪

if you are attached to something, that something dictates your life. that something dictating your self concept. if you don’t see yourself worthy of what you desire, you will never get it. this is why people say “don’t put shifting on a pedestal” because when something is placed so highly & idolized in your mind you me only choice is to look up at it. when you look at it from that view, you’ll never be at eye level. you’ll always have a different perspective. the concept of detaching from this reality, this current experience weather it be trying to get to harry potter or get a new job because you believe it’s bigger then you & the only reason why you think it’s bigger then you is because you think you’re not worthy of what you want. you think things or people are above you or more special when that’s not true. we all end up in the same place in death, we all cry and sleep and need air.

if you give something like your desired reality friends or partner the power to make you happy & that’s what you’re banking on to fill a hole in your life, then you’ll never be fulfilled. your happiness, you’re emotions all depend on you. the only thing we can control is how we react to things. if you say something like “im so mad that i didn’t shift” & it legitimately ruins your day or robs you of something, then you’re vibrating at a low level. the highest level we as human beings vibrate at is love & that loves comes internally. you don’t need someone or a place to complete you because you are already a complete person with the capacity to give & receive love.

ways to detach:

ཻ۪۪♡. meditation.

ཻ۪۪♡. become aware of your thoughts & recognize what serves you.

ཻ۪۪♡. persist in the state that you already have your desires.

ཻ۪۪♡. redefine your concept of self.

ཻ۪۪♡. affirmations.

ཻ۪۪♡. lucid dreaming.

ཻ۪۪♡. the hypnogogic state.

ཻ۪۪♡. paying attention to what music you listen to & how it makes you physically feel so it doesn’t keep you stuck in situation that doesn’t serve you.

ཻ۪۪♡. look at your failed shifting attempts as lessons & corrections I that you can take into your next attempt.

⋆౨ৎ˚⟡˖ ࣪

attachment is redefining your concept of self & learning that seeing is not always believing. the ability to see if one persons perspective. lady gaga once said she knew she was going to be famous. she had this internal sense of knowing & persisted in that feeling until her thoughts were a reflection of what she saw. if someone says “you’re car is ugly” that’s not a fact. that’s someone’s opinion of you or of a situation.

taking a step back & looking at the bigger picture, you have to trust yourself. if you can’t trust yourself what are you putting trust in ? the universe ? you are the universe. you are the creator of your own life. you decide when to stop trying.

ways to attach:

ཻ۪۪♡. you are what you allow yourself to have.

ཻ۪۪♡. redefining how you view other people; humanizing others.

ཻ۪۪♡. allowing yourself to feel or pretend that you already have your desires.

ཻ۪۪♡. shifting subliminals (or any subliminals that pertain to your desired self & life).

[girlactionfigure]

Resistance Banker: Walraven van Hall

$250 Million Heist

Walraven van Hall was a Dutch banker whose brains, bravery, and unwavering moral compass saved thousands of Jews and anti-Nazi resistance fighters during the German occupation of the Netherlands.

Walraven was born to a prominent Dutch family in Haarlem, the Netherlands, in 1906. The dream of his youth was to join the merchant marine and see the world, but because of poor eyesight his application was rejected. Instead Walraven moved to New York City, and with the help of his brother Gijs, a banker (and future mayor of Amsterdam), Walraven got a job on Wall Street. After learning the ropes of the banking industry, Walraven returned to the Netherlands and worked as a banker and stockbroker.

In 1940, Germany invaded the Netherlands. Among those affected by this calamitous event were families of merchant sailors who were unable to return home. Walraven and his brother Gijs created a fund to help these families pay their bills. The fund was guaranteed by the Dutch government-in-exile in London. 

It didn’t take long after occupying Holland for the Nazis to start enacting anti-Jewish regulations, taking away Dutch Jews’ most basic liberties and conscripting them into forced labor camps and later, death camps. (Ultimately, 75% of Dutch Jews were murdered by the Nazis.) As the persecution intensified, so did the anti-Nazi resistance movement. Walraven expanded his fund to support a wide range of resistance activities, with a particular emphasis on helping Dutch Jews. He tapped into his network of wealthy Dutch citizens to fundraise and quickly became known as the “banker to the resistance.”

For three years, Walraven funded the Dutch resistance, providing about $500 million (!) to save Jews and other victims of the Nazis. How did Walraven, with his brother’s help, raise such a massive amount of money? Incredibly, they obtained $250 million by robbing De Nederlandsche Bank (Dutch National Bank), the biggest bank heist in European history. The details of how they achieved this are complicated, involving multiple shell companies, fake documents, bureaucrats who were friendly to the cause, and cooperation between a wide network of resistance organizations. Walraven was known as the Olieman (Oilman) because his warmth and charisma lubricated the friction between various resistance groups and fighters. The rest of the money was supplied by donations and loans from generous Dutch people who were outraged by the Nazi atrocities taking place in their country.

The complete story of how Walraven raised so much money may never be known, but one of his tricks was falsifying bank bonds and exchanging them for real bonds, and then paper money. He did this right under the nose of bank president Rost van Tonningen, a prominent Nazi who collaborated with the German occupiers. The money Walraven collected was used to secretly house and support over 8000 Jews in hiding, conduct acts of sabotage against Nazi targets in Holland, and rescue captured Allied pilots.

In January 1945, Walraven was arrested by the Germans, along with seven other resistance fighters, in revenge for the death of a police commander. All eight were quickly executed without trial. Ironically, the Germans had no idea who Walraven was; they assumed he was just another resistance fighter rather than the banker and leader who made so much resistance activity possible.

Posthumously, Walraven received several honors including the Dutch Cross of Resistance and the U.S. Medal of Freedom. He was honored as Righteous Among the Nations by Israeli Holocaust Memorial Yad Vashem in 1978. However, Walraven’s brave deeds were not widely known until recently, possibly because powerful banks didn’t want people to know the secrets of how they were robbed.

In 2018, Dutch director Joram Lursen released “The Resistance Banker,” a feature film about Walraven van Hall that became one of the highest-grossing Dutch films of all time. Joram said in an interview with the Jewish Telegraph Agency (JTA), “When people think of the resistance.. they rarely think of the enormous amounts of money that it cost to keep this organization – the resistance – running.” He likened his film to a Hollywood action film, characterizing it as “easy to follow and full of suspense as a casino heist.” The film is available on Netflix.

For saving thousands of lives by funding the Dutch resistance to Nazi occupation, we honor Walraven van Hall as this week’s Thursday Hero.

[darkmaga-returns]

The Democrats complained for MONTHS that the economy was the best ever - the BEST! But as we look across the global economy today, there's very real evidence that we're treading on thin ice. Beneath the surface of macroeconomic data lie unsettling signals pointing to a fragile and vulnerable economic landscape.from Eurodollar University

Job markets are cooling, consumer resilience is fading, and global demand is faltering in key sectors. Central banks, once steadfast on inflation control, are now cutting rates more aggressively than anticipated. Together, these indicators paint a picture of a world economy struggling to maintain stability, with potential downturns lurking in multiple directions. Below, we break down the key data points and industry insights that underscore this precarious economic moment.

Labor Market Weakness:

Declining Job Openings: Job openings tumbled by over 400,000 in September 2024 to 7.44 million, the lowest since January 2021. This signals weakening demand for workers.

Low Hiring Rate: While slightly up for three months, the hiring rate remains depressed at around 5.5 million in September 2024, far below healthier levels.

Declining Quits Rate: The quits rate fell to around 3 million, similar to 2015 levels, suggesting workers are hesitant to leave their jobs due to a perceived lack of opportunities.

Rising Layoffs: Layoffs and discharges rose above 1.8 million in September 2024, the highest since January 2023, signaling a potential uptrend in job losses.

Private Payroll Weakness: Private payrolls were under 100,000 in every month except September since May, even reaching close to zero in August (revised).

Weak October Payrolls: A meager increase of 12,000 jobs in October 2024, with private payrolls down 28,000.

Declining Hours Worked: The hours worked index has been flat for four months (since May 2024). The average workweek fell back to a cycle low of 34.2 hours.

Anecdotes:

Bartenders, waiters, and waitresses report declining tips, foot traffic, and overall lower restaurant sales. Some have had their hours cut despite base pay raises, forcing them to seek additional jobs.

Nissan cutting production of North American models by 30% due to lower sales and rising inventories. Similar struggles reported by Ford and Stellantis.

German auto parts maker Schaeffler AG cutting 4,700 jobs in Europe due to lower automotive production and general industrial weakness.

Expert Quotes:

Ryan Sweet (Oxford Economics): While a prior job openings increase was encouraging, he emphasizes the importance of consistent improvement and close monitoring of the quits and layoff rates.

Elizabeth Renter (NerdWallet): Observes that employers are hesitant to hire and workers are reluctant to leave their current jobs.

[doberbutts]

(asking in good faith) do you not think any trans men experience male privilege, and if so, do you think anyone truly experiences male privilege, and if not, what do you think male privilege is, and what sort of man experiences it?

I think that the privilege conversation as it exists both online and in progressive spaces irl is extremely bastardized from its original context to mean “have” and “have not” rather than an actual complex look at what’s going on.

Do trans men have male privilege? On an individual level, at times, if perceived as men, an individual trans man may benefit from male privilege during a specific interaction. On a societal level, it very much depends, because the transgender part of his manhood impacts the way society treats him.

Is it easier for a trans man to have an abortion than a cis woman? No, in fact, it’s often harder. Is it easier for a trans man to receive government aid? No, again, it’s often harder. Do trans men win more of their court cases? No, most of the time they lose, if they manage to survive whatever encounter led them to court in the first place. Are trans men in STEM and other high paying jobs at similar rates to cis men? Are they there more than trans women? To the first, not at all. To the second, it’s difficult to find an exact number due to these high paying jobs almost universally requiring stealth or being closeted, but I’d wager it’s probably equal. Are trans men free from worry about rape or domestic violence? No, it’s often occurring at higher rates than cis women. Have trans men historically been free from being considered their family’s property to be sold to the highest bidder for their husband? No, in fact, some trans men still experience this to this day. Have trans men historically been able to perform male-dominated or male-only jobs? Not unless they were stealth, and if they were found out they were usually immediately jailed or killed. Have trans men historically been able to own property, have credit cards, or use bank accounts in their name? No, to the point where when this began to be challenged entire laws were written up to prevent this from happening. Are trans men free from the societal shame regarding menstruation cycles? Not unless they’ve had a hysterectomy or have some other reason to not menstruate, just like a cis woman. 

Has there ever been a trans man as president or otherwise leader of an entire country? Have any trans men held any meaningful office for long enough to actually create policy and write laws? Are trans men running huge multi-million or multi-billion dollar companies? How many CEOs are trans men? How many characters in the media are trans men- actual trans men, not “trans-coded”, not “probably transgender”, not “popular fanon trans”, but actually trans men? How many of them are played by actors who are trans men and not just cis women? How many religious leaders are trans men, and how many religions value trans men as actual men instead of as woman-lite or disobedient women?

Again, in specific situations, an individual trans man who passes in the moment may benefit briefly from male privilege. A particularly lucky individual may be able to live as stealth for the bulk of his life and never be questioned. But the mistake of considering “passing privilege” the same as “cis male privilege” is especially egregious when considering that this just isn’t the life of the majority of trans men- not even taking into account that many trans mascs are not men, they are non-binary, but they are being lumped in with men all the same despite not being men or passing as men at all.

I think all privilege, not just male, is highly conditional when in individual contexts and depends incredibly on the giver’s bias rather than the receiver’s identity. A gay man may have “straight privilege” if he is closeted, and may enjoy a life free from homophobic attacks due to being perceived as straight, but that doesn’t mean society at large somehow got better for gay people. It just means he had to hide in order to be spared, and I don’t think being forced to hide is a privilege.

Rather, I think when discussing who “has privilege”, it’s better to consider the broader picture of society rather than pointing at an individual and deciding for them how their life and experiences worked. Certainly, if that individual tells you, “I’ve never thought of [blind spot]”, that is an example of that person’s privilege. But I think it’s better to say male privilege is better shown in the examples I brought up, and how it’s societal, rather than pointing to someone you don’t know and saying “you’ve never had to deal with this”.

Especially when the discussion becomes warped to the point of “trans men received male privilege from birth because they’re men.”

[probablyasocialecologist]

Global South countries are currently experiencing a debt crisis wherein governments like that of Sri Lanka are unable to service the debts they hold that are denominated in a foreign currency. Such debts began to balloon across the Global South in the aftermath of the oil crises of the 1970s. Following the Volcker Shock—and the accompanying steep rise in interest rates for dollar-denominated debts—countries that held those bonds found themselves in a situation similar to that of today. At that time, Global North governments, acting through the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), agreed to a series of bailouts conditional on Structural Adjustments Programs (SAPs). SAPs allowed these institutions to intervene directly in the fiscal policy of indebted countries and to implement neoliberal reforms which reduced public spending and opened up economies to transnational corporations. The explicit goal of SAPs was to kickstart growth, as the only means for indebted countries to pay back their loans and to lift communities out of poverty—the implicit goal being the creation of societies mirroring those of their former colonisers. Yet the last forty years have yielded the opposite result: an explosion of inequality both within and between countries and debts at their highest level this century. To understand this trend, we need to recognise that loans to the Global South were never about achieving prosperity; instead, the intention was to reassert neo-colonial control over the decolonising world. Decolonisation reduced the Global North’s access to the cheap labour, energy and raw materials that colonialism had ensured for centuries. Debt relationships between the former colonisers and colonised recreated the conditions for the plunder of the Global South. It turned poor countries into captive markets for companies based in the Global North and created a race to the bottom in environmental and labour standards meant to attract foreign investors. Under this arrangement, indebted countries need to grow their economies to service their debts. Growth relies on exports priced at disadvantageous rates that create ecologically unequal exchange between the Global South and Global North. Economies centred on the export of low-value-added commodities prevent the Global South from achieving full decolonisation. Fortunately, scholars of Modern Monetary Theory have shown that it is not necessary to prioritize growth for the sake of growth before investing in what countries actually need. Instead, what matters is a country’s productive capacity determined by social and ecological boundaries, and here the Global South is far richer than the Global North. To invest in necessary programmes like a Job Guarantee and Universal Public Services, however, countries must first free themselves of colonial currencies and end the cycles of debt that trap them in poverty. Given that stopping ecologically unequal exchange is a cornerstone of degrowth, the need for debt restructuring is clear. The only question is how to achieve this revolutionary reform. 

[sixstringphonic]

Musk Says Trump Win Would Result in ‘Hardship’ for Some Americans

The world’s richest man promises big spending cuts if Trump gives him a job, says people “taking advantage of government are going to be upset”

By Naomi LaChance (Rolling Stone, October 27th 2024)

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, said that if Donald Trump wins and gives him a role in government, Americans will suffer “hardship” as a result of efforts to address the national debt. He made the comments Friday in a virtual town hall on his website, X. 

When asked about “tackling the nation’s debt,” he mentioned changing the tax code, and then went on to say there would be some financial difficulty imposed on some Americans. “Most importantly, we have to reduce spending to live within our means,” he said, adding that these efforts will “involve some temporary hardship, but it will ensure long-term prosperity.”

Later on, Musk said that he would “balance the budget immediately,” adding: “Obviously, a lot of people who are taking advantage of government are going to be upset about that. I’ll probably need a lot of security, but it’s got to be done. And if it’s not done, we’ll just go bankrupt.”

Trump has said that Musk would head a “government efficiency commission” to organize a “complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government” and make “recommendations for drastic reforms.” 

J.D. Vance, Trump’s running mate, has suggested that Musk could target Social Security for potential savings. Speaking last month about the billionaire’s potential role, Vance said, “How are we going to fix all of the broken inefficiencies?” He continued: “And the thing that’s complicated about this, man, is it’s going to look much different in, say, the Department of Defense versus Social Security.”

Musk endorsed Trump in mid-July. He has given nearly $119 million to his pro-Trump Super PAC, America PAC, since the start of July, before he publicly endorsed the former president. The group has spent $123 million boosting Trump in the presidential race, including $102 million since Vice President Kamala Harris took over the Democratic ticket, according to federal election records. 

To save cash, Trump’s campaign has effectively outsourced its get-out-the-vote program to Musk’s America PAC. As Rolling Stone has reported, some Republicans close to Trump have warned the former president that they are concerned about the effectiveness of the group’s efforts.

Republicans have long fear-mongered about the national debt during Democratic presidencies — and appeared less concerned about it during GOP administrations. “People who claim to be deeply concerned about debt are, all too often, hypocrites — the level of their hypocrisy often reaches the surreal,” wrote New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.

The tax law that Trump signed in 2017, which slashed tax rates for corporations and the wealthy, has greatly contributed to the national deficit. Trump has personally bragged about cutting taxes for the nation’s “highest” earners, pledging to maintain those tax cuts and while proposing a further cut to the corporate tax rate.

Musk is a major government contractor and beneficiary of federal spending. His company SpaceX has several federal contracts, including a $1.8 billion contract with an intelligence agency to make a global surveillance network with satellites. The company also works with NASA to get astronauts to and from the International Space Station. 

Speaking about the national debt on Friday, the Tesla CEO and X owner said, “If you’re an individual, and you’re racking up crazy debt, well, obviously … you gotta reduce your spending, and you gotta start paying down that debt. And the same is true of a country. So that’s what I’d like to do.”

Musk, of course, borrowed $13 billion to purchase Twitter in 2022, before rebranding the social media platform as X. The Wall Street Journal called this “the worst buyout for banks since the financial crisis.”

At an America PAC town hall on Saturday in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Musk spoke more about potential spending. “People sometimes ask, like, where would you start with government efficiency? And it’s kind of like being in a room where the entire room is targets, and so you can shoot in any direction and not miss,” he said.

Musk added, “It can’t be like, you know, we’ll, we’ll trim a little bit here and there. That’s not going to work there. There have to be quite radical reductions in cost.”

At another point during the town hall, Musk once again “joked” about someone killing Harris. 

Calling the vice president a “puppet,” Musk said, “I made a joke that was sort of misconstrued, that it was like, ‘Nobody even bothers to try to kill Kamala.’ That’s pointless. Why? They’ll just get another puppet. Nobody even bothers. Nobody’s even tried to kill [Joe] Biden.”

It was at least the fourth time that Musk has publicly questioned why no one is trying to kill the president or vice president of the United States.

[dollsonmain]

I did not sleep at all last night. I even went and laid down in the guest room after That Guy got up where I usually pass right out but I didn't sleep in there, either.

I feel like All the Shit.

Long morning ramble.

Sleeping in a night cap is annoying but it's keeping my ends from being fried for longer. My hair's texture was already chef's kiss, now it's double chef's kiss.

-

That Guy said that he has to run the car tax payment to town on his way home from work today but DO NOT try to walk home if he's not there when I get off work because it's going to be nearly 100F and wait for him to pick me up.

He also said he'll have to start looking for another car, which should have been done a very, very long time ago because I could have been working as soon as Son expressed and demonstrated that I wasn't needed by him anymore. Don't take that the wrong way, I don't mean he said "I don't need you." he said things like he'd like to go to the bus stop by himself and has shown that he can be trusted on his own, etc.

I did intend to get my own car (or a truck), but if he buys one and doesn't expect me to pay for it (though he may expect me to pay for it) that lets me put more into savings for later.

I think That Guy is suddenly aware of how difficult he's made it for me to work all this time, which is interesting because I really did think he did it on purpose and then was blaming me.

He was saying that to drop me off and pick me up at the mail room job he'd only be able to work 4 hours a day. Granted he'd earn more in that four hours than I will in 12 hours even with this moderately big pay rate. And I was like yes, that's why I'd been limiting my job search to positions on your normal route (as he'd demanded), but this job pays much more per hour than any of the others I can do locally and I have experience which makes it more likely I'd get in, so it's worth the extra time and effort in my opinion.

$19.23/hr is THE highest income I've seen locally for almost ANY job, actually... There was one federal job that requires a TS clearance that pays like $65/hr, most are paying around $15 with some management positions offering $17 - $24. The gas station I'm at is actually one of the lowest at $10 though there are some places offering $8.50. Because they can.

He did say he'd thought it was a federal mail position and I'd get the Big Bennies and retirement but I'd just be an employee of Goodwill so not get the USPS packet. I'm not the only one that's been confused by how the job was listed.

The actually bennies:

50% Company-paid Health Insurance After 30 days of employment and begins the first day of the first month after employees’ first 30 days.

Company-paid Life Insurance

Company-paid Long-Term Disability (LTD) and Accidental Death and Dismemberment (AD&D) insurance

Dental Insurance – Guardian Dental

Vision Insurance – Davis Vision

Supplemental Insurances – Colonial Life and Legal Shield

401(k) – The company matches up to 4% of salary and is available for enrollment after six months of employment.

Employee Assistance Program (EAP)

Resource Assistance Program (RAP)

Direct Deposit

Vacation Leave – Twelve days of vacation available after 3 months of employment.

Sick Leave – 6 days that can be used after 30 days of employment.

Personal Days – 3 days that can be used starting on your first day.

Holiday Pay – 8 paid holidays after 30 days of employment.

That's not as good as federal, but is pretty good.

-

It's like he's only just now understanding what telling me to get insurance, which meant getting a job because he won't let the insurance companies look at his finances to prove that I can afford insurance and won't sell a policy to someone with less than $1k in the bank and no income, MEANS.

It means me being even more physically exhausted, in more pain, chores not getting done, falling asleep at the dinner table while eating....

He really did not expect me to throw myself out into the world like i have, and does not seem to have understood just how much of an inconvenience me working would be for him.

Like, he was crunching the numbers because he doesn't want to be thrown into a higher tax bracket even if it means more money coming in overall, but I think I'd be filing separately anyway so I can get back as much as possible without it being on a check in his name.

I wonder if the mail room folks get any sort of tax preparation deals since we're working IN an IRS office... Wouldn't that be nice to be able to say "It's my turn" and go sit down with an IRS prepper and do your taxes in person to be sure they're very correct?

So, I think I mentioned already the hours are 6:30-3 which is kind of nice as I do like getting my day over with early and I'd still be getting up at 3:30 with That Guy anyway so it's not like I'd have to change my sleep schedule at all.

The lady on the phone also cleared up some confusion for me about why the job listing said Goodwill, then IRS, and talking about custodial jobs????

So, I'd be an employee of Goodwill, and Goodwill contracts out those employees to other places, specifically the local Goodwill contracts out to federal and military establishments (the IRS building is on a small National Guard base so I do have to go through a checkpoint and get the car searched which is annoying and I hope I don't have to do that EVERY day, like I hope I get an ID card I just scan and can get in or something...) and their contract has been running so long with this IRS branch that Goodwill's sign is on the building.

The custodial job mention was them pointing anyone that IS severely disabled toward that job instead of the mail room position because the custodial job is slow paced which makes it suitable for people with developmental delays who may need more time to complete a task. But the whole job listing was a mess.

I do need to ask when the next bid is, because I could get hired on, the contract be rebid, and Goodwill lose which would leave me with no work until another contract was picked up, or could also mean a pay cut if they have to undercut another contractor to get the lowest bid and it's good to know what to expect.

She also said that some of the small mail crew, which is about 5 people (to me that is a lot because I'm used to being alone in the mail room) bring in knitting or crochet projects because it's slow now and then. That's generally when I would pick up a broom or a bottle of cleanser but I wouldn't mind crocheting at work :P

Also need to ask about lunch because the work day is exactly 8 hours so unless lunch is paid, I'd not be getting paid for 8 hours of work every day.

-

Anyway I've been feeling the guilt about maybe jumping jobs so soon (my start date would likely be mid August if not a little later), but I also helped find a vendor for something the gas station needed and that helps two people [who aren't me make more money... hm....] so I guess I don't feel too bad.

Manager asked me if I bake because people have been asking for fresh baked goods and I said no, I hate cooking and you can't make me do it, BUT I know that one of Son's classmates' moms bakes and is selling things through the local 7-11 so I'll ask if they'd be interested and they are. They should get in contact with the gas station any day now.

My suggestion is that the baker take some samples to the gas station and go talk to Manager in person, but I'm not the one running the business.

[360degreesasthecrowflies]

"But just"/"Why don't you just?" is not always the magic solve you think it is, boomers

Feeling a little disheartened today by the way that my mum point-blank refuses to acknowledge structural barriers. And I do think it is at least partially a generational thing.

The thing about the deck being stacked against you that has the most impact, and that certain folk of a certain age seem unable to put together is that...

You reach a point in your life, or in your career, or in your day to day financial situation where not only is there no magical solution, there are also no good options.

And it's the kind of situation where it's not the case where there are no good options because you, the individual, made mistakes or burned bridges or wasted your starting out nest egg or your initial savings so you have only yourself to blame - or even where if you just reduced your basic outgoings down several levels you'd be able to build a nest egg (back) up in order to give yourself more options again... There just aren't any good options from the jump.

Recent solves my mum has put to me as if I'm not an adult, in my 30s, living independently in another country from her with over 10 years' working experience, include:

Why don't you just get a higher paying job?

Why don't you get a pension?

Why don't you buy a house?

Why don't you move further away from your work (and your established community and the amenities you rely on) so you can buy a house?

The undertone implication is a) that we haven't already considered all the options before us, done the calculations and concluded that (unfortunately, as if it worked out it would be helpful) it isn't viable right now, and b) that by not doing these things you are somehow deliberately crafting your own misery and setting yourself up for more hardship, instead of the reality that we are making the best of what's available to us within the system that is how our generation are asked to live and exist.

I don't 'just get a higher paying job' because the structural barriers are my lack of education and my lack of social connections among the higher strata of the demographic that, by their wealth-funded access to as many qualifications as they would like to pay for, and by being able to buy the time to complete them, holds a monopoly on hiring. That's something that's come from making education something available to the highest bidder, rather than grant-funded and obtainable by anyone with the capacity to qualify for the course.

I don't have a pension (right now) because I can't afford one. The minimum contribution that I can make by law to a pension is 10% of my income a month, and I can't afford to lose an extra 10% of my income when I'm already paying around that out of my salary to a student loan with compound interest that was sold to me as a loan that wouldn't have compound interest added. I'm also paying 50%+ of my income per month on housing alone, and more on bills. Where am I supposed to find more? And of course, if my salary goes up, so too does the amount I'm meant to pay back the student loan.

I don't buy a house because I can't afford one, despite saving for a deposit for several years. Unfortunately, Liz Truss crashed the economy last year and as a result, the banks don't offer mortgages as high as they used to, and require larger deposits for properties. As such the amount that I have saved up might have been enough to put down a healthy deposit two years ago, but now, isn't. And I can't save any more because of the aforementioned draws on my income above.

And if I was to move further afield to buy a house, what's the benefit to me? I'd have to spend more money on my commute, I'd probably have to live in a much less safe area, and it's going to be cold comfort to me that I own a property if I end up getting assaulted or stabbed on my way home at night.

Trust me, I would love to live in an era where I didn't have to overthink these basics. Where the fact that I have a college degree and multiple years of specialised work experience across multiple sectors including private business and government would actually count for something and afford me a solid and stable standard of living.

But it doesn't any more. And this is my life, and the lives of many of us nowadays. And we can't just sit and mope about it, we have to accept it, and adapt, and do the best we can to keep going until something gets a little easier for us, until the luck of the draw rolls our way or until someone with the power and ability through government or big business to effect a real change takes that shot and acts to make things just that bit less bleak for us.

Until then, a little empathy wouldn't hurt instead of a lecture.