#its a lot of work and its not something you owe anyone. if there are people you dont want to do the work with then just be up front

[isa-ah]

one of the best things about getting older is hitting the point where you look around and realize you arent legally bound to be nice to anyone. it doesnt matter if youve known someone all your life or if you met them last week, if you decide someone is too immature, unevolved, annoying or just plain uninteresting to you, you can simply tell them you dont want to talk anymore. you can just break it off and walk away. you dont have to stay in meaningless or frustrating friendships or relationships. you can decide you dont like someone and it doesnt have to be moral it can be any reason you could ever think of and you can simply say hey. i dont think were compatible and id like to go our own ways. and then you can clean your hands of it and never have to stress about it again. its fantastic.

[wormchaser]

you are complaining about complaining too much while complaining about the fact that maybe people dont like you because you complain too much while complaining about being alone. just stop complaining and do something about it. talk to people. reach out. dont just wait for someone to come to you first.

i have tried reaching out to different people in the past year or so but it never works. i understand its my own fault for letting relationships decay because of my own insecurities and issues but that doesn't mean i can just will myself to think or believe different things about myself. it's a self fulfilling prophecy ; i think people don't like me so i don't reach out so people don't like me etc . i am sure you do not want to hear me list all the things i want to say in response so i will put them in the tags.

[holytrickster]

you know it's bad when kit calls loth arteloth fnfjjd

[drdemonprince]

any advice for coping with being on the receiving end of a public callout ?

Oh yes:

Do not acknowledge the callout publicly. It will only further its spread, lend it legitimacy, cause you to be interpreted as guilty, and convey to anyone who bears you ill will that you are rattled and feeling socially threatened.

Do not act out of urgency. One of the ways that cancelled people get themselves in far worse trouble is by spiraling due to anxiety and rushing to issue a statement about what has happened, or to attempt to socially manage public impressions about what has happened. Do not do this. Anything that you say will be picked apart and used against you. The situation is truly not as urgent as it might feel. A lot of times, doing nothing and being quiet is the best way to proceed, and the dust will settle better if you do.

Do not issue a public apology. If you truly feel that you have wronged someone, that conflict should be worked out in private with the people you have directly affected. You do not owe the anonymous public audience a damn thing. Do not apologize for something you don't honestly believe that you have done wrong. Take time and really think about what happened, and seek the counsel of people whom you trust in PRIVATE.

Do not attempt to disprove the callout unless you have crystal clear, smoking gun evidence that the person who accused you is actually victimizing you. And even then, probably don't do it. I have only seen a disproof of a callout work ONCE, and that was when Juniper Abernathy revealed the person cancelling her had been abusing her. Even if the facts are on your side, acknowledging the accusations will only make more people aware of them, give your detractors ground to criticize your every word, and will muddy the waters and make people find the situation confusing and troubling rather than clear.

GET THE FUCK OFFLINE. Delete your social media apps for the time being. Turn off notifications. Turn off DMs requests. Change your settings so that you only ever hear from people you already follow (I do this, on the advice of Philosophy Tube). Get away from the computer.

Connect with IRL friends. When you're wrapped up in a cancellation, the negative opinions of a handful of foaming at the mouth freaks loom way larger than they actually are. And social media dramatically skews our sense of social priorities such that the approval rating of complete strangers starts to seem more important than people we actually know, and trust, and who actually know us. Go get a meal with a buddy. Watch a dumb movie. Talk to your grandma about her plans for her garden. Surround yourself with real people you care about and focus on their life and problems, to help put things in perspective.

Find distracting, active, rewarding activities that bring you out of the digital space and into physical reality. Not everyone is talking about you, not everybody hates you, most people have no fucking clue what has been said about you, and most people do not give a fuck about you (that's good). There are so many areas of life that are completely fucking untouched by what a bunch of social media power users have to say online. Go volunteer to clean up a park, run some errands, take an exercise class, foster a dog, regrout your bathroom, knit a hat. Even if the worst case scenario happens and a cancellation sticks, it's really only among a certain very vocal group of miserable fucking people. There is a whole world around you that will not ever care, and you will have a life outside of this.

Good luck!!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What the fuck is a PBM?

TOMORROW (Sept 24), I'll be speaking IN PERSON at the BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY!

Terminal-stage capitalism owes its long senescence to its many defensive mechanisms, and it's only by defeating these that we can put it out of its misery. "The Shield of Boringness" is one of the necrocapitalist's most effective defenses, so it behooves us to attack it head-on.

The Shield of Boringness is Dana Claire's extremely useful term for anything so dull that you simply can't hold any conception of it in your mind for any length of time. In the finance sector, they call this "MEGO," which stands for "My Eyes Glaze Over," a term of art for financial arrangements made so performatively complex that only the most exquisitely melted brain-geniuses can hope to unravel their spaghetti logic. The rest of us are meant to simply heft those thick, dense prospectuses in two hands, shrug, and assume, "a pile of shit this big must have a pony under it."

MEGO and its Shield of Boringness are key to all of terminal-stage capitalism's stupidest scams. Cloaking obvious swindles in a lot of complex language and Byzantine payment schemes can make them seem respectable just long enough for the scammers to relieve you of all your inconvenient cash and assets, though, eventually, you're bound to notice that something is missing.

If you spent the years leading up to the Great Financial Crisis baffled by "CDOs," "synthetic CDOs," "ARMs" and other swindler nonsense, you experienced the Shield of Boringness. If you bet your house and/or your retirement savings on these things, you experienced MEGO. If, after the bubble popped, you finally came to understand that these "exotic financial instruments" were just scams, you experienced Stein's Law ("anything that can't go forever eventually stops"). If today you no longer remember what a CDO is, you are once again experiencing the Shield of Boringness.

As bad as 2008 was, it wasn't even close to the end of terminal stage capitalism. The market has soldiered on, with complex swindles like carbon offset trading, metaverse, cryptocurrency, financialized solar installation, and (of course) AI. In addition to these new swindles, we're still playing the hits, finding new ways to make the worst scams of the 2000s even worse.

That brings me to the American health industry, and the absurdly complex, ridiculously corrupt Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), a pathology that has only metastasized since 2008.

On at least 20 separate occasions, I have taken it upon myself to figure out how the PBM swindle works, and nevertheless, every time they come up, I have to go back and figure it out again, because PBMs have the most powerful Shield of Boringness out of the whole Monster Manual of terminal-stage capitalism's trash mobs.

PBMs are back in the news because the FTC is now suing the largest of these for their role in ripping off diabetics with sky-high insulin prices. This has kicked off a fresh round of "what the fuck is a PBM, anyway?" explainers of extremely variable quality. Unsurprisingly, the best of these comes from Matt Stoller:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/monopoly-round-up-lina-khan-pharma

Stoller starts by pointing out that Americans have a proud tradition of getting phucked by pharma companies. As far back as the 1950s, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver was holding hearings on the scams that pharma companies were using to ensure that Americans paid more for their pills than virtually anyone else in the world.

But since the 2010s, Americans have found themselves paying eye-popping, sky-high, ridiculous drug prices. Eli Lilly's Humolog insulin sold for $21 in 1999; by 2017, the price was $274 – a 1,200% increase! This isn't your grampa's price gouging!

Where do these absurd prices come from? The story starts in the 2000s, when the GW Bush administration encouraged health insurers to create "high deductible" plans, where patients were expected to pay out of pocket for receiving care, until they hit a multi-thousand-dollar threshold, and then their insurance would kick in. Along with "co-pays" and other junk fees, these deductibles were called "cost sharing," and they were sold as a way to prevent the "abuse" of the health care system.

The economists who crafted terminal-stage capitalism's intellectual rationalizations claimed the reason Americans paid so much more for health care than their socialized-medicine using cousins in the rest of the world had nothing to do with the fact that America treats health as a source of profits, while the rest of the world treats health as a human right.

No, the actual root of America's health industry's problems was the moral defects of Americans. Because insured Americans could just go see the doctor whenever they felt like it, they had no incentive to minimize their use of the system. Any time one of these unhinged hypochondriacs got a little sniffle, they could treat themselves to a doctor's visit, enjoying those waiting-room magazines and the pleasure of arranging a sick day with HR, without bearing any of the true costs:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/27/the-doctrine-of-moral-hazard/

"Cost sharing" was supposed to create "skin in the game" for every insured American, creating a little pain-point that stung you every time you thought about treating yourself to a luxurious doctor's visit. Now, these payments bit hardest on the poorest workers, because if you're making minimum wage, at $10 co-pay hurts a lot more than it does if you're making six figures. What's more, VPs and the C-suite were offered "gold-plated" plans with low/no deductibles or co-pays, because executives understand the value of a dollar in the way that mere working slobs can't ever hope to comprehend. They can be trusted to only use the doctor when it's truly warranted.

So now you have these high-deductible plans creeping into every workplace. Then along comes Obama and the Affordable Care Act, a compromise that maintains health care as a for-profit enterprise (still not a human right!) but seeks to create universal coverage by requiring every American to buy a plan, requiring insurers to offer plans to every American, and uses public money to subsidize the for-profit health industry to glue it together.

Predictably, the cheapest insurance offered on the Obamacare exchanges – and ultimately, by employers – had sky-high deductibles and co-pays. That way, insurers could pocket a fat public subsidy, offer an "insurance" plan that was cheap enough for even the most marginally employed people to afford, but still offer no coverage until their customers had spent thousands of dollars out-of-pocket in a given year.

That's the background: GWB created high-deductible plans, Obama supercharged them. Keep that in your mind as we go through the MEGO procedures of the PBM sector.

Your insurer has a list of drugs they'll cover, called the "formulary." The formulary also specifies how much the insurance company is willing to pay your pharmacist for these drugs. Creating the formulary and paying pharmacies for dispensing drugs is a lot of tedious work, and insurance outsources this to third parties, called – wait for it – Pharmacy Benefits Managers.

The prices in the formulary the PBM prepares for your insurance company are called the "list prices." These are meant to represent the "sticker price" of the drug, what a pharmacist would charge you if you wandered in off the street with no insurance, but somehow in possession of a valid prescription.

But, as Stoller writes, these "list prices" aren't actually ever charged to anyone. The list price is like the "full price" on the pricetags at a discount furniture place where everything is always "on sale" at 50% off – and whose semi-disposable sofas and balsa-wood dining room chairs are never actually sold at full price.

One theoretical advantage of a PBM is that it can get lower prices because it bargains for all the people in a given insurer's plan. If you're the pharma giant Sanofi and you want your Lantus insulin to be available to any of the people who must use OptumRX's formulary, you have to convince OptumRX to include you in that formulary.

OptumRX – like all PBMs – demands "rebates" from pharma companies if they want to be included in the formulary. On its face, this is similar to the practices of, say, NICE – the UK agency that bargains for medicine on behalf of the NHS, which also bargains with pharma companies for access to everyone in the UK and gets very good deals as a result.

But OptumRX doesn't bargain for a lower list price. They bargain for a bigger rebate. That means that the "price" is still very high, but OptumRX ends up paying a tiny fraction of it, thanks to that rebate. In the OptumRX formulary, Lantus insulin lists for $403. But Sanofi, who make Lantus, rebate $339 of that to OptumRX, leaving just $64 for Lantus.

Here's where the scam hits. Your insurer charges you a deductible based on the list price – $404 – not on the $64 that OptumRX actually pays for your insulin. If you're in a high-deductible plan and you haven't met your cap yet, you're going to pay $404 for your insulin, even though the actual price for it is $64.

Now, you'd think that your insurer would put a stop to this. They chose the PBM, the PBM is ripping off their customers, so it's their job to smack the PBM around and make it cut this shit out. So why would the insurers tolerate this nonsense?

Here's why: the PBMs are divisions of the big health insurance companies. Unitedhealth owns OptumRx; Aetna owns Caremark, and Cigna owns Expressscripts. So it's not the PBM that's ripping you off, it's your own insurance company. They're not just making you pay for drugs that you're supposedly covered for – they're pocketing the deductible you pay for those drugs.

Now, there's one more entity with power over the PBM that you'd hope would step in on your behalf: your boss. After all, your employer is the entity that actually chooses the insurer and negotiates with them on your behalf. Your boss is in the driver's seat; you're just along for the ride.

It would be pretty funny if the answer to this was that the health insurance company bought your employer, too, and so your boss, the PBM and the insurer were all the same guy, busily swapping hats, paying for a call center full of tormented drones who each have three phones on their desks: one labeled "insurer"; the second, "PBM" and the final one "HR."

But no, the insurers haven't bought out the company you work for (yet). Rather, they've bought off your boss – they're sharing kickbacks with your employer for all the deductibles and co-pays you're being suckered into paying. There's so much money (your money) sloshing around in the PBM scamoverse that anytime someone might get in the way of you being ripped off, they just get cut in for a share of the loot.

That is how the PBM scam works: they're fronts for health insurers who exploit the existence of high-deductible plans in order to get huge kickbacks from pharma makers, and massive fees from you. They split the loot with your boss, whose payout goes up when you get screwed harder.

But wait, there's more! After all, Big Pharma isn't some kind of easily pushed-around weakling. They're big. Why don't they push back against these massive rebates? Because they can afford to pay bribes and smaller companies making cheaper drugs can't. Whether it's a little biotech upstart with a cheaper molecule, or a generics maker who's producing drugs at a fraction of the list price, they just don't have the giant cash reserves it takes to buy their way into the PBMs' formularies. Doubtless, the Big Pharma companies would prefer to pay smaller kickbacks, but from Big Pharma's perspective, the optimum amount of bribes extracted by a PBM isn't zero – far from it. For Big Pharma, the optimal number is one cent higher than "the maximum amount of bribes that a smaller company can afford."

The purpose of a system is what it does. The PBM system makes sure that Americans only have access to the most expensive drugs, and that they pay the highest possible prices for them, and this enriches both insurance companies and employers, while protecting the Big Pharma cartel from upstarts.

Which is why the FTC is suing the PBMs for price-fixing. As Stoller points out, they're using their powers under Section 5 of the FTC Act here, which allows them to shut down "unfair methods of competition":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

The case will be adjudicated by an administrative law judge, in a process that's much faster than a federal court case. Once the FTC proves that the PBM scam is illegal when applied to insulin, they'll have a much easier time attacking the scam when it comes to every other drug (the insulin scam has just about run its course, with federally mandated $35 insulin coming online, just as a generation of post-insulin diabetes treatments hit the market).

Obviously the PBMs aren't taking this lying down. Cigna/Expressscripts has actually sued the FTC for libel over the market study it conducted, in which the agency described in pitiless, factual detail how Cigna was ripping us all off. The case is being fought by a low-level Reagan-era monster named Rick Rule, whom Stoller characterizes as a guy who "hangs around in bars and picks up lonely multi-national corporations" (!!).

The libel claim is a nonstarter, but it's still wild. It's like one of those movies where they want to show you how bad the cockroaches are, so there's a bit where the exterminator shows up and the roaches form a chorus line and do a kind of Busby Berkeley number:

https://www.46brooklyn.com/news/2024-09-20-the-carlton-report

So here we are: the FTC has set out to euthanize some rentiers, ridding the world of a layer of useless economic middlemen whose sole reason for existing is to make pharmaceuticals as expensive as possible, by colluding with the pharma cartel, the insurance cartel and your boss. This conspiracy exists in plain sight, hidden by the Shield of Boringness. If I've done my job, you now understand how this MEGO scam works – and if you forget all that ten minutes later (as is likely, given the nature of MEGO), that's OK: just remember that this thing is a giant fucking scam, and if you ever need to refresh yourself on the details, you can always re-read this post.

The paperback edition of The Lost Cause, my nationally bestselling, hopeful solarpunk novel is out this month!

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/23/shield-of-boringness/#some-men-rob-you-with-a-fountain-pen

Image: Flying Logos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Over_$1,000,000_dollars_in_USD_$100_bill_stacks.png

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

[hotyanderedaddies]

Yandere Nerd Blackmails "Mean Girl" You into Being His

[Yandere! Nerd x Popular! GN! Reader]

·゜·:.。..。.:·☆·゜·:.。..。.:·☆

You're one of the popular people in school: surrounded by tons of friends, always going out on dates every weekend, and always invited to every party.

To say the least, you loved you life.

However, while your social life was on an upward trajectory, you struggled a little bit with your classes. And with an upcoming physics midterm giving you anxiety, you knew that you had to do something.

"H-hey, Y/N," some random nerd (Nate?) who sat beside you in class said. He wore a really large smile and his eyes seemed to shine with adoration the more he stared at you.

"Yeah?" you asked, anger seeping into your tone due to your stress levels.

"If you want a tutor, I can help you out?" Nate cheerily smiled, almost begging you to accept his offer.

He wanted you to accept so badly! He loves you so desperately!

You vaguely recalled this nerdy guy as the one who kept following you around like a lovesick puppy. However, given your high social status, you didn't pay him too much attention.

"Eww," you scoffed, oblivious to his frown. Ugh, what would your friends say if they saw you with him?

You didn't like the idea of owing anyone, plus, Nate would most likely just drool all over you as you attempted to study.

*Sigh, it's just the price to pay for being pretty.

After school, you were making your way down the hall when you noticed that the door to your physics class was slightly ajar, and there was zero sign of the teacher. And on the desk was a little, tantalizing manilla folder.

You knew it was wrong, that you could get in some serious trouble (even risking expulsion), yet you couldn't resist rushing inside and snatching the folder off the desk to peek at its contents.

And voilà!

The answers to the midterm were in your clutches. Thinking quickly, you took a quick picture of the answers with your phone and placed them back into the folder, setting it on the desk and rushing out of the classroom.

·゜·:.。..。.:·☆·゜·:.。..。.:·☆

You got an A+ on your physics midterm.

"Good work, Y/N," the teacher even said as she handed you back your exam. "I can tell you studied a lot."

"Sure did," you confidently said, a wide smile on your face. You were on top of the world, having passed the hard test with absolutely zero negative consequences.

You were riding high for most of the school day, already planning out your weekend that was supposed to be full of partying and flirting with the quarterback of the football team (he has muscles for days), when Nate approached you at your locker.

"Hey there, Y/N," he smirked, his eyes narrowing for some reason.

"Whaaaat?" you sighed, already fed up with this loser who seemed to just want to waste your precious time.

"I heard you got a perfect score on the midterm," Nate knowingly grinned, something in his tone making you wince. "That's pretty impressive, seeing as how you were a little worried before."

You rolled your eyes, slamming your locker shut as you readied yourself to storm off. "Are you trying to say that I'm not smart?" you deflected. "That's not nice." You spun around on your heels.

"Neither is cheating," Nate muttered, making you freeze.

Slowly, you turn around to stare Nate down. Despite your face going pale at the thought of being found out, you saw that Nate had a big smirk on his... did... did he know? No, there was no way.

You were careful, right?

"What are you talking about?" you asked, trying to act all cool, but your heart was racing like crazy in your chest.

The knowing smirk on Nate's face, the way he narrowed his cold calculating eyes at you, and the way he chuckled let you know that something was wrong. Plus, Nate was WAY taller than you, and the way he towered over you, leaning threateningly over you, was enough to make you shiver.

Something was definitely wrong.

Nate snatched his phone out of his pocket and held it up to your stunned face. On the screen was something horrible:

A video recording of you sneaking into the physics room, and taking a picture of the midterm answers.

How?

How could Nate have recorded you cheating? You were so careful to not get caught?

...and worse...

...w-was Nate following you? Why else would he record you?

The blood drained from your face as you watched the video play over and over on Nate's phone.

Out of instinct, you tried to snatch it away from the nerd, but he was too fast for you. He held it up in his grasp, way out of your reach.

Nate mock-frowned at you. "That's not very nice, Y/N," he teased. "Now let's think about this real quick."

You huffed and fought with all of your might to not roll your eyes (again).

"If I were to show this copy to the school board," Nate continued, his voice slow and smooth, "and yes, I said 'Copy'-- then you'd be expelled. And then what would happen to you?"

If you were expelled, it'd be the end of the world for you, no exaggeration. Your parents are super strict, and if they found out you'd cheated on a midterm, they'd blister your ass. And if they found out you'd been expelled for cheating on a midterm, then you'd might as well dig your own grave.

And Nate inferred that he had more than one copy of the video of you cheating.

No matter how much you wanted to deny it, the stupid nerd had you cornered.

Hangin your head in defeat, you tried to hide your reddening face. "You can't show that video," you whispered. "...please."

Nate snorted as he crossed his arms in front of his chest. "Oh?" he questioned, challenging you. "And what's stopping me?"

Fuck.

Your stomach was tied in knots, and the more you stared up at the smirking nerd, the more you realized that you had you cornered; both literally and figuratively.

"Well," you frowned, feeling as if you'd projectile vomit all over his cocky face, "what do you want?"

Nate's smirk grew and stretched out the confines of his face, the shadows crossing over it in an eerie manner. He leaned in closer to you, making your back press tightly against the cold locker that you were trapped against, especially when he pressed both of his arms on either side of your trembling frame.

"You," he answered flatly.

"...huh?" you asked.

Nate snorted and leaned down even closer, his nose brushing up against yours. "I want you," he said.

At first, a look of pure disgust crossed over your face. You were popular, the top fo the top! There was absolutely no way in the world that you'd be caught dead with someone as lowly as Nate!

But when his smirk transformed into a scowl, your face melted into a look of fear.

"Look, Y/N," Nate spat, "either you be mine, and only mine; or, I tell the school board that you're nothing but a filthy, lying cheater, and you get expelled."

Your heart fell the floor.

Nate continued to smile down at you. "The choice is yours, Y/N."

To be continued...? (depending on if people like Nate)

[antiquarianfics]

Accidental

What happens when you accidentally kidnap the exact man you were looking for?

pairing: mob!bucky x reader

warning(s): canon level violence, kidnapping

a/n: idk if this does well, maybe i’ll do a pt 2?

part 2

»»———-———-———-———-———-———-———-««

You glance down at the picture in your hand of your younger sister before putting the picture back safely away in your jacket pocket. You take a deep breath and pull the right ear loop of your black mask up around your right ear to secure your mask to your face. Then, you pull your hood up over your head, check that your gun is still securely in its holster, and slide around the corner. You were going to find your sister. You promised.

You walk with purpose towards the bar that you’d heard men who work for the man responsible for your sister’s disappearance were known to hang out. In fact, you’re pretty sure the man responsible owned the bar, so you have a good feeling anyone you kidnap to question will be able to give you some amount of information. You have a feeling, though, that you’re not getting into the bar, so you slink around the back. Surely someone will need a cigarette break?

As luck would have it, as you slink around the corner, someone is already taking a cigarette break. The man stands tall, leaning against the side of the wall, a cigarette lit. He isn’t smoking it, though, merely holding it lit in front of his face, studying it. The man is wearing a black suit, his jacket unbuttoned. Perhaps he had just gotten off work?

Good, you think. He must be freshly off work; I’ll have a few hours before anyone thinks to look for him.

You walk quietly, stealthily up to the man. Before he notices you, you take the butt of your gun and knock it hard against the man’s temple. He crumbles.

—

It isn’t easy, but you manage to drag the man to an empty townhome where you tie him up in the basement. You have his hands bound to the chair, each wrist tied carefully to the chair’s arms. His feet are bound at the ankles. You don’t bother gagging him. You sit a good distance away on an uncomfortable futon, your mask still on, your hood still pulled up. You’re cleaning your gun when the man finally stirs.

The man groans as he raises his head, bright blue eyes scanning the room, settling on the only exit up the stairs behind him, noticing the lack of windows, and then falling on his captor in front of him: You. The man says nothing, merely stares. You stare back, raising an eyebrow. He breaks first.

“I’m awake now. What do you want?” His voice is gravely with disuse, his tone serious.

You laugh. To your own surprise as well as your captive’s, it’s a genuine laugh—your normal laugh.

“What? No “Who are you? What’s going on? How did I get here?” You ask, amused.

“You’ve watched too many cop shows.”

You laugh again. “Perhaps.”

“I’ll ask again. What do you want?”

“Information.”

“Can’t help you.”

“Sure you can.”

“Why’s that?” He raises a curious eyebrow.

“Found you outside The Red Star. The only people who hang around that bar work for the man that’s responsible for my sister’s kidnapping.”

He laughs humorlessly. “Kid, listen, if your sister was taken by the mob, she probably owed them something she couldn’t repay. You’re going to have to accept your sister was in with the wrong crowd.”

You pull a knife from its sheath at your belt and put it to the man’s neck. He sucks in a breadth.

“Bullshit. Tell me. What do you know about my sister?”

“Nothing.”

You push the knife further against his neck. “Bull.”

“There’s a lot of women in Brooklyn, sweetheart. Can’t expect me to know which one you’re talkin’ about with no information.” He shoots you a cheeky smile.

You sigh and pull away. You pull out your sister’s picture and show it to him.

“Her name is Ellie. Now, spill.”

He leans forward a little to look at the picture before leaning back.

“Never seen her.”

You tilt your head at him and purse your lips.

“You’re lying. You know something.”

“Perceptive are we?”

You hum. He sighs.

“Well, I’m not just going to risk my life and my job for anyone. Who are you? Show your face.”

You roll your eyes, and against your better judgement, you pull your hood back and your mask down. You need answers. The man stares at you, taking in your features, and after what feels like forever, he seems to make a decision. He smirks.

“You’re looking for a man by the name of Barnes, James Barnes. He’s the owner of the bar you took me from, and he’s the head of the Barnes Family. He’ll have the answers you’re looking for.”

“Where can I find him?”

The man grins, a dashing smile.

“I’m right here, Doll.”

[literaila]

can we get one of those scenarios where gojo does go to reader's dorm at 3am to go get sweets?

before you came to jujutsu high, you were a very patient person.

your temper was long, if anything. a stretchy sort of thing that was folded in the hands of people who didn’t deserve it.

it took a lot to get you worked up—some might even say that you were a people pleaser. if you had a certain… distaste for anyone or anything, well that was between you and your brain.

before you came to jujutsu high, that is.

because now it takes less than a knock on the door for your irritation to rise from your chest into your eyes. stress headaches have become a newfound acquaintance.

“what?” you hiss, opening your door to be met with—to no one’s surprise—a giddy grin and a sliver of eyes so bright it makes you want to puke.

so yeah. things have changed.

it wasn’t even one knock this time, though, but at least four different pounds, each one luring you even further into the cloud of homicidal thoughts.

at least no one will blame you in jail.

“is that how you answer your door?” satoru asks, leaning against the jam, so tall it hurts your soul.

“gojo,” you say, sweetening your rough, still-sleeping voice. “unless you’re here to tell me that someone’s dead, i’m going to break your nose.”

you didn’t used to be this violent, you swear. there’s just something about him—

satoru pinches your cheek fondly. “you’re such a joy to be around. even with your bed head.”

“did someone die?”

“yes,” satoru adjusts your shirt for you, kindness a silly thing he likes to wear occasionally. “my stomach. its rotting away.”

“good for you. goodnight.”

and you move to close the door, but satoru has always been faster than you. his foot is there, and you could break it, but you won’t.

god knows why.

“c’mon, sleeping beauty,” he whines, “i want bad ice cream.”

“then go get some.”

“i want company while i eat it.”

“don’t you have other friends or something? it’s..” you turn, blinking in the dark. “1:34 am.”

gojo grins. “snack time,” he says, simply.

you groan, missing when life was simple and no one talked to you unless you were making a mistake. “i’m tired. you woke me up, and i was having a good dream, too.”

“about me?”

“about something i don’t remember because,” you scowl at him, “you woke me up.”

“i didn’t want you to miss out.”

“if you keep smiling at me like that, i’ll—“

you stop, mostly because you don’t know what you’ll do.

“are you trying to sweet talk me? because it’s working.”

“no.”

gojo laughs. “get dressed. unless you want to wear your… care bear’s shirt.”

“go with geto,” you say, trying to shut the door again. it only succeeds in making satoru flinch just briefly.

which is enough to feed the vicious animal in your head.

“he’s just not as cute as you, though.”

you scoff. “stop trying to manipulate me.”

“but it always works so well.”

and is he wrong?

…no. but who can blame you for falling victim to his whims? satoru has spent his entire life being waited on, being given every little thing he could possibly want.

and he seems to want you.

it’s such a unique, bewildering feeling that you have to follow through. you can’t let something like affection go to waste.

the girl you were a year ago would scream for this very moment. she would be at satoru’s door, hugging his leg like a child.

(and if he’s a little bit… okay to look at. well. at least there’s one plus to this arrangement).

“i’ll even wait for you to get dressed,” satoru says like it’s a generous offer. “can’t you hear the ice cream calling?”

and then he leans in, eyes peering into yours over his ridiculous shades.

his hair is a bit messier than usual this late, his mouth a terrifying pink.

some small part of you wants to desperately to lean a little bit closer. to push this even further. so what if you need more convincing? so what if he owes you something?

so what if you can’t say no to him?

it has nothing to do with the itchy feeling in your chest, or the giddy fog in your brain.

(god, satoru makes you feel… something else. different than a human, but nothing more than a prize. he makes you feel like you are something other—like you’ve been the problem this entire time—but in a good way.

satoru sees you as something to behold.

you’re the god of this small thing.

and it’s wonderful. its infuriating and painful, and still you’d rather die than attempt to let it go.)

so what?

“fine,” you almost gasp. “but you’re buying.”

gojo clasps his hands together in satisfaction. “we’ll see,” he sings.

“ten minutes,” you tell him, trying to shut the door.

“five,” he whispers back, so sweetly.

and then satoru flashes his teeth at you, so different from anything else.

your responding nod is just unconscious at this point.

[cloudcountry]

Yooooooo happy to see that field of mistria are making you happy ^-^ i'd like to request reader helping march dye his hair ( lots of bickering and threatening to turn him pink instead ) but since ik you don't really like him and might not feel inspired here's another idea ( choose whichever one you feel most comfortable writing for ) how about flower picking with Celine :)

SUMMARY: when the saturday market can't come to town, you offer to help march dye his hair instead

COMMENTS: no pls wifey im very much joking w you i like march :(( hes just a bitch and im going to stab him. with a plastic sword. gently.

i dont have dividers so i am recycling my header ITS FINE DONT WORRY ABOUT IT

“Ow, would you quit pulling my hair like that?” March groans, shooting you a dirty look over his shoulder, “For all that skill you claim to have you don’t act—”

“Oh will you hush?” you huff, gently tugging on a handful of March’s hair on purpose, “If you stopped squirming and whining, maybe it wouldn’t hurt so bad!”

He grumbles something under his breath that you don’t catch, but you’re far too busy sectioning off his surprisingly thick hair to prepare for the (tacky) bright red hair dye.

“Why the fuck is your hair so thick?” you comment, very much amused.

“Oh shut up.” March snaps, “If I could reach back there and grab a fistful of your hair to yank around I would, you little—”

You click your tongue, interrupting him once again. “Worry about yourself, March. Wouldn’t want my hand to slip and for you to end up with pink hair, now would we?”

He grumbles again, and you giggle.

It occurs to you that, if anyone were to overhear this conversation, they’d assume you and the blacksmith were a hair’s breath away from killing each other.

You pat yourself on the back for the winning pun you just made. Holt would be proud.

“Oi, I can feel your smugness from here. Whatever you’re thinking about, it’s making me sick.”

“I was just thinking about you.” you comment offhandedly, snatching up the bottle of dye flippantly, “You must be pretty awful if you make yourself sick.”

“Don’t say shit like that, it’s weird.” he crosses his arms in his chest and sinks into the chair, his back hunched as if trying to make himself smaller.

You wonder why he’s shriveling up now. Normally he'd return your scathing insult.

Instead of asking, you opt not to. You pop the cap off the dye bottle and start applying it to his scalp, massaging it into the roots. You try not to feel smug about the way March so obviously relaxes, shoulders dropping and head falling into your touch, his breathing shifting from frustrated to calm.

You also try not to feel warm about the way he looks right now, vulnerable and soft, you try not to think about how it’s just the two of you here, with his brother who knows where, and you try not to think about the very tempting open space of his forehead, which is finally not all wrinkly for once.

You don’t want to smooth over those wrinkles with your thumb at all. And you certainly do not want to kiss them after a hard day’s work.

Even when he’s sweaty.

Especially when he’s sweaty.

You cough loudly into your arm, trying your best not to squirm where you’re standing, lest you mess up March’s hair.

Fully expecting him to turn around and scold you for ruining the moment, you’re surprised when he doesn’t move.

“You’re such a weirdo.” he says, but his voice his soft and there’s no real bite to them.

The smile that threatens to burst out of you is barely held back by your desire to keep the solemn, dare you say affectionate atmosphere going.

“So are you.” you reply, and your voice is equally as soft.

March snorts, and if you didn’t know any better you’d say it was a genuine laugh.

[soaps-mohawk]

So...

I've been doing some thinking about a couple of things.

This blog has grown considerably, even from its start and I appreciate each and every one of you so much. Your support never ceases to amaze me and I owe all of you a lot for giving me something to focus on this year instead of spiraling into insanity.

But

Things have gotten a tad bit overwhelming recently between trying to run the blog and trying to write. I find myself either having to ignore the blog to get writing done, or sacrifice writing time and energy to spend time on the blog and keep up with all the replies/reblogs/asks etc. Definitely not complaining, you all never cease to amaze me.

But, I am just one person and my brain only has so much power right now. So, I'm planning to take some (more) time off each week right now while I focus on writing and planning since we're getting into some serious plot stuff soon. So I'm planning to be on the blog three days a week for a while: Saturday, Sunday, and Thursday. That gives me some time to get some writing done as well as some time to rest my brain.

Saturday and Sunday of course to post the chapter and respond to replies and reblogs so I don't get super behind. Monday I'll have some asks queued up as well as maybe a few reblogs. I'll still use the queue Tuesday and Wednesday for reblogs/asks with spoilers as usual. Thursday I'll be on the blog answering asks from Monday - Wednesday as well as things I get that day. I'll queue up a few things for Friday since that day gives me a little break between to prepare for the weekend and posting the chapter.

I'll probably add more days as time goes on. You can still send in asks on the days I'm gone, but just know I won't see them or respond to them until later in the week. I already get behind by a couple days on asks anyway so that's not much of a change.

Don't feel bad for sending them either, I love getting all these asks, I just tend to get behind on days I spend more time writing.

The second order of business

has to do with my taglist. Most of you probably haven't noticed (which I don't blame you lol) but my taglist has gotten very big. Very, very big. It's just over 230 people right now, and I'm sure there will be others asking to join. It's quite time consuming to do all of these tags for every chapter (especially since we can't tag in blocks anymore) so I've been doing some thinking into how I can make it easier for me, and for you.

I know there's at least one blog I've heard of, though I'm sure there's more, that have made side blogs that they have people follow and turn on notifications for and just make a post on that blog when they post a chapter or fic, etc. I've been considering doing that since the taglist is a lot of work and time.

I've also seen blogs that have side blogs that just post chapters/fics and nothing else. I know quite a few of you only follow for the fic, so if anyone is interested, I could put together a side blog like that as well that you can follow and get notifications from instead of having to follow this blog and having to go through the probably 100 posts that I make a day 😂 (at least it feels that way for me)

Having a separate blog for the taglist too would allow me to schedule posts so I can have them come out a bit earlier than I get up for those of you across the world who stay up to read and have to wait for me to post in the morning when I get up (or later like today because I slept in). Of course Ao3 will get posted later because I can't schedule posts there, but at least for Tumblr I can have things post earlier.

So let me know what you think about the taglist side blog and the possible just chapters/fics side blog. Feel free to send in asks (anonymously or not) with your opinion. I might not answer them all (not tonight because my brain is fried and honestly i'm not sure if this is even comprehensible English) but I will at least use them to make the decision (or make a post with all of them and answer it as just one).

[leeknow-thoughts]

୨୧ GLIMPSES OF THE LUSTFUL

𝝑𝝔 cw : blasphemy kink???, churchboy!Jeongin, toys, smut

𝝑𝝔 a/n : the years of my life spent in the Catholic church came in clutch with this fic

Growing up Catholic had its perks, but its drawbacks as well. The tradwife stereotypes for women along with the general theme of sexual repression.

You had grown up with Jeongin, going to church together and going to the same Catholic school with the boy. Over the years, you had lost your faith, Jeongin however only grew in his faith, it never bothered you, and your lack of faith never bothered him.

Eventually, you both went off to the same college, a few states away, and figured it would be easier to live together. It was easier then having to make new friends and less risky than having complete strangers be your roommates.

"My theology professor is trying to kill me, I think," you joke to Jeongin over dinner.

"How so?"

"Because I'm not religious, and I told him that, and he started like interrogating me, it was weird," you confess, taking a bite of cereal.

"Is he religious?"

"I suppose so, I mean I told him that I was raised Catholic, so he started assuming the worst," you explain.

"Isn't that religious discrimination?"

"I don't know what to call it, but it was weird," you shrug it off.

"Sounds weird, but any whom," Jeongin changes the subject, "tomorrow I'm leaving early to help with this fundraiser at church, so don't be surprised if I'm not here when you wake up tomorrow."

Jeongin's whole weekends revolved around church, whether it was because he was helping plan a youth trip or assisting the nuns or even helping run a fundraiser, he kept busy with the volunteer work. And of course he was also an avid participant in Sunday Mass, communion, and other traditions.

"m'kay," you figure, rubbing your tired eyes, "my mom and dad are coming over tomorrow," you inform him.

"Oh, fun," he retorts sarcastically.

"Yeah, fun," you say in that same sarcastic tone as him.

"D'you need help like hiding anything?" Jeongin asks timidly.

"Hiding anything?" you ask.

"Like," Jeongin blushes, hiding his face in his hands before he speaks, "s-sex stuff."

"Oh, I mean if you wouldn't mind?"

"I just don't want your parents to freak out on you, remember last time?"

How could you forget the last time your parents came over and they accidentally found a condom in your bathroom, immediately going into a five hour long lecture about how they expected better from you and that you needed to go to a confessional to be forgiven for your sins of sexual impurity.

"Yeah, trust me I remember," you chuckle, "that would be nice, I have all that shit in a box, so I'll just give you the box."

You rise up from your seat at the dining table and walk into your room, grabbing the medium sized box from the closet and walking into the living room with it when suddenly, you trip, and the contents of the box spill everywhere.

"Ow, fuck," you groan, clenching your knee, which you hit on the ground.

Jeongin is quick to stand up and rush to your side, helping you up. You watch as his face eventually turns to the spilled contents of the box. "What in the fuck is that?" he questions.

Jeongin never swore. He thought swearing was pointless and made someone sound trashy, but here he was, swearing.

"It's a dildo," you whisper an explaination.

"B-but wh-why does it l-look like that?"

"It's supposed to look like a dragon, like, uhm, dick," you explain with an embarrassed tone.

"That's really weird, I hope you know, also that thing is so like big how does it- how do y- how can it- how-"

"A lot of lube, and a lot more patience," you half-joke.

"And what is this?" Jeongin exclaims as he picks up the rose shaped toy.

"I-it's a clit sucker," you explain as you grab it from him and put the toy back in the box.

"And what are these?" he holds up a pair of nipple clamps.

"Nipple clamps," you inform him.

"Why in the hell would anyone ever use something like that," Jeongin speaks to himself.

"Don't knock em till you try em," you insist.

You take the nipple clamps from his grasp and put them back in the box before Jeongin is picking something else up, "and what is this?"

"It's a butt plug."

"But why does it have a tail? Ew wait this thing has been in your butt!?"

"It's clean!" you exclaim, "it has a tail because- well-well because I just like it I d'know?"

"Weird," Jeongin mumbles as he puts the toy in the box.

"And what is this?" he holds up a flogger.

"A flogger, you hit people with it," you explain as you take it from the boy.

"But wouldn't that hurt?"

"That's kind of the point, Jeongin," you hum, "hold out your arm, it's not as bad as you think it is, I promise."

After a moment of thinking it through, Jeongin holds out his arm, you lightly hit him with the flogger, "oh that isn't bad at all," Jeongin hums.

"Mhm," you nod, placing the flogger back in the box.

"Oh, what's this?" Jeongin holds up a tentacle grinder.

"It's a grinder," you tell him.

"What does it do?" he asks sheepishly.

"Well," you pause, embarrassment creeping onto your face, "you like grind on it, like you grind your clit on it."

"Oh," Jeongin's face falls before putting the grinder back in the box.

"I hope you don't think I'm weird or gross or anything now," you confess to him.

"I-I d'think y-your weird," he promises, "I promise, y-you're not weird for having s-sex. It's n-natural."

"But you don't have sex, so I j-"

"Who said I've never had sex?"

You stare at him blankly, "you-you've..."

"Well like it's not sex but like I've masturbated before," he confesses.

Your lips make an o shape as you nod your head, "oh, th-that's good?"

"That's good!?"

"I d'know what to say! I was just surprised!"

"Well I mean I'm human y-you don't think I'm weird do you?"

"No! Of course not!" you insist.

The silence that passes between the two of you is almost deafening. You glance down and that's when you notice it, the bulge in Jeongin's pants. "Je-Jeongin," you mumble.

"I-I-I should go to my room!"

Just as he's about to get up you grab his wrist, the way he looks at you tells you a thousand words. "Stay," you practically plead with him.

"I-I haven't, I don't know how-" he whimpers under your intense gaze.

"I'll teach you," you reassure him, "anything you want, I'll teach you."

No words are exchanged between the two of you as he leans forward and slams your lips onto his own. He's messy and sloppy and inexperienced. "Calm down," you muse to him, "enjoy this, we have all the time in the world," you reassure him.

You gently cup his jaw with your left hand, your right hand running through his hair, "darling, calm down," you mumble against his eager lips.

"Can't get enough of you, d'you know how many nights I've had to listen to you whining and whimpering and falling apart on these things? Hm?" he groans into a kiss, "how I've beat my cock to the thought of you? D'you know about that?"

"Jeongin," you murmur, melting further and further into the kiss, "thought of you too," you confess.

"Want to watch you," he states, breaking apart from the kiss, "I want to watch you fuck yourself, the way you do at night."

That is how you find yourself naked on your couch, Jeongin watching you intently as you ride one of your dildos. "Hmm, so all you do is ride that toy and think of me? That's pathetic," he scoffs, watching you like he's disinterested, but you can tell from the tent in his pants that he is anything but disinterested.

"And all you do is what? Hm? Stroke your cock?" you remark.

"You know, filthy whores like yourself shouldn't fucking talk," Jeongin stands up and kneels next to you, taking your nipple in his mouth, making you gush around the toy, "recite first Corithians 6:18," he demands.

"J-Jeongin," you whine, eyes rolling to the back of your head.

Jeongin is pulling you by your hair, making you look at him, "recite it."

"Flee from sexual immorality. All other sins a person commits are outside the body, but whoever sins sexually, sins against their own body," you quote.

"That's it honey, yet here you are, riding this fucking toy every night, thinking of me," Jeongin's words are venom, "don't worry though, I'll make a good girl out of you."

You can only whimper at his filthy words.

And that is what started your little taboo tradition, every Sunday night you'd be face down ass up on Jeongin's bed, getting pounded from behind, and you'd only get to cum if you could recite five Bible verses for him.

Jeongin was definitely no priest but he brought you closer to the pearly gates than any real priest ever could.

[tokyo-daaaamn-ji-gang]

How would they react if their crush shoved them out of the way to hug their friend instead of them (ALSOOO I LOVE UR WRITING AND I LITERALLY GET SO HAPPY WHEN YOU UPDATE UR BLOG EVEN WHEN ITS NOT ABT WRITING HCS ETC AT ALL)

Aww thanks, glad you like them! I kinda imagined the reader walking past instead of shoving them but here's them being ignored when they hold their arms out for a hug!

Takemichi- He has the saddest expression on his face, he looks like somebody just died (it was his happiness). This has literally ruined his whole day. 

Mikey- Pouts, that wasn't very nice of you to just ignore him like that and no one ignores him. Immediately walks over to you to confront you about it, he wants to know why you just did that.

Draken- Frowns but shrugs and "moves on". Basically he doesn't let it show that it effects him but mentally he thinks about it all day.

Baji- Curses under his breath, he's going to go fight a bunch of guys to calm down now

Chifuyu- He looks like he's about to cry for a moment, he got his hopes up that he was going to get a hug only for you to walk straight past him. Vaguely wonders what he did wrong and decides to study more later (read manga). 

Mitsuya- He's pretty chill about it, a bit shocked at first but mostly understands that you probably just didn't want a hug in that moment and that's ok. 

Hakkai- Sighs in relief, he only did that because Yuzuha told him to (she knowd he likes you and is trying to get him to make a move already).

Pah- Frowns but assumes you just didn't see him, maybe he'll try again some other time.

Peh- He looks so sad for a moment but quickly shrugs it off. It probably doesn't mean anything right?

Smiley- His eyes snap open in surprise and his smile fades for a minute before he puts it back on. He spends the rest of the day muttering unhappily and seems to threaten more guys then usual. 

Angry- Blinks as he takes in what just happened, he's disappointed but tries not to let it bother him so much. You walking past doesn't mean you hate him or anything.

Mucho- Calls your name and asks you about it, figures the direct approach is the best way to clear things up. 

Sanzu- Says nothing but stares after you for a bit too long. Spends the rest of the day silently being annoyed, not with you though, he's annoyed with himself for hoping that would work.

Kisaki- He really didn't like that, spends a lot of time going over the scenario in his head over and over. He's trying to figure out where he went wrong and how to avoid it in the future. 

Hanma- Oh you want to play games with him? He can play games with you too! Hugs you and introduces himself as your boyfriend to your friends, all while having a very smug grin on his face.

Kazutora- "oh..." he just kinda stares blankly the rest of the day, being more quiet then usual. He's upset but tries to hide it (doesn't do a great job).

Taiju- Says your name, calling out to you. He doesn't exactly yell but he says it loudly enough that it can be mistaken as yelling. Of course he's marching over to you to ask what that was about. 

Koko- Pouts for a second before sticking his tongue out and acting like that didn't just bother him. He thinks about other ways he can win you over with later.

Inui- Shrugs and walks off, no one can actually tell if that bothered him or not. He's good at hiding his disappointment. 

Izana- Frowns and tries to convince himself that he didn't want a hug anyway. Watches you very closely though, if you offer anyone else a hug then he's going to get a bit jealous. This also makes him want a hug even more, he plans to get one eventually. 

Kakucho- He's a bit confused, he really thought that was going to work but it didn't. Worries that he did something to upset you. 

Shion- Just stays standing there, he thinks you're coming back after you're done talking to your friend. 

Ran- Sighs before walking after you, he stops quickly to whisper to you that you owe him now before he walks away, giving you a half hearted wave and smile before he disappears round the corner.

Rindou- He's just frowning a lot, frowns the rest of the day. But quickly says nothings wrong when Ran tries to question him. 

[unoislazy]

‘Til The Caged Bird Sings

(Part 1)

Mizu x Mixed! Fem! Reader

Disclaimer; This is less of a chapter and more of a prologue for what’s to come.

I see your requests and I have begun to work on a few of them, but I have a few ideas that I had started previously that I would like to get to first. Thank you for your patience.

————————————————————

Marriage was not something you expected to be a part of your life. You truly believed you would never find someone who completed you enough to be set on sealing the deal. All the men you had met were arrogant and egotistical, so hellbent on fueling their ego that they refused to treat you like a human being. They believed that if they had been seen being paired with an ‘unreal’ like you, they would lose any fortune or honor they might have had, no matter how small. If that was how you would be treated, maybe that wasn't the life for you. Your life was by no means glamorous, if you had married it wouldn’t have been for monetary gain by anysense, for your parents maybe, but you got the short end of the stick no matter what. It more than likely would simply have been just to extend someone else's family lineage, then again who would want to have impure blood mixed with their own. Other than the desperate men who were practically chomping at the bit to get you, likely just to sell you off to someone else.

Not wanting anything like that for yourself, you had given up your life at home in favor of living a peaceful life on your own, far away from anyone who could treat you otherwise. You stayed out of people's way and just went about business as usual.

That was until you had met Mizu.

Your paths had crossed in the most unusual way, almost as if it was fate. You had met her on a day that you had to visit the market, which was peculiar on its own considering you very rarely went into town. You hadn’t seen her get into a fight, but you did witness the very bloody outcome first hand. You knelt down before her bloody body which had been just haphazardly strewn about against a wall. She struggled to keep her eyes open as they shifted to you, you were unsure if she could even see you properly but you could just barely make out the blue hue as her eyelids began to shut.

She was a mess and no one else around her seemed to care. You didn’t have much medicinal knowledge but you thought it right to help with what you could. So, you slung her over the back of your horse along with the supplies you had bought and made your way back to your home.

And that is where she stayed.

She was extremely skeptical at first, extremely jumpy and quite hesitant to even allow you to get near her. It took some convincing but eventually she had learned to trust you, even just the slightest bit. You meant no harm to her and she eventually came to realize that. She didn’t understand why, you owed her nothing, you didn't even know who she was but you still helped. You paid no mind to her skepticism or her ‘flaws’ and continued to treat her just as you saw fit.

Because you knew what it was like to be considered a demon.

You too had mixed blood and because of that you had always been cast away, looked down upon, and pushed to the side without another thought. You had been poked and prodded at like you were some otherworldly being that amounted to nothing more than the mud underneath people's shoes.

Once you both came to the realization that you had this fact in common, your relationship slowly began to build from there.

Because of Mizu’s injured state you both spent a lot of time around each other and while Mizu wasn’t incredibly talkative at first she had begun to open up to you. You two began to share stories with each other, spend late nights together, sometimes just sitting in silence enjoying each other's company. You had never met someone who had so much in common with you and neither had she, you both completed each other in a way that you almost didn’t think to be true. It took a while for you to gain her trust, but once you had you two were inseparable. Every chore you had around the house, Mizu insisted on helping, any place you needed to go, Mizu insisted on coming with. She never left your side and you never truly left hers either.

For once in her life, Mizu had finally begun to feel comfortable around someone, which was something she wasn’t able to say for a long time. She had gotten comfortable enough that she no longer felt the need to wear her glasses or pull her hair so far back, or even wear the baggy clothes she had initially gotten used to wearing. When she was around you, she felt as if she could truly be herself, she could wear whatever she wanted, she could finally let go as if no one was waiting to ridicule her and strike her down.

She felt safe.

She didn’t think she’d ever get to say that about anyone but there she was, standing before you, a few years later. You both were dressed in your best attire as you conducted a very makeshift ceremony. You both knew it wouldn’t be legal for you to get married officially, it was one thing that you both were mixed and it was an entirely new issue that you were both women. So you decided to do it yourself, sure it wouldn’t be legally recognized, but who cares? All that matters is that you both agreed that you loved each other enough to want to vow to protect each other at any cost. If anything, you appreciated it more than what was normally done and said at weddings.

You couldn’t be happier. You lived a quiet life, now with a wonderful wife by your side who was willing to do practically anything for you, and you would do the same for her. One day you had decided to surprise her by going out to buy a horse for her, you figured it would be better than you both just trading your poor old horse. You laughed as you watched Mizu attempt to groom the horse she had picked; with Mizu being Mizu, she chose the most stubborn one anyone could have possibly gone for. You watched on as she cautiously reapproached the rambunctious stallion, surprised she had gotten so far to begin with.

You leaned your head on your hands as you rested your weight on the wooden fence of the field, your eyes not once leaving Mizu as you focused on what you could see of her facial features.

She was probably one of the most beautiful women you had ever seen. How any one could’ve even considered to claim that she was a demon or a monster, you would never know. She might have started off quite rude and abrasive but you couldn’t blame her for that, you would’ve too if one minute you were on the street and the next in some random person's house. But once her personality began to shine through and she began to slowly reveal parts of herself piece by piece, you slowly began to fall for her. You would’ve been a fool not to.

You snapped out of your thoughts, refocusing on Mizu, watching as her eyes squinted ever so slightly as she began to smile, her efforts paid off so she approached the stallion without any added effort. You cheered for her, walking onto the field with her as she continued to ever so gently pet the stallion.

“I told you I could.” She gloated in a joking manner, turning to you with a very proud smile on her face.

“And I never said you couldn’t.” You responded, matching her tone with a smile. She had taken her hand off of the horse and turned to face you as you linked your arm with hers, pulling yourself much closer to her.

“You thought about it.” She teased while sending you a challenging, yet very playful, glare.

“I did not.” You laughed at the childish nature of the conversation. You never would have guessed that stoic woman you had met years before would even think to have a conversation such as this.

You gave the woman a very soft peck on the cheek before telling her,

“I’m going to go back into the house to finish up some things, are you coming with me?” You asked. She thought about it for a second before turning back to her newly befriended horse,

“No, I think I’ll spend a little more time out here with him.” She replied, to which you smiled and nodded.

You made your way back inside, humming a tune that you had heard playing when you had visited the market last. It was light and airy, one that reminded you of something a songbird might sing. The notes were so fluttery it made you feel at peace, as if nothing could harm you.

You walked inside your home, shutting the door behind you as you continued to hum the tune. You grabbed your unfinished embroidery project and some thread and walked towards the spot where you usually sat when you were to complete a very long task. You had been so engrossed in your task you had yet to notice the three other people that also occupied the room.

By the time you had noticed their presence however, it had been too late.

“Hey, I think we need to go out and buy more fruits we don’t-” Mizu paused, Her eyes widening as she looked on at the scene before her. The house you shared, now in complete mess, the table toppled over, bits and pieces of different decorations you both had now torn to shreds and thrown about on the floor. The embroidery that you had been working on had been left, thrown carelessly to the side and still unfinished.

The worst thing Mizu had come across was a few droplets of blood that had been left on the floor.

What if it was your blood? What if they had harmed you?

Luckily though, because of the amount of blood that had been left, it was clear that the wound had not been too deep.

But if it had been your blood, whoever had raised a hand to harm you was going to wish they had never made such a careless mistake

[a-substantial-trash-pile]

hey guess what. it's finally time for my Stardew Valley Loredump. i’m about to ramble about my farmer and yo-yo/yoba and shane in a probably long-ass, disjointed post because i have a problem ok. not expecting anyone to read it all of course—just want to finally write these brainstorming shenanigans down. the loredump will be below the cut below the image 👇 (WARNING: IT'S LONG):

SAMUEL IZAWA:

*samuel is 28 years old, pan, japanese okinawan (no im not self projecting hahaha), and goes by he/they. main thing is that they’re from “our world” where stardew valley is a video game, but he died and ended up in the stardew universe. because i think isekai tropes are fun and silly. as the player, samuel can do things others in the stardew world can’t do, such as: 

summon the in-game HUD that’s only visible to him, so he can see health/energy levels and inventory and all that.

speaking of inventory, it’s essentially a pocket dimension samuel can shove stuff in. the inventory doesn’t really care about size/weight/etc as long as it’s something the system considers an “item.” so like samuel can put a whole ass four poster bed in there but he can’t do that to a person or a whole house. samuel just needs to touch the item to make it disappear into his inventory. he can then summon it back out when he needs it. the game’s inventory limit system remains the same. samuel gets 12 slots on their own, but if they have a bag on them it increases to 36.

can access the player menu you can normally access in game. so like profile, skills, collections, relationships, etc are all there. no options or quit tab though. having the relationship tab is a nightmare for samuel, who has major insecurities about what people think of him. that tab is a quantifiable measure on how much people like him. it a real brain demon for him to know it exists and is right there for him to access anytime. 

can see the “stats” of food and healing items. hp/energy recovery amounts, buffs, etc. 

*funny thing is that samuel has never played SDV himself and only has knowledge based on what he’s heard and seen online secondhand. ironically he was planning on playing the game for the first time before the whole dying thing ruined it. they can’t even remember how they died, but it doesn’t bother them as much as they think it should. they didn’t leave much behind in that life.

*anyway, i’m talking a lot of game terms here, but don’t get it twisted. while samuel has all these game systems going on, the SDV world is very much a real one that doesn’t normally work by that logic. by that i mean time flows normally like in our world and there isn’t just 4 months in a year. things exist outside the valley. there’s a whole planet of places and people. 

*luckily samuel has help in navigating this new world in the form of yo-yo the junimo, who is the first living thing samuel sees when he first wakes up in that joja cubicle. yo-yo helps explain a lot of things and guide samuel around in its own abrasive way. he’s also there to be like, “hey i gave you a second chance at life so you kinda owe me actually. sign this contract.” and samuel, who is a pushover and also confused, is just like, “ok.” (yo-yo sounds like danny devito btw. because i think it’s funny.) 

*i call the contract a “magical girl contract” because that’s essentially what it is. samuel gets access to extra powers/abilities on top the stuff he can already do as a player. in return he fights monsters n shit for yo-yo and generally does things for them that they can’t do easily on their own. the extra benefits include: 

higher pain tolerance. which isn’t always a good thing. especially when you tend to not be great with self-preservation like samuel is. 

can heal most injuries by just eating/drinking stuff to regain hp.

yo-yo can teleport the both of them around as needed, but it’s tiring and it drains a lot of magic. distance matters too.

yo-yo can spawn items but it drains magic as well. the more valuable/rare the item, the more draining it is. spawning items is already a magic-intensive thing in the first place. also yo-yo isn’t creating the item out of nothing. they’re actually randomly taking it from wherever it already exists in the world. for example, say yo-yo “spawns” a jar of pickles. somebody in the world is going to open their fridge and discover their jar of pickles is missing or maybe a grocery store will have a sudden empty spot on its shelf. yo-yo doesn’t have control of where the items are taken from (or so they claim).

samuel and yo-yo’s magic pools became connected so they can both do more than they could do on their own before. this is one of the reasons why yo-yo wanted a contract with samuel, who has a larger magic pool than normal due to being from another world. but it’s possible for one side to use up all the magic for the both of them. 

*samuel’s personality can be summed up as Awkward People-Pleasing Tired Sad Garbage Dork. either he’s dressed like a grandparent in sweaters and turtlenecks or he’s wearing a button up shirt with the collar undone and jeans. they usually have their neck covered in public to hide the mark of yoba embedded there. he has a “resting bitch face” as some may call, but that’s just because his brain is busy over-analyzing 193828 different things. he loves being outside in the grass and dirt, looking at bugs n shit. he’s also a nerd who likes to play video games and ramble about the lore in them (he likes RPGs the most, but if the game’s got a good story and cool world, he’s into it). they like to do things with their hands like model building/painting. in their new stardew life, they get into woodcarving after willy teaches them the basics (he carves shane a little chicken). 

*samuel does NOT know how to say “no.” absolute pushover. their self-worth is based on how much they’re liked by others, which isn’t healthy obviously. he has a fear that the only way he can be liked is by being useful. he’s scared that he is inherently a bad and selfish person, because he can’t say for sure if he’s helping others purely out of kindness or because it just makes him feel better about existing. deep down there’s anger/frustration that’s accumulated over the years, anger towards himself and also others because he’s always doing things for other people—going above and beyond—but it never feels like enough. at the same time though, they hate it when these thoughts come up because they believe that you shouldn’t go into helping somebody expecting that you’ll get something out of it. he hates how much of a hypocrite he is. he hates how he bases so much of his self-worth on the opinions of others, but feels helpless to it. they usually just push these emotions down because samuel feels guilty about them. how can they be a good person if they’re thinking like this? how can they deserve to exist with this mindset? however they get a chance to let out the anger/bitterness/frustration through fighting monsters. kind of disassociating in a way. this also isn’t a good thing because his demeanor is much colder and scarier during combat. having someone who’s felt powerless for so long suddenly gain power is a dangerous thing.

*this mindset when monster fighting shatters when samuel meets krobus and realizes that monsters aren’t just the simple enemy NPCs their brain had been automatically categorizing them as. guilt galore. he gets real depressed about that for a while but yo-yo, krobus, and shane are there to help him. 

*SPEAKING OF SHANE… it’s crush at first sight for samuel because hot damn is shane their type. i mean just look at him. mamma mia. haha anyyyway, they first meet at the stardrop saloon. samuel’s waiting at the bar for his to-go order near where shane is drinking. shane’s looking sad, so samuel gives in and decides they’ll start a convo to maybe distract him from whatever’s bothering him. samuel employs the “crack a dumb joke to hide the fact that i’m nervous because i’m talking to a hot person and then use that opening to introduce myself” strat. shane, being an asshole, is like, “oh so you’re the new farmer. here’s a tip: don’t bother me.” samuel takes 999 damage and their brain immediately goes “THIS IS MY FAULT I FUCKED UP like who wants to be talked to by a stranger when they’re sad goddammit why am i so bad at this?!!” it’s overall not a great first impression. after that, samuel tries to avoid shane out of embarrassment, but circumstances keep making them run into each other. for instance, samuel works a lot with marnie with her being a mentor figure to him in animal husbandry, so he and shane have a lot of opportunity to interact through that (plus marnie is secretly trying to get them closer to each other). through these meetings and shenanigans, samuel and shane get to know each other better until one day they’re friends. then good friends. then best friends. then kiss friends. then marry friends. :)

YOBA (A.K.A. YO-YO): 

*yo-yo is ????? years old and goes by any pronouns but most of the time it's it/they.

*yo-yo is actually THE yoba, but they’re not the completely benevolent creator-of-all-things humans have made them out to be. maybe they were in the past, but now they’re selfish and rude and swear a lot. but they do still care, even if they don’t admit it (tsundere-ass). yoba is currently stuck in the form of a little junimo and is substantially weakened because it gave too much of itself away to the world in the past and got burned for it. because the world kept taking and taking. and now there’s war and pollution and shit and yoba/yo-yo is maybe just a teensy tiny bit angry and bitter now. but it’s ok because now they got this human from another reality to help them reclaim the pieces of itself. and maybe along the way relearn how to love the world again.  

*oh also yoba didn’t create the whole planet like the creation story claims. they’re technically an alien that came across a young planet full of life and decided to stay and help it develop. 

*main reason yo-yo made a contract with samuel is because it needs help finding/reclaiming the pieces of itself. pieces can usually be found in strong monsters empowered by the piece. this isn’t always the case though. sometimes it’s in an ancient artifact. sometimes it’s in a specific place like a temple. sometimes it’s in a person. 

*samuel doesn’t have to deal with having an existential crisis about yo-yo, since he’s from our world where yoba doesn’t even exist as a god. yo-yo claims to be the one responsible for bringing samuel over into the stardew universe, but there are holes in their story. where did yoba even find the power to do such a thing when they’re in such a weakened state? mysterious. 

*the first time yoba reveals itself to shane is kind of chaotic. it’s in the middle of the night when yo-yo suddenly appears in shane’s room, grabs his face with its little stick arms and yells, “WAKE UP!!! YOUR BOYFRIEND IS IN MORTAL PERIL!!!” shane is like, “WHAT THE F–”     it was an act of desperation on yo-yo’s part, because samuel was in trouble and shane was the only one it could think of going to for help. essentially samuel meets something Bad in the deep mines, something that takes him out of commission and puts him in a trance state while draining his lifeforce. y’know, the classic kind of trance state where you need to figure out how to get the person back–how to snap them out of it. yo-yo tried and failed, so that’s where shane comes in. it’s the classic “love-interest-breaks-main-character-out-of-mind-control-with-sheer-power-of-love” trope. except shane does punch samuel during it. lovingly. in the face. hey it works ok.     after the chaos is over and everyone’s safe and gathered together, samuel and yo-yo explain everything to shane (well more like samuel explains everything while yo-yo wishes outloud that they had their memory erasing powers back). shane, who is canonically an atheist, learns that this talking pottymouthed jerkass apple is actually THE yoba and is just like, “yeah. this might as well happen.” and then he remains atheist because what else are you going to do when you learn that god is a talking pottymouthed jerkass apple who calls you a bitch and is also responsible for your partner having to go do dangerous shit. he and yo-yo have a rocky relationship at first to say the least. but once they both realize how much the other cares about samuel, things get a little better. 

*yeah, yoba may be a bitch and they may be angry and they may be bitter, but they really do care, even if they try to convince themselves otherwise. even though so much got taken from it, it still cares about humans and dwarves and shadow people and everything else on the planet. and when it eventually comes down to it, yoba will step up to protect what it loves, even if it means losing everything again. 

SHANE FINCH: 

*this post was technically supposed to just be about my farmer and yo-yo’s lore and stuff, but i gotta give some personal headcanons i have about shane… like for instance his last name is “finch.” because i thought the bird theme was cute. he’s 29 years old, bi, and half asian, half white (in our world that asian half is korean). i’m not being specific because i don’t know if korea even exists in the stardew world, since all we know in the game is that there’s a “ferngill republic” and a “gotoro empire.” i was thinking of just headcanoning that stardew’s planet is essentially the same as earth. so like most of the same countries/nations exist except the history diverged a bit along the way, leading to the ferngill republic and gotoro empire. OK SORRY for the tangent—back on topic.

*so shane is a trans man who started transitioning back in high school. he had two best friends who were very supportive and really helped him on his journey to figure himself out. those two friends were like family to him. it was good that he had this support because his parents were always pretty shitty and shane transitioning just made them act even shittier. the only good family member of shane’s is marnie, who was supportive, but she lived far away, was busy, AND wasn’t on good terms with her sister (shane’s mom), so shane didn’t get to see her much. 

*the moment shane became a legal adult, he got away from his parents, finding a place with his two best friends and moving in together. oh and his friends’ names were rosa and heath. should’ve probably mentioned that earlier oops.     shane, rosa, and heath go to the same college together, suffer student loans, graduate, etc. haven’t thought of what shane would get a degree in yet—most likely something “generic” because he’s unsure of what he wants to do himself (i feel u bby). 

*ok so rosa and heath were dating since high school, but they were so comfortable with shane and vice versa that things never got that awkward living together. however when rosa and heath got married (“yoba, FINALLY,” shane would say), shane felt like it was time to find his own place, much to the devastation of his bffs. the apartment ended up close to where rosa and heath lived of course—the couple made sure of it (“stop backseating my apartment hunting!” “MAKE US”). 

*rosa and heath get pregnant and have a healthy baby girl that they name jasmine. i headcanon jas as black (from heath’s side) and portuguese (rosa’s side). everyone is thrilled about the baby. shane was immediately offered godfather role and he happily accepted. jas was the cutest baby ever and he adored her. he babysat jas all the time. 

*jas was 4 years old when rosa and heath tragically passed away in a car accident. they were coming home from a business dinner when they lost control of their car on some black ice and slid into oncoming traffic. shane was babysitting jas when he got the call. in the span of one cold winter night, shane and jas’s world shattered. 

*rosa and heath didn’t have any reliable relatives either. those relatives only came to take the money and belongings. shane was the only one jas had, so he adopted her. he tried his best to pick up the pieces. he really did. he lasted for a year trying to raise a kid on his own with the salary of a dead-end job, but he knew the situation wasn’t good with the money and how much his mental health was spiraling. he knew he and jas were in dire need of more support (“jas deserves better than this”). so he turned to the one person he had left to rely on: his aunty marnie. and that’s how shane and jas ended up in pelican town.

*shane’s joja jacket was actually originally rosa’s. rosa worked as an accountant for joja and would get free promotional items all the time from the company. the jacket was one of the only things she actually ended up using because “it’s pretty comfy for being joja bs.” she would wear it all the time, much to her more fashion-conscious husband’s chagrin (yet he would patch up any holes she’d get in it anyway). after rosa died, shane kept her jacket. there were a lot of memories in it. 

~~~

ok that’s it for now. if anyone actually read all that, thank you for even wasting your time to process my ramblings. i’m sorry it’s so fucking long like jfc.

*who is mr. qi?

[modelbus]

Anyone else have a newfound love for this song and an addiction to task force 141? No? Just me?

To my mcyt readers: …I can’t explain. Just know that is ✨ different ✨ from my usual. (Quite Suggestive) To the COD readers I've attracted: I haven't played the games and reality is what I decide to make it (feel free to send asks educating me or info dumping <3)

Pairing: John Price x Gn!Reader

Too sweet

Baby, I can never tell How do you sleep so well?

”Morning Captain.” The words are practically a ritual, although you know he won’t respond. He never does this early in the morning.

There were a lot of unwritten rules in 141. When you first joined, you fucked them all up. Continuously. More often than not, it was Soap who laughed at you while Price patiently explained why you can’t joke about Ghost being afraid of snakes.

This rule, though, only took you a few days to catch onto. The “don’t talk about the sleepless nights” rule. Everyone knew why that rule existed; you’d seen enough combat to not be that naive. You’d been there enough to wake up before the sunrise, to watch the sky bleed orange.

And that’s exactly why you don’t ask Price about the circles under his eyes. If he’s not up doing paperwork, he’s up for other reasons. You don’t pity him; being Captain isn’t something you could ever do.

“Had a dream that Gaz found a goat and convinced you to make it the base pet.” You continue. His lips quirk up, gaze turning amused, so you soldier on. “Then it ate Ghost’s clothes, so he kicked it out of the base and Gaz quit the task force over it. And Soap claimed he could speak to it, but I called bullshit on him and he disappeared.”

”Disappeared to where?”

“Hell, maybe? That’s where he fucking belongs.” You smile at him, and his eye roll—you pretend it’s fond—seems like a victory of its own.

You’re too sweet for me You're too sweet for me

“No.”

The finality of his word rings clear, but you persist. You were never too good at stopping before you crossed that line, never too good at giving up while you were ahead. Things, more often than not, ended up right as rain.

“Price—“ You try.

“You’re too young, and it’s wrong.” Never before have you seen a man so tortured. It wasn’t a question of if he wanted you, it was a question if he would let himself want you. And you both knew it. “I won’t take your innocence from you.”

You scoff, following him down the hall and out of the briefing room. So much for staying after to help him gather papers.

“I’m a soldier, hardly innocent!”

“Compared to me, you are!” He turns, and you automatically look up to his eyes. As you said before: tortured. “I’m harsh, and we both know it. You deserve to be with someone soft, someone who can be sweet with you.”

“I don’t want to be.”

From the second you laid eyes on John Price, you knew you’d never want to be. It wasn’t his age, although you never minded an older man. It was his passion, his care, his leadership and skills and everything else about him. He was magnetic, drawing you in despite everything.

And you weren’t blind to the way his gaze always met yours in a room, either.

Price sighs heavily. “Go to bed, soldier.”

Tactful retreat it is, then. “Good night, Price.” You murmur, turning away.

A pause, then another sigh. This one is lighter. “Good night.”

I work late where I’m free from the phone And the job gets done But you worry some, I know

Knocking twice, you don’t wait for Price to respond before entering his office. His light was on, shining out a signal to anyone in the hallway that he was awake.

”You’re about to owe me.” You announce, ignoring his groan.

“I was working.”

“And now you’re going to eat dinner. I had to smuggle these from the dining hall, you know.” You drop the napkin bundle you had made on his desk, opening it to reveal the food. His and yours.

“I was going to get food later.”

“Liar.��� You sit in the chair across from his desk, grabbing a bread roll. “No drinks, because even I can’t smuggle that out.”

“I could get you in trouble for this.” He points out.

“But you won’t. I’m your favorite.”

Price reaches forward, taking his bread roll. Mimicking you, although he never puts his pen down. The paperwork spread out in front of him is just like every other night you’ve brought him food.

“Who says you’re my favorite? Maybe it’s Ghost.” Price smiles, and you beam back at him.

“Don’t insult me like that. I’m proud of my title as your favorite. I mean, I am the only one that you let lounge in your office.”

“Tenuously.”

“Still.”

His attention turns back to filling out his paperwork, leaving you to sit there. Per usual. You stay until all the food is gone, leaving him with only crumbs on his desk to show for it.

Sweeping the napkin and crumbs into his desk, you pause by the doorframe. His hat obscures his face, but you know he’s aware that you’re still there.

“Get some sleep sometime tonight, yeah?” You hedge.

“I should be the one telling you that.”

“Someone gotta look after you, Price. Besides, I’m not the one who doesn’t go to bed before daylight.”

Knocking at the door to signal your exit, you head out.

You treat your mouth as if it’s heavens gate The rest of you like you’re the TSA

"Never have I ever... been a virgin." Soap says, raising his beer.

"That's not how it fucking works." You argue. "You were a virgin at some point, obviously."

"You know wha' I mean."

"Just pick something else." Ghost butts in gruffly.

This is why you prefer not to play drinking games with the task force. Soap always ends up fucking them up first, and then it manages to devolve into chaos. For an elite spec ops team, 141 sure did struggle at these games.

"Fine." Soap groans, taking a drink of his beer while he thinks.

"In the meantime, I'll go-" Gaz starts, but immediately gets cut off.

"Never have I ever been a virgin right now."

You stare at Soap. He stares back. "I'm going to beat your ass for targeting during training tomorrow." You threaten him, taking a sip of your wine. You're the only one drinking wine here, but you prefer the taste of it over beer or whatever the others are drinking.

As you tilt your glass back, your eyes lock with Price's. You're reclined on the floor with Soap while he's in a chair, giving you the perfect line of sight on each other. He watches with dark eyes as you swallow, tracing your figure with a gaze so heavy that it makes you shiver.

In his hand, his whiskey remains untouched.

"You just need to get laid and then you won't be such an easy target." Soap is saying, oblivious to the tension simmering between you and Price.

"Unlike you dumbasses, I'm don't want to sleep with the first moving thing I see." You don't look away from Price pointedly. "I prefer to wait for the right person."

Ghost makes a disinterested noise from the chair next to Price, making you flick your gaze to him. He inclines his head slightly, well-aware of the thing between you and Price, but doesn't say a word. Thank fuck for Ghost.

"I'm heading to the bathroom. Don't set the room on fire while I'm gone. Soap."

"God, I didn't do anything yet!"

"Yet."

"I'll go too." Price says lowly, his footsteps tailing yours. It's not until you're in the hallway and out of earshot from the others that he speaks to you. "You're a tease, doll."

"I'm aware." You turn to grin at him, but startle at his proximity. He steps forward and you take a matching one back, your back hitting the hallway wall.

"In front of everyone, too." He murmurs, boxing you in. Your heartbeat pounds loudly in your ears, but not from fear. You know what fear feels like, and it certainly isn't the warmth pooling in your gut. "Begging for it."

"You know I have been."

His head dips, and just for a moment the bitter taste of whiskey invades your tastebuds. Your eyes flutter shut as his tongue swipes across yours, and when you open them he's gone.

Point, you.

As soft as the rain Pretty as a vine As sweet as a grape

John Price was everywhere.

His hands on your hips, his bookshelf pressing against your back, his mouth on yours. Every inch of him invaded every inch of you, and you loved it.

As it turns out, all you had to do was get shot in the field. A graze made well worth it by this reaction.

“Don’t you ever pull that shit again.” Price says into your mouth, hands tight on your skin like you’ll disappear. You’d worry that they’d leave bruises, but you already know your love looking at the reminder of him.

“Or what?” You taunt when he pulls back for air.

“Or I’ll tie you to my fucking bed.”

The threat lights your blood on fire in a way it’s never done before. Want, roaring strong, sears through you.

“Truly a terrifying prospect, the guy I’ve been waiting to ask me out finally taking me to his bed—“

He smothers your laughter with his lips and tongue, hand coming up behind your head to protect it from the shelves. You tug at his hair, earned yourself a low addicting sound. Yeah, you need to hear that more. A lot more.

“What’d medical say?” Price asks, dipping his head to trail kisses along your neck. Because he had been waiting to ambush you the second you stepped into his office, you never got to tell him.

“Um.” You struggle to collect any rational thoughts as he nips at your neck, his beard and mustache scratching your skin. “They cleared me. Wrapped it and said I was good.”

“And what do you think I have to say about that?”

Trick question.

You groan, but it comes out less annoyed and more like something entirely different. He hums in response before you can even be embarrassed by the sound.

“I don’t want to run for training.” You complain.

“I think you’ve gotten enough things that you want from me.” As if to serve as an example, he presses a quick kiss to your lips before pulling back. Not too far: his hands on your hips ensure he’s still got a hold on you.

“…maybe.” You relent, staring up at him.

He smiles, reassuring, and you know this is going to stick. “Pretty thing.”

“I know you are.”

“I was talking about you, doll.”

And you knew he was, you were making a joke, but the way he says it has your cheeks flaming. He laughs, breath fanning over your hair, amused.

“Let’s grab food from the mess hall.” He suggests.

“You? Actually grabbing food? At a reasonable time?” It’s a goddamn miracle.

“Yeah yeah, don’t rub it in. Wipe that smile off your face.”

“Yes sir.” You don’t wipe the smile off your face.

“I had my tongue in your mouth, I think you can stop calling me sir. Or Captain, frankly.”

“What, you don’t like that stuff?”

His eyes widen briefly. “Oh, you little—“

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Private equity rips off its investors, too

I'm coming to DEFCON! TOMORROW (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On SATURDAY (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

It's amazing how many of the scams that have devastated our economy and everyday people owe their success to the fact that we assume that rich people know what they're doing, so if they're doing something, it must be real.

Think of how many people lost everything by gambling on junk bonds, exotic mortgage derivatives, cryptocurrency and web3, because they saw that the largest financial institutions in the world were going all-in on these weird, incomprehensible bets.

Then there are the people who are convinced that online advertising is built around a mind-control ray, because tech companies claim that's what they have ("I am an evil dopamine-loop-hacking wizard and I can sell anything to anyone!"), and because huge, sober blue-chip companies hand billions to these soi dissant svengalis. Sure, online ads are a swamp of clickfraud and garbage, but would these super smart captains of industry spend so much on online advertising if it didn't work super-well?

http://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

From our worms'-eye-view here on the ground, it's easy to assume that rich people and the people who sell them stuff are all on the same side. "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product," right? If Facebook is tormenting you with surveillance advertising, it must be doing so on behalf of the surveillance advertisers, for whom Mark Zuckerberg has bottomless reservoirs of honest, forthright impulses.

The reality is simultaneously weirder, and obvious in hindsight. The reason Zuck is tormenting you is that he's a remorseless sociopath who doesn't care who he hurts. He rips off everyone he can rip off, and that includes advertisers, who have seen steady price-hikes and lower-fidelity targeting, even as ad-fraud has skyrocketed while Facebook draws down its anti-fraud spending:

https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/

This is not to say that Facebook advertisers have your best interests at heart, that they aren't engaged in active deception in order to better themselves at your expense. Rather, it's to say that there's no honor among thieves, and Zuck is an equal-opportunity predator. Moreover, both Zuck and his advertisers are credulous dolts, so the mere fact that they are pouring money into something (advertisers: FB ads; Zuck: metaverse) it doesn't follow that these are real or important or the coming thing.

For me, the Ur-example of "rich people are dumb, even when it comes to money" is the private equity sector. I've written a lot about PE, and how destructive it is to the real economy, from Toys R Us to pet grooming:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/05/rugged-individuals/#misleading-by-analogy

How they killed Red Lobster:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

And how they actually created the death panels that Sarah Palin warned us about (it's OK, though: these death panels are run by the efficient private sector, not government bureaucrats):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

The devastating effect of private equity on the real economy is increasingly well understood, and a curious side-effect of this is that people assume that if PE is destroying their lives, they must be doing so on behalf of their investors, who are making bank.

But – like Zuck – PE bosses are just as happy to steal from their investors as they are to to steal from the workers and customers of the businesses they acquire on those investors' behalf. They swaddle this theft in performative complexity and specialized jargon, but when you strip all that away, you find more fraud.

All the misery that PE inflicts on workers, communities and customers are just a convincer in a Big Store con, a bid to make the scam seem credible. For a certain kind of investor, any economic activity that destroys communities and workers' livelihoods must be a good bet. This is the dynamic at work in the pitch of AI image-generator companies, who spend tens of billions on technology that there is no substantial market for:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/25/accountability-sinks/#work-harder-not-smarter

AI image generators represent a high-profile, extremely visible example of "a job that AI can do." Nevermind that AI illustration went from a novelty to a tired cliche in less than a year. Even if you think that AI illustrations are a perfect substitute for commercial illustrations, that still won't come anywhere near making AI companies a profit. Add up the entire wage bill for every commercial illustrator in the world, hand it to Open AI, and you're not even gonna cover the kombucha budget for Open AI's staff kitchens.

Hell, all the wages of every commercial illustrator that ever lived won't pay back even a fraction of the money the AI companies spent on image generators. The pauperization of an entire class of creative workers is just a canned demo, a way to fool investors into thinking that there is a whole universe of similarly situated workers whose wages can be diverted to AI companies. This is the logic of small-time spammers, scaled up to the scale of the entire S&P 500. Smalltime spammers looked at AI and thought, "OK, I can generate as much botshit as I want on demand for free. Science fiction magazines pay $0.10/word. So if I generate a billion words, I'll get $100 million." But that's not how any of that works: sf magazines don't buy botshit, and even if they did, the entire market for short fiction adds up to what Sam Altman spends on a single designer t-shirt. The point of destroying these beloved, useful things isn't to make a lot of money by taking their markets – it's to convince dopey, panicked rich people to give you lots of money you can steal, because they think you can do this to every market and they don't want to miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

Take "divi recaps": after a private equity firm acquires a company (by borrowing money against its assets), it typically declares a "special dividend," emptying out the company's cash reserves and pocketing them. A "divi recap" is when PE then takes out another massive loan against the company's (remaining) assets and pockets that:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/17/divi-recaps/#graebers-ghost

All of this happens under an opaque cloud, thanks to the light-to-nonexistent disclosure rules for PE. A public company has to open its books for the SEC, its investors, and the world. PE is private – and so are its finances. It is absolutely routine for PE bosses to put their spouses, kids, and pals on the payroll and hand them millions for doing little to nothing, all at the expense of their investors:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2022/02/sec-set-to-lower-massive-boom-on-private-equity-industry.html

PE bosses charge huge fees to their investors – not merely the usual 2-and-20 (2% of the funds under management and 20% of any profits) – but also a wide variety of special one-off fees that pile to the sky. They also dip into their investors' funds to issue themselves massive loans that they use to make side-bets, without telling the investors about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/10/monopoly-begets-monopoly/#gary-gensler

PE investors are chickens ripe for the plucking: take "continuation funds," which allow PE bosses to soak the rich people and pension funds who supply them with billions:

https://news.bloomberglaw.com/mergers-and-acquisitions/matt-levines-money-stuff-buyout-funds-buy-from-themselves

Remember 2-and-20? 2% of all the money you manage, every year, and 20% of all the profits. You'd think that these would be somewhat zero sum, right? If you use some of your investors' cash to buy a company, and then sell off that company for a profit, you get the 20%, but now the pot of money you're managing has gone down by the amount you used to buy the company, and so your 2% carry goes down, too.

But what if you sell your portfolio companies to yourself, using your investors' own money? When you do that, you continue to hold the company on your PE firm's books, meaning you continue to get the 2% carry, and you can pocket 20% of the sale price as a "profit":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/20/continuation-fraud/#buyout-groups

This is straight-up fraud, wrapped up in so much jargon that it can successfully masquerade as "financial engineering" ("financial engineering" is really just a euphemism for "fraud"). PE bosses keep coming up with new, exotic ways to steal from their investors. The latest scam is "tax receivable agreements":

https://archive.ph/RczJ9

On its face, this is a tax scam. When a company goes public, early investors generally hold stock in the original partnership or LLC; this company ends up holding a ton of shares in the new, public company. When they sell those non-public shares in the LLC, this creates a (potentially gigantic) tax credit.

A TRA hustle involves tracking down these LLC shareholders and convincing them to sign off on dumping the LLC's shares, which generates a huge tax credit for the public company. The hustler offers to split these credits with the LLC holders.

All of this is especially attractive to PE bosses, who often take a company private, do a bunch of "financial engineering" and then take it public again, leaving the PE firm as the owner of those LLC shares that can be converted to a TRA and a huge windfall – which the PE bosses pocket, because they (not their investors) are holding those credits.

This scam is really doing big numbers. KKR – the monsters who killed Toys R Us – just diverted $650 million in TRA loot, prompting a lawsuit from Steamfitters union pension fund, which had handed these jerks millions of its members' money to gamble with:

https://archive.ph/kqQvI

This highlights another very weird aspect of the PE scam: they are absolutely dependent on pension funds. To add insult to injury, PE funds are notorious union-busters – they use union money to buy companies and destroy their unions:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/05/mr-gotcha/#no-ethical-consumption-under-capitalism

People who try to understand the PE business model often give up, because it seems to make no sense, leading many to assume that they're too unsophisticated to grasp the complex financials here. For example, PE is absolutely dependent on massive loans as a way of looting its businesses, but it also often defaults on those loans. Why do banks and investors keep making huge loans to PE deadbeats? Because – like the PE fund investors – they are credulous dolts.

The reason PE seems like a scam is that it is a scam. It is a fractal scam – every part of it is a scam. You might have heard about the "carried interest" tax loophole that allows PE bosses to avoid billions in taxes on the money they steal from their investors, creditors, workers and customers. Most people assume "carried interest" has something to do with "interest" on a loan. Nope: "carried interest" is a 16th century nautical tax rule designed for mercantalist sea-captains who had an "interest" in the cargo they "carried":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/29/writers-must-be-paid/#carried-interest

But rich people and other "sophisticated investors" (like pension fund investment managers) are no smarter than the rest of us. They are herd animals. When they see other rich people piling into some scheme or asset class, they rush to join them, which makes the asset price go up, which makes them think they're smart (until the inevitable rug-pull). When one plute jumps off the Empire State Building, the rest of them jump, too.

Which is why there's more money flooding into PE than at any time in history, $2.62T in "dry powder," handed over to greedy, thieving PE bosses in a poker game where everyone is the sucker at the table:

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/2di1vzgjcmzovkcea8f0g/portfolio/private-equitys-dry-powder-mountain-reaches-record-height

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/08/sucker-at-the-table/#clucks-definance