#once again photo review of last month!!

[weepingactorsoverpopmusic]

[freyaphoria]

Run Away Together (Part II)

a/n: It's me again! I apologize for making you wait months for the second part of this. First of all, this is the continuation of the first part I wrote, the main story. Since everything got so mixed, I feel the need to state it again. This story is the continuation of the fic where reader and hwa tried to escape and joong shot reader in the leg. I will start writing the second part of Passion to Punishment. And I would like to thank my babe, @matzrionette , for her contributions♡ PLEASE READ THE FIC SHE WROTE, I READ IT THREE TIMES EVERY DAY

tw: yan!hongjoong, poor hwa:( , blood, violence, bone fracture, failed escape attempt, punishment, swearing, knife, gun, killing, being shot, fever, painkiller use, body bruise, bone breaking with an iron rod, fainting, slightly gore, manipulation, hurt comfort(HAJDMDJ sorry), I had so much fun writing Jongho's parts, Yunho is at the crime scene AGAIN, kinda seongjoong

wc: 6.5k

taglist: @aim-blossom

Yan!Matz masterlist

<- previous part

Hongjoong, with his hands covered in blood from bandaging his new doll, opened the basement door, locked the two of them inside, and went upstairs. He had to do it; he had to hurt them. The tension in the air was palpable as he ascended the creaky wooden stairs, each step echoing the weight of his decision. Hongjoong's mind raced with conflicting emotions. He knew that to protect you, protect Seonghwa, drastic measures were necessary, even if it meant compromising his own morals. The blood on his hands was a stark reminder of the lengths he was willing to go to keep you here. As he reached the top of the stairs, he know that the consequences of his actions would haunt him for a long time to come.

Seonghwa’s attempt to escape after months, and your somehow convincing him, was an indication that Hongjoong’s plans were going well. Did Seonghwa breaking his rules make him unhappy? Yes, it did cause him a measure of displeasure. However, at this moment, what truly mattered was not Hongjoong’s feelings. After all, in the grand scheme of things, he would ultimately get what he desired; he had the power to make Seonghwa worship him once again. That was not what mattered right now.

After stepping out of the shower, Hongjoong meticulously put on his new clothes, carefully combed, and dried his growing hair. This grooming routine ensured he looked exceedingly neat, normal, and entirely harmless. His youthful yet captivating appearance was a highly effective tool in gaining the trust of his unsuspecting victims. People were drawn to his neat, his warm smile, the soft and gentle tone of his voice, the light that sparkled in his eyes, the professional gestures he employed while speaking, and the seamless harmony of the words he chose. Just like Seonghwa did...

If he lingered at home any longer, he would be late, so he quickly got ready and packed his belongings into a backpack. The weather had gotten colder compared to two hours ago when he had shot one of his victims and dragged the other inside, and he was angry with himself for not wearing his jacket and putting it in his bag. After quickly getting into his car and starting it, he turned on the heater and took out the paper from the glove compartment. He knew where he was going, but he still wanted to check. He saw photos of a man in the file. In the first photo on his profile, the old man's wrinkled eyes were full of life and shone with a light that was unexpected from his age. Hongjoong took pleasure in very few things as much as he took pleasure in making lively people lose their zest for life.

When he reviewed the file again and reached the last page, he suddenly hit his forehead with his hand in frustration. He was supposed to inform someone before leaving the house, but it had completely slipped his mind. He quickly went to the contacts on his phone, scrolling through the list, and was just about to find the name of the person he needed to inform when the phone rang. The unexpected call interrupted his search, and he hesitated for a moment before answering. When he saw who was calling, he realized he was indeed late, and the person on the other end of the line was likely angry with him.

“Why the fuck are you late?”

“How the fuck are you talking to your hyung like that?” Hongjoong fastened his seatbelt and put the files back in the glove compartment.

"Hyung my ass. I’m freezing here, hurry up or I’ll screw you the first moment I see you.”

“Shut up, I’m in the car, I’m coming"

“Hurry up, asshole.” All he wanted was a little respect, but he was looking for it in the wrong place. Respect was currently in the basement, probably calming down his new little lover. Hongjoong drove the car out of the parking lot and hit the road.

︶꒦︶꒷︶︶꒷꒦︶︶︶꒷꒦‧ ₊˚・

You had started to come to your senses. Hongjoong, the most considerate person in the world, had taken the bullet out of your leg without any anesthetic and stitched it up, causing you to pass out from the pain. But being extremely considerate, he had given you a choice: “Pick your own punishment, either I take that bullet out without any drugs, or I don’t take it out and it stays there.” You were going to choose the second option at first, but because living with a constantly bleeding wound that nearly exposed your bone and getting infected in this dusty basement would be impossible, you chose the first option.

And oh, when he inserted a big tweezer into your leg to remove the bullet, the pain was so intense that you wished you would die from the infection. The searing agony felt like it would never end. Maybe you didn't realize he hurt you so much on purpose, but the last thing you remember is Seonghwa holding your hand tightly, his grip firm and unwavering. His eyes were swollen and red from crying, tears streaming down his face as he whispered words of comfort, trying to keep you conscious and hopeful. The room around you seemed to blur, but Seonghwa's presence was the only thing that kept you grounded in those harrowing moments. Still, Seonghwa wasn’t very successful and you left yourself in the darkness of your mind.

"Angel! You're awake!" As Seonghwa crawled towards you, you tried to sit up from where you were lying. The constant pain in your leg and the cold spreading throughout your body made you jump and shiver suddenly. "Wait, don't get up suddenly." When you looked at him, you saw that his legs were bruised and swollen. It looked like the bruises on his skin were about to burst and bleed, as if he had been hit by something very hard. "H-Hwa? What happened to you?" your voice came out very hoarse, all that shouting and gasping in pain had dried your throat. Despite feeling freezing cold, the warmth coming from within you made you uncomfortable and you started to shiver. "Don't worry, I'm fine, but you have a fever. We need to bring it down." Seonghwa placed his hand on your sweaty forehead to check your temperature. His hands were trembling, and if you looked closely, you could also see his lips trembling.

"Is he still here?" you asked in a low and nervous voice, your eyes darting around the dark basement as if expecting him to appear any second. He shook his head slowly, his expression a mix of relief and concern. "He left about half an hour ago," he replied, his voice steady as he tried to stay calm and not alarm you.

He dragged himself on the ground again, his movements slow and labored, trying to reach the bathroom in the basement. You watched him with growing anxiety, the silence between you heavy with unspoken questions. "What did he do to your legs?" you asked, your voice barely above a whisper, but he didn't answer. Instead, he wet a tissue and came back to you, his face pale and etched with pain.

"Hwa, did he break your legs?" you asked again, your voice trembling as you tried to understand the extent of his injuries. He looked at you with haunted eyes, the silence stretching on, making your heart pound even harder.

When the wet and cold tissue touched your forehead, you shivered and wanted to pull back, but Seonghwa held your head with one hand, preventing you from retreating. “It doesn’t matter. We need to lower your fever first.” As he moved the napkin from your face to your neck, you flinched more and tried to move forward to escape, but your injured leg hit Seonghwa’s probably broken leg. A deep, pain-filled groan came from Seonghwa, and he tried to hold his leg. “Seonghwa! I’m so sorry! I didn’t mean to do that.” While Seonghwa continued to writhe in pain, he nodded at you and tried to smile as much as the pain allowed. “It-it’s okay. It-it will pass soon- Agh….” “We need to wrap your leg, there must be a cloth here, right?” When Seonghwa saw you moving, he grabbed your shoulder and tried to lay you back down. “I’ll take care of it, you worry about yourself. Your fever is too high.” He could never be convinced. Once he set his mind on something, he would definitely do it, and if he didn’t want to do something, he would never do it, so you didn’t argue with him further.

Seonghwa managed to lower your fever a bit and found a painkiller from the depths of the basement; its expiration date had passed by 3 months, and normally you shouldn’t take it, but it was a mild herbal medicine, and you really needed it. To see if you would be okay after taking it, Seonghwa tried it himself first and, not seeing any side effects, gave it to you as well. And surprisingly, it worked. Seonghwa hid these medicines in one of the most cluttered parts of the basement in case such an event happened again. As your pain eased, your fatigue fully surfaced, and you let yourself fall asleep. Seeing that you fell asleep willingly without passing out, Seonghwa felt a bit relieved. As he saw your fever dropping and the bleeding from your wound stopping, he remembered he needed to treat himself.

His leg was extremely swollen and constantly aching, a persistent pain that seemed to get worse with each passing moment. The pain was so intense that it made him feel dizzy and lightheaded, as if the world around him was spinning, and the painkiller he took didn’t work for him. He thought about taking another one but didn’t, in case you needed it again since it worked for you. Hongjoong had probably broken both of his legs with an iron rod, right below the calf.

He couldn't stand on both of his legs; previously, he had hit his leg with an iron rod because he had tried to escape, but at that time, he could still stand a little. This time, it was impossible. It must have been definitely broken. The sharp pain was spreading from his ankle to his thighs, and from there to his entire body, becoming unbearable. It felt as if his entire body was broken, with pain everywhere. Every part of him hurt with each heartbeat and blood pump, making it impossible for him to stay still. The pain was making him dizzy, and his vision was starting to darken. If he didn't pull himself together, he would faint, and if he woke up only to find that Hongjoong's anger hadn't subsided and he attacked her again, he wouldn't be able to protect her while unconscious. But why was he protecting her in the first place? Was it because he felt guilty? Because he had given Hongjoong the idea to kidnap her? Maybe Hongjoong should have killed her right there.

He needed to pull himself together; he was sweating profusely, even in this cold basement. Crawling was excruciating, as if his leg was being sanded with sandpaper and his skin was being set on fire. Nevertheless, he had to wash his face. He had to do something, or he would lose himself. He pulled himself forward using his arms towards the sink. His arms also hurt; Hongjoong had hit his arm when he raised it to defend himself, but at least it wasn't broken. Compared to the pain in his leg, the pain in his arm was nothing. But the most painful thing was breaking Hongjoong's trust.

He shouldn't have done it, yes, he had gone too far. He had ruined Hongjoong's trust in 5 minutes and didn't know if Hongjoong would trust him the same way again. But freedom had seemed very tempting. It meant he still wasn't a completely obedient toy to him, he needed more shaping. He noted to himself that when Hongjoong returned home, he would need to fall at his feet, apologize hundreds of times, and beg for his forgiveness.

He gave a sigh of relief when he reached the sink with tears streaming down his face from the pain. It had taken him about 5 minutes to get there from your side, even though it would normally take a regular person 10 seconds. If you suddenly called him, he couldn't come immediately, so he had to finish it quickly and return to your side. He lifted himself using the strength from his arms, each muscle straining with effort, and bent over the sink. He tried not to put any weight on his feet, which throbbed with a dull, persistent pain. When he quickly washed his face with the cold water, the sensation momentarily jolting him awake, he let himself fall back to the ground and groaned in pain. He balled up a piece of toilet paper, wet it under the faucet, and, leaning heavily against the door frame, placed it on his ankle as a makeshift cold compress. He looked over at you sleeping calmly on the other side of the basement, your breathing steady and peaceful. He wished so much that he could sleep like you right now, to escape his pain and find some semblance of rest… Maybe he could sleep. His head was spinning, and the floor wasn't stable, it felt like he was on a roller coaster. As his head and eyelids grew heavier, his body began to relax. The pain hadn't gone away, it was still there, but at least he wasn't thinking about it right now. He would sleep, even if Hongjoong came here and took you, he would sleep, he needed it so much. The cold wetness of the wet paper ball on his leg had calmed him, and he let himself fall asleep.

︶꒦︶꒷︶︶꒷꒦︶︶︶꒷꒦‧ ₊˚・

"If you keep complaining about the weather a little more, Jongho, I'll throw you out of the car and you'll walk the whole way. I even turned on the heater for you, what more do you want?" Jongho shoved his hands into his pockets and glared at Hongjoong while shivering. "You accepted this gig, dragged me along, and now you're saying you'll throw me out of the car?" Jongho snapped angrily in one go. "You also chose to team up with me, you could have told Yunho, and he would have changed it. So stop whining." After Hongjoong's harsh response, the younger one sighed, sank into his seat, and started watching the road through the car window.

They weren't a good team, they constantly bickered and argued over the smallest things, but they still got their work done and left no evidence behind. "We're here, wake up, princess." Hongjoong said with a mocking tone as soon as they arrived. Jongho, who had been in a light sleep, immediately woke up and punched Hongjoong in the arm. "I'm not that little mouse you took into your home, don't call me that again, bastard." If they didn't have a job to do, they would probably have fought each other, but they knew if they didn't get the job done on time, Yunho would nag them. "Move, don't dawdle." Hongjoong got out of the car and looked at the ultra-luxurious villa adorned with lights. 'Same scenario again...' he thought to himself

They had paid a large amount to kill that old man to Hongjoong and Jongho, and now the reason was understood. Another rich businessman, another money-related murder. "How do these bastards have so much money?" Jongho stuck his head out of the car and looked at the mansion, which was almost invisible from the lights. "They don't sit at home jerking off like you, they work." Hongjoong spoke as he opened his trunk and took out his equipment. "What am I doing right now? Do you see my dick out or am I on the job?" Jongho also joined Hongjoong and started rummaging through his bag.

The mansion was four stories tall and very wide, built in a new architecture, and the ornamental shrubs in its garden looked recently pruned. As Yunho had said, surprisingly, only two security guards were protecting this huge house, and they didn't seem to be paying much attention to their surroundings. They could easily be killed. Hongjoong put on his special gloves and mask, took his gun and spare bullets. Normally, he wouldn't go on a mission with so little equipment, but Yunho had told them that even a few bullets would suffice, and they trusted him. He and his team had never made a mistake.

After dressing, Jongho threw his bag into the car and closed the car door. Outside, the only sound other than the wind was the two security guards talking as if they were discussing something very important. Both guards were taller than them but very distracted. Even though Hongjoong’s car wasn't very far away, the gurads still hadn't noticed them. With Hongjoong's signal, the two of them advanced from the side of the car to the front yard, towards the guards. Jongho usually preferred to use a knife; he was very good in close combat. Hongjoong was also good, but Jongho was much stronger than him.

They continued to approach silently. Since the house lights illuminated the entire path, there was nowhere to hide or camouflage; they had to be quick and attack as soon as they approached. Using the garden wall as cover, they got closer and were now very close to the guards. Jongho wondered how such careless people could be guards, but it worked in his favor. Thanks to that, he would complete his mission and receive a large amount of money he had never received before.

The guards were about three meters in front of them. In this silence, Jongho and Hongjoong could hear all their conversations, even their breathing. They had prepared themselves to kill them instantly. If Yunho was wrong and there were more guards, they didn't know what they would do.

Jongho stepped in front of Hongjoong and took his long and large knife in his left hand; he waited for Hongjoong's signal.

Hongjoong pulled the trigger of his suppressor-equipped gun, ensuring he held it properly with both hands for maximum stability. The suppressor wouldn't completely block the sound of the shot, but it would significantly muffle it. Since they were in an open area and the distance between the entrance and the house was far, it could prevent those inside the house from hearing the noise.

The two of them made eye contact, their gazes locking in silent communication. Hongjoong raised his eyebrows, a clear gesture indicating that he was waiting for approval from Jongho. Understanding the unspoken question, Jongho blinked in confirmation. With a steady hand, Hongjoong pulled his left hand away from the gun, making sure Jongho could see his every move. He showed three fingers to Jongho, signaling a countdown. Then, he lowered one finger, then two, and then one. And as Jongho grabbed the neck of the man with his back turned and stabbed him with the knife, Hongjoong simultaneously shot the man facing the knife-wounded man in the forehead. It had taken no more than 3 seconds for both to die, and as they had predicted, no other guards came from anywhere else. It was a very quiet job; everything had happened in an instant.

Now they had left the man on the ground with blood gushing from his neck and the other man whose brains were scattered all over the road and entered the garden to proceed towards their main goal, towards the mansion.

︶꒦︶꒷︶︶꒷꒦︶︶︶꒷꒦‧ ₊˚・

Suddenly, you were jolted awake by a sharp, piercing pain. As your consciousness slowly returned, you realized that your leg was bleeding from the area where it had been stitched up. It seemed that during your sleep, you must have made a wrong move, causing the stitches to tear open. The pain was so intense and overwhelming that for a brief moment, you completely forgot where you were and what was happening around you. The room seemed to blur as your mind struggled to catch up with the sudden burst of agony.

"Hwa..." You called out weakly to him, but got no response. The place where you were lying was stained and damp with the mixture of blood and the wet cloth that Hwa had used to bring down your fever. Your wound was definitely going to get infected. You tried to see Seonghwa in the darkness of the basement but it was nearly impossible. The reflection of the moonlight from the small window only illuminated the area in front of you. At least you knew he wasn't nearby.

"Hwa, are you here?" you called out, raising your voice slightly. The tension in your tone was unmistakable, filled with worry and fear. Seonghwa would never leave you alone after a punishment, especially not when you were suffering from a fever and bleeding. It was so unlike him. As the blood from your leg ran down your thighs once more, you felt a sharp pang of pain. Your vision blurred slightly, and you realized just how parched you were. The thirst crept up on you, making your mouth feel dry and your throat scratchy. You needed water, but more than that, you needed Seonghwa by your side to reassure you that everything would be okay.

The only continuous water source in the basement was the water from the sink, and there was no problem with drinking it. Besides, even if there was an issue, you had to drink it. Your mouth was very dry, and your lips were cracked.

You didn't want to try standing up; it would hurt too much. The idea of enduring another layer of pain on top of the already unbearable one was simply inconceivable. So, instead, you gathered all the strength you could muster and began to drag yourself towards the sink, relying heavily on your good leg and the support of your arms. As you slowly inched your way forward, you were startled by the sight of a silhouette leaning on the bathroom door. Your heart immediately started to beat rapidly, pounding in your chest, and you were gripped by a sudden sense of panic, not knowing what to do next. In your frantic state, you attempted to crawl back in the opposite direction, desperate to escape whatever danger the shadow might represent. But then, a low, agonized familiar groan emanated from the shadow, causing you to pause in your tracks. The sound was filled with such pain that it made you stop crawling.

"Seonghwa? Is that you?" you called out, your voice trembling with worry. When the shadow made a sound as if confirming, you quickly crawled towards him, your heart pounding in your chest. As you got closer, you could finally make out his features. He was drenched in sweat, and his eyes seemed glazed over, indicating that he wasn't fully conscious. His body started to writhe and moan in place, and you quickly realized that his condition was far worse than your own.

You reached out and touched his forehead, feeling the intense heat radiating from his skin. He had a fever, and it was burning through him even in this cold basement. You pulled back slightly, your eyes scanning down to his legs. The sight made your stomach churn. If you had to describe it in one word, it would be 'terrible'. His legs were completely messed up. Despite the poor visibility in the darkness, you could distinguish light from dark, and Seonghwa’s legs were an ominous, deep shade. They were swollen and purple up to his kneecaps, but 'purple' didn't quite capture it—they were almost black. "Seonghwa! Why didn’t you wake me up? Your legs are so bad!" you exclaimed in a panic.

You knew you had to help him. The condition of his legs was alarming, and you weren't sure if a person could die from such severe bone fractures, but he looked like he was on the brink. It was clear that Hongjoong must have hit the same spot over and over, pulverizing his bones into a gruesome state. Seonghwa's suffering was evident, and you couldn't let him endure it alone.

"Ugh… it hurts…” he groaned softly, feeling the intense pain radiate through his body. “I know it hurts. Wait,” you responded, your voice filled with concern. You stood up very nervously, taking great care not to open any more stitches that had barely begun to heal. And you did it! You managed to balance yourself by putting your strength into your good foot.

With determination, you wet a few cloths in the sink and leaned over to run them over his face, just like he had done for you before. The soothing touch of the wet cloths seemed to provide a small comfort in the midst of the chaos.

Suddenly, the door swung open with a loud bang, and the clatter of metal filled the room. Startled, you lost your balance and fell to the ground. Even though the impact sent sharp waves of pain through your body, you chose not to make a sound out of fear. The last thing you wanted to do was draw attention to yourself and face the devil who was now approaching.

He came right at you with an air of menace. As he suddenly turned on the lights, the harsh brightness illuminated his dangerous face. His expression was constantly grinning, as if everything was so funny, a stark contrast to the terror and pain you were experiencing. The sinister amusement in his eyes made your blood run cold.

“Where were we?” Hongjoong's voice sounded sarcastic and amused, the tone of someone who finds great entertainment in the suffering of others. Seonghwa’s eyes snapped open as soon as he heard his voice. It was like he had just woken up from a nightmare, except the nightmare was about to begin now, in real life, with no escape. “Don’t come any closer, can’t you see our condition? We’re already in a bad situation. What more do you want?” Your voice was trapped in fear, trembling and barely audible. You were wondering if he could hear you because your voice was so quiet, almost a whisper.

He took slow, deliberate steps in front of you, his eyes never leaving your trembling form. As he approached, towering over you, you felt the weight of his gaze. You were pinned to the ground, feeling utterly tiny and insignificant under his scrutiny. The sight of you, bloody and scared, with helplessness written all over your face, made his heart race with a mix of excitement and something darker. Seeing you in such a vulnerable state stirred something deep inside him, an insatiable desire that making him want more.

Seonghwa, with a sudden burst of energy, lunged forward, using all his strength to drag himself to Hongjoong’s feet. His movements were frantic, and it was clear that he still wasn't in his right mind. Hongjoong, on the other hand, was brimming with excitement. Hongjoong knew exactly what Seonghwa was going to do.

Hwa, what are you doin-” You were cut off when Seonghwa threw himself at Hongjoong’s feet, desperation evident in every movement. “I-I beg you, f-forgive me. I didn’t do it on purpose- agh! I didn’t do it on purpose. P-please love me again. I’ll do a-anything!” The basement was eerily silent except for Seonghwa’s pitiful pleading. Hongjoong watched him without uttering a single word, his expression unreadable. “Why would I forgive you? Who would love naughty little bunnies like you? After all, you betrayed me.” Seonghwa started to cry harder at Hongjoong’s cold, cutting words. You were on the verge of tears too, the discomfort and tension of the situation weighing heavily on you. You wanted to tell him to shut up and go back to his old place, but you were too scared to intervene.

“No, I’m not! I’m not naughty! I didn’t mean to act like that!” Seonghwa’s voice was choked with emotion, his tears flowing freely. Hongjoong watched his masterpiece with a sense of twisted satisfaction. His first love, with his legs broken, threw himself at his feet and begged for forgiveness while his new toy, with her burst stitches, watched what was happening in fear and helplessness. The wiev was of unparalleled beauty. If he hadn’t left his phone upstairs, he would have definitely taken a photo to preserve this view forever. Hongjoong felt a surge of power and control, basking in the pain and fear that radiated from both of you. The basement, usually a place of darkness and dread, became a stage for his cruel artistry, a tableau of suffering and submission.

“But you acted like that.” He finished his sentence with a smile by kicking Seonghwa in the chest. When Seonghwa’s breath hitched and he fell back, you backed away from Hongjoong in panic. Neither of you could muster the courage to speak. Only the sound of his painful, ragged breathing filled the room. Hongjoong looked down at Seonghwa’s ankles. They were broken, but it wasn’t anything that wouldn’t heal in a few weeks. Despite his injuries, it was almost endearing how Seonghwa continued to beg for forgiveness in such a weakened state. When Hongjoong shifted his gaze to you, he noticed that your leg was bleeding again. If he went any further, it would be hard for both of you to heal, so he decided it was enough for now. “Since I’m such an understanding person, I’ll end your punishment here. But you’ll be staying here for the next few days.” You were relieved that he wouldn’t hurt you any further. But you both needed proper first aid right now. “We can’t stay like this. H-Hwa is in a bad condition. Can’t you help him?” Your voice trembled as Seonghwa flinched when he heard his name as he writhed on the ground. The fact that you were thinking of him warmed his aching heart a little. Hongjoong looked at Seonghwa again and smiled that annoying smile of his. “You should have thought of that before you ran away together.”

You thought he would at least help Seonghwa. After all, Seonghwa had asked for forgiveness from him and had been with Hongjoong for a long time. But he hadn’t. He would leave him like this, he would leave you like this. You shouted and cursed after him as he left the basement; you didn’t know where you found this confidence but you were very angry with him. Interestingly enough, he didn’t turn around and do anything to you after you insulted him. He just locked the door and went upstairs.

︶꒦︶꒷︶︶꒷꒦︶︶︶꒷꒦‧ ₊˚・

As it was 5 am, the exhaustion of the whole day had settled on him like a heavy blanket. All he wanted was to take another shower to wash away the day's fatigue and then fall into a deep, dreamless sleep. Normally, he couldn’t sleep without Seonghwa by his side, but tonight he was so tired that he knew he had to sleep, no matter what. He didn’t even have the energy to dry his hair after stepping out of the shower with wet hair clinging to his face and neck. Instead, he just threw himself on the bed with a towel wrapped loosely around his waist and his hair still dripping wet. He was probably going to get sick from it, but he didn’t care right now. All he could think about was closing his eyes and escaping into the oblivion of sleep.

He couldn’t sleep. Despite his best efforts to find a comfortable position, he tossed and turned in bed for what seemed like hours. The chill in the air only made things worse, seeping through only the damp towel tied around his waist and about to be opened and causing him to shiver. The cold weather, combined with the lingering dampness of his towel, was a miserable combination that left him feeling even more cold. He had to wrap himself in something. Something warm. Something warm to take away the cold in his heart and body...

He got up with a stumbling motion, slowly put on some clothes, and started walking down the stairs. The sky was gradually lightening at dawn, casting a soft glow over everything, and the fresh morning air was filling the house through the open windows. He quietly opened the basement door, careful not to make any noise. He could see who was where with the light of the new sunlight seeping through the window. You were both sleeping where he had left you last, Seonghwa lying on the floor and you sitting with your backs against the wall. Sleeping would be the wrong word to describe your state. You were more like unconscious.

Hongjoong picked up his favorite toy, trying not to wake or hurting his toy. Although he was short compared to most men, he had a strength that was unexpected from his appearance; he was very strong, so he was able to easily lift his favorite. He returned to the basement door, casting one final glance at his other toy. Without locking it, he quietly closed the door and ascended the stairs. As he gently laid his toy on the bed, he heard a groan of pain.

“Shh, go back to sleep, my prince. I’m here.” Seonghwa’s eyes widened as he locked eyes with Hongjoong, feeling a rush of emotions. He loved him for that. No matter how much Hongjoong hurt him, he would always take care of Seonghwa and show him love. Hongjoong couldn’t stay mad at him for long. Even though he was still running away, he was still in Hongjoong’s bed right now. “I’ll wrap your legs, wait here,” Hongjoong said softly. When he returned with the first aid kit and went to Seonghwa’s side, he saw him looking at him with admiration and a disturbing level of affection. “What?” Hongjoong asked as he unwrapped the new bandage pack in his hands, trying to ignore the intensity in Seonghwa's eyes.

“I love you,” Seonghwa whispered. He loved him very much. Or maybe he thought he did; sometimes, he didn’t know. The lines were blurred. Hongjoong broke him so well, yet he couldn't help but feel an overwhelming sense of attachment. It was a complicated, twisted love, but it was all they had. Hongjoong broke him so well.

“It'll be over soon, don't worry. Just keep your legs straight.”

Seonghwa didn’t take offense that Hongjoong didn’t tell him he loved him back. He knew Hongjoong loved him too.

“Ugh Joongie, it hurts so much." Seonghwa squirmed in discomfort as he felt the tight bandage wrapped securely around his legs, which were throbbing with sharp pain. “Shh shh, I know. Be a good little bunny for me, and don't squirm.” Hongjoong's soothing yet firm voice made Seonghwa suddenly go still. He didn't want to disappoint him even more with his actions. "That's a good boy. I'll give you painkillers as a reward." Hongjoong's words were filled with a mixture of comfort and authority. Seonghwa's eyes met Hongjoong's, filled with a silent plea for relief, and he nodded weakly.

After Hongjoong finished wrapping Seonghwa’s legs tightly to ensure they were properly supported, he gave him a strong painkiller and laid down on the bed next to Seonghwa. He was enveloped in the warmth he so desperately needed, and the soothing heat radiating from Seonghwa’s weakened body served as a balm for Hongjoong’s cold heart and chilled body.

He closed his eyes, thinking that he could finally get some much-needed sleep by holding him tightly in his arms without hurting him too much. The warmth and comfort he felt were almost enough to lull him into a peaceful slumber. Just as he was about to drift off to sleep, he suddenly heard the annoying ringing of his phone. The sound was jarring in the quiet room, and he opened his eyes again, startled by the sudden noise, he noticed Seonghwa jump slightly in his arms. He gently reassured Seonghwa, whispering softly that nothing was wrong and that he should continue sleeping. With a sigh, he carefully reached for his phone to see who was calling, hoping it wasn't something urgent that would further disrupt their rest.

Jeong Yunho.

It was strange that he was calling at this hour, and if he was calling after the mission, it usually meant there was a problem with the mission. He sighed in annoyance and picked up the phone.

“What’s wrong?”

“Hyung, you need to come here immediately.”

The voice on the other end of the phone was anxious. It was hard to see Yunho anxious; he was always so sure of what he was doing and relaxed. Something was definitely wrong.

Hongjoong cursed at him when the phone abruptly hung up on him. Yunho always liked to make people curious and leave them hanging. As Hongjoong got out of bed and started getting dressed, he caught sight of Seonghwa’s anxious eyes. “Is someone in trouble again or are the police going to raid our house?” He could speak more comfortably now that the pain had subsided a little. “I don't know, he didn't say. Also, don’t bother your beautiful brain with such things. I’ll be back in a few hours. Make sure our princess doesn’t escape from the basement in the meantime. Otherwise, I won’t forgive you this time, Park Seonghwa. So, keep an eye on her and don't let your guard down again.”

It was absolutely impossible for someone upstairs with broken legs to check if someone in the basement had escaped, so Hongjoong carefully picked him up again before leaving the house and took him down to the basement. Although Seonghwa felt a deep sadness to leave the comfort of his bed and the warmth of Hongjoong’s arms, he was happy and relieved that he would now be able to keep an eye on you. Leaving the two of you in the brightly lit basement once more, Hongjoong made a mental note to get Seonghwa a pair of crutches on his way home. He then grabbed the bag containing his weapons and equipment, ensuring everything he needed was inside, and headed back to his car with a sense of urgency.

I wanna feedback juseyo♡ I wanna feedback please♡ I wanna feedback çebal♡

[ewanmitchellcrumbs]

Who Taught You How to Love Like That? - Chapter One

Pairing: Modern!Aemond Targaryen x female character (third person) Warnings: Sugar daddy/sugar baby dynamics. Word count: ~2.5k Series masterlist

Chapter summary: Desperate to pay off her student loans, she downloads a dating app with a twist, and makes an interesting match.

She sighs, her eyes scanning over the PDF of her payslip for the month, before locking her phone and letting it drop heavily onto the kitchen counter.

“Bad news?” Mysaria quirks an eyebrow, sliding a glass of wine across to her.

“These student loan repayments are fucking killing me. I’ve basically worked an entire week for free this month.” She complains, taking a huge swig from her glass.

“Bummer.” Her flatmate says. “Any way I can help?”

“Unless your mattress is secretly stuffed full of cash, no. Super Noodles for me for the rest of the month, once I’ve paid my share of the rent.”

“You could give being a sugar baby a try?” Mysaria says with a smirk over the rim of her wine glass.

She laughs, rolling her eyes. “Yeah, or take up pole dancing lessons and become a stripper!”

“I’m being serious.” Mysaria, puts her glass down and pulls out her phone, flicking to the App Store and typing. “See? There are loads of apps, why not give it a try?”

“Isn’t that just prostitution?” She wrinkles her nose in disgust.

“Hey!” Mysaria chides. “Sex work is real work, but this isn’t prostitution. Most of these guys are just desperate, lonely guys who earn big bucks and are willing to spoil you in exchange for a conversation or a few selfies. You don’t even have to sleep with any of them…unless you want to.”

“I think I’ll pass, thanks.”

Even if she did go through with it, she was inexperienced, and would surely be a disappointment to any potential sugar daddies she might attract. She’d had one boyfriend in her entire life, it had lasted six months and they’d never gone beyond unsatisfying quickies that focused entirely on his pleasure. The idea of taking money from a stranger in order to pay her bills makes her incredibly uneasy.

They’re half way through their second bottle of wine as she scrolls through her phone. Mysaria is snoring softly on the sofa next to her, while an episode of some trashy reality TV show plays away to itself in the background.

Her thoughts keep drifting back to her flatmate’s mention earlier in the evening of sugar babies. She knows it’s likely the wine inspiring her actions, but she finds herself scrolling through the same apps they’d looked at previously.

Seeing one with particularly good reviews, she presses download before she’s had a chance to think twice about it and then goes through the process of setting up a profile, picking the best photo she has of herself on her camera roll.

Her heart races as she swipes with shaky fingers through photos of a myriad of men. She stops when she sees the look of one she likes.

Larys, 45. Tell me all your secrets.

His curly brown hair and piercing blue eyes immediately capture her attention, and she enjoys the flirtatious nature of his tagline. She swipes right and is stunned when she gets an “It’s a match!” notification. Wow, that was fast.

Instantly a message pops up from him.

Hello beautiful. How are you this evening?

She smiles, this seems harmless enough.

I’m fine, thanks. Just watching TV. How are you?

Her eyes linger on the screen as she awaits his reply.

I’d be better if I could get a look at your pretty feet. How much?

Bile rises in her throat and she throws the phone away from her in disgust. The worst possible start she could have asked for. She silently curses Mysaria’s stupid idea and vows never to open the app again.

Three weeks later and she is thoroughly fed up. She’s tired of never going out or doing anything, sick of existing on instant noodles. When she receives another payslip and sees yet another loan repayment has eaten away at her earnings, she reaches breaking point. She considers looking for another job, but she currently doesn’t qualify for anything beyond an entry level position in her field, and the pay everywhere else is no better than what she’s already on.

Her thumb lingers over the app that she hasn’t touched for weeks, too scarred by having such an awful first encounter to bother with it again. However, she’s desperate and willing to try anything - not with Larys though. She’s quick to unmatch with him, eager to forget his disgusting request.

She swipes mindlessly for a few minutes, not finding anyone attractive, until she happens across a photo that stops her in her tracks.

The man in question has sharp features - an aquiline nose, an impossibly chiseled jawline and sculpted cheekbones. His long white blonde hair frames his face elegantly, his only imperfection is the scar that runs across his left eye, a slightly duller blue than the right. She wonders if he’s still able to see out of it.

Aemond, 35.

No tagline, no other photos, save the one of him staring directly into the camera. He seems intense and mysterious. She swipes right, unable to fight the disappointment she feels when it’s not an instant match.

She closes the app, her desire to look at anyone else has been thwarted by how ridiculously good looking he is.

She has nearly forgotten about him when her phone buzzes the next day. He’s matched with her. She unlocks her phone, her palms sweaty with nerves, and looks at his message.

Hello.

Simple, to the point, possibly the words of a serial killer? She pushes the thought away and types out a response.

Hi. How are you?

She almost gives up and puts her phone away in the time it takes for him to reply, but eventually he does.

I don’t do small talk. Tell me about yourself.

Her eyes widen as she reads the message. He’s either incredibly rude or just not used to interacting with other people. She decides to give him the benefit of the doubt. She tells him about her history degree, about her museum job, about her living situation and her aspirations to one day become a curator of historical artifacts. He is unsurprisingly evasive when she attempts to ask about him.

So, what brings you to the app?

She decides there’s no point in hiding the fact that she’s strapped for cash, she wouldn’t be using an app that matches sugar babies with sugar daddies if that weren’t the case. She explains that her student loan repayments are crippling her, half expecting not to hear from him again. His next message is much quicker to arrive.

How much? And are you free Saturday night?

Dread gnaws at her stomach. Oh god, what does he expect of her? Hesitantly, she types out the remaining balance she has on her student loan and asks what he has in mind for Saturday. Again, he replies straight away.

Give me your bank details. I need a date for my nephew’s engagement party.

Her eyes widen. This cannot be real, and yet it’s happening. Dazed by his forwardness she sends across her account number and sort code, and tells him she’s free on Saturday.

Her mouth runs dry when after a few minutes her banking app pings with a notification of a deposit. The full amount she owes on her student loan has been transferred to her under the name ‘A. Targaryen.” 

Aemond has transferred her thousands of pounds as if it were nothing more than pocket change, and all under the loose agreement that she’ll attend a party with him. This man has to be obscenely wealthy, or insane, perhaps both.

Her phone vibrates again. Another message from him.

Transferred. Give me your number, I hate the messaging interface on this app.

With clammy hands and a pounding heart she types out an entirely too long, rambled message of thanks, along with her number.

She wonders if she’s blown it when she doesn’t hear from him again, yet the money still sits in her bank account, feeling as though it’s burning a hole in it. She hasn’t exactly played it cool, most sugar babies probably accept money with cool sophistication, not simpering words of gratitude.

She feels like she’s forgotten how to breathe when he texts her on Friday.

Tell me your address and dress size.

Once more, she’s taken aback by how blunt he is, yet she complies and provides both. 

When she arrives home from work later that evening, there is a package waiting for her. She opens it to reveal a black silk gown. The cut of the fabric is beautiful. Her jaw drops when she sees the Chanel label. This likely cost more than the entirety of the clothing she owns put together.

There’s a note that simply reads: Wear this tomorrow - A.

She smiles at the neatness of his handwriting. Aemond is a strange man, and yet she can’t help the intrigue she feels towards him. This is his second act of generosity towards her in the space of a week and they’ve yet to even meet.

She spends all of Saturday ensuring she is waxed, exfoliated and moisturised all over, before carefully styling her hair and applying make-up that she feels will do the eye-wateringly expensive dress she’s been given to wear justice. 

She is jittery with nerves when a sleek, black sports car pulls up outside the block of flats. She can just tell it’s Aemond, nothing that costs that much has any business being on this side of town otherwise.

She hurries downstairs to meet him, eager to avoid the embarrassment of him seeing the mess that is the inside of the pokey, little flat she shares with Mysaria.

He steps out of the car and she inhales sharply at the sight of him. He is tall, at least six foot easily, despite her wearing heels he still towers over her. A well tailored, black suit clings to his long, lithe form and his white hair is pulled back neatly into a bun that sits at the nape of his neck.

“You must be Aemond.” She says, praying her make-up is enough to hide the evidence of how hot her face currently feels.

“Mmm. Yes, I must. You look good.” His right eye rakes appreciatively over her form, and when his left doesn’t follow the motion, she realises it’s a prosthetic. “Shall we go?”

He gestures towards the car, walking around to the passenger’s side to open the door for her.

He fills her in on what’s expected of her as he drives. His nephew, Jace, has gotten engaged to his longtime girlfriend, Baela. He is sick of fending off questions around why he’s not with anyone yet, especially from that side of the family. He expects her to stick by his side for the evening and he’ll deal with any awkward questions that may arise.

They arrive and Aemond is ever the gentleman, quickly stepping out of the car to open the door for her and offer her a hand out. 

She shivers at the feel of his hand against hers and is stunned further still when he interlocks their fingers, keeping a firm hold of her hand as they enter the house.

“Just play along.” He whispers.

She is immediately struck by the opulence of it all as they walk through the foyer. This is a family that comes from old money. It was clear from the antique furnishings and vaulted ceilings that the Targaryens had always had money and always would.

She balks a little, unsure of if she will fit in, suddenly self conscious. Aemond seems to pick up on this.

“Relax.” He whispers to her. “Everyone here looks like shit compared to you.”

His words, combined with the tickle of his breath against the shell of her ear sends a shiver down her spine.

True to his word, he doesn’t let her stray from his side the entire evening. The tension between family members is unmistakable. The sneers with which a trio of dark haired young men regard Aemond is incredibly off putting.

She is informed by Aemond that the eldest of them is Jace, whose engagement they are here to celebrate. She meets Aemond’s mother, the doe eyed, auburn haired woman is pretty and seems shocked but delighted at the sight of her son with an actual date on his arm.

The lies that flow from his mouth are effortless. He had met her at the museum she works at when he’d come in to browse an exhibition. They’d hit it off instantly and been inseparable ever since.

Every touch of his hand at the small of her back feels like a brand and as the night goes on, and the champagne continues to flow freely, she finds herself eagerly playing up to the part of dutiful girlfriend. She leans into every touch, her eyes fluttering closed at the gentle press of his lips to her hairline. He is respectful, too respectful, never getting handsy or going for a full on the lips kiss.

When the evening draws to a close and he escorts her back to the passenger side of his car, she feels bereft at the loss of his touch as he moves around to the driver’s seat.

“You did well this evening.” He tells her as she starts the engine. “We put on quite the show.”

Remembering that none of this was real, that she’d been paid to be here startles her out of her tipsy fantasy that this is an actual relationship and her mouth presses into a tight line as she nods.

They drive in silence for a while before Aemond speaks again.

“If you’re up for it, my mother is having a birthday meal this Wednesday. She mentioned tonight she’d love for you to come. Are you available? I’ll pay you, obviously.”

So much for this not feeling like prostitution. She’s already paid off her student loan, she could just say no, but then she wouldn’t get to see him again.

“Y-yeah, sounds good.” She says meekly.

They pull up outside the block of flats and, right on cue, Aemond is striding around the car to get her door. She wobbles on her heels as she climbs out, the effects of the evening’s alcohol getting the better of her, and falls against his chest.

His large hands move to steady her by the shoulders and as she looks up into his face she is struck by how gorgeous he really is. 

Her eyes slowly close, as she leans in, her lips pressing towards his.

His grip on her shoulders tightens, pushing her back ever-so gently. “You don’t need to do that.”

Her eyes snap back open, shame coursing through her like liquid fire. “Oh…”

“I’ll text you the details about Wednesday. Thanks again for tonight.”

He gets back into the car, driving away as she stands on the kerbside, feeling thoroughly embarrassed.

[shou-jpeg]

-Back on the Beat-

Part 4. 06

One year later

November 19th, 9:50pm 

Kim hits a high note and the crowd goes wild. 

He’s sweaty and high on adrenaline, approaching the end of his largest show yet. 

It’s only a few hundred people, but it’s also a sold out show, and Kim still feels a little overwhelmed with that knowledge.

Porchay is in the crowd. 

He had walked into their apartment five weeks ago and announced to Kim that he was going to celebrate the end of his first year of university by devoting himself wholly to being WiK’s #1 fan; a job he then applied himself to with as much, if not more gusto than he applied himself to studying medicine. 

He looks ridiculous right now, dressed head to toe in unofficial, homemade WiK merch. He’s also holding a handmade sign above his head and Kim has to stop himself from smiling like an idiot every time he looks over at him so his fans don’t start rumours.

They'd agreed to keep their relationship on the down-low, for now. Only while Kim builds his audience, since being single sells.

He holds Chay’s gaze throughout the entirety of the song they wrote together and the people around Chay are definitely noticing. Kim isn’t doing a very good job at being subtle, he thinks.

Oh well. 

He’s exhausted, but he raises his arms over his head and makes a heart with his fingers to thank his audience as he closes the set. The crowd goes wild once more and Chay is giggling into his hand over something.

He’s so cute. 

He’s probably laughing at Kim though, Kim thinks warily. 

~~~

A few days later, Chay announces that a photo of Kim from his concert is going viral on twitter and is doing wonders to boost his popularity both nationally and internationally. Something about people thinking he’s cute?

Kim considers how much he can press and the wary way the bodyguards back at the compound look at him when he walks past. 

He’s definitely not cute.

Porchay won’t let him see his phone though, and he can't be bothered to check himself.

Whatever. So long as it’s getting him good reviews.

May 23rd, 6:05pm - a few months earlier

“I think Jimbo likes you more than me now.”

Porchay scoffs. “That’s just because I’m the one who feeds him most of the time. You’re always out these days, being all popular and in demand. What will we do when you become proper famous?”

“You don’t like having a popular boyfriend?” Kim pouts, turning to look at Porchay from where he lies on the bed, watching him play with their cat. Porchay only moved in last week, yet he’s taken on being a cat parent like nothing else. Kim has barely even cleaned the litter this past week. It’s been a weird disruption to his daily routine, but it has given him a lot less to worry about with his increasingly erratic schedule. 

He released the song they wrote together last month and it hit the national top 10. He’s had three different studios reach out, wanting to sign him. 

Kim tries not to think about it too much; it’s too overwhelming, how good he feels about it. The bars he usually performs in are starting to become too small for the crowd that he draws. 

He should probably hire a manager. 

Porchay looks up at him. “P’Kim as your biggest fan, I could not be more thrilled to be dating my idol. It’s like I’m living inside of a fanfiction.”

Kim hums, hesitant.

“Does that mean we get to live happily ever after?”

It’s way too soon, they’ve only been together six months. Kim was ready to spend his life with Chay from the moment Chay unblocked him, but he’s pretty sure there are rules around these things. 

Kim isn’t good at this. Porchay told him so himself… though he was smiling at him fondly when he did. 

He’s smiling that same smile at him again now. 

“Yeah,” Chay says, soft. “We get to live happily ever after, p’Kim.”

February 10th, 9:28am

“I want to study medicine.”

Porsche looks at him with almost comical surprise, and Porchay tries not to laugh at his expression.

They’re out at their new weekly brunch date together, and Chay has been waiting for the right moment to bring this topic up. He’s spent a lot of time over the past few months, both on his own and with Kim’s help, figuring out what he wants to do with his future. He’s feeling pretty confident in his choice, but he hasn’t even begun looking at universities yet and enrollments are coming up soon. 

“I’m not sure what field I want to specialise in yet, but I’ve thought a lot about it and medicine feels like the right direction for me. I should have at least a year of classes before I have to choose my field - I want to feel it out a little and see what feels right for me. I was hoping you could help me look at university courses?”

Porsche puts his fork down and settles back, serious but obviously trying to hold back his glee. “Of course, Chay. We can get you into any university you want.”

“No!” Chay interrupts him, “I want to get in on my own merit. I only want help finding a good course… please…”

Porsche smiles at him, big and wide and happy. “You can do it! Come around here, let’s start now!”

Chay gets up and moves around to join Porsche on his side of the table, bringing his phone with him. 

“Okay, so I’ve already been looking at a couple courses. Tell me what you think, hia…”

February 6th, 11:39pm

“What about some sort of doctor?”

Porchay looks up at Kim. 

They’ve been going through lists upon lists of career ideas and quizzes and self help guides. It’s been nearly four hours and Porchay really shouldn’t have been as surprised as he was with the seriousness and intensity at which Kim approached the task. 

Kim loves solving cases and sorting through things. It’s something Porchay discovered recently, and even though the topics themselves sometimes aren’t so cute, the way Kim gets when he has something to solve in front of him definitely is. 

He reaches over to smooth the little furrow between Kim's brows. “What kind of doctor?”

“I don’t know. You said before that you wanted to do something to help people, but didn’t put your own self at risk.” He's right, but it’s also a little left field. All the results from Porchay’s quizzes have pointed him in the direction of something creative, and they haven’t done much research outside of creative careers yet. 

Doctor. 

Porchay thinks about Porsche and his new, scary job. He thinks about Kim and his tendency to push himself too hard. 

He thinks about Khun, and Kinn and all the bodyguards.

Doctor. 

Yeah. Something about that feels right.

January 26th, 10:45am

It’s their two month anniversary and Porchay is nearly jumping on his heels as he waits in the lobby of Kim's building. Kim approaches slowly, trying to look cool and not at all as nervous as he feels inside. 

Chay has been secretive about today, only telling Kim to keep his schedule completely clear. He's been distracted every time they've seen each other over the past couple of weeks abd Kim has had to put a surprising amount of effort into not trying to suss out what Chay has been planning for them. 

An effort that proved even more challenging when Khun's crytic texts began rolling in even couple of days.

Of course it turns out Khun was on the money with everything. As usual.

“You never use it, so I stole it back the other week and made you this.”

November 28th, 10:35am 

“I’m a little nervous.” Chay is sitting across from him, boba tea in hand and a light flush to his cheeks. 

They’re at their usual boba tea spot, but it’s also their first date.

Kim is feeling the same. 

“Mmmm.”

Chay laughs at him lightly. “P’Kim! Are you nervous too? You’ve hardly said anything since we got here.”

Kim takes a moment to consider, looking up from his tea at Chay’s slowly growing smile. 

“...mmmm.” Chay laughs loudly enough that a few people around them turn in their direction. Kim smiles. 

Success.

THE END

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Playlist

[official-magnus-institute]

hey Jon can we have that book recommendation I’m curious

STATEMENT OF DONNA RHETTE, REGARDING 'THIS FUCKING BOOK'- VERBATIM FROM TEXT. STATEMENT TAKEN FROM REVIEW LEFT ON www.lionstreetbooks.com/i-spy-housewarming/K-6482749278.html

(tw: stalking, scopophobia, loss of child, arson)

STATEMENT BEGINS.

@_Donnarhette

★☆☆☆☆

do not purchase this book do not buy anything off this website theyre stealing your information. this website is unreliable and customer service does not respond they do not pick up their phones.

i bought this book for my 5 year old daughter. she kept waking me up in the middle of the night for weeks beforehand. it was normal, kids do that, kids are scared of monsters. but i would always read her i spy. we have every other edition, down to the miniature versions and the seasonal ones. eventually, she learned where everything was, though, and the books got boring, so i looked up 'i spy books' for the 80th time this month. it brought me here, and i purchased the book for shipping.

the very next day it was brought here, and i was astonished at first, but once i saw the condition of how it was packed, i figured why it came so fast. it was a wreck, the corners all beat, a handful of packing peanuts and some thin paper tossed cattywompus inside. the shippers mustve played hacky-sack with it before tossing it up to the house

even so, my girl was excited. she had completely forgotten about the supposed monsters, she just wanted the book. it's a unique edition for sure, instead of looking for small items on a small scale, it just looks like pictures of parks or buildings, along with riddles like 'i spy a tricycle, i spy ten cards, i spy a crack in concrete that's hard'. it was a change of pace for me, even- a challenge. but my daughter was doing phenomenally.

the photographer must be local to my area, because i recognized the photos soon. hell, i think i saw the back of my head in the bank one. but it got strange when it came to a picture of a street.

my street of my home.

now im thinking, 'maybe it's personalized, it's google maps, and they look up the address for the buyer before they send it out?' but that was... impossible. after i ordered the book it came the very next day, there was no way theyd be able to just cram this page in last second. not only that, but there was the riddle.

i spy a sewer grate, a baseball, a torch,

i spy a busted-up box on the porch.

i shut the book on that page and told my daughter to go to bed. there was fuss, but something was wrong. i tuck her in and she complains again about monsters in the window. all through the night, theres monsters in the window, and i snap at her when she wakes me up the 3rd time.

at that point she was crying, and i was.. yelling. i dont feel good about it, god, especially not now, but i was tired and scared. thats no excuse. so was she.

after telling her it would be ok, she slept in my bed with me. i held her tight the whole night through, and i would do my research in the morning, i assured myself.

but i didnt het a chance. by sunrise she was gone. not in her bed, in her pillow fort, not in the kitchen, the den, nowhere. i phone the police, and i end up running down the street screaming her name.

as i get back home, though, i felt compelled to that damn book. god, why did i go back to that damn book??

it was a picture of us through the window.

'i spy ten earrings, 2 rings, and a comb

i spy a mom and daughter at home.'

it was like my tears froze from shock. i steeled myself and flipped to the next page.

'i spy a woman, big tears and brown curls

i spy a book, but i see no girl.'

as i said, the police are investigating this store. burn in hell you freak. ill see you there.

Well. It took some digging, but there's your recommendation. We were able to get I Spy: Housewarming from the crime scene - or, more so, the wreckange. Donna was griefstruck, this adding onto the loss of her husband shortly before this, leading to a burst of arson. The book was recovered just fine, seemingly one of the Leitners that can withstand some flames.

J. Sims, The Archivist

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kitchensink callithump linkdump

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

With just days to go before my summer vacation, I find myself once again with a backlog of links that I didn't squeeze into the blog, and no hope of clearing them before I disappear into a hammock for two weeks, so it's time for my 21st linkdump – here's the other 20:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

I'm going to start off this week's 'dump with a little bragging, because it's my newsletter, after all. First up: a book! Yes, I write a lot of books, but what I'm talking about here is a physical book, a limited edition of ten, that I commissioned from three brilliant craftspeople.

Back in March 2023, I launched a Kickstarter to pre-sell the audiobook of Red Team Blues, the first novel in my new Martin Hench series, about a forensic accountant who specializes in unwinding tech bros' finance frauds:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

One of the rewards for that campaign was a very special hardcover: a handmade, leather-bound edition of Red Team Blues, typeset by the typography legend John D. Berry:

https://johndberry.com/

Bound by the legendary book-artist John DeMerritt:

https://www.demerrittstudios.com/

And printed by the master printer JaVae Berry:

https://www.jgraphicssf.com/

But this wasn't a merely beautiful, well made book – it had a gimmick. You see, I had already completed the first draft of The Bezzle, the second Hench novel, by the time I launched the Kickstarter for Red Team Blues. I had John Berry lay out a tiny edition of that early draft as a quarter-sized book, and then John DeMerritt hand-bound it in card.

The reason that edition of The Bezzle had to be so small was that it was designed to slip into a hollow cavity in the hardcover, a cavity that John Berry had designed the type around, so that both books could be read and enjoyed.

I offered three of these for sale through the Kickstarter, and the three backers were very patient as the team went back and forth on the book, getting everything perfect. Last month, I took delivery of the books: three for my backers, one each for John DeMerritt and John Berry's personal archives, one for me, and a few more that I'm going to surprise some very special people with this Christmas.

Look, I had high hopes for this book. I dote on beautiful books, my house is busting with them, and I used to work at a new/used science fiction store where we had a small but heartstoppingly great rare book selection. But these books are fucking astounding. Every time I handle mine, my heart races. These are beautiful things, and I just want to show them to everyone:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/albums/72177720318331731/

As it happens, the next thing I'm going to do (after I finish this newsletter) is turn in the copyedited manuscript for the third Hench novel, Picks and Shovels, which comes out in Feb 2025 (luckily, I had enough time to review the edits myself, then turn it over to my mom, who has proofed every book I've written and always catches typos that everyone else misses, including some real howlers – thanks Mom!):

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels

Of course, the majority of people who enjoy my books do not end up with one of these beautiful hardcovers – indeed, many of you consume my work exclusively as electronic media: ebooks and (of course) audiobooks. I love audiobooks and the audio editions of my books are very good, with narrators like Amber Benson, Wil Wheaton, and Neil Gaiman.

But here's the thing: Audible refuses to carry my books, because they are DRM-free (which means that they aren't locked to Audible's approved players – you can play my audiobooks with any audiobook player). Audible has a no-exceptions, iron-clad rule that every book they sell must be permanently locked into their platform, which means that Audible customers can't ditch their Audible software without losing their libraries – all the books they purchased:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

Being excluded from Audible takes a huge bite out of my income – after all, they're a monopolist with a 90% market share. That's why I'm so grateful for indie audiobook stores that carry my books on equitable terms that Audible denies – stores like Libro.fm, Downpour and even Google Books.

This week, I discovered a new, amazing indie audiobook store called Storyfair, where the books are DRM-free and the authors get a 75% royalty on every sale:

https://storyfair.net/helpstoryfairgrow/

Storyfair is a labor of love created by a married couple who were sickened and furious by the way that Audible screws authors and listeners and decided to do something about it. Naturally, I uploaded my whole catalog to the site so they could sell it:

https://storyfair.net/search-for-audiobooks/?keyword=cory+doctorow&filter=any

These books are DRM-free, which means that no matter who you buy them from, you can play them in the same player as your other DRM-free audiobooks. You know how you can read all your books under the same lamp, sitting in the same chair, and then put them in the same bookcase when you're done with them? It's weird – outrageous even! – that tech companies think that buying a book from them means that they should have the legal right to force you to read or listen to it using their technology exclusively.

If you let your Storyfair audiobooks touch your Libro.fm audiobooks, they won't get cooties! Audible is like a toddler that won't let their broccoli touch their peas – only that toddler is also a rapacious monopolist that keeps 75% of every sale.

The fight for fair audiobooks is one of those places where the different parts of my professional life cross over: activism, digital media, art, writing the web, and breaking down complex technical subjects for a mass audience. I've just signed up to a six-year project to combine all those facets in a structured way, in collaboration with Cornell University.

Cornell just named me as their latest AD White Professor-at-Large. This is a six-year appointment that involves a series of week-long visits to Ithaca to lecture, run seminars, meet with colleagues, collaborate on research, and do community performances:

https://adwhiteprofessors.cornell.edu/

We've tentatively scheduled my first visit for early September 2025, to coincide with the Ithaca Book Festival, and we've got big plans, roping in multiple departments at Cornell, the local alternative school and local colleges, doing talks at the fair as well as at the university, and (we hope!) squeezing in a stop in NYC on the way home for a day at Cornell Tech. I'm so excited (and honored) to be working with Cornell (and getting a chance to visit Moosewood Restaurant, whose cookbooks taught me how to cook!). Watch this space.

Authorship has always been a political act, but never moreso than today, with waves of book-bans sweeping the country. One of the heroes of those bans is Maggie Tokuda-Hall, who made headlines when she publicly excoriated Scholastic for demanding that she remove references to racism from her kids' books in order to make them more palatable to reactionaries:

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/15/1169848627/scholastic-childrens-book-racism

Tokuda-Hall has stepped up the fight, co-founding Authors Against Book Bans, an org that provides training and support for author/activists so they can fight back against book bans at library board and city council meetings:

https://www.authorsagainstbookbans.com/

Authors Against Book bans is looking for members! I signed up last week, within seconds of having Tokuda-Hall give me the pitch when we ran into each other in Oakland at the Locus Awards. Are you an author? Sign up too! They're especially interested in branching out beyond YA and kids' authors (though they want those kinds of writers, too!).

Book bans affect us all. Even if you personally are never stymied when you visit your library and discover the book that you want to read has been removed by a swivel-eyed loon with terminal groomer-panic. The bans sweeping our country mean that our neighbors and loved ones are being denied literature by these cranks. There are people in your life who are losing out on the possibility of a life-changing literary adventure (which is why the far right hates these books – they want to be sure no one encounters the ideas between their covers).

The realization that you have to live in a society with people who are harmed by injustice, even if you personally escape that justice? It's the whole basis for solidarity.

Americans are living through a multigenerational project of stamping out solidarity and insisting that we only ever view ourselves as individuals, with no stake in the plights of our neighbors. That's how the US got the most expensive, least effective health care system in the world. And even if you are in the vanishingly tiny minority of Americans who are happy with their health care, you live amongst people who are being killed by the system around you.

The health system is a perfect example of how monopolization drives more monopolization, and how that comes to harm the public and workers. Health consolidation began with pharma mergers, that led to pharma companies gouging hospitals. Hospitals, in turn, engaged in a nonstop orgy of mergers, which created regional monopolies that could resist the pricing power of monopoly pharma – and screw insurers. That kicked off consolidation in insurance, which is why most Americans have a "choice" of between one and three private insurers – and why health workers' monopoly employers have eroded their wages and working conditions.

A new study in American Economic Review: Insights puts some quantitative spine in this tale, tracking the relationship between hospital mergers and skyrocketed health-care prices:

https://harris.uchicago.edu/news-events/news/consolidation-hospital-sector-leading-higher-health-care-costs-study-finds?itid=lk_inline_enhanced-template

The researchers investigated 1,164 acute-care hospital mergers, finding that while the FTC only challenged 1% of these, they could – and should – have challenged 20% of them, based on the agency's own criteria for merger scrutiny. The researchers blame the rising costs of hospital care directly on these mergers, and point out that Congress has historically starved the FTC of the budget it needed to investigate these mergers. The annual additional costs to the American people from these mergers exceed the entire annual budget of the FTC.

It's not just hospitals: the entire investor class is hell-bent on spending their way to monopoly. Nowhere is that more true than in AI, where hundreds of billions are being poured into bids to attain permanent dominance through scale. Writing for their excellent AI Snake Oil newsletter, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor inject some realism into the AI scale hype:

https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-scaling-myths

Narayanan and Kapoor challenge the idea that throwing more data at large language models will make the better: "With LLMs, we may have a couple of orders of magnitude of scaling left, or we may already be done." They are skeptical that this can be fixed with synthetic data (whose use is limited to "fixing specific gaps and making domain-specific improvements"). They also point out that if returns from data slow, then returns from adding more compute or making bigger models might also be throttled.

They reserve their most skeptical take for "AGI" – the idea that LLMs are going to achieve consciousness. This is a fundamentally unserious idea, one that they unpack in detail in their forthcoming book:

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691249131/ai-snake-oil

One thing I'm hoping for from the book is some analysis of the material usefulness of AI hype – what purpose does the hype serve? I mean, obviously, hype is useful if you're looking to suck up investor capital, or flip an investment to a greater fool. But there's a specific character to AI hype: namely, the claim that AI will displace labor, which is really a claim that a bet on AI is a bet on the increasing wealth of capital at labor's expense.

In other words, AI is a bet on oligarchy. In America, that's a pretty safe bet, and the odds just got even better, thanks to a string of brutal Supreme Court decisions that legalized bribery, banned most regulatory enforcement, and made being alive and unhoused into a crime (Poor Laws 2.0):

https://prospect.org/justice/2024-06-29-whos-gonna-check-supreme-court-chevron-separation-powers/

But amidst all those gimmes to the rich and powerful, there was one notable exception: the SCOTUS ruling on the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy. Purdue was the family business of the Sacklers, a multigenerational dope-peddling dynasty that went from super-rich to stratospherically rich by kickstarting the opioid epidemic with their blockbuster drug Oxycontin.

The Sacklers sold mountains of Oxy the old fashioned way: by lying. The lied about its efficacy and they lied about its safety, and they helped kill hundreds of thousands of Americans. Eventually, this caught up with them, and Purdue lost a bunch of court cases and was forced into bankruptcy.

That's where things get gnarly: the Sacklers took the already-sleazy world of elite bankruptcy to a whole new level, with a set of breathtakingly sleazy maneuvers that ensured that their case would be heard by the one judge in America who would let them off the hook:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/11/justice-delayed/#justice-redeemed

That judge was Robert Drain and the Sacklers were the blow-off to a long and shameful career in public "service." The Sacklers incorporated a subsidiary in White Plains, NY (in Drain's turf) precisely 181 days before filing for bankruptcy, then claimed that this empty small-town office had been the company HQ for more than six months. Then they hid machine-readable metadata in their filing that tricked the court's database into assigning the case to Drain:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#shoppers-choice

The reason the Sacklers were so horny for Drain? He was a notoriously generous source of "nonconsensual third-party releases." These would allow the Sacklers to permanently end every lawsuit against them without having to declare bankruptcy. Instead, they could take their (ruined, hollow) company through bankruptcy, throw a small fraction of their personal fortunes into the pot, representing fractional pennies on the dollar of what they owed to their victims, and walk away with tens of billions and eternal protection from any future suits.

In other words, they could stiff their creditors and keep the loot. Which is exactly what Robert Drain gave them – before retiring from the bench to get a two-orders-of-magnitude pay raise at a white-shoe firm that specializes in representing corporate mass-murderers like the Sacklers.

That's where it would have ended, but for a surprising ruling from the Supreme Court, which threw out the nonconsensual third-party release deal and put the Sacklers back on the hook to pay the victims of their many, many crimes.

As ever, the best source of analysis and explanation for elite bankruptcy shenanigans is Adam Levitin of the Credit Slips blog:

https://www.creditslips.org/creditslips/2024/06/purdue-pharma-decision-a-big-win-for-mass-tort-victims.html

Levitin has a prediction for what's going to happen next. He rejects the predictions of Sackler apologists, who say that this is going to add years or decades to the already too-long wait for compensation that the Sacklers' victims have endured. Instead, Levitin says that the Sacklers will almost certainly transfer billions more from their personal fortunes to the settlement pot and beg for consensual releases from their victims. In other words, they'll go from dictating terms to asking for them.

So the settlement will stand, but it will be larger, and victims who don't want to take it won't have to – they'll be able to sue. In other words, this ruling "does not prevent deals in bankruptcy. It just changes the terms of what those deals."

This has implications for other mass-murderers and corporate criminals, like Johnson and Johnson (who tricked women into dusting their vulvas with asbestos):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/01/j-and-j-jk/#risible-gambit

And the Boy Scouts of America, who let pedophiles abuse children for decades:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/05/third-party-nonconsensual-releases/#au-recherche-du-pedos-perdue

Both J&J and BSA carved out nonconsensual third-party releases in the mold of the Sacklers' deal, and both briefed the Supreme Court, warning that if the Sacklers were forced to pay what they owed, J&J and BSA's victims would also be entitled to far larger sums. Go ahead and threaten us with a good time, why doncha?

The Sackler decision is a real bright spot at a dark time for corporate impunity. It's always nice to see big corporate bullies getting a bit of a comeuppance. Another one of those comeuppances was just delivered thanks to a classic fatfinger error.

A Microsoft engineer accidentally released the sourcecode to Playready, the company's flagship DRM product:

https://borncity.com/win/2024/06/26/microsoft-employee-accidentally-publishes-playready-code/

Microsoft's DRM doesn't do anything to protect the interests of creative workers or even the companies that employ them. As a Microsoft rep admitted on stage at a presentation in 2006, the purpose of Microsoft DRM is to prevent small startups from entering the market, ensuring that Microsoft and its "rivals" can safely divide up the world without worrying about disruptive competitors:

https://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/30/msft-our-drm-licensing-is-there-to-eliminate-hobbyists-and-little-guys/

I was there that day and reported on the remarks, prompting both Microsoft and its rep to furiously deny that they'd ever said this, despite multiple witnesses who heard it. This was just a couple years after I gave a viral talk at Microsoft about why the company shouldn't use DRM:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/18/greetings-fellow-pirates/#arrrrrrrrrr

By 2006, it was clear that the company was all in on DRM, and today, DRM is the centerpiece of Microsoft's anticompetitive strategy, and Playready is the centerpiece of Microsoft's DRM. The source-code leak is doubtless going to give rise to lots of grey-market tools for stripping DRM from all kinds of media:

https://security-explorations.com/microsoft-playready.html

You love to see it! Now I'm doubly looking forward to this summer's security conferences, including Defcon, where, for the first time, I'll be emceeing the charity poker tournament to benefit EFF:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/06/betting-your-digital-rights-eff-benefit-poker-tournament-def-con-32

This should be very fun – and funny – especially given how little I know about poker (I have been specifically selected on that basis, for the comedy value). Every player gets a custom EFF poker-deck, and the winner gets a treasure chest filled by EFF board member Tarah Wheeler, including "emeralds, black pearls, amethysts, diamonds, and more."

I like to close these linkdumps with something fun and uplifting, and I'd planned to end things with the poker-tournament, but then my pal Raph Koster announced that his game studio Playable Worlds had dropped its first announcement of Stars Reach, an open-world MMO like no other:

https://www.raphkoster.com/2024/06/28/announcing-stars-reach/

Raph is a legend in MMO design circles, whose credits include Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. He wrote the definitive text on how games work, A Theory of Fun, that's does for games what Understanding Comics did for comics:

https://www.theoryoffun.com/

Stars Reach is stupidly ambitious. It consists of truly open worlds, modeled to an absurd degree of fidelity:

We know the temperature, the humidity, the materials, for every cubic meter of every planet. Our water actually flows downhill and puddles. It freezes overnight or during the winter. It evaporates and turns to steam when heated up. And not just our water — everything does this. Catch a tree on fire with a stray blaster bolt. Melt your way through a glacier to find a hidden alien laboratory embedded in the ice. Stomp too hard on a rock bridge, and watch out, it might collapse under your feet. Dam up a river to irrigate your farm. Or float in space above an asteroid, and mine crystals from its depths.

The game is fundamentally a climate story, whose lore has humanity seeded around the galaxy by a powerful alien race called the Old Ones, only to have humans bust through the planetary limits of every world they were given. Now the Old Ones are giving humans another chance to try smarter ways of sustaining ourselves on new worlds, with the aid of powerful robots call "Servitors."

Because this is a Raph Koster game, it's got a bunch of extremely satisfying play dynamics:

A classless skill tree advancement system, where peaceful play matters just as much as combat

An intricate player-driven economy where players can craft their way to fame and fortune

An accessible yet deep combat system, where you can choose whether to play using action aiming or more forgiving homing shots or lock-on targeting

In-world player housing that lets you build and customize your home and form towns… and enough room for everyone to have a house

A single shardless galaxy, with both space and ground gameplay… in fact, you can build that house on an asteroid, if you want

The ability for a group to govern a planet, and define its laws, whether you want a peaceful home or a PvP free for all

Stars Reach is not playable yet, but the company's looking for gamers to give them feedback and steer the development:

https://starsreach.com/

OK, that wraps up the week's links. I'm gonna get one more edition out on Monday, god willin' and the crick don't rise, and then I'll be off for a couple weeks. Enjoy your summer!

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

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/2024/06/29/pasticcio/#professor-at-large

Image: James St John https://flickr.com/photos/47445767@N05/40894047123

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[jxtina-86]

Control

Part of the Roman/Katherine series - this follows on a few months after the The Request where these two decided to level-up their escapades.

Two things inspired this. This promo which makes my brain short-circuit every time I see it and this GIF series. Especially the first one. Jesus Christ. Anyway - credit to the owner (and @thesamoanqueen for finding that first one MONTHS ago when I first had this idea).

Oh and I spent way too much time hunting around for a certain item that features in this and reading the reviews - my search history is beyond rescue at this point.

Warning: Sexual content/descriptions

Rating: MA

Comments/reblogs/likes all welcome!

****

Katherine rolls her neck slowly, easing the tension that's built up from sitting still for too long. Stretching her arms up briefly, she drops her hands to her face and pushes her glasses up to rub her eyes.

Letting the frames fall back into place, she blinks at the screen. She clocks the time in the corner and knows she should shut her laptop down and come back to it in the morning with fresh eyes. But yet…

Her brow furrows as she re-reads the last few paragraphs. She knows it's a bad habit - she should leave it alone, let the words sit and breathe a little longer before she edits, but in moments of frustration, such as this one, she can't help herself.

Her finger hovers over the delete button for a second before she shakes her head and retracts her hand. Spinning slowly away from the desk, she once again pushes her glasses up onto her head. Closing her eyes, she slowly pieces together fragments of the intended scene in her head.

His hands, one gliding down her body, fingers tugging… the other cupping her face, turning it to his.

His body pressed against her back, firm, strong. She melts into his embrace, her body loose and willing as his fingers slip between her legs.

Her thighs open, welcoming him and she relishes in the groan that vibrates through him as he teases the exposed and sensitive skin.

A loud buzz.

No. That's not right.

Her eyes flicker open and she sees her phone lit up. She already knows it's him before she even spots the name.

Back at the hotel x

She swipes to reply but he sends through another message before she finishes.

You better be in bed, baby girl. It’s late x

Busted, she grins at the screen as she taps out a reply.

I'm working x

Go to bed x

Make me x

She chews her lip, waiting as she sees that he’s typing. There’s a brief pause and then…

She grins as both her face and his flashes up on the screen - a new photo she took the last time they were together in the back of a cab on the way back from a bar. The smirk on his face and her wide eyes give away the fact that his hand, not seen in the photo, was sliding over her thigh and between her legs as she’d taken the snap.

Her skin tingles at the memory, but Katherine still leans back in her chair in mock defiance as she answers the video call. Yet the second she sees him, her resolve begins to crumble - even she would admit that was inevitable.

Roman is standing in a hotel bathroom, in a pair of grey joggers that are slung deliciously low on his hips. Katherine physically has to suppress a whimper, her eyes unsure of where to look as she takes in his chest, abs, arms, face, the faint imprint of his dick against the grey material.

Roman smirks, leaning forward to tower over the phone he has propped on the vanity.

“See something you like?”

“Always,” she replies, not missing a beat.

“You should be in bed. It’s nearly midnight there, baby girl.”

“I know. But I was mid-flow.”

“Bullshit,” he chuckles. “You wouldn’t have replied if you were.”

Katherine pouts in response.

“Bed,” he tells her. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

“Will you?” She tries not to sound too hopeful.

Roman scrapes a hand across his face. “This was your idea, baby girl.”

She pouts. “I didn’t realise a four-week stint was on the cards.”

“Yeah, about that…”

“No, Ro…”

“Someone dropped the ball, my schedule got fucked. I swear to God, I gave ‘em fuckin’ hell.” His brown eyes stare at her pleading through the screen.

“So when are you back?”

“Saturday.”

“So three extra days?”

“Yeah…” he exhales slowly. “I’m sorry, Kat.”

She forces a smile. “It’s okay. Shit happens.”

“I’m gonna make it up to you. Dinner on Saturday. I’ll take you to that fancy sushi place you’ve been telling me about.”

“It’s booked up for weeks, I tried.”

“Good job you got yourself a man with contacts then.”

“How-”

“Uh-huh, I got contacts, that’s all you need to know.”

She smiles. “Okay, okay. Thank you. I can’t wait.”

“For you, anything.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Anything?”

A deep laugh echoes through the screen. “Oh, you really are trying it on tonight, baby girl.”

“Four weeks, Ro,” Katherine whines, unashamed of how much of a brat it makes her sound.

He shakes his head. “Firstly, this was your idea. I’m just playing my part. And secondly, it’s only a few more days. Plus,” his voices drops an octave. “You’re doing so well.”

A shiver curls down her spine. “Yeah?”

He nods slowly, his head rocking to the side as he eyes her. “You can hang on a few more days.”

She knows he’s right - it was her idea.

And she also knows that if she does default on this agreement, there’s no real consequence. He’d only take it further if she asked him to.

But the way he embodies the character she demands of him - a man in charge of her pleasure - makes her feel that she owes it to him to carry out her part.

She didn’t quite imagine it would end up like this - what had started as the occasional teasing play had quickly evolved. The sex had been pretty fucking wild before she’d made the request. Now it was off the charts.

Now she could only cum with his permission and more crucially, only in his physical presence.

In past travel stints, they’d survived on phone sex, purring down the phone at each other, listening to each other’s breathless moans, slick fists and fingers and the occasional gentle hum of a toy. 

Now he’d pull her back from the brink, even from miles away with just one solitary word she finds she can’t ignore. Stop.

It had been equal parts delicious and torturous. Katherine had countdowns set on her phone for each trip away, waiting for his return. But even then, he’d take his sweet time, watching her writhe in frustration until he relents and tells her ‘now’.

But four weeks. Four weeks was not the plan. And nor was an additional three days.

He interrupts her thoughts. “Did a package arrive today?”

She blinks. “Huh? Oh. Yeah.”

“Go open it for me.”

She does as she’s told - the spell is wound too tightly to refuse him anything at this stage - and heads for kitchen. “Why’d they send it here?”

“I asked them too. Knew you’d be in to take it and saves me getting a redelivery or going to the depot.”

She nods, placing the phone against a mug on the counter before finding a knife to slice open the box. “What is it?” she asks as she peels back the flaps of the box.

He smirks. “You’ll see.”

“What’s with the mystery?” Katherine grumbles lightly as she rifles through the packing paper that fills the box. Her hand finds a smaller box - two in fact. She tugs the first free and casts Roman a curious look. “A new phone?”

“For you.”

“Why-”

“Find anything else?”

“Yeah, I-” she stops as she pulls out the other box and sees the image on the front. She raises an eyebrow. Looking back at the phone, she sees the wicked smile playing across Roman’s face. “You’re a bastard, you know that right?”

“What?” He winks. “Can’t I treat you, baby girl?”

“This,” she taps the box. “This is not a treat. This is a torture device.”

“Don’t be too hasty,” he smirks. “Read the box.”

She scans the blurb and then looks back up at him. “Oh…”

“Not such a bastard after all, right?”

“Perhaps,” she throws him a wink. “But Ro… it says it needs a Bluetooth connection to set up and link to more than one phone.”

“Two steps ahead of you, baby girl.” Grinning, he tugs a phone from his pocket and flashes it at the screen.

“You planned this?”

“Well, I didn’t quite plan not being with you to try it out together but actually, this works just as well…”

Katherine can feel her heart starting to pound as she opens the box and the vibrator slides into her hand. “Pretty,” she tells him with a grin.

“Turn the phone on. Passcode is your birthday.”

She does as she’s told and when the phone boots up, she clicks on the solitary app on the homescreen. A second later, she jumps as the vibrator starts to hum in her hand and she looks up to see Roman grinning at her. He twists his hand to show her the app opened on his second phone too, his thumb on the screen sliding slowly up. As he does, the vibrations gradually increase and Katherine feels her breath catch in her throat.

“All in my control,” Roman murmurs, his dark eyes meeting hers through the screen.

She nods, almost hypnotised.

“I’m gonna take care of you, baby girl.”

“You… you are?” Katherine feels a tremor down her spine at the thought. 

“Only if you do exactly what I tell you.”

“I will.”

“Good girl.” A whimper escapes her before she can stop it and he scrapes a hand over his face and down his neck with a deep chuckle. “One day I’m gonna see if I can just make you cum by saying that over and over again…”

“That,” she breathes shakily. “Would be one hell of a dangerous talent.”

“More dangerous than this?” His thumb is back on the app and the vibrator jolts once again in her hand. “Bed, baby girl.”

She doesn’t need telling twice. She eagerly gathers the three devices in her hands and makes her way to the bedroom. Propping up her main phone against the lamp on the bedside table, she awaits his next instruction.

“Strip. Slowly.”

Taking a step back so he can see her fully, she hooks her fingers into the waistband of her tight shorts. Turning away from the screen, she wriggles her hips as she slides the material over her ass before slowly bending forward.

She hears a sharp intake of breath from behind her and glances over her shoulder. Roman’s eyes are dark with lust and his tongue slips out to wet his lips briefly as his head tilts to one side. “Keep going,” he breathes.

With a grin, she edges the shorts down her legs before she slowly straightens. Turning back to face him, she crosses her arms to grab the hem of her shirt before pulling it up and over her head. Cool air hits her breasts and she cups them, her thumbs brushing over her bare nipples.

“Fuck,” Roman groans. “Keep going.”

She shakes her head. “Show me first.”

“Show you what?” he says, taking a step back and dropping his gaze down for a second. He drops a hand to the waistband of his sweatpants and tugs them an inch further south but not far enough.

“Show me what’s mine,” Katherine whines softly.

“What’s yours, huh?” He glances up, his hand letting go of the waistband and dropping instead to palm his dick through the material. “You’re gonna be in a whole world of trouble when I get home.”

“I can’t wait.”

“Missed those sweet fuckin’ lips on my dick,” he groans. “Fuck, keep touching your tits baby girl.”

She does as he requests, her fingers gently circling her hardening nipples and she’s rewarded almost instantly. She bites her lip, her head rocking to the side as he pushes his sweatpants down and kicks them away. It still takes her breath away every time she sees him naked - every part of him is chiselled and toned to perfection and she can’t quite believe her luck that she gets to explore every part of him.

She watches, transfixed as he takes his hard dick in his hand and pumps it slowly. She closes her eyes briefly and remembers the last time they were together - on her knees in front of him, hands loose on those deliciously thick and taut thighs of his. She’d gazed up at him, her brain still foggy from the intense orgasm he’d bestowed on her moments before, her mouth open as he fisted his dick with one hand, the other wrapped in her hair.

“Get on the bed,” his voice cuts through her thoughts and it takes her a second to remember where she is.

She steps forward and readjusts the phone on the bedside table, making sure he can see her and she can see him.

“What were you thinking about?” he prompts as she settles back against the pillows.

“Our last time together,” she sighs. “I’ve thought about that night every fucking night since.”

He grins. “Me too.”

“And the morning after…”

“That too,” he agrees. 

It had been equal parts rough, messy, fast, slow, tender, loving. He’d pushed and pulled her body in ways that left her unsure which way she was lying, facing, standing. He’d growled in her ear commands to wait, stop, cum, knees, open wide. And then he’d scooped her up, carried her to where she lay now, and cocooned her in his arms until she fell asleep.

The following morning, every movement was slow and gentle - he’d adorned every inch of her with soft, warm kisses, making his way down beneath the sheets and made slow, lazy love to her, his body pressed firmly against hers, his hands cupping her face to kiss her as her legs at wrapped around his waist.

“Stop,” Roman murmurs and Katherine realises her hand is on her stomach. She feels her cheeks flush as she blinks at the camera. 

“I…”

“You’re forgetting something.” He lifts the spare phone into view. “I’m in control, remember?”

She nods, reaching for the toy before taking a shaky breath of anticipation. A second later, it begins to hum softly in her palm.

“Squeeze them tits for me again,” he tells her and she notes the soft rasp in his voice already.

She obliges him, her free hand palming her breasts for a moment, awaiting his next instruction.

“Pinch your nipples for me.”

She gazes at the screen, feeling the haze starting to cloud her mind. He’s leaning against the vanity again, one hand out of sight that she knows is back fisting his dick and her mouth waters at the thought.

“Now with the toy.”

The vibrations hum through her body as she glides the toy across her breasts before circling one nipple and then the other, making both impossibly long and taut. All that’s missing is his hot mouth and tongue on them and she tells him so, drawing a shaky ‘fuck’ from him before he resumes control.

Literally.

The vibrations kick up a notch and Katherine’s back arches in response as she continues to drag the toy over the sensitive skin of her breasts. She lets the toy slide down to her ribs for a second, finding the spot that makes her squirm from any touch, her head flooded with the memory of Roman discovering it for the first time and practically latching onto it until she begged him stop through squeals.

“Uh-huh,” he corrects her and she returns the focus to her breasts once again. “Better. But I need to know…”

“Know what?” she manages to get out as she swirls the tip of the vibrator around one nipple again and again.

“How fuckin’ wet you are.”

She lets her free hand drag over her stomach slowly, her legs spreading. She can feel how wet she is already - the combination of the situation, the toy, him, her imagination all make it inevitable. She lets her fingers caress her inner thighs for a second before she slides two fingers across her wet slit.

“So wet,” she tells him with a groan.

“Show me…”

She pushes her two fingers inside herself briefly, letting out a moan as she does. She pumps them slowly, once, twice before she holds her hand aloft to show the glistening mess.

“Taste yourself.”

She bites her lip for a second, holding his gaze before she rubs the tips of her fingers across her bottom lip and then swirls her tongue around them. She grins at the screen, watching Roman’s eyes clouding with lust and wonderment.

“I taste good,” she murmurs.

“I know,” he rasps. “I’m gonna eat that pussy up all fuckin’ night when I get home, I swear. You’ll be beggin’ me to stop.”

“Never,” she promises. “You between my thighs, why the hell would I tell you to stop.”

“My favourite place, baby girl. And you might not be telling me to stop, but I sure as hell have to hold you still to get you good.”

“That just makes me wetter,” she teases. “I miss you, Ro.”

“I miss you too, Kat,” he says softly. “I had a whole other plan for this tonight.”

“Yeah? Tell me…”

“I was gonna drag that damn toy over your entire body. Real slow too - I wanted to hear all those breathy moans you give me when I’m teasin’ you.” The rasp is back in his voice and Katherine can feel her skin start to prickle in anticipation once again. “Do it, baby girl. Do what I’m saying.”

She lets out a soft moan as she moves the toy down her body at last.

“All the way,” he encourages. “That’s it… across your stomach, tease them thighs for me…”

Katherine’s eyes close as her back arches as the vibrations near her core. She’s not sure how she’s going to last beyond a minute when this toy is inside her.

“Slow,” Roman’s voice echoes beside her. “Spread those legs for me.”

“Ro…” she whines.

“Almost,” he promises as she bites her lip as the vibrations relent for a second. “Tease your pussy for me, talk to me…”

“Fuck, Ro…” her voice catching in her throat as she runs the toys over her wet entrance. “Like when you tease me with your dick, making me beg for it…”

“Just like that, baby girl.”

“Or when you spit and blow on my clit,” she gasps, her back arching at the thought. “And then you wrap your… your arms around my waist so I can’t escape… Ro…”

“Keep going…” The vibrations kick in again for a split second, just as she drags the toy over her clit and she yelps in shock. His chuckle fills her mind and she doesn’t need to open her eyes to see the wicked grin on his face.

“I… I need it,” she gasps.

“Keep teasing,” he tells her. “You know how I love to make my dick nice and wet with your juice before I fuck you… Do exactly that…”

His breath hitches and her eyes flick open to see that he’s moved - no longer in the hotel bathroom, he’s on the bed, the phone angled so that whilst she can’t see his face, she can see the length of his body. She groans as she sees his hand, slowly pumping his dick, his thumb swiping over the tip with every other stroke.

“Kat…” he breathes. “You listening to me?”

“Yeah,” she moans.

“Push it inside you.”

She gasps as she does. It’s the first time he’s let her put a toy inside her for four weeks and even though the toy is far smaller than what she’s used to, it feels impossibly big. Her back arches as she slowly pushes it deeper inside herself, her breath ragged at the sensation.

Rocking her head to the side, Katherine glances at the screen. Roman has moved again so she can see his face. His dark eyes glint wickedly at her as with one hand he still grips his thick cock and the other flicks the vibrations up a notch. Her whole body starts to hum and she lets out a strangled whimper.

“Do not,” he half-growls slowly. “Cum. Not until I tell you.”

“Ro…” she gasps. “Please…”

The vibrations stop and she’s left panting and squirming whilst he chuckles at her from a thousand miles away. “Too much, huh?”

“You…”

He grins. “I’m going easy on you, baby girl. This is nothing compared to Saturday…”

Katherine can feel her brain start to short-circuit. “What… what about Saturday?”

“That’s for me to know.”

She groans in frustration and then gasps again as the vibrations start again. Her hands grip the sheets tightly, twisting them around her fists as she tries to anchor herself to the bed.

“Breathe,” he tells her and she lets out a shaky breath in response, unable to stop herself from doing anything he says.

Through hazy eyes, she gazes at him through the screen, watching his hand grip his dick firmly and his abs tense. His head rolls back for a second and she wonders what he’s thinking.

“Tell me,” she moans.

“Tell you what?” he replies throatily.

“What you’re thinking about.”

“You. Always you, baby girl. You grinding on me, sliding up and down my dick.”

She nods, her eyes closing. “Your hands on my tits… then up to my neck and pulling me down to kiss you… Flipping me over onto my back, pushing my…” she gasps as the thought swirls around her head. “My legs up over your shoulders so you… you can go deeper… Ah, fuck…”

“That’s it,” he groans. “Wrapping my arms around your legs so they don’t fall and fuckin’ you hard and deep…”

“Twisting me over,” Katherine’s mind is overdrive now, snippets of past encounters flashing before her. “Pulling my hips up, pushing my head down so you can fuck me even harder…”

She’s not sure how she’s getting the words out. Her body is on edge, the toy throbbing inside her, pulsating even and every part of her is tingling. Her mind races on, imagining Roman pulling out of her with a growl and flipping her back over, his mouth on hers for a second before he slides down her body and wraps her legs around his head. What a combination that would be, his tongue and mouth on her clit whilst the toy hums inside her.

“It’s like you read my mind,” she hears him groan and only then does she realise that thought has spilt out of her mouth.

“I just…” she whimpers softly as she feels blood rushing to her ears. “Ro…”

“Not yet…” The hum of the toy inside her ebbs slightly and she tries to steady her breathing to slow down the surge of pleasure rattling through her.

“Please…” she chokes out.

“Soon,” he promises. “I got you, baby girl. I promise.”

Fixated on the screen, she watches as his leg twitches and she knows he’s close. “I wish I was there, Ro…” she starts, watching his head roll back onto the pillows. “My hand where yours is right now. My mouth too, running my tongue up and down your dick, taking you all the fucking way…”

“Shit… Kat…”

“Keep going,” she tells him, enjoying the thrill of telling him what to do for once. “You gripping my head, pulling me back and telling me to open wide so you can cum on my tongue…”

“Kat…” he growls, his eyes closing tightly as he gasps and she watches enthralled as he cums, his fist pumping himself dry as she moans at the sight.

“Ro…”

His chest rises and falls as he sinks back against the pillows for a second and then she squeals as the vibrator jolts back to life inside her.

“I got a request,” he murmurs.

“Yeah?” Katherine manages to get out, her body tense with anticipation as her back arches yet again.

“Saturday. My flight gets in at 5. I’ll be at yours by 7. You better be ready.”

“I will be,” she promises.

“Wear those heels that I like. The black ones. And that dress that makes your ass look amazing.”

“Done,” she groans. “Anything else?”

“The toy.”

“What… what about it?” Her breathing is getting more laboured as she twists on the bed.

“I want you to have it in you already.”

“Ro… no…”

“Oh yes, baby girl. I’m gonna tease you all fuckin’ night. I want my dessert nice and wet after dinner,” he chuckles.

She can picture it now: sat in a dark corner of the restaurant, one of his hands casually resting on her thigh whilst with the other he sends powerful vibes quite literally her way. She can see herself gripping the table, trying to compose herself as he grins wickedly and then leans towards her and whispers dirty thoughts into her ear.

“I told ya I was gonna eat your pussy up when I got back. I just wanna make sure it’s perfect for when I do…”

“Fuck… Ro…”

He chuckles. “Take my sweet time with you till you’re a fuckin’ mess. Squeeze and pinch your tits as I do, make you taste yourself on my fingers, fuck you with that damn toy until you scream my name, baby girl…”

She’s on the edge, right there, waiting for that word, begging him to say it.

“Then I’m gonna fuck you slowly… Pull all the way out and then push back in inch by inch so you feel every single part of my dick buried inside you…”

“Ro…”

“Tell you what a good fuckin girl you are…”

Her eyes roll back as she balances on the edge, her breath caught in her chest, the vibrations too much now. There’s no way back, even if she tries, she’s right there and she’s going to…

“Cum.”

She falls, with a gasp that echoes around her head. His name tumbles from her as every inch of her body erupts with force and she feels herself twisting and writhing without shame before him.

Her head throbs as she comes down from the high and she tenderly unclenches her fists from the sheets.

“You okay?” Roman’s voice cuts through as always, pulling her back. “Talk to me, Kat.”

“Yeah,” she murmurs, her eyes still squeezed shut as she grounds herself back in the here and now.

“Hey,” he murmurs. “Look at me.”

She twists her head towards the phone and opens her eyes slowly. His face fills the screen, his eyes wide and full of concern like they always are after moments like these.

“That was amazing,” she reassures him as she reaches down between her legs to remove the toy. Her own eyes widen as she feels how wet she still is. “Jesus, Ro… I think you made me…”

He laughs. “Just imagine what I can make you do on Saturday.” He tucks his arm beneath his head and not for the first time tonight, she wishes he was there next to her, wrapping his big arms around her.

“You’re serious about what you said, aren’t you?” She picks up the phone, bringing it closer to her as if that will make a difference to the distance between them.

“Deadly serious.” He eyes her for a second. “But only if you’re up for it.”

She chews her lip. “I am…”

“You don’t seem sure.”

“It’s not that.” 

“Then what?”

Despite the space he offers her, she can’t find the words. Not the right ones anyway. She can’t tell if it’s the post-orgasm haze or something else, but she can’t put into words the disconnected thoughts running through her head.

She can feel him watching her, so she smiles to reassure him.

“Tell me,” he murmurs. “Or… Can I tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“If you’re worried that I see you differently because of all this shit we do together… You best believe that ain’t true.”

She stares at him in disbelief. How…

“I do this for you because I wanna make you happy, baby girl. You wanted to explore it, I was right there with you. But that doesn’t change how I see you. It’s just a tiny part of what we do together. I think you gave me an opportunity to tap into something too and I like it. But I like you more.”

She blinks. “How do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“Read my mind.”

He grins. “I know you, baby girl. Inside out. Literally,” he winks and she feels her cheeks flush. “But seriously, Kat. I’m not here just for this. This is just a bonus. At the end of the day… I just want you.”

Her heart flips. They’ve skirted around this for months - she’s bitten her tongue far too often not wanting to ruin it in case he was just looking for a casual fuck.

“I just want you too,” she hears herself whisper and his eyes light up at the words.

“I’m still doing what I promised you earlier on Saturday,” he tells her. “But on Sunday morning, I’m gonna show you exactly how much more you mean to me than just that.”

“You always do,” she says softly.

“What do you mean?”

“You do that already. Whenever we have nasty sex, the next time you’re treat me like glass.”

Now it’s his turn to blush and he runs his hand over his face with a grin. “See? I can’t hide it.”

“Hide what?”

“I’ll tell you Sunday.”

But she already knows.

Fin x

So... votes for a follow-up? Wanna see how Saturday unfolds...? Or Sunday...?

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

Do you think William's reputation will survive? I feel so sorry for him and Catherine, I had to take a break from social media, the affair rumors are everywhere, everyone is now believing he had an affair, foreign media is now talking about him fathering an illegitimate child with Rose, they are even accusing him of domestic violence and people take it all as a fact.

In the long term big picture, William will be fine. A lot of this is going to be just a paragraph or two when he’s Charles’s age and we’re celebrating a jubilee or the birth of George’s child or Louis’s wedding or Charlotte leading the Lionesses to Olympic Gold and World Cup medals.

But in the short term, yes, William’s reputation will take a hit. What he does next will determine how long it takes for his reputation to climb back up. There are three things that he can do:

Prove that everyone is wrong, that his marriage is fine and he does not have anger management issues.

Go away and not be in the news for a few weeks or months till everyone’s forgotten.

Work. Really crank out the engagements, get his numbers up to spitting distance of Edward’s, and maintain them at that baseline from here on out.

#1 requires becoming more public, and we know that’s not going to happen for the Waleses. That’s fine. History will have to judge on that one. But there is some good news on this front - the Chumleys have had enough and they’ve begun taking legal action on the rumors involving them and their children.

#2 is not happening. William can’t just peace out and not work or be seen for 3-4 months. He’s the heir, it’s his job to be seen and to work, especially when Charles can’t do much because of his own health.

Which leaves us with #3 - work. I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. William (and Kate) both need to work more. Their numbers both need to go way up once Kate’s current health crisis is over and she’s back to top form. If they’re not going to work more, that’s fine but they need to show us more of the in-progress work that they’re currently doing and not save it all for the bow-on-top end-result. There’s a reason why the photos and videos of The Queen and Charles working through the red boxes are popular and, at times, iconic - because it shows that they’re working. If just every other week we got a photo of William in a meeting or Kate reading the reports that the Early Years Foundation says she’s been reviewing.

However, the issue with William’s work is that it can’t be a one-and-done. What ever changes they make and whatever the new number is after they’ve scaled up, that has to be the new baseline, the new standard. It must be maintained, otherwise it becomes clear that it was just a PR exercise to distract from these scandals.

Something else I’ve been thinking of a bit lately is the Waleses’ engagement numbers, particularly Kate’s and since accession in 2022. There was a lot of talk throughout 2023 of how disappointing it was that the Waleses turned in the same numbers for 2023 as they did while they were Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, at the bottom of the list. There was an idea on the blogs that everyone understood William and Kate to keep a lower profile through the spring so the attention was rightly focused on Charles and the coronation, but then they’ve should’ve scaled up from late summer onwards, after the anniversary of The Queen’s passing to demonstrate their ability to be heirs and show acceptance of their future.

But now I wonder if Kate’s numbers have been affected by her condition. They haven’t said a whole lot, but what I know of bowel/stomach issues is that they’re usually chronic and people can suffer symptoms for a long time before surgery becomes an option. So with that, perhaps Kate’s numbers didn’t change much last year because she was dealing with these issues? And to save face, the palace made the usual “for the children” excuses until it became emergent and the surgery essential. Just something to think about.

[hourcat]

Model and Designer for piarles 😘🙏

20. model and designer

Pierre can't sleep.

It's becoming a habit, which is not boding well for his stomach lining considering how much more coffee he's been drinking because of that fact. Pierre just...can't sleep. There's not much he can really attribute it to, except for maybe the fact that he's a few months out from the big debut of his whole new fashion line--the latest Louis offshoot he'd been fortunate enough to helm. This is years of his life at stake: all that school and groundwork, all the bleeding and pricking and crying he'd done to find himself here, surrounded by fabric swatches laid out haphazardly at the desk kitty-cornered in his bedroom. There are stacks of photos and torn-up magazines out on his kitchen counter. His whole apartment is now a perfect parallel to his workplace: covered in ideas, wall-to-wall.

Hm. Maybe that's why he's becoming an insomniac.

Instead of paying the thought any more attention, though, Pierre slips out of bed and pads over to his desk chair, grabs the nearest sketchbook of his and flips to a blank page. It's not quite dawn, but there's more light than there was a few hours ago--enough to see what he'd left behind.

Charles is out cold. Completely asleep, drool and all. He looks innocent in ways that no photographer would ever be able to capture: forehead smoothed out with sleep, body curled in on itself slightly in the absence of someone next to him. Pierre gazes at him, sketchbook heavy in his hands, and feels the guilt in his stomach like a knife. He'd only invited his lead model over tonight for a review of their plans for the first walk-through with the clothes. (They have to move right, after all: Pierre needs to see his work from all angles in motion before he can be comfortable putting it on stage, even for a dress rehearsal.)

He hadn't planned for two bottles of wine. He certainly hadn't planned for Charles in his lap, warm and pliant and so, so easy as Pierre had given him direction: take this off and open your mouth and hands and knees. The memory of it makes Pierre's throat tight. So good for me, he'd mumbled after, mouth pressing just under Charles' ear, and the yes sir he'd gotten back had thrown him right out of his own mind.

He grips the sketchbook tighter. There's no way this can ever happen again, he knows--once is a mistake and he'll keep it that way.

From the bed, Charles snores lightly. It's a soft sound: sweet, almost. Pierre's chest is so tight he swears he must've forgotten how to breathe.

"Oh, Charlie," he whispers to the quiet of the room, "what have I done?" Nothing good, he's certain. Pencil in hand, Pierre tries to redirect his thoughts to the work laid out on the desk behind him--dresses with angular cuts, wide-arm sleeves, the jagged lines of a belt that's been nagging at the back of his mind since he'd axed the last round of the designs from his main book.

What he ends up with is this: Charles, in charcoal, curled up in his expensive sheets. The most damning evidence of his lapse in judgment, and he can't even bring himself to rip the sketch to shreds because it feels like a waste--a waste of beauty, even if it's a beauty he can't have.

[initial-dream]

Kodansha USA (2024) Omnibus Release Volume 02

Has it really been three months already?

The second volume of Kodansha USA's Omnibus release of Initial D just released (June 25th 2024, though it was also released digitally three weeks earlier on June 4th) and I have just gotten my hands on a copy.

Pretty much every compliment I paid to the translation last time is true. As with before, the many oddities and changes present in the Tokyopop and earlier 2019 Kodansha USA release are gone.

I feel its pertinent for me to offer a minor addendum to my review of the first volume, specifically in regard to print quality. Many people have noted that the paper that the first volume is printed on appears incredibly grainy. While it isn't something I paid much mind to, it does appear to be grainier than your average, which is somewhat embarrassing for a "premium" release that costs twice the amount of a normal manga volume. Many people have also complained that their volumes have pages where the ink is visibly lighter than it should be. This doesn't effect every reader, but it is unfortunate that some people are having a worse experience than I am with this release.

The paper grain of this volume does seem better to my eyes, though it may be about the same (I would like to provide a photo of this but my phone's camera doesn't really show the grain very well.

Unfortunately, once again, there is a minor blight on this great release in the form of a translation error. When Shingo is first introduced in chapter 29, he, for whatever reason, calls himself "Shingo Atsushi", instead of Shingo Shoji.

This error does confuse me slightly, as a quick cursory search online would show that this is incorrect. It's possible that the translator misread 庄司 (Shoji) as 厚司 (Atsushi), as they do have a character in common, but I cannot say for sure. I believe this is the only location in this volume where Shingo is referred to using his surname, so we may have to wait for the next release to see if this gets corrected. This does remind me of a similar mistranslation in the Tokyopop release with Toru Suetsugu's name, which I may cover at some point.

I dont mean for any of this to come off as a condemnation of this release; this is still the best version of Initial D that we have ever received, it's just unfortunate to see the translation be tripped up by minor things such as this. I do still recommend picking this up if you are interested in reading the manga (and I think you should be, its the best version of the story.)

[glindaupland]

The Phantom of the Opera | Seoul, South Korea | October 8-14th, 2023 [REVIEWS]

Wow it's about time I posted these reviews that I kept lying about (this week! tomorrow! in 10 years!) Better late than never?

In this post I'll drop a few general things about the production, but the performances are analyzed in my reviews linked here. I recommend reading those all in order since I revisit points about actors I've made previously along the way to avoid repeating myself. Also leaving a disclaimer that these performances are from October so there are some changes in what the actors are doing now (with the exception of Jeon Dong-seok since he left in November) Apologies in advance for my wordiness, but this is more of a "release my feelings for my sake and if anyone else likes it that's cool too" kind of thing? Listen - I wrote a lot of notes on my performances there. So just go in knowing this is the more coherent version of my insane looking notes app!

Before I start I want to thank a few lovely friends who helped me out with this trip because it wouldn't have gone as well as it did without them!

Thank you to @lucygold95 for helping me so much with planning over the past months and for giving me the best time in Busan. Thank you @capitanogiorgio for all the shenanigans we went through and the most special time going to the 1500th and meeting Yoon Young-seok. Thank you to @fadinglandtragedy for the fun talks and the good advice before my trip! The best part of things like this is making friends of course! : )

PERFORMANCE REVIEWS:

| October 8, 2023 | October 11, 2023 | October 12, 2023 | | October 13, 2023 (M) | October 13, 2023 (E) | October 14, 2023 |

STAGE & THEATER

This was as close to the original staging as possible. So I was able to take it in one more (or I guess 6 more?) times post-Broadway closing. The Charlotte Theater is a lot smaller than the Majestic so every view was pretty solid in my opinion, even the second to last row. I took a video of my view from 4th row under the chandelier during the exit music on October 11th so you can see! The angel and chandelier are shown halfway through. I'd say 5th row was almost the cut off for the chandelier drop (that was my spot next day) Broadway seats in this area were always too expensive for me so I'm glad I was able to grab these spots for this production

There were photo zones you can take pics at which you've probably seen. One was a large rose wall, the other was the cute statue of their mascot 오유령. People also take forever lining up for the cast boards for photos and yes I was one of those people. Here's a comparison of the cast boards from the second season (pictures I found when reading old reviews on Naver) and the cast boards now (I forgot to take a photo of one on the top floor though)

I found this review where someone took more detailed clean photos than I did if you're curious about the layout and decorations!

MERCH AND GIFTS

The tickets had these designs! If you booked on Yes24, you received a special envelope and a ticket holder with the face of the Phantom performing for that show

I only didn't receive a second Ju-taek because that was booked on another site - Interpark (bottom middle ticket). I also received paper masks with printed autographs every day I went to commemorate the 200th performance of the run/100th for Seoul and the 1500th overall Korean performance. We used them for the curtain call photos on those two dates (with Jeon Dong-seok then Kim Ju-taek). There are multiple versions of the program book and at the time of writing this I have all except the Daegu one. The first Busan program book was pretty bare and only had the teaser pictures - the same was the case for my Les Mis program book in Busan. -There are different photos in each one, so to me it was worth grabbing them all. My third version signed by Kim Ju-taek is currently on display as you can see below! (The writing says "내 노래를 날게 해 주오 - Make my song take flight") Once again thank you to Lucy for this! 🥹❤️

Here's some of my POTO merch (including a spare cupsleeve from the coffee shop next door, I also had a keyring, but I forgot to show it) RIP to the second program book I sacrificed for scans I still have the pages stored/displayed though! I'm not wasteful! I'll have more to post soon after sharing these reviews

TRANSLATION

Let me emphasize this: my Korean abilities are limited, so don't look to me as the expert on this at all. But I'll still share my notes and perspective as an outsider who's studying The lyrics have changed quite a bit since 2001-2. There are still lines kept or songs that are mostly similar. MOTN had a lot of similarity to 2009-11 even with its changes, STYDI was identical to 2009-11, but Angel of Music was pretty different from even the last season, etc etc. The Phantoms all have unique lines sprinkled here and there, mainly in MOTN (this happens sometimes in Korean musicals). You get some things like random single line changes in some parts depending on the actor or different order/wording of the same lines as well. Just tiny diversions from the script. This is the case for the Christines and Raoul to a lesser extent. Additionally, actors are often permitted to do some occasional improvisation/ad libs. Some unique lines are pretty normal parts of their interpretations now, some appear depending on the feeling of the performance, some are one time only events. I'll mention some of the actor-specific ones and such in their actual reviews, but I have been trying to mark down all of the differences like these for example

Of course, some things obviously have to be adjusted to make sense because of cultural / linguistic reasons. So one example would be the "Wrote...written" line in Notes I. Firmin speaks rudely and informally, but quickly tries adding a more respectful ending particle 요 after Raoul and André give him a shocked 'what did you just say?' kind of look. So "대체 뭘 썼다고 하는 건데...요!" is pretty much like "What the hell are you saying I wrote?" André would look so embarrassed by this each time 🫣

퇴근길 / STAGE DOOR

Stage door doesn't really work the same as it does in places like New York, London, etc. Most of the time if an actor comes out it's more like a quick greeting or chat with the fans. Some actors (not in this case) might sign or take photos in designated spots, but it really depends and it's not so common. It's gotten more restricted ever since COVID as well. 퇴근길 -> "way home from work" is literally what this is called. Dong-seok did wave at us a few times happily after the 200th performance, Gun-ha briefly came out to thank fans after the 1500th while Ceci and I waited to meet Young-seok who had agreed to meet us. I did not have the time (or strength) for the Seung-woo mob, but he usually greets fans after shows.

I literally asked Yoon Young-seok directly on Instagram if Ceci and I could meet him and give him gifts because I figured it didn't hurt to try! When he agreed, my anxiety was not necessarily about meeting an actor, but more about my ability to express my thoughts in another language. But he was truly the sweetest guy and incredibly patient. I think he got that I understood everything he said, but that replying was a whole other challenge. I'm glad I was making enough sense that he was able to get my points and helped me finish sentences if I looked stressed about it 😂 I basically told him I had been planning this trip since the cast announcement because it was too perfect to miss and that I came for 6 shows. I really like to listen to his Phantom on the cast recordings and I thought he made the shows I had seen so far so much fun.

We both said where we were from (the US and France) and he was amazed. He was also shocked when I pulled out my original Korean cast recording (I still laugh thinking about the way he said "와, 세상에!" like "Wow, oh my god!" and enthusiastically took it agreeing to sign when I was mid-way asking him haha) I also thought it was funny when he asked Ceci if she saw his Phantom last season. We wish! But she mentioned she had gone to Busan a few times and he looked very touched and appreciative that we went to multiple performances 🥹 This poor man was tired he signed our things with November (11.13) though and he also spelled Ceci's name wrong first time, but it was the 1500th show though okay. And if he says it's November...who are we to question him? Ceci should also legally change names so he isn't wrong. Anyway, ramble over you can find the art we made for him in this post

OTHER

Here's just bonus fun I had that I will manage to connect to POTO despite it not being POTO because I love doing that. I mean I went because I like these musicals as well (otherwise I would've been foolish enough to go see Ben-Hur but I have, uh, standards for my plots sorry to Park Eun-tae 😭), but it's fun to point out these things. I'm happy to share my show experiences in a different post if anyone's interested in my thoughts on those

Rebecca

I went to see Rebecca, mainly focused on seeing a scheduled date for 이지혜 Lee Ji-hye (Ich) and 장은아 Jang Eun-ah (Mrs Danvers). The whole cast was fantastic. Some Korean musicals have special encore bits they do where the leads sing a part of a song from the show during bows so that was really fun. Unfortunately, we don't get to have fun at POTO like that haha

Lee Ji-hye was in Y&K Phantom as Christine in the same cast as Jeon Dong-seok (Erik), Yoon Young-seok (Gérard Carrière), and Lee Sang-jun (Cholet). Two other cast members in Rebecca were in Y&K as well - 에녹 Enoch (Maxim) who was Philippe and 신영숙 Shin Young-sook (Mrs Danvers) who was Carlotta. Sadly, they had such few shows this season due to a busy schedule, so I couldn't see them (when will trot give Enoch back to musicals). Original Korean ALW Raoul and Y&K Erik 류정한 Ryu Jeong-han was also on rotation as Maxim, but I picked another day for my show so I didn't see him either

Les Misérables

I went to opening night of Les Mis in Busan! It was the Dream Theater, same place POTO played at before. As many of you already know, Choi Jae-rim is playing Jean Valjean at the same time as the Phantom.

I could recognize him easily as the Phantom, but honestly when he appeared at the very start of Les Mis it took me a minute to process that it was him! While I did enjoy his Phantom a lot, I think I enjoyed his Valjean performance a little more. It was only opening night, so curious to see how things develop!

The actor who played Javert that night, 카이 Kai (stage name), was a former Y&K Erik for two seasons too. So many Phantoms!

Frankenstein

On the last day I got to see Dong-seok and Ji-hye once more in a concert for the musical Frankenstein which they have been in together. So have some pics I took without a mask blocking his face!

Ending Note

Thinking back to December 2022 when I said: "Maybe I'll go to Seoul and see Dong-seok once or twice and that's it, I can have my first international POTO" That was funny. That was really very very funny and silly of me to say. 9 performances and 6 of those were POTO! But I'm so grateful and I have zero regrets about it. This is one of the best experiences I've had even if it might look ridiculous to some people to do something like this...I don't care! I hope my crazy essays can help paint a good picture for you!

[silvyysthings]

Yeah I saw that. The part about dismissing fans and them not finding out if Tim doesn’t want them to know is not the whole thing it’s worse and in Elle. It also doesn’t end in “KJ knows how to keep things private” It ends with “she knows how to keep what she wants secret”. Here’s what’s not a secret. Fans have had enough of this charade. Fans are not the ones talking about this in between the bombardment of updates and blinds supplied by PR to the press every week. Here’s another non secret. Fans are responding. Timmy’s IG is in fucking Freefall right now. He’s been losing 1k plus followers a day for weeks with this romance and the W trailer fans outside of here hated. The only time he gained 2500 was the day fans found out they had broken up after the onslaught of articles after their not serious but casual PR narrative bullshit. I hope his career is worth all these games but going by the strong response now and the overly negativity comments everywhere I don’t think so. Nobody believes this is real. It looks like her side only is working overtime with innuendo, quotes in articles and alleged leaks. Remember the hickey photo with articles? You think his team would stay quiet on that if it wasn’t true? It’s been four months? It’s always her insider quotes for articles and tabloids and alleged leaks to Dmuh who’s been doing some heavy lifting for this romance almost like she’s a paid extension of their PR teams. That was until last weeks break up fiasco where tmz said “multiple sources from both sides” say their still an item. How can fans still seriously think its all in her head and he’s not involved? I get it shes fantastic for reaching a wider audience he needs coming up with nearly 400 m IG followers but a liability for him in the respect department so is his remaining silent and not getting his hands dirty a business choice? Remember this isn’t the first time Timmy has made Silence and removing himself a strategy and an an art form when it comes to anything or anyone deemed toxic getting in the way of his career. Friends drowning by media. Silence. SAG strike. Silence. Romance. Silence and blurry, but approved bts through all forms of media and car dates. Why is it though he always seems to happily participate in crystal clear Pap photos with A list power players like Leo, Larry David, Adam Sandler or Scorsese though? Stop making excuses for his behavior. Others are not. I’m not a fan of her but this is not one sided even if that’s his strategy once again by making it appear it’s her side doing all the work publically with him getting to pass off a silence strategy as privacy or non involvement. At the moment it’s been set up media wise so he can walk away at anytime and fans will believe she made it all up. Even she deserves better especially if it turns out to be true.

I'm posting your ask because as I've always said I don't censor anyone when their thoughts are expressed politely like you did.

But I ask you a question: what exactly do you want to convince me of? About the " falling " of his instagram or the bad reviews on Wonka trailer? On the fact that Tim is a private person and prefers not to comment publicly on some things and let his actions speak for themselves, including that of never being seen publicly around and possibly lately in the same state with his alleged flame? And above all, do you seriously think that the esteem I have for him as an actor and as a man can change for what he eventually chooses to do in his private life without hurting anyone? It's his life, he doesn't have to justify himself to us, he's not our property. He doesn't need anyone to excuse him for what he chooses or doesn't choose to do.

[geometricalien]

Life is Strange Double Exposure Review

(Spoiler warning)

I finished the game last night and my thoughts have been given time to proof- like making bread.

Characters

- I loved playing Max again! There was such a sweet nostalgia while playing her and hearing her repeat lines from the first game like, "Shaka brah", and it was awesome to see how 10 years had treated her- both the trauma of Arcadia Bay and how she is more confident, more assured of herself!

- I was instantly endeared to Safi from the beginning, her friendship with Max and their bantering was fun! You could tell they had a good close friendship- which only got deeper during the last 2 episodes. I think she is complicated and interesting. It just sucks that she kinda feels like a watered down Chloe. Which it had to be this way for the themes and plot. She is funny, daring, reckless, sometimes mean, vengeful, scared. I wish I knew more about her since she is going to be a bigger part of the universe going forward (if it continues).

- Moses is sweet but again I wish we knew more about him. We are only in his office once and there wasn't much to snoop around with. He gave such a weird expression when I picked the toilet mug in episode 1, I thought there was going to be more depth (which is going to be a reoccurring criticism of mine). I know he was more Safi's friend and it was only a few days since Safi's death, Max and him can't bond that fast and Alex and gang had weeks/months to bond but it still irks me.

- Amanda. She's nice. I played as a messy bisexual so Max and her are not together and I don't know if that's how it is for everyone's ending (which railroads the ending a bit and I'll go into that more later) but i think she was half developed? She is "a cool artsy music lover gay who falls in love quickly" doesn't that sound like Steph? Deck nine is playing the same fucking tune and I'm getting sick of it.

-Vihn. I didn't like him but then he won me over. What do you meannnn he is a well dressed, well groomed calendar of a bi man who seems like he only cares about the university and yasmin's schedule, but actually he has a prized hedgehog statue (where's that fucking story? Where is the depth? It is a fucking flat narrative object like when max was in that motel loop and everything was flat cardboard except the wall LIKE EVERYTHING IN THIS GAME THATS NOT TIED TO THE MAIN THEME OF THE GAME, sigh, I'll continue this later), and does tarot??? I like him alot more than Amanda actually because he is narratively tied to the plot and hence has more characterization and depth. I don't ship him with Max but hot people appreciate hot people. She smashes. I smash. Let them kiss.

- I like Gwen. She's fucking awesome. I loved snooping in her office. Icon. Firewalker mention! But again, I could use more info about her outside of relation to Safi and Yasmin.

- Lucas. [Crowd boos] shhhhh shhh you're right but shhhhh. This is less cruel Jefferson. Narcissistic scum of the earth. But still I feel like we needed more info on him. Think about how much info we have of actual Jefferson and even Nathan!

- Yasmin... let's hear it for overprotective parents who value their reputation more than their child's health and safety whoooooooo

- Diamond. Again i feel like i don't know much about her. And I'm trying to dig into what her power could be- probably something with past and future or prophecy shit. Idk I'm just thinking about her project in the fine arts building. Also who did she have a crush on? Moses? I liked having little undergrads around but she could have been developed more

- Reggie. Anxiety gay boy. Does photos. Could have been developed more.

- Reporter girl. I don't even remember her name, SHE could have been developed more. Could have been an actual element in the story, someone pressuring Max about inconsistencies and shit. Except she didn't. Not in my play through

Setting

- College was very cozy and so was the bar. I'm also a grad student so alot of the background talk of grading, finals, college traditions, thinking about dropping out, that x professor hasn't given feedback for your proposal- it was all so fucking relatable.

- but it was small. The world. The set pieces. There wasn't alot to examine or explore. I feel like if there was more of this we could know the characters more and a campus is one of those characters! I do think the split dimensions offered a slightly interesting view of the campus with and without tragedy but only in episode 2 and 3 bc then that aspect was forgotten about.

- episode 5's setting was great. I always loved the dreamscape "nothing feels real or is right" of the original's last episode AND true color's last episode bc those types of settings tell us about the characters. And that's what setting is supposed to do. I feel like double exposure didn't use the setting effectively enough

Plot

- the parallelism was good but if this was released an episode a month or two like the original- people would be calling the twist ending of episode 3. I wasn't fucking surprised. I was intrigued and wanted to see what they would do with a shape shifter but. I'll get into that in the ending section

- lis games are getting very predictable bc the creators have a mold they want to follow for better or worse "main character has superpower, aesthetic vibes, romantic interests, murder to solve, a twist!" And now. A fucking marvel ass universe. I'm intrigued but ugh. The media is so so over saturated with superpower teams of heroes and multiple dimensions- I'm over it. And so is alot of people.

Themes

- the one thing they did really really well was having Chloe and Arcadia Bay haunt Max. Everything that happened back then was paralleled in the present and Max faced the storm. She made up for her cowardice and mistakes.

Did it honor lis 1?

- yes. And no. Yes in the way that I think it was the best way to wrap up the hotly debated ending of the original. It really showed how Max grew as a character. Which is important if she's like one of the main characters in this universe they are trying to make. No in the way that it upset many people that Chloe and Max broke up. It really goes to show you can't have a decisions matter game as a series. You just can't. Because you railroad shit and take away choices and character insights. You take away the punch the bite the thing that makes the story talked about a decade later.

Gameplay

- I know there is a reason both intext and meta wise why the power is dimension hopping. But it could have been developed more. It left me wanting. (Common theme of this review)

Choices

- again. Your choices don't matter. Deck nine in making more installments trying to reuse characters or tie in events, make it so your choices don't matter. It becomes more and more aparrent every game that deck nine makes that they are railroading the game and your choices. I'm not even upset about Chloe and Max break up because I sacrificed her in my playthrough, I'm saying true colors ended with Alex either being in Colorado or not being in Colorado. This game ended with Max agreeing to stand with Safi or not when she comes back- and I'm willing to bet, deck nine will not make a game that has a big impact if they are friendly or not. That's not how deck nine makes their games. They railroad choices and make things go their way. They aren't going to do something intriguing like have one game be Max and Safi taking over the world together and another where Max is fighting Safi. That is two separate games. Whatever game they make in the future with these characters is going to be 1 game. 1 game where they decide your choices you made previously don't matter. They are going to make the story they want to make. Which is why you shouldn't make a choose your own adventure/examination on interpersonal relationships game a fucking series- and that's why so much of the set dressing and interactable objects were gone which in turn impacts the characters.... it's a fucking shit show.

- also some of the choices I made that said "this will have consequences" didn't fucking matter. Like, I didn't tell Safi about the restraining order. I really thought in episode 5 that would be important and the cops would be called at the bar. It. Wasn't. It just. This game railroads you hard.

Ending

- so as I said, your choices don't matter, they will just explain away Safi and Max's friendship in the next game like they always do

- the fucking cheesy ass marvel ending- i am both vaguely curious what will happen and sick to my stomach because. What. Why. Why are they doing this. I give them some benefit of the doubt because if they go the "we could be Gods" route... it could be interesting. But it makes me hesitant.

- People are souring over this series. I'm not even sure if they will be able to have enough support to make the series they want to make. They need to break the mold they put themselves in (see me saying the predictability in plot) but when dontnod made life is strange 2 with completely different characters and setting and a main character without power- people hated it (i loved it, it's my favorite lis game) but that's why deck nine has been leaning hard in the prequel and steph and Max and "max will return" but what they are doing in making this a series is betraying the original premise and fucking importance of the original game. That choices matter.

- Unless they suck it up and actually make a game that takes into account all the different endings we have (which max could she really could in the final game of the series, the last episode, hopping dimensions that have Chloe alive, Daniel in Mexico or not, etc.) this series is going to be a pale shadow in comparison to what it could've been.

Extension Game

- What the fuck was that. The cat extension seems fucking stupid to me, if someone actually got that and played it tell me- did it actually add something to the game or was it a way for us to give deck nine 10 more dollars?

And lastly, Ranking:

Here's the thing. Double exposure is a really good sequel/continuation of Max's story but it's a bad execution of a "choices matter" game and a game hinging off of interpersonal relationships and how superpowers can impact them. So,

Life is Strange 2

Life is Strange

Life is Strange: True Colors

Life is Strange: Double Exposure

Life is Strange: Before the Storm

Now with my mixed feelings I am going to play lis2 and wait for lost records bloom and rage comes out hoping that dontnod does their usual magic again.

[krinndnz]

An Ad-Hoc, Informally-Specified, Bug-Ridden, Single-Subject Study Of Weight Loss Via Potassium Supplementation And Exercise Without Dieting

Here's the short version: I lost 30 pounds in 6 months by chugging a bunch of potassium salt and exercising a lot. My subjective experience is that cranking my potassium intake way up made it possible to do a lot more exercise than I had been doing without also eating a lot more. Exercising more without also eating more led to weight loss (as one would hope!). I did not diet: I ate as I had been doing and as it pleased me to do. Do with the raw data as you please.

Losing weight this way is unusual and worth paying attention to because many things about increases and decreases in weight and obesity are very poorly understood. Many people would like their personal weight and obesity levels to be different, so anything that improves our collective understanding of how to make that happen is valuable. However, losing weight this way is an experiment: it's not necessarily safe to do what I did! Part of why I did it was to find out what would happen, and if you have any kind of existing kidney problems then you definitely should not do what I did. Note to other transfemmes: if you're taking spiro, that counts as a kidney problem.

I also don't want to overstate the significance of this experiment: what I've been up to in the last 6 months amounts to a single data point that happens to also be 1,100 spreadsheet cells. It's a data point that is highly suggestive, sure, but it would be extremely ambitious to say that it proves anything beyond "this worked for me" and perhaps "it's not impossible for this to work". I am writing about it because as far as I know, this particular experiment is something that nobody else has tried, and, again, anything that improves our collective understanding here is valuable.

The long version comes next: how I came to be doing this experiment, what I did in the experiment, what I plan to do next, and finally what I think about it all. The really long version is the ongoing conversation that this post is part of, starting with A Chemical Hunger, which is a book-length literature review about the 1980s–present global increase in obesity prevalence, also the posts about single-subject research where the same authors discuss the limits of what can be learned from experiences like mine, also the Experimental Fat Loss guy and his wide variety of diet-only experiments, also some critics who disagree.

How I came to be doing this

At the tail end of 2022, I noticed both that my BMI had hit 30 and that I had become very unhappy about my weight. There's a specific photo where I didn't realize until I saw the photo that my belly was hanging out over my waistband and it's vividly unpleasant in my memory. Around the same time, I happened to find the potassium-supplementation community trial that the Slime Mold Time Mold folks were running. The value proposition was "this will be easy, cheap, and safe, but also it might not actually work," and that sounded good to me, so I signed up for it and took a modest amount of potassium all through December and January. It kinda-sorta worked: I lost 6 pounds. Not nothing, but "it kinda-sorta worked" is the most one can really say about losing 6 pounds in 60 days.

The low-dose potassium delivered on all of what the SMTM folks promised, though. It was easy, cheap, and safe. So I kept doing it and, since I was already doing the potassium, decided that I should get an exercise habit going. I am a big believer in the idea that it's a tremendous amount easier to go from doing Something to doing More Something than to go from doing Nothing to doing Something. The low-dose potassium got me through the first step: once I was doing Something about my weight, it was relatively easy to do More Something. When the community trial ended in early February, I didn't have to worry about messing up its results by departing from the trial's instructions, so I started taking more potassium and building my own experiment. I also kept in touch with the SMTM authors, who were very encouraging. 🐯💕

By late March I had brought myself up to daily amounts of potassium and exertion that seemed good to me, and I stuck with those. This is the first time in my life I've focused on trying to lose weight, and I was not fully prepared for how demoralizing it is that the weight change from day N to day N+1 sometimes seems perversely unrelated to what you were doing on day N. Fortunately I have experience with spreadsheets, so I put together a tracker for myself that focused on the trailing-week average of my daily weight and exercise measurements as well as long-term graphs. Three months of data were enough to put together a chart whose trendline said very, very clearly, "what you are doing is working — keep it up!" With any kind of long-term project it's very important to create and sustain sources of feedback. All else being equal, the longer it takes before you can get a read on "is this going well or poorly?", the worse it will go.

I decided that my goal would be to get my BMI from 30 (the lower limit of "obese") to under 25 (the upper limit of "normal"). Happily, the math is very easy there: for my height, a BMI of 25 rounds off to 200lbs. I further decided that I was willing to spend all of 2023 working on this. That decision is why I'm writing this post now: halfway through a project is a natural time to pause and take stock.

What I did

By the end of March, my regimen was firmly settled and I kept at it through the end of June without further tinkering. The daily goals I settled on were 10,000mg of potassium and 1,200kcal of exertion. That amount of exercise worked out to be 90 to 100 minutes per day. For contrast, in 2022 my average amount of exercise per day was 15 minutes and my average exertion was 500kcal.

I used my smartwatch's exertion number ("how many calories are you using above the amount you need to burn to be alive at all?") and gradually walked up my daily goal, settling at 1,200kcal/day partially because it was working and partially because one hour of watch face equaling 100kcal was helpful for being able to read "how close to my goal am I?" without thinking hard about it. Most of the exercise was treadmill time, usually a brisk walk or light jog. Over the months I also did some running, some bicycling, and some hiking, but treadmill time was the reliable, unremarkable, do-this-every-day core of my exercise regimen. It took a while to ramp up to that amount of exertion and there were definitely days when I stumbled, for good reasons and bad. However, in general I hit the exertion goal and in particular had it absolutely dialed from early March to mid-April.

It was easier to be totally rigorous about the potassium-intake goal — it helped that that part only took a few minutes per day, instead of 90+ minutes! I used potassium chloride powder (whatever came up first on an Amazon search since all KCl should be alike) mixed with regular Gatorade (i.e. not the sugar-free kind) to make it taste okay (I recommend blue Gatorade, it's the closest to appealing when kaliated — the yellow lemon-lime was meh and the fruit punch red was awful). I added two heaping teaspoons of KCl powder to a 20oz. bottle of Gatorade and drank that. KCl is about 52% potassium and a heaping teaspoon of it is about 6500mg, so I rounded up a smidge and called that 6600-and-a-bit milligrams of potassium per bottle. On Thursdays and Sundays I drank 2 full bottles and on other days 1.5 bottles. I recorded this as 10,000mg of potassium on regular days and 13,500mg on Thursdays and Sundays.

Is 10,000mg of potassium a lot? It's a lot more than average! The SMTM potassium trial post contextualizes it helpfully:

For a long time, the recommended daily value for adults (technically, the “Adequate Intake”) was 4,700 mg of potassium per day. But most people don’t get anywhere near this amount. In every CDC NHANES dataset from 1999 to 2018, median potassium intake hovers around 2,400 mg/day, and mean intake around 2,600 mg/day. In this report from 2004, the National Academy of Medicine found that “most American women … consume no more than half of the recommended amount of potassium, and men’s intake is only moderately higher.” Per this paper, only 0.3% of American women were getting the recommended amount. Similarly low levels of intake are also observed in Europe, Mexico, China, etc. But in 2019, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine changed the recommended / adequate intake to 2,600 mg/day for women and 3,400 mg/day for men. They say that the change is “due, in part, to the expansion of the DRI model in which consideration of chronic disease risk reduction was separate from consideration of adequacy,” but we can’t help but wonder if they changed it because it was embarrassing to have less than 5% of the population getting the recommended amount. In any case, recommended potassium intake is something like 2,500 to 5,000 mg per day for adults, and many people don’t get enough. Potatoes are exceptionally high in potassium. A single potato contains somewhere between 600 and 1000 mg of potassium, depending on which source you look at. They are the 6th highest in potassium on this list of high-potassium foods from the NIH, and 9th on this old list from the USDA. If you do the math, this means that someone on the potato diet, eating 2,000 kcal of potatoes a day, gets at least 11,000 mg of potassium per day, more than twice the old recommended intake.

This explanation is most of why I decided to stabilize at about 10,000mg per day: because that's about how much potassium people were getting during the SMTM potato diet community trial. Because that community trial involved around 200 people, it was unlikely that there would be any truly heinous health effects from knocking back that much potassium, especially together with the anecdotal evidence that inspired the trial. Aiming for that amount also meant that it would be easier to compare my results to something that worked decently well and to ask questions like "is there something special about whole potatoes, or is it mostly the potassium?" If it's mostly the potassium, you'd expect my results to be closer to the full-potato-diet results than to the low-dose-potassium results — which is what happened.

I measured those results in a very basic way: ordinary bathroom scale, first thing in the morning, every day. Considering how much noise there is in weight measurement, there's just no advantage to measuring it more often. I kept the circumstances of the weigh-in simple and stable, trusting that that was good enough. I also measured exertion in two other forms — step count and exercise minutes — but that was mostly for my personal curiosity because both are basically downstream of exertion as such. Similarly, I tracked my sleep but didn't expect that to matter a whole lot.

While I was affirmatively not dieting, I want to make sure to talk about my food habits because I could be missing something that's easy for others to see as unusual but seems totally ordinary to me. My meals are heavy on pasta, rice, bread, and granola. I work diligently to get enough dietary fiber. I eat some meat but not a lot (eating a pound of meat in a week would be above average for me), and I enjoy coffee but not a tremendous amount of it since usually I make Chemex-style coffee and having a bunch of that in a day would be too time-intensive. My go-to snacks are cashews, pistachios, cherries, and granola bars. Like most people, I should eat more dark leafy greens than I do. I use a generous hand when measuring out olive oil. I believe that if you need either milk taste or milk fat, you shouldn't half-ass it, so when I need milk taste or milk fat, I rely on whole milk and heavy cream. Fats, generally, taste good. I eat more whole food and food I personally cook than I eat packaged and processed food, and I only infrequently eat restaurant food (weekly pizza night, maybe twice a month other than that). I really like sour candies but basically stopped eating them last autumn after some very patient coaxing from my dentist. Once in a while, dark chocolate, usually with the nuts and fruit.

I ate as I had been doing: I ate the food I felt like eating and ate as much of it as I felt like eating. If I felt like eating more or less, I did that. Since I wanted to keep the exercise habit going regardless of whether or not I lost weight, it was very important to me to not make the exercise any more difficult than it had to be. Going hungry would definitely make it more difficult, so I avoided doing that. One way in which I'm very sure my experience generalizes is, it's much easier to persuade people to try "add this supplement to what you're already eating" than to get them to try "replace all of your current food with potatoes," especially when talking about long-term or indefinite-duration changes.

What I plan to do next

I'll be thrilled if I can recapture something like the 7-week March/April streak I had going. Most days in this period (44 out of 49) were PB days (i.e. a day where my trailing-week-average weight was the lowest it had been since the start of the year) and no two consecutive days in this period were non-PB days (i.e. if a day wasn't a PB day, both the day before and the day after were PB days). I was losing almost 2lbs per week and exercising a lot and I felt great. However, my intuition is that that was the honeymoon period of going from mostly-sedentary to exercising regularly, and that I should expect further progress to be more difficult, to be like the less impressive results I got in May and June.

Still, the thing as a whole has definitely been successful enough that I'm going to keep at it until the end of the year, re-evaluating again in December (and maybe when I hit my weight-loss goal, which should happen around halfway between now and then). Since I'm using January 1st as my anchor date for the start of the experiment, it lines up nicely with the calendar if I just keep going all year and see what happens. Besides, I only need 6 months more to generate a year of data, while someone going from a cold start would need a whole year.

Given that I have a setup that is working pretty well, I'm reluctant to tinker with it. I might add one more high-potassium day in addition to Thursdays and Sundays, and I might start tracking some extra data — even though I'm not trying to change them, recording my food habits seems like the most helpful additional thing I could record.

If I develop health problems I'm gonna pull the ripcord (and post about it). There are already too many shitty fake weight loss regimens in the world that fuck up the health of people who try them, we do not need more.

What I think about it

Since I'm the one doing this experiment, I get to be excited about how it's working out for me personally, which is to say, very well indeed. Right now it seems pretty certain that I'll be able to reach my goal of losing ~50lbs in a long-term-sustainable way and just as importantly, getting myself to a much better baseline state of physical fitness. I feel pretty great about that part!

The experiment is not just for me, though: the reason it's an experiment rather than just "I'm trying to lose weight" is that I am keeping track of things carefully such that other people could carry out the same steps I did and get results similar to or different from mine and ideally everyone eventually comes to pretty firm conclusions about whether this — losing weight via potassium and exercise without dieting — works or not. My chugging potassium and Gatorade for six months to a year is the very beginning of that process, and I expect that the difficult parts of the process will be carried out by people with more expertise and resources than me.

I also expect that I have not tumbled to the One Weird Trick for weight loss that everyone else just overlooked. As someone with plenty of programming experience, I have a hearty suspicion towards "well, it worked on MY setup" stories. One obvious alternate explanation for my successful weight loss is "well yeah, you doubled your exertion and kept your food intake the same, of course you lost weight" — but I don't find that explanation satisfying. To start with, if it were that easy, people would do it more often. There are a tremendous number of people who would like to lose weight and a tremendous marketplace of devices, services, and professionals to help them use exercise for that purpose, and yet in a 20-year NCHS study, average exercise rose without obesity falling. It's also very, very easy to find fat people who exercise plenty — you will find them more or less anywhere you find lots of people exercising, as well as in places like sumo stables. A member of my family has taken up powerlifting in the last year, making him both fitter and heavier by quite a bit.

Additionally, there's studies like Keating 2017 concluding that short-term exercise intervention doesn't do enough to matter, or like the Wu 2009 work concluding that exerise-and-dieting isn't meaningfully better than just dieting over periods of 6+ months, and then there's the STRRIDE study, Slentz 2004, concluding that jogging 20 miles a week can get people to lose about 7 pounds over 8 months. The STRRIDE study caught my eye because it's pretty similar to what I did: they took obese mostly-sedentary folks, had them exercise more, and forbade them from eating less. However, once you do the math the results are much less similar: the average STRRIDE participant did around half the exercise I've done for at most a fifth of the weight loss (i.e. around 1lb/month vs. around 5lbs/month and around 3mi/day vs. 7mi/day). If someone else told me "Krinn, your naïve just-hit-the-treadmill exercise regimen is 2.5x as effective as an exercise regimen supervised & measured by professionals," I would want them to provide some compelling evidence for that.

If you tell someone you want to lose weight and would like their advice, it is overwhelmingly likely that the advice will involve exercising more. Everyone has heard this advice. And yet, as Michael Hobbes observes in a searing piece for Highline, "many 'failed' obesity interventions are successful eat-healthier-and-exercise-more interventions" that simply didn't result in weight loss. Even if we as a society choose to believe "more exercise always leads to weight loss, most people just fuck up at it," that immediately confronts us with the important question, why do they fuck up at it? and its equally urgent sibling, what can we learn from those who succeed at it to give a hand up to those who have not yet succeeded?

I find the SMTM authors' metaphor for this helpful:

[exercising more and eating less] is not an explanation any more than "the bullet" is a good explanation for "who killed the mayor?" Something about the potato diet lowered people's lipostat set point, which reduced their appetite, which yes made them eat fewer calories, which was part of what led them to lose weight. Yes, "fewer kcal/day" is somewhere in the causal chain. No, it is not an explanation.

Since I've been doing this for six months, I feel pretty certain that the potassium is doing something positive for me and I'm entirely willing to put in another six months to find out what happens for me. Finding out whether that generalizes is beyond my power: all I can do is explain what worked for me, one middle-aged Seattle housewife, and hope that it's useful to people who are in a position to do serious work about it.

One kind of serious work that's available is the very cool analytic techniques that other people in this conversation have used while looking at their data. If you are the kind of person to get elbows-deep in R or Matlab, feel free to grab my day-by-day measurements for that (I release this data under Creative Commons' CC0 if that's relevant to you). I'm not going to do that, though, partially because it's been a long time since I last used R but mostly because of the thing I said earlier about my whole experiment basically being one data point. If you have a data series, then yeah, get in there with some numeric interrogation, but if you only have one data point, that data point is what it is and statistical analysis can't really add to it. All I can claim here is that this is a new data point: people going about their everyday lives do not spontaneously increase their potassium intake severalfold and the background work from the SMTM potato diet and potassium community trials tell me that no-one's run a study looking directly at what happens if you do increase your potassium intake that much.

Do you want to increase your potassium intake that much? If you do, I have to re-emphasize the potassium community trial's safety warning: if you have existing kidney problems, do not try this. Also I'm gonna deploy the boldface again to make sure I get this across to other trans women: on this topic, taking spiro counts as a kidney problem! I am not a doctor and I'm extremely not your doctor, you should talk to your actual doctor if you have any kind of potential kidney issues and even if you're in good health and want to try chugging a bunch of potassium, you should titrate up gradually the way the SMTM writeup suggests (which is also the way I did).

In addition to a general spirit of responsibility, those warnings are important because otherwise just telling you that this is easy would sound like a recommendation. Did I mention that the experiment was easy? Easy easy. Piss easy. Lemon squeezy, etc. Of course building an exercise habit wasn't easy, but the potassium part didn't make it easier or harder, and the potassium part itself was pretty trivial. Mix this powder into Gatorade a couple times per day, drink it, done.

That said, if you do want to try this, godspeed and please write down how it goes for you. I recommend building positive reinforcement into whatever you use to track it; my personal spreadsheet for this is adorned with color-coding and happy emoji. I also recommend at least thinking about the following questions, whether you're going to do this, evaluate the results of this, or both.

How safe is it, in general rather than for me particularly, to chug this much potassium? This is the big one: "just mix potassium salt into Gatorade and drink it a few times a day" is so incredibly easy that even if the effect size is small, it could benefit a huge number of people, but of course it doesn't benefit them if it's not actually safe to do that.

Does this replicate? If it's not safe it matters a lot less whether it replicates, so the safety question comes first, but if it is safe, then one would immediately want to find out whether it works for 1% of people, 10% of people, or 50% of people.

How much do other mineral nutrients, particularly sodium and magnesium, matter for this? Maybe they need to be combined in some specific way, as this Twitter thread suggests.

Do sex hormone levels matter? I'm a trans woman and I've been having problems with access to HRT in this timeframe. Given how many things in one's body testosterone and estrogen affect, and given that previous obesity research has shown differences based on hormone profiles, that's definitely something to keep an eye on. Also because spironolactone in particular messes with renal function and potassium metabolism, I expect that it affects this. Digression: spironolactone is total bullshit as an anti-androgen of first resort. It sucks and I hate it and I should have switched to other anti-androgens even sooner than I did. If you're using spironolactone as an anti-androgen because it was the first thing your doctor tried for that, you really should try something else and see if that works.

I steadfastly avoided dieting. I like my existing diet just fine, and that's why I preferred the "what if I just chug a bunch of potassium" plan. All else being equal, I'd rather try things that let me eat what I like than things that require throwing my relationship with food into upheaval. But of course you wonder, what would happen if you did combine dieting and exercise and potassium? The ExFatLoss guy has been busy trying a lot of diet-only interventions and he's got a lot of interesting results. I am not the person to try it, but it's one of the obvious things to try, so I hope someone does try it.

How does this interact with the munchies? If you decide to try what I tried and you, like me, enjoy living somewhere where marijuana is legal, I think you should look at whether the potassium changes how you experience marijuana-induced hunger/overeating. One of the things I found very striking about the matter is that it was possible for me to chug enough potassium that the marijuana-induced hunger was drastically reduced. I expected the opposite since the potassium was causing me to eat less (relative to exertion) at other times. However, I have very strong habits about marijuana (exactly twice a week, edibles only, same amount every time) and I'm not willing to change them for this, so who knows how this aspect will work out for others. Definitely something to keep an eye on, though. Even if I wasn't losing weight, the potassium reduces marijuana-induced overeating enough that I'd probably keep going with it just for that effect.

Conclusion

I spent 6 months trying to lose weight with lots of potassium and exercise but without dieting. So far I have succeeded. Unless something disastrous comes up, I'm going to keep trying it for at least another 6 months and going to keep recording what I'm doing. I'm particularly curious to see where I'll plateau, since I assume at some point I'll start getting really hungry and/or tired instead of accidentally starving. I hope that my experience and the data I've recorded from it, are useful to people who are looking into questions about obesity and weight. Please feel free to use my data and my writeup (this post) for that. If you want to try doing as I've done, good luck and stay safe: this has worked for me but it is still experimental, it might be unsafe and/or fail to work for you.

[thegongoozlerreacts]

Dead Plate (Part 2)

OK so its been a month since the last time ive played Dead Plate and uhh oops!! my bad !!

in my defense life has gotten very busy for me especially since its the holidays but now i finally have the time to finish this game and get at least one ending!! (hopefully)

spoilers under the cut

back to day 5 where i struggled so incredibly hard

the amount of times ive played through day 4's nightmare sequence is killing me

bro. how do i pass this level without losing a customer

NOOO I WAS SO CLOSE WHYYY. PLEASE. literally i was doing so well but i took too long for the 4 table orders ugh <//3

i wish you could see like, a patience meter for the customers or something

maybe i should try using the item that slows down how impatient they get

YESSS FINALLY!!! I DID IT I FINALLY DID IT!!

what is that weird squelching sound.

still here even though the shift is over and the sounds i am hearing are concerning to say the least

what if... i just leave ok i cant leave

boss's office? also i just noticed the timer ticking down uhh

can i just leave please why is the timer ticking down wtf do i do???

also lots of interesting things in that office

was the review on the waiter about Rody? if so ouch man thats harsh

NOOOOO OH MY GOD...... I ACCIDENTALLY QUIT I HAVE TO DO DAY 5 ALL OVER AGAIN ARE YOU KIDDING ME

ok well. at least now i know my key to success is the cologne

ok so Rody had an interesting reaction to the crumpled up picture of Vince and a woman so maybe he knows who she is? is this the 'her' that you can sorta not really call on the telephone??? or is he just surprised to find love letters in the trash

anyways its telling me the sounds are coming from the freezer but idk where to go from here

LMAO the sound signalling the end of the day jumpscared me askhjdakj

at least the food looks tasty

what was that whole thing about tho? what was going on in the freezer??

back home, looked out the window and i noticed you can see someone's silhouette in the background windows

i dont know if that was always there and i just missed it but very interesting

FINALLY a new nightmare

bro he was in an oven?? why ?? damn Rody's nightmares are like really creepy akladjalks

another day another dollar

damn. im gonna struggle once again because there is a LOT of customers and like i am just sooo. ksfdjslkdj whatevr kakayanin !! lets go guys

my hands are so sweaty akladh

another successful day and another tasty dish ....my fingers hurt LMAO

looked out the window and yep alright the person's silhouette isnt always there

huh. interesting nightmare it was Vince eating him and like damn that actually scared me lskjd

shorter than previous nightmares

well onto day 7 another day another dollar

lets go!! i am winning!!! only had to retry once this day!!

BROSKI JUST QUIT?!?!?

ohhh so the woman is named Manon

aww i feel so bad for this guy :(( the girl isnt picking up i wonder why tho? like does she just not like him anymore and he just needs to give up on her or is it cuz of smth w Vince (shes probably the girl from the crumpled photo in the trash right?)

damn the phone just ringing while the credits are playing

ouch :((

alright then time to get the other endings!! to do this i will be following the ending guide bc my brain is not big enough to figure it out by myself lmao

ive opened up the official ending guide and oho? you can actually get a phone call from Manon? cool i will try that out first

restarting all the way to day 1 bc i miss how easy it was

yk an interesting thing that was introduced in the tutorial that i havent experienced yet is the customers asking questions

oh hey!! i kept the stuff that i purchased in my previous run?? really?? awesomeee

ooh hey!! i kept the dishes from previous runs too!! cool

ok its day 3 now and i have to take out the trash to activate the cutscene

ok went through that whole baffling ordeal of getting slapped

also!! i chatted with Vince on day 3 and like. idk their chats are just funny to me

also like there might be something wrong with me but i am lowkey shipping Rody and Vincent together kadjlksd this is something that happened in Elevator Hitch where i started lowkey shipping the two main characters oopsies

anyways!! moving swiftly onwards!!

um. my guy disappeared after i checked the fridge

oh shit new cutscene

BRO ??? UM ????? well that was scary uhh. damn

oh the boss isnt in the kitchen anymore wait i didnt get to do all the dialogue options that are needed!! no!! does this mean i need to redo this whole day in order to get the phone call event???

better safe than sorry i guess

ok so interestingly when Rody asked Vince if he liked his job, he didnt answer the question he just changed the subject and made fun of Rody LOL

the 'can you give me a raise' question gives some more details on Manon and what Rody thinks of her (he is a grade A simp bro)

the 'are you single' question is interesting to me just bc Rody the simp has issues w Vince being like 'meh' on romance and tbh im with Vince on romance not being the end-all-be-all

THAT IS DEFINITELY NOT A STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE

IS IT CUZ I FED THE RAT CHEESE INSTEAD OF SCARING IT AWAY OR SMTH???

EW ITS IN THE FRIDGE AND THE REAL ONE I HAD BEFORE IS GONE NOOOOOOO

Vince: I haven't got any sense of taste. Rody: Yeah I could see the decorations out there-

LMFAOOO RODYYY

bro now i am sad that i missed out on these gold interactions between them on my first run this is so funny

also they both didnt really have any proper answers for what their favorite food is Vince was like 'eh i dont have any since i cant taste stuff idk lemons or smth' while Rody was like 'i just like whatever my girlfriend likes'

very interesting how Rody is like obsessed(?) with Manon

then when asking Vince what he's reading, he just straight-up lies about what the reviews are saying about Rody lmfaoooo

anyways now for the creepy night restaurant segment and going back in Vince's office to check out the possible Manon love letters in the trash

i just realized the croque madames are like. rotten cuz they have flies flying around it which ew! yuck! why is it like that

well. nothing i can do about it so next day i guess!! oh hey wait i can now afford the matches which i will be needing for ending 3! nice

OK NOW I HAVE REACHED THE PHONE CALL

damn ok so its not Manon but its Vince inviting Rody to a dinner party!! nice !!

LMFAOOOO HE INVITED RODY TO MAKE HIM WORK VINCE I CANT BELIEVE YOU!!

Rody you are so embarrassing but its ok bc ur really funny anyways!! getting interesting lore on Vince and Rody!!

one of Rody's old classmates was there, and then another guest said that either Vince must really like Rody to have him there at the party or is incredibly desperate akldskl (since she said that Rody's outfit sucks LOL)

ooh ok so. Rody is desperate and a bit delusional my bro u gotta let go of that girl bc apparently she dumped you already so like. stop bro

dkjhskas nooo ive served all the guests and theres nothing left to do except snoop around in Vincent's bedroom agh!! agh!!!!!

bro when i go in the room the music just disappears wtf

UM? HELLO??? BRO THAT SCARED ME DSKJKSDJ

i knew this was going to happenn aughjahkj

BRO THE MUSIC IS JUST GONE AJKSDFK not Rody asking what happened like he didnt just steal smth from Vince and pretty much get caught in the act 😭😭😭

well ok then so that happened

actually you know, now that im thinking about it, its kinda weird that Vince threw Manon's letters in the trash does that mean she is pursuing him romantically but he like just doesnt care or what??

i am inside and i am afraid cuz the game asked 'are you sure?' when i clicked 'go inside' broooo

oh hey its Manon and Rody WAIT WHY IS THIS LOCKET IN HERE ?? DID VINCE KILL HER ??

ASKHDKAS OH FUCKK OH NO

bro thats so like. sadistic leaving him tied up and telling him he can live if he runs away but like he can only crawl across the floor

i see why the matches are needed for this part

gee wow thanks game

ok now this time im bringing the matches with me

ok so ive burned away the ropes but im still trapped inside cuz he locked the freezer aghhh

what the heck do i do?? oh nvm i found bags of flour, i can use these to reach the cooler

so i have to stop the fans of the cooler, probably by putting something in it

can i take the saw out?? oh wait theres a switch LOL

ok so ive use the saw to cut the meat off and now ive got animal bones

ive jammed the bones in the fans and now i can break open the window wow

SHIT GOT CAUGHT BY VINCE

DID HE JUST BITE A PIECE OF MY FLESH?!??!

oh my god. he killed and cooked her to feed to Rody i. wHY???

oh so he ate Rody's ear i am shook wtf

bro Rody just severely pissed this guy off by telling him he never ate his food i feel it in my bones also makes sense why its just sitting in his fridge

Rody really hitting this guy where it hurts damn i mean its deserved cuz of like the whole thing

i accidentally got ending 4 since i messed up a QTE but damn. damn that was wild and also this is gross

something i didnt mention earlier but i noticed that there was a grilled hanger steak on the table, which is the dish when you get ending 1 would the other dishes i got in past endings show up when i got them? but i got ending 2 and the dish from that didnt show up so maybe its just a little detail for ending 1 wait was the steak made out of Manon. oh boy that makes that ending a lil more fucked up

ok going back to the chase sequence

BRO RODY JUST KILLED HIM

so i went into Vince's office, surprisingly did not get chased inside and then i picked up the broken bottle and now Rody's just killed the guy

got the restaurant key

bestie like. theyre gonna arrest u if u just leave and never say anything please explain the situation to the police or smth

why is the game not letting me leave. what do you mean revenge is best served cold. does the game want me to put Vince in the freezer!??!?!

yep the steak is def Manon

why r u not letting me leave wtf do i do

trying to read the comments on the game's page on itch.io and the amount of people going 'when will they kiss' 'kiss ending when' im laughing

like even tho all this horrible shit just happened i still lowkey ship Vince and Rody oopsies. toxic yaoi LOLOLOL

i have no idea what to do now so i am just gonna look up a guide rq

ok i need to get the cooking oil

he's burning this place to the ground

wait was Vince still alive after getting stabbed repeatedly???? his eye moved when Rody was pouring oil on him and i mean the game did say that his eyes are still following you

oh bro after-credits cutscene with Manon???

aww ok my opinion of Manon has greatly improved cuz she broke up w Rody cuz he was destroying himself for her she realized that she wasnt good for him and like, for the greater good of his mental health they cant be together

its burnt and also its lemon, which is what Vince said was his favorite food

OH HEY IT CHANGED

actually i did notice that after ending 3 it was snowy

damn

well, thats the end of my playthrough on Dead Plate

honestly, it was a very fun and enjoyable game! i liked the serving aspect even tho i kinda sucked at it and like i also really liked Rody and Vince despite all that just happened those two are seriously fucked up and i love them LOLOL

the music was really good and made up for having to redo day 5 over and over again alskdjh i was jamming most of the time to the music the art was also really good! i liked how cute the pixel sprites were, and then like the art for the portraits and CGs and everything was also really good! i really enjoyed the art style and music

the story was interesting, and i liked it too the twist was wild and blew my mind but i am still a massive fan of Vincent x Rody JKDAHSDKJ

i like how there was a cannibalism twist but Vincent wasnt actually like, an actual cannibal he was just insane and planning on making Rody an unknowing cannibal

i know he ate Rody's ear but like. he said that he doesnt eat people on the regular so yk he's just fucked up

also its really funny reading all the comments and seeing a lot of Vincent x Rody stuff LMFAOOO so true of everybody honestly

HELP I FOUND A COMMENT THAT SAID THEY NOTICED EVERY PIC WITH VINCE IN IT (on the store page) HAS HIM LOOKING AT RODY LDSJHSFLSDKN THE SHIP IS SO REAL!!!

ok sorry enough of that

overall, 10/10 would play again solely for the server gameplay (would be cool to have a kind of endless mode where you just serve customers until one leaves or something) and also because i love these characters

thats all for today and probably for this month LOL byebye!!

[aphroditesknife]

Oldest Filipino political prisoner turns 85, appeals for executive clemency

via Kilusang Magbubukid ng Pilipinas - KMP Facebook Page

Yesterday, April 23, 2024, Tatay Gerardo Dela Pena turned 85 years old. Tatay Gerardo is the country's oldest political prisoner. As the oldest political prisoner, Tatay Gerardo suffers from medical conditions including hypertension, deteriorating eyesight, and hearing impairment, further exacerbated by his advancing age. Last year, the Department of Justice’s Board of Pardons and Parole (BPP) issued Resolution No. OT-08-02-2023, which states that "Persons Deprived of Liberty (PDLs) who are 70 years old and above, and even if they are considered high-risk, shall be considered for executive clemency if they have already served 10 years of their sentence. This consideration is especially applicable if they are suffering from old age, sickness, terminal or life-threatening illnesses, or other serious disabilities.” It is evident that Tatay Gerardo Dela Peña perfectly fits the criteria for executive clemency outlined in this resolution. Who is Tatay Gerardo Dela Peña? Gerardo Dela Peña is a Martial Law veteran and survivor. Just like many other martial law victim-survivors, Tatay Gerardo hails from the peasantry in the province of Camarines Norte in Bicol. Tatay Gerardo, as he is affectionately called, dedicated himself to activism and organizing within his community, standing up against the oppressive dictatorship of Marcos Sr. In 1982, Tatay Gerardo was subjected to arrest, torture, and detention by police and military forces. Trumped-up charges of subversion and robbery were filed against him, he later was acquitted of these charges. While in detention, Tatay Gerardo ran for Barangay Captain and won, a move that ultimately facilitated his release in 1983. Following his freedom, he continued his service to his community by instituting programs dedicated to peace and order, dispute resolution, and access to justice at the barangay level, among others. Later, with the downfall of the Marcos dictatoship and the founding of Samahan ng Ex-Detainees Laban saDetensyon at Aresto, (SELDA) Gerardo Dela Pena served as a founding member of SELDA and later as the chairperson of its provincial chapter in Camarines Norte. Tatay Gerardo remained steadfast in his commitment to peasant organizing and human rights advocacy within his home province. However, on March 21, 2013, at the age of 74, he was once again arrested, this time by the 49th Infantry Battalion in Brgy. Matango, Vinzons, Camarines Norte, on fabricated charges of murder. Ten months after his arrest, on December 12, 2013, Gerardo Dela Peña was convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, with a term of 20 to 40years. He is now serving his sentence at the New Bilibid Prisons in Muntinlupa. Human rights organizations both locally and internationally have fervently advocated for his immediate release, citing not only his deteriorating health but also his innocence. These organizations have tirelessly campaigned for his inclusion on the list of candidates for executive clemency submitted to the Board of Pardons and Parole (BPP) for the December 2023 review. Despite all the efforts, Tatay Gerardo Dela Peña’s inclusion for executive clemency was denied by Malacanang. Tatay Gerardo's fervent wish is to spend his remaining years with his beloved wife and family. It is our collective hope that he receives the immediate freedom he deserves, not only for humanitarian reasons but also in recognition of his innocence and unwavering dedication to justice and human rights. # Free Gerardo Dela Pena! Free all peasant political prisoners! Photo from KAPATID.