#personal advertisements

[newspaper-advertisement]

releaseMyAd is here to help you book your personal advertisement in any Indian newspapers of your choice.

[xinganhao]

🌱 wonwoo x producer!reader.

the five times wonwoo swears he's over you (and the one time that he decides he isn't) ★ see also: main post, drabble

♫ maybe i'm just not better than this, i haven't tried / 'cause maybe you'll finally choose me after you've had more time.

🌱 the five times.

when he sees you for the first time in over a year.

he believes it's the nice thing to do, treating you out to dinner. he froze you out, after all, because he was stupid and he didn't know how to handle his crush on you. he likes to think that the past fourteen months have made him better. wiser. so, that night, he makes it up to you. he also makes up a dozen different excuses. do his eyes linger on you a little too long as you happily drink your yogurt drink? he's just making sure you like what he chose for you. does he walk a little closer when he notices you're shivering from the evening cold? he's just concerned you might get sick. he doesn't like you anymore. he's better now, wiser now. he has to be.

when your second studio choom video comes out.

it's not the same as the first time, where he'd smiled to himself while watching you perform your latest comeback in STUDIO CHOOM's crisp, 4k quality. back then, that's how he had known he was done for. this time, he watches it purely out of curiosity. to add to the millions of views that the video is already raking up. he keeps a straight face the whole time. just watches with a perfectly neutral expression. he's just a guy supporting a friend, isn't he? when he gets through the entire video without smiling, he counts that as a win. if his heart— the bloody traitor— had stuttered at your ending fairy, well. that's an entirely different story.

on a random tuesday, just because.

he's never really seen the appeal in games like stardew valley; they were always a little too slow for his taste. but you'd absolutely begged, and so he begrudgingly bought the game for ₩20,600 just to shut you up. he still doesn't care much for it, to be quite honest. there's a lot of slow, lazy days where he just dicks around in-game. he bears with it anyway since you're always so happy when you beat him at fishing, or when you get to steal away the bachelorette he was going after. your voice is a low buzz in his ear as the two of you play until the sun has risen, until he's cussing you out for keeping him up so late when he has a schedule to go to. you let him complain all he wants because he'll still back online for co-op later that night.

when you're back in the same recording studio as him.

this one is the hardest, because this is where he fell for you in the first place. you, with your head bent as you fiddle with jihoon's digital audio workstation. you, with your usually friendly demeanor shuttered behind something so cool and collected. the pencil tucked behind your ear. the way you worry your lower lip as the boys croon. he wants to scream, wants to test just how soundproof this damn studio is. instead, he sings his lines. he makes adjustments as necessary. he watches you do your thing, even jokes to you here and there. it's all he can do to keep his mind away from what it wants so badly to stray back to. in the end, he doesn't scream. but when you smile at him and tease him that he did a good job— he wishes he had.

when he drives you home after you've had one too many to drink.

you're half-asleep in his passenger seat, all soft edges and incoherent mumbles. he tries to be cross with you, tries to tell you off for not knowing your limits and ending up like this. there's an unmistakable softness in his gaze, though, as he makes sure the seatbelt isn't too tight around your frame. he avoids all the potholes and goes extra careful over the speed bumps. by the time he makes it to your dorm, you're already passed out with your cheek pressed against the window. he decides to let you sleep for only thirty seconds more. as he mentally counts down— thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight— he tries to convince himself that it won't sting when he gets to one. (it still does.)

🌸 the one time.

on another random tuesday.

in the end, it's not an evening of stardew valley that gets him. it's not one of your fancams, not your warm presence in his shotgun. no, it's something much more stupid. something much more small. it's the way he looks for his phone when it pings. he doesn't even know if it's you who's texting him. but it could be, and that's enough to have him fishing through his bag hastily. he catches himself one afternoon, notices the way he's just a touch too excited to check the newest notification. he's not any wiser or better, it seems. he doesn't know if he can be. he's still the same jeon wonwoo with a hopeless crush on you.

[nights-at-crystarium]

behold my discord stickers

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Surveillance pricing

THIS WEEKEND (June 7–9), I'm in AMHERST, NEW YORK to keynote the 25th Annual Media Ecology Association Convention and accept the Neil Postman Award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity.

Correction, 7 June 2024: The initial version of this article erroneously described Jeffrey Roper as the founder of ATPCO. He benefited from ATPCO, but did not co-found it. The initial version of this article called ATPCO "an illegal airline price-fixing service"; while ATPCO provides information that the airlines use to set prices, it does not set prices itself, and while the DOJ investigated the company, they did not pursue a judgment declaring the service to be illegal. I regret the error.

Noted anti-capitalist agitator Adam Smith had it right: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

Despite being a raving commie loon, Smith's observation was so undeniably true that regulators, policymakers, and economists couldn't help but acknowledge that it was true. The trustbusting era was defined by this idea: if we let the number of companies in a sector get too small, or if we let one or a few companies get too big, they'll eventually start to rig prices.

What's more, once an industry contracts corporate gigantism, it will become too big to jail, able to outspend and overpower the regulators charged with reining in its cheating. Anyone who believes Smith's self-evident maxim had to accept its conclusion: that companies had to be kept smaller than the state that regulated them. This wasn't about "punishing bigness" – it was the necessary precondition for a functioning market economy.

We kept companies small for the same reason that we limited the height of skyscrapers: not because we opposed height, or failed to appreciate the value of a really good penthouse view – rather, to keep the building from falling over and wrecking all the adjacent buildings and the lives of the people inside them.

Starting in the neoliberal era – Carter, then Reagan – we changed our tune. We liked big business. A business that got big was doing something right. It was perverse to shut down our best companies. Instead, we'd simply ban big companies from rigging prices. This was called the "consumer welfare" theory of antitrust. It was a total failure.

40 years later, nearly every industry is dominated by a handful of companies, and these companies price-gouge us with abandon. Worse, they use their gigantic ripoff winnings to fill war-chests that fund the corruption of democracy, capturing regulators so that they can rip us off even more, while ignoring labor, privacy and environmental law and ducking taxes.

It turns out that keeping gigantic, opaque, complex corporations honest is really hard. They have so many ways to shuffle money around that it's nearly impossible to figure out what they're doing. Digitalization makes things a million times worse, because computers allow businesses to alter their processes so they operate differently for every customer, and even for every interaction.

This is Dieselgate times a billion: VW rigged its cars to detect when they were undergoing emissions testing and switch to a less polluting, more compliant mode. But when they were on the open road, they spewed lethal quantities of toxic gas, killing people by the thousands. Computers don't make corporate leaders more evil, but they let evil corporate leaders execute far more complex and nefarious plans. Digitalization is a corporate moral hazard, making it just too easy and tempting to rig the game.

That's why Toyota, the largest car-maker in the world, just did Dieselgate again, more than a decade later. Digitalization is a temptation no giant company can resist:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1wwj1p2wdyo

For forty years, pro-monopoly cheerleaders insisted that we could allow companies to grow to unimaginable scale and still prevent cheating. They passed rules banning companies from explicitly forming agreements to rig prices. About ten seconds later, new middlemen popped up offering "information brokerages" that helped companies rig prices without talking to one another.

Take Agri Stats: the country's hyperconcentrated meatpacking industry pays Agri Stats to "consult on prices." They provide Agri Stats with a list of their prices, and then Agri Stats suggests changes based on its analysis. What does that analysis consist of? Comparing the company's prices to its competitors, who are also Agri Stats customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/04/dont-let-your-meat-loaf/#meaty-beaty-big-and-bouncy

In other words, Agri Stats finds the highest price for each product in the sector, then "advises" all the companies with lower prices to raise their prices to the "competitive" level, creating a one-way ratchet that sends the price of food higher and higher.

More and more sectors have an Agri Stats, and digitalization has made this price-gouging system faster, more efficient, and accessible to sectors with less concentration. Landlords, for example, have tapped into Realpage, a "data broker" that the same thing to your rent that Agri Stats does to meat prices. Realpage requires the landlords who sign up for its service to accept its "recommendations" on minimum rents, ensuring that prices only go up:

https://popular.info/p/feds-raid-corporate-landlord-escalating

Writing for The American Prospect, Luke Goldstein lays out the many ways in which these digital intermediaries have supercharged the business of price-rigging:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-05-three-algorithms-in-a-room/

Goldstein identifies a kind of patient zero for this ripoff epidemic: Jeffrey Roper, a former Alaska Air exec who benefited from a service that helps airlines set prices. ATPCO was investigated by the DOJ in the 1990s, but the enforcers lost their nerve and settled with the company, which agreed to apply some ornamental fig-leafs to its collusion-machine. Even those cosmetic changes were seemingly a bridge too far Roper, who left the US.

But he came back to serve as Realpage's "principal scientist" – the architect of a nationwide scheme to make rental housing vastly more expensive. For Roper, the barrier to low rents was empathy: landlords felt stirrings of shame when they made shelter unaffordable to working people. Roper called these people "idiots" who sentimentality "costs the whole system."

Sticking a rent-gouging computer between landlords and the people whose lives they ruin is a classic "accountability sink," as described in Dan Davies' new book "The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions – and How The World Lost its Mind":

https://profilebooks.com/work/the-unaccountability-machine/

It's a form of "empiricism washing": if computers are working in the abstract realm of pure numbers, they're just moving the objective facts of the quantitative realm into the squishy, imperfect qualitative world. Davies' interview on Trashfuture is excellent:

https://trashfuturepodcast.podbean.com/e/fire-sale-at-the-accountability-store-feat-dan-davies/

To rig prices, an industry has to solve three problems: the problem of coming to an agreement to fix prices (economists call this "the collective action problem"); the problem of coming up with a price; and the problem of actually changing prices from moment to moment. This is the ripoff triangle, and like a triangle, it has many stable configurations.

The more concentrated an industry is, the easier it is to decide to rig prices. But if the industry has the benefit of digitalization, it can swap the flexibility and speed of computers for the low collective action costs from concentration. For example, grocers that switch to e-ink shelf tags can make instantaneous price-changes, meaning that every price change is less consequential – if sales fall off after a price-hike, the company can lower them again at the press of a button. That means they can collude less explicitly but still raise prices:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

My name for this digital flexibility is "twiddling." Businesses with digital back-ends can alter their "business logic" from second to second, and present different prices, payouts, rankings and other key parts of the deal to every supplier or customer they interact with:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Not only does twiddling make it easier to rip off suppliers, workers and customers, it also makes these crimes harder to detect. Twiddling made Dieselgate possible, and it also underpinned "Greyball," Uber's secret strategy of refusing to send cars to pick up transportation regulators who would then be able to see firsthand how many laws the company was violating:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/03/technology/uber-greyball-program-evade-authorities.html

Twiddling is so easy that it has brought price-fixing to smaller companies and less concentrated sectors, though the biggest companies still commit crimes on a scale that put these bit-players to shame. In The Prospect, David Dayen investigates the "personalized pricing" ripoff that has turned every transaction into a potential crime-scene:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-06-04-one-person-one-price/

"Personalized pricing" is the idea that everything you buy should be priced based on analysis of commercial surveillance data that predicts the maximum amount you are willing to pay.

Proponents of this idea – like Harvard's Pricing Lab with its "Billion Prices Project" – insist that this isn't a way to rip you off. Instead, it lets companies lower prices for people who have less ability to pay:

https://thebillionpricesproject.com/

This kind of weaponized credulity is totally on-brand for the pro-monopoly revolution. It's the same wishful thinking that led regulators to encourage monopolies while insisting that it would be possible to prevent "bad" monopolies from raising prices. And, as with monopolies, "personalized pricing" leads to an overall increase in prices. In econspeak, it is a "transfer of wealth from consumer to the seller."

"Personalized pricing" is one of those cuddly euphemisms that should make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. A more apt name for this practice is surveillance pricing, because the "personalization" depends on the vast underground empire of nonconsensual data-harvesting, a gnarly hairball of ad-tech companies, data-brokers, and digital devices with built-in surveillance, from smart speakers to cars:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars

Much of this surveillance would be impractical, because no one wants their car, printer, speaker, watch, phone, or insulin-pump to spy on them. The flexibility of digital computers means that users always have the technical ability to change how these gadgets work, so they no longer spy on their users. But an explosion of IP law has made this kind of modification illegal:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

This is why apps are ground zero for surveillance pricing. The web is an open platform, and web-browsers are legal to modify. The majority of web users have installed ad-blockers that interfere with the surveillance that makes surveillance pricing possible:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

But apps are a closed platform, and reverse-engineering and modifying an app is a literal felony – several felonies, in fact. An app is just a web-page skinned with enough IP to make it a felony to modify it to protect your consumer, privacy or labor rights:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

(Google is leading a charge to turn the web into the kind of enshittifier's paradise that apps represent, blocking the use of privacy plugins and proposing changes to browser architecture that would allow them to felonize modifying a browser without permission:)

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

Apps are a twiddler's playground. Not only can they "customize" every interaction you have with them, but they can block you (or researchers seeking to help you) from recording and analyzing the app's activities. Worse: digital transactions are intimate, contained to the palm of your hand. The grocer whose e-ink shelf-tags flicker and reprice their offerings every few seconds can be collectively observed by people who are in the same place and can start a conversation about, say, whether to come back that night a throw a brick through the store's window to express their displeasure. A digital transaction is a lonely thing, atomized and intrinsically shielded from a public response.

That shielding is hugely important. The public hates surveillance pricing. Time and again, through all of American history, there have been massive and consequential revolts against the idea that every price should be different for every buyer. The Interstate Commerce Commission was founded after Grangers rose up against the rail companies' use of "personalized pricing" to gouge farmers.

Companies know this, which is why surveillance pricing happens in secret. Over and over, every day, you are being gouged through surveillance pricing. The sellers you interact with won't tell you about it, so to root out this practice, we have to look at the B2B sales-pitches from the companies that sell twiddling tools.

One of these companies is Plexure, partly owned by McDonald's, which provides the surveillance-pricing back-ends for McD's, Ikea, 7-Eleven, White Castle and others – basically, any time a company gives you a hard-sell to order via its apps rather than its storefronts or its website, you should assume you're getting twiddled, hard.

These companies use the enshittification playbook to trap you into using their apps. First, they offer discounts to customers who order through their apps – then, once the customers are fully committed to shopping via app, they introduce surveillance pricing and start to jack up the prices.

For example, Plexure boasts that it can predict what day a given customer is getting paid on and use that information to raise prices on all the goods the customer shops for on that day, on the assumption that you're willing to pay more when you've got a healthy bank balance.

The surveillance pricing industry represents another reason for everything you use to spy on you – any data your "smart" TV or Nest thermostat or Ring doorbell can steal from you can be readily monetized – just sell it to a surveillance pricing company, which will use it to figure out how to charge you more for everything you buy, from rent to Happy Meals.

But the vast market for surveillance data is also a potential weakness for the industry. Put frankly: the commercial surveillance industry has a lot of enemies. The only thing it has going for it is that so many of these enemies don't know that what's they're really upset about is surveillance.

Some people are upset because they think Facebook made Grampy into a Qanon. Others, because they think Insta gave their kid anorexia. Some think Tiktok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama bin Laden. Some are upset because the cops use Google location data to round up Black Lives Matter protesters, or Jan 6 insurrectionists. Some are angry about deepfake porn. Some are angry because Black people are targeted with ads for overpriced loans or colleges:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/04/meta_ad_algorithm_discrimination/

And some people are angry because surveillance feeds surveillance pricing. The thing is, whatever else all these people are angry about, they're all angry about surveillance. Are you angry that ad-tech is stealing a 51% share of news revenue? You're actually angry about surveillance. Are you angry that "AI" is being used to automatically reject resumes on racial, age or gender grounds? You're actually angry about surveillance.

There's a very useful analogy here to the history of the ecology movement. As James Boyle has long said, before the term "ecology" came along, there were people who cared about a lot of issues that seemed unconnected. You care about owls, I care about the ozone layer. What's the connection between charismatic nocturnal avians and the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere? The term ecology took a thousand issues and welded them together into one movement.

That's what's on the horizon for privacy. The US hasn't had a new federal consumer privacy law since 1988, when Congress acted to ban video-store clerks from telling the newspapers what VHS cassettes you were renting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

We are desperately overdue for a new consumer privacy law, but every time this comes up, the pro-surveillance coalition defeats the effort. but as people who care about conspiratorialism, kids' mental health, spying by foreign adversaries, phishing and fraud, and surveillance pricing all come together, they will be an unbeatable coalition:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

Meanwhile, the US government is actually starting to take on these ripoff artists. The FTC is working to shut down data-brokers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/16/the-second-best-time-is-now/#the-point-of-a-system-is-what-it-does

The FBI is raiding landlords to build a case against Frontpage and other rent price-fixers:

https://popular.info/p/feds-raid-corporate-landlord-escalating

Agri Stats is facing a DoJ lawsuit:

https://www.nationalhogfarmer.com/market-news/agri-stats-loses-motions-to-transfer-dismiss-in-doj-antitrust-case

Not every federal agency has gotten the message, though. Trump's Fed Chairman, Jerome Powell – whom Biden kept on the job – has been hiking interest rates in a bid to reduce our purchasing power by making millions of Americans poorer and/or unemployed. He's doing this to fight inflation, on the theory that inflation is being cause by us being too well-off, and therefore trying to buy more goods than are for sale.

But of course, interest rates are inflationary: when interest rates go up, it gets more expensive to pay your credit card bills, lease your car, and pay a mortgage. And where we see the price of goods shooting up, there's abundant evidence that this is the result of greedflation – companies jacking up their prices and blaming inflation. Interest rate hawks say that greedflation is impossible: if one company raises its prices, its competitors will swoop in and steal their customers with lower prices.

Maybe they would do that – if they didn't have a toolbox full of algorithmic twiddling options and a deep trove of surveillance data that let them all raise prices together:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-06-05-time-for-fed-to-meet-ftc/

Someone needs to read some Adam Smith to Chairman Powell: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

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/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[goshyesvintageads]

Venturi Inc, 1969

[traumasurvivors]

My partner and I are in a really rough spot financially. I know that's true of a lot of people right now, so I totally get that people can't afford to purchase stuff.

But I thought I'd share this in case some people might be interested in purchasing and can afford to do so:

I have a stim toy business called @flappyhappystim. Our website is www.flappyhappystim.com. We sell stim toys, with a focus on ones for adults like fidget earrings and stuff like that. We offer free worldwide shipping on orders of $70 CAD or more (we cannot cover or predict import fees though.) Here's our Tumblr advertising post.

I also have an Etsy workbook I did awhile ago. It's called Building Resilience. You can find it here. It's about $6 CAD.

I also have two books I wrote on my Etsy. The first one is called a Survivor's Guilt, and is a book I wrote about what I learned on my healing journey, and a hope to offer validation to others. You can find it here.

I also have a poetry book, the second part of a set of books. It's poems I wrote as I began healing. It's here.

Both the poetry book, and book about my healing journey are $1.25 CAD which I think is about $1 USD.

[carsthatnevermadeitetc]

Mercedes-Benz 450 SL, 1973. The US-spec R107 series differed from the European and other international versions by having twin round headlamps and larger bumpers to comply with federal legislation. All US R107 cars had 4.5 litre V8 engines though early cars were badged as 350SL models (other markets received 3.5 litre V8s) but for 1973 they got 450SL badges. Two thirds of total R107 production were sold on the North American market

[rohirric-hunter]

It's so funny to me when I tell people, "You can't depend on an AI for that, it has to be done by a human," they're always like, "You're just afraid of technology." I'm not afraid of it. I understand it. And I know that an AI is never going to be able to comprehend things like context, which come naturally to a human and are essential to all kinds of information gathering and parsing.

Like yeah, there are uses for AI technology. The bread-sorting computer comes to mind. But that doesn't mean I want an AI to analyze the results of my google searches. Last night I googled, "Where to find iron ore minecraft," and Google's AI told me to dig 15 blocks down from anywhere and promised me that 100% I would find iron ore. Because the computer lacks the ability to look at phrases like "y level 15" and go, "huh, I wonder what that means, maybe I should look that up." It also lacks the ability to get the first apparent answer (y level 15) and then think that there might be more information (likelihood of spawning, size of spawns) and keep reading for that information. It doesn't know that's relevant information. And you can't teach these skills to a computer. People think that you can solve these problems by simply feeding more information into the computer but you can't. It just confuses it. And even if you could, what's the proposition? To fill a computer with the sum total of all human knowledge? I trust I don't have to say why that's a bad idea? The only thing you can do is manually block bad answers and replace them with good ones. By a human. Which means that all of those fixed answers... are not AI generated. :/

[recapitulation]

[ID: gifs from episode 20 of the series "Mysterious Lotus Casebook." Li Lianhua says, "Di Feisheng is like a good knife. It'll be a pity if we break him." Fang Duobing says, "I'm afraid he's a snake. A frozen snake. He'll bite you if he's awake." /end ID]

[bloominglegumes]

im.hunting for secrets in the tf one trailer because i'm normal

there are markings on this guy's chest and shoulder that seem too deliberately designed to not be some kind of writing, but comparing it to cybertronian alphabets that have been presented before, i cannot for the life of me make out what it could be

bottom right purple text only has "MINE" visible in the shot

top middle text says "HA'LS" in gold (or at least i'm assuming it does, i'm not sure what the little dash in the middle is meant to be) and "BAR" in green

i hope they get in a bar fight. i love bar fight scenes

just thought it was funny that "IACON 5000" is written in english,, i assume it's because this setting is more important to the story and other text is mainly easter egg purposes

the clearest frames i could pick out showing megsy's first alt mode. just for fun

alpha trion is some kind of mossy mystical cave unicorn creature

alpha trion is some kind of mossy cave creature who plucks organs out of rusting bodies and shoves them into people no hesitation

note alpha trion is also huge. (comparable size to the very creature-type bodies all around this cave area?)

this shot was deliberately chosen to highlight this dead guy for some reason

gold and blue, claws, big feathered wings ringing bells for anyone??

if they're an existing character, i don't know who it could be

the way baby megs is kneeling, gently placing his hand on the face and talking to it seems reverent or like he's confiding in it, so like duh showing that he feels connected to it in some kind of intimate, emotional way

(dead bodies don't turn grey in this universe, judging from the winged blue+gold guy, so.is little megs hanging out with a giant head is that what's going on)

note d-16 has the decepticon insignia already on his left shoulder throughout the whole trailer, and it seems about as beat-up and grimy as the rest of him, so it has to have been there for a good while

[gonkaccino]

Season 4 hope/prediction: Deb's show is solid, zero issues, runs flawlessly with great ratings, but her personal life is completely eroding. We start with her discovering Marcus is leaving, and it culminates in DJ going into labor right before a taping. Deb chooses the show. When it's over, and she finally flies to Vegas, it's too late -- Aiden's not letting her in because he loves his wife too much to let DJ get into a shouting match with her mom right after giving birth, and instead takes the brunt of Deb's wrath, with her making excuses and talking about how they used her money for IVF, and anyway, DJ's fine, so who cares if she wasn't there? Kathy's in the room with DJ and the baby (DJ's the closest she has to a daughter, after all) and Deb leaves too furious to think about how badly she's hurt her family.

She heads back to her Vegas mansion -- empty, obviously, Josefina and the dogs would be in LA -- and pops open a bottle of wine. Alone. Completely alone. Can't call Marty, she has no friends, the closest she's got would be Kiki and wouldn't that be embarrassing, calling your poker dealer to talk about your feelings --

and then Ava's there. She got the news about DJ's labor, she got the story from Aiden (who was distraught, by the way, man's too much of a sweetheart for Vance drama), a spare key from Damian (happy to pawn that off on her, though if it isn't returned promptly he's taking legal action) and has arrived just in time to see the Deborah Vance having a breakdown the likes of which no one thought physically possible. Crying gives you wrinkles, you know. But Ava has to be here. She's the physical embodiment of a lesson Deb never truly learned: you don't have to like someone to love them.

In my imaginary fantasy land that I am concocting this would then subsequently lead into them fucking nasty but I understand that this may be a step too far for the surprisingly large number of very normal people who watch this show and would forgive JPL for not taking it that far. However I do believe they should fuck about it and let Ava take the reigns in their relationship while they see how many of Deb's bridges they can un-burn.

[kply-industries]

[daisybell-on-a-carousel]

Bored so you check out what your little brother is doing and end up getting distracted for like an hour

[moonchair]

📢📢📢 it takes time and effort to make fanwork for the rest of us to enjoy, so please do not repost fanwork without permission. it goes for art, edits, gifs, etc.

📢📢📢 claims like 'kudos to whoever made this thing' in a post you make are no different from posting things uncredited!

[goshyesvintageads]

Kimberly, Clark and Co, 1953

[grimae]

Last day for my art book's campaign! Only 24 hours left to pledge.