#radio sector | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

skzdarlings · 2 months ago

Text

the rescue ; skz; aotm!hyunjin x reader

original ask: requested by @tattywood: ❛ i'm simply enjoying the view. it's not every day i get to fuck someone so pretty. ❜ would 100000% fit Hyunjin 🩶 + requested by anonymous: ❛ you're mine, and i take care of what belongs to me. ❜ with hyunjin? thank you

pairing: hwang hyunjin/reader content info: artist of the month!hyunjin was inspo here. gangster stuff, reader has been kidnapped and is in a see through nightdress, most violence off page though, bad guy hyunjin who is actually a good guy, arranged marriage, multiple smut scenes, not great communication but gets better lol. smut includes fingering, blow jobs, pussy eating, piv, spanking, light choking, husband/wife kink. word count: 6300 words.

masterlist. part of the valentine’s day stories series. credit to prompts. requests are closed.

enjoy! <3

“I’ve already explained,” you say, equal parts frustrated and exhausted. “My husband isn’t coming for me.”

The gangster cronies still don’t seem to understand. You are tied to a chair in their basement (because they are preposterously corny goons, tying you up like a comically silly damsel in a ridiculous film) while they berate you for your husband’s tardiness.

You have tried explaining, over and over, that Hyunjin is not coming, but they won’t accept that answer. The fools try in vain to reach him again, but his line leads straight to a dial tone.

He went radio silent after the initial video contact, when your captors demanded a price for your healthy return.

Hyunjin was quiet on the call. Your husband is a quiet man in general, though he knows how to use his charms and work a room, and he has certainly perfected the art of severe intimidation. When your marriage was arranged, one mob family to the other, you mistakenly assumed you were marrying a monster.

Hyunjin is very reserved when not conducting business. He doesn’t engage in any of the more debauched sides of the business, unlike the men in your family. Evenings at home are silent and still, the penthouse view of the glittering cityscape the only real bustle.

Maybe that shouldn’t have surprised you. When he took over his family’s business, Hyunjin altered a lot of their practices, cutting the crueler sectors, opting for illicit crimes of more practical varieties.

The country is in a political chokehold, government affairs conducted none too differently from the criminal underworld. The cops are all dirty, the politicians corrupt, the wealthy depraved. Hyunjin has taken it upon himself to alleviate the pressure suffered by the regular people, the civilians who truly pay the price of a broken system.

In a world with no good guys, sometimes only villains can be heroes.

You think of his face now, how he certainly looked the part of a villain on the video call. Hyunjin has a very austere demeanour, exacerbated by his severe appearance: sharp marble features and dark, vicious eyes often further darkened with heavy lining, sleek black hair, scattered scars and tattoos, and the sort of regard that judges at a glance. He is young, but he has the air of a man who has already traversed the universe and found it wanting.

You think of his face now, the silent perusal he gave your bound body on that video call. You are dressed in your favourite nightgown, your underthings partially visible through the light material, but it was not willingly donned. At the time of your kidnapping, you were attired appropriately for the wealthy wife of a famous gangster. You were returning from a family visit when your captors intercepted you in transit from the airport.

Either to intimidate or threaten or just because they could, they made you remove all your jewelry and fine clothes. They rifled through your luggage and demanded you change into the nightgown.

Hyunjin recognized the nightdress, realized you must have been stripped, and likely inferred the very worst.

“Address,” was the only word Hyunjin said. He ended the call seconds later.

“Oh, he’ll come,” your captor says. He points at you with a hand that feels more threatening than a knife. It makes your terrified heart leap into your throat. “Or else.”

“He won’t, though!” you exclaim. “You��re wasting your time!”

They are not listening. They leave the basement, slamming the door behind them.

You huff and settle back in your bonds.

It is only a matter of time before they realize you are telling the truth. Hyunjin will not waste the money or resources to rescue you. He has always been respectful of the marriage arrangement, but your husband is not sentimental. There is a professional distance between you. His decision will be based in the logic of all his strategies: nothing personal, just a matter of business.

You sometimes see a different side of him, something buried under that quiet intensity. He collects fine art and spends hours poring over his favourite pieces, listening to music, losing himself to artistic fantasies. He always comes back, but you know there are other worlds in his mind.

Every attempt to bridge the gap has been gently rebuffed, but there have been moments when your husband seems curious about you. You often catch him staring. He gets a wistful look that softens his face, even with that shield of make-up. His eyes are gentle when you talk about your passions. You never let his quietude deter your friendly penchant for chatter. He seems more than content to listen. He remembers everything too.

You know he finds you attractive, if nothing else. He has caved on that front several times over, though not right away. He didn’t touch you on the wedding night, nor the honeymoon. He left your beach holiday early to return to business, leaving you in a villa with security and his credit card. It was the first time you realized the material world was no replacement for true companionship. You missed his dark eyes.

Your family also had expectations. There would be consequences if the marriage fell through. You would be blamed, not him. Worried he would renege on the nuptials, you did everything to try and seduce him.

He politely rejected you at every turn.

Just when you were resigned, he arrived home after a job. It was almost three in the morning when he entered the penthouse. You have separate bedrooms but they share a connecting bathroom. You could hear him cursing above the running water.

You only meant to peek. The sliding door on your side was partially ajar so you tip-toed over.

Hyunjin was standing in front of the mirror, shirtless, pressing a rag to his wounded shoulder. There was a mess of blood streaked down his back, making you gasp at the terrible mosaic of pain, his body littered with violent scars.

That gasp contained multitudes, for the horror, for his beauty. His dark eyes were as severely lined as ever, expression intense as he breathed hard through the pain. Smooth black hair fell across his face when he tipped his head.

He froze at the sound of your gasp. His turn was very slow, eyes peeking through the curtain of his short hair. They captured yours.

You held your breath.

Eventually, he straightened, flicking his hair out of his face. He looked in the mirror and sighed.

“You can come in,” he said. “This is your home too.”

You slid the door open, just enough to squeeze through. Your attention was utterly transfixed on his bleeding shoulder. You could see the wound was a thin stripe. It was not deep so stitches were not necessary, but it was slightly out of his reach as it sloped towards his back.

“Oh, Hyunjin,” you said, thoughtlessly taking the rag right out of his hands.

In spite of the violence that raised you, or maybe because of it, you can’t stand to see suffering. You and Hyunjin have had that in common from the start. You were quick to help him clean the wound, wordlessly wiping all the blood then applying cream across the clotted cut.

He flinched when the stinging cream made contact. You went to apologize but your words evaporated when your eyes met through the mirror. You were surprised to find him already looking at you, that expressive gaze as thoughtful as ever.

“How did this happen?” you couldn’t help but ask, eyes rivetted to his reflection. “You – you have people to protect you.” You managed to rip your gaze away, looking at your task, feeling hot in the face.

“I do,” he said. “But I’d never ask someone to do something I’m not willing to do myself.”

This did not surprise you to hear. It is obvious that Hyunjin cares very deeply about the wellbeing of other people. It is a fact known to few. It aggravates you at times, but his reputation does not seem to bother him. He would rather people think him a monster while he secretly does good rather than be praised in public while cruel in private.

You have never known another man like him. Looking at that scar that night, the realization truly struck you.

Your fingers began to tremble where they brushed his bare skin, your eyes widening as you looked at the scar and many others. If something happened to him, what would become of you? Certainly, as his widow, you would be financially sound, but what did that matter? This world would lose something irreplaceable if it lost Hwang Hyunjin. This penthouse could be brimming with silver and gold and it would be empty, worthless.

Tears in your eyes, you succumbed to desire, kissing him very gently on his hurt shoulder.

“Hyunjin,” you said, your eyes closed, lips grazing his skin as you spoke. “Please make sure you always come home, okay?”

He did not answer at first. When you lifted your eyes and looked in the mirror, those dark eyes were so enflamed that you were surprised nothing caught fire.

“Hyunjin?” you said softly.

“You mean that,” he said, not quite a question, more like a realization.

“Of course,” you replied. You looked at his scarred back again, let your fingertips brush down the length of his spine. It made him stand a little straighter. “Have you ever known me to lie?” you asked.

He finally turned around, looking at you with an long-engrained wariness, but also a hunger. He was a starving man presented with a banquet, but one who did not easily trust when sitting at someone else’s table.

“You’re a smart woman,” he said. “I know that. And I know that you’re – good.”

Good was an exhale, like the word was too heavy for his tongue. You realized that his wariness was less suspicion for you than hesitation regarding himself. He was only starving because he though himself undeserving of the meal he wanted.

“You’ve seen – and done – many bad things tonight, haven’t you?” you asked.

Having the full force of his gaze was overwhelmingly heady. You remember how it made your heart race like you were being chased, your breath catching over and over until you were almost panting.

Arousal struck quickly, a sensation like you never experienced before. You thought you understood attraction, but not until that moment when he released a breath, so close to your face, and you became truly aware of his proximity. Of him, of all that he was, all that he did. His character, his hidden depths.

Your husband.

It made your racing heart thunder something fierce, your blood pumping hotly, throbbing places you did not know were so sensitive.

You desperately wondered what was on his mind. The gears in his head were spinning and whirring, delaying his response. Was he feeling the same tension? Were his thoughts the same realization?

My wife.

“Yes,” he finally said.

“Is there something I can do to help?” you asked.

His tattooed hand cupped your head, tilting it just so. It made your lips part with a gasp, eyelids heavy with anticipation for a kiss.

He took his time looking at you, like he was scrubbing all those bad memories away, replacing them with the flustered look on his aroused wife’s face.

“Yes,” he said again, and kissed you for the first time.

You were so glad he rebuffed your previous half-hearted advances, clumsy seductions made out of obligation rather than desire. It was so different to that kiss. You would not have known how to even ask for a kiss like that. You never knew what you were missing.

Your quiet husband and his multitudes. All that simmering intensity, hot just below the surface of his icy demeanour, burned right through his skin. His kiss was ravishing, entirely possessive, like he wished to take your whole essence into him and hold it forever.

He walked you backwards. With a snap of his wrist, he slid the door open the rest of the way, so sharp that it tried to bounce back. He continued onward, kissing you until you were dizzy with it.

He picked you up just to put you on the bed himself. Your kiss separated only then as you landed with a bounce and a breath.

He loomed over the edge of the bed, this man who was both stranger and husband, hero and villain. He looked at you like he already loved you. He looked at you and saw the reciprocation. You had fallen for him without realizing you had ever even stumbled.

He ran his hands through his hair, the sleek black locks fluttering back into place. His eyes were still rivetted to your face, to your body. You were wearing the nightdress you are wearing now. It is why it became your favourite.

He looked down at you, the material translucent enough to see the details of your body. It broke through that last layer of ice. He surrendered with a choked breath.

He unclasped a holster on his thigh, dropped a knife that was hidden in a pocket. Once unarmed, his hands went to his belt. You watched those nimble, efficient fingers, swallowing hard. You were aching to an embarrassing degree, undoubtedly obvious in your desires. No one ever warned you it would feel like this, just being looked at, never mind touched.

Then his belt was on the floor and he touchedyou for real. His calloused hands moved up your thighs, pushing the nightdress up and out of his way. He climbed on top of you, swift as a feline, mouth descending onto yours with that same desperate hunger as before.

Recollection makes you crave another kiss. You think you will always be starving for more.

“Hyunjin,” you whispered, hands on his face, his shoulders, down to his chest.

He took your hands and laced your fingers with his, pinning those hands to the bed. He kissed you again, long and slow. It was all more sensual than desperate.

His voice, however, was desperate when he begged, “Let me make you feel good, please.” He kissed down your face, your jaw, your throat. “Please, my wife.” He kissed further down still, through your nightdress, tracing the curve of your breast with his tongue, wetting the material and awakening every nerve beneath it. “My wife,” he repeated.

“My husband.” The words left your lips in a dizzy, delirious whisper.

It was all the confirmation he needed. Those deft and skilled hands, so quick to assemble weapons and pull triggers, applied themselves with a startling gentleness. He took you apart and put you together with the same efficient ease.

He hooked his fingers in the only material between him and his desire, tugged it out of his way. His fingers went to you, slipping through all that wetness. Those intense eyes rolled back even though it was just his fingers inside you, then he closed his eyes like it was too much, and it seemed he had to temper himself, murmuring nonsense as he let his fingers sink into you.

He kissed you again, drinking down every sigh and gasp and moan while he fucked you with his long fingers. It was like he could taste your pleasure, like he was trying to get drunk on it, every noise you made filling his mouth. He gave them back and brought you over a peak, first with his hands, then with his mouth. He laid between your legs and put your thighs around his head, losing himself entirely in you.

He did not remove a single article of your clothing nor his pants, not that first time. He simply held the material to the side as he unzipped and finally got inside you. It made your whole body keen, coming to life like it never had before. You forgot all your sensibilities and let every wanton sound and action loose.

He responded in kind. His kiss tasted like your pleasure, his heart pounding as fast as yours where your chests pressed together. You were careful near his injured shoulder, fingertips dodging scars. Your soft touch made him whimper, this powerful man entirely undone by a few caresses.

His skin was hot and he worked up a sweat, but his stamina seemed endless. He always wanted more.

You fell asleep tucked in his arms, content to believe the walls had crumbled. However, they revealed themselves in the morning light, as concrete as ever. He slipped away and left a note to excuse his absence as he was called away to business. You thought about phoning or messaging him, but those lines were not always secure, not for such intimate conversations.

When he returned a few days later, he hid behind those concrete walls, but too much had changed. There was now an awareness of your proximity and your distance. The lack of intimacy was not called into question before, the absence of something being a nothing. But now that nothing was something, or had been something for a moment, and it made you both very aware of how it was now missing – and anticipating always when it might again appear.

He tried very hard to keep away, to stay cordial at best, his habitual quietude even heavier than before. But while his silence was significant, so was his glance. Every time you turned around, he was already looking at you, a longing in his eyes and a thought on his lips that he never dared to speak aloud.

You granted him some distance for a time. When it became abundantly obvious he was holding himself in check, you realized that your own vulnerability was required to bridge the gap.

One night you crossed through the bathroom, slid open the door on his side. You found him at his desk, dressed down in a white dress shirt and pants. His blazer was discarded on the floor, his face still made up.

He stood quickly when you entered, though he didn’t say anything.

It was strange to imagine this man would need any reassurance, but you felt that was the case. His fingers fidgeted at his sides, his roving eyes studious.

You said nothing. You approached him, laid your hands on his chest, and gently guided him back into his chair. He sat slowly, his eyes on your face the entire time, even when he had to tip his head back to peer up at you.

You ran your fingers through his hair. When you entered the room, his face was tightly screwed in an expression of aggravation, but all those harsh lines softened as you traced a thumb down the sharp slope of his cheek.

There were some wipes on his desk. You took one and began to carefully remove that shield of dark make-up. His hand lifted but not to stop you, simply to rest his palm on your waist. He began to really touch you, feeling the shape of your body through your robe as you helped him come back to himself.

“Hello,” you finally said, looking at his bare face. Still impossibly beautiful.

“Hello,” he replied.

His fingertips dipped towards the hem of the robe. Before he could distract you with your own pleasure, you sunk to your knees in front of him. This startled him, his hand frozen in the air as you fit yourself between his open knees.

He caught your hand, his reflexes fast, before it could reach his fly. You could see he was already affected, a heavy bulge in the black material making your mouth water and core tighten.

He squeezed your hand and you looked up at his face. He tipped his head, blinked rapidly, an expression of mild confusion.

You took your hand back and unknotted your robe. The silk fell from your shoulders and down, sliding like water right off your body. You were completedly naked underneath.

It clarified everything, his confusion gone, replaced with surprise.

“You—” he began. It was interrupted when you put your head in his lap, resting on his thigh. You led his hand to the back of your neck and kissed him through his pants. It made his fingers clasp tighter around you.

“Please,” you said.

He would never deny you anything. Not the smallest gift nor grandest gesture. When you started a new charity to further your combined philanthropic efforts, he spared no expense in aiding the endeavour. You shared passions, and now you shared this.

He was stiff at the start, but gradually let himself go lax in his seat. His hand kept a steady grip on the back of your neck, not guiding but holding, like he thought you might disappear otherwise. He murmured your name, letting his head fall back as you worked him in your mouth.

You intended to make him finish like that, seeking nothing for yourself at that precise moment. He had other ideas, needing more of your shared pleasure to take him over that brink.

He lifted your face, adjusted his pants, and was on his feet in a matter of seconds. That hand on your neck dragged you up, up, up until your naked body was pressed against his clothed one. He clung to you needily, claiming your mouth in a wanting kiss.

His hands moved over you, every new inch of skin making him moan as he walked you towards the bed. The kiss only broke when you both sat down, his lips against yours as he breathed, almost smiling, “My pretty wife.”

“Hyunjin,” you said, shaking your head, feeling suddenly shy just because of a simple compliment.

He did not allow you to curl into yourself with any shame. When you tried, he seized you, pulling you onto his lap so you straddled it. His eyes moved up and down your body, hands following, from your thighs to hips to waist and up.

“What are you doing?” you said, laughing helplessly when he kissed somewhere ticklish on your throat. The sound made him smile, even softer than before, though it turned a little wicked as his mouth went lower.

“I’m simply enjoying the view,” he said, then wrapped his lips around the stiff peak of your breast, ran his tongue up and over. He licked and kissed back up to your mouth. “It’s not everyday I get to fuck someone so pretty.”

As he said this, he opened his pants again, eyes on yours as he grabbed your thighs and moved you so he could thrust up into you. His hips moved with a slow roll, letting you adjust to him. It had been a little while, and this angle was different.

And Hyunjin is not small. Your husband is built in perfect proportion, his body a long, hard, slender build – everything inside you at that moment was no exception. This angle made you whimper, clinging to him like he was a life preserver in a storm. The roll of his hips kept coming like waves and you were sure you would drown otherwise.

Your arms were around his neck, his graceful but strong hands digging into the meat of your thighs as he fucked you. He felt impossibly deep, every upward stroke feeling like it was bursting past something, pushing everything inside your body up to your throat.

You swallowed again and again, the taste of him still on your lips, the feel of him inside every inch of you. You clenched and tightened involuntarily, just pure animal reaction, and it made him moan and find all those sweet spots to make it happen again.

“Help,” was your somewhat nonsensical request, blurted in the midst of some moaning babbling.

Fortunately, he was and is a smart man. He understood. He clasped you tight to his body and fell back on the bed, thrusting up into you with sharper, more focussed determination, faster until you were weeping on his chest, delirious with pleasure. His shirt was unbuttoned and you accidentally ripped a few buttons right off, trying to press your face to bare skin.

“Yes, yes, yes,” you said as you tumbled over a height you never reached before. You never knew you could come just from that, stimulated somewhere so deep inside you, but it made you come undone in his arms.

He watched you unravel and it made him follow, clinging to you as he just barely pulled out before coming between your dripping thighs. It was all so messy and wet, your legs trembling, but it felt so good that it hardly mattered.

He caught his breath, then looked at your face just lose that breath again. He moaned and dragged you in for another kiss.

Then you were on your back, the night far from over.

That second night is the one that truly opened the door to more. Though your husband can be reticent in other regards, he is not quiet when he is inside you. You have come together again and again, a conversation with your bodies as you look for pleasure in a dangerous world. You always find it, tucked in the protective circle of his arms, wrapped around every inch of him.

You have been out of his arms for too long. Your visit to your family grew tedious before long. Your home is with Hyunjin now and you were eager to return.

Now it seems you may never see it again. You may never see him again.

No.

Just like the night when you took control for yourself, you must take control now. You realize if anything is to happen, then you must take the reins of your own rescue. You would not want Hyunjin to compromise himself or his important business. You know if something bad happened to you, it would weigh on his conscious, even if it was the better business decision. You must eliminate the need for choice.

It turns out, comical rope bindings are truly best suited for silly movies. When the men come to check on you again, you have slipped free of your bindings. There was an array of weapons in the room, so carelessly disposed because the assailants never assumed you would get free – or, if you did get free, that you would not know how to use them.

It is true, you do not like violence.

That does not mean you do not understand it.

You leave the two men unconscious in their basement. Unfortunately, you cannot find your suitcase and you do not want to hang around, so you venture outside in your nightgown. You are debating your next move when a car pulls into the driveway.

You back away quickly, raising the gun you stole as more men get out of the vehicle. You only stay your hand because you recognize one of them, though it takes a second to place him as one of Hyunjin’s lieutenants.

Then Hyunjin emerges. You have seen your husband before and after a confrontation, but never during it. If you thought he was an intimidating figure in the aftermath, he is all danger and darkness as he storms up the driveway now. There is such an energy radiating from him, it makes you stumble and forget yourself entirely.

Then he stumbles, recognizing you. You are both startled, staring at each other with the gun raised between you.

He looks nowhere but your eyes.

“Hyunjin?” you finally say.

“I—” He looks at you, the gun, the nightdress. He shakes his head. Some of that bravado returns when he says, “I’m here to save you.”

“Ah,” you say. You slowly lower the gun, at a loss how to reply. You were so resigned to the idea this was all still business. The reality of your husband risking himself to rescue you from unknown hostiles is making your heart pound.

In the end, all you can think to say is, “Sorry. You’re late.”

That wicked smile crosses his face, his tongue pushing at the corner of his mouth. He is suddenly nothing but amused, looking at you, then at the house.

“I can see that,” he says.

He whistles sharply and gestures to the house with a gloved hand. His lieutenants run past you and charge the door, no doubt heading inside to finish the job you started.

You turn to watch them go. In your distraction, Hyunjin grabs your arm. He is fast, effectively disarming you. He catches the gun with a twirl before tossing it aside.

It is not the gun he wants; it’s you.

Still holding your wrist, he tugs you into him. You throw your arms around him. The hug is surprisingly chaste, his face in your neck as he squeezes you like it is the only thing keeping him alive and standing.

“Are you hurt?” he asks.

When in his arms, it seems impossible to consider you could ever feel any pain.

You shake your head, daring to kiss his cheek. He turns his face to yours, your lips close enough to brush in a swipe.

“I’m all right now,” you say. “Sorry I beat you to the punch. I – I wasn’t sure if—”

His brow crinkles. That gloved hand goes from your wrist to your chin, seizing it between thumb and forefinger. He tips your head so he can look at your face. He always regards you like he does one of his masterpieces, like he can never get his fill, like there is always something new to find. He is enchanted every time.

“You’re mine,” he says. “And I take care of what belongs to me.”

You gasp when those fingers go from your chin to your throat, just enough to pull you in that last breath of a space. He kisses you there in the sunlight, utterly shameless.

“Do not ever doubt that,” he says. His eyes are soft with his affection, but his voice is hard, skirting the edge of a threat he would issue an adversary. It makes you tingle from head to toe. “Do I need to remind you?”

You never actually answer. You are not sure if your answer would have made a difference, as Hyunjin is determined to show you the very second you are home.

You reach the penthouse. There is no time to shower or decompress once you cross the threshhold. He sweeps you off your feet, your arms around his shoulders and your legs around his waist. You are wearing his blazer over your nightdress to preserve your modesty – not that it will last long.

He carries you to the bedroom where so many slow and subtle exchanges took place. Now, he is not slow or subtle. He is a force of nature. He tells you that he held no greater fear than losing you and he tried to keep his distance, but he regretted it the moment he saw you on that video call.

“You’re my wife,” he says, peeling his blazer off your body. “I’m your husband. There is nothing I should be holding back.”

“Yes,” you say, running your fingers through that smooth black hair. You shiver as he bunches the fabric of your nightdress, the material spilling over his fingers. “Don’t hold back,” you say, mouth open against his, stealing his every breath. “Do whatever you want.”

He tells you exactly what he wants, using his words for a change, finally letting those walls come down. He whispers every filthy thought into your ear, between kisses, between bites. You shiver at every suggestion.

And so, moments later, he is sitting on your bed. He arranges you to lay across his lap, facedown in the pillows while he runs his hands down your spine and over the curve of your ass.

“You’re my wife,” he says. The first tap of his open palm is through the thin material of your nightdress. It is truly just a warning tap, just enough to make you bounce. “Don’t ever doubt me again,” he says, swinging that strong hand a little harder.

This time a yelp escapes your lips. You wriggle until he pins you down, a hand on the back of your neck and the other lifting your dress. He already stripped your underthings, his open palm smoothing down all that bare skin.

You tingle with anticipation, braced yet still unprepared for the sharp smack he next delivers. You feel it tingle all the way up to your head, as well as the next one, and the next. You squirm under his firm grip, groaning his name as your thighs get tense and press together.

“Don’t say my name,” he says, and smacks you again. “Who am I?”

“M-my husband,” you say, practically mewling like a kitten when he next brings his hand down. “My husband,” you say again.

“And you are—”

“Your wife,” you say, though it comes out almost like a sob, a desperate gasp as he slips his fingers between your thighs and finds a new way to torture you. ��With your backside hot and stinging, the pleasure of his hand in that sensitive place feels amplified by a tenfold.

“Husband,” you say, hips bucking. His free hand goes from the back of your neck to your lower spine, holding you in his lap as he slowly finger-fucks you.

“Yes?” he says.

You do not even remember what you were going to say, or beg, or plead. You are overcome with sensation, tingling all over, intensifying the press of his fingers as he curls his fingers into that soft, soft place. Then you are really squirming, helplessly, instinctively, whining into the pillows.

“I make you feel good,” he says. “I take care of you. You, who are so good, and so smart, but so—”

You cry out when he angles his hand just a little differently. Your vision swims with stars as he speeds up.

“So soft,” he says, his own voice going soft, just a whisper as he makes you come all over his hand in a throbbing, aching, desperate wet mess. “Just for me,” he says in that whisper. “Just for your husband.”

“Mmmf,” is all the response you have left in you.

Your thighs are trembling and your pussy throbbing with aftershocks when he picks you up. He stands and turns, laying you on your side in the bed. You are grateful, as your backside still stings, though you suspect he is not done yet.

He strips out of his clothes, tearing through his shirt, leaving the pants in a heap. He forgets to remove his necklace. All that silver is cold against your hot skin as he lays down behind you. You do not have time to linger on it, as he gathers up the hem of your dress and adjusts himself behind you.

He has taken you many times, in many ways, many positions. When you are on your hands and knees, he is overtaken by a primal urge, your hips as leverage in his hands as he pounds into you like it is a chase. When you are on your back, he sinks into you slowly and deeply, rocking his hips into yours like he intends to fuck you forever. When you are in his lap, he rolls his hips in steady, needy waves, captivated by the sight of you in his arms.

He lays behind you now and wraps his arms around you, coaxes your thighs apart. Your nightdress is bunched every which way, leaving nothing to the imagination, and you feel especially exposed and vulnerable in this position somehow. Perhaps it is the fact he is the one holding you open, keeping you in position so he can take you.

You let yourself fall into it, fall into him. You let him tell you, with words and actions, exactly how he feels.

Before it ends, you change position. He lays back and you straddle his hips while stripping off your dress entirely. He keeps rolling up into you, only stopping when you plant your hands on his chest to slow him down. Then he practically sinks in the mattress, murmuring your name. His make-up is smudged, his calloused hands rough on your body. Whatever pains you experienced have been overtaken by his hands, by the smarting on your backside, still tender as you bring your body down onto his again and again. He has completely claimed you for himself and you take the same in turn.

“Hyunjin,” you say. “My husband, oh—”

He kisses your hand, long and hard, like he needs his mouth on some part of you desperately. Your fingers are curled into his pretty mouth when he comes, his hands on your hips and his cock buried inside you.

“Oh,” is your final sound before you slump on top of him, skin to skin.

He rolls you onto your side, though he keeps you wrapped around him, his arms around you in turn. His hair is already a sweaty mess and you rub your thumb through some of his shadowy make-up, but those familiar dark eyes are gazing at you with so much warmth. There is no more ice, no more cold concrete.

“I should let you rescue me more often,” you say with a laugh.

He doesn’t laugh back, but he does smile softly. It should be incongruous with his severe appearance, but it somehow comes together, layers of him exposed all at once as he strokes your cheek.

He looks at you like his favourite work of art.

“You were the one who rescued you,” he says. “Just like you rescued me.”

You cannot find the words to reply, so you kiss him. It speaks volumes, and he replies, kissing back.

You lose yourself to the sweetness, to the heat, to the passion, to all those things more, knowing there are many more to come with this man as your husband.

#hwang hyunjin x reader #hyunjin x reader #hwang hyunjin smut #hyunjin smut #stray kids x reader #stray kids smut #skz x reader #skz smut #stray kids x you #hyunjin x you #skz x you #valentinesdaystories

1K notes · View notes

no-144444 · 4 months ago

Text

red flag- o.piastri

===========

summary: you get in an accident on track.

pairing: oscar piastri (no.81) x fem! driver! reader

===========

“Red flag, red flag, safety car coming on track to retire all cars, too dangerous out in sector 3, drive with extreme caution,” his race engineer called over the radio.

“Is everyone alright?” Oscar questioned, slowing the car, the other drivers behind him doing the same.

“We’re not sure, Y/l/n crashed in sector 3 and hasn’t gotten out of the car just yet. We’ll keep you posted.”

What? You’d crashed and you weren’t out of the car yet? What the fuck? He knew you, he remembered what happened back in f2, back when you’d had the worst crash of your career and you jumped out of the car with a broken leg. Then, you’d at least gotten out of the car. Now? You were in the fucking car. Still. Minutes after your crash.

“Race is off, conditions are too dangerous.”

Fuck.

As he pulled into the pitlane, he jumped out of his car, following the other drivers to the briefing room as they all pulled off their soaking suits and damp helmets.

They sat, waiting for news as none came through. All they knew was that you had to be pulled out of your burning car and airlifted to the nearest hospital. Which meant that you weren’t conscious when you got out of the car. Which meant fucking terrible things.

Time passed and nothing really happened, so they were all sent back to their hotel rooms.

“Hey Osc, you want us to come with you? We don’t want you to be on your own right now,” Logan smiled softly, standing at the exit to the McLaren motorhome. Beside Logan was George, Lando, and Alex.

“Thanks guys,” he mustered up some half-smile and they shared a car, then hung out in his room for a few hours.

Oscar’s phone rang after about an hour, an unknown number. Usually, calls like these would go ignored, especially at a time like this, but something told him to pick it up.

“Piastri speaking,” he asked quietly.

“This is Oscar Piastri? Y/n Y/l/n’s emergency contact?” a female voice asked.

“Yes, yes it is,” he blurted out, grabbing the attention of Logan, Alex, George, and Lando beside him. They held their breath.

“Well, Y/n was in an accident on the track and she suffered extreme internal bleeding from a broken rib, one that broke during the early laps of the race. She passed out from a lack of oxygen, and crashed into the barrier at a very high speed, meaning that she has a few more broken bones and issues. We'd ask you to come to visit her, she’s been asking about you non-stop since she woke up.”

“S-she’s awake?”

“Yes, Mr. Piastri, and she’s refusing to take any medication unless you come down here.”

“I’m on my way,” he hung up the phone without questioning and grabbed his coat and shoes, as the boys followed. Oscar didn’t even bother putting on his shoes as he ran through the hotel and out into the pouring rain. Logan hailed a cab as the other boys tried to get him to calm down.

“You need to slow down,” George soothed, getting a grip on Oscar’s shoulder. It was strange for them, seeing this much emotion from Oscar. He’d always been so level-headed, so calm. Well, it wasn’t strange for Logan to see it. He was there in f2 when Oscar started crushing on you, and when you two got together. Every summer break you three (and a few other ex-f2- current f2 drivers) go on a week-long trip, just to stay in contact, Logan got a front-row seat to Oscar’s devotion to you. It was sweet, and it brought Oscar out of his shell.

“She’s refusing medication, if I don’t get there fucking quicker, George, so no, I don’t plan on calming down-” he cursed, brushing his hand off his shoulder.

“Hey! That was shitty, apologise Oscar. Everyone’s fuckin’ stressed right now,” Logan called back as the taxi pulled up.

“Sorry George,” Oscar added and George nodded, unaffected by his comment.

The car ride was tense, all of them wanted to get to you, needed to get to you. The hospital came into view, and the boys ran out, George paying the driver and following the rest of them into the foyer.

“Oscar Piastri, I’m here for Y/n Y/l/n?”

“Oh yes! Are you family?” the nurse behind the desk asked.

“I’m her emergency contact,” he replied.

“Yes, but are you family?”

“I’m her fiancé?” he answered.

“What?” Lando gasped. “You two got engaged?”

“During the summer break,” Logan answered. “He was planning on telling you after today.”

“All her family is in another country,” Oscar explained. “I’m the closest thing- we’re the closest thing.”

The nurse nodded and handed them visitor badges, and led them up to your room.

“You go in first,” George nodded to Oscar. “You’ve got this.”

Oscar tried to look positive, but it was difficult when the love of his life was in a hospital bed behind the door in front of him. He pushed open the door and when he saw you, he wanted to scream. Hooked up to machines, but you were awake and bothering the nurse about him. Who gave a shit about him? You were important, you were the most important thing on the planet.

“Baby, take the meds please,” he barely whispered, but you heard it and almost cried at the relief. She administered the drugs and left you to be. Your engineer left the room to give you privacy, he’d gone in the helicopter with you and had been the first to notice something wrong with you during the race.

Oscar listened as the nurse explained your condition before she left. They suspected that you’d broken a rib during the first few laps, but it had punctured your lung, and you’d passed out in the car. Then you went straight into a barrier at almost 250 km/h. You broke 3 more ribs, 5 vertebrae in your back, your right hip, your right leg, your left arm, and you fractured your collarbone, as well as all the bruising and cuts you’d gotten. He felt sick to his stomach. The nurse left to inform the others.

Oscar stood at the end of your bed. “What were you thinking? Why would you refuse medicine?” He asked, his voice tense but calm.

“I wanted to see you,” you shrugged. “I needed to talk to you.”

He looked up to see you. The bruising, the cuts, the bandages, all of it, it was almost too much.

“I lost the ring,” you admitted, choking up. “When I woke up it was gone. I’m so sorry Osc-”

“I dont give a fuck about the ring baby, I care about you. I care that you’re alive, alright?” He sighed, moving closer to your face. “I’ll get you another.”

You started crying as you held him close. It was all too much, the pain, the stress, thinking about what would happen after you got out, wondering if you’d ever be in an F1 car again, it was too much. Oscar always seemed to calm you down, to settle you, not this time. You’d never seen him this stressed, no one had. It was unsettling, unnatural, and it made you more worried, it made you think more, and it made everything too real. Every sob that left your body caused another surge of pain through your back and chest, god, broken ribs were no joke. You kept crying and he kept holding you, pleading with you to stop because he knew how painful it was, and he knew you’d pass out, and he’d be alone again.

You passed out in his arms and the nurses ushered him away and back to the boys.

“How is she?” Alex asked, standing from his seat.

“She passed out,” Oscar answered. “She’s in so much pain.”

Logan clapped a hand on his shoulder. “She’ll pull through. She’s the strongest person we know.”

Oscar nodded as tears filled his eyes. “This is so fucking unfair,” he cursed.

“We know mate,” Lando agreed. “We’re fucking livid.”

“Did she at least take the meds?” George asked.

Oscar scoffed. “Yeah,” he rolled his eyes. “She wanted to talk to me because she lost the fucking ring I gave her. Like I’d ever fucking give a shit about a ring over her.”

Logan chuckled softly. “Well, that’s your Y/n for you. Loyal.”

They all cracked a smile, even Oscar (kind of).

“She’s going to be ok, alright?” George reminded him. “She’ll be back in that car in no time. She’s a fighter.”

“I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep going if she doesn’t,” Oscar answered. The weight of his confession sobered the other three to the somberness of the moment.

“Well, it’s a good thing she’ll pull through,” Alex said.

===========

navigation for my blog :) (masterlist)

#f1 imagine #f1 x reader #formula 1 x you #formula one imagine #oscar piastri x reader #oscar piastri #oscar piastri x you #formula one x reader #formula 1 #formula one #mclaren #oscar piastri x fem!reader #f1 fluff

1K notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 2 months ago

Text

Prime’s enshittified advertising

Prime's gonna add more ads. They brought in ads in January, and people didn't cancel their Prime subscriptions, so Amazon figures that they can make Prime even worse and make more money:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/10/amazon-prime-video-is-getting-more-ads-next-year/

The cruelty isn't the point. Money is the point. Every ad that Amazon shows you shifts value away from you – your time, your attention – to the company's shareholders.

That's the crux of enshittification. Companies don't enshittify – making their once-useful products monotonically worse – because it amuses them to erode the quality of their offerings. They enshittify them because their products are zero-sum: the things that make them valuable to you (watching videos without ads) make things less valuable to them (because they can't monetize your attention).

This isn't new. The internet has always been dominated by intermediaries – platforms – because there are lots more people who want to use the internet than are capable of building the internet. There's more people who want to write blogs than can make a blogging app. There's more people who want to play and listen to music than can host a music streaming service. There's more people who want to write and read ebooks than want to operate an ebook store or sell an ebooks reader.

Despite all the early internet rhetoric about the glories of disintermediation, intermediaries are good, actually:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/direct-the-problem-of-middlemen/

The problem isn't with intermediaries per se. The problem arises when intermediaries grow so powerful that they usurp the relationship between the parties they connect. The problem with Uber isn't the use of mobile phones to tell taxis that you're standing on a street somewhere and would like a cab, please. The problem is rampant worker misclassification, regulatory arbitrage, starvation wages, and price-gouging:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

There's no problem with publishers, distributors, retailers, printers, and all the other parts of the bookselling ecosystem. While there are a few, rare authors who are capable of performing all of these functions – basically gnawing their books out of whole logs with their teeth – most writers can't, and even the ones who can, don't want to:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/19/crad-kilodney-was-an-outlier/#intermediation

When early internet boosters spoke of disintermediation, what they mostly meant was that it would be harder for intermediaries to capture those relationships – between sellers and buyers, creators and audiences, workers and customers. As Rebecca Giblin and I wrote in our 2022 book Chokepoint Capitalism, intermediaries in every sector rely on chokepoints, narrows where they can erect tollbooths:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

When chokepoints exist, they multiply up and down the supply chain. In the golden age of physical, recorded music, you had several chokepoints that reinforced one another. Limited radio airwaves gave radio stations power over record labels, who had to secretly, illegally bid for prime airspace ("payola"). Retail consolidation – the growth of big record chains – drove consolidation in the distributors who sold to the chains, and the more concentrated distributors became, the more they could squeeze retailers, which drove even more consolidation in record stores. The bigger a label was, the more power it had to shove back against the muscle of the stores and the distributors (and the pressing plants, etc). Consolidation in labels also drove consolidation in talent agencies, whose large client rosters gave them power to resist the squeeze from the labels. Consolidation in venues drives consolidation in ticketing and promotion – and vice-versa.

But there's two parties to this supply chain who can't consolidate: musicians and their fans. With limits on "sectoral bargaining" (where unions can represent workers against all the companies in a sector), musicians' unions were limited in their power against key parts of the supply chain, so the creative workers who made the music were easy pickings for labels, talent reps, promoters, ticketers, venues, retailers, etc. Music fans are diffused and dispersed, and organized fan clubs were usually run by the labels, who weren't about to allow those clubs to be used against the labels.

This is a perfect case-study in the problems of powerful intermediaries, who move from facilitator to parasite, paying workers less while degrading their products, and then charge customers more for those enshittified products.

The excitement about "disintermediation" wasn't so much about eliminating intermediaries as it was about disciplining them. If there were lots of ways to market a product or service, sell it, collect payment for it, and deliver it, then the natural inclination of intermediaries to turn predator would be curbed by the difficulty of corralling their prey into chokepoints.

Now that we're a quarter century on from the Napster Wars, we can see how that worked out. Decades of failure to enforce antitrust law allowed a few companies to effectively capture the internet, buying out rivals who were willing to sell, and bankrupting those who wouldn't with illegal tactics like predatory pricing (think of Uber losing $31 billion by subsidizing $0.41 out of every dollar they charged for taxi rides for more than a decade).

The market power that platforms gained through consolidation translated into political power. When a few companies dominate a sector, they're able to come to agreement on common strategies for dealing with their regulators, and they've got plenty of excess profits to spend on those strategies. First and foremost, platforms used their power to get more power, lobbying for even less antitrust enforcement. Additionally, platforms mobilized gigantic sums to secure the right to screw customers (for example, by making binding arbitration clauses in terms of service enforceable) and workers (think of the $225m Uber and Lyft spent on California's Prop 22, which formalized their worker misclassification swindle).

So big platforms were able to insulate themselves from the risk of competition ("five giant websites, filled with screenshots of the other four" – Tom Eastman), and from regulation. They were also able to expand and mobilize IP law to prevent anyone from breaking their chokepoints or undoing the abuses that these enabled. This is a good place to get specific about how Prime Video works.

There's two ways to get Prime videos: over an app, or in your browser. Both of these streams are encrypted, and that's really important here, because of a law – Section 1201 of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act – which makes it really illegal to break this kind of encryption (commonly called "Digital Rights Management" or "DRM"). Practically speaking, that means that if a company encrypts its videos, no one is allowed to do anything to those videos, even things that are legal, without the company's permission, because doing all those legal things requires breaking the DRM, and breaking the DRM is a felony (five years in prison, $500k fine, for a first offense).

Copyright law actually gives subscribers to services like Prime a lot of rights, and it empowers businesses that offer tools to exercise those rights. Back in 1976, Sony rolled out the Betamax, the first major home video recorder. After an eight-year court battle, the Supreme Court weighed in on VCRs and ruled that it was legal for all of us to record videos at home, both to watch them later, and to build a library of our favorite shows. They also ruled that it was legal for Sony – and by that time, every other electronics company – to make VHS systems, even if those systems could be used in ways that violated copyright because they were "capable of sustaining a substantial non-infringing use" (letting you tape shows off your TV).

Now, this was more than a decade before the DMCA – and its prohibition on breaking DRM – passed, but even after the DMCA came into effect, there was a lot of media that didn't have DRM, so a new generation of tech companies were able to make tools that were "capable of sustaining a substantial non-infringing use" and that didn't have to break any DRM to do it.

Think of the Ipod and Itunes, which, together, were sold as a way to rip CDs (which weren't encrypted), and play them back from both your desktop computer and a wildly successful pocket-sized portable device. Itunes even let you stream from one computer to another. The record industry hated this, but they couldn't do anything about it, thanks to the Supreme Court's Betamax ruling.

Indeed, they eventually swallowed their bile and started selling their products through the Itunes Music Store. These tracks had DRM and were thus permanently locked to Apple's ecosystem, and Apple immediately used that power to squeeze the labels, who decided they didn't like DRM after all, and licensed all those same tracks to Amazon's DRM-free MP3 store, whose slogan was "DRM: Don't Restrict Me":

https://memex.craphound.com/2008/02/01/amazons-anti-drm-tee/

Apple played a funny double role here. In marketing Itunes/Ipods ("Rip, Mix, Burn"), they were the world's biggest cheerleaders for all the things you were allowed to do with copyrighted works, even when the copyright holder objected. But with the Itunes Music Store and its mandatory DRM, the company was also one of the world's biggest cheerleaders for wrapping copyrighted works in a thin skin of IP that would allow copyright holders to shut down products like the Ipod and Itunes.

Microsoft, predictably enough, focused on the "lock everything to our platform" strategy. Then-CEO Steve Ballmer went on record calling every Ipod owner a "thief" and arguing that every record company should wrap music in Microsoft's Zune DRM, which would allow them to restrict anything they didn't like, even if copyright allowed it (and would also give Microsoft the same abusive leverage over labels that they famously exercised over Windows software companies):

https://web.archive.org/web/20050113051129/http://management.silicon.com/itpro/0,39024675,39124642,00.htm

In the end, Amazon's approach won. Apple dropped DRM, and Microsoft retired the Zune and shut down its DRM servers, screwing anyone who'd ever bought a Zune track by rendering that music permanently unplayable.

Around the same time as all this was going on, another company was making history by making uses of copyrighted works that the law allowed, but which the copyright holders hated. That company was Tivo, who products did for personal video recorders (PVRs) what Apple's Ipod did for digital portable music players. With a Tivo, you could record any show over cable (which was too expensive and complicated to encrypt) and terrestrial broadcast (which is illegal to encrypt, since those are the public's airwaves, on loan to the TV stations).

That meant that you could record any show, and keep it forever. What's more, you could very easily skip through ads (and rival players quickly emerged that did automatic ad-skipping). All of this was legal, but of course the cable companies and broadcasters hated it. Like Ballmer, TV execs called Tivo owners "thieves."

But Tivo didn't usher in the ad-supported TV apocalypse that furious, spittle-flecked industry reps insisted it would. Rather, it disciplined the TV and cable operators. Tivo owners actually sought out ads that were funny and well-made enough to go viral. Meanwhile, every time the industry decided to increase the amount of advertising in a show, they also increased the likelihood that their viewers would seek out a Tivo, or worse, one of those auto-ad-skipping PVRs.

Given all the stink that TV execs raised over PVRs, you'd think that these represented a novel threat. But in fact, the TV industry's appetite for ads had been disciplined by viewers' access to new technology since 1956, when the first TV remotes appeared on the market (executives declared that anyone who changed the channel during an ad-break was a thief). Then came the mute button. Then the wireless remote. Meanwhile, a common VCR use-case – raised in the Supreme Court case – was fast-forwarding ads.

At each stage, TV adapted. Ads in TV shows represented a kind of offer: "Will you watch this many of these ads in return for a free TV show?" And the remote, the mute button, the wireless remote, the VCR, the PVR, and the ad-skipping PVR all represented a counter-offer. As economists would put it, the ability of viewers to make these counteroffers "shifted the equilibrium." If viewers had no defensive technology, they might tolerate more ads, but once they were able to enforce their preferences with technology, the industry couldn't enshittify its product to the liminal cusp of "so many ads that the viewer is right on the brink of turning off the TV (but not quite)."

This is the same equilibrium-shifting dynamic that we see on the open web, where more than 50% of users have installed an ad-blocker. The industry says, "Will you allow this many 'sign up to our mailing list' interrupters, pop ups, pop unders, autoplaying videos and other stuff that users hate but shareholders benefit from" and the ad-blocker makes a counteroffer: "How about 'nah?'":

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

TV remotes, PVRs and ad-blockers are all examples of "adversarial interoperability" – a new product that plugs into an existing one, extending or modifying its functions without permission from (or even over the objections of) the original manufacturer:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

Adversarial interop creates a powerful disciplining force on platform owners. Once a user grows so frustrated with a product's enshittification that they research, seek out, acquire and learn to use an adversarial interop tool, it's really game over. The printer owner who figures out where to get third-party ink is gone forever. Every time a company like HP raises its prices, they have to account for the number of customers who will finally figure out how to use generic ink and never, ever send another cent to HP.

This is where DMCA 1201 comes into play. Once a product is skinned with DRM, its manufacturers gain the right to prevent you from doing legal things, and can use the public's courts and law-enforcement apparatus to punish you for trying. Take HP: as soon as they started adding DRM to their cartridges, they gained the legal power to shut down companies that cloned, refilled or remanufactured their cartridges, and started raising the price of ink – which today sits at more than $10,000/gallon:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/30/life-finds-a-way/#ink-stained-wretches

Using third party ink in your printer isn't illegal (it's your printer, right?). But making third party ink for your printer becomes illegal once you have to break DRM to do so, and so HP gets to transform tinted water into literally the most expensive fluid on Earth. The ink you use to print your kid's homework costs more than vintage Veuve Cliquot or sperm from a Kentucky Derby-winning thoroughbred.

Adversarial interoperability is a powerful tool for shifting the equilibrium between producers, intermediaries and buyers. DRM is an even more powerful way of wrenching that equilibrium back towards the intermediary, reducing the share that buyers and sellers are able to eke out of the transaction.

Prime Video, of course, is delivered via an app, which means it has DRM. That means that subscribers don't get to exercise the rights afforded to them by copyright – only the rights that Amazon permits them to have. There's no Tivo for Prime, because it would have to break the DRM to record the shows you stream from Prime. That allows Prime to pull all kinds of shady shit. For example, every year around this time, Amazon pulls popular Christmas movies from its free-to-watch tier and moves them into pay-per-view, only restoring them in the spring:

https://www.reddit.com/r/vudu/comments/1bpzanx/looks_like_amazon_removed_the_free_titles_from/

And of course, Prime sticks ads in its videos. You can't skip these ads – not because it's technically challenging to make a 30-second advance button for a video stream, and doing so wouldn't violate anyone's copyright – but because Amazon doesn't permit you to do so, and the fact that the video is wrapped in DRM makes it a felony to even try.

This means that Amazon gets to seek a different equilibrium than TV companies have had to accept since 1956 and the invention of the TV remote. Amazon doesn't have to limit the quantity, volume, and invasiveness of its ads to "less the amount that would drive our subscribers to install and use an ad-skipping plugin." Instead, they can shoot for the much more lucrative equilibrium of "so obnoxious that the viewer is almost ready to cancel their subscription (but not quite)."

That's pretty much exactly how Kelly Day, the Amazon exec in charge of Prime Video, put it to the Financial Times: they're increasing the number of ads because "we haven’t really seen a groundswell of people churning out or cancelling":

https://www.ft.com/content/f8112991-820c-4e09-bcf4-23b5e0f190a5

At this point, attentive readers might be asking themselves, "Doesn't Amazon have to worry about Prime viewers who watch in their browsers?" After all browsers are built on open standards, and anyone can make one, so there should be browsers that can auto-skip Prime ads, right?

Wrong, alas. Back in 2017, the W3C – the organization that makes the most important browser standards – caved to pressure from the entertainment industry and the largest browser companies and created "Encrypted Media Extensions" (EME), a "standard" for video DRM that blocks all adversarial interoperability:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/09/open-letter-w3c-director-ceo-team-and-membership

This had the almost immediate effect of making it impossible to create an independent browser without licensing proprietary tech from Google – now a convicted monopolist! – who won't give you a license if you implement recording, ad-skipping, or any other legal (but dispreferred) feature:

https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/the-end-of-indie-web-browsers/

This means that for Amazon, there's no way to shift value away from the platform to you. The company has locked you in, and has locked out anyone who might offer you a better deal. Companies that know you are technologically defenseless are endlessly inventive in finding ways to make things worse for you to make things better for them. Take Youtube, another DRM-video-serving platform that has jacked up the number of ads you have to sit through in order to watch a video – even as they slash payments to performers. They've got a new move: they're gonna start showing you ads while your video is paused:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/09/20/youtube-pause-ads-rollout/75306204007/

That is the kind of fuckery you only come up with when your victory condition is "a service that's almost so bad our customers quit (but not quite)."

In Amazon's case, the math is even worse. After all, Youtube may have near-total market dominance over a certain segment of the video market, but Prime Video is bundled with Prime Delivery, which the vast majority of US households subscribe to. You have to give up a lot to cancel your Prime subscription – especially since Amazon's predatory pricing devastated the rest of the retail sector:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

Amazon's founding principle was "customer obsession." Ex-Amazoners tell me that this was more than an empty platitude: arguments over product design were won or lost based on whether they could satisfy the "customer obsession" litmus test. Now, everyone falls short of their ideals, but sticking to your ideals isn't merely a matter of internal discipline, of willpower. Living up to your ideals is a matter of external discipline, too. When Amazon no longer had to contend with competitors or regulators, when it was able to use DRM to control its customers and use the law to prevent them from using its products in legal ways, it lost those external sources of discipline.

Amazon suppliers have long complained of the company's high-handed treatment of the vendors who supplied it with goods. Its workers have complained bitterly and loudly about the dangerous and oppressive conditions in its warehouses and delivery vans. But Amazon's customers have consistently given Amazon high marks on quality and trustworthiness.

The reason Amazon treated its workers and suppliers badly and its customers well wasn't that it liked customers and hated workers and suppliers. Amazon was engaged in a cold-blooded calculus: it understood that treating customers well would give it control over those customers, and that this would translate market power to retain suppliers even as it ripped them off and screwed them over.

But now, Amazon has clearly concluded that it no longer needs to keep customers happy in order to retain them. Instead, it's shooting for "keeping customers so angry that they're almost ready to take their business elsewhere (but not quite)." You see this in the steady decline of Amazon product search, which preferences the products that pay the biggest bribes for search placement over the best matches:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

And you see it in the steady enshittification of Prime Video. Amazon's character never changed. The company always had a predatory side. But now that monopoly and IP law have insulated it from consequences for its actions, there's no longer any reason to keep the predator in check.

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

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/2024/10/03/mother-may-i/#minmax

#pluralistic #amazon #enshittification #ads #prime #ad-tech #discipline

762 notes · View notes

vague-magnus-archives · 2 months ago

Text

This is like… the Flesh, but silly- “They’re Made Out Of Meat” by Terry Bisson. He was an author who wrote a lot of really cool stuff and just died recently- while I can’t currently find the link to the original story, here’s the version I copied to tumblr-

"They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

"Meat. They're made out of meat."

"Meat?"

"There's no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They're completely meat."

"That's impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?"

"They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don't come from them. The signals come from machines."

"So who made the machines? That's who we want to contact."

"They made the machines. That's what I'm trying to tell you. Meat made the machines."

"That's ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You're asking me to believe in sentient meat."

"I'm not asking you, I'm telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in that sector and they're made out of meat." "Maybe they're like the orfolei. You know, a carbon-based intelligence that goes through a meat stage."

"Nope. They're born meat and they die meat. We studied them for several of their life spans, which didn't take long. Do you have any idea what's the life span of meat?"

"Spare me. Okay, maybe they're only part meat. You know, like the weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside."

"Nope. We thought of that, since they do have meat heads, like the weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They're meat all the way through."

"No brain?"

"Oh, there's a brain all right. It's just that the brain is made out of meat! That's what I've been trying to tell you."

"So ... what does the thinking?"

"You're not understanding, are you? You're refusing to deal with what I'm telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat."

"Thinking meat! You're asking me to believe in thinking meat!"

"Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?"

"Omigod. You're serious then. They're made out of meat."

"Thank you. Finally. Yes. They are indeed made out of meat. And they've been trying to get in touch with us for almost a hundred of their years."

"Omigod. So what does this meat have in mind?"

"First it wants to talk to us. Then I imagine it wants to explore the Universe, contact other sentiences, swap ideas and information. The usual."

"We're supposed to talk to meat."

"That's the idea. That's the message they're sending out by radio. 'Hello. Anyone out there. Anybody home.' That sort of thing."

"They actually do talk, then. They use words, ideas, concepts?" "Oh, yes. Except they do it with meat."

"I thought you just told me they used radio."

"They do, but what do you think is on the radio? Meat sounds. You know how when you slap or flap meat, it makes a noise? They talk by flapping their meat at each other. They can even sing by squirting air through their meat."

"Omigod. Singing meat. This is altogether too much. So what do you advise?"

"Officially or unofficially?"

"Both."

"Officially, we are required to contact, welcome and log in any and all sentient races or multibeings in this quadrant of the Universe, without prejudice, fear or favor. Unofficially, I advise that we erase the records and forget the whole thing."

"I was hoping you would say that."

"It seems harsh, but there is a limit. Do we really want to make contact with meat?"

"I agree one hundred percent. What's there to say? 'Hello, meat. How's it going?' But will this work? How many planets are we dealing with here?"

"Just one. They can travel to other planets in special meat containers, but they can't live on them. And being meat, they can only travel through C space. Which limits them to the speed of light and makes the possibility of their ever making contact pretty slim. Infinitesimal, in fact."

"So we just pretend there's no one home in the Universe."

"That's it."

"Cruel. But you said it yourself, who wants to meet meat? And the ones who have been aboard our vessels, the ones you probed? You're sure they won't remember?"

"They'll be considered crackpots if they do. We went into their heads and smoothed out their meat so that we're just a dream to them."

"A dream to meat! How strangely appropriate, that we should be meat's dream."

"And we marked the entire sector unoccupied."

"Good. Agreed, officially and unofficially. Case closed. Any others? Anyone interesting on that side of the galaxy?"

"Yes, a rather shy but sweet hydrogen core cluster intelligence in a class nine star in G445 zone. Was in contact two galactic rotations ago, wants to be friendly again."

"They always come around."

"And why not? Imagine how unbearably, how unutterably cold the Universe would be if one were all alone ..."

#submission

281 notes · View notes

papaya-twinks · 2 months ago

Text

mauve - l.n - p.2

Warnings: Swearing, angst, crash, sexism, banter, insulting(?)

Pairing: Lando Norris x fem!reader

Taglist: @cheriiepies @jan1on @sagestack @fall-bambi @meglouise00 @eclipsedcherry @suzzie105 @rebelatbay @fly-me-away @cabbyhabs @djoenthusiast @georgeparisole @justcharlotte @cutieln4 @amz824 @coff33andb00ks @yoruse @neferaskingdom @dramaticpiratellamas @leonie404 @awritingtree @lolzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz @easy4 @ironmaiden1313

A/N - I’m so happy y’all like it! Remember, message in the comments if you wanna be on the tag list! Also, remember, at this stage of the fic, Lando has 0 wins!

other parts 💜💜

Thankfully for both you and Lando, he didn’t have to see your face for the next few days, not until pre-season testing anyways. You looked great in your suit, the Williams suited you so well, you drove impeccably, your car nowhere as slow as it had been the year before, and Alex had been a healthy 15th.

Hey, could’ve been worse. As you got into your car, your helmet a sweet purple with oil splashes along the side, your number emblazoned on the top, you readied yourself for your first ever drive as part of the Formula One World Championship. Fuck.

You turned sharply right, ready to warm your tyres, checking your mirror and responding to radio messages. “So, Lando’s done a 28.8 for sector one, that’s a 28.8, Y/N,” your engineer said you responded with a simple ‘copy’.

Once your tyres were up and ready you began your lap, sliding through the corners with just the right amount of balance, your concentration unwavering, the places you put the car just perfect. Yes, it was just practise, but it seemed like you’d been doing it for years.

And then, as you began your next lap, heading down the main straight, you caught a flash of orange in your rear-view mirrors, the almost blindingly neon helmet of Lando Norris shimmering behind you. What the fuck was he doing?

No one ever raced during pre-season testing. It was testing. After all. But you were on a hot lap, and you weren’t one to back down, which greatly surprise Lando, as he saw you continue, not letting off a single second. Two could play at that game.

He dove down the inside, his wheel tapping into the side of yours, sending your car onto the rumble strip, your body bouncing in the car. “What’s he playing at?!” you shrieked into the radio. “We’re on it, Y/N,” your engineer reassured.

“So, uh, Y/N, what do you make of the situation with Lando on track?” one of the reporters asked, as you lifted your microphone. You let out a breath of air, a mix of a scoff and sigh as you shrugged. “I’m not responsible nor do I know what he was thinking,” you said simply.

“Maybe if she can look. She’d have seen me,” Lando said, a harsh, hostile laugh on his lips as he rolled his eyes, “this sport would be better off without people who can’t see others on track,”. You didn’t say anything, blinking for a second.

“If you want a change of scenery, F1 Academy’s always open,” you said, moving the straw of your drink to your lips to hide the smug smirk on your lips as you pulled your Williams cap down low on your forehead, your hair smooth, albeit sweaty.

And Lando? He was taken aback. The new girl had bite, huh? Well, so did he. He was Lando fucking Norris after all, not some push over. But neither were you, it supposed. Lando didn’t say anything, he wasn’t one to stroke the fire when he knew how much of a field day the media would have with it.

But that didn’t mean he’d let you get away with it, oh no. He’d make you pay. And pay for it you would, tenfold for what you had done. How you’d insulted him. To Lando, you’d have been a better grid girl than a driver.

You didn’t say anything as you sat in your motor home, now changing into a comfy pair of sweats and a t-shirt, the cold air of a February in Bahrain filing in through your window. You didn’t understand why Lando was even being such a jerk to you.

You hadn’t done anything wrong, you’d only given him what he’d given you first. But if it was gonna be like that, then fine. You could dish it out and if Lando wasn’t okay to take it, so be it. Anyways, testing? It had gone reasonably well, but almost as if to add salt to the wound, mclaren were looking stronger than usual.

Lando would have a field day with that one.

It was half-refreshing to come out of your second FP1 session to see that there were, fortunately, some people who did think Lando was being mean to you. Whilst at the same time, there were people who shipped you? What the hell? That would never happen. And you only did come 13th, and in a car as slow as Williams? That was an achievement and a half.

#lando norris #lando norris x reader #lando norris imagine #lando norris x you #lando x reader #f1 #lando norris smut

250 notes · View notes

grantgoddard · 2 months ago

Text

My application wins our tiny black music pirate station a valuable London-wide radio licence : 1989 : KISS 100 FM

It was only just daylight when I suddenly realised that the phone was ringing. It seemed to take me ages to drag my weary body out of bed, as the phone continued to ring long and hard. Who on earth would want to phone me at this early hour on a Saturday morning? I toyed with the notion that it might be my former girlfriend, who seemed determined to inflict as much hurt on me as possible, despite our relationship having ended abruptly through her own infidelity and lies.

But it was not her. It was [‘KISS FM’ managing director] Gordon McNamee, calling me from his mobile phone. He said he was standing in the middle of his local park, walking his dog, accompanied by his mother. I could hear in the background that it was pouring with rain. McNamee asked if I had the home phone number of any of the Independent Broadcasting Authority [media regulator IBA] staff so that he could find out whether KISS FM had won the licence. I asked him why he was so anxious to find out at such an early hour in the morning. McNamee told me that ‘Music Week’ magazine’s radio correspondent, Bob Tyler, had rung him at home at around eight o’clock that morning to find out if he knew who had won the licences. McNamee admitted that he had heard nothing, despite knowing that the decisions had been made by the IBA at its Thursday meeting and should be announced imminently. McNamee told me that he had stayed at the KISS FM office [in Finsbury Park] all day Friday, but there had still been no phone call from the IBA, so he assumed that KISS FM had lost the licence for the second time, and had returned home.

Bob Tyler had phoned McNamee a second time at around nine o’clock that morning to say that he had just heard a rumour that KISS FM had won a licence, though there was still no means of official confirmation. McNamee, feeling agitated and frustrated, had decided to get out of bed and take his dog for a walk in the local park. Halfway across the park, it had started to pour with rain. Then, just as he, his mother and his dog had run for shelter, McNamee’s mobile phone had rung again. This time it was Richard Brooks, media editor of ‘The Observer’ newspaper, offering his congratulations to McNamee on KISS FM’s win of one of the two licences, and asking for a comment to include in the next day’s issue. McNamee thanked Brooks for his call, but emphasised that he himself had not been told the news and so would have to obtain official confirmation from the IBA before he could say anything publicly. Brooks assured him that he had seen a letter sent to one of the losing applicants which definitely stated that KISS FM and easy listening applicant ‘Melody Radio’ were the two winners. McNamee promised to ring him back as soon as possible.

There was jubilation in the park, despite the torrential rain. McNamee and his mother leapt up and down with excitement, watched by an astonished old man who was also sheltering from the storm. The old man asked them what all the fuss was about and, when McNamee told him he had just won a hotly contested radio licence, the old man offered him a celebration roll-your-own cigarette and apologised for not having a cigar. Now, McNamee needed to find out from the IBA if the news was true, and why it had been broken to him by a journalist, rather than in an official IBA communication. That was when he had rung me. I told McNamee that I probably had the home phone number of one of the IBA officers, if the paperwork had not disappeared from my flat, so I would find it and try to obtain official confirmation. I quickly found the home phone number of the IBA press officer, Stuart Patterson, on the top of an old press release he had sent me. I called him and, although he himself refused to confirm or deny whether KISS FM had won, he promised to arrange for someone from the IBA radio division to call me as soon as possible.

It was only a few minutes later that David Vick, the IBA’s principal radio development officer, called me. At first, he was pre-occupied with explaining to me the protocol of the IBA announcement, and did not tell me outright that KISS FM had won:

“Hi, it’s David Vick from the IBA. I gather you’re the only people who haven’t got the news officially yet ... I’ve just had a quick word with Stuart, obviously ... We’ve told the winners that they might expect calls from journalists. What we’re anxious not to happen, and maybe it’s a false hope now, is for journalists to ring losers before they’ve got their letters. But clearly, the Christmas post is so unpredictable that our best laid plans have fallen apart this morning.”

“I didn’t ring Stuart as a journalist,” I interrupted. “It was the KISS FM side ... Did we get it or didn’t we?”

“Yes, of course you did,” answered Vick.

“Oh, brilliant,” I screamed. I was elated. Until now, I and the rest of the KISS FM team could only have dreamed of this moment when the IBA would ring us to say that we had won a radio licence. Now, it had really happened. I was very tired. I was still shattered from the long journey home [from a holiday in The Gambia the previous evening]. I had only just woken up, but I was also incredibly happy that my hard work on the licence application had won out in the end.

“Congratulations,” said Vick, while I gasped with joy at the other end of the call. He remained far more composed than I was right now, and he continued to explain the detail of the announcement: “I don’t know how The Observer got hold of it. Clearly, one of the losers has talked to The Observer fairly early on this morning, because they’ve been hot on the trail from quite early on. So congratulations on that.”

I was still laughing and whooping at my end of the conversation, as Vick continued: “We normally do ring winners on Saturday morning but, this time, we’ve been playing it so laid back and ultra cool that I hadn’t actually planned to do that. All the letters seem to have got through, but clearly some of the most serious applicants have given business addresses, and they’re the ones who haven’t actually got the letters. You’re not unique. We’ve had a vexed Lord Hanson [of Melody Radio, the other licence winner] ring us this morning, asking what’s going on and why is he being rung by journalists.”

Vick continued: “You and Lord Hanson have been in the identical situation this morning of being rung by The Observer and others at the crack of dawn, and not known what was going on ... What we didn’t want was for losers who haven’t got their letters this morning to find out from the newspapers either on Sunday or ideally on Monday ... We had a terrible botch-up with the Post Office on one of the previous months. And, this time, I rang the district postmaster yesterday afternoon and said ‘look, we’ve got another run of letters going through.’ And he said he’d do his best to catch them the moment they arrived at the sorting office and hustle them straight through for us. And he’s clearly done the job with unfailing skill and everything’s arrived this morning. But the ones going to business addresses, yours and Hanson’s and some of the other quite serious applicants, have ended up hearing about it through the grapevine as a result.”

“Oh, this is brilliant,” I gasped. I was still far from composed and I was barely taking in Vick’s pre-occupation with the minor points of the procedure. We had won! That was all that was important to me right there and then. We had won! Vick continued regardless: “We told everybody our press release would be [published] Tuesday morning. But I’ve spoken to Peter Baldwin [IBA director of radio] and Stuart [Patterson], and that’s clearly crazy now, so we’re going to issue the press release early Monday morning. So, if you could bear to at least smile inwardly and say as little as you can to the press until then ...”

I was muttering words of agreement without really taking in all the detail that Vick was relating. He could tell my excitement was getting the better of me, so he suddenly changed gear: “Well done. We’ll obviously have a lot to do with each other in the months ahead. One of the things we’ve said in the letter is that, if you could come in [to the IBA office] and meet us all in the next couple of weeks, that would be super.”

“We would love to,” I replied, still giggling uncontrollably. Once more, Vick was keen to discuss the nitty gritty, right here and now on a Saturday morning: “Very well done. It was an excellent application. The trouble is that you’re going to get a lot of griping comment now from people saying that they [the IBA] only did it to keep the pirate lobby happy. The fact was that it was a bloody good application that got it on merit, because we certainly wouldn’t have given it to you if the application hadn’t been deserving of it.”

It was incredibly pleasing to hear Vick credit the KISS FM application after all the hard work I had put into it. I felt that, finally, I had been vindicated for my insistence to McNamee that the whole licence application had to be as perfectly presented as possible on this occasion. I thanked Vick for his kind comments, and he continued: “I think, to be honest, that the extra six months actually did you a lot of good. Not that the first application was bad or anything but, in this one, you had clearly learnt so much over the last six months, and you had strengthened it in so many ways. And, fortunately, by majoring on the new release aspect of the daytime [music] playlist, you’ve given us a very solid peg to hang the ‘diversity’ point on. Because, when ‘Capital [Radio]’ and others predictably start complaining, we can actually point to the fact that you are going to be playing the music before it gets in the charts, and they will play it after it gets in the charts, which gives greater diversity.”

Since its launch in 1973, Capital Radio had been London’s one and only commercial pop music station, and it was still eager to defend what it considered to be its own rightful territory – a monopoly over playing pop music in the capital. The IBA was charged with widening the choice of radio stations available to listeners, whilst not duplicating the existing output of Capital Radio. The emphasis I had placed in the KISS FM application on the station’s championing of new music had proven to be precisely the argument the IBA could use to defend a decision to award KISS FM the licence. Admittedly, Capital Radio did play dance music within its programmes, but it only played songs that were already in the ‘Top Forty’ singles chart. KISS FM would be playing mostly new releases, before they gained widespread popularity. My strategy for the KISS FM application had worked exactly as I had intended, which Vick confirmed as he continued to relate the detail: “The press release actually says that KISS FM has been chosen as a station that will be in the forefront of music tastes and that’s your market position, as we define it.”

McNamee must have returned home by now, so I gave his home telephone number to Vick and thanked him for calling me so promptly. It was absolutely brilliant news and I was still utterly ecstatic. I tried to phone McNamee straight away, but Vick must have managed to get through to him first. I continued re-dialling for several minutes, until the phone eventually rang. McNamee was shouting down the phone to me over the top of a loud conversation I could hear in the background:

“Grant, you cunt,” he greeted me, in his typically perverse way. “We’ve got it! I can’t believe it! David Vick just phoned me and we went through the whole lot. I can’t fucking believe it.”

There was loud laughter in the background and McNamee already sounded drunk on the news, in spirit, if not in reality: “You’ve got a job! Your gamble worked out. We’ve all got a job. Fucking wonderful! It’s wonderful! It’s just unbelievable. I’m going to be down at Dingwalls [nightclub in Camden] tonight and the whole world will be, I should think. I’m going to phone everyone today. I’ll talk to you later on. I’ve got to phone all the bosses, and I’ll talk to you later.”

McNamee was right. My gamble had paid off. I had believed that KISS FM could win the licence, if only someone was prepared to work hard on the application this time around. Then, when McNamee had failed to take up the challenge, I had decided to take on the task myself. While McNamee had been pre-occupied with his initial failure, I had been determined to turn KISS FM’s second application into a winner. Asked subsequently what had persuaded the IBA to award KISS FM a radio licence, David Vick answered: “A well-researched application and musical knowledge.”

It was pleasing to know that my strategies had been proven correct. It was my detailed research and my belief in KISS FM’s musical expertise that had swung the licence bid. Now, here I was, having learnt the good news only hours after arriving back in the country. If KISS FM had lost its licence bid this second time around, I would have had no job to return to. Plus, my flat had been deliberately and spitefully emptied [by my former girlfriend whilst I had been away]. But these things did not matter to me anymore. The dream I had cherished for so many years of a legal black music radio station in London was about to become a reality at last. I had played my part in turning that dream into reality. I was absolutely thrilled. For me, it was literally a dream come true.

[Excerpt from ‘KISS FM: From Radical Radio To Big Business: The Inside Story Of A London Pirate Radio Station’s Path To Success’ by Grant Goddard, Radio Books, 2011, 528 pages]

Originally published at https://peoplelikeyoudontworkinradio.blogspot.com/2024/09/the-day-my-application-won-our-tiny.html ]

#career #commercial radio #David Vick #Gordon McNamee #Grant Goddard #KISS FM #London #pirate radio #radio #Radio Authority #radio industry #radio licensing #radio regulation #radio sector #radio station

0 notes