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mostlysignssomeportents · 8 months ago

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No, “convenience” isn’t the problem

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in CHICAGO (Apr 17), Torino (Apr 21) Marin County (Apr 27), Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

Using Amazon, or Twitter, or Facebook, or Google, or Doordash, or Uber doesn't make you lazy. Platform capitalism isn't enshittifying because you made the wrong shopping choices.

Remember, the reason these corporations were able to capture such substantial market-share is that the capital markets saw them as a bet that they could lose money for years, drive out competition, capture their markets, and then raise prices and abuse their workers and suppliers without fear of reprisal. Investors were chasing monopoly power, that is, companies that are too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

The tactics that let a few startups into Big Tech are illegal under existing antitrust laws. It's illegal for large corporations to buy up smaller ones before they can grow to challenge their dominance. It's illegal for dominant companies to merge with each other. "Predatory pricing" (selling goods or services below cost to prevent competitors from entering the market, or to drive out existing competitors) is also illegal. It's illegal for a big business to use its power to bargain for preferential discounts from its suppliers. Large companies aren't allowed to collude to fix prices or payments.

But under successive administrations, from Jimmy Carter through to Donald Trump, corporations routinely broke these laws. They explicitly and implicitly colluded to keep those laws from being enforced, driving smaller businesses into the ground. Now, sociopaths are just as capable of starting small companies as they are of running monopolies, but that one store that's run by a colossal asshole isn't the threat to your wellbeing that, say, Walmart or Amazon is.

All of this took place against a backdrop of stagnating wages and skyrocketing housing, health, and education costs. In other words, even as the cost of operating a small business was going up (when Amazon gets a preferential discount from a key supplier, that supplier needs to make up the difference by gouging smaller, weaker retailers), Americans' disposable income was falling.

So long as the capital markets were willing to continue funding loss-making future monopolists, your neighbors were going to make the choice to shop "the wrong way." As small, local businesses lost those customers, the costs they had to charge to make up the difference would go up, making it harder and harder for you to afford to shop "the right way."

In other words: by allowing corporations to flout antimonopoly laws, we set the stage for monopolies. The fault lay with regulators and the corporate leaders and finance barons who captured them – not with "consumers" who made the wrong choices. What's more, as the biggest businesses' monopoly power grew, your ability to choose grew ever narrower: once every mom-and-pop restaurant in your area fires their delivery drivers and switches to Doordash, your choice to order delivery from a place that payrolls its drivers goes away.

Monopolists don't just have the advantage of nearly unlimited access to the capital markets – they also enjoy the easy coordination that comes from participating in a cartel. It's easy for five giant corporations to form conspiracies because five CEOs can fit around a single table, which means that some day, they will:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/18/cursed-are-the-sausagemakers/#how-the-parties-get-to-yes

By contrast, "consumers" are atomized – there are millions of us, we don't know each other, and we struggle to agree on a course of action and stick to it. For "consumers" to make a difference, we have to form institutions, like co-ops or buying clubs, or embark on coordinated campaigns, like boycotts. Both of these tactics have their place, but they are weak when compared to monopoly power.

Luckily, we're not just "consumers." We're also citizens who can exercise political power. That's hard work – but so is organizing a co-op or a boycott. The difference is, when we dog enforcers who wield the power of the state, and line up behind them when they start to do their jobs, we can make deep structural differences that go far beyond anything we can make happen as consumers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

We're not just "consumers" or "citizens" – we're also workers, and when workers come together in unions, they, too, can concentrate the diffuse, atomized power of the individual into a single, powerful entity that can hold the forces of capital in check:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/10/an-injury-to-one/#is-an-injury-to-all

And all of these things work together; when regulators do their jobs, they protect workers who are unionizing:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

And strong labor power can force cartels to abandon their plans to rig the market so that every consumer choice makes them more powerful:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

And when consumers can choose better, local, more ethical businesses at competitive rates, those choices can make a difference:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/10/view-a-sku/

Antimonopoly policy is the foundation for all forms of people-power. The very instant corporations become too big to fail, jail or care is the instant that "voting with your wallet" becomes a waste of time.

Sure, choose that small local grocery, but everything on their shelves is going to come from the consumer packaged-goods duopoly of Procter and Gamble and Unilever. Sure, hunt down that local brand of potato chips that you love instead of P&G or Unilever's brand, but if they become successful, either P&G or Unilever will buy them out, and issue a press release trumpeting the purchase, saying "We bought out this beloved independent brand and added it to our portfolio because we know that consumers value choice."

If you're going to devote yourself to solving the collective action problem to make people-power work against corporations, spend your precious time wisely. As Zephyr Teachout writes in Break 'Em Up, don't miss the protest march outside the Amazon warehouse because you spent two hours driving around looking for an independent stationery so you could buy the markers and cardboard to make your anti-Amazon sign without shopping on Amazon:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/29/break-em-up/#break-em-up

When blame corporate power on "laziness," we buy into the corporations' own story about how they came to dominate our lives: we just prefer them. This is how Google explains away its 90% market-share in search: we just chose Google. But we didn't, not really – Google spends tens of billions of dollars every single year buying up the search-box on every website, phone, and operating system:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Blaming "laziness" for corporate dominance also buys into the monopolists' claim that the only way to have convenient, easy-to-use services is to cede power to them. Facebook claims it's literally impossible for you to carry on social relations with the people that matter to you without also letting them spy on you. When we criticize people for wanting to hang out online with the people they love, we send the message that they need to choose loneliness and isolation, or they will be complicit in monopoly.

The problem with Google isn't that it lets you find things. The problem with Facebook isn't that it lets you talk to your friends. The problem with Uber isn't that it gets you from one place to another without having to stand on a corner waving your arm in the air. The problem with Amazon isn't that it makes it easy to locate a wide variety of products. We should stop telling people that they're wrong to want these things, because a) these things are good; and b) these things can be separated from the monopoly power of these corporate bullies:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/08/divisibility/#technognosticism

Remember the Napster Wars? The music labels had screwed over musicians and fans. 80 percent of all recorded music wasn't offered for sale, and the labels cooked the books to make it effectively impossible for musicians to earn out their advances. Napster didn't solve all of that (though they did offer $15/user/month to the labels for a license to their catalogs), but there were many ways in which it was vastly superior to the system it replaced.

The record labels responded by suing tens of thousands of people, mostly kids, but also dead people and babies and lots of other people. They demanded an end to online anonymity and a system of universal surveillance. They wanted every online space to algorithmically monitor everything a user posted and delete anything that might be a copyright infringement.

These were the problems with the music cartel: they suppressed the availability of music, screwed over musicians, carried on a campaign of indiscriminate legal terror, and lobbied effectively for a system of ubiquitous, far-reaching digital surveillance and control:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes

You know what wasn't a problem with the record labels? The music. The music was fine. Great, even.

But some of the people who were outraged with the labels' outrageous actions decided the problem was the music. Their answer wasn't to merely demand better copyright laws or fairer treatment for musicians, but to demand that music fans stop listening to music from the labels. Somehow, they thought they could build a popular movement that you could only join by swearing off popular music.

That didn't work. It can't work. A popular movement that you can only join by boycotting popular music will always be unpopular. It's bad tactics.

When we blame "laziness" for tech monopolies, we send the message that our friends have to choose between life's joys and comforts, and a fair economic system that doesn't corrupt our politics, screw over workers, and destroy small, local businesses. This isn't true. It's a lie that monopolists tell to justify their abuse. When we repeat it, we do monopolists' work for them – and we chase away the people we need to recruit for the meaningful struggles to build worker power and political power.

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/2024/04/12/give-me-convenience/#or-give-me-death

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

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

#pluralistic #enshittification #victim blaming #convenience #a la carte

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news-of-the-day · 6 months ago

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5/23/24

About two weeks ago, Russia launched a counteroffensive and is making large gains, especially since the Ukraine is much more tired and doesn't have as much aid as before.

The Identity and Democracy Group (ID) for the EU Parliament said it was expelling the Alternative for Germany (AfD). I don't know if you remember this, but when the huge wave of migrants to Europe began in the 2010s and then Chancellor Merkel welcomed them, there was a backlash within Germany and far-right politics started to become popular, and the AfD came to the forefront with large rallies. The ID is a far-right coalition for the EU parliament from many different European countries and accepted AfD into the fold, but recently one of the AfD's prominent members, Maximilian Krah, gave an interview downplaying the crimes of the SS, and it turned into a big scandal. The fact that the ID is willing to expel the AfD right before the EU parliamentary elections shows how much of a liability it's become.

The Supreme Court threw out a ruling by a lower court that South Carolina's congressional district lines were racial gerrymandering against blacks. Admittedly the current court is leaning conservative, but Justice Alito, who wrote for the majority, brought up a reasonable point: It is illegal to gerrymander based off of race, but not by party (in some cases you may actually want to dilute a strong party block so as to encourage competition within a district and discourage incumbency and extremism). Considering blacks in South Carolina vote overwhelmingly Democrat, it's much harder to prove whether the lines drawn were to exclude blacks rather than to shuffle around Democrats.

China is doing military drills around Taiwan with live ammunition and mock approaches.

The DoJ is suing to break up Live Master, the subsidiary of which is TicketMaster, saying that Live Master has a monopoly on the ticket industry.

NYT 2) DW, France24 3) SCOTUS Blog 4) Washington Post 5) WSJ

#news #war in ukraine #afd #supreme court #gerrymandering

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mariacallous · 1 year ago

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No wonder Italy’s current leader feels indebted to the four-time prime minister; she owes her ascent to the man who played a decisive role in normalising the far right.

The man who changed the face of Italy and paved the way for the ruling far right died on Monday, but Berlusconism has risen. After Silvio Berlusconi’s death, my country seems to have fallen under a spell. The major TV channels broadcast hagiographic reports of the four-time prime minister, with nostalgic music playing in the background. Celebrities remember the day they met the tycoon but have ostensibly forgotten his “bunga bunga” parties. The mainstream narrative leaves out Berlusconi’s conflicts of interest, his connections with the mafia, his disregard for rules and his obduracy in siding with his friend Vladimir Putin to the very end.

As if to resurrect the rampant years of Berlusconism, media and politics are speaking with one voice. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has proclaimed a day of national mourning to coincide with her coalition partner’s state funeral. Although Berlusconi’s centre-right party, Forza Italia, is now in disarray, the man’s true legacy consists of Meloni’s ruthless far right governing the country and furtherly reshaping it.

The Leopard

One year ago, when he was campaigning for the general elections, the octogenarian Berlusconi appeared on TikTok and tried to endear the digital generation. Most likely, teenagers think of Berlusconi as an old billionaire who founded a media empire and led four governments; some of them associate him with the football team Milan, others think about his sex parties with prostitutes. But youngsters are poorly aware of the way Berlusconi put democracy under stress in the last three decades.

In the early Nineties, a huge corruption scandal, named “Tangentopoli”, shattered the political system. Investigations into the illicit financing of parties also triggered the collapse of the Socialist Party, Psi, and its leader, Bettino Craxi. The latter’s friend, Berlusconi, “entered the field” to fill the void. Berlusconi was not at all an outsider. He was a Leopard: he was part of the so-called “First Republic”, but became the one who capitalized from its collapse. Taking office as Prime Minister in 1994, he founded the “Second Republic” and led four governments until 2011. To quote The Leopard, a classic Italian novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, “if we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”.

Berlusconi and Craxi were united by friendship and strings. In the 1980s, Craxi was in charge as Prime Minister and paved the way for Berlusconi’s media empire: Fininvest’s private broadcasting was illegal at that time, but the Socialist leader passed two “Berlusconi decrees” to save that business.

In 1994, after creating a TV empire, thanks to politics, Berlusconi conquered politics thanks to television. He seduced voters with the dazzle of entertainment and the marketing tactics of advertisement; the electoral programme was promoted as if it was a dazzling product, keeping contradictions in the shade. When in power, Forza Italia’s leader had a grip on private and public broadcasters: “they speak with a single voice, saying that Berlusconi is fantastic”, as the Italian political scientist Giovanni Sartori noticed decades ago.

During the Berlusconi era, Sartori was deeply concerned about “the erosion of democracy in Italy”. In a “videocracy” where images are hegemonic, “citizenry is intellectually impoverished, and the monopoly of television in the Berlusconi case is even more worrying”, he said.

Melon benefited most from his legacy

Berlusconi used his TV empire as a tool to shape the narrative and to get an audience. He was an ante litteram populist: he blamed parties, he promoted a centralized worship around his person, he used scaremongering tactics and even unleashed his supporters against judges. Now you can see why Berlusconi inspired Viktor Orbán, and you may notice that the Italian leader had something in common with Donald Trump or Andrej Babiš. But it is Meloni who is benefitting most from Berlusconi’s political and cultural legacy. He played a decisive role in normalising the far right. In 1993 Gianfranco Fini, the leader of the Italian Social Movement, Msi, ran for mayor of Rome; the tycoon had not yet jumped into politics but he hastened to endorse the post-fascist candidate. In a matter of months, Msi was rebranded into Alleanza nazionale, National Alliance, and entered the first government led by Berlusconi.

In 2001, Fini himself was deputy-prime minister in the second Berlusconi government; at that time, the G8 hosted in Genoa ended in blood. A huge anti-globalization movement, so transversal as to bring together teenagers and pensioners, leftists and Catholics, was forcibly repressed by police brutality. Amnesty International stated that it was the most serious suspension of democratic rights in a Western country since the Second World War.

Forza Italia’s leader never showed any sense of limit. Putting aside the sex parties, his strategy of power showed no restraint: it was founded on alliances with racist and even secessionist parties such as Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord, the ancestor of Matteo Salvini’s Lega. And post-fascists have always been Berlusconi’s coalition partners, although they rearranged their framing over the years: in 2012, Meloni founded Brothers of Italy. A decade later, she took charge as Prime Minister. Within a few months, her government attacked media freedom and took over the broadcaster Rai. Forza Italia’s leader started the takeover of the media and the public sphere. He purged critical journalists such as Enzo Biagi from the public broadcaster and never hesitated to attack institutions. A few weeks ago, Meloni’s government moved to curb the state audit court’s oversight powers.

The far-right Prime Minister also plans “not to bother those who create wealth” and is benevolent towards tax dodgers, to say the least. Not only did Berlusconi count on the votes of tax evaders, but he was himself charged with tax fraud. He faced a huge amount of scandals and convictions but avoided jail and unleashed his supporters against the judiciary. Despite this, Meloni has proclaimed national mourning. It’s pretty clear why she feels indebted to Berlusconism.

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ktempestbradford · 1 year ago

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My brain wants to solve this problem by coming up with all new euphemisms, but ones that TikTok can't ban without messing up their own bag. Things like:

Sony Films = suicide

Paramount+ = rape

Coca-cola = sexual assault

But then I thought about it a bit more and realized how out of hand this could get. Plus, it reminded me of something Cory Doctorow posted recently in an essay about how Brand Safety killed Jezebel (from the day that was first announced):

It's easy to point and laugh at conservative dopes when they're tricked into shooting themselves in the balls to own the libs. ... But progressives do it, too, particularly when they embrace monopolies as a force for positive social change. Remember 2019, when people got excited about playing loud pop music at Nazi rallies in the hopes that the monopoly video platforms' copyright filters would make any video from that rally impossible to post? I warned then that if this tactic worked, it would be used by cops to prevent you from recording them... and yup, within a couple years, cops were blaring Taylor Swift music in hopes of preventing the public from posting videos of their illegal conduct... Which brings me to ad-tech, "brand safety," and the demise of Jezebel... many progressives have become cheerleaders for "brand safety," as a countervailing force to the drawdown of trust and safety at online platforms... Articles about ads for major brands showing up alongside Nazi content on Twitter are now a staple of progressive reporting, presented as evidence of Elon Musk's lack of business acumen. ... This isn't wrong. Musk is a bad businessman (he's a good scam artist, though). Twitter is hemorrhaging advertisers... But progressives are out of their minds if they think the primary effect of the brand safety industry is punishing Elon Musk for secretly loving Nazis. The primary effect of brand safety is killing reality-based coverage of the news of the day, and since reality has a well-known anti-conservative bias, anything that works against the reality-based community is ultimately good for oligarchy...

Obviously the two situations aren't the same. Still, remembering this made me realize that coming up with alternate words--even if it is funny and will mess up some marketing and advertising people's day--is not an act that solves the problem. It might even create other problems, like with the music.

What solves the problem is having social networks where these words are not banned and will not get you in trouble just for posting them regardless of context. Tumblr is that social network right now. And it would behoove so many of the TikTok youth to come on over here and experience that freedom.

BUT. As I said the last time I reblogged this thread (without the more recent additions), we need to be kinder to those who are self-censoring themselves on platforms other than TikTok, YouTube, etc. because, for a ton of them, that's all they really know and they think it's normal. Us olds (I am An Old. I'm an Auntie and proud.) know it's not normal and shouldn't wag our fingers or dismiss these folk and instead let them know they don't have to do that stuff here.

Oh, and also consider paying for Tumblr so we can keep this precious space full of the feral.

“you don’t like the proliferation of terms like Unalive outside of TikTok because you realize that you’re aging out of youth culture and it makes you uncomfortable!”

no I don’t like it because there’s something INCREDIBLY dystopian about being forced to soften terms for basic parts of the human experience like death and sex (and even more so terms for oppressed minorities- call me a “le-dollar sign-bian” and I will bite you) purely because advertisers and corporations demand it

#reject the TikTokification of language #TikTok censorship #tiktok euphemisms #corporate censorship #I would pay for Tumblr

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nickgerlich · 2 months ago

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Search Is The Word

The vast majority of my students have many things in common, and I don’t mean their youth. They have known a world in which the internet reigned supreme ever since they were born. They probably don’t remember life without smartphones. Shopping online is a no-brainer, while shopping in stores can be a chore.

And search engines are just a click or tap away.

The first search engine in the modern era, meaning 1994 when the World Wide Web was unleashed for public use, was Yahoo. The site sent out crawlers to scan what was then a pretty small internet, and users could find things if they knew how to frame a search query.

Yahoo was followed by Lycos, AskJeeves, and a rudimentary search tool created by Larry Page and Sergey Brin called BackRub. If you don’t recognize those two names, you should, because two years later, in 1998, they released Google. And the world has not been the same ever since.

While there were numerous other search engines that entered the market in the late-90s, it was Google that went on to rule the roost and become a verb. It is the go-to website for whenever we need to find out something, to the extent that the Department of Justice recently ruled the company had an illegal monopoly on search. But that’s a topic for another class.

Being able to search online sure beats the old card catalog system that libraries had when I was growing up. Imagine having to write a research paper and you had to know the Dewey Decimal System before you could even begin. It was a very different kind of hell.

But times are changing. Evolution is inevitable and unstoppable, a force not only of nature but also technology. While “traditional” search—and I use that word in quotes because it seems odd to use it for something less than 30 years old—is still dominant, other forms of search are emerging.

And, as when many new technologies arrive, these new ways are being adopted by younger people. GenZ in particular is ushering in a new generation of search, which includes these relatively new options: social search, AI platforms, and e-commerce sites.

While I cannot claim to be among the GenZ cohort, I can speak from experience. Although I Google among the best, and consider it the Swiss Army knife of my modern existence, I increasingly use Instagram and Facebook to find companies. I have used chatbots, which rely heavily on AI. And, not to be left out, I lean heavily on Amazon and Expedia.

Whaaaat?

Since Amazon is the world’s ultimate store, I figure if I strike out in a search there, then the product simply does not exist. That may not always be true, especially since there are some brands—notably Nike—not available there. Some of their third-party vendors may sell them—or knock-offs—but Amazon and Nike cut ties back in 2020.

And then there’s Expedia, the travel booking site for lodging, flights, and rental cars. I seldom if ever actually book anything through them. Instead, I use it to quickly find out which lodging properties are available in a particular city. Like Amazon, it is a pretty safe bet that most hotels and motels will show up in an Expedia search. Once I find out what is available, I then go to my brand-specific apps, which is usually Hilton, but not always.

So what does this mean? Plenty. It means that marketers must understand exactly how people search, and who is most likely to use the various methods. Failure to do so could leave you wondering why all that money you have been paying to Google isn’t yielding the results you wanted.

This helps explain how and why Google became the advertising giant it is, by selling top search query result rankings, but also at sites like Amazon and Expedia. It behooves marketers to pay Amazon, who realized ad revenues of $46.9 billion in 2023, to show up first. The same goes for hotels listed on Expedia. Organic search results are nice, but paid placements are better.

Since GenZ is such a huge consumer of sites like Instagram and TikTok, it also makes sense to have a significant presence there with ads and standard posts. Having to flip outside of an environment is inconvenient. If search can be done within an app where you already spend a lot of time, then all the better.

I suspect that in another 30 or 40 years, people will be reminiscing about how in the good old days, they had to use a clunky search tool like Google, because it had come to dominate the scene and left other search engines, like Bing, Duck Duck Go, Yahoo, and others, scrambling to pick up leftover crumbs.

With AI now all the rage, it also behooves sites like Google to embrace the technology in an effort to make search engines more fruitful. We started seeing the results of these efforts even before Chat GPT was released in November 2022. Have you noticed the predictive spelling and query completion appearing on your screen? You can thank AI.

We’ve come a long way since the Stone Age, which basically ended around 1994. Some people still cling to it. And there will be those who cling to the methods that came after 1994, but before the modern era. To each their own. But the marching orders for marketers remain the same: understand your target audience, and you will increase the chances of your success.

Sure beats having to flip through a card catalog.

Dr “Search Me” Gerlich

Audio Blog

#marketing #search #Google

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busterstrouble · 8 months ago

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breathe in breathe out it will be ok || Self Para

(tw: death, abuse, violence)

If I ever leave this world alive, I'll take on all the sadness that I left behind. If I ever leave this world alive, the madness that you feel will soon subside. So, in a word, don't shed a tear, I'll be here when it all gets weird. If I ever leave this world alive.

Everyone has lost someone in their life. Some people have lost people they were close to and some have lost those they only knew through others. Either way death and loss is something that brings everyone together in some way. In this world not everyone will die but they have faced it through others.

What death is to you may not be the same as it is to others though. Death is the end of their being. Not the memory of them but the ability to make any more memories. You will never get to go hit a bucket of balls with them at the driving range again. You will never get to call their phone and hear their voice in the other end. You will never get to celebrate a tradition the same ever again. This list of what you will no longer get to do is endless. That is a place where grief likes to live. In the world of what was taken from you. The memories you will no longer get to make.

Now the memories you have previously built are all you have left. They will play like reruns in your mind any time you think of them. The brain does fade and the fear of loss of memories can sit in the back of your mind forever. It is up to you to replay those memories in your head so you never forget. The problem with that is the sadness that comes up when you think of those you have lost. Your mind will fight itself. No i cannot think of the memory; it will ruin my day or i will cry. Then on the other hand your mind is begging you to think of the memory so you can relive the happiness you once had. This is something you will have to sit and deal with forever.

Some memories are not pleasant. They are the ones maybe only you have and its the last moments of their life. You could be watching the last breath leave their body. You could be watching them gasping for air as their body is slowly dying on the inside. The memory of your hands crushing their rib case as you attempt CPR to give them any last chance of life. These memories may take over the good memories; but only for a brief time. The last moments of their life when they look a way you have never seen them before. You have to remember that that version of them will live with you forever but they will also be over shadowed by the good memories. Living intertwined in your memories forever; but that is the only way they can coexist.

It was Christmas Eve 2023 - the night they all crossed over. The day their bodies shed their last breath. The last day the all howled together as a pack. The territory battle between the Cor Pack and the Italian Vampires who were pushing the boundaries finally reached its climax. The feud started nearly 15 years prior but after push and pull over the Camden Town neighborhood only one side could win. There was no way for both sides to survive. Business could only survive if one clan kept control. Unfortunate for Buster and the Cor Pack they were only 6 deep. The Changretia family were dozens. Buster and Rancor had the monopoly over the illegal auction in Camden Town. Nothing went in or went out that they didn't have their hands on. Lucrative and a connection to packs all over the UK they really had zero competition - until the greedy Vampires caught wind. They simply wanted territory originally - the business was none of their concern but if the Cor Pack lost their territory they lost the business as well. Goods can only come in through the warehouse; sellers and buyers were not going to trust the confidentiality if they moved locations. The Bread Warehouse was in operation since before The Blitz in the 40s. Every day for 15 years the feud brewed and more and more Changretia vampires bought in.

The locals were protected by the Cor Pack; they trusted them, were afraid of them, and benefited from the Bread Factory and the hidden business within. When Lokus Changretia himself finally moved into Camden Town he swindled his way into the hearts of the locals; offering false promises. Turning faith on the Pack that kept them safe for years. Soon the allies turned; but Buster himself was unaware of where the allegiance lied until the end. Betrayed by their close allies the Cor Pack was led into an ambush. 6 lives flat lined.

This was Busters family. They were who he had spent nearly 20 years of his life with. Every day. Tick and thin. Hate and love. They had felt it all. The blood family was long gone; as if it never existed. Left him stranded and never returned. Rancor. Marshall. Phillip. Emmett. Arthur. Ada. That was his family. Rancor. Last Breath 12.24.23 7:15PM.

The leader of the pack. The alpha. The one to turn Keaton when he was a young boy. The two were practically made for each other. Sought each other out; and Rancor offered to change him. Leading the pack into a fight they expected to win he went out as a true commander. Fighting from the front. Throwing himself between the Italian Vamps and the rest of his pack. Buster watched from a warehouse window; hoping for the element of surprise - he watched his Alpha and only true father figure held up against a building with a metal pipe. Teeth clashing against the metal until he took a fatal bite from Lokus Changretia.

Marshall. Last Breath 12.23.23 7:18PM.

If Buster was the Sargent at arms; Marshall was his right hand man. Turned in the same week the two were raised together from young boys to men. The only voice that would calm Buster down. Where Buster was the brawn Marshall was the brains - always able to get them out of trouble if it was looming. As Rancor was being held against the wall it was Marshall who charged from behind a parked car in any effort to surprise the swarming vampires. Held by 6 vampires Marshall was forced to watch as Rancor was murdered. Cries piercing the alley way - finally taken out by all 6 vampires Marshall was left with 6 bites all along his body.

Phillip. Last Breath 12.24.23. 7:25PM.

The found brother. Rancor found Phillip stranded north of London; left for dead. Turned and rejected by his family; Philliip never lost the feral. The packs wild card Phillip was always first to use his fists before his brains. Buster fought with him side by side before they agreed to separate and get higher ground. Buster went left and Philliip went right; he never mad it to the warehouse floor. Over zealous Phillip decided to detour only to be strangled to near death. Nothing but muffled howls heard from the dark corner. Buster knew he was gone when his voice forever went silent in his head. That was three gone.

Emmett. Last Breath 12.24.23. 7:26PM.

The only born wolf to join the pack. Found the life of his family and their ways to not be sufficient enough. He was tired of following the rules of his own father so while on a post graduation trip abroad Emmett deflected and joined the Cor Pack after years of searching for a family he believed in. Buster had left Emmett with the youngest in the pack; fighting in the rear. As the voices started to to fade Emmett knew that was a sign to retreat. Take the young two and run until they couldn't be found. It was all too late. 6 vs. 24 was never a fair fight. At the mouth of the tunnel Buster watched as Emmett, Arthur, and Ada were ripped to shreds by the fangs of a dozen vampires.

Ada & Arthur. Last Breath 12.24.23. 7:26PM.

The Twins. The only two that Buster himself had changed. Both fosters in his final foster home - they had only arrived a few years after he left but he never stopped checking in. There was a moment when Ada started looking battered and bruised and Arthur was rail thin. Buster knew he had to save them - it was an offer just like he was offered. They accepted and have spent the last 12 years with the Cor pack. If there was anyone they wanted to save it was the brother sister pair. Ada the devil and Arthur the maniac. Only two to refer to him as Keaton. Watching their wolves scream under dozens of teeth almost led Buster to surrendering himself.

Buster taking the higher ground was his only saving grace. It is what truly saved him and he knows it. Everyday he relives it. The screams. The howls. The panic in all 6 of their voices as they faded in his mind. The silence was deafening. From a world where he was surrounded by 6 voices all their own; each filling a small void. His family. Wiped out in front of him. Every day is hard. Buster knew he didn't even that courage to say their names out loud. What would he even say. The memories he had no one to share them with. Nobody knew them now. He was the only one. He thought of writing to Emmetts parents to letting them know he was gone - but the weren't his family - he was their family. Swynlake was his safe haven now. This was going to be his new home. Every day was a battle. Everyday it was harder to get up and smile. The memories were there but it hurt him to his core to think of them. It felt wrong to laugh. It felt wrong to smile. It felt wrong to do anything but mourn them. The wolf inside was barely surviving - or at least thats what it felt like. Their pack was gone. The love was gone. Buster knew he was to carry on their legacy but even forming a pack felt wrong. Who was going to follow him if he was still unable to lift his head and howl on his own. The wall was up. It was not coming down. The aggression was ramped up and it was not going to go down. Buster was going to to deal with it time. When the screams don't haunt him. When the business is back running. When the sound of Adas laugh doesn't make him tear up. Until then - his family was gone. Their deaths on replay. The screams a broken record. The silence deafening. Alone. Once again alone.

#self #edits #task #tw: death #the cor pack #The saddest boy Buster #going to count this as my sibling task for buster

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translationandbetrayals · 2 years ago

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Piracy over Crunchyroll: Why Piracy Hasn't Died Yet?

This topic was a hot spot after one of the latest acquisitions of Sony, Crunchyroll and Funimation. As many know, Crunchyroll is a streaming platform managed in the US, Funimation is known for its dubbed content and Sony is a multinational corporation regarded as one of the world's leading businesses in electronics and visual entertainment, which in the recent time, this group corporation holds the whole distribution and dubbing in the west, a matter that has earned the name of anime monopoly.

But it is a bad thing? Well, all the above means that Sony control a sizable percentage of the market, especially since Crunchyroll is also an anime licensee, and with Funimation, it sort of like they basically shifted every part of Funimation under Crunchyroll corporations. Thereby, this union has become one of the few legal ways to watch anime in the West, and since there's less competition in this area it has brought cost increases and plenty of technical issues such as bad quality, lack of available content and web development, mess in the community system, etc. Most of it being caused by the launch of their famous premium content.

Yup, piracy is illegal and morally incorrect, but this kind of acts shows up to these businesses that consumers aren’t foolish. Some users are not going to buy a product that does not satisfy them, and others can’t even afford it at all. Just like that, it generates that many users questioned its decisions regarding legally or illegally ways to watch content; is an easy move to return to (or just never leave) our favorite free sites to enjoy anime but feel guilty about the fact that we aren't supporting the anime indrustry, so then, what happen with the support to anime studios from Sony/Crunchyroll and consumers?

First, remember that Sony is a huge corporation that’s not going to be completely aware about subordinates of one of their sub-acquirements, and second, we barely can know the treatment of this kind of companies to their employees and the idea of what’s the payment that they receive. It goes like this: anime studios just sell the license to Crunchyroll and studios retrieve a percentage of the profits, then Crunchyroll keeps the rest (speaking from a brief an generalized view). However, there's a lot of controversy about the real percentage that anime studios gain:

Atsuko Enomoto, known for roles on Pokemon and Detective Conan, shared in a Twitter space how even as professional working since 1998 that getting paid enough is a struggle. “The fees for animation work are too low," she explained. "Only those who have been performing for a long time and are confident can afford it." When funds were broken down based on Enomoto's explanations of pay, it equaled about 750 yen per hour, which is significantly below Japan's minimum wage of 930 yen per hour.*

Seeing the states of affairs, the best way to support properly the work of your favorite studio, animator or voice actor still is by watching their anime movies when they come out in theater, buying a Blu-ray or getting official merchandise of anime’s you thoroughly enjoyed.

Anyhow, if Crunchyroll want to successfully be engaged to their audience, they must do it through what they truly need, what they really want to see and what is certainly worth paying (even more here in the West, where's a ton of third world countries). Is better for them to open up to the actual people’s requests, because that will closely involve innovation, global accessibility and of course, a more sustainable and enjoyable franchise.

But since yet this is not the case, long live piracy!

By: Brenda Acevedo Z.

#essay

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wack-ashimself · 2 years ago

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I remember when I first learned of monopolies. I was told explicitly they were illegal. Yet I only saw monopolies....

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

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Cloudburst

Enshittification isn’t inevitable: under different conditions and constraints, the old, good internet could have given way to a new, good internet. Enshittification is the result of specific policy choices: encouraging monopolies; enabling high-speed, digital shell games; and blocking interoperability.

First we allowed companies to buy up their competitors. Google is the shining example here: having made one good product (search), they then fielded an essentially unbroken string of in-house flops, but it didn’t matter, because they were able to buy their way to glory: video, mobile, ad-tech, server management, docs, navigation…They’re not Willy Wonka’s idea factory, they’re Rich Uncle Pennybags, making up for their lack of invention by buying out everyone else:

https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/

But this acquisition-fueled growth isn’t unique to tech. Every administration since Reagan (but not Biden! more on this later) has chipped away at antitrust enforcement, so that every sector has undergone an orgy of mergers, from athletic shoes to sea freight, eyeglasses to pro wrestling:

https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2021/07/09/the-importance-of-competition-for-the-american-economy/

But tech is different, because digital is flexible in a way that analog can never be. Tech companies can “twiddle” the back-ends of their clouds to change the rules of the business from moment to moment, in a high-speed shell-game that can make it impossible to know what kind of deal you’re getting:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin

To make things worse, users are banned from twiddling. The thicket of rules we call IP ensure that twiddling is only done against users, never for them. Reverse-engineering, scraping, bots — these can all be blocked with legal threats and suits and even criminal sanctions, even if they’re being done for legitimate purposes:

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

Enhittification isn’t inevitable but if we let companies buy all their competitors, if we let them twiddle us with every hour that God sends, if we make it illegal to twiddle back in self-defense, we will get twiddled to death. When a company can operate without the discipline of competition, nor of privacy law, nor of labor law, nor of fair trading law, with the US government standing by to punish any rival who alters the logic of their service, then enshittification is the utterly foreseeable outcome.

To understand how our technology gets distorted by these policy choices, consider “The Cloud.” Once, “the cloud” was just a white-board glyph, a way to show that some part of a software’s logic would touch some commodified, fungible, interchangeable appendage of the internet. Today, “The Cloud” is a flashing warning sign, the harbinger of enshittification.

When your image-editing tools live on your computer, your files are yours. But once Adobe moves your software to The Cloud, your critical, labor-intensive, unrecreatable images are purely contingent. At at time, without notice, Adobe can twiddle the back end and literally steal the colors out of your own files:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

The finance sector loves The Cloud. Add “The Cloud” to a product and profits (money you get for selling something) can turn into rents (money you get for owning something). Profits can be eroded by competition, but rents are evergreen:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

No wonder The Cloud has seeped into every corner of our lives. Remember your first iPod? Adding music to it was trivial: double click any music file to import it into iTunes, then plug in your iPod and presto, synched! Today, even sophisticated technology users struggle to “side load” files onto their mobile devices. Instead, the mobile duopoly — Apple and Google, who bought their way to mobile glory and have converged on the same rent-seeking business practices, down to the percentages they charge — want you to get your files from The Cloud, via their apps. This isn’t for technological reasons, it’s a business imperative: 30% of every transaction that involves an app gets creamed off by either Apple or Google in pure rents:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell/posts/3788112

And yet, The Cloud is undeniably useful. Having your files synch across multiple devices, including your collaborators’ devices, with built-in tools for resolving conflicting changes, is amazing. Indeed, this feat is the holy grail of networked tools, because it’s how programmers write all the software we use, including software in The Cloud.

If you want to know how good a tool can be, just look at the tools that toolsmiths use. With “source control” — the software programmers use to collaboratively write software — we get a very different vision of how The Cloud could operate. Indeed, modern source control doesn’t use The Cloud at all. Programmers’ workflow doesn’t break if they can’t access the internet, and if the company that provides their source control servers goes away, it’s simplicity itself to move onto another server provider.

This isn’t The Cloud, it’s just “the cloud” — that whiteboard glyph from the days of the old, good internet — freely interchangeable, eminently fungible, disposable and replaceable. For a tool like git, Github is just one possible synchronization point among many, all of which have a workflow whereby programmers’ computers automatically make local copies of all relevant data and periodically lob it back up to one or more servers, resolving conflicting edits through a process that is also largely automated.

There’s a name for this model: it’s called “Local First” computing, which is computing that starts from the presumption that the user and their device is the most important element of the system. Networked servers are dumb pipes and dumb storage, a nice-to-have that fails gracefully when it’s not available.

The data structures of source-code are among the most complicated formats we have; if we can do this for code, we can do it for spreadsheets, word-processing files, slide-decks, even edit-decision-lists for video and audio projects. If local-first computing can work for programmers writing code, it can work for the programs those programmers write.

Local-first computing is experiencing a renaissance. Writing for Wired, Gregory Barber traces the history of the movement, starting with the French computer scientist Marc Shapiro, who helped develop the theory of “Conflict-Free Replicated Data” — a way to synchronize data after multiple people edit it — two decades ago:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-cloud-is-a-prison-can-the-local-first-software-movement-set-us-free/

Shapiro and his co-author Nuno Preguiça envisioned CFRD as the building block of a new generation of P2P collaboration tools that weren’t exactly serverless, but which also didn’t rely on servers as the lynchpin of their operation. They published a technical paper that, while exiting, was largely drowned out by the release of GoogleDocs (based on technology built by a company that Google bought, not something Google made in-house).

Shapiro and Preguiça’s work got fresh interest with the 2019 publication of “Local-First Software: You Own Your Data, in spite of the Cloud,” a viral whitepaper-cum-manifesto from a quartet of computer scientists associated with Cambridge University and Ink and Switch, a self-described “industrial research lab”:

https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/static/local-first.pdf

The paper describes how its authors — Martin Kleppmann, Adam Wiggins, Peter van Hardenberg and Mark McGranaghan — prototyped and tested a bunch of simple local-first collaboration tools built on CFRD algorithms, with the goal of “network optional…seamless collaboration.” The results are impressive, if nascent. Conflicting edits were simpler to resolve than the authors anticipated, and users found URLs to be a good, intuitive way of sharing documents. The biggest hurdles are relatively minor, like managing large amounts of change-data associated with shared files.

Just as importantly, the paper makes the case for why you’d want to switch to local-first computing. The Cloud is not reliable. Companies like Evernote don’t last forever — they can disappear in an eyeblink, and take your data with them:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/9/23789012/evernote-layoff-us-staff-bending-spoons-note-taking-app

Google isn’t likely to disappear any time soon, but Google is a graduate of the Darth Vader MBA program (“I have altered the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further”) and notorious for shuttering its products, even beloved ones like Google Reader:

https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-rss-social

And while the authors don’t mention it, Google is also prone to simply kicking people off all its services, costing them their phone numbers, email addresses, photos, document archives and more:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/22/allopathic-risk/#snitches-get-stitches

There is enormous enthusiasm among developers for local-first application design, which is only natural. After all, companies that use The Cloud go to great lengths to make it just “the cloud,” using containerization to simplify hopping from one cloud provider to another in a bid to stave off lock-in from their cloud providers and the enshittification that inevitably follows.

The nimbleness of containerization acts as a disciplining force on cloud providers when they deal with their business customers: disciplined by the threat of losing money, cloud companies are incentivized to treat those customers better. The companies we deal with as end-users know exactly how bad it gets when a tech company can impose high switching costs on you and then turn the screws until things are almost-but-not-quite so bad that you bolt for the doors. They devote fantastic effort to making sure that never happens to them — and that they can always do that to you.

Interoperability — the ability to leave one service for another — is technology’s secret weapon, the thing that ensures that users can turn The Cloud into “the cloud,” a humble whiteboard glyph that you can erase and redraw whenever it suits you. It’s the greatest hedge we have against enshittification, so small wonder that Big Tech has spent decades using interop to clobber their competitors, and lobbying to make it illegal to use interop against them:

https://locusmag.com/2019/01/cory-doctorow-disruption-for-thee-but-not-for-me/

Getting interop back is a hard slog, but it’s also our best shot at creating a new, good internet that lives up the promise of the old, good internet. In my next book, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (Verso Books, Sept 5), I set out a program fro disenshittifying the internet:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

The book is up for pre-order on Kickstarter now, along with an independent, DRM-free audiobooks (DRM-free media is the content-layer equivalent of containerized services — you can move them into or out of any app you want):

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

Meanwhile, Lina Khan, the FTC and the DoJ Antitrust Division are taking steps to halt the economic side of enshittification, publishing new merger guidelines that will ban the kind of anticompetitive merger that let Big Tech buy its way to glory:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/biden-administration-corporate-merger-antitrust-guidelines/674779/

The internet doesn’t have to be enshittified, and it’s not too late to disenshittify it. Indeed — the same forces that enshittified the internet — monopoly mergers, a privacy and labor free-for-all, prohibitions on user-side twiddling — have enshittified everything from cars to powered wheelchairs. Not only should we fight enshittification — we must.

Back my anti-enshittification Kickstarter here!

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/2023/08/03/there-is-no-cloud/#only-other-peoples-computers

Image: Drahtlos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Motherboard_Intel_386.jpg

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

—

cdsessums (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monsoon_Season_Flagstaff_AZ_clouds_storm.jpg

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

#pluralistic #web3 #darth vader mba #conflict-free replicated data #CRDT #computer science #saas #Mark McGranaghan #Adam Wiggins #evernote #git #local-first computing #the cloud #cloud computing #enshittification #technological self-determination #Martin Kleppmann #Peter van Hardenberg

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mojave-pete · 4 years ago

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COLLUSION

COLLUSION How The Obama Administration Set In Motion Democrats’ Coup Against Trump Rep. Devin Nunes realized the purpose of Obama’s dossier. 'Devin figured out in December what was going on,' says Langer. 'It was an operation to bring down Trump.' By Lee Smith OCTOBER 28, 2019 The following is an excerpt from Lee Smith’s book out October 29, “The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History.”

AFTER DONALD TRUMP was elected forty-fifth president of the United States, the operation designed to undermine his campaign transformed. It became an instrument to bring down the commander in chief. The coup started almost immediately after the polls closed.

Hillary Clinton’s communications team decided within twenty-four hours of her concession speech to message that the election was illegitimate, that Russia had interfered to help Trump.

Obama was working against Trump until the hour he left office. His national security advisor, Susan Rice, commemorated it with an email to herself on January 20, moments before Trump’s inauguration. She wrote to memorialize a meeting in the White House two weeks before.

On January 5, following a briefing by IC leadership on Russian hacking during the 2016 Presidential election, President Obama had a brief follow-on conversation with FBI Director Jim Comey and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates in the Oval Office. Vice President Biden and I were also present.

President Obama began the conversation by stressing his continued commitment to ensuring that every aspect of this issue is handled by the Intelligence and law enforcement communities “by the book.” The President stressed that he is not asking about, initiating or instructing anything from a law enforcement perspective. He reiterated that our law enforcement team needs to proceed as it normally would by the book.

From a national security perspective, however, President Obama said he wants to be sure that, as we engage with the incoming team, we are mindful to ascertain if there is any reason that we cannot share information fully as it relates to Russia. . . .

The President asked Comey to inform him if anything changes in the next few weeks that should affect how we share classified information with the incoming team. Comey said he would.

The repetition of “by the book” gave away the game—for there was nothing normal about any of it.

Rice wrote an email to herself. It commemorated a conversation from two weeks before. The conversation was about the FBI’s investigation of the man who was about to move into the White House—an investigation from which Obama was careful to distance himself. During the conversation, the outgoing president instructed his top aides to collect information (“ascertain”) regarding the incoming administration’s relationship with Russia.

“To any rational person,” says Nunes, “it looks like they were scheming to produce a get-out-of-jail-free card—for the president and anyone else in the White House. They were playing Monopoly while the others were playing with fire. Now the Obama White House was in the clear—sure, they had no idea what Comey and Brennan and McCabe and Strzok and the rest were up to.”

Boxing Trump in on Russia Meanwhile, Obama added his voice to the Trump-Russia echo chamber as news stories alleging Trump’s illicit relationship with the Kremlin multiplied in the transition period. He said he hoped “that the president-elect also is willing to stand up to Russia.”

The outgoing president was in Germany with Chancellor Angela Merkel to discuss everything from NATO to Vladimir Putin. Obama said that he’d “delivered a clear and forceful message” to the Russian president about “meddling with elections . . . and we will respond appropriately if and when we see this happening.”

After refusing to act while the Russian election meddling was actually occurring, Obama responded in December. He ordered the closing of Russian diplomatic facilities and the expulsion of thirty- five Russian diplomats. The response was tepid. The Russians had hacked the State Department in 2014 and the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 2015. And now Obama was responding only on his way out.

Even Obama partisans thought it was weak. “The punishment did not fit the crime,” said Michael McFaul, Obama’s former ambassador to Russia. “The Kremlin should have paid a much higher price for that attack.”

But the administration wasn’t retaliating against Russia for interfering in a US election; the action was directed at Trump. Obama was leaving the president-elect with a minor foreign policy crisis in order to box him in. Any criticism of Obama’s response, never mind an attempt to reverse it, would only further fuel press reports that Trump was collaborating with the Russians.

Spreading Intelligence to Spring Leaks In the administration’s last days, it disseminated intelligence throughout the government, including the White House, Capitol Hill, and the intelligence community (IC). Intelligence was classified at the lowest possible levels to ensure a wide readership. The White House was paving the way for a campaign of leaks to disorient the incoming Trump team.

The effort, including the intended result of leaks, was publicly acknowledged in March 2017 by Evelyn Farkas, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Obama administration.

Obama’s biggest move against Trump was to order CIA director John Brennan to conduct a full review of all intelligence relating to Russia and the 2016 elections. He requested it on December 6 and wanted it ready by the time he left office on January 20. But the sitting president already knew what the intelligence community assessment (ICA) was going to say, because Brennan had told him months before.

Brennan’s handpicked team of CIA, FBI, and NSA analysts had started analyzing Russian election interference in late July. In August, Brennan had briefed Harry Reid on the dossier and may have briefed Obama on it, too. Earlier in August, Brennan sent a “bombshell” report to Obama’s desk.

When Brennan reassembled his select team in December, it was to have them reproduce their August findings: Putin, according to Brennan, was boosting the GOP candidate. And that’s why only three days after Obama ordered the assessment in December, the Washington Post could already reveal what the intelligence community had found.

“The CIA,” reported the December 9 edition of the Post, “has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system.”

The story was the first of many apparently sourced to leaks of classified information that were given to the Post team of Adam Entous, Ellen Nakashima, and Greg Miller. The reporters’ sources weren’t whistle-blowers shedding light on government corruption— rather, they were senior US officials abusing government resources to prosecute a campaign against the newly elected commander in chief. The article was the earliest public evidence that the coup was under way. The floodgates were open, as the IC pushed more stories through the press to delegitimize the president-elect.

A Wave of Leak-Sourced Stories All Saying the Same Thing The same day, a New York Times article by David E. Sanger and Scott Shane echoed the Post’s piece. According to senior administration officials, “American intelligence agencies have concluded with ‘high confidence’ that Russia acted covertly in the latter stages of the presidential campaign to harm Hillary Clinton’s chances and promote Donald J. Trump.”

A December 14 NBC News story by William M. Arkin, Ken Dilanian, and Cynthia McFadden reported that “Russian President Vladimir Putin became personally involved in the covert Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.”

The ICA that Obama ordered gave political operatives, the press, and his intelligence chiefs a second shot at Trump. They’d used the Steele Dossier to feed the echo chamber and obtain surveillance powers to spy on the Trump campaign. The dossier, however, had come up short. Trump had won.

But now, on his way out of the White House, Obama instructed Brennan to stamp the CIA’s imprimatur on the anti-Trump operation. As Fusion GPS’s smear campaign had been the source of the preelection press campaign, the ICA was the basis of the postelection media frenzy. It was tailored to disrupt the peaceful transition of power and throw the United States into chaos.

Because Trump hadn’t been elected by the US public, according to the ICA, but had been tapped by Putin, he was illegitimate. Therefore, the extraconstitutional and illegal tactics employed by anti-Trump officials were legitimate. The ultimate goal was to remove Trump from office.

“If it weren’t for President Obama,” said James Clapper, “we might not have done the intelligence community assessment . . . that set off a whole sequence of events which are still unfolding today.”

Nunes agrees. “The ICA,” he says, “was Obama’s dossier.”

Changing the Intelligence Assessment Nunes is sitting in his office in the Longworth House Office Building along with his communications director, Jack Langer, a forty-six-year-old former book editor and historian with a PhD from Duke University.

“The social media attacks on Devin began shortly after the election,” Langer remembers. “They’re all hinting at some vast conspiracy involving Russia that the chairman of the Intelligence Committee is part of. And we have no idea what they’re talking about.”

Nunes points out that his warnings about Russia fell on deaf ears for years. “And all of a sudden I’m a Russian agent,” says the congressman.

Now Langer and Nunes see that the attacks were first launched because the congressman had been named to Trump’s transition team. “I put forward [Mike] Pompeo for CIA director,” says Nunes. “He came from our committee.”

The attacks on Nunes picked up after the December 9 Washington Post article. The assessment provided there was not what the HPSCI chairman had been told. The assessment had been altered, and Nunes asked for an explanation. “We got briefed about the election around Thanksgiving,” he says. “And it’s just the usual stuff, nothing abnormal. They told us what everyone already knew: ‘Hey, the Russians are bad actors, and they’re always playing games, and here’s what they did.’”

By providing that briefing, the IC had made a mistake. When it later changed the assessment, the November briefing was evidence that Obama’s spy chiefs were up to no good. “I bet they’d like to have that back,” says Nunes. “They briefed us before they could get their new story straight.��

‘They Kept Everyone Else Away from It’ Nunes acknowledges that he was caught off guard by many things back then. “We still thought these guys were on the up and up,” he says. “But if we knew, we’d have nailed them by mid-December, when they changed their assessment. ‘Wait, you guys are saying this now, but you said something else just a few weeks ago. What’s going on?’”

After the Post story, Nunes wanted an explanation. “We expressed deep concern, both publicly and privately,” says Langer. “We demanded our own briefing to try to determine whether that Post story was true or false. They refused to brief us. They said, ‘We’re not going to be doing that until we finish the ICA.’”

Nunes says the fact that the IC conducted an assessment like that was itself unusual. “I don’t know how many times they’d done that in the past, if ever,” he says. “But if the IC is operating properly, when someone says what can you tell me on X or Y or Z, they have it ready to pull up quickly. The tradecraft is reliable, and the intelligence products are reliable.” That was not the case with the ICA. There were problems with how the assessment had been put together.

“If you really were going to do something like an assessment from the intelligence community, then you’d get input from all our seventeen agencies,” says Nunes. “They did the opposite. It was only FBI, CIA, NSA, and DNI. They siloed it, just like they had with Crossfire Hurricane. They kept everyone else away from it so they didn’t have to read them in.”

‘Manipulation of Intelligence for Political Purposes’ Nunes released several statements in the middle of December. The HPSCI majority, read a December 14 statement, wanted senior Obama intelligence officials “to clarify press reports that the CIA has a new assessment that it has not shared with us. The Committee is deeply concerned that intransigence in sharing intelligence with Congress can enable the manipulation of intelligence for political purposes.”

After the statements warned of political foul play in the IC’s assessments, the social media attacks on Nunes became more regular. “They were constant,” says Langer.

Anti-Trump operatives recognized that Nunes was going to be a problem. The HPSCI chair had previously called out the IC for politicizing intelligence. “They said that we had defeated Al Qaeda in Iraq and Syria,” says Nunes, “and I knew that wasn’t true. Then they withheld the Osama bin Laden documents to conceal that Al Qaeda worked with Iran, because the administration was protecting the Iran deal. So when I saw them changing this assessment of the 2016 election in midstream, I knew it was the same old trick: they were politicizing intelligence.”

The speed with which Brennan’s handpicked analysts produced the ICA and then got a version of it declassified for public consumption was another sign that something wasn’t right. “All throughout Obama’s two terms, his IC chiefs aren’t paying attention to Russian actions,” says Nunes. “We give them more money for Russia, which they don’t use. But now they know so much about Putin that they manage to produce a comprehensive assessment of Russian intentions and actions regarding election interference in a month—at Christmastime, when everything slows down. And then they produce a declassified version in a manner of weeks. None of this is believable.”

Three different versions of the ICA were produced: an unclassified version, a top secret one, and another highly compartmentalized version. According to a January 11, 2017, Washington Post story by Greg Miller, Ellen Nakashima, and Karen DeYoung, an annex summarizing the dossier was attached to the versions that were not declassified.

‘Designed to Have a Political Effect’ The FBI had been working from Steele’s reports for more than half a year. Including the dossier along with the ICA would provide Comey with ammunition to take on the president-elect. Both he and Brennan were manipulating intelligence for political purposes.

“A lot of the ICA is reasonable,” says Nunes. “But those parts become irrelevant due to the problematic parts, which undermine the entire document. It was designed to have a political effect; that was the ICA’s sole purpose.”

The assessment’s methodological flaws are not difficult to spot. Manufacturing the politicized findings that Obama sought meant not only abandoning protocol but also subverting basic logic. Two of the ICA’s central findings are that:

Putin and the Russian government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. Putin and the Russian government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her unfavorably to him. To know preferences and intentions would require sources targeting Putin’s inner circles—either human sources or electronic surveillance. As Nunes had previously noted, however, US intelligence on Putin’s decision-making process was inadequate.

But even if there had been extensive collection on precisely that issue, it would be difficult to know what was true. For instance, the closest you can get to Putin’s inner circle is Putin himself. But even capturing him on an intercept saying he wanted to elect Trump might prove inconclusive. It is difficult to judge intentions because it is not possible to see into the minds of other people. How would you know that Putin was speaking truthfully? How would you know that the Russian president didn’t know his communications were under US surveillance and wasn’t trying to deceive his audience?

Quality control of information is one of the tasks of counterintelligence—to discern how you know what you know and whether that information is trustworthy. There was no quality control for the Trump-Russia intelligence. For instance, Crossfire Hurricane lead agent Peter Strzok was the FBI’s deputy assistant director of counterintelligence. Instead of weeding out flawed intelligence on Russia, the Crossfire Hurricane team was feeding Steele’s reports into intelligence products. Yet the ICA claimed to have “high confidence” in its assessment that “Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President- elect Trump.” What was the basis of that judgment?

According to the ICA:

Putin most likely wanted to discredit Secretary Clinton because he has publicly blamed her since 2011 for inciting mass protests against his regime in late 2011 and early 2012, and because he holds a grudge for comments he almost certainly saw as disparaging him.

“Most likely” and “almost certainly” are rhetorical hedges that show the assessment could not have been made in “high confidence.” Putin may have held a grudge against Clinton, but there is no way of knowing it.

The supporting evidence deteriorates more the farther the ICA purports to reach into Putin’s mind.

Beginning in June, Putin’s public comments about the US presidential race avoided directly praising President-elect Trump, probably because Kremlin officials thought that any praise from Putin personally would backfire in the United States.

This is absurd. Part of the evidence that Putin supported Trump is that he avoided praising Trump. It is difficult enough to determine intentions by what someone says. Yet the ICA claims to have discerned Putin’s intentions by what he did not say.

There is no introductory philosophy class in logic where reasoning like that would pass muster. Yet Brennan’s handpicked group used it as the basis of its assessment that Putin had helped Trump.

Moscow also saw the election of President-elect Trump as a way to achieve an international counterterrorism coalition against the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.

This may be an accurate description of how Putin saw Trump. But Trump’s predecessor also wanted to coordinate anti- ISIS operations with Moscow. On this view, Trump would have represented a continuation of Obama’s ISIS policy. Why would this make Trump’s victory suspicious to Obama’s intelligence chiefs?

Curious Inaccuracies about Russia’s RT Network The ICA also pointed to documentary evidence of Putin’s intentions: English-language media owned by the Russian government, the news site Sputnik, and the RT network, were critical of Clinton.

State-owned Russian media made increasingly favorable comments about President-elect Trump as the 2016 US general and primary election campaigns progressed while consistently offering negative coverage of Secretary Clinton.

Curiously, just days before the election, the informant the US government sent after the Trump campaign praised the Democratic candidate in an interview with Sputnik. “Clinton would be best for US-UK relations and for relations with the European Union,” Stefan Halper told the Kremlin-directed media outlet. “Clinton is well-known, deeply experienced, and predictable. US-UK relations will remain steady regardless of the winner although Clinton will be less disruptive over time.”

The ICA includes a seven-page appendix devoted to RT, the central node, according to the document, of the Kremlin’s effort to “influence politics, fuel discontent in [sic] US.”

Adam Schiff appeared on RT in July 2013. He argued for “making the FISA court much more transparent, so the American people can understand what’s being done in their name in the name of national security, so that we can have a more informed debate over the balance between privacy and security.”

RT’s editor in chief, Margarita Simonyan, is a master propagandist, according to the ICA. The document fails to mention that Simonyan heads another Moscow-owned media initiative, Russia Beyond the Headlines, a news supplement inserted into dozens of the West’s leading newspapers, including the New York Times. Russia Beyond the Headlines has been delivered to millions of American homes over the last decade. By contrast, RT’s US market share is so small that it doesn’t qualify for the Nielsen ratings. Virtually no one in the United States watches it.

Taking the logic of Brennan’s handpicked team seriously would mean that the publishers of the New York Times played a major role in a coordinated Russian effort to elect Donald Trump.

‘It Was an Operation to Bring Down Trump’ Nunes realized even then the purpose of Obama’s dossier. “Devin figured out in December what was going on,” says Langer. “It was an operation to bring down Trump.”

There was no evidence that any Trump associate had done anything improper regarding the Russians, and Nunes was losing patience. “We had serious things the committee wanted to do,” he says. “With Trump elected, we could do some big stuff, like with China.”

Still, it was important for HPSCI to maintain control of the Russia investigation. Otherwise, Democrats and Never Trump Republicans were likely to get their wish to convene a bipartisan commission to investigate Russian interference—with the purpose of turning it on Trump.

“Before they started floating the idea of a special counsel, the big idea was a special commission like the 9/11 Commission,” says Langer. It was outgoing secretary of state John Kerry who first came forward with the proposal.

The point was to change the power dynamic. “In a normal committee,” says Langer, “the majority has the power, and that happened to be us. They wanted to strip our power and make it fifty-fifty.”

“Bipartisan” was a euphemism for “anti-Trump.” “It would have been a complete joke,” says Nunes. “A combination of partisan hacks from the left and people who hated Trump on the right.”

Democrats led by Schiff and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer were joined by the late John McCain, the most active of the Never Trump Republicans. After the election, the Arizona senator had instructed his aide David Kramer to deliver a copy of the Steele Dossier to Comey.

“God only knows who they’d have populated that committee with,” says Nunes. “Anyone they could control. It would have been a freak show.”

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan defended HPSCI’s independence. On the Senate side, Intelligence Committee chairman Richard Burr had only one move. To deflect demands for an independent commission, he effectively ceded control of the Senate investigation to his vice chair, Democrat Mark Warner.

No Evidence of Collusion Years Later Still, Nunes believed that all the talk of Trump and Russia was a waste of time. “They kept promising us evidence of collusion, week after week, and they came up with nothing.”

Nunes’s disdain for the ICA forced the Crossfire Hurricane team’s hand. “Right around the time that they came out with the ICA, they kept saying that we were waiting on something to show us, something important that was coming in,” he says. “They said it was some significant figure who they couldn’t quite track down yet.”

But the FBI knew exactly where its missing link was, the piece of evidence that they thought would convince hardened skeptics like Nunes that collusion was real. They didn’t have to chase him down, because he was sitting at home in Chicago. He submitted to a voluntary interview January 27 and without a lawyer because he had no idea what the FBI had in store for him.

The Crossfire Hurricane team was figuring how they were going to set up the Trump adviser they’d used to open up the investigation in July 2016: George Papadopoulos.

Lee Smith is the media columnist at Tablet. Photo White House / public domain

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fipindustries · 8 months ago

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i think for as many examples of goodwill and cooperation "working" that we can find both in nature and human history we can find as many examples of conquest and extermination, i think we can hardly point out at the last 300 years where, for example, slavery has been made illegal (only in certain countries (and even then those countries have a nasty tendency to replace with subtler forms of slavery)), and brush under a rug the previous 50.000 years were slavery was more or less the norm. international cooperation is also a fairly novel thing when put in the context of the whole of human history. rome as an empire lasted around a thousand years based on conquest and slavery. furthermore, even in modern days, the fact that is necesary a goberment holding the monopoly on violence to keep a civilization, well, civilized speaks to the fact that we cant *just* rely on our better angels. and to see how humans interact when there is not a larger organizer body that can keep bad actors in check we need only to see at the actions of russia, of israel, of china, of the united states of america on the global stage. again, im not saying the human animal is a bloodthirsty beast and that cooperation is impossible. but conflict and violence does seem to be something tremendously hard the erradicate entirely from our civilization and our behavior. but this all speaks only about human nature, fair enough. lets look at other species.

there sure seems to be a lot of killed or be killed in nature in order to survive. and again, fair enough, that doesnt paint THE WHOLE picture, there is lots of cohabitation and symbiosis in nature, but there is also a lot of predation, of living on calorie margins, of parasitism, etc. and any current "harmony" we see is merely the equilibrium reached after aeons of evolution, of survival of the fittest, after any other option been erradicated through consumtion or starvation. and furthermore, what usually happens when we see a radically new species introduced in a new enviroment or ecosystem that is not theirs usually two things happen either the species dies off or they tend to completly overtake the enviroment they are placed in. this happens not only with animals but also with fungi and with plants. there is a reason botanists get so frustrated with invasive species like kudzu.

if i am allowed to extrapolate from the examples provided by living creatures on the planet earth, it seems to be the case that when two entities, wether they are species, civilizations, tribes or individuals, are in conflict, when they both want something that the other wants and there are no easy ways for both to have it, unless there is a really good reason for one entity to care about the needs of the other as much or more than their own, conflict will happen. and these reasons to care shouldnt be taken for granted. the default is "this other entity is an obstacle to overcome". empathy, compromise, cooperation and solidarity seem to arise when a whole other host of conditions are met, they dont come garanteed with inteligence or power or strength. i need to emphazise this, kindness and cooperation are not a grantee, not something that can be relied upon. is not something assured by nature in the same way conflict is. batteries are not included. it comes separatly, at a cost. its something that could be the case but not necesarily so.

and the more different both entities are from each other (and the bigger the power differential) it seems to be the case that it becomes harder and harder and harder for one to care about the other.

ultimatly is not a certainty, is just a posibility, a probability coupled with terrible enough consequences if proven right that even if the possibility is small it should be taken very seriously. its a pascal's wager.

remember, its not just a forest, its a *dark* forest. not dark in terms of evil but dark in terms of unknown. when dealing with the unknown i think its reasonable to "walk softly, but carry a big stick"

The Netflix adaptation of 3 Body Problem is pretty good, but it's reminding me of all the things that managed to rub me wrong about the original text.

Some of those objections were superficial, but at some point I need to sit down and definitively go after the Dark Forest Hypothesis in a substantive way. The construction is taken rather seriously in some quarters, by people that I respect, but my understanding of how reality works gives me such a different answer with such insistence! I think I would benefit greatly from actually tracing what my brain is doing on this one from beginning to end, actually going to the effort of rendering it all in language so I can check my work or let other people offer critique.

Finding a way to do it in less than 20,000 words, might be more of a trick...

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tmntgirlie · 4 years ago

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TMNT Universe!Reader x Turtles 4

A giant rat. Four mutated turtles. These were now your roommates. Did I mention your living quarters were inside a sewer?

You always wondered how nobody ever found them by accident. Surely, there were teams of employees that worked in the sewers. If there was anything that seemed fishy or out of place, they’d be called to investigate. Right?

To be honest, it was kind of amazing. They lived underneath people that would possibly never even know they existed. They fought crime in the shadows, protecting people that would never know their names.

Except April. Casey. That Falcon guy, what was his name again? And those police officers you remembered from the 2016 movie. They all knew, but that was it. That was a very small friends list. It was smaller than your own, which was really saying something.

No wonder they were so out of touch with socialization. And socializing.

“What time is it?” you asked, finally breaking the pregnant silence that ensued after your prolonged questioning.

“Almost two in the afternoon,” Donatello answered immediately.

You hummed quietly to yourself. “What do you guys usually do all day?”

“Depends, dudette,” Michelangelo said with a sly smile. “Depends on our company.” After a firm wack from his red-banded brother, he forced a laugh. “We eat, train, play video games. Like anybody else.”

You started to reconsider your promise to not get a job or anything up top. This was a dream situation, really, but was that really it?

These boys needed some spice in their lives.

“How old are you guys now?” you asked.

“Twenty-ish,” the blue-banded leader said. “We don’t really have birthdays, but we know we’re all at least twenty.”

“You don’t have birthdays?” Your expression changed from surprise to pure sadness. “I can’t imagine not having a birthday. You don’t know your star signs, your daily horoscopes, when the right day is to finally have your first drink- legally, anyway-, that kind of sucks.”

“It’s not like we can throw a party anyway,” Raphael said. “It would be like any other day in the sewers.”

Well, they weren’t wrong. If your calculations were correct, and you were pretty sure they were, this was 2020 in their time as well. You thought that in the 2014 movie they had been around 15, and around 17 in the 2016 movie. It made sense they were around 20 or 21 by now. Meaning it was only about five or so years since they met April and the Falcon guy, and three or four years since they met Casey Jones.

(If the turtles weren’t an option, you’d definitely go for Casey. He just had this way about him. It was too bad you figured he was well along with April by this point.)

“That only tells me that we have years to make up in parties,” you said with a grin. “Around twenty to be exact. Besides, parties don’t have to have fifty people. I’d much rather prefer a party with less than ten people that I’m close to. It’s too much otherwise.”

In less than ten minutes, you found yourself planning a party for four mutant turtles that didn’t even exist in your universe. Sure, they weren’t teenagers anymore, but they were close enough to probably enjoy some high school party games. Spin the bottle, truth or dare, two truths and a lie, House Party- they were probably too old to play musical chairs, right?

You weren’t even sure if alcohol was on the table or not.

You liked video games as much as the next person, but there was something more genuine about playing games without electronics. Maybe it was just you being nostalgic. Monopoly on the Nintendo Switch just didn’t have the same dramatic effect as playing it at the dinner table, with the banker not really keeping great track of the money.

The game of Life probably wouldn’t be a great idea. Would they be able to even hold the tiny people pegs?

This party could just consist of you, the four boys, and Splinter- but on second thought, you weren’t sure how he would react to a jolly game of spin the bottle. You’d have to get in contact with Casey, April, and maybe even that other dude. What the heck was his name?

“Hey, Donnie,” you called, leaning over the notepad you had been writing on. “What’s the dude’s name that took credit for that whole thing that happened with Sacks and the mutagen?”

He seemed a bit taken aback by the question. “Vernon. Why, what do you need with him?”

“I might be adding him to the guest list,” you said slowly, trying to judge his face for his reaction. It seemed positive enough. “Might make things a little more interesting.”

“Are you really planning us a party?” Michelangelo asked as he plopped down next to you on the couch.

You quickly hid the list at your side. “Maybe. I’m not really a planner per se, but you guys deserve something like this.”

“You’ve known us for less than a day,” he said with a lilt in his voice. He frowned. “How do you know what we deserve?”

“If everything I know about you guys is true, you deserve at the very least a celebration of your existence,” you said matter-of-factly. “Since I don’t know your birthdays. I think it’ll be fun.”

“That’s so nice!”

“Reading stuff about you guys brought me out of funks many times in my life, it’s only right that I do something for you, too.” You just smiled. It was still such a surreal situation. Were you really going to throw a party for these turtles? And invite April, Casey, and Vern?

“As long as it’s alright with you,” you said quickly. “I am just a guest right now- an unwelcome guest at that.”

“Nah, don’t even think that! We’ve dealt with way weirder stuff. It’s nothing having you here. If you’re looking for permission, I’d probably talk to Leonardo or Master Splinter. Probably Leo more, though.”

It wasn’t like this was some illegal drug-infused party. Why did you feel so nervous to ask the blue-banded leader for permission?

#tmnt #tmnt 2k14 #tmnt 2k16 #tmnt raph #tmnt leo #tmnt donnie #tmnt mikey #tmnt universe reader #tmnt reader #tmnt x reader #tmnt imagines #bayverse tmnt #tmnt party

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lettrespromises · 4 years ago

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> LettresPromises informs you : You have one notification.

> Letter object : The tamer of the flamboyant flames of passion.

> Todoroki Shouto sent you a letter, would you like to read it?

@mangosnakesandpeaches sent a letter : ❝heyo! its aydudenoway, just moved to my writing account! request number 1/3 : okay okay, so ya know how people always tend to write like, dom shouto and sub reader? what about dom reader and sub shouto. like, damn as much as i like dom shouto, kinda want to see some dom reader nglll. could this be a drabble/imagine and not too too graphic NSFW? i hope this is okay! ahhh okay okay so idk if you started writing my request (dom reader) or not, but could i add onto it real quick? breathless Shouto is all im saying. im so sorryyy for this being so sudden! if you can't add it, thats okay!❞

author’s letter : ❝dear @mangosnakesandpeaches, thank you once more for trusting me with your ideas and letting me express through words the love i have for this man and this man only!! hot take but i do kind of feel you.... like.... shouto is low-key a sub to me (aside from pegging ofc.) anywhoopsies!!! i hope you’ll like this and i tried not to make it nsfw which was a bit confusing but?? nonetheless, i hope you’ll enjoy this promised letter.❞

Genre : Erotic but not explicit smut, fluff. (Please consider that the characters are aged up.) Warnings : Cursing, foreplay, innuendos, sexual deeds. Word count : 1.6K.

After personally handing crushing losses to many villains throughout the entire week, admiring the hint of a shy smile adorning the face of civilians torn by fear as a gleam of hope while they’re being saved, secretly glancing at the newfound scars worn as medals on the abused flesh of your skin when no one is looking, any hero would be mentally and physically drained, as if your body was just the host of vacuity. And rightfully so.

Thus came the ever so needed tradition of self-care with Shouto, this renaissance of an evening was held every Friday night ever since you both graduated from U.A. No word was needed, the sole acknowledged information of today’s date was enough for the both of you to understand that today had your name as a synonymous of self-care written all over it.

This context explains why you found yourself enveloped in Shouto’s embrace, a physical testimony of just how much he loved and cherished your presence, if you will. These oh so special Friday nights also drew a contrast with your everyday life as heroes, it was also the perfect opportunity to say (or paradoxically declare in a silent manner) just how much your presence was needed to one another as the cons of being a pro-hero weighed on your mind like the sword of Damocles. To put it more harshly, the inevitable curse of never knowing if the day you were bound to spend together would be the last represented said cons.

His arms found shelter on the area above your hipbones, and every time he would let his genetically given large palms roam on this area, he would always wonder if said area had been carved to fit perfectly the form of his hands— Shouto liked to think that perhaps this was yet another sign that you were meant to be, he always tried to find poetic parallels everywhere.

His thumbs were brushing invisible shapes on the flesh of your hips left bare by the intervention of Shouto’s hands, these brushes were anything but calculated, yes, they did respect a certain common pattern— but each time they felt similar, they always felt new at once. The semi-random nature of his gestures were the living proof that the documentary being played on the TV was semi-interesting as well.

You, on the other one hand, were sheltered in Shouto’s warm and welcoming embrace, your head fit right in the crook of his neck, and as per usual, Todoroki found yet again another poetic parallel drawn by your jointed souls. Nonetheless, if Shouto’s stare was focused on the succession of bright lights radiating off of the TV, yours was laying on the personification of your source of happiness— your boyfriend himself. After all, wasn’t staring at him way more interesting than some documentary being played? Nothing could compare to some well-deserved ‘staring at Shouto session’, but said sessions came with the slight danger of being caught, oh well…

« Love, I believe you’re doing it again. » Shouto blurted out which made you unconsciously flinch in response.

« Doing what exactly, mhm? » Oh, the fake tone of innocence could have been heard from miles away, and it sure as hell didn’t go unknown under Shouto’s radar.

« You know what I’m hinting at— staring. » But this time, it was his turn to stare at you, it was a mutual game now.

« You’re saying that as if staring at you was illegal, I mean, looking this hot should totally be considered illegal. » Shouto’s blood rushed under your newly left comment, causing his cheeks to adopt a rosy tone.

« Y/N, I’m a pro-hero, I’m not quite sure I can be considered as a villain… Is looking a certain way truly illegal? Should I change something about my appearance? » His heterochromatic eyes found yours, and a certain desire for reassurance chimed in the way.

« Shouto, baby— of course not! You’re perfect the way you are, I was only messing around, you know? » His desire for reassurance fades away and instead, you are met with a gleam of content as you continue :

« What I meant to say was… You’re so handsome, so out of this world… » Each word leaving your lips and connecting to his eardrums was accompanied with the fitting gestures to emphasize just a bit more the comforting undertone of your speech. It all began with a swift shift of position— you were now sitting on Shouto’s lap, a crucial position which guaranteed you the upper hand of physical exchanges.

« You’re divine, Shouto… » The longer your eyes met his, the more you were secretly convinced that he was indeed out of this world, thus, you underlined this statement by tracing an invisible line from the corner of his lips to his jawline under his intrigued facial expression. An intrigued expression, perhaps, but he was begging to hear more.

« You’re have all the qualities one could dream of, don’t you? » This rhetorical question was signed with the manifestation of the presence of your lips upon the flesh of his neck, Shouto let out a gasp he ignored he was holding and tilted his head to give you more room to play with as an answer, longing for the next lines of your tirade. Instead, the soft pressures left by the pecks were replaced with biting motions, and interchanged with sucking motions at times. This newfound balance of pleasure on Shouto’s newly bruised skin was the cause of a chain reaction— first, his lips parted as if he was gasping for oxygen, he didn’t need it, it was more like a precautious deed than a clear remedy to something he needed; then, his lids closed shut, in anticipation of the bliss which was bound to course every inch of his body; eventually, a deadly sin named gluttony got the best of him and encouraged him to let his palms wander on your derrière. A bold action quickly reprimanded by a quick slapping motions on the back of his hands.

« No touching, got it? Keep your hands to yourself and maybe, just maybe I’ll reward you. » A sentence so embedded with delicious sin which became amplified under the spell of your whispers, right against the shell of his ears. There was no vocal response on his end, only a line of chills from the back of his neck to the bottom of his spine, sure, it wasn’t vocal, but it was such a sweet way to respond to the temptation.

This comment would be stating the obvious but you had the monopoly of the game, you controlled the fate of the protagonists and bent the rules your way— some would call it cheating, you’d call it having the world at your feet. An adventurous hand traveled underneath the fabric of Shouto’s shirt and, on its journey, felt the various kinds of reliefs sculpted on his body. The rock hard sensation of his abdomen against the soft flesh of your palm was one of the sweetest contrasts. Your hand followed a vertical path— first, a journey near his pectoral muscles, and a tragic fall to his growing bulge right beneath you, you couldn’t help but bow your lips into a grin which echoed to a thousand of hidden desires and beyond while Todoroki looked at you with pleading eyes.

« Aren’t you such a good boy to me? You did as I said, baby, keep going for me, yeah? » Shouto knew that the way you would pronounce each individual word was a hint to what was bound to happen, and the precise manner you moaned « good boy » near his eardrum was just a mere indicator amongst a myriad of them that you would not give up on your iron hold any time soon. Your lips eventually met his once more in a heated exchange, the advantage of the height played in your favor to assert dominance and set the done of the secret ballet between your tongues. Meanwhile, your palm was dangerously stroking the oh so growing bulge in Shouto’s underwear— and when your tongue would twist in a clockwise direction, your hand would do the opposite and vice-versa.

Shouto could feel you through all his senses— and although his lids were shut closed, this couldn’t prevent him from picturing your frame towering over him, he would always remember everything about you, even the most trivial details anyway. The gluttony in him cursed at him and screamed to touch you, but he knew better than to fall under the spell of his temptations. If he couldn’t manifest his pleasure physically, he could still do it orally— and thus a silent melody resonated in your mouth at the contact of your tongue with his. Said melody ended in the crescendo of the volume of his uneven breaths after breaking your kiss due to the lack of oxygen.

His cheeks were crimson red, his mouth was set agape to let fresh air fill his lungs again, his eyes echoed nothing but an irresistible paradox of pleading and will to continue further, his head felt dizzy under your sweet toxins which had just penetrated his mind… He was so addicted to you.

You let a smirk grow on your face in response to the aftermath of your antics, knowing very well that this was just a way to foreshadow what was bound to happen : « You’ve been so good to me, pretty boy, so, so good. Guess who’s going to have his reward now, baby? »

He knew he was going to get his reward, but at what cost?

#shouto x reader #todoroki shouto x reader #todoroki x reader #shoto todoroki x reader #shoto x reader #mha x reader #bnha x reader #shouto todoroki #todoroki

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