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nasa · 1 year ago

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NASA Inspires Your Crafty Creations for World Embroidery Day

It’s amazing what you can do with a little needle and thread! For #WorldEmbroideryDay, we asked what NASA imagery inspired you. You responded with a variety of embroidered creations, highlighting our different areas of study.

Here’s what we found:

Webb’s Carina Nebula

Wendy Edwards, a project coordinator with Earth Science Data Systems at NASA, created this embroidered piece inspired by Webb’s Carina Nebula image. Captured in infrared light, this image revealed for the first time previously invisible areas of star birth. Credit: Wendy Edwards, NASA. Pattern credit: Clare Bray, Climbing Goat Designs

Wendy Edwards, a project coordinator with Earth Science Data Systems at NASA, first learned cross stitch in middle school where she had to pick rotating electives and cross stitch/embroidery was one of the options. “When I look up to the stars and think about how incredibly, incomprehensibly big it is out there in the universe, I’m reminded that the universe isn’t ‘out there’ at all. We’re in it,” she said. Her latest piece focused on Webb’s image release of the Carina Nebula. The image showcased the telescope’s ability to peer through cosmic dust, shedding new light on how stars form.

Ocean Color Imagery: Exploring the North Caspian Sea

Danielle Currie of Satellite Stitches created a piece inspired by the Caspian Sea, taken by NASA’s ocean color satellites. Credit: Danielle Currie/Satellite Stitches

Danielle Currie is an environmental professional who resides in New Brunswick, Canada. She began embroidering at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic as a hobby to take her mind off the stress of the unknown. Danielle’s piece is titled “46.69, 50.43,” named after the coordinates of the area of the northern Caspian Sea captured by LandSat8 in 2019.

An image of the Caspian Sea captured by Landsat 8 in 2019. Credit: NASA

Two Hubble Images of the Pillars of Creation, 1995 and 2015

Melissa Cole of Star Stuff Stitching created an embroidery piece based on the Hubble image Pillars of Creation released in 1995. Credit: Melissa Cole, Star Stuff Stitching

Melissa Cole is an award-winning fiber artist from Philadelphia, PA, USA, inspired by the beauty and vastness of the universe. They began creating their own cross stitch patterns at 14, while living with their grandparents in rural Michigan, using colored pencils and graph paper. The Pillars of Creation (Eagle Nebula, M16), released by the Hubble Telescope in 1995 when Melissa was just 11 years old, captured the imagination of a young person in a rural, religious setting, with limited access to science education.

Lauren Wright Vartanian of the shop Neurons and Nebulas created this piece inspired by the Hubble Space Telescope’s 2015 25th anniversary re-capture of the Pillars of Creation. Credit: Lauren Wright Vartanian, Neurons and Nebulas

Lauren Wright Vartanian of Guelph, Ontario Canada considers herself a huge space nerd. She’s a multidisciplinary artist who took up hand sewing after the birth of her daughter. She’s currently working on the illustrations for a science themed alphabet book, made entirely out of textile art. It is being published by Firefly Books and comes out in the fall of 2024. Lauren said she was enamored by the original Pillars image released by Hubble in 1995. When Hubble released a higher resolution capture in 2015, she fell in love even further! This is her tribute to those well-known images.

James Webb Telescope Captures Pillars of Creation

Darci Lenker of Darci Lenker Art, created a rectangular version of Webb’s Pillars of Creation. Credit: Darci Lenker of Darci Lenker Art

Darci Lenker of Norman, Oklahoma started embroidery in college more than 20 years ago, but mainly only used it as an embellishment for her other fiber works. In 2015, she started a daily embroidery project where she planned to do one one-inch circle of embroidery every day for a year. She did a collection of miniature thread painted galaxies and nebulas for Science Museum Oklahoma in 2019. Lenker said she had previously embroidered the Hubble Telescope’s image of Pillars of Creation and was excited to see the new Webb Telescope image of the same thing. Lenker could not wait to stitch the same piece with bolder, more vivid colors.

Milky Way

Darci Lenker of Darci Lenker Art was inspired by NASA’s imaging of the Milky Way Galaxy. Credit: Darci Lenker

In this piece, Lenker became inspired by the Milky Way Galaxy, which is organized into spiral arms of giant stars that illuminate interstellar gas and dust. The Sun is in a finger called the Orion Spur.

The Cosmic Microwave Background

This image shows an embroidery design based on the cosmic microwave background, created by Jessica Campbell, who runs Astrostitches. Inside a tan wooden frame, a colorful oval is stitched onto a black background in shades of blue, green, yellow, and a little bit of red. Credit: Jessica Campbell/ Astrostitches

Jessica Campbell obtained her PhD in astrophysics from the University of Toronto studying interstellar dust and magnetic fields in the Milky Way Galaxy. Jessica promptly taught herself how to cross-stitch in March 2020 and has since enjoyed turning astronomical observations into realistic cross-stitches. Her piece was inspired by the cosmic microwave background, which displays the oldest light in the universe.

The full-sky image of the temperature fluctuations (shown as color differences) in the cosmic microwave background, made from nine years of WMAP observations. These are the seeds of galaxies, from a time when the universe was under 400,000 years old. Credit: NASA/WMAP Science Team

GISSTEMP: NASA’s Yearly Temperature Release

Katy Mersmann, a NASA social media specialist, created this embroidered piece based on NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) global annual temperature record. Earth’s average surface temperature in 2020 tied with 2016 as the warmest year on record. Credit: Katy Mersmann, NASA

Katy Mersmann is a social media specialist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. She started embroidering when she was in graduate school. Many of her pieces are inspired by her work as a communicator. With climate data in particular, she was inspired by the researchers who are doing the work to understand how the planet is changing. The GISTEMP piece above is based on a data visualization of 2020 global temperature anomalies, still currently tied for the warmest year on record.

In addition to embroidery, NASA continues to inspire art in all forms. Check out other creative takes with Landsat Crafts and the James Webb Space telescope public art gallery.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

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batmanisagatewaydrug · 6 months ago

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Do you have a list of good sex ed books to read?

BOY DO I

please bear in mind that some of these books are a little old (10+ years) by research standards now, and that even the newer ones are all flawed in some way. the thing about research on human beings, and especially research on something as nebulous and huge as sex, is that people are Always going to miss something or fail to account for every possible experience, and that's just something that we have to accept in good faith. I think all of these books have something interesting to say, but that doesn't mean any of them are the only book you'll ever need.

related to that: it's been A While since I've read some of these so sorry if anything in them has aged poorly (I don't THINK SO but like, I was not as discerning a reader when I was 19) but I am still including them as books that have been important to my personal journey as a sex educator.

additionally, a caveat that very few of these books are, like, instructional sex ed books in the sense of like "here's how the penis works, here's where the clit is, etc." those books exist and they're great but they're also not very interesting to me; my studies on sex are much more in the social aspect (shout out to my sociology degree) and the way people learn to think about sex and societal factors that shape those trends. these books reflect that. I would genuinely love to have the time to check out some 101 books to see how they fare, but alas - sex ed is not my day job and I don't have the time to dedicate to that, so it happens slowly when it happens at all. I've been meaning to read Dr. Gunter's Vagina Bible since it came out in 2019, for fucks sake.

and finally an acknowledgement that this is a fairly white list, which has as much to do with biases with academia and publishing as my own unchecked biases especially early in my academic career and the limitations of my university library.

ANYWAY here's some books about sex that have been influential/informative to me in one way or another:

The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (Michael Warner, 1999)

Virginity Lost: An Intimate Portrait of First Sexual Experiences (Laura M. Carpenter, 2005)

Virgin: The Untouched History (Hanne Blank, 2007)

Sex Goes to School: Girls and Sex Education Before the 1960s (Susan K. Freeman, 2008)

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (Mary Roach, 2008)

Transgender History: The Roots of Today's Revolution (Revised Edition) (Susan Stryker, 2008)

The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity is Hurting Young Women (Jessica Valenti, 2009)

Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (Amy T. Schalet, 2011)

Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality (Hanne Blank, 2012)

Rewriting the Rules: An Integrative Guide to Love, Sex and Relationships (Meg-John Barker, 2013)

The Sex Myth: The Gap Between Our Fantasies and Realities (Rachel Hills, 2015)

Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Tranform Your Sex Life (Emily Nagoski, 2015)

Not Gay: Sex Between Straight White Men (Jane Ward, 2015)

Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education (Jonathan Zimmerman, 2015)

American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus (Lisa Wade, 2017)

Histories of the Transgender Child (Jules Gill-Peterson, 2018)

Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers' Rights (Juno Mac and Molly Smith, 2018)

Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex (Angela Chen, 2020)

Pleasure in the News: African American Readership and Sexuality in the Black Press (Kim Gallon, 2020)

A Curious History of Sex (Kate Lister, 2020)

Boys & Sex: Young Men on Hookups, Love, Porn, Consent, and Navigating the New Masculinity (Peggy Orenstein, 2020)

Black Women, Black Love: America's War on Africa American Marriage (Dianne M. Stewart, 2020)

The Tragedy of Heterosexuality (Jane Ward, 2020)

Hurts So Good: The Science and Pleasure of Pain on Purpose (Leigh Cowart, 2021)

Strange Bedfellows: Adventures in the Science, History, and Surprising Secrets of STDs (Ina Park, 2021)

The Right to Sex: Feminist in the Twenty-First Century (Amia Srinivasan, 2021)

Love Your Asian Body: AIDS Activism in Los Angeles (Eric C. Wat, 2021)

Superfreaks: Kink, Pleasure, and the Pursuit of Happiness (Arielle Greenberg, 2023)

#bookblr #sex edventures 2024 #sex witch library

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missmeinyourbones · 2 years ago

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I’LL MAKE THIS FEEL LIKE HOME

cw: nsfw, 18+. minors and ageless blogs will be blocked for interacting. wc 6k. todoroki fam lore. bnha manga + s6 spoilers. angst and fluff and smut and love and

“Do you feel held by him? Does he feel like home to you?”

- Midsommar (2019)

Touya was eight years old when his youngest brother was born—the same age realized that his house no longer felt like home.

And while it never fit the traditional cookie-cutter feeling of a home before then, it was comforting in its own kind of way. It was definite, something that he could hold onto and strive towards. Something that was there at the end of the day, no matter how badly his hands burned or how quiet the dinner table was.

Because before Shouto was born, there was still a chance.

Fuyumi and Natsuo were just as much of failures as he was—it was anyone's game. He could keep pushing, train his hand to defy the science of his body and deal with it. Become what his father wanted so badly he’d kill for. That was home, the knowledge that there was still a chance for him.

But the moment Shouto was born, hair perfectly split the same as his flawlessly cursed body, Touya knew.

Instantly, he knew that his time was over—that there was no saving his dream of making his father proud. He hadn’t been enough, and he would have to live with that, in a house that's no home with a family that lives in the shadow of what he never got to be.

He carries that feeling everywhere he goes. Like an eternal kink in his neck, it weighs heavy on his shoulders and disintegrates the marrow of his bones. Forever the boy without a home, Dabi continues to do what he does best—or maybe worst—and he survives.

But, you don’t remember when Dabi became home to you.

Well, that's not entirely true. Like all other things, you suppose it happened slowly, then all at once.

You remember meeting him when you shouldn’t have. Recognizing his appearance from the local news, you remember the heavy feeling in your chest, like a child who was caught doing something wrong. The fear, the confusion. The part of you that wanted to help, the other than wanted to run.

But you don’t remember how fast it all happened.

Sewing his wounds and scrubbing his blood from your floor. Letting him sneak in to hide out, and waking up to an empty bed. You don’t remember the days bleeding into nights, but you could never forget the way his skin felt against yours.

You remember the impact, but the falling is all a blur. The stranger sleeping on your couch who has now read all of the books on your bedside table. The one who hissed and snarled for you to stay away, now crawls home to you on his knees.

One day he wasn't, and the very next day, he was.

You think that’s enough for you, but Dabi knows it’s too much for him.

…

The sound of your window creakily opening no longer scares you in the middle of the night. If anything, it brings you a sick sense of comfort.

Dabi slides through your living room balcony with ease, far too familiar with the routine of navigating your apartment in the dark. It does the job for him—keeps him out of the cold, gives him a bed to sleep in, a roof over his head. He finds that he enjoys the perks of your shitty building complex.

Oh, and you're there, too. But, he swears that has nothing to do with the magnetic urge that keeps pulling him back to the fire escape on the fourth floor that remains unlocked.

He opens your cabinets in search of something, anything, to fill his stomach in the slightest. He’s thin, almost alarmingly so, if you didn't know him—didn’t know his body is constantly working against him, eagerly taking the destruction he so carelessly puts it through.

Your sudden voice doesn't scare him. He doesn't so much as flinch at your clear tone in the silence of your home.

“Cremation.”

He briefly looks at you over his shoulder, humorously expressionless, before turning his back to you and rummaging through the cabinet again.

“Gesundheit,” he scoffs.

“It’s what your name means,” you breathe, tone still devoid of any emotion he can detect—or deflect.

The realization burns him like his quirk, oddly painless but still alarmingly there. He holds his breath without realizing it, and its not until he coughs that he mindlessly exhales.

Dabi. Cremation.

True, he thinks. It’s no secret by any means, but he still finds his muscles tensing up as if you’d just said something you shouldn’t have.

He doesn’t let his facade falter as he plucks a box of saltines from your cabinet. “Doesn't take a genius to do a basic translate search.”

“It’s not your real name,” you state, addressing the elephant infiltrating the room.

And at this, he fully turns to you. You stand in the entryway of the dark kitchen, arms crossed and eyes filled with sleep (or lack thereof, Dabi isn't sure he can tell the difference just yet).

You're not angry. No, he's seen you angry before. This is different, harder. It's almost stoic. And while Dabi can’t put his finger on the exact feeling of the pit in his stomach, he knows he doesn’t like it.

He sticks his hand in the cardboard box before plucking a cracker and plopping the snack in his mouth. The salt burns the cuts on his lips when he sarcastically speaks, “You’re on fire with the observations today.”

He watches you shrug, expression still void of any true indication of whatever your heart is feeling. The only light in the tiny apartment comes from the stove behind him. He can just make out your silhouette and barely your face through hardened focus and adjusting eyes.

He thinks he’s grateful for that. He doesn’t want to see the details of your dissapointment when you see the real him.

“Figured it was a bit too coincidental,” you rest against the doorframe. Dabi takes it as a good sign, you're not stiff.

“Quirks don’t even manifest until a few years after birth, unless you were unnamed for the first five years of your life.”

Should’ve been, he bitterly thinks. Things would've been easier that way.

He bites his tongue.

The only sound that can be heard is the crunching of his teeth against the cracker he gnaws on. After a moment, he offers you one. You don’t move a muscle at his extended hand. He lets it sink back slowly, defeated, as he clears his throat.

“It fits, doesn't it?”

It’s a rhetorical question, one he doesn’t actually expect you to answer. Because his name is all that’s known of him. Of course it should fit. Because when you look at him��his peeling and charred skin and hand that wields nothing but pain—it’s evident that all he can do is cremate.

His breath hitches when you speak up.

“To some, sure,” you decide.

With the way his chest tightens at your declaration, Dabi decides he doesn't like your tone.

He shields himself with his bark. “What’s that mean?”

“It means I want to call you something different,” you ache, but Dabi can read between the cracks you let falter. I deserve to call you something different, is what your heart bleeds onto the floor. I’m different.

He refuses to let that be the truth.

“Didn't think you’d be one for pet names, doll.” He tosses the half-eaten box back into your cabinet, lazily shutting the wood and wiping his crumby hands on his sleeves.

“I don’t see you how they see you,” your voice is stern now, he hears the determination in your shaky words. “I want to know your name.”

Your real one, the lines read once again. But in a split second, Dabi realizes he’s come too far to ruin whatever this is now.

“Fat chance in hell,” he dismisses, brushing your shoulder as he leaves the kitchen.

You’re quick to follow—as you always are, he’s begun to notice. You're like a mosquito constantly buzzing in his ear. No matter how many times he swats and repels, you come back stronger. He doesn’t know why he doesn’t hate it.

“Please.”

“No,” he’s even quicker to bore. “M’not dragging you into my shit.”

Too late, the voice in the back of his mind laughs. He’s always been his own worst enemy.

“There's more to you,” you continue to press, wanting something tangible, more from him. “You're not just what they make of you. You're a person, someone's son, someone’s–”

“Don't,” a balloon bursts behind his eyelids. His voice comes louder than ever before and it unsettles you, him, and the floorboards beneath your toes.

“Don't you ever...fucking say that again. You hear me?” With his finger in your face, Dabi shakes. He prays to whoever is listening that you see it as fury, and not what it truly is—fear.

And based on the tears flooding your eyes, he’d bet money he doesn't have that he’s right. In the silence of your home, you nod.

Dabi decides he’s had enough for one night, done enough to make you hate him just the right amount to forget about fixing him.

On the way out, Dabi mumbles something that sounds a lot like, “Say something stupid like that one more time and you'll never see me again.”

…

Dabi is exhausted.

His burner rings obnoxiously through the bedroom in the middle of the night.

You’ve begun to associate the loud melody with the feeling of a knife—the blade cruelly trickling its tip against your skin. Cold, sharp, barely applying enough pressure to make you hyperaware of its potential to rip everything you've ever known away from you with a mere movement forward.

You never know who’s on the other end of the line, and this time is no different. When the infamous sound sends a chill up your spine, Dabi answers it without a second thought. He wordlessly picks up, listens intently, and hangs up as quickly as it rang.

Then, he’s out of bed and putting his shoes on.

He knows you're not asleep, so there's no point in pretending to be when you crawl out of bed and follow him to the den of your home.

He grabs the remote, flicks the television on, and eagerly surfs the channels until he lands on the local news. Endeavor runs through the barren and obliterated streets of downtown, defending the city and fighting some… creature. You don't miss the way Dabi’s eyes don't blink whenever the hero is on screen.

He’s too focused, too emotional when it comes to him. It's unlike anything you've ever seen from him, and you're tired of pretending not to see the smothering fire in his eyes whenever the man is brought into discussion.

The reporter on the screen flips to another battle somewhere else in the city, with other heroes and other creatures and other things that should matter right now but for some reason don't. Because when Dabi finally takes his eyes off the screen to slip into his shoes, you spill.

“Why him?”

He harshly tightens the laces of his boot, “Huh?”

“Endeavor,” falls from your lips, and he nearly hisses at the sound of the name on your tongue. “Why him out of all heroes?”

He hesitates in the slightest. The average eye wouldn't have noticed his pause, but you know him. You see the way he clenches his jaw and fiddles with the staples sealing his chin.

He merely shrugs before tying his other lace, “He’s number one.”

“He wasn't always,” you contest, a bit too accusatory for his liking.

“Why does it matter?” Dabi bites. Bites the hand that feels him, shelters him, listens to him and chooses to remain quiet with what it knows. He bites the hand that loves him, and he almost regrets it when he sees your slight shock.

Almost.

His stomach churns as he watches you slightly falter before finding your footing once more. “It seems to matter to you.”

So it matters to me, your heart aches to drill into his rock-solid mind. His eyes feel hot on your skin as he shakes his head and stands from where he sits.

“He’s not a good guy, none of ‘em are.”

“How do you know?”

His grip on his coat tightens in frustration. “I have a ton of shit on him. He’s not the savior you think he is.”

“I don’t think he’s a savior,” you retort, and it comes out a bit childish, like a belief you wish to convince yourself of. “I don’t know him.”

“But you trust him,” Dabi is quick to jump, almost as if you've fallen right into his trap. He looks a bit wild, as if you’re prey in his hands, saying all the right things so sweetly just for him to do what a predator does and hunt. Sink his teeth into your flesh and ruin you for the thrill of it.

“Cause he’s the face of the fuckin’ country?” he coos with a venomously fake smile. “Cause he’s big and strong and always does the good thing, right?”

He’s trying to scare you, you know this—but you’ve never been scared of Dabi. Not when he’s tried to make you be, not when he’s done unspeakable things. He doesn’t scare you, but he’s upsetting you. He’s being mean, which isn't new to you but still rare enough to sting.

“I trust you,” your voice cracks, making his stomach churn with shame, “so if you don’t trust him, then I trust you have a good reason not to.”

Silence overtakes the room and Dabi’s chest burns with bile rising.

You trust him? On what grounds? What reason has he given you to just hand over your patience without a fight, without a reason?

Most importantly, if the thought of you trusting him makes him sick to his fucking stomach, then why does he find his lips moving before he can stop himself?

“He beats his kids.”

The television cuts to a commercial. A car drives by below, honking furiously at something or other. He says it casually, eyes looking away from yours.

Your voice is barely heard, “His kids?”

You didn't even know he had kids. Come to think of it, you knew of one boy. Fire and ice who attends the hero facility downtown that's always getting into trouble. Set to follow in his father's footsteps, according to the tabloids.

Dabi’s face doesn't falter at your surprise, immune to the violence he knows lives within his words. “Wife, too.”

The pieces don't add up in your mind. Dabi’s never been one for morals, not one for evening the tides and setting the universe straight when it comes to what's right and what's wrong. He does what he wants, he’s selfish. So why on earth would he care about a tragedy that doesn't involve him?

He interrupts your thoughts when he walks over to the front door. The sound of him fiddling with the lock makes your heart drop—because it means he’s leaving, and for how long, you never know.

“Doesn’t anymore, apparently, but he did for years,” he scoffs in disgust. “Claims he’s turned a new leaf. Wants to be father of the year, all of a sudden.”

Leaving before you can process any thoughts to convey into words, he sneaks through your door without a second thought.

“The good guys aren't actually good, y’know,” he warns as he leaves you.

You don’t see him for two weeks.

…

Dabi doesn't fuck you with caution.

It's the same every time. Rough, quick, desperate. You on your stomach and him towering behind you. He doesn't look at you or say much other than a grunt or curse here and there. Always pulls out, if he even cums, and always leaves right after, if not in the middle of the night.

But that doesn't mean it’s not good. Because fuck, it's great.

While short-lived and based on nothing but selfish, primal needs, it's a private moment of feeling nothing but him. His hands are everywhere and his teeth are never too far behind. His skin is on fire and his pace is nothing short of eager.

Your back is arched as your face is pressed to the mattress. You feel his cock throb as it swells against the insides of your walls with every rushed and eager thrust.

“Fuck, please,” he hears you breathily whine, and you feel his smirk against the skin of your back.

He uses your polite desperation to reward you, snap his hips extra hard and bury himself to the hilt of your cunt. He sits and burns inside of you, grip tight on your waist as he pulls you as close to him as he can without swallowing you whole.

His tip dances directly at the opening of your cervix, just barely brushing the overly tender spot with a feather-light prodding that somehow feels like too much and not enough. He lets himself continue to stretch you, to mold you, to enjoy the only thing he believes was made for him before he ruins it.

He feels you repeatedly clench around him as you mewl, “Please, more please.” You’re already completely spent when you plead, “Please, Dabi.”

And just like that, a switch is flipped inside of him.

His grip on your hips tightens, “Don’t.”

He goes to pull out of you completely, but your cry from his movement halts his hips. “Oh, nnnngh, Dabi—!”

In a whirl, you're flipped onto your back and met with a harsh gaze.

“Don’t,” he growls into your throat, “call me that.”

Frozen in place from both shock and pure need, you airily gasp when you feel his cock head brushing itself through your folds. With a scarred wrist, Dabi swipes his tip between your folds, eyes fully absorbing and watching your expression twitch with every sensitive brush.

“Touya,” he tells you through a slack jaw, watching your eyelids flutter at the teasing.

He pushes himself into your cunt, not fully, but enough for you to cry in slight release, before pulling out to where his tip is the only part of him swallowed by you.

“Touya,” he repeats, nearly chanting as he aches to engrain it into your system. So it’s all you’ll ever know, the only word your tongue will ever taste from now on, no matter who is sticking what inside of you. He works to make your body remember that the only thing it should think of when feeling the slight stretch of your throbbing cunt is—

“Touya,” he bleeds. It almost doesn’t even sound like a word. “Say it. Touya.”

And you do. It crawls breathy and drunk from your throat as if your lips were made to form its syllables. Like a holy mantra falling from your lips, his whole body shivers when he hears your sweet heaves.

“Touya,” is whimpered into his lips.

He holds his breath for a beat, before shakily recollecting himself from his quickly approaching high and readjusting his grip on your jaw.

“Again, fuck.”

“Touya,” you gasp at his now snapping hips. It’s deeper, slower, and even more desperate than you thought it was before. It's messy and tired and he cradles you in his palms as you chant his name like a prayer.

Touya. Touya. Touya.

He abruptly finishes inside of you, his spurting warmth easily sending you over the edge, too.

While it was something that was always offered, Touya has never once come inside of you, always choosing to pull out last second, if he finished at all. You savor the moment, letting him rut his cum into you until your both dry with exhaustion.

Breathing returns to a normal rate and Touya lets himself soften inside of you. With his head burrowed in your neck, he makes a move to pull out of you. To leave, your chest tightens at the realization, so on instinct, you let your legs wrap around his torso, crossing your ankles and keeping him as your own for just a little bit longer.

Without a fight, he lets you. He lets himself stay inside of you as he drifts to sleep in your hold.

“Touya,” he hears you coo, listens to you taste it on your tongue and determine that you like its flavor.

“S’pretty,” you decide in a sleeping daze. “Fits you better.”

Dabi drifts to sleep thinking about the irony of that statement.

…

The puzzle pieces itself together rather quickly after that.

It turns out Endeavor does have kids—four, to be exact. Three boys and a girl, all different equations of fire and ice and grief.

It's not hard to find articles on what happened at Sekoto Peak. What happened to Touya Todoroki, the boy who died for nothing, who you now know somehow sits alive on your couch with a bowl of ramen noodles and a wet head.

He focuses on the television before him. A cheesy horror film from the late 80s plays through the grainy screen. His feet are resting on top of the coffee table and the bowl in his lap is steaming. He uses his chopsticks to dive in regardless of its heat.

Sitting on the opposite end of the couch, you can smell your eucalyptus shampoo in his hair from where you sit. Though his head is still damp, you can tell the color has gotten lighter. While still practically jet black all over, you're able to see the slightest tint of light peeking through his roots. You know better than to ask, but you're sure your guess is as good as any.

Touya must feel your gaze on him because his eyes flicker to the side where you quietly admire his profile. Through a mouthful of noodles and steaming broth, he mumbles.

“What’re you doing?”

You smile at the lack of enunciation in his words before innocently shaking your head. “Nothing.”

Unconvinced, his eyes narrow. “Why’re you lookin’ at me like that?” he accuses.

You roll your eyes out of habit though your heart is anything but irritated, “What, I can’t look at you, now?”

He uses the next bite he takes to hide the smirk growing on his face. “Not with that stupid look on your face.”

He takes pride in watching you get flustered, scrunching your nose and giggling out a horrified, “What look?”

He reaches across the couch to close the gap between the two of you, before flicking your forehead.

“That look,” he declares.

He doesn't move back to where he was sitting. He lets himself remain next to you, your head lightly resting on his shoulder as the sound of the movie webs throughout your living room.

It’s easy, too easy. It’s natural and warm and feels like the closest thing to a home he’s ever held in his calloused and weeping palms.

And Touya is selfish.

He wants to grasp onto it, white-knuckled and pressing crescents into his palms—he wants to keep you. Wants to keep this. But he knows better.

Touya knows that the stupid look on your face was one of love. Pure and undeniable. But he doesn't let himself think too much about it.

…

The weather changes with the wind, and it’s colder in Japan when Touya gives you a piece of him you never thought you’d get.

He’s just arrived back from god knows where doing god knows what, but you’ve learned not to question it. You welcome him in every time with a warm smile and an urge to hold him, and he thinks maybe thats why he hears himself suddenly spilling.

“Saw him today,” he breathes evenly.

His words hold no context, no prior conversation triggering his statement. It just exists in the space between the two of you on the couch, and the ball is in your court.

Your head tilts in careful thought, “Who?”

“Downtown,” he ignores your question, “cornered him for a second and everything.”

And though you know nothing and shouldn’t be able to understand the man beside you, you do.

You feel his pain in the way his eyebrow twitches, how his fingers crack against his palms. You might not get it, but you try. You’ll always try for Touya.

You encourage him, “And what happened?”

The wind howls outside, and you feel your home settle beneath its harsh hit. The walls crack with movement as the two of you remain seated beside one another.

After a moment, Touya clears his throat.

“Nothing,” he bitterly laughs to himself. “Absolutely nothing.”

The tea in your hand buzzes heat through its mug, and it feels like Touya’s touch. When he’s careful and cautious and places his hands on your stomach, treating you like glass he needs to mold.

“Looked me dead in the eyes, felt my fuckin’ flame, and—” he cuts himself off at the emotion crawling into his words with a cough, “and nothing.”

You say nothing, but Touya knows that nothing needs to be said. He can sit on his couch with the tea you made him and the look you're giving him and he knows he can trust you. As much as he doesn't want to, he can.

With his head hung low in shame, he rips off the only bandaid he’s ever had for the deepest wound he never got the chance to properly clean.

“He’s my old man,” he harshly swallows.

After a moment of silence, he drags his head up from the floor.

You're still looking at him the same, eyes dancing with love and some sick want to understand him.

You simply reach across the cushion and squeeze his hand.

“I know,” you whisper.

And in what Touya imagined to be an earth-shattering conversation, he feels the corner of his mouth pulling upwards into an ironic smile.

“’Course you do,” he laughs under his breath. It's not malicious or accusatory, it's a matter of fact.

Because of course, you know. Of course, you would see through his master puppetry and barring fangs. Of course, it wouldn't change how you see him.

Of course.

In what should be a terrifying moment, Touya lets himself smile. He shakes his head as he sighs, “Father of the fuckin’ year, right?”

…

“M’gonna do something,” Touya tells you solemnly one afternoon in bed, “and you’re gonna hate me for it.”

The freshly setting sun shines through the window, and you can feel its heat warming up your legs through the frame. The rays feel oddly contrasting to his cloudy day words.

You open your eyes to find his. They’re already looking back at you, glasslike as they flicker across your features. Like he’s searching for something neither of you have an answer to.

Your foot brushes against his calf as you shift to face him.

“I could never hate you,” you softly remind him, “you know that.”

Touya fights the urge to roll his eyes, and you bite back a smile at the agitation wrinkles forming on his forehead. Your fingers move without thinking, using your thumb to iron and smooth over his delicate skin.

“Fine,” he huffs, but you don’t miss the way he softens beneath your touch.

“I’m gonna do something and you’re gonna yell at me for it,” he follows up more gentle this time, like a tainted whisper afraid to be too loud in the honeyed quietness of your home.

It fills your stomach with a familiar sense of unease.

“Well, do you deserve to be yelled at?”

He softly smiles, one equal parts of happy and sad, “Probably.”

You return the look as you sit on his words. He’s treading lightly, which is a thoughtful change compared to his usual acting on impulse.

He’s cautioning you. Preparing you for something bitter, and while you appreciate the warning, you know it can’t be anything good. It feels a lot like the breathtaking sunset before a disastrous overnight storm.

Your voice is a whisper when you meekly ask him, “Can you tell me any more?”

And though the look on his face is regretful, his answer comes all the same.

“No,” he swallows.

And like the saint you are, Touya doesn’t know why he’s surprised when you merely bob your head in understanding and smile.

“Okay,” you nod.

You expect that to be all. Because Touya’s never been one for words, let alone more than the bare minimum amount needed. And you were deemed lucky enough to get a vague warning.

That should be the end of the conversation, but it’s not.

Touya reaches for your wrist and his fingers dance along the bone lightly. He doesn’t remove his eyes from where they bore into yours when he breathes.

“M’sorry.”

The words are foreign on his tongue, and his smallness unsettles you. Something feels wrong, like nausea brewing and waiting for bile to finally strike.

You sit up, cradling his face in your palms as you coo words of reassurance. He feels cold, his body temperature ironically contrasting the heat that runs through his veins. He’s trying so hard to keep whatever he knows inside the clear cage of his mind, but you can practically hear the cracking of the glass beneath it’s weight.

“Hey, no,” you exhale between kisses to his hairline. “No, don’t start that shit.”

Because while he doesn’t tell you everything, Touya tells you enough, and it’s more than you ever thought would be true with someone as out of reach as him.

He may not tell you he loves you, but he says it through his eyes. He doesn’t tell you how he has so much respect for you it could swallow him whole, but sometimes, in the glimpse of his stolen glances, you can feel it.

He can’t tell you what he’s going to do, but he can tell you he’s sorry. And that is something in and of itself.

Touya closes his eyes at the affection. He wishes he could freeze time and savor this moment forever. Keep it as a souvenir to place on his shelf and keep him company on lonely nights to come. He doesn’t want it to end, doesn’t want to be anywhere else that isn't here, right now, with you.

He does his best to soak in how your lips feel against his as you promise, “We’ll figure it out, yeah?”

But he’s not so sure, because while you think he’s apologizing for not being able to tell you more, Touya is apologizing for the hell he knows is to come.

��

He’s dead. He has to be dead.

The screen in front of you feels like a cruel joke as it flashes clips of the scene. Not Dabi, but Touya, on national television—spewing venom to the entire country with a smile. .

He speaks slowly, solemnly, like he's thought this through. Like he’s rehearsed and planned this all along. He speaks like a spiraling politician, and it cuts like a blade in your back.

You think about the television screens across the city right now.

A family whose gameshow night got rudely interrupted. A cafe whose workers are making their final lattes for the night, sweeping the floors and washing the counters as his rambling mindlessly plays in the background. You wonder if anybody is home at the Todoroki residence, if the television is on, or if it was unplugged years ago.

Touya is dead, and he warned you.

That’s why he did this, why he planned this to unfold the way it did. He told you that you’d hate him, and like a fool, you told him he was wrong.

A knock on the door is barely heard over your heavy breathing, and you debate on answering it.

It has to be the police, or maybe even a hero—looking for you, now an accomplice blinded by a mirror you thought was a window.

Your brain starts to spiral with thoughts that make your chest heave.

Did Touya turn himself in? Go down without a fight? Did someone see him leave your home? Had they known this entire time?

Maybe they were waiting for the right moment to strike, for the dominoes to ripple so they can make their move when you’re too weak to defend yourself. Maybe he double-crossed you, blamed whatever he could on you before driving a getaway car in the opposite direction of your apartment. Maybe he never cared at all—maybe the realest thing you’d ever known was orchestrated from beginning to end.

Another knock comes, this time more urgent and harsh. And there’s no point in prolonging the inevitable—so with tear-stained cheeks and shaking shoulders, you open the door.

And it’s Touya.

With white hair and soggy clothes, he stands in the hallway of your crumby apartment complex.

You want to laugh at the irony of it all. The first time he uses your actually door instead of window, he's a new man.

New hair, new name, a new look in his eye—one that swims of something you can't put your finger on. He’s alive and in front of you, and regardless of the anger overflowing your cup, you need to feel him.

So you pull him through the threshold, inside of your home, and against your skin. You feel the wet leather of his jacket, and smell the ash from the battle mixed with the coffee he had before he left this morning.

He’s here, and you love him.

“I hate you,” your cries vibrate against his chest as you weakly push and punch at his shoulders. “I hate you, I fucking hate you.”

Touya lets you sob into his shirt. It’s covered in your tears and blood that’s not his. He lets you thrash and scream and crumple beneath his hold.

He wants to say I told you so. I told you you’d hate me.

“How could you do that,” he makes out between your hyperventilating and sobs, “how could you do that to me?”

His throat restricts with tears that can’t come as you melt against his body, “I would have never done that to you.”

“I’m sorry,” Touya breathes, and he repeats it. Says it again and again and again until it all bleeds together into nothing but syllables and sobs.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m home, and I’m sorry.

…

The bedroom is cold, the window slightly cracked open as Touya shuffles your quilted blanket off of his clammy body.

He always runs a bit hot at night, though he’s ironically ice to the touch when his quirk isn’t at work.

Now on top of your comforter, his scarred palm lays open to you. He flinches every now and then as you delicately draw shapes into it with a painted fingernail. His eyes are closed, but he’s able to recognize the swirling form of your movements, the same ones you’ve drawn every night since he came back home to you.

He doesn’t remember the last time he’s felt this at peace.

After everything, he’s still here. And not only is he still here, but he’s okay with that, because he’s with you.

“I've never—” he hesitates, but the darkness illuminating the room gives him a surge of confidence.

“I've never had this,” his voice is pained, nearly softer than silence itself.

He feels your finger stop swirling for a moment, but it resumes just as quickly as it halted. He feels you alter your pattern, and with cleaner lines and softer edges, he’s able to recognize the heart you doodle on his skin.

“Had what?” you gently ask.

“A home,” Touya breathes, before correcting himself, “where I’m wanted.”

You smile and Touya feels so loved he nearly makes himself sick. He feels so held, so wanted, so right in your bed and beneath your delicate fingertips.

The stranger in your home. The outlaw who smells of your perfume. The boy who never got a second chance, but the man who got a third.

Touya has so much love for you that he doesn't know where to put it all.

But for a moment, when he looks at your smile and feels your fingertip tracing his palm, he sees it as you offering your open arms to hold any excess he can’t carry.

He feels you grin against the scarring of his wrist.

“Well,” you kiss the tender spot where skin meets stitching, “you might wanna get used to it.”

#i am very very proud of this pls be kind to me thank u love u muah #touya x reader #touya todoroki x reader #touya x you #touya todoroki x you #dabi x you #dabi x reader #dabi fic #touya fic #touya todoroki fic #dabi smut #touya smut #touya todoroki smut #touya angst #dabi angst #touya todoroki angst #dabi fluff #touya fluff #touya todoroki fluff

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asthedeathoflight · 3 months ago

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Im here as a certified Blade Runner expert to inform all of you that Armand would prefer the theatrical release with the happy ending because deep down hes a scared little kid and he wants to believe that everything is going to be alright for Deckard and Rachael forever and Daniel prefers the director's cut which is obviously objectively the better version and so he would be very caught off guard by Armand preferring the theatrical release, even tho he really shouldnt because he and Armand saw the theatrical version together in theaters and the directors cut didn't come out until after they broke up so of course thats the version Armand has been rewatching all these years.

However because they're both so damn stubborn this would result in their first ever couple fight post-turning which inevitably becomes extremely personal extremely quickly (should Rachael get to live forever with Deckard? Is her life beautiful BECAUSE its short? Does Deckard's love for her mean more if he's turning his back on his long-lived brethren to embrace the ephemerality of her existence?) and results in several pieces of furniture being destroyed. After this Armand has a blu ray of the final cut overnighted bc neither of them have ever seen it (even tho its available digitally) and they have a seven hour long conversation about whether Deckard is a replicant and what it would mean if he was which at some point turns into makeup sex but never stops also being a philosophical discussion of the themes of timeless Ridley Scott classic Blade Runner.

And in late 2018 Armand kept mentioning that there's this science fiction movie set next year to Louis like he expected him to be excited but Louis was too busy manipulating the stock market or whatever and he just didn't really get why it mattered- all scifi movies are set in the future Armand, and we're immortal so we're going to live to see all of those futures, you weren't like this in 1984 Armand - and Armand doesn't quite regret what he did but the loneliness cuts sharper than usual on New Year's 2019.

#i know all this about blade runner bc that movie is one of my moms special interests lol #if anyone is ever writing a dm fic and wants a blade runner consultant hit me up ive seen that movie so many fucking times #benni proof #devils minion #blorboposting #iwtv #interview with the vampire #im not tagging any of the other armand/daniel tags that shit is called devils minion stfu about armandiel

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rabbitcruiser · 9 months ago

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On February 27, 1860 Abraham Lincoln made a speech at Cooper Union in the city of New York that is largely responsible for his election to the Presidency. It is now referred to as the Cooper Union Address.

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afeelgoodblog · 7 months ago

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The Best News of Last Week - 29 April 2024

1. Net neutrality rules restored by US agency

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 on Thursday to reinstate landmark net neutrality rules and reassume regulatory oversight of broadband internet rescinded under former President Donald Trump.

2. Airlines required to refund passengers for canceled, delayed flights

DOT will also require airlines to give cash refunds if your bags are lost and not delivered within 12 hours.

The refunds must be issued within seven days, according to the new DOT rules, and must be in cash unless the passenger chooses another form of compensation. Airlines can no longer issue refunds in forms of vouchers or credits when consumers are entitled to receive cash.

3. How new mosquito nets averted 13 million malaria cases

Compared to standard nets, the introduction of 56 million state-of-the-art mosquito nets in 17 countries across sub-Saharan Africa averted an estimated 13 million malaria cases and 24,600 deaths. The New Nets Project, an initiative funded by Unitaid and the Global Fund and led by the Innovative Vector Control Consortium (IVCC), piloted the use of dual-insecticide nets in malaria-endemic countries between 2019 and 2022 to address the growing threat of insecticide resistance.

4. Germany has installed over 400,000 ‘solar balconies’

This new wave of solar producers aren’t just getting cheap electricity, they’re also participating in the energy transition.

More than 400,000 plug-in solar systems have been installed in Germany, most of them taking up a seamless spot on people’s balconies.

5. Voyager-1 sends readable data again from deep space

The US space agency says its Voyager-1 probe is once again sending usable information back to Earth after months of spouting gibberish.

The 46-year-old Nasa spacecraft is humanity's most distant object.

6. Missing cat found after 5 years makes 2,000-km journey home

Five years after it ran out the door, a lost cat was returned to a couple in Nevada after it was found thousands of kilometres away. The couple are praising the cat’s microchip for helping reunite them.

7. Restoring sight is possible now with optogenetics

Max Hodak's startup, Science, is developing gene therapy solutions to restore vision for individuals with macular degeneration and similar conditions. The Science Eye utilizes optogenetics, injecting opsins into the eye to enhance light sensitivity in retinal cells.

Clinical trials and advancements in optogenetics are showing promising results, with the potential to significantly improve vision for those affected by retinal diseases.

---

That's it for this week :)

This newsletter will always be free. If you liked this post you can support me with a small kofi donation here:

Buy me a coffee ❤️

Also don’t forget to reblog this post with your friends.

#best news of last week

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probablyasocialecologist · 8 months ago

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As environmental, social and humanitarian crises escalate, the world can no longer afford two things: first, the costs of economic inequality; and second, the rich. Between 2020 and 2022, the world’s most affluent 1% of people captured nearly twice as much of the new global wealth created as did the other 99% of individuals put together, and in 2019 they emitted as much carbon dioxide as the poorest two-thirds of humanity. In the decade to 2022, the world’s billionaires more than doubled their wealth, to almost US$12 trillion. The evidence gathered by social epidemiologists, including us, shows that large differences in income are a powerful social stressor that is increasingly rendering societies dysfunctional. For example, bigger gaps between rich and poor are accompanied by higher rates of homicide and imprisonment. They also correspond to more infant mortality, obesity, drug abuse and COVID-19 deaths, as well as higher rates of teenage pregnancy and lower levels of child well-being, social mobility and public trust. The homicide rate in the United States — the most unequal Western democracy — is more than 11 times that in Norway. Imprisonment rates are ten times as high, and infant mortality and obesity rates twice as high.

[...]

Our work has shown that the amount spent on advertising as a proportion of gross domestic product is higher in countries with greater inequality. The well-publicized lifestyles of the rich promote standards and ways of living that others seek to emulate, triggering cascades of expenditure for holiday homes, swimming pools, travel, clothes and expensive cars. Oxfam reports that, on average, each of the richest 1% of people in the world produces 100 times the emissions of the average person in the poorest half of the world’s population. That is the scale of the injustice. As poorer countries raise their material standards, the rich will have to lower theirs.

[...]

The scientific evidence is stark that reducing inequality is a fundamental precondition for addressing the environmental, health and social crises the world is facing. It’s essential that policymakers act quickly to reverse decades of rising inequality and curb the highest incomes.

#capitalism #billionaires #inequality #sustainability #degrowth

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lookingforcactus · 10 months ago

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Went to a big quilting convention today and am feeling inspired so here's todays edition of

What the fuck do you mean that's a quilt??

Most people have no idea about how much craft goes into quilting or how much quilting as a craft, art, and even a science has been evolving in recent years. So here's my personal appreciation post

And btw the flat images do NOT even do these quilts justice, especially in terms of the absolutely amazing and detailed texture embroidery that a lot of quilters are using these days. Up close the texture and the sheer detail of many of them is just stunning

These are all from the Road to California quilt show 2023

1st Place: Portrait

Title: Sharing the Moment Maker: Hollis Chatelain Quilter: Hollis Chatelain Design Basis: Maker's Original Design African-American women are a powerful force in motivating their families and communities to vote. I wanted to create a piece about this and highlight the fact that African-American women did not receive the right to vote in all 50 states until 1965 when the Voting Rights Act was passed. I met Phyllis at a rally. I was drawn to her and asked if she would be my model. Without hesitation she said yes. She later brought her friend Loretta with her.

1st Place: Naturescape

Title: Augustinii Maker: Andrea Brokenshire Quilter: Andrea Brokenshire Design Basis: Maker's Original Design “Augustinii” is a blue/purple variety of rhododendron my momma planted within her forest garden. I was lucky to be home on when it was in bloom. When I see this quilt, I am reminded of my momma and how she loves to tend her garden and “grub in the dirt.”

1st Place: Pictorial

Title: Leap of Faith Maker: Kestrel Michaud Quilter: Kestrel Michaud Design Basis: Original design In this Steampunk fantasy world, men and women have taken to the skies on ships held aloft by hot air, ingenuity, and luck. Faith’s favorite past-time is bungee-jumping off the side of her airship, with Bubo, her pet clockwork owl. This quilt depicts the photo Faith took on her latest jump to test her brand-new camera and selfie stick.

2nd Place: Naturescape

Title: Homage to Birches Bare Maker: Jessica Noble Quilter: Jessica Noble Design Basis: Fabric recreation of Kesler Woodward's Birches Bare, acrylic on I fell in love with Kesler Woodward’s Birches Bare painting and knew I had to create it in fabric. I cut about 1,700 pattern pieces out of freezer paper and then fused fabric, through the fall of 2019 until the pandemic started. During this time, I homeschooled my two children and the quilt sat in quarantine. I quilted this freehand on my midarm in the winter of 2021. I managed to take the majority of the summer of 2022 on the binding.

2nd Place: Pictorial

Title: Toroweap Overlook Maker: Sandra Mollon Quilter: Sandra Mollon Design Basis: Derived from a photo Toroweap Overlook, in the Grand Canyon National Park, is an incredible view of the Colorado River. When John Slot sent me the photo to consider for an art quilt, I realized the complexity of the amount of the pieces it would require, but knew I had to do it. Raw edge fused, machine quilted, small amounts of media.

3rd Place: Pictorial

Title: Catch it Yuri! Maker: Hiroko Miyama and Masanobu Miyama Quilter: Hiroko Miyama Design Basis: Maker's Original Design Inspired by dogs’ action. Yuri, golden retriever big jumped to catch a ball and Ponta, mix hardly waited his turn. Dogs and girl were fused appliquéd.

Seriously can you believe these are all quilts!!! incredible amazing showstopping spectacular

#I said today's edition but this is in fact the only addition #so far!#might make another one when they put up the winners from this year #which will hopefully be in the next few days #quilting #quiltblr #fiber crafts #fabric art #fiber art #fibercraft #textiles #quilt art #quilt making #quilts #textile art #fibre arts

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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months ago

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The disenshittified internet starts with loyal "user agents"

I'm in TARTU, ESTONIA! Overcoming the Enshittocene (TOMORROW, May 8, 6PM, Prima Vista Literary Festival keynote, University of Tartu Library, Struwe 1). AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

There's one overwhelmingly common mistake that people make about enshittification: assuming that the contagion is the result of the Great Forces of History, or that it is the inevitable end-point of any kind of for-profit online world.

In other words, they class enshittification as an ideological phenomenon, rather than as a material phenomenon. Corporate leaders have always felt the impulse to enshittify their offerings, shifting value from end users, business customers and their own workers to their shareholders. The decades of largely enshittification-free online services were not the product of corporate leaders with better ideas or purer hearts. Those years were the result of constraints on the mediocre sociopaths who would trade our wellbeing and happiness for their own, constraints that forced them to act better than they do today, even if the were not any better:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Corporate leaders' moments of good leadership didn't come from morals, they came from fear. Fear that a competitor would take away a disgruntled customer or worker. Fear that a regulator would punish the company so severely that all gains from cheating would be wiped out. Fear that a rival technology – alternative clients, tracker blockers, third-party mods and plugins – would emerge that permanently severed the company's relationship with their customers. Fears that key workers in their impossible-to-replace workforce would leave for a job somewhere else rather than participate in the enshittification of the services they worked so hard to build:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/#dont-buy-it

When those constraints melted away – thanks to decades of official tolerance for monopolies, which led to regulatory capture and victory over the tech workforce – the same mediocre sociopaths found themselves able to pursue their most enshittificatory impulses without fear.

The effects of this are all around us. In This Is Your Phone On Feminism, the great Maria Farrell describes how audiences at her lectures profess both love for their smartphones and mistrust for them. Farrell says, "We love our phones, but we do not trust them. And love without trust is the definition of an abusive relationship":

https://conversationalist.org/2019/09/13/feminism-explains-our-toxic-relationships-with-our-smartphones/

I (re)discovered this Farrell quote in a paper by Robin Berjon, who recently co-authored a magnificent paper with Farrell entitled "We Need to Rewild the Internet":

https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-rewild-the-internet/

The new Berjon paper is narrower in scope, but still packed with material examples of the way the internet goes wrong and how it can be put right. It's called "The Fiduciary Duties of User Agents":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3827421

In "Fiduciary Duties," Berjon focuses on the technical term "user agent," which is how web browsers are described in formal standards documents. This notion of a "user agent" is a holdover from a more civilized age, when technologists tried to figure out how to build a new digital space where technology served users.

A web browser that's a "user agent" is a comforting thought. An agent's job is to serve you and your interests. When you tell it to fetch a web-page, your agent should figure out how to get that page, make sense of the code that's embedded in, and render the page in a way that represents its best guess of how you'd like the page seen.

For example, the user agent might judge that you'd like it to block ads. More than half of all web users have installed ad-blockers, constituting the largest consumer boycott in human history:

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

Your user agent might judge that the colors on the page are outside your visual range. Maybe you're colorblind, in which case, the user agent could shift the gamut of the colors away from the colors chosen by the page's creator and into a set that suits you better:

https://dankaminsky.com/dankam/

Or maybe you (like me) have a low-vision disability that makes low-contrast type difficult to impossible to read, and maybe the page's creator is a thoughtless dolt who's chosen light grey-on-white type, or maybe they've fallen prey to the absurd urban legend that not-quite-black type is somehow more legible than actual black type:

https://uxplanet.org/basicdesign-never-use-pure-black-in-typography-36138a3327a6

The user agent is loyal to you. Even when you want something the page's creator didn't consider – even when you want something the page's creator violently objects to – your user agent acts on your behalf and delivers your desires, as best as it can.

Now – as Berjon points out – you might not know exactly what you want. Like, you know that you want the privacy guarantees of TLS (the difference between "http" and "https") but not really understand the internal cryptographic mysteries involved. Your user agent might detect evidence of shenanigans indicating that your session isn't secure, and choose not to show you the web-page you requested.

This is only superficially paradoxical. Yes, you asked your browser for a web-page. Yes, the browser defied your request and declined to show you that page. But you also asked your browser to protect you from security defects, and your browser made a judgment call and decided that security trumped delivery of the page. No paradox needed.

But of course, the person who designed your user agent/browser can't anticipate all the ways this contradiction might arise. Like, maybe you're trying to access your own website, and you know that the security problem the browser has detected is the result of your own forgetful failure to renew your site's cryptographic certificate. At that point, you can tell your browser, "Thanks for having my back, pal, but actually this time it's fine. Stand down and show me that webpage."

That's your user agent serving you, too.

User agents can be well-designed or they can be poorly made. The fact that a user agent is designed to act in accord with your desires doesn't mean that it always will. A software agent, like a human agent, is not infallible.

However – and this is the key – if a user agent thwarts your desire due to a fault, that is fundamentally different from a user agent that thwarts your desires because it is designed to serve the interests of someone else, even when that is detrimental to your own interests.

A "faithless" user agent is utterly different from a "clumsy" user agent, and faithless user agents have become the norm. Indeed, as crude early internet clients progressed in sophistication, they grew increasingly treacherous. Most non-browser tools are designed for treachery.

A smart speaker or voice assistant routes all your requests through its manufacturer's servers and uses this to build a nonconsensual surveillance dossier on you. Smart speakers and voice assistants even secretly record your speech and route it to the manufacturer's subcontractors, whether or not you're explicitly interacting with them:

https://www.sciencealert.com/creepy-new-amazon-patent-would-mean-alexa-records-everything-you-say-from-now-on

By design, apps and in-app browsers seek to thwart your preferences regarding surveillance and tracking. An app will even try to figure out if you're using a VPN to obscure your location from its maker, and snitch you out with its guess about your true location.

Mobile phones assign persistent tracking IDs to their owners and transmit them without permission (to its credit, Apple recently switch to an opt-in system for transmitting these IDs) (but to its detriment, Apple offers no opt-out from its own tracking, and actively lies about the very existence of this tracking):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

An Android device running Chrome and sitting inert, with no user interaction, transmits location data to Google every five minutes. This is the "resting heartbeat" of surveillance for an Android device. Ask that device to do any work for you and its pulse quickens, until it is emitting a nearly continuous stream of information about your activities to Google:

https://digitalcontentnext.org/blog/2018/08/21/google-data-collection-research/

These faithless user agents both reflect and enable enshittification. The locked-down nature of the hardware and operating systems for Android and Ios devices means that manufacturers – and their business partners – have an arsenal of legal weapons they can use to block anyone who gives you a tool to modify the device's behavior. These weapons are generically referred to as "IP rights" which are, broadly speaking, the right to control the conduct of a company's critics, customers and competitors:

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

A canny tech company can design their products so that any modification that puts the user's interests above its shareholders is illegal, a violation of its copyright, patent, trademark, trade secrets, contracts, terms of service, nondisclosure, noncompete, most favored nation, or anticircumvention rights. Wrap your product in the right mix of IP, and its faithless betrayals acquire the force of law.

This is – in Jay Freeman's memorable phrase – "felony contempt of business model." While more than half of all web users have installed an ad-blocker, thus overriding the manufacturer's defaults to make their browser a more loyal agent, no app users have modified their apps with ad-blockers.

The first step of making such a blocker, reverse-engineering the app, creates criminal liability under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $500,000 fine. An app is just a web-page skinned in sufficient IP to make it a felony to add an ad-blocker to it (no wonder every company wants to coerce you into using its app, rather than its website).

If you know that increasing the invasiveness of the ads on your web-page could trigger mass installations of ad-blockers by your users, it becomes irrational and self-defeating to ramp up your ads' invasiveness. The possibility of interoperability acts as a constraint on tech bosses' impulse to enshittify their products.

The shift to platforms dominated by treacherous user agents – apps, mobile ecosystems, walled gardens – weakens or removes that constraint. As your ability to discipline your agent so that it serves you wanes, the temptation to turn your user agent against you grows, and enshittification follows.

This has been tacitly understood by technologists since the web's earliest days and has been reaffirmed even as enshittification increased. Berjon quotes extensively from "The Internet Is For End-Users," AKA Internet Architecture Board RFC 8890:

Defining the user agent role in standards also creates a virtuous cycle; it allows multiple implementations, allowing end users to switch between them with relatively low costs (…). This creates an incentive for implementers to consider the users' needs carefully, which are often reflected into the defining standards. The resulting ecosystem has many remaining problems, but a distinguished user agent role provides an opportunity to improve it.

And the W3C's Technical Architecture Group echoes these sentiments in "Web Platform Design Principles," which articulates a "Priority of Constituencies" that is supposed to be central to the W3C's mission:

User needs come before the needs of web page authors, which come before the needs of user agent implementors, which come before the needs of specification writers, which come before theoretical purity.

https://w3ctag.github.io/design-principles/

But the W3C's commitment to faithful agents is contingent on its own members' commitment to these principles. In 2017, the W3C finalized "EME," a standard for blocking mods that interact with streaming videos. Nominally aimed at preventing copyright infringement, EME also prevents users from choosing to add accessibility add-ons that beyond the ones the streaming service permits. These services may support closed captioning and additional narration of visual elements, but they block tools that adapt video for color-blind users or prevent strobe effects that trigger seizures in users with photosensitive epilepsy.

The fight over EME was the most contentious struggle in the W3C's history, in which the organization's leadership had to decide whether to honor the "priority of constituencies" and make a standard that allowed users to override manufacturers, or whether to facilitate the creation of faithless agents specifically designed to thwart users' desires on behalf of manufacturers:

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

This fight was settled in favor of a handful of extremely large and powerful companies, over the objections of a broad collection of smaller firms, nonprofits representing users, academics and other parties agitating for a web built on faithful agents. This coincided with the W3C's operating budget becoming entirely dependent on the very large sums its largest corporate members paid.

W3C membership is on a sliding scale, based on a member's size. Nominally, the W3C is a one-member, one-vote organization, but when a highly concentrated collection of very high-value members flex their muscles, W3C leadership seemingly perceived an existential risk to the organization, and opted to sacrifice the faithfulness of user agents in service to the anti-user priorities of its largest members.

For W3C's largest corporate members, the fight was absolutely worth it. The W3C's EME standard transformed the web, making it impossible to ship a fully featured web-browser without securing permission – and a paid license – from one of the cartel of companies that dominate the internet. In effect, Big Tech used the W3C to secure the right to decide who would compete with them in future, and how:

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

Enshittification arises when the everyday mediocre sociopaths who run tech companies are freed from the constraints that act against them. When the web – and its browsers – were a big, contented, diverse, competitive space, it was harder for tech companies to collude to capture standards bodies like the W3C to secure even more dominance. As the web turned into Tom Eastman's "five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four," that kind of collusion became much easier:

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

In arguing for faithful agents, Berjon associates himself with the group of scholars, regulators and activists who call for user agents to serve as "information fiduciaries." Mostly, information fiduciaries come up in the context of user privacy, with the idea that entities that hold a user's data would have the obligation to put the user's interests ahead of their own. Think of a lawyer's fiduciary duty in respect of their clients, to give advice that reflects the client's best interests, even when that conflicts with the lawyer's own self-interest. For example, a lawyer who believes that settling a case is the best course of action for a client is required to tell them so, even if keeping the case going would generate more billings for the lawyer and their firm.

For a user agent to be faithful, it must be your fiduciary. It must put your interests ahead of the interests of the entity that made it or operates it. Browsers, email clients, and other internet software that served as a fiduciary would do things like automatically blocking tracking (which most email clients don't do, especially webmail clients made by companies like Google, who also sell advertising and tracking).

Berjon contemplates a legally mandated fiduciary duty, citing Lindsey Barrett's "Confiding in Con Men":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3354129

He describes a fiduciary duty as a remedy for the enforcement failures of EU's GDPR, a solidly written, and dismally enforced, privacy law. A legally backstopped duty for agents to be fiduciaries would also help us distinguish good and bad forms of "innovation" – innovation in ways of thwarting a user's will are always bad.

Now, the tech giants insist that they are already fiduciaries, and that when they thwart a user's request, that's more like blocking access to a page where the encryption has been compromised than like HAL9000's "I can't let you do that, Dave." For example, when Louis Barclay created "Unfollow Everything," he (and his enthusiastic users) found that automating the process of unfollowing every account on Facebook made their use of the service significantly better:

https://slate.com/technology/2021/10/facebook-unfollow-everything-cease-desist.html

When Facebook shut the service down with blood-curdling legal threats, they insisted that they were simply protecting users from themselves. Sure, this browser automation tool – which just automatically clicked links on Facebook's own settings pages – seemed to do what the users wanted. But what if the user interface changed? What if so many users added this feature to Facebook without Facebook's permission that they overwhelmed Facebook's (presumably tiny and fragile) servers and crashed the system?

These arguments have lately resurfaced with Ethan Zuckerman and Knight First Amendment Institute's lawsuit to clarify that "Unfollow Everything 2.0" is legal and doesn't violate any of those "felony contempt of business model" laws:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/02/kaiju-v-kaiju/

Sure, Zuckerman seems like a good guy, but what if he makes a mistake and his automation tool does something you don't want? You, the Facebook user, are also a nice guy, but let's face it, you're also a naive dolt and you can't be trusted to make decisions for yourself. Those decisions can only be made by Facebook, whom we can rely upon to exercise its authority wisely.

Other versions of this argument surfaced in the debate over the EU's decision to mandate interoperability for end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging through the Digital Markets Act (DMA), which would let you switch from, say, Whatsapp to Signal and still send messages to your Whatsapp contacts.

There are some good arguments that this could go horribly awry. If it is rushed, or internally sabotaged by the EU's state security services who loathe the privacy that comes from encrypted messaging, it could expose billions of people to serious risks.

But that's not the only argument that DMA opponents made: they also argued that even if interoperable messaging worked perfectly and had no security breaches, it would still be bad for users, because this would make it impossible for tech giants like Meta, Google and Apple to spy on message traffic (if not its content) and identify likely coordinated harassment campaigns. This is literally the identical argument the NSA made in support of its "metadata" mass-surveillance program: "Reading your messages might violate your privacy, but watching your messages doesn't."

This is obvious nonsense, so its proponents need an equally obviously intellectually dishonest way to defend it. When called on the absurdity of "protecting" users by spying on them against their will, they simply shake their heads and say, "You just can't understand the burdens of running a service with hundreds of millions or billions of users, and if I even tried to explain these issues to you, I would divulge secrets that I'm legally and ethically bound to keep. And even if I could tell you, you wouldn't understand, because anyone who doesn't work for a Big Tech company is a naive dolt who can't be trusted to understand how the world works (much like our users)."

Not coincidentally, this is also literally the same argument the NSA makes in support of mass surveillance, and there's a very useful name for it: scalesplaining.

Now, it's totally true that every one of us is capable of lapses in judgment that put us, and the people connected to us, at risk (my own parents gave their genome to the pseudoscience genetic surveillance company 23andme, which means they have my genome, too). A true information fiduciary shouldn't automatically deliver everything the user asks for. When the agent perceives that the user is about to put themselves in harm's way, it should throw up a roadblock and explain the risks to the user.

But the system should also let the user override it.

This is a contentious statement in information security circles. Users can be "socially engineered" (tricked), and even the most sophisticated users are vulnerable to this:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security

The only way to be certain a user won't be tricked into taking a course of action is to forbid that course of action under any circumstances. If there is any means by which a user can flip the "are you very sure?" circuit-breaker back on, then the user can be tricked into using that means.

This is absolutely true. As you read these words, all over the world, vulnerable people are being tricked into speaking the very specific set of directives that cause a suspicious bank-teller to authorize a transfer or cash withdrawal that will result in their life's savings being stolen by a scammer:

https://www.thecut.com/article/amazon-scam-call-ftc-arrest-warrants.html

We keep making it harder for bank customers to make large transfers, but so long as it is possible to make such a transfer, the scammers have the means, motive and opportunity to discover how the process works, and they will go on to trick their victims into invoking that process.

Beyond a certain point, making it harder for bank depositors to harm themselves creates a world in which people who aren't being scammed find it nearly impossible to draw out a lot of cash for an emergency and where scam artists know exactly how to manage the trick. After all, non-scammers only rarely experience emergencies and thus have no opportunity to become practiced in navigating all the anti-fraud checks, while the fraudster gets to run through them several times per day, until they know them even better than the bank staff do.

This is broadly true of any system intended to control users at scale – beyond a certain point, additional security measures are trivially surmounted hurdles for dedicated bad actors and as nearly insurmountable hurdles for their victims:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/como-is-infosec/

At this point, we've had a couple of decades' worth of experience with technological "walled gardens" in which corporate executives get to override their users' decisions about how the system should work, even when that means reaching into the users' own computer and compelling it to thwart the user's desire. The record is inarguable: while companies often use those walls to lock bad guys out of the system, they also use the walls to lock their users in, so that they'll be easy pickings for the tech company that owns the system:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

This is neatly predicted by enshittification's theory of constraints: when a company can override your choices, it will be irresistibly tempted to do so for its own benefit, and to your detriment.

What's more, the mere possibility that you can override the way the system works acts as a disciplining force on corporate executives, forcing them to reckon with your priorities even when these are counter to their shareholders' interests. If Facebook is genuinely worried that an "Unfollow Everything" script will break its servers, it can solve that by giving users an unfollow everything button of its own design. But so long as Facebook can sue anyone who makes an "Unfollow Everything" tool, they have no reason to give their users such a button, because it would give them more control over their Facebook experience, including the controls needed to use Facebook less.

It's been more than 20 years since Seth Schoen and I got a demo of Microsoft's first "trusted computing" system, with its "remote attestations," which would let remote servers demand and receive accurate information about what kind of computer you were using and what software was running on it.

This could be beneficial to the user – you could send a "remote attestation" to a third party you trusted and ask, "Hey, do you think my computer is infected with malicious software?" Since the trusted computing system produced its report on your computer using a sealed, separate processor that the user couldn't directly interact with, any malicious code you were infected with would not be able to forge this attestation.

But this remote attestation feature could also be used to allow Microsoft to block you from opening a Word document with Libreoffice, Apple Pages, or Google Docs, or it could be used to allow a website to refuse to send you pages if you were running an ad-blocker. In other words, it could transform your information fiduciary into a faithless agent.

Seth proposed an answer to this: "owner override," a hardware switch that would allow you to force your computer to lie on your behalf, when that was beneficial to you, for example, by insisting that you were using Microsoft Word to open a document when you were really using Apple Pages:

https://web.archive.org/web/20021004125515/http://vitanuova.loyalty.org/2002-07-05.html

Seth wasn't naive. He knew that such a system could be exploited by scammers and used to harm users. But Seth calculated – correctly! – that the risks of having a key to let yourself out of the walled garden were less than being stuck in a walled garden where some corporate executive got to decide whether and when you could leave.

Tech executives never stopped questing after a way to turn your user agent from a fiduciary into a traitor. Last year, Google toyed with the idea of adding remote attestation to web browsers, which would let services refuse to interact with you if they thought you were using an ad blocker:

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

The reasoning for this was incredible: by adding remote attestation to browsers, they'd be creating "feature parity" with apps – that is, they'd be making it as practical for your browser to betray you as it is for your apps to do so (note that this is the same justification that the W3C gave for creating EME, the treacherous user agent in your browser – "streaming services won't allow you to access movies with your browser unless your browser is as enshittifiable and authoritarian as an app").

Technologists who work for giant tech companies can come up with endless scalesplaining explanations for why their bosses, and not you, should decide how your computer works. They're wrong. Your computer should do what you tell it to do:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/08/your-computer-should-say-what-you-tell-it-say-1

These people can kid themselves that they're only taking away your power and handing it to their boss because they have your best interests at heart. As Upton Sinclair told us, it's impossible to get someone to understand something when their paycheck depends on them not understanding it.

The only way to get a tech boss to consistently treat you well is to ensure that if they stop, you can quit. Anything less is a one-way ticket to enshittification.

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/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

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

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

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