#subscription addict online

[bitchfendi]

pop tap beat doesnt update frequently enough and the arcade at my mall took the taiko machine away i need taiko web back NOW

[tieronecrush]

BNBG (brand new baby girl)

frankie morales x curvy OF/cam girl f!reader

summary: frankie has been needing distractions from a hurdle in his sobriety, so he ventures to his frequented subscription service platform to take his mind off things. he sees the title of your page, intrigued immediately, and dives deep into your content. catching your attention on a livestream with his confident commands, frankie becomes infatuated with you and an avid viewer before he decides to DM you one day...and then ends up with a brand new baby girl.

wc: 11k

rating: E (very)

warnings: daddy kink!! **cover does not depict anything about the reader, simply vibes of softness**, vague descriptions of reader's body (plush, thick, curves, soft, etc. no definite descriptors used otherwise. picture her as you want but she is mid to plus size in my head 🫶), no age specified (only that reader started out of college, no specifications of when she went to school), discussions of addiction & drug use, childless frankie au, sex work, sex livestream, consumption of porn, unestablished relationship, online relationship, pet names (conejita, baby, babygirl, pequeña, bunny, etc.), gratuitous descriptions of frankie's dick, SMUT, male masturbation, female masterbation, sex toys, both frankie & reader have thoughts about the other (unprotected piv, fingering, oral, etc.), major dirty talk, d/s dynamics, some fluff sprinkled in <3, this might be lowkey problematic that frankie uses porn to cope (esp reader's porn) buuuuut hopefully it's hot

a/n: cover design & dividers by me 💋 this is an unhinged daydream of mine, hope y'all enjoy! huge thank you to my besties @kiwisbell and @northernbluess for beta-reading 💓

The time on Frankie’s phone screen turns over to well past midnight. Bedroom pitched black save for the blue light illuminating his face as he scrolls on Instagram, unable to fall asleep from thoughts stirring. He wants to scratch the itch — to pick at the scab that’s been growing in his brain for over a year. Temptation runs hot in his veins. A craving, deep in his gut. A strong inhale or the rub of his fingertip against his gums. It would be fast.  And it would only last less than half an hour — he could manage it one more time, he was sober enough for that, wasn’t he? He indulges himself in other aspects now: drinking, food, lax with his once regimented workout routine.

Frankie can hear the voice of his sponsor, the one he listens to speak at his weekly meetings in the musty church hall. Sure, his sponsor’s got valuable advice for him, having been sober for decades now, but he can’t relate to Frankie. Not really. He doesn’t know the level of temptation he’s consistently faced with, doesn’t know the fucked up shit he’s seen that got him into the substance in the first place.

His sponsor tells him to get into meditation. That it helps him turn his brain off when he has a craving, redirecting the energy into himself and crushing the aching want for it. Or some spiritual bullshit that Frankie doesn’t understand.

And besides, he’s found his own means of meditation.

Exiting the social media app, he opens his browser and types in the website. The light of the phone illuminates his face enough for his saved login to work, bringing him into his plane of piety. Where he escapes at least three times a week, late nights like now and the occasional mid-afternoon or morning on his desperate days off. When the urge is too strong. When he’s formulating a plan of how to get his hands on a tiny baggie, he loses himself — distracts his brain here.

Scrolling through his usual subscriptions, nothing seems to be hitting the spot. One hand grips his phone, thumb gliding along the screen, while the other cups his hard-on through his boxers, palming himself as he searches for something to get off to.

That’s when he sees it — the perfect combination of words that draws him in by the title. Clicking the page, he’s quick to pledge his monthly amount, eager to get access to all that lies beyond the paywall. And what he’s greeted with, pulls a sigh from his lips in the quiet room, his large hand squeezing his cock through the thin fabric elasticated around his waist. 

“Fuck…” he mumbles to himself when he sees that there’s a live stream happening. A cosmic intervention for him, he thinks, a sign that he’s meant to satiate his vices with this.

With you.

The screen changes to a vertical view of you in front of the camera, iPhone seemingly propped up against something while you sit on your mattress. It’s so…delicate and soft. Those are the words he can think of to describe the backdrop that he takes in quickly. Billowing white comforter on your bed, pillows surrounding you. The first thought he has is that it looks like a bed he could easily sleep in — much more inviting than his. There are touches of blush pink, sky blue, and more. A complete rainbow of desaturated colors.

It all compliments you. Centered in the frame, the next sound you make drags his eyes back to your form as you move around. Another squeeze to his cock draws a longer sigh from his lips as he combs across the view of your body, scantily clad in a thong and a bra covered in cherries. The cups of the bra push up the weight of your breasts, spilling over the edge. His tongue runs across his lips to wet them, a new craving ravaging his mouth as he wonders what you would taste like with the skin of your tits dampened by his saliva.

The rest of your body is as softly lined and curving as your chest, waist swooping into your hips as you sit on your knees in front of the camera. Thick thighs spread with the press of your calves into the back of them, the inside of them meeting at the apex and providing cover for what he so badly wants to be shown. There’s a line of your stomach above the waist of your panties, supple skin glistening. Delicious, is all he can think to himself. You look so fucking delicious that it floods his mouth with saliva, enough that he feels the overwhelming need to push his boxers down, freeing his hard cock to rest against his stomach until he’s spitting into his palm and starting a slow, languid pace.

The grain of his palm drags against the length of his cock as he keeps a steady flick of his wrist. Not too fast, but not achingly slow. Enough to start stoking the burning coals in the pit of his stomach as he watches you on the small rectangular screen. Puffs of hot air leave his mouth, his jaw hanging open while he watches you shift to reach for something out of frame, the first look at your ass gifted to him. Rounded swell of curves with the fabric of your thong dipping between them. The slight jiggle of your cheeks makes Frankie moan quietly, taking the briefest moment to picture that same ripple in your skin from him fucking you from behind.

“Shit…” he grumbles under his breath, minorly increasing the pressure of his grip to squeeze his cock as his hand moves, desperate to mimic the feeling of someone — apparently you, despite not knowing anything close to your name.

Skin on skin catches on the base of his dick and he exhales sharply with his teeth bared, opening his palm to spit once again. It’s not enough, but he continues the slide of his wrist as he sets his phone down on the mattress briefly, reaching over to his nightstand, pausing once again to dispense a pump of lotion into the palm of his right hand. Wrapping the moistened hand around his cock again, he starts a faster pace before slowing down to drag out his pleasure longer.

Returning into the frame fully, he sees your face for the first time and coughs as his open-mouthed inhale seizes in his throat. His fingers circle the base of his cock, squeezing hard as he takes in your face. Perfectly primped with a layer of makeup, but he can tell you’ve got the kind of beauty that wouldn’t ever need changing or enhancing — effortless. Velvety skin, as silky as the rest of your body but with an added glow. Bright eyes that are shining with mischief and want, and a smirk that’s as playful; he finds himself shutting his eyes again, for a few lazy strokes as he pictures that face, and your plush, pliable body, on your knees in front of him. Eagerly awaiting his cock to fill your mouth.

Fuck, you’re really doing a number on him tonight. He needed this. His desperation for a high of any kind coats his open mouth with each labored breath.

Focused back on his phone, you show off the treasure that you dug for off-camera. A lilac vibrator, one that fits the length of your hand, with a swell of size rounded off at the tip and tapered in at the end. Leaning closer to your camera, Frankie groans when your tits bounce, spilling out of your bra with a tiny nip slip that he catches immediately. And it only makes him want to see more.

“Mm, c’mon, pretty girl, show me something here. M’fuckin’ dying…Necesito la distracción (I need the distraction),” Frankie speaks toward the screen, feeling pathetic as he barters with you in the one-way system.

As if you heard his pleas, you adjust your position, laying back on the mountain of pillows to prop yourself up and letting one leg fall open. Even in the lowered lighting of the room you’re in, presumably your bedroom, he can make out the wet patch covering your folds. He finds himself wondering if the act of getting off in front of a camera, in front of people watching live, is what gets you wet. Or if you have a fluffer like he’s heard they do in porn.

He’d wanna be your fluffer.

Or maybe he’d want to be the one to fuck you in the porno. At least both of you’d get to finish then.

“Think I need someone who knows better than me to tell me what they wanna see.” Your voice is saccharine, the slight fry in your voice jolts his hips into his hand, mumbles of curses slipping from his lips. “Anybody have any suggestions for me, chat?”

A low hum starts when you press the button of the vibrator in your hand, spreading your knees further to open your core to the view of the camera completely. Your opposite hand to the toy hooks into the crotch of your thong, pulling the small bit of fabric, practically a string with the amount it’s covering.

Frankie’s mouth waters as the speed of his hand picks up, the grip of his fingers not nearly as satisfying as the clench of a pussy, but he’ll make do. He has been for a year; you know what they say, no relationships for the first year sober. That, and he couldn’t find anyone that could take his mind off of coke long enough for him to get it up. So eventually he just let it be.

Now, though, he’s painfully hard. The quick movements of his hand send a shock of pleasure up to his brain, veins contracting with the extra effort to keep the blood supply to his cock. Thumb brushes over his tip, mixing in his precum with the other lubrication, a hiss from behind his teeth shot out from the stimulation. His gaze is glued onto his rectangular screen, huffing out deep breaths while you press the vibrator against your clit. There’s a quiver in your thighs that he notices, as if this is your first touch after teasing yourself, or someone else teasing you. Sensitive already.

Biting your lip, your eyes scan the screen as you read aloud, “FiveFingersAtFreddys said ‘Take your bra off please.’ Well, actually he said ‘Take your tits out’ but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, dude, and say that you actually do have good manners.”

He laughs, and it’s a first for him. Laughing at someone’s jokes as he jerks off, alone.

You comply with the request, taking the vibrator away from your clit to reach around and unclasp your bra. Tossing the material aside, you lean back into the pillows again and the next sight nearly makes Frankie come right then and there until he takes his hand away completely. Laid out, legs open and fingers pulling your panties aside, vibrator pushing into your clit and driving a high-pitched moan from your lips. All while you're bare from the waist up, cushioned torso melting into your heavy tits, pert nipples bringing them to a point. The form of a Greek classics statue, one with fleshy outlines carved impeccably from marble.

“La obra maestra (A masterpiece)…” Frankie whispers to himself, the squelch of his lotioned hand working his hard length bringing him back into his body, a moan slipping from his mouth.

“I think I need someone else to tell me how I should play with myself. M’so wet, jus’ wanna touch myself but I don’t know where to start. All seems like—like it’s going to feel so good,” you stutter out when your hips buck against the vibrator, a whimper echoing from your chest as you turn your attention to the chat again, awaiting intriguing instructions.

Maybe it’s sexual frustration, maybe it’s pathetic. Maybe it’s the intense fucking craving to replace his need for coke high with a need for an orgasm, but for whatever reason chosen, Frankie finds himself clicking on the comment box with his thumb, typing wildly with one finger. He takes a second to read it for spelling errors before he presses send. Too lost in it all now to care.

Your eyes perk up, smirk growing on your face when you read the influx of chat replies. One must have caught your eye because the vibrator is being left to the side again. Fingers hook into the waist of your panties, slowly pulling them off as you read aloud the comment that caught your attention.

“There’s a new name I see here…Maybe we should do what you want, Mr. FlyingFish. Consider it a welcome gift from me to you.” His heart is pounding in his chest, hand gripping tighter and twisting around his dick as he fucks his fist, mumbles of curses spilling out as he listens to you repeat what he desperately typed not a minute prior. It sounds dirtier coming from you, despite his best efforts at politeness, “You said ‘Please show off how many of your little fingers fit into your pretty pussy. Think a pretty girl like you deserves to fuck her fingers…’ Alright, FlyingFish, you’ve got me blushin’ from that request and that is difficult to do, sir. Thank you for calling me a pretty girl. I promise I’m smart, too. I’ll be sure to count ‘em for you.”

One finger slips into your dripping entrance easily, the other hand reaching for the vibrator and replacing it at your clit while your finger starts to fuck shallowly, “One finger…”

Whines of frustration crack over his small speakers before a bigger moan falls from your lips, a second finger slid into you alongside the first, “Oh, fuck…That’s two. Mm, how am I doin’? FlyingFish, d’you think I can get another?”

Frankie’s wrist flicks rapidly now, the direct address to him driving him mad as the sounds of his arm slapping against his stomach and thigh clap in his room and cut into the sounds your pussy is making as you get yourself off. He types as quickly as he can, strings of curses flowing from his mouth as the heat of his desire burns red hot inside of him. He’s so fucking close but he wants to watch you fall apart at the same time. Wants to be the reason you come.

“Oh, shit—you’ve got a mouth, FlyingFish. ‘I’d hope you can take another, otherwise, you couldn’t take my cock.’ Is that a promise, Fish? You saying you got a big dick for me to take?” 

You whimper and he’s edging himself, squeezing hard to stay together when you inadvertently use his call sign. The closest thing you have to his name, and all he can think about is you screaming it while he’s fucking you. He wants to tell you it’s a promise only if you follow through, indulging in the fantasy of actually getting to touch you only for a moment. But instead, his attention is completely drawn to a third finger stretching your cunt in full view of the camera, your wanton moans popping in his speakers and driving his forearm to burn with the strain of muscle as he attempts to fist his cock even harder.

“Fuckfuckfuck…Come for me, baby, please fucking come on those fingers,” he begs no one but himself, a blinding white heat licking the entire inside of his body as he balances on the edge. Waiting for you to fall first.

“Oh my god, fuck…” The last word is drawn out, pitching up at the end as your fingers fuck faster, squelching sounds of your wetness flooding his mouth as his brain pleads for a taste of your cunt. “I don’t think—I don’t think I can get a fourth. M’gonna fucking come—ah! Oh, fuck me, Fish…”

You barely whisper his name, or at least what is his name to you, but it’s singlehandedly what punches out his guttural moan, ropes of warm, sticking spend coating his hand as he keeps moving and spilling onto his stomach. It’s prolonged, the tension in his calves relaxing after he spills the most come he has in a while.

Airy, light, a rush of blood back to his head has his whole body tingling with a high. Satiating his cravings from earlier, dissolving the want, the need, for anything of the sort. Instead, it’s replaced with thoughts of you — the image of you laying fucked out on his phone, adding his own touch of imagination when he closes his eyes to see you as you are but covered with his come the same way he is. Normally, this is when the smallest bit of shame crawls up his spine and sits at the nape of his neck, but instead, he melts into warmth. Faced with your smile as you sit up and lean over toward the camera again, laughing to yourself as you end the live.

“Um, if you’re still here, thanks for that FlyingFish. Felt fucking good…And to everyone else, I’ll stream again on Monday night, same time as always. Night, everyone. Have a good weekend.” All he hears before the sound cuts out is your excited giggles, the brightness of your post-orgasm joy stretching a smile across your face. He’s faced with a black screen, staring back at himself in the reflection with the shit-eating, smug grin he has on his face.

Now he’s got plans for Monday night.

Frankie hasn’t been able to get you out of his head. He’s hooked. Images of your sloping curves flash behind his eyes on the days when you’re not available to watch, his hips fucking his fist in bed, the shower, even on his couch with the blinds all open because he was that needy. Thoughts of you replaced his thoughts of the white powder, chasing after the different high he’s gifted by your voice, your body — all through a screen.

He’s caught himself rasping affections as he pictures you, hissed compliments as he comes and imagining what he’d say if you were in front of him. Letting him use your mouth or your cunt. He’s even gotten into a habit of imagining his head between your legs; the hardest he came is the one time he pictured you sitting on his face and all of the pretty sounds you’d make for him. Fuck, cariño, that’s so good. Mm, bonita, you’re such a good girl. Love doin’ what you’re told, don’t you, baby?

The fact that he doesn’t even know your name but is this infatuated isn’t lost on him. He knows he has an addictive personality, but this feels different. Like he was meant to find you for some reason. His sponsor would tell him it’s a call from the universe that this is all part of his ‘journey to sobriety’, but really, he just thinks that you’re fucking hot. And the tiniest part of him thinks you might like him watching too, even though you have no idea who he is.

Each time he watches you live, his thumb taps across the keyboard, responding to your requests and even adding in some encouragement. Virtually having conversations with you, he quickly became a frequent flyer (your joke, not his). You listen to him. Like the sweet girl that you are. Taking his suggestions — his demands when you beg — and showing off for him, a whimpering mess when he’s done with you.

At times, it feels like he’s the only one watching, or at least the only one that matters to you. With the amount of times his username falls from your lips, it’s easy to fall into a bubble of you and him. You’ve picked up the habit of referring to him as ‘Fish’ and it’s driven him mad, the closest thing to his name that he’ll hear you say. You give him material to think back about for days after. I love a man that knows what he wants, Fish. You can boss me around, Fishie. I always know what you tell me to do is gonna feel so fucking good.

All of this over the last few weeks has built up his courage, which is why he finds himself sitting on his couch with your profile open, the sun barely set outside. A random baseball game plays on his TV, but his focus is completely on his phone, writing and deleting a DM to you about ten times.

It has to be right. Friendly, but not stalker-ish. Flirty, but not creepy. Commanding enough to get your attention among what he imagines are countless messages in your inbox.

After another good ten minutes drafting a message, his thumb hovers over the ‘Send’ button for a few seconds. Squeezing his eyes closed, he lowers his finger and hits the button, anxiety washing over him as he opens his eyes to stare at the blue bubble.

No going back now.

Standing at the stove, water boils over the side of the pot while you pour in the uncooked pasta noodles. A few drops hit your skin, mumbles of curses leaving your lips, “Fucking shit!”

You stir the pasta before reaching for the nearest kitchen towel to wipe the once-scalding water off of your hand. A deep sigh exhales, relaxing your shoulders as the ding of a notification draws your attention to your phone lying on the marble countertop next to you.

What you find on your lock screen sends a shock of excitement down your spine, the warmth of anticipation radiating around your body to tingle your fingers and toes.

[Direct Message:] FlyingFish

Quick to swipe up, the device unlocks with a scan of your face and opens a new notification when you click on it with your thumb. Subconsciously, your opposite thumb has ended up between your teeth, biting down on the skin as you hold back an eager grin while you wait for his message to load.

You’ve never had this reaction to a message before, actually, it was usually the opposite. Rolling your eyes, ignoring the men until the last moment. Only responding to keep them enticed and subscribed — all of which keeps more money in your pocket. That’s really why you started this whole thing anyway.

FlyingFish:

Hey

A puff of air exhales through your nose, a chuckle cutting the otherwise silent kitchen. Shaking your head to yourself, you can’t help but smile at your screen. Heartbeat fluttering, you internally kick yourself for having such a reaction to such a simple message. Not even knowing who this person is, you find yourself typing back a response.

Hey there Fish

Guess I never actually asked if I could call you that

You turn back to your task at hand, continuing to cook your dinner and attempting to put out of your mind all of your assumptions about this person messaging you. You’d guess it’s a guy, an educated inference based on the demographics of your audience, but everything else is a complete mystery. The one time he insinuated he had a big dick stuck in your mind, and based on his behavior, you’d like to assume he isn’t lying. An image of a man sticks out to you each time you whimper his nickname, on camera and that handful of times off camera and alone: tall, solid, and strong. Brunette, only because that’s your type. Rough hands and commanding touches. Someone to bend your stubborn will into submission. He’s confident, at least through the chat, and he seems to know what he’s talking about. Each time you see his username pop up, you can feel yourself start to get wetter. Since you started this whole gig, there hasn’t been anyone quite like him. It’s always people asking for more for them — Show us your tits. Say my name. Turn around so we can see your ass.

But with him, it’s the opposite. He asks for more for you, which you guess is what he gets off to, not that you mind. Bet one more finger would feel even better for you, baby. Curl your fingers, cariño. You reaching that special spot? Gotta get deeper for me, baby. Rub slower, drag it out. Promise it’ll be even sweeter at the end. 

Always polite but stern in his demands. Never too much, mostly not enough for your taste. He’s built up an appetite in you that you haven’t had before, a desire to please and to be good for him. All of it doesn’t feel like performing when he’s telling you what to do, it feels like he’s there, deep rasp in your ears as you picture thick fingers in place of yours and tight grips on your plush curves. Fingerprint-shaped bruises left behind and sore muscles in your thighs from holding yourself up as he asks you to come for him over and over and over.

A vibration against the hard surface of the countertop refocuses your gaze from a thousand yards away. Turning to grab your cell, you rub your thighs together in hopes of relenting the ache between them from your daydreams. Wet panties get caught in your folds, discomfort only momentary before you lean over the counter and open your legs, reading the mystery man’s response.

You can call me anything you want bonita

But I will tell you that Fish is pretty close to my name

Fish is close to your name?

What is it? Bass? Salmon? Trout?

Funny

Fish is short for Catfish which was my call sign with my Special Ops team

Ahhh a military man. You know I like a man in uniform

Oh really? :)

Don’t wear it anymore but does it still count if I was once a man in uniform?

Hmm

:( please?

I wanna be liked by you

Showing your cards there Fishie

Not trying to play it cool?

Once you get to know me baby you’ll come to find out that me and cool don’t really go together.

I doubt that’s true

So Catfish is your call sign? Who came up with that?

My buddies on my team

Said I couldn’t grow a beard for shit and that it looked like I had whiskers

So Catfish

Well I don’t wanna call you Fish if it’s mean like that :(

What’s your real name? If you wanna tell me

Are you gonna sell my identity and let someone tank my credit score?

Never

It wouldn’t benefit me much if your card gets declined every month

I appreciate the honesty baby haha

My name’s Frankie

I like your name Frankie :)

It’s nearly an hour of messaging back and forth, flirting intermingled with genuine curiosity about the other’s life, history and background. Frankie learns that you were struggling to find a job straight out of university and needed to make rent, so you figured it couldn’t hurt to try out selling content. You detailed briefly the time that you grew your following, telling him about your Instagram too, which he follows in that instant. The notification makes you laugh and you follow him back despite the profile being completely empty of any information besides his name. Not even a profile picture. He learns that you don’t speak much to your parents anymore, that your siblings live across the country so you don’t get to see them much.

He tells you about his family — no siblings, parents that live in another part of the state and refuse to visit him in the city — and his chosen family, the Special Ops guys. Laughter hiccups from your chest when he recalls a few of the better stories from them, telling you about each other them as if he was preparing you to actually meet them. He has that thought, briefly, about all of you out for drinks. How they would probably like you as much as he does; your charm and sincerity would hook them all just as it has for him. Frankie tells you all about his current hobby, fixing up an old, cherry red 1978 Jeep Cherokee. How the only other time he spends online is searching for car parts, watching Youtube as he works on the vehicle in his garage.

You make a cheeky comment that he must be good with his hands before sending another message immediately:

Would you wanna actually talk? Like on Facetime maybe

Frankie stares at the message, blinking slowly as if it will disappear. You’re asking to talk to him? Shouldn’t it be the other way around? I mean, if he knew that was an option he would have asked himself…

He wouldn’t and he knows he wouldn’t based on the way his stomach has dropped to his feet, his hands have gone clammy and his throat tightened. Swallowing hard, he whispers a small pep talk to himself to work up the nerve to say yes. He wants to see you, he always wants to see more of you, but the fact that you’d see him as well…he can’t cope.

Heat trickles across the back of his neck and up his cheeks, thumbs hovering over the keyboard as his brain completely wipes any thought to respond. Dropping his phone into his lap, both of his hands reach up, one grabbing the brim of his cap and lifting it from his head while the other runs through his hair to push it back away from his face. In the corner of his eye, he catches his left knee bouncing. Lips press together in a thin line, rolling the flesh between his teeth before he picks up his phone again and sends a message back to you with just his phone number.

Not even a minute later, his screen lights up with a list of digits strung together in an unfamiliar order. As if it were possible, he felt his stomach drop lower than his feet, deep into the ground below and burrowing away along with his confidence.

Shit, this was a stupid idea. He’s going to make a fool of himself and you’ll lose interest and he’ll have to think about you every day for the rest of his life and wonder what you’re doing, how you’re doing, even what your name is—

Fuck, he’s gonna miss the call.

Frankie decides that it is much more embarrassing to miss the call he just sent his phone number for than to potentially come off as uncool, so his finger swipes to the right to answer. Quickly, he turns off his camera before you notice, opting for the level of anonymity to remain.

“Hi, Frankie…” Your candied voice drips with sweetness around his name. He’s been imagining you saying it, trying to get it right in his mind over the past few weeks, but hearing it now he relishes in the fact that none of them were right. None of them sounded like spun sugar, like it did just now.

You fill the frame from your shoulders up, the same bright smile on your face that he’s seen at the end of each live, after he’s had his fun with you, but looking completely different out of that context. It’s a bit shy, demure in the way you're resting in your bed against your pillows, t-shirt on and fresh-faced. You look beautiful. And it makes him feel a bit silly that you can’t see his reaction.

“Hey, bonita. M’sorry I don’t have my camera on, jus’ nervous. Didn’t want you to hang up right away gettin’ a look at this mug,” he says with self-deprecating laughter at the end, watching as your brows knit together with a pout on your lips.

“You don’t have to apologize, Frankie. M’happy to do whatever you’re comfortable with. Besides, if your voice gives me any indication of your looks, you’d probably be making me way more nervous.” Teeth bite into your bottom lip as you hold in a grin, a hand coming into view to nudge at your nose. He’s seen you do it a few times on live, whenever you’re waiting in anticipation. For him, he’d like to think.

“Oh, yeah? Why’s that?” he teases, the smirk playing at his face evident in his flirty tone.

“You jus’ sound…nice.”

“Nice? That’s all? Why would that make you nervous, baby?”

A sigh slips from your lips, rolling your head back as he hears the smallest whine from you. His cock jumps in his sweats, already half hard from the flirty back and forth in your messages.

“God, you’re going to be a problem with all those pet names,” you say exasperated. Frankie laughs at his screen, feeling like an idiot sitting here alone and smiling like a fool. You’re cute when you’re mad.

“You can tell me your name and I can use that instead?” he propositions, licking his lips as he awaits the piece of information he’s been chomping at the bit to have.

“No! I mean, I’ll tell you my name, but…I like the nicknames. Keep them. Please.” Your words scramble out and it makes him grin wider, witnessing you as nervous as he’s feeling. When you give him your name, he repeats it a few times, rolling it around in his mouth, tasting the syllables on his tongue. Delicate, floral, sweet but a slight tang. Smooth as it rolls across his vocal cords, soothing the rising heat he’s feeling with a refreshing chill. Like peaches and cream.

The two of you chat back and forth for a while, pride swelling in his chest when you laugh at his stupid jokes or give him a compliment, despite being none-the-wiser to his looks. He’s quick to make you blush with his comments, telling you how beautiful he thinks you are. And Frankie��s thanking himself for keeping his camera off, because at times during the call, his eyes drift to your chest, blatantly staring at your perked up nipples through the thin fabric of your t-shirt. It grows his hard on, the softness of your breasts bouncing around as you restlessly squirm during the call enticing him to picture getting his mouth on them. He’d guess you’d taste the same as your name.

The next time you move, he watches your chest again before a sight in the background catches his eye, drawing a chuckle from his mouth. A stuffed bunny lays next to you in your bed, messy with age and love. A soft pink color with a red ribbon tied around its neck, he finds the need to ask about it prodding in his mind.

“Is that who films everything for you?” he jokes, watching your face twist with confusion before looking to your side and bursting out in a laugh. Returning your eyes to the camera, you shake your head timidly.

“No, unfortunately he’s pretty limited to cuddling.”

“He? Didn’t know you had a man in your life, baby. Feels like we shouldn’t be talking like this in front of him.” The sound of your laughter quickens his pulse, the melody trilling in his ears with comfort.

“Well, I guess if you could offer me more than cuddling, he could be demoted.”

“I think I can offer more, Conejita.” Frankie watches as something akin to excitement, but burning brighter, flashes in your eyes. You sit up more, one eyebrow raising in challenge.

“What could you offer me, Frankie?” It’s a loaded question. He could be polite, steer the conversation away from where he so desperately wants it to go, to be a gentleman. It would be easy to make a joke, to get you both to move on.

But he always wants to see where this could go. You’re the one who wanted to talk on the phone in the first place. And he would never suggest anything to make you uncomfortable, and he thinks that you know that. It’s like what the two of you do in your lives — a conversation, a back and forth that may end up benefitting both of you.

“Depends on what you’re lookin’ for, Conejita. I’m a man of many talents.” The words are slick on his tongue, silvery with enticement.

“Hm…” you ponder out loud, tapping your index finger against your bottom lip before turning back to the camera, “Can you cook?”

“Decently. Can’t claim I’m a chef, but I feed myself. And m’pretty good at a grill and makin’ some of my mamá’s recipes. Insisted on teaching them to me so they didn’t end with her.”

Grinning warmly, he feels his heartbeat kick up against his chest, thumping hard at the sight of you giving him that look. “That’s so sweet that she taught you. You can teach me, then someone else in the world will know her recipes too.”

Christ, you’re so fucking adorable. He doesn’t know what he wants more in the moment: to keep talking and simply listen to your voice, or to flirt his way into something more.

“She might be a better teacher than me, baby. Would probably be over the moon if you asked to learn since she had to force me a bit,” he laughs along with your quiet giggle, taking a deep breath when you bite down on your bottom lip.

“Are you a good teacher of other things?”

“I’d like to think so. Haven’t I taught you new things already, Conejita?”

There goes his heartbeat when you look away from the camera, smirk lifting your cheekbones as your demeanor goes shy, shrugging your shoulders as you lay back again, shifting to get comfortable.

“You have…And now I’ve learned how sexy your voice is, too. I’ll be picturing everything you type now to be said in your voice.”

Frankie breathes out a chuckle, a heat burning the nap of his neck, trickling down his back. He feels the effects of his blood rushing below his belt, ever-so-slightly lightheaded as he quietly palms his bulge in his sweatpants.

“My voice is sexy?”

“Um, duh. Are you kidding me? You sound all…rugged and raspy and deep. Like you could manhandle me easily,” you admit your thoughts easily, and he sighs quietly at the thought of having you in front of him to throw around his bed and mold you into the positions he dreams of getting you into.

“No tienes ni idea de lo que haría contigo (You've got no idea what I would do with you)...” he mumbles under his breath, hearing a soft whimper from you. One of your arms is slung across your front, pressing your breast into the other and he can take a guess as to what your hand is up to. “You want some help, baby? I bet you’re jus’ feeling so needy, aren’t you? Listening to my voice got you that worked up?”

“Mhmm…I need it, Frankie…” Your voice has the edge of a whine and he exhales slowly as he hears you beg for him. Not his call sign or a username. His name. Him. There’s no one else who’s making you feel this way, no one else striving for attention.

He pushes his pants down, pulling his hard cock out to start slowly stroking. You’ve left him aching, dripping precum that his fingers smear around his length to lubricate as he moves up and down in a teasing pace.

“Use your manners, Conejita. What d’you say?”

“Please. Please, Frankie. I wanna hear your voice, I want you to tell me what to do.” He hisses from behind his teeth as he squeezes his cock at the base, leaning his head back against his headboard before his focus zeroes in on you on his screen, asking for his guidance, his control to get you off. No one else privy to the sights he’s seeing.

“Good girl. Such a good girl for me, baby. Why don’t you take off your shirt for me? Let me see you, bonita.” Wetting his lips with his tongue when you move to prop your phone up on your mattress, an expert at framing yourself perfectly. The thin, worn fabric of your sleep shirt slips over your head, leaving you on full display for him — already pantyless. Whether you started the call with any on is a mystery to him, but now, he settles back to tell you exactly what he wants from you…what he knows will feel good for his conejita.

“Okay, bunny, lean back for me…That’s it, get comfortable. Good girl.” Looking into your camera to your side, a nervous smile plays at your lips, shyness overcoming you as you wait with bated breath for Frankie, who’s still a mystery to you, to instruct you. It’s driving him mad, how trusting you are of him without ever seeing his face. Such a sweet girl. His sweet girl.

“Show me how you like to play when no one’s watching.”

When his phone dings one evening a few weeks later, Frankie pulls himself out from under the hood of his project car. A familiar fizz bubbles over his body, a Pavlovian response that’s been built over the last few weeks he’s been talking to you. There have been text chains, full of flirty sincerity, and more phone calls, all with his camera off but not all ending like that first one. There have been times when the two of you have had long conversations, full of laughter and learning about the other. A few calls have ended with you falling asleep, stuffed bunny tucked under your chin and pillowy lips parted slightly with deep, even breaths.

Admittedly, he’s grown attached. Maybe a bit much for…whatever this relationship or friendship is, but he can’t help the teenage giddiness he’s felt with every text chime, ringtone, or dial that he’s found you on the other end of.

He’s got a crush.

So immediately at the peal of his cell, he’s reaching for the rag on his workbench, wiping his hands clean of grease before reading over your message.

Conejita:

Hiii 😚

Are you busy?​

Grinning like a fool at the gray bubble, Frankie begins to type out a response before abandoning the message and clicking the phone button at the top of your name instead. Pressing the speaker to his ear, he runs a thumb across his bottom lip while he listens to the trill of the dial tone. Steps pace him across the garage, counting them in his head as he waits for an answer.

“Hey, stranger.” The line clicks on and your voice immediately draws a smile across Frankie’s face, hearing one of yours in your upbeat tone.

“Hey, Conejita. What’s up with you?” Even your presence over the phone calms his nerves, sparking kindling low in his gut that spreads down to his toes and up to the back of his neck. Frankie tucks his phone between his ear and shoulder as he wanders back over to the carhood, shutting it carefully. He retreats inside, washing his hands as he listens to you recount your day.

“...So then I got pissed off and left ‘cause she was being so unreasonable. And then I wanted to talk to you ‘cause, I dunno.” The intensity in your cadence slows down toward the tailend of your story of an argument with a friend of yours; Frankie chuckles, biting his tongue while you sigh deeply and he dries his hands off on a kitchen towel.

“You don’t know why you wanted to talk to me? Don’t get all shy on me now, cariño,” he teases you, receiving a frustrated huff on the other end. “Well, for what it’s worth, I agree with you. She sounds like she has a stick up her ass. And m’glad you wanted to call me, Conejita.”

“D’you wanna switch to Facetime?”

“‘Course, I do. Always wanna see your face, jus’ one sec…” Frankie climbs his stairs two at a time, reaching the landing as his screen lights up with the Facetime request from you. He answers it, camera off, while he changes out of dirty clothes and listens to you chatting about plans for the weekend. He mentions going out with the guys tomorrow night, and you make a jest that gets him laughing, both of you bantering back and forth before he settles back on his bed.

“Y’know, I am content to chat with you like this, Frankie. But I keep wondering what you look like…” In the small rectangle of his screen, you lean forward to fill more of it, cleavage exposed in your bralette. He’s been waiting for this to be brought up again, and feeling so much more comfortable with you, he can’t admit he hasn’t thought about it. But with that stronger connection comes the anxieties. What if he isn’t what you pictured? What if he isn’t your type? What if you don’t like him anymore?

Frankie thinks he’s decent looking enough — he hasn’t had much trouble pulling girls since he was a teenager, but not being the most commanding or charismatic in the room, he has had his bouts of struggle in the relationship department.

“Please, Frankie. S’not fair I get to hear your sexy voice and not know what you look like. Pretty please, I’ll give you something special if you do,” you bargain with a pout on your face, bottom lip protruding and puffy. He wants to kiss it away, bite down on the glossy flesh, work away your frowning moue with his own mouth. Wonderings of what you taste like.

Coming back into himself, he wears a proud, intrigued smirk that you’re blind to except for the way his words curl around his slick, silvery tongue, “Oh, is that right, bunny? What if I wanna know what the something special is to decide?”

“Not how it works, silly. Either you want something special or you don’t.” A stern shake of the head, sitting up straight as you raise an eyebrow at him.

He sits with it for a moment, thoughts warring on the inside. In the end, his realistic side barters that either way could end badly: he doesn’t turn the camera on and you get frustrated, ending it, or he does turn the camera on and you don’t like the look of him, ending it. A phantom whisper of your voice, bubbly and bright, reminds him that it could make everything even better, and that ultimately is what convinces him.

“Alright, alright. You make a convincing argument, Conejita.”

A beaming smile stretches across your face as you draw a leg up to your chest, resting your head on your kneecap while you hold back your excitement and anticipation. Frankie takes in the sight of you, astir on tenterhooks.

“Here goes nothing,” he mumbles to himself before his thumb is pressing the camera button, illuminating himself on your screen. He sees himself in the smaller rectangle in the corner, grimacing before he laughs softly and grins, awaiting your reaction with waves of solicitude raging inside.

You see him, your Frankie. Filling your phone screen. Finally.

A nearly inaudible gasp leaves your lips, blocked from the mic by your knee. Studying his face, you witness the lines next to his eyes deepening as he laughs, his shy smile growing on his face. Big brown eyes strike your chest, their sincere softness making you want to fall into their warmth and stay there forever. Like the comforting heat of a mug of coffee on a chilly morning. You note that your visualizations were correct, mostly. Brown hair, curling out from under the cap branded with Standard Oil that sits on his head. Wide set shoulders that extend out of frame, a build to him that screams he most definitely can manhandle you around in bed. His call sign makes a bit more sense to you, seeing patches in his short beard, admiring the one on his left cheek that is shaped like a heart. Simply endearing. The image of him in front of you sends a shock to your core, wet spot in your panties growing as you begin to imagine what the rest of him looks like.

Hot is all you can think. Frankie is fucking hot.

His voice cuts through your trails of admiration, joking around to break the silent tension, “So are you gonna ask me to keep my camera off now?”

As you swallow to recover some of your composure, shaking your head back and forth quickly before a genuinely eager smile paints your expression. Leaning closer to see more of his details, freckles across his neck and where his shirt exposes a sliver of his chest, the peak of his cupid’s bow shaded by his mustache, long eyelashes that reach toward his eyebrows. You drop your knee from in front of you, leaning an elbow on the surface of your desk and resting your shin in your palm.

“Frankie, respectfully, what the fuck? You’re so hot.”

A boisterous laugh rolls from his chest, the same shy smile returning with a blush across his cheeks, “Conejita, you’re the hot one between us.”

“No, no, I’m being serious. You’re like — Damn. Your smile. And you have pretty eyes, Frankie. And you’re just like…really fucking hot. I can’t even think of another word. You should be the one doing what I’m doing.”

“Oh, c’mon, you’re only seeing my face, baby.”

“Yeah, and? It’s a pretty face…Wanna sit on it.” Your giggle cuts through his speakers, and Frankie groans at the comment. Saliva coats your mouth as you watch the muscles in his neck tense, licking your chops like a prowling lion. If only he was in front of you right now…

“Diablita…eres una problema. (Little devil…you’re a problem.) Do I get my special something now?”

Another giggle and a mischievous smirk make Frankie’s brows stitch together in frustration, your shoulders shrugging as you toy with the strap of your bra, hooked under your index finger, “Actually, I think I wanna move the goalpost. Will you show me what I’m missin’, Frankie? I wanna see more.”

Desire burns bright and wild inside of you, ache building between your legs as your arousal drips from your panties and onto your thighs. You’d been picturing him — all of him — for weeks. Ever since that first message. But now, seeing him on your phone screen, your imagination is running wild with newfound information and attempting to fill in the blanks. He has to be big, thickness would be just right. He’s the quiet type, unassuming in his own looks, which means he has to have a virtually perfect dick. It's the rules of the universe. Undecided if he’s cut or not, but regardless, picturing your manicured fingers wrapped around it and tongue licking at his tip. Watching him come undone from you. Stomach tensing, those long fingers that you sneak a peek of when he adjusts his hat wrapped up in your hair. Rasping moans. What would he taste like?

Frankie shakes his head, a quick tsking drawing your attention back to the moment as he looks on with a teasing expression, “Conejita, I don’t think it works like that.”

“Okay, then no special something for you. Your choice, Francisco.”

He watches as you move the strap back up your shoulder, the soft snap of the elastic against your skin. Huffing out a frustrated breath, he mumbles, “No serías tan valiente si estuvieras aquí conmigo, mocosa. (You wouldn’t be so brave if you were here with me, brat.)”

Uncaring in whatever annoyances he was airing with you, you watch him sit up further in the frame, knocking off his cap and reaching for the hem of his shirt. Despite his words, he lifts his shirt over his head, looking back at the camera, bare shoulders and chest on display, “This is what you get for now, bunny.”

Satisfaction glows from your smile, biting hard into your bottom lip while Frankie watches your eyes search everywhere on your screen besides his own. A stern clearing of his throat breaks your trance, a commanding expression on Frankie’s face.

“You promised me something, Conejita.”

A deep pout replaces your grin, huffing in defiance as you slip your bra straps from your shoulders, “Can’t you please take the rest off? Show me what I wanna see, Frankie. Please.”

“Nah uh. Quit demanding, baby. Y’know that’s my job. Now tell me, what are you gonna do for me to get what you want?” His unwavering voice surprises you, despite hearing it for weeks. With the added heat factor of his looks, you crumble a bit quicker, clenching your thighs as you sigh and nod obediently.

“I’ll do anything, Frankie. Jus’ tell me what to do, I wanna make you happy.”

He grins on the screen, sincere softness peeking out, “Oh, baby, y’know it’s easy to make me happy. Jus’ gotta be a good little bunny, yeah?” He hums, licking his lips as he ponders what he wants from you tonight, a night he wants to fill with another milestone for the two of you. He’s only seen you use a small vibrator or your fingers on the phone with you, but he knows what else you have. He’s watched the video of you using it on your profile only about ten times.

“Get your pretty pink toy for me, Conejita. Y’know the one. And then get on the floor and you’re going to show me exactly how you use it.”

There’s rustling as you follow his instructions, stripping bare and suctioning the toy to your hardwood floors, propping the phone up for him to see it all. The hot pink dildo bobbles from you moving around it, glistening with lube that you applied — even though with one glance at your cunt, both you and Frankie know you wouldn’t need it. Straddling over the silicone, you slowly tease your entrance with it, whining before you make one more attempt to Frankie watching you with a smugness in his smirk.

“Please, Frankie, can’t you please show me your cock? I wanna picture it while I fuck myself. Wanna know if it’s how I imagined…Dream about it a lot.” He can read right through your tactics, but his dick can’t. It strains against his zippered jeans, throbbing under the fabric for some sort of relief. He squeezes his palm over it once, exhaling as he shakes his head, strong in his convictions.

“Be a good girl, and I’ll show you what you wanna see.” No more room for negotiations.

“Yes’sir.”

Frankie’s mouth hangs ajar while his focus trains on the apex of your thighs. Watching you slowly sink down, the bright pink rubbery toy disappears inside of you. Whimpers slip from your lips as you brace your hands on your thighs, fingers digging into the plush skin. Need burns brightly in his chest and below his belt, clenching his jaw while he imagines biting the meaty part of you, leaving teeth marks in his wake before settling his mouth at your entrance.

Your hips set a quick pace, desperate for the high you’ve been dripping for since getting on the phone with Frankie. A low growl followed with a disapproving tut clicks over the speakers of your phone.

“Slow down, baby girl. Not a race…” Frankie corrects, and the only response you have is a frantic nod, turning your movements to a drag. The toy fills you up, stretches you the most that you have ever been. Pain heats your feelings of pleasure, intensifying it all in the lightness of your limbs and head. The ridges of the faux veins of the fake cock impress into your walls, the tip of it notching at the spot inside of you that Frankie taught you to reach. It only skates by it, whines accompanying your frustrations.

Frankie, on the other end, listens to the squelch of your pussy around the silicone. The sound drives him to fully cup his erection through his pants, palming himself with heady breaths as your own moans for him drive the iron hot brand of need deeper into his skin. He can see your need for a change, your need to be given permission to chase that feeling that’s within reach.

“Lean back, little bunny. Sit back on your hands and use your hips…Show me more of that pretty pussy,” he instructs, cool and confident while his hips buck up into his hand. Being his perfect girl, you do as he says and change positions, gasping when you sink down onto the toy. Your cunt clenches around it, a satisfied smirk painting Frankie’s face. He knows he’s gotten you to hit that special spot. With the grip your entrance has around the base of the dildo, he wonders if you’ll pop it off of the floor on your next thrust.

“Oh, fuck…Frankie, wish you were here. Tell me—tell me what you’d do to me if you were here,” you beg, your hips still dragging at the new angle.

A groan escapes Frankie at your request, biting down hard on his lip and taking his hand away from his lap to deny himself the temptation.

“You love hearing me say all the dirty things to you, huh Conejita?” Without waiting for an answer, he continues, “If I were there with you, I’d would be—shit—I’d be devouring you right now. Fucking you with my tongue and my fingers, making you squeeze me and getting your come all over my face. Gotta get you ready for me, bunny. After, I’d flip you over. Get your pretty ass up for me, and I’d fuck you senseless. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Turn it all off up there and just let me take care of you…”

Nodding, your hips start to move faster as Frankie speaks to you. He doesn’t have the heart to tease you anymore, letting you start to take what you want for a bit. Your moans pitch up, tits bouncing with your nipples pebbled and the rest of your soft curves twisting as you rock back and forth on the toy.

“Yes, please. I want that,” you mewl, heavy breaths erratic.

“That’s right. My baby deserves it all,” he says with a sigh, his large palm squeezing his hard cock again, slowly unzipping his jeans and slipping his hand into his boxers to grip himself at the base. “I’d fuck you until that pretty little brain of yours was filled up only with thoughts of how good I make you feel. How good you are for me, pretty girl…Look at you go, bouncing on that toy. Rub your clit, Conejita. Slow, at least for right now.”

You follow his orders, supporting yourself on one arm. Slow circles against your clit have you shuddering with pleasure, a twitch of your tummy as you moan. Your eyes flutter shut, face twisting with overwhelming need. Frankie drinks in the sight, indulging himself in a few long strokes of his cock before he hears it.

“Daddy…” you breathe, near a whisper, but it’s audible to him. Lost in yourself, you don’t even notice you’ve let it slip until it comes again, “Oh my god, Daddy.”

The surprise of it shocks your eyes open, stuttering your hips as you narrow in on your screen. Frankie’s eyes grow dark, licking his lips as he holds in a loud moan. His fingers grip the base of his aching cock, holding off at the edge. So close to coming when he heard that word drip from your mouth like melted sugar.

He can tell you’re attempting to gauge his reaction, nervous settling in as you attempt to move on from it and continue fucking yourself closer to finishing. Frankie’s eager to take it in stride, clearing his throat before he gives it right back to you, opening that door that he knows won’t be shut any time soon. At least not by him.

“Yeah, that’s right, baby. Let Daddy tell you what you need, yeah?” He chuckles darkly, satisfaction thumping in his veins while you nod and whimper yes yes yes back to him, “Y’know, if you like that lil’ toy, baby, Daddy’s cock will feel even better. S’bigger than that fucking thing.”

“Oh, fuck, I need to—I need you, Daddy, please!”

“I know, Conejita, I know. Poor little thing jus’ needs Daddy to be filling her up, huh? You wanna know what my cock feels like inside of you, don’t you, pequeña?” He hisses with a buck of his hips into his fist, squeezing his eyes shut for a brief second.

“Yes, yes, please, Daddy! Please,” you choke on a breath and Frankie can see you twitch at your inner thighs from the full-on view of your pussy, your tell-tale sign that you’re about to come.

“Y’know the rules, Conejita. Better ask before you come.”

“Please, please may I come?” you moan, rubbing faster circles against your clit and grinding down on your toy.

“Oh, bunny, you can ask nicer than that. May I come…?” he leads, smirking devilishly when you nearly squeal from the way he’s holding you out on the edge. Teetering on the verge of that high that he knows well, he can see your legs faltering with a cramp.

“Please may I come, Daddy?” Your eyes open, heavy-lidded and lips parted with shallow breathing. Frankie gets lost in the sight, wrecked from his direction, his words, a sheen of sweat over your skin and the arousal coating your thighs. A fucking dream.

“Mm, come for Daddy, baby girl—” he’s interrupt as you erupt in a high-pitched moan, mouth wide open as you string together mumblings Oh fuck, Daddy, feels so good. Need you so bad…

“Good girl.”

Frankie hums contently, chuckling as a dopey grin finds your face, blinking through the orgasmic haze. Laying back, you slip the toy out of your pussy, leaving it to wobble in place and spreading your legs around it. One arm comes to rest against your forehead, breasts rising and falling with deep, recovering breaths. He’s blocked of the view that would make this moment even sweeter, licking his lips before he speaks up.

“Lemme see that fucked cunt of yours, bunny. Let Daddy see what belongs to him.” You sit up again, popping the toy off of the floor and laying it to the side to be cleaned later. Frankie hums as you part your legs more, the glittering of your come dripping on your thighs and across your swollen pussy. “Eres un buen oyente, pequeña. (You’re a good listener, little one.)”

“What’s that mean?” you ask, a long exhale punctuating the question.

“You’re a good listener, little one.” Frankie grins when you grow shy, inching your legs together before he tsks again, one hand coming into frame to motion for your lower limbs to part again.

“Y’know, it would look even prettier with my come dripping out of ya, baby.”

“Please.”

“What, Conejita?”

“Don’t tease me anymore…Can’t take it, Daddy.” You lips push out in a pout, subtle but he can catch the change in expression.

“Nah uh, no pouting, bunny. Who said that I was teasing? I’m going to make it happen.”

Sweetness slips from your lips in a giggle, leaning over to pick up your phone and hold him closer to your face.

“So, if I was a good girl, doesn’t that mean I get to see what I asked for before?” Wiggling in eagerness, Frankie feigns ignorance, scratching at his beard as he shrugs, acting as if he didn’t nearly come in his pants multiple times in the last few minutes.

“I dunno, Conejita. What did you ask me for? Gonna have to remind me.”

“Your cock. I wanna see it.” Your pout sneaks back, biting your lip. “May I please see your cock, Daddy?”

“I think I could do that for you, baby. Asking so nicely. Such a good girl for Daddy, yeah?”

“Always.” A giggle bubbles up from your tummy, biting down on your lip as Frankie takes you in, shaking his head in subtle disbelief. How the hell did clicking for one subscription get him here, having Facetime sex with you?

He obliges your original requests, moving to prop his phone up in front of him, stripping down his jeans first. The sight of his bulge waters your mouth, pupils widening in want at the outline of his cock. No tricks of the light, no chance of manipulation like some men in your DMs do. All natural.

And Frankie wasn’t lying. He’s big.

The reveal comes when he tugs his boxers down to his ankles, settling in front of the camera again. His heavy length rests against his lower stomach, precum dripping into his dark happy trail. Your eyes drag over the veins ribbing him, leading down to show off that he’s tastefully groomed. Swallowing saliva, you lick your lips as his large hand wraps around, slow strokes that gently shift the foreskin away from his tip. The end of his cock glistens with pebbles of precum, red and aching. Frankie hisses at the contact, the veins in his neck straining against his skin while he starts to fuck his fist.

“You look so pretty, Daddy,” you compliment sweetly, grinning at him as he laughs quietly back at you.

“Such a sweet little bunny. You think you can take me in your tight little cunt?” A long exhales concaves his chest, quiet moans as his hand picks up pace. 

You return his regular favor of talking him through it, detailing how good of a girl you’d be for him, telling him all that he would be allowed to do to you. The sounds Frankie makes has you dripping again, getting his permission to fuck your fingers, both of you driving each other to a peak, your second one taking the breath from your lungs as Frankie comes at the same time. Whimpers escape your mouth as you envy his hand and stomach being covered in his release, biting your tongue and crowding the screen as he shows off how much you made him come.

“Wish I was there to clean you up, Daddy.”

“Right back at you, Conejita.”

A few days later, Frankie calls you after one of your livestreams, grinning like a schoolboy when you answer in only your underwear. You laugh as you set your phone down on the surface of your dressing, his childish smirk turning to a pout as he stares at your white painted ceiling. Calling out to him, you ask for one second while you tug a sweatshirt over your head, shuffling around before grabbing the device and relaxing back on your bed, bunny in your lap.

“Hi, baby,” Frankie coos, one side of his mouth lifting in a smile as he drinks in your cozy, drowsy demeanor. Cuddling with the toy against your chest, you grin back at him, curling up onto your side like a cat.

“Hi, Frankie,” you mumble back, exhaustion heavy in your eyes.

“You sleepy, little bunny?” A slow nod answers his question. “Alright, I won’t keep you up for long then. Just had a question for you.”

The vague proposition piques your interest, your eyes shooting open and the camera being brought closer to your face, “What’s your question?”

Frankie works his lips between his teeth, nerves crackling over his entire body. Realistically, he knows you’ll say yes, but there’s still that chance for rejection in the moment. His left leg bounces against his couch, hand running over his face as he takes a deep breath in, “I was wondering if you’d wanna come visit me here in Florida? If you don’t have time—”

“I would love to come visit, Frankie,” you agree immediately, a sincere smile growing on your face. Frankie mirrors your excitement with a goofy grin, the creases next to his eyes deepening and his dimple cratoring his cheek. “I’ll even book my flight right now, that’s how eager I am.”

Shaking his head furiously, he clicks his tongue in a tut, scolding you playfully, “Hey, hey. No, none of that. I’m not letting my baby pay, I’m the one who asked you to come.”

“But—”

“Nope, no buts. Except yours getting onto a plane and coming to see me,” Frankie laughs at his own joke, earning a playful eye roll as you hold back your own chuckle. “Oh, c’mon, that was funny, Conejita. I can tell you want to laugh.”

The two of you go back and forth while he books your flight on his laptop, showing off the confirmation number once it’s all gone through. Both of you wear shit-eating grins on your faces, sitting in disbelief.

Frankie can’t help the rush of anxiety, unable to tell if it’s solely from his excitement. All he can think about is having you in front of him, in the flesh, in person. No screens between the two of you, no broken signals or shitty wifi interruptions. Hearing your voice without the strain of speakers, getting to touch you, taste you, hear you, feel you all over him. There’s the flash of a vision of you laid out underneath him, making your little sounds that drive him crazy and digging your nails into his back…

“Gonna let Daddy spoil you while you’re down here, baby girl?” Frankie smirks as you stretch sleepily, biting down on your lip.

“You’re flying me out, isn’t that spoiling me enough? Shouldn’t it be my turn to spoil you then?”

“Think you know the answer to that, baby. Having you in front of me is spoiling me enough, I jus’ wanna take care of you.” 

The simple statement brings a smile to your face, shyly tucking your face into your pillow. The rest of the call relaxes you back to near sleep, listening as Frankie tells you all about what he’ll take you to do. Your drowsiness catches up with you, drifting off on the phone. Frankie chuckles quietly to himself, sitting with you for a moment silently before he goes to hang up.

“Night, Conejita. Can’t wait to see you.”

taglist: @northernbluess @swiftispunk @joelsversion @mrsmando @ilovepedro @lovers-liability @deathwife @undrthelights @atticrissfinch @casa-boiardi @wannab-urs @ramblers-lets-get-ramblin @fishingforpike @msjarvis @walkintotheriveranddisappear @sugadolly @yazsos @peppesgirl @pastawench @addictedtotlou @brittmb115 @anoverwhelmingdin @spishsstuff @wolfbook87 @mswarriorbabe80 @harriedandharassed @decemberdolly @laiisleitte @fierce-bab @vickie5446 @pertinentpostmortem @livingdeadmaria @sullyosully @bitchwitch1981 @its-nebuleuse @marini03 @piercethevic03 @joeandpedrosimp @kiwisbell @planet-marz1 @txtattoostark @jrosie25 @vee-bees-blog @joelsflannel @k-k0129 @cartoon-garbage04 @nostalxgic @ravenpoe67

[ckret2]

What app or program or website or what do you use to write?

I’m asking because I entirely use the notes app on my tablet and I have no idea what other people use.

I use physical paper notebooks, the default notes app, and 4thewords.

4tw is a site/game that has your character progress the plot and earn materials by beating monsters, which can only be defeated by typing ## words in ## minutes. (Word counts vary by monster; I prefer fighting a string of small ones, like 50 words in 5 minutes.) It's designed to take the strategies that make things like free-to-play/pay-to-win games so addictive and use them for good by gamifying writing, so you keep going "—okay one more monster—" and bam suddenly you've written like 5000 words.

It's a 30 day trial and then a subscription service, but honestly if I had to cancel every single subscription I have except one this is the one I'd keep.

Also you can make cute little avatars.

I am shamelessly showing off sweet sweet high-wordcount loot I earned as far back as the 2018 nanowrimo special event. I finally get to live out my childhood dream to have an over-decorated Gaia Online-esque avatar, except instead of getting it by grinding games for imaginary currency, I just had to write a metric ton of words.

Anyway there's my pitch for 4tw, I think it's a very useful site

EDIT: and since at least one person has decided to try out 4tw thanks to this post, if ur interested, my referral code is ZIUQJ49028 ✨

[mywingsareonwheels]

Modern technology/works/understanding/etc. I'd like to give "Endeavour" characters...

Morse: noise-cancelling headphones, an mp3 player with a huge amount of opera on it, non-alcoholic real ales (St Peter's Without, the alcohol-free Doom Bar, etc.), a subscription to medici.tv, awareness of Joyce DiDonato's voice. Shadi Bartsch's translation of The Aeneid. Awareness of ADHD and autism as Relevant To Him and some suitable online community. Also some therapy but that goes without saying...

Fred Thursday: Fred. <3 awareness of PTSD and C-PTSD as A Thing and both being relevant in his case (from the war & work and his childhood respectively) even more therapy than Morse needs. All those youtube channels with 24/7 livestreams of various wildlife. The complete works of Terry Pratchett. I'm almost tempted to say fandom spaces because the gentler of them might actually appeal to him a lot.

Max Debryn: more recent medical knowledge. Modern queer community including the more awesome online bits. The work of recently rediscovered composers such as Barbara Strozzi and Joseph Bologne. Possibly Carol Ann Duffy's poetry. Elly Griffiths' "Ruth Galloway" novels if he fancies a busman's holiday read. ;-) Other than that I think he has more to teach us than the other way around. :-)

Peter Jakes: see Fred re: PTSD and C-PTSD awareness and a huge amount of therapy. I'm tempted to add at least the option of more recent help with giving up smoking given a lot more is understood these days. A Netflix subscription and an excellent gaming system. Instant messenger things so he can keep in touch with Oxford friends while in the US.

Joan Thursday: an environment in which it's more usual for women to not give up their jobs on marriage (or not get married at all). A lot of more recent folk rock, singer-songwriter, pop, and indie music might hit the spot for her to add to what she already loves. Yet more therapy. An awesome community of intersectional feminists. The complete works of bell hooks.

Win Thursday: oh Win. Therapy, the Open University. Really good couples therapy with Fred because they clearly love each other so much but *boy* do they fuck up towards each other (mostly him, but not only him). Instant messenger for better keeping in touch with everyone. An air fryer.

Sam Thursday: more therapy, and addiction help. Anger management help. Oh bless him. <3

Reginald Bright: grief counselling, instant messenger, Abir Mukherjee's detective novels, online ordering of Indian groceries, places online to put his art and get it fully admired, and then instant messenger once he moves back to India.

Jim Strange: honestly? he's the only one who seems to weirdly thrive in the time he lives. But I *would* like to throw intersectional feminist, LGBT+ and anti-racism literature at him to help avoid his less admirable moments. And actually some online community (fandom even?) so he has more people to bond with that aren't at the Lodge or at work...

[nerendus]

Y'all, if you have Xfinity fucking cancel your subscription. I've been trying to get into contact with them for days, and when I finally got someone, they were from India and they said there isn't even any customer support in the states like!!! Why have an internet company operate in a country where your customers can't even get on the phone with someone local.

My internet has been messing up for two months, starting as just ten minutes each day to progressively worsening to the point now where I'll be lucky to be online for an hour. My next door neighbour is having the exact same issue, so I know it isn't on my end but the only information Xfinity offers is to check my own devices like!!!

I need internet so I can be on my computer and write and it's making me viciously angry that I can't do that (especially since I just got to my favourite chapter in the manuscript!!), but more than anything, I'm angry at this service because I can't continue to fuel my addiction to Honkai Star Rail.

[animefeminist]

Scholars Kim Hanjae and Kim Jongik on sharing manhwa globally

Manhwa has seen a huge boom with English-language audiences over the past several years. A few manhwa titles were localized during the manga boom of the 2000s, largely through Tokyopop, but online subscription service WEBTOON changed the game when it launched its global version in July 2014—beating Shonen Jump to the launch of their app by two months. Webtoons held a unique allure compared to online manga available at the time: they’re predominantly fully colored and formatted to be read on mobile, and services like Lezhin Comics featured an addictive pay-by-the-chapter model.

Though South Korea’s relationship with Japan remains fraught to this day, bans on Japanese media in Korea were lifted in the 1990s; and since the Webtoon boom, manhwa have become increasingly popular subjects for adaptation into anime, from The Tower of God and Why Raeliana Ended Up at the Duke’s Mansion to the upcoming Solo Leveling. And yet, there continues to be a relative dearth of manhwa-related guests invited to American conventions. 

Otakon 2023 decided to address this dearth by inviting several manhwa artists and experts, two of whom sat down with us for an interview. Kim Hanjae is a Manhwa, Animation, and Contents professor at Gangdong University whose convention biography described her as “one of Korea’s top Otaku professors. She debuted as a manhwaga at the age of 21 and majored in Cartooning at the School of Visual Arts in New York. She has a master’s degree in animation and a PhD in Emotional Engineering.” Speaking through a translator, she elaborated on her study of emotional engineering as approaching the technical construction of art, marketing, and AI through the frame of human experience. 

Read it at Anime Feminist!

[nintendowife]

I rolled the end credits in Easy Come Easy Golf on Nintendo Switch in June. Very fun arcade golf game, filled with good vibes.

Easy Come Easy Golf is the latest title by the developer Clap Hanz famous for Everybody's Golf / Hot Shots Golf series. Their golf game expertise and pleasant design philosophy shows here too.

There's a twist on the normal golf formula here: you don't play as one character but as a team of 9 characters. Each character is assigned to tee off on one hole of the course and the next character handles the next hole. Your characters gain exp and their stats improve as you use them.

Easy Come Easy Golf was originally a mobile game and unfortunately that shows in the gameplay mechanics that have been simplified a bit. The triple-click shot mechanics are fine and work well but they lack the more intricate real-time mechanics that were used to apply spin in the Everybody's Golf games (here spin is applied on ball before swinging, not during). As a result the gameplay doesn't feel quite as engrossing and satisfying. Also the visual feedback on swings and ball travel has been toned down which takes away some of the excitement of making a successful swing.

Weather, ball lie, surface, etc. affect how the ball travels, just like in their earlier games. There are some differences here it seems and I still have trouble predicting how much wind affects the ball. Reading the green based on the animated grid is quite similar with earlier titles. I still haven't managed a hole-in-one on a regular cup course and I've been playing the game for some time now.

If we continue with the negative points, the music department here is lacking. Gone are the fantastic course specific tunes for example. Most of your golfing is spent in silence, accompanied by some ambient sounds.

The golf courses are well designed with some tricky narrow points, water hazards and bunkers. Carefully weighing the risks is a key to success - will you attempt to cross a lake with a top spin swing to have the ball bounce from the water surface or will you play it safe and take a detour, resulting into extra shots? Progression is a bit grindy as you unlock more courses and playable characters by earning stars from tournaments. You can also unlock alternate costumes and color variations for characters.

Difficulty level is very forgiving. The game's CPU opponents feel significantly easier than the ones in Everybody's Golf / Hot Shots Golf, so don't worry if you're not the best golfer out there.

What this game truly excels in is character design. The whimsical caricature-like designs really hit the spot for me. There's 30 different characters with a lot of variation on body shapes, ages, personality, etc. The characters have their own strenghts and weaknesses - some are great playing in the rain, some may have great power but poor control in their shots. Character animations are unique and quite humorous at times. Rosie Weaver, a calm teenage girl with bad posture is one of my favorite characters, along with the refined lady Madam D. and older grandma-type Bella Donna.

What I especially like in Clap Hanz's games is the way the game encourages you to improve your skills. Challenging yourself and noticing how you're getting better and better is an addictive feeling. Even if you're bad at the game at first, the game gives you positive feedback and gently pushes you to try again. You might lose a tournament but at least you got to see some funny animations when your character is boiling with rage! The cheery, positive mood is a great stress-reliever and infects with a good feeling.

My experience on the game is purely from offline single-player mode. The game also offers some kind of online multiplayer possibilities which require Nintendo Switch Online subscription.

Based on the single-player content on offer here, I'd recommend Easy Come Easy Golf to anyone looking for an enjoyable, laid-back golf game. This game offers a lot of good fun but it is a downgrade from Everybody's Golf / Hot Shots Golf in some ways. It took me about 45 hours to roll the end credits. After that there's still tournament ranks to reach and more characters to unlock so you probably won't run out of content too fast. I'm hoping one day Clap Hanz will delight us with a sequel that's been built for Switch from the ground-up, includes more finesse on gameplay and adds music on courses.

[wild-grinders]

Wild Grinders: The Fan Analysis (Pt.3)

First Previous

if anyone has finals, consider this as a gift for making it through

Alright, it’s time for the third part of the analysis. It took awhile to actually begin writing this because I don’t want to dive into my self-indulgent yuri-beam reboot. And we shouldn’t nitpick to make the series ‘better.’ However, there’s a lot for Wild Grinders to improve on that that leaves you thinking, ‘Actually, we should rework it entirely.’ And that’s what this is. The best way was to organize it into 3 categories: Theme, Plot, and Characters. Most of this analysis is going to focus on the writing because animation is not always in our control. (And we kinda covered animation in the last part and said it needed a whole renovation).

That being said, this part of the analysis is primarily focused on keeping the structure of the TV series and the original vision that Rob Dyrdek has. (To the best of my ability).

[Part A]

Let’s assume that the script is taken seriously. Wild Grinders need to have a better overall theme because the wacky skate tricks didn’t do enough to draw in attention.

The current theme of Wild Grinders doesn’t exactly work. As mentioned in the second of my analysis, the writers were trying their best to appeal to the Gen Z audience. Usually by means of implementing modern pop culture references and putting social media in the spotlight in the latest episodes. While the writers aren’t wrong about the technology/socmed obsession amongst children, they missed out on an extremely alarming picture. They didn’t notice why children were becoming gravitated to this era of internet.

Recently, I have been learning about the way that society treats children and teenagers. (Awkward sentence, sorry). But I find myself learning more and more about the ways that society puts control on what kids can and cannot do. Many adults make the decisions to remove places to hang out such as parks and even skate parks (reason: to prevent drug dealers). In the age of our digital era, theaters and physical media are diminishing in favor of online subscriptions. Basically, kids are losing public spaces where they can hang out safely.

And it does NOT stop there. Cops are constantly being funded to ‘handle’ teens who are loitering (Why? Because they don’t have places to hang out). I don’t want to go on an off-topic rant in this analysis, but this post sums up what I’m trying to talk about. It really makes your brain think about the ways that society fails to let kids… be kids. Society uses harmful tactics to remove teenagers for ‘the greater safety’ of property. And I doubt that adults will listen to younger people who speak up about it. Instead, society would rather complain about raising a generation of phone-addicted youths. Older children and teenagers will be threatened and put into dangerous just by being outside because cops have control on where they can be. And by having ‘suspicion’ on teenagers is absolutely allowed in their rulebook to put a kid in a police station.

This is what Wild Grinders should have focused on as the whole theme if you consider the setting it takes place in (2010ish). If the writers wanted to talk about the phone-addicted kids, then they should have questioned why it was happening in the first place. Not only that, but it’s just a perfect theme for Wild Grinders. Reason one, it’s completely different from Rocket Power (their main theme was the history and safety of extreme sports). Reason two, it fits for the main cast. Lil’ Rob is literally the embodiment of ‘screw your authority!’ Jay Jay and Spitball are literally POC characters that the police often go after and the series could have delved into this. In Ketterville-canon, Jack Knife is homeless and lives under a highway, he’s 100% anti-cop. Emo Crys could have went to Linkin Park territory and his archetype was meant to be an intensely rebellious soul. And Goggles? He has the camera to capture video evidence of everything they go through.

Is it possible to air an anti-cop TV series? Nope. But it’s very possible to write and utilize it for what Wild Grinders is. A group of preteens who want to just hang out and skate. In fact, a few of the episodes featured the Wild Grinders being turn away by security and cops when they wanted to find a place to skate. However, they just obeyed in favor of ‘sending a good message to kids about obeying the rules.’ And the script writers didn’t think to push it further than this. But man, they could have done something else entirely if they went to the territory of police brutality used on adolescents. The Monster High Movie, Ghouls Rule! actually did something like this! The movie managed to present a family-friendly version of what ‘police brutality on teenagers’ feels like. To be specific, it wasn’t until 2020 when MH fans became aware of this hidden message and began openly talking about it on Tumblr and TikTok. But to keep it brief, Monster High movies were able to explain police brutality and racism incredibly well. And it’s possible for Wild Grinders to use this a whole theme for a series about kids who want to skateboard in an anti-children and anti-loitering system.

But anti-cops won’t be the only theme in Wild Grinders, there’s another theme that I would love to see; a coalition of diverse skaters. Rob Dyrdek’s vision when creating the Wild Grinders’ characters was to have a diverse cast who were brought together by their love of skating. The idea of diversity has always been intentional for Wild Grinders, but the writers did NOT utilize it enough! They attempted to make the cast be diverse in personality, but they made all of their backgrounds vague and look like they were all normal American kids by hiding their families. Not only that, but they missed out on multiple opportunities to create other skaters outside of the Wild Grinders skate crew. (We’ll talk about this later). In the second season, they were close to introducing the ‘Street Rats’, the crew that Squeaks was apart of. But 2015 happened and Rob Dyrdek packed up his TV series because he didn’t have the motivation to continue Wild Grinders. But we can’t really blame Dyrdek, he was going through a rough patch at the time and the studio screwed Wild Grinders over (in animation and the writing). And that’s why I’m here to talk about what should have been done. And most of it is to improve the writing! The writers were adults who didn’t bother to understand what kids wanted more of at the time and began to parody off of other kids’ TV series.

But yeah. If the writers weren’t bent to the idea of kids-being-incapable-of-thought-processing, then we could see more effort being put into the theme. And not just that, but some of the writers just weren’t here to write for kids and wanted to write Adult Swim jokes. Do I have a passive-aggressive voice about these adult writers? Definitely. Children deserve to consume media that has good writing about meaningful messages in the world.

[Part B]

Next step, Wild Grinders needs to use these two main themes for the plot.

We know for a fact that Rob Dyrdek never planned for a real plot in Wild Grinders. If we were to take his route, Wild Grinders will eventually become boring because a good plot draws people more than the quirkiness. In order to draw people through quirkiness, the visuals need to exceed expectations (clearly something that Wild Grinders failed to do in animation). Therefore, we need to think about a plot for Wild Grinders because it does NOT have the budget for a Kyoto Animation or BONES Studio anime. The plot is compensation here!! It needs to be worked on well!!

Let’s diverge from Rob Dyrdek’s ideas. He wants to make an amazing, cool, and crazy series. But in order to do something like this, you do need some sort of plot. Conflict in writing can lead to all sorts of situations that causes to the characters to be cool, crazy, and amazing.

There is some plot in the writing of Wild Grinders, each episode being 13 minutes long and trying its best to implement one. Most of the episodes have decent plots, but these plots didn’t grab the audiences’ attention, unless you actually liked Wild Grinders as a whole. I don’t know the most professional way to explain this, but Wild Grinders needs a build-up to a greater plot, it needs an actual ‘Big Bad’. Or it just needs a longer run time to build it up better. Some of my favorite small, plot-driven episodes were ‘Midas Touch’ and ‘Skater Who Cried Wolf’ because it didn’t rely on wacky quips to make it entertaining. ‘Skater Who Cried Wolf’ made the animation put extra effort in enhancing the setting, by having Lil’ Rob and his friends watch a horror movie on a school night and then making a ghost-hunting green-filtered screen chase around in the woods. It was just a cool episode compared to the rest. But ‘Midas Touch’? That episode will always be my weakness in Wild Grinders. It focused on a character other than Lil’ Rob, but the plot would be rushed because of the runtime. I wanted to see deeper into Goggles’s character when he decided to become popular. Hell, I wanted to see him be mean to his friends and let the popularity get into his head. (Well, we did see this in ‘Going Hollyweird’, but even that was short). But the resolution to ‘Midas Touch’ was simplified where Goggles’s just cries about not being able to nerd out. No. I want more inner conflict on his side and his to feel deeper regrets other than rejecting a movie screening. While these episodes are both quick and easy plots, ‘Midas Touch’ contributed to the greater idea that is known as character development. Something that is essential for a greater plot. Can I elaborate why this is? Not really, but you just have trust me that it does work.

Anyways, let’s get into the real idea here. Using the themes of diversity and cops abusing their authority on the youth. The main plot will have to involve a large-scale conflict against the police force that bans skateboarding. That’s it. That’s the plot. But it will need to developed throughout the series, carefully placed in different episodes until it becomes a more blatant problem. Think about it for a moment. The first episode makes an off-hand reference to the way that police ‘warn’ skateboarding kids to stay away from the mall. Then it leads to episodes where characters are being arrested for ‘loitering’ in an outdoor public space. Finally, there’s an entire ban on skateboarding in the whole city and you’ve got a group of kids who are willing to challenge it. This is what the writers completely missed out on because they didn’t put themselves in the same shoes of Gen Z youth.

And we can add more to this mix. We need to add in a diversity of skateboarders, they all come from different backgrounds and have different experiences, but they share their love of skateboarding and do their best to protect each other in a world where adults rule over them. Wild Grinders needs LGBTQ kids, teens who want justice for their POC friends, and young adults who are willing to listen to them. They all love skateboarding and they’re sick of adults who want to take their skating spaces away from them.

Wild Grinders was able to make this a plot, but they didn’t.

[Part C]

We need to talk about the characters. We’ve got a lot and we’ve got nothing going on for the cast. As stated before, Rob Dyrdek wanted to create a diverse cast of skateboarders. But he didn’t do the best job at balancing them as characters. Obviously, Lil’ Rob was the main character and got all the attention, but it got to the point that he was considered a Gary Stu because of it. There’s such an imbalance between him and his friends. The TV series didn’t do ALL of the Wild Grinders any justice. They were all watered down to adore Lil’ Rob and when they never got any real development. There was an attempt to balance the characters, but they were lacking. They were always reduced to their conventional personalities and felt static and sterile. Lil’ Rob clearly has the majority of episodes that focus on him.

It’s shocking that Emo Crys has the least amount of episodes considering his popularity and the fact that Rob Dyrdek always hyped him during the first wave of toys. But it’s important to note that the rest of the cast often got their spotlight stolen by Lil’ Rob when they were meant to have an episode dedicated to them. ‘Wild BFFs’ is an oddball on here because it didn’t really contribute to Jack Knife’s characters, but it was an episode where Lil’ Rob didn’t take it away from him. Either way, these were the episodes where the writers tried to put some spotlight on the rest of the main cast, but these episodes fell short. Jay Jay and Emo Crys had the most lukewarm episodes where Lil’ Rob usually has to solve the problem. ‘Wild Grinder with Two Heads’ was the only episode where Lil’ Rob was actually cut off, but both Jay Jay and Emo Crys had to share this episode. Honestly, it wasn’t exactly the best episode because it was one of the ‘wacky’ ones and it’s just brings secondhand embarrassment to watch it. It’s great to see 2 different characters (one of them not being Lil’ Rob) have to work out their problem together, but I would rather have it be a handcuffs situation where they were forced to work out their differences. Spitball is clearly the quiet character and that makes some excuse for his lack of episodes. To keep him mysterious. Goggles had the best development out of everyone in most of his episodes, but it still feels underwhelming until ‘Midas Touch’. While it looks like Jack Knife has a lot of episodes, there’s something that pisses me off about them all. It’s his Sprawl City-canon personality. He was reduced to being the dumb, uneducated American with a southern accent. This funny persona basically demolishes him from having a meaningful character arc. I want the Ketterville-canon Jack Knife for a lot of reasons, but mostly because the whole point of his character was being the kindest out of all the Wild Grinders despite the fact that he was poor and made to always be the joke. Before the production of the TV series, all the Grinders had expression sheets drawn by Tracey, only Emo Crys’s sheet being released. However, there was a tweet that revealed a glimpse of Jack Knife’s sheet where he was like full-on, pissed-the-hell-off.

The only reason why they could never let Jack Knife be angry in the series was to probably avoid him from looking like an angry redneck due to his strong southern accent being permanent later on. If they stuck to the Ketterville-canon and original voice actor for Jack Knife, we could have had an episode where he finally snaps after being docile for long enough. My boy was meant to slash tires and defend his friends when they are mistreated!!

Speaking of Ketterville-canon, it was very fleshed-out and made the characters unique and interesting. You want to know why Spitball got his nickname? He used his spit on people because he thought it would heal wounds from a story he heard. The writers should have made Emo Crys way more moodier and Jay Jay deserves more screen time of his hobbies. The rest of the cast needs to have conflicts (both internal and outside) of their lives and be able to resolve them. The writers avoided anything that would truly challenge the characters in favor of keeping a conventional typecast. And we aren’t done yet. Another improvement on characters we need is: less antagonists and adults that appear for an episode. There’s too many one-time villains in the TV series than like, actual kids who are the same age the Wild Grinders. No, this doesn’t mean we need a girl skate crew to play as girlfriends. Absolutely not. We need different kids who love to skateboard. We need gay and trans kids. We need to see black and brown skateboarding kids. We need to see new designs for characters and skate crews who can make challenges and befriend the Wild Grinders. If kids are going to watch the TV series, they deserve to feel seen because Wild Grinders make more celebrities and adults in the cast where they don’t do a lot. (Unless it’s Lil’ Rob’s mom. She contributes more to the story than the actual antagonists).

Anyways, we need better development for the main and reoccurring cast. But we need to see a diversity of skateboarders as well to create unique plots and encourage character development by having them interact with the Wild Grinders. I’m tired from writing all of this in one shot, but it’s sincerely tiring that the script writers wrote everything the way it is in the TV series.

Apologies if any part of this analysis feels rushed or incomplete, it’s the week of finals and my brain isn’t working (and threw off everything I was supposed to write about the analysis). To the few people reading this, thank you and hope that this enhances the brainrot. Feedback is very appreciated on my end.

[firjii]

Idk why but it's oddly offensive to me when you order a used book online and the package arrives with a coupon for a wine subscription service. I'm not questioning people who like to curl up in a chair with a book and a glass, but I kind of object to such an obvious and unsolicited nudge.

I regard the ones for pet meds or home spa goods or food delivery services as a minor advertising annoyance, but those are tangible things that actually benefit some people and a few folks might really need or use those coupons at some point. Booze? Not so much.

Idk man there's just something jarring about people trying to ply you into buying a potentially addictive product with centuries-proven links to dangerous or fatal behavior. I know the booksellers are just taking the ad money, but there are so many other ways to do it, yeah?

[marlo-noni]

Marlo's Chinese learning journey, part 3

Here are parts one and two.

When when I watched The Untamed in early 2021, that began the current phase of my Mandarin obsession, still going strong in 2024.

Online language learning resources are so amazing compared to when I was in university and when I was working as a Chinese-speaking receptionist. I discovered when I was studying Japanese from 2017-2019 that not only was there Duolingo, but Google Translate also had an OCR function so you could take a photo or screenshot of anything, and it would translate it for you.

For my mental health, I started working out for an hour every morning beginning in 2022. I ride my road bike hooked up to a bike trainer. So I have an hour every morning where I'm trying to distract myself from the pain of intense cardio, and Cdramas and Chinese variety shows are the perfect thing to focus on while I'm working out. I also usually watch them when I'm eating dinner.

As most of my Tumblr friends already know, fannish obsession is also an extremely powerful motivator. To get my Wang Yibo fix, I started watching the variety show Day Day Up (天天向上), which he was on on a weekly basis for many years. At first, I only watched the episodes with English subs, which were only a small fraction of them. Then I discovered that some episodes had subs in other languages, and YouTube could machine-translate those into English, so I could sort of muddle my way through. By then, I was addicted, so then I started watching episodes with no English subs and trying to see if I could figure out what was going on by context. The fact that there were Chinese subs meant that when I was really interested in finding out what Wang Yibo was saying, or what someone was saying about him, I could pause it, look at the Chinese characters, and try to look it up. I could either run OCR if I had a screenshot, or try to look up the characters by radical and stroke order in my Oxford Chinese-English dictionary (I hadn't yet figured out that Google Translate had handwriting recognition, and also my written Chinese was abysmal).

There are many other things that have helped me along the way. Here are some:

Language Reactor is a browser extension that allows you to watch subtitles in multiple languages in Netflix (also supposedly YouTube, but it was too buggy for that to ever work for me), so I was able to watch the few Cdramas there are on Netflix (including, importantly, The Untamed, which I watched multiple times) in English, Pinyin, and Chinese characters. You can also hover your mouse over a certain word, and it will give you the definition. The Pinyin isn't always accurate for characters that have multiple pronunciations, but otherwise, it's a fabulous tool. Viki used to have something similar called "language learning mode" which would show subtitles in multiple languages, but it's pretty much discontinued now. Still, a lot of Chinese streaming shows have Chinese subtitles, and it's the best when the English subtitles display above them instead of overlapping them.

I signed up for Skritter sometime in 2022, and it's improved my written Chinese by leaps and bounds. The subscription isn't cheap - like CAD $22/month - but it's been absolutely indispensible. I couldn't have reached my current approximate HSK 4-5 level without it. I've learned about 2900 characters now. Every day I learn about 5-10 new words (not characters; at this point there's a lot of repetition when you learn new words, just different combinations of characters you already know), and I also do review every day for at least 10 minutes. On the weekends, it's longer. Whenever I'm on public transit, I'm reviewing on Skritter.

I also use Hanping Lite now super regularly. It has very good handwriting recognition, and also an excellent dictionary. It's extremely handy when I'm watching/listening to Liu Yuning's livestreams and he uses a word or phrase I don't know, because it has a lot of slang and chengyu in it. Also, a lot of Chinese shows don't provide English subtitles for text that shows up on screen, whether it's funny captions/commentary on variety shows, text messages in contemporary dramas, or signs and handwritten messages. So if I don't know a character, I can draw it on my phone screen with my finger, and Hanping Lite will tell me what it is.

My Liu Yuning obsession started in November/December 2023, and sometime soon after that, I started using the Kugou (酷狗) music app, and I've discovered some other really great Chinese music through that app as well. Song lyrics are some of the hardest things for me to understand, but I catch bits and pieces of meaning, especially to songs I listen to over and over again.

Liu Yuning has also made me a daily Weibo user. Weibo has a translate function that I use pretty often because I'm lazy and want Liu Yuning info now, but I often test myself by trying to read posts without doing that, and then running to translate to see if I was right.

I also made friends with a new coworker in 2021 who was born and raised in Beijing. She immigrated to Canada about 20 years ago and her kids were born here. She and I both happen to be people interested in languages and cultures other than our own, and she is happy to listen to me practice my Chinese, correct my mistakes, and answer my questions. Law is also an extremely difficult field to work in here if English isn't your first language, so I help her with her English when she wants me to as well. I also have a handful of other coworkers I speak Chinese with as well when I see them in the lunch room and around the office.

(I'm actually travelling to Beijing, Xi'an, and Wutai Shan with my brother and dad for all of September this year, and my coworker friend is going to be in Beijing at the same time as me for 3 days! She planned her trip that way so we'd overlap. I am so excited to be in her hometown with her!)

I also had a brief kind of romance thing with a guy I met in Hangzhou when I was on my trip last year (not worth explaining further, he's pretty much a puxin nan 普信男 and also freaked out when I explained I never wanted kids), and when I came back to Vancouver, we were regularly messaging and video chatting on WeChat for a couple months before it fizzled. If nothing else, that was also obviously very good Mandarin practice, since he spoke very, very little English.

I'm at the point now in my Chinese ability where I'm considering recording a video of myself speaking, since except for that one famous polyglot guy in New York (who SHOCKS PEOPLE by ORDERING FOOD IN THEIR NATIVE LANGUAGE 🙃 omg it's so cringe), there don't seem to be a lot of videos of white people in North America speaking Chinese. I'd have to figure out what I'd want to talk about, though.

[beardedmrbean]

1. One person killed in third shooting around Porte de Hal this week

One person was shot dead in Saint-Gilles at around 06:00 on Wednesday morning in the same location as Tuesday's shooting. This is the third incident to take place in the area around the Porte de Hal this week. Read more.

2. Four shootings in three days: What is happening around Porte de Hal?

Four shootings have taken place in the area of Porte de Hal area over the past few days – with several people injured and one dead. As drug-related violence is escalating, local authorities are calling for stronger measures. Read more.

3. Belgium's quirky traditions: Orange throwing at Binche Carnival

Belgium's carnival season is underway, with small towns around the country rising to national attention as they display peculiar traditions and spectacular costumes. Especially renowned is Binche Carnival, where the custom of throwing oranges sets it apart. Read more.

4. Belgium issues two new state bonds in March, but limits subscriptions

Belgium will again issue state bonds – one with a one-year term and one with a three-year term – on 4 March, but it will limit the amount raised to €6 billion and may close the subscription early, the Debt Agency announced in a press release on Tuesday afternoon. Read more.

5. 'Unique property': Smallest house in Brussels put up for sale

What is believed to be the smallest house in Brussels has been put up for sale. The house, which is full of character but is due for renovation, can be bought for just under €200,000. Read more.

6. 'Addiction is not loyalty:' Belgium urged to tighten gambling policy

As the number of online gamblers has doubled in four years, several organisations are now calling on Belgium's Federal Government to strengthen its gambling policy against the dangers of addiction. Read more.

7. Belgium's highest prices: Most expensive and cheapest communes in Brussels

While the entire region is the most expensive in the country for buying property, there are large discrepancies in Brussels' housing market. The difference between the lowest and highest median price was around €400,000 in 2023. Read more.

[tieronecrush]

BNBG (brand new baby girl) masterlist

frankie x curvy OF/cam girl f!reader

summary: frankie has been needing distractions from a hurdle in his sobriety, so he ventures to his frequented subscription service platform to take his mind off things. he sees the title of your page, intrigued immediately, and dives deep into your content. catching your attention on a livestream with his confident commands, frankie becomes infatuated with you and an avid viewer before he decides to DM you one day...and then ends up with a brand new baby girl.

rating: E (very)

warnings: daddy kink!! **cover does not depict anything about the reader, simply vibes of softness**, vague descriptions of reader's body (plush, thick, curves, soft, etc. no definite descriptors used otherwise. picture her as you want but she is mid to plus size in my head, hence the tag 🫶), no age specified (only that reader started out of college, no specifications of when she went to school), discussions of addiction & drug use, childless frankie au, sex work, sex livestream, consumption of porn, unestablished relationship, online relationship, pet names (conejita, baby, babygirl, pequeña, bunny, etc.), gratuitous descriptions of frankie's dick, SMUT, male masturbation, female masterbation, sex toys, both frankie & reader have thoughts about the other (unprotected piv, fingering, oral, etc.), major dirty talk, d/s dynamics, some fluff sprinkled in <3, this might be lowkey problematic that frankie uses porn to cope (esp reader's porn) buuuuut hopefully it's hot

part 1

part 2

part 3

[alexandrarosa]

Normal People

This is going to be yet another rant and I don’t actually know where my train of thought is going to lead me so let’s go.

I heard a lot about Normal People recently and I finally decided to watch it (bc I already have an hbo max subscription and I didn’t know if it’s worth to buy an actual book). And I didn’t make it past the half of the show. But I did read the spoilers online.

First of all the tile was… quite misleading for me. I was assuming I am going to watch a show about, well, normal people. And I don’t think I did.

Calling them normal and therefore their relationship – normal, seems really hurtful. I’m a psychology major, maybe that’s why it triggers me so much but let me state it clearly: their relationship was not healthy nor normal. They behavior was at times problematic. And romanticizing that kind of relationship can have awful consequences.

It’s a sad story about the lack of communication – at least the half I’ve watched. About mistreatment between two people who claim they love each other. About a deep shame about the person they are dating.

I’ve dated a guy like Connell. And I did think that it was very romantic. I was practically addicted to him. The moments when he would decide we can get back together did feel like a great weight was being lifted from my chest. And let me tell you - that relationship destroyed me. Just like it was destroying Marianne.

But the worst thing about that show is that I was actually rooting for them to get together. Like how f*caked up is that? I was in a relationship like that. I’m a psychology major able to identify the incorrect patterns of behavior. And I was still hoping they’ll stay together. Because the way their relationship is shown in the Normal People makes it really hard not to ship them. And that’s also problematic.

For example because upon being in a relationship like that the best thing to do is to get out of a relationship like that. And the viewers hoping they’ll stay together fundamentally accept the toxic and problematic nature of that relationship.

I feel like calling that show Normal People suggests that this kind of relationship is not only acceptable but also, well, normal. So people watching it can assume that the toxic relationship they are in is not to be avoided but rather appreciated.

Don’t get me wrong – the show shows us flaws of the people involved. We know that they are doing poorly and their behavior is wrong. But at the same time is still feels like we are to accept that it’s all a part of life.

In a world that’s hard on its own making it seem okay for a relationship to be hard too – seems just wrong.

Upon seeing the title I thought I was going to see a show about people struggling with life but having a comfort of being together – and facing the normal life together. I was anticipating some cozy scenes and homely feel. And I’m sad I didn’t get that.

[blimpixels]

To counter your argument of there being "too much piracy" as you stated on twitter, if it wasn't for piracy there would be so much media out there that'd lost forever. I'm surprised you feel that way about this especially these days as we witness multi-billionaire companies nuke different media off the face of the earth that wouldn't survive if it wasn't for piracy. A lot of cultural contributions and their value would be lost forever. To use an example of the library of alexandria, Eratosthenes' most important work Geographika would not have survived at all if it was not for the fact that Strabo preserved many fragments of his work through quotations. While this isn't necessarily the same as piracy, the core concept is still the same. We are witnessing attempts at eradicating third spaces and what they offer for free to their users such as libraries, for example through censorship and defunding. Piracy is becoming more relevant and even more important than ever before, specifically because of the rot capitalism forces on society. I can understand why you might feel that there's too much piracy going around, but please consider why that might be and the importance of preserving culture and the cultural items that come with it.

“so you hate waffles?”

This isn’t countering an argument I made, it’s making up an argument I made because you have worms in your brain and you can’t read the word “piracy” without going on a tirade about digital preservation when they aren’t actually the same thing, despite the overlap.

Maybe ask me about the context of my tweets before going on anon and sending me essays about shit I also already talk about. I could’ve been talking about anything.

Obviously I know and care about digital and physical media preservation, I tweeted that literally coming home from the library yesterday. But that’s not the same as piracy.

Maybe I was talking about how hundreds of artists and SWs personal subscription sites are being regularly stolen and consistently updated and the creators can do nothing about it short of shutting down their patreons and OFs. Obviously it sucks that people even have to have middlemen like this to be financially supported online but people stealing their content isn’t preservation, it’s theft.

As a creator it pisses me off when cumbrained, porn addicted consumers feel entitled to people’s creative and sexual labor. Even when it’s only $5 a month to actually support them.

You should’ve asked me what originally prompted my tweet. I was in a comic book store yesterday and I felt guilt after seeing how full some of the shelves were and seeing books that I’ve read online for free that I could’ve bought and supported the creators with. I try to buy physical media when I can because I hate how streaming services and gaming companies have a disgusting amount of needless control over the content they just so happen to “own”. I’ve talked about this before.

But then of course you’d retort “but most of that money doesn’t go to the creators, it goes to people on top” and I’d say “so what?” I’m not talking about who fully gets the money (though it’s very important), I’m talking about people taking from modern media producers without giving anything back. It’s an unfair exchange. Even if comics were 100% owned by the people creating and printing the books, piracy would still be just as big. Because it’s not about “preservation” for most people, it’s about getting content for free.

Being anticapitalist doesn’t mean not compensating people for their work.

Of course, opinions are nuanced and that tweet wasn’t. But it’s a tweet. They aren’t nuanced. It was barely a sentence. So next time hop off anon and own your words like an actual human being. This isn’t even everything I want to say about piracy and media preservation but I have stuff to do today.

I’m glad you’re passionate about this. It’s important. I actually agree with you on most of the things you said. But also shut the fuck up.

[wandringaesthetic]

I’VE PLAYED EVERY MAIN SERIES FINAL FANTASY AND I SAVED THE WORST FOR LAST

I was an SNES kid. I played Super Mario World and Kart and Donkey Kong and Kirby, but from about the third grade until high school I pretty much didn’t play video games at all. Thought they were a waste of time. Toys. Kid stuff. It probably would have stayed that way, but two things happened. 1) Pokemon Blue convinced me that video games could be a mental exercise, a puzzle and a strategy rather than just a test of your reflexes. 2) A friend lent me Final Fantasy VII and her PlayStation over Christmas break, which began an obsession with video games as a storytelling medium in general and with Final Fantasy in particular that lasts to this day.

That was in the year 2000. 22 years and 1 month later, I’ve finally played all of them.

I won’t quite say I’ve “beaten” all of them, because for XI, well. It depends on what you mean. I beat the base game and the first four expansions (Rise of Zilart, Chains of Promathia, Treasures of Aht Urhgan, and Wings of the Goddess), the first two chapters of the last major story expansion (Seekers of Adoulin) and all but the very final boss of the “epilogue” of the game, Rhapsodies of Vana’diel. The final boss of Rhapsodies was what I set as my own arbitrary end goal (because that’s where the credits roll!) and I made it to the boss but couldn’t beat it on my own. In the end, I played more of the main storyline than some people who played it for years in its heyday did, but I also never engaged with the endgame content at all and have less than no interest in doing so. Certainly I’ve beaten the base game. But has someone who has played through A Realm Reborn really beaten Final Fantasy XIV? I mean sure as some kind of arbitrary benchmark, but….

I could almost certainly have beaten that last Rhapsodies boss if I had found a party of players willing to assist me, but I so wanted to just be done with the game that I cancelled my subscription in a fit of pique.

I’m a JRPG person not an MMO person. I’ve claimed that I avoided MMORPGs for a long time because I was in school and/or thought I might be prone to addiction, but that’s only half the truth. I avoided them because, honestly, from everything I’d heard it didn’t seem like they would appeal to me. It’s not that I don’t care about gameplay, but if I’m not engaged in a story I’m probably not sticking around. Plus MMOs seemed like a scam. The way gacha games and collectable card games seem like a scam. You want to be better at this? Spend more money. More content? More time, more money. The entire point seemed to be to get you addicted. And what could possibly be the plot of an MMO? A bunch of quests where you collect bear asses? Despite my love of Final Fantasy, I first played A Realm Reborn with a spirit of ugh, okay, fine, you convinced me. Then I left and didn’t return until the pandemic. Today I continue to have a great time with FFXIV generally, but relevant to what I’m writing about here: when I finally got to the end of Endwalker, that left only one Final Fantasy mountain that I hadn’t climbed.

Final Fantasy XI Online. A game that wasn’t exactly well regarded in its heyday and has aged especially poorly. A game that is a huge time sink. A game that certainly had its cult following, but even they tend to talk about it in terms of I don’t know man, you just had to be there.

Very often in Final Fantasy XI, in order to advance the plot, you have to find a spot on a map. The spot isn’t marked. Usually there’s not any visual indication that it’s there. I played with a mod that added a minimap, and the minimap showed your character as an arrow on the map, red dots indicating enemies, blue dots indicating other players, and green dots indicating all other things that you could target: NPCs, crystal “home” points, nodes for harvesting/mining/etc., and also these targets where you could “find” an object or initiate a cutscene or whatnot.

But as far as I know there wasn’t a shortcut to finding these in the original game other than to tab through everything in your field of vision. No green dots, even. The in game instructions for quests and missions from NPCs and in your menus are usually vague. So you could be going over entire maps like this, tabbing through everything in sight until you find what you need. As far as I know, there’s not another way to find these points built into the game. I mostly got around this by hooking up a second monitor to my pc, having a fan wiki open at all times and using a combination of coordinates from the wiki and the dots on my minimap to find my interaction point.

If you played Final Fantasy XI back in the day, especially if you played on PS2 where modding was impossible, I don’t know how you did this. I imagine a few players were obsessive enough to find the target and then shared that info with everyone else. Word of mouth.

There are very many obtuse gameplay decisions I could complain about in this game, but I use this example because it’s emblematic of what seems to be the design philosophy of the whole business. Explain nothing, not even basic systems.  Give the most minimal cues. I think the game designers saw themselves as playing against every subscriber of the game at once. I could see how this could be exciting, as a player. How you could feel like an explorer, discovering new sights, new gear, new ways to solve a problem, information you could then pass on to your fellow players and feel important.

The legendary Absolute Virtue (a notorious monster which took over 18 hours to beat if you used the Squeenix recommended strategy—which no one ever succeeded at) makes me think that my impression of the game designers seeing players as The Enemy is absolutely correct.

Haha! They must have been thinking. Let’s see them handle THIS!

Anyone who’s spent more than a couple hours on either side of a dungeon master screen knows this philosophy fucking sucks, man.

If you’re not playing on the day new content broke, if you weren’t a person who had the time to be in the race to solve these things, if you’re playing with a small group or alone over twenty years later, the game is either a solid, unsolvable, unclimbable cliff face, or you comb through various fan wikis and FAQs and ancient forum threads (doing much the same as players did 20 years ago with word of mouth, but more efficiently) and…. Follow a really long list of instructions. There’s really no game there. No mountain left to climb. Nothing left to discover. It felt like doing my taxes.

The high school friend who started my obsession with Final Fantasy also lent me Final Fantasy VI (the SNES cartridge labelled Final Fantasy III) alongside an exhaustive unauthorized guide, and recommended I follow the guide religiously, which I did, every turn, every treasure chest. It was an awful mistake that soured my entire experience of the game and I think is part of the reason that game ranks lower in my list of favorites than it does with many FF fans. It’s not that I’m against using guides, I do it often, especially when I’m stuck or when a game is making me jump through a hoop rather than giving me something to discover or solve. But using it every step of the way like that was like reading a book, but before every page you have to read “Okay, on this page watch out for the moment where she looks out the window, it’s going to be important later (the curtains are blue!)”

Gross.

But with FFXI, at least in the year of our lord 2023, there’s practically not another way to do it, and I often felt like the challenge I was facing was not within the game itself, but in finding the information online that I needed in order to proceed.

Final Fantasy XI is a game that seems to not want you to play it. You make a character, you choose a starting city, the game gives you a coupon it tells you to exchange to an NPC for an extremely measly 50 gil—not enough to get you started doing anything. And targeting (tab through everything in your field of vision) and trading the item (with the NPC targeted, open your menu, go to trade, choose the item, choose enter) is, uh, not intuitive. And… that’s it. That’s all the guidance you get. I feel like there should have been a thick print manual that came with the game. But if ever such a thing existed, it’s not easy to come by now.

I’m pretty sure that without my I’m-going-to-beat-every-Final-Fantasy (bitch) determination I would have bounced off of it before the end of the free trial period. In fact, even with that determination, I did bounce off of it. Circa 2017 I made a character, struggled with PlayOnline, struggled with menus, never could figure out how to find that damn NPC and trade that damn coupon, never left the starting city, couldn’t remember my login password, and cancelled.

Yet I’ve heard that, at the time of its release, FFXI was one of the easier MMORPGs to pick up and play. Yikes.

I have to take it on faith that in the brief period of time after EverQuest and before World of Warcraft this game was actually a contender in the MMORPG market. I have to take it on faith because as much as I disliked playing Final Fantasy XI now, I would have disliked it even more in the years directly after its release, with its steeper grind and the challenge of finding other players with similar goals and its even more time and gil consuming travel. It demanded so much of its players in the way of time and frustration and money and gave so very, very little reward.

All it seemed to give was camaraderie between players, and I’m pretty sure I would have given up on the game before I found that.

I meant to check how much time I spent on Final Fantasy XI before I unsubscribed, but I cancelled my sub in a moment of frustration and forgot to. I know that the last time I checked, sometime in the Aht Urhgan storyline, it was more than a week. So my final time (unless I find myself possessed to return some day) was probably around the two week mark. Somewhere between 300 and 400 hours. This feels like a lot, but compared to FFXI players who were active in the early to mid oughts, this is nothing.

I watched this video to see the end cutscenes and credits of the game that I ran out of patience to beat. At the end, the player checks his playtime: 2955 days.

Because of the way FFXI’s auction house works, much of that was likely passive or afk, inputting only if someone bid on one of his items or letting macros or 3rd party tools handle it. Yet. As I was playing, I sought out the voices of people who played this game for years during its heyday and found, among others, this one: an episode of a general Final Fantasy podcast with the hosts of a Final Fantasy XI turned Final Fantasy XIV podcast as guests. One of them said his final playtime before he quit was over two years.

“How much of that was ass in seat?”

“For me? Nearly all of it.”

I cannot imagine.  

Both of those hosts had some “Maybe the real Vana’diel was the friends we met along the way” stories. One met her husband through the game. I still cannot fathom it being worth it in any form.

[By contrast, I just checked my time in Final Fantasy XIV: 44 days, 17 hours, 40 mins. A little over a thousand hours. That’s the story so far, two jobs mastered and a few more dabbled in. Weaver and Botanist capped plus a lot of levels in leatherworker and alchemist. More of the normal gold bubble side quests than not. A little bit of raiding. I don’t feel like this cut into my real life, but this was a little under two years of real world time where this was most of the video game I played. This is about the maximum I am willing to give to a game.]

I don’t want to be overwhelmingly negative about Final Fantasy XI because I feel like every person that wasn’t an avid player during its heyday is. It has strong art direction and worldbuilding. The idea of an MMO having any kind of strong storyline was still novel at the time of its release, but it was a main series Final Fantasy, and I think the somewhat arbitrary decision to make it a main game rather than a spinoff rested the responsibility of telling an epic story on its shoulders, and it mostly rose to that challenge. From the second expansion on, FFXI’s stories are at the very least good. Promathia has a god-slaying story that I wouldn’t have been disappointed in if it were the plot of a non-online Final Fantasy title. Aht Urhgan, in a storyline I would be obsessed with were it just slightly better written, has a ghost pirate prince who made a deal with a deity in order to get revenge on the empire that slaughtered his people except, whoops, he develops feelings for the empress. From Zilart on, FFXI squeezes real beauty out of late PS2 era graphics in the forms of environments and character and monster animations. The music is good to extremely good.

It broke ground. XI was the first Final Fantasy with enemies on screen in the field instead of random encounters. It was the first Final Fantasy with a day/night cycle. It’s designed in such a way, both in terms of game design and the focus of the camera, that you really pay attention to enemies, something that rarely happens on anything less than a boss in FFXIV. It advanced MMO storytelling. It walked so that FFXIV could (eventually) run.

But weighed against how obtuse and adversarial this game is. Weighed against the cost, in subscriptions and expansions, weighed against the monstrous amount of time one had to sink into it to play it competently? It’s too much to pay in the year of our lord 2023 and was IMO several times too much to pay at the peak of its popularity.

Versus all those negatives, what does it have going for it? Vibes?! It’s not worth it. Not for me. Not for anyone.

Yet.

I’m glad the servers are still up. As a Final Fantasy fan I’m glad I experienced it, even in truncated form. I’m glad it was still out there for me to explore. As a piece of history. As a piece of the puzzle.

There’s a private FFXI server called Horizon whose mission is to preserve the game as it was at its zenith, when the level cap was 75 and there were no trusts for people like me to waltz through the world while rarely interacting with other players. They’re even trying to scale content that was made after the level cap was raised to fit that restriction. As a piece of preservation and as a fan project, I find this beautiful and fascinating. I wish them every success.

Will you ever find me setting foot in it? Absolutely not.

[therecordchanger62279]

WHAT AM I READING? I get that question sometimes - even from people who never read. I like print magazines because you can drag them from room to room, or to the car, or the park, or the cafe - wherever you like. But they're on the endangered species list. So, gradually, I've begun to make my peace with reading magazines online.

I subscribe to the new Creem magazine - both print and digital editions. But the print magazine is too large, and the print too small. So I read it online instead. But the subscription also gives me access to the online archive where all back issues are stashed. I'm addicted to those.

The Trouser Press site has been redesigned, and the entire run of the magazine made available for free. And that's still a great read 40 plus years later. There's new content on the site as well.

I used to read The Village Voice when I could find it. But it folded, and then they went online. And then it folded again - only to be resurrected once more. I find it well worth my time. There is both new and archival content, and it's far better than what generally passes for print journalism these days.

I subscribe to Record Collector, a UK music magazine aimed at vinyl collectors. And I just bought a subscription to Goldmine after a 15 year sabbatical. They'll cover the U.S. side of the collecting scene. Both of those come in print and digital editions. I do print on those.

And, finally, there's a website called Circulation Zero that has digital downloads of print runs for Slash, Boston Rock, No Mag, Damage and Dry. All are complete except Boston Rock (but they have 50 issues of it). I'm reading Slash because I missed it completely first time around. It was a West Coast Punk 'zine, and I never saw a single issue of it in Midwestern Ohio. Of all the things I'm reading at the moment, Slash and Creem are my favorites. Rock journalism at its best when it mattered most. I even created digital playlists based on each of them so that after I finish an article, or an issue, I can listen to the music they were writing about. And for that few hours, at least, the 21st Century - which has, so far, been a complete waste of time - is still in the distant future. That's the power of the written word, and the magic of music.

All of the above can easily be found with a Google search.