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6toru · 2 months ago

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𝑾𝑯𝒀 𝑼𝑺𝑬 𝑨 𝑻𝑶𝒀 𝑾𝑯𝑬𝑵 𝒀𝑶𝑼 𝑯𝑨𝑽𝑬 𝑴𝑬? — gojo satoru.

imagine gojo fucking you with the dildo you bought to prepare yourself for his big dick 🧎‍♀️

cw. 18+ content mdni, dildo fucking & explicit language | wc. 2.2k

author's note. another one of my works from my previous blog ! happy reading <3

The first time you stumbled across 𝐒𝐀𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐔 freshly out of the shower, all naked and bare, the first thing your eyes caught sight of was that obscene baguette of a cock hanging between his legs. By then, you were convinced that he wasn't going to fit – at least, not easily. Your thesis was later proven to be correct when you had your first time with the ivory-haired male; tears immediately welling up in your eyes as you cried out in sheer pain. Of course, your boyfriend stopped his actions, making it his top priority to ensure your comfort and wellbeing. Since then, he didn't make any more advances – offering only his mouth and fingers for your pleasure, despite your many pleas telling him that you're ready.

It had been nearly a month now, and you had finally taken matters into your own hands. After all, desperate times called for desperate measures. While Satoru was off on a mission, you stared intently at the laptop screen, scrolling through the myriad of sex toys that are put on sale. What better way is there to stop your lovely boyfriend from holding himself back any longer than to buy a dildo to prepare yourself for him? Undeniably the mere image of his twitching cock being held down by the confines of his boxers and trousers made your mouth water. Eventually, after a couple minutes, you click on checkout.

It’s the next day, and your boyfriend is still away for a mission, and you find yourself staring at the box sitting in front of your door in surprise — honestly, you had expected it to come in a week. But then again, you’re back to business. Rushing back inside your abode, you plop the box down onto the kitchen table, tearing the cardboard with a scissor in nimble movements. Lo and behold, the extra large rainbow dildo rests upon the palms of your hands.

Blushing, you stare down at the lewd toy and you gulp.

You plop yourself back onto the comfort of your soft mattress; the freshly washed dildo and the small bottle of lube splayed out across the bed. at this point, you were already bare – your bra being the only garment left on your body. Leaning back on the mattress, your back makes contact with the soft and gentle plush of your pillow. You stretch your legs wide open and lick a thin stripe of saliva against your finger, rubbing it against your folds. A hitched breath escapes from your lips as you align the tip of the dildo with your aching hole. God, you desperately wish it's your boyfriend instead.

All you can think about is Satoru; his body above yours, his eyes staring lovingly into yours as his soft lips graze against your own. You shut your eyes closed, softly biting onto your lip as you press the large tip against your entrance —

“Guess who’s home~” The door suddenly opens and in barges your boyfriend, and as if the angels had sent him a message because of how much you have missed him, he finally returns from his week long mission. However within seconds, you both jumped in surprise — despite wearing his blindfold, you could tell by the way his mouth was agape that his eyes were ogling at the sight of a dildo pressed against your slick cunt. “Rainbow?”

As an immediate response, you cross your legs together and tossed the toy to the side; feeling an intense wave of embarrassment wash over your whole entire body. You want to evaporate, you really do. Your face feels undeniably warm, looking at your boyfriend bashfully. “Welcome home, ‘Toru.”

Without any words, Satoru makes long strides to the bed and he presses his lips onto yours, almost greedily; his fingers trails to the back of your head, cupping it as he kisses you deeper. Shortly after, he pulls away from your lips, leaving a thin string of saliva connecting your lips together. you can only look at him, both aroused and embarrassed.

“Were you planning on surprising me with this, my love?” Your boyfriend questions you, tearing the black fabric off his face; revealing his cerulean eyes blown out in arousal. You can barely utter a response, the embarrassment is simply too much for you to bear.

“Can't say that i'm too happy about this, though. Seein' you use a plastic dick instead of my own is making me a lil' jealous, y'know?”

You press a soft kiss against his cheek, looking at the male bashfully, “I'm sorry baby, i just wanted to prepare myself so I can take you better. That’s all.”

As if your words have ignited some sort of flame within him, all signs of fatigue from his mission has evaporated and he pulls you in for another heated kiss. “You’re so fuckin’ cute,” he says in between kisses, “you know that?”

You’re unable to reply, your brain already feeling mushed from the way his lips mold so nicely against yours and his hands brushing against your thighs. You can only hum against his lips, though you’re barely keeping track of what he’s saying. But when you see his hand travel towards the toy, you felt your cheeks heat up even more when he decides to lube it once more upon inspecting it.

“Out of everything, why rainbow?”

“it’s the closest thing to your size,” you reply, your voice soft yet it’s dripping in arousal. “I didn’t want you to keep holding back for my sake.”

Satoru glanced down at the toy and right back at you, grinning cockily. “Cute. I hope you know that this is still pretty small compared to my dick.”

he leans to your ear, playfully slapping the toy against your pussy. “Say, baby. Do you mind if I help you prepare?”

Fuck. How can you say no to that? You nod your head eagerly towards your boyfriend, unable to control your desperation and arousal. Your gaze trails down towards Satoru’s trousers and you could immediately feel your mouth water — the sight of his fat cock restrained by the confines of the tight fabric is a sight you’ve definitely missed seeing.

You softly gasp at the sudden, cool sensation of the lube being sprayed onto your folds and then your eyes rolling back shortly after when he sticks his long and thick finger inside your heat — effortlessly kissing your g-spot with the tips of his thick fingers before pulling away, eliciting a small whine from you.

“you’re already squeezing so tightly around my finger,” Satoru comments, a sly smirk tugging at the corner of his lips. “How are you going to take this dildo, let alone my dick, inside you?”

“I…” you try to find the words to speak, but a shocked squeak merely escaped your throat when he squirted a little bit of lube onto your juicy cunt; the cool liquid making your body jump slightly. Satoru chuckles softly at your reaction, leaning into your face to press a chaste kiss on your lips. “Sorry, hehe, you’re too cute I couldn’t help myself.”

He slides the tip of the dildo along your folds; starting from your clit to down your hole, pushing the tip ever so slightly to elicit a reaction out of you. You shiver slightly at the sensation, thrusting your hips softly against the plastic toy. There's no denying that you feel embarrassment washing over your entire being, yet there's also something awfully arousing about being at his complete submission.

“Try to relax yourself, 'kay baby?” You can hear Satoru's low voice ringing in your ears, dripping in complete arousal. You hum in response, eagerly nodding your head as you await his actions with your lips bitten in anticipation.

“Imagine that it’s my cock fucking you,” satoru says, chuckling deeply, “nice and deep.”

The moment he inserts the tip inside you, your toes immediately curl — your arms scrambling to find solace in his broad and brawny shoulders; your body writhing beneath his as he pushes the toy even deeper, deliciously stretching your velvety walls with his slow movements.

“Shit,” The ivory-haired male lets out a needy groan, his cerulean gaze locked onto your pussy; taking in the pornographic sight of your folds sucking the toy back in each time he pulls away — he’s unable to look away; he wants to see more.

“Baby, you think you take it even deeper?”

The sultry tone in Satoru’s voice sends immediate shocks of arousal straight to your heat, arching your back in delight when he presses his palm against the end of the dildo — pushing it deeper. He grins almost maniacally, relishing in the way you whimper so desperately for him; begging him to use his dick in lieu of a plastic toy.

“S-Satoru… please — I wan’ your cock so badly… Mmh—Oh!”

A loud mewl rips from your throat, your eyes widening as he slams the toy all the way; the head of the rainbow plastic cock planting a kiss on your cervix. You dig your nails deeper into his skin, your lips latching onto his shoulder to mask the desperate moans that threaten to escape your lips. Satoru licks his lips, his jaw clenching at your cute reactions.

He’s tempted, and that's an understatement — he's beyond horny and desperate, yet there's an inkling of curiosity egging him on; wanting to see how you'd react if it was his fat cock instead. He brushes a finger on your face, bringing a strand of hair behind your ear; leaving whispers of praise. After all, you’re taking the dildo so fucking well. He watches, amused, as he pulls the toy back – his eyes glued onto your slick juices coating the ridges before he slams in back inside, laughing almost sadistically when you let out a cry.

It isn't long before he increases his speed, his lips whispering sweet nothings in your ears as he relentlessly fucks the dildo inside your wall, and t's taking everything within him to ignore the ache dwelling in his pants – twitching within the confines of his boxers as he continues to pleasure you.

"F-fuck! 'Toru–mm! Please, baby, I-I'm so fuckin' close please I want your dick so badly – I p-promise i can take it now – Ah!"

Jaws slacked and eyes blown out in lust, he stares keenly at the juices trickling down your gaping hole; your thighs trembling and jumping each and every time he slams the rainbow toy inside you.

"Is that right?" Satoru grunts, licking his lips. He increases the fervour with his thrusts, beads of sweat trickling down his forehead as he imagines that it's his own cock going in and out of you.

"You're doing so fuckin' good, baby – takin' that toy like a fuckin' champ, yeah? I'll give you my dick right after this. You just have to cum good for me, 'kay?"

His groans comes in tandem with your lewd moans as nears you to your release. He truly revels the way your hips rock frantically against his hands, moaning desperately against his shoulder before you tense on the spot – your juices spraying all over his hand, dampening the bedsheets and a loud cry of his name leaves your trembling lips.

"Mmm... shit." Satoru sighs, staring down at you as he unbuckles his belt with ease, and your eyes snap over to his boxers; your mouth instantly watering at the sight of the humongous bulge as well as the pre-cum that dampened the grey fabric. A delicious sight. He slips out of the garment, almost teasingly and he laughs at the wanton look plastered across your face.

In languid movements, he rubs his giant dick in front of you; relishing in the sight of desperation that is plastered across your face while he teases you. "You've been so hungry for my cock, yeah? You're such a dirty, dirty girl."

"Please, 'Toru." you whimper, you can feel the tears of frustration slowly building up in your eyes. God, you want him so bad. Eventually, he returns to you; reconnecting his lips with yours in an arduous kiss. He leans you back to the mattress, his lips never once leaving yours as he unclasps your bra with one hand in ease. You gasp when you feel his hands immediately grasping at your soft mounds; his fingers rubbing, pulling and twisting at the erect buds.

When you pull away, a thin string of saliva is what was left that connected your lips together and you stare longingly at him through bated breaths — your breathing has gone even faster; your heart pounding against your chest as you watch Satoru align his cock to your needy cunt. It's going to happen now, you thought to yourself, biting your lips.

"Hey, baby. you think you can cum like that again?" He asks as he rubs his fat cock against your drenched folds, eliciting a sweet and needy moan from your lips.

Satoru has long lost his grasp on the remaining control he had on himself. There's a carnal look in his eyes, yet it only makes you all the more excited.

"I want you to cum like that on my dick this time, baby. You think you can give it to me?"

#⭑ 𝐰𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐧 𝐛𝐲 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫 #gojo satoru x reader #gojo satoru x you #gojo satoru x reader smut #gojo smut #jujutsu kaisen smut #jjk x reader smut #jjk x reader #gojo x reader #gojo x you #gojo x y/n #jjk smut #satoru gojo smut #satoru smut

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quarterlifekitty · 23 days ago

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That Price coming home to his missus with a baby thing was delicious, absolutely divine. Do you think for the other boys and Nik it'd be something similar or would they have wildly different reactions? Btw I absolutely love your writing, I check your blog daily for your new stuff, the way you write is delicious, thank you <3

I’ll give you a little something for Ghost since you made me blush and teehee

Also uhhhh I might’ve fucked up the timing a little on infant development milestones but you’re gonna have to forgive me on that

cw: suspicions of infidelity

Ghost is bouncing his leg the whole time he spends in evac. The heli ride, the plane back to base, the car back to his flat— as soon as he was released from the mind frame of the mission it was like all of that anxiety over you he’d built up over the past year and half came crashing on his head.

You’d’ve left him. You must have. He wasn’t really anything he’d call worth sticking around for. That was the plain and honest truth. He’s thinking of the quickest way he can find you and get on his knees for you once he’s scraped all of the blood and dirt off. It was easy to nod and go along with a sudden job Price called about, back when he was under the impression that it would be a few months tops.

He sees a light on in the window of your shared flat. Fuck, hopefully that you and not some new tenant— that somehow his automatic payments had fucked up while he was away and he got evicted. For a split second he debates whether sprinting up the stairs would be faster than waiting for this god-forsaken lift.

He pauses at the door when he hears your laughter. Thank fucking god. His relief is palpable, he’s thanking you and god and whoever else will listen, he’ll never ask for anything again—

“When did you get so cute, huh?”

No.

You wouldn’t.

Not in the flat you two shared, where you fucked and loved each other and cried together, the world couldn’t possibly be so cruel that you’d—

He gets as far as bursting through the door after he manages to find the right key before he’s stopped in his tracks. You look to the door like a deer in headlights, your eyes wide and with a little spoon of sweet potato puree in your hand. Your hair is a mess and—

There’s a baby looking at him. Looking where mommy is looking. The fat little thing is in a high chair, a mess on its face. The name “Lydia” is embroidered in big, swirly letters on her bib. It was a name he’d talked about, his one decent childhood memory, his aunt—

He drops his duffel and rips off the mask. The baby has these whisps of hair that are undeniably yours, eyes that he’s only seen in the mirror.

“Simon— is it really you?” You almost whisper in disbelief. Like you’d dreamed him coming through the door before. Makes his heart fucking ache. The words come out of his mouth before he can stop them.

“Yeah, mama. S’me.”

#writing #cod fanfic #simon ghost riley #simon riley x you #simon riley x reader #simon ghost riley x reader #secret baby #cod #cw suspected cheating

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echoekhi · 1 year ago

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I’m Declaring War Against “What If” Videos: Project Copy-Knight

What Are “What If” Videos?

These videos follow a common recipe: A narrator, given a fandom (usually anime ones like My Hero Academia and Naruto), explores an alternative timeline where something is different. Maybe the main character has extra powers, maybe a key plot point goes differently. They then go on and make up a whole new story, detailing the conflicts and romance between characters, much like an ordinary fanfic.

Except, they are fanfics. Actual fanfics, pulled off AO3, FFN and Wattpad, given a different title, with random thumbnail and background images added to them, narrated by computer text-to-speech synthesizers.

They are very easy to make: pick a fanfic, copy all the text into a text-to-speech generator, mix the resulting audio file with some generic art from the fandom as the background, give it a snappy title like “What if Deku had the Power of Ten Rings”, photoshop an attention-grabbing thumbnail, dump it onto YouTube and get thousands of views.

In fact, the process is so straightforward and requires so little effort, it’s pretty clear some of these channels have automated pipelines to pump these out en-masse. They don’t bother with asking the fic authors for permission. Sometimes they don’t even bother with putting the fic’s link in the description or crediting the author. These content-farms then monetise these videos, so they get a cut from YouTube’s ads.

In short, an industry has emerged from the systematic copyright theft of fanfiction, for profit.

Project Copy-Knight

Since the adversaries almost certainly have automated systems set up for this, the only realistic countermeasure is with another automated system. Identifying fanfics manually by listening to the videos and searching them up with tags is just too slow and impractical.

And so, I came up with a simple automated pipeline to identify the original authors of “What If” videos.

It would go download these videos, run speech recognition on it, search the text through a database full of AO3 fics, and identify which work it came from. After manual confirmation, the original authors will be notified that their works have been subject to copyright theft, and instructions provided on how to DMCA-strike the channel out of existence.

I built a prototype over the weekend, and it works surprisingly well:

On a randomly-selected YouTube channel (in this case Infinite Paradox Fanfic), the toolchain was able to identify the origin of half of the content. The raw output, after manual verification, turned out to be extremely accurate. The time taken to identify the source of a video was about 5 minutes, most of those were spent running Whisper, and the actual full-text-search query and Levenshtein analysis was less than 5 seconds.

The other videos probably came from fanfiction websites other than AO3, like fanfiction.net or Wattpad. As I do not have access to archives of those websites, I cannot identify the other ones, but they are almost certainly not original.

Armed with this fantastic proof-of-concept, I’m officially declaring war against “What If” videos. The mission statement of Project Copy-Knight will be the elimination of “What If” videos based on the theft of AO3 content on YouTube.

I Need Your Help

I am acutely aware that I cannot accomplish this on my own. There are many moving parts in this system that simply cannot be completely automated – like the selection of YouTube channels to feed into the toolchain, the manual verification step to prevent false-positives being sent to authors, the reaching-out to authors who have comments disabled, etc, etc.

So, if you are interested in helping to defend fanworks, or just want to have a chat or ask about the technical details of the toolchain, please consider joining my Discord server. I could really use your help.

------

See full blog article and acknowledgements here: https://echoekhi.com/2023/11/25/project-copy-knight/

#ao3 #fanfic #copyknight #theft #copyright

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exfil · 6 months ago

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i absolutely agree - this is the self perception of both soap himself and the game's moral perspective as a whole - killing the right people for the right reasons. jacob geller made a great video essay about modern warfare i, but I think with the introduction of soap this becomes even more jarring

because while soaps need for vigilante justice is not always authorized (interestingly, soap still defers to higher authority in the authorization of killing even after getting betrayed (think we will get the green light to go after these guys?) because none of the good guys ever disobeys a direct order in modern warfare.), it is always rewarded. even in it's mechanics (red names for enemies and blue ones for allies) the morality is black and white.

which is especially interesting in the case of soap because not only is it mostly his reactions that frame the violence of the antagonists (see his judgement of hassan and makarov, but also sheperd and graves), he also makes the classification that matters most in the normative paradigm of modern warfare: whether or not an involved party is a civilian.

In las almas, soap laments that graves is committing war crimes, and the game agrees, giving all the voice lines names like "civilian male". but during the mission cartel protection, when soap asks about civilians, alejandro tells us that the cartel took over, and killing anyone here is fair game. hassan cannot be shot as Iran is not at war with mexico (an adherence to rules of engagement that gets punished narratively) but members of the British forces killing dozens of members of the Mexican army (because again, the cartel) is not even addressed as an issue, legally, ethically or politically. (and is it not crazy that outside of the vigilante revenge on shadows, the people you kill in modern warfare ii are almost exclusively mexican "cartel" and iranian "terrorists"? and that while rules of engagement come up as a topic frequently, they are never questioned when it comes to non-white people?)

but then again, this is a game the authors insist is "not political" as it "is not about real administrations" despite, and i cannot stress this enough, being a game that was released in 2022 which begins with the CIA executing an Iranian general.

one of soap's defining character traits is righteousness. be it helping his comrades in al mazrah over the mission objective (are you saying we shouldn't have helped?) or walking into a cartel villa unarmed to bring down el sin nombre (we came here to stop a missile, so let's stop it), it is clear that his main motivation is to do the right thing. so is the protection of innocent people - soap is almost always the one who articulates the involvement of civilians (what happened to the families here? / they're innocent people. / he's killing civilians - his own people.)

for soap, in this righteousness, and in the protection of these innocent people, the threat and execution of violence is the right thing. killing is not the avoidable means to an end, but the objective - as long as the people killed are evil (my job is to kill the enemy. guess what you are). he shows a clear favoritism for vigilante justice (you're going down for what you did / makes me want to commit a few war crimes of my own / you will hang for this) and has to be actively dissuaded from executing people instead of having them face due process on multiple occasions (you can't be serious he is right here / i will blow your brains out i swear i will do it).

and it is soap who decides who is evil and who is not. while he and ghost condemn graves' killing civilians as putting himself above the law (he is jury judge and executioner now) soap justifies the killing of dozens of mexicans without jurisdiction as part of a foreign army due to their cartel involvement (there are no civilians here). he never judges the violence of his own allies, only the lack of it (should have killed him when we had the chance).

a seargant hell-bent on doing the right thing but operating with both a brutal reverence to violence as the only option and a morality of black and white that does not survive closer scrutiny. he is clearly not a good person - if the amount of people he killed in cold blood is any indication - but he not only thinks that he is good but can tell whether a person is good or not to the point that he sees himself as a rightful executioner. now that's a character!

#as someone who was there when the iranian ambassador yelled at the us one for the assassination of soulemani do you know how fucking jarring #it was to play the beginning of modern warfare.#thank you for your response this whole blog actually started bc me and my best friend are writing about cod ethics #and i park the rest of my brainrot here but rest assured i have a lot of thougts #on call of duty and the geneva conventions.#i remember playing the wetworks mission for the first time and being like this is crazy...how is this framed....and it all got worse #from there....#exfil meta

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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 days ago

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Kickstarting a new Martin Hench novel about the dawn of enshittification

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/07/weird-pcs/#a-mormon-bishop-an-orthodox-rabbi-and-a-catholic-priest-walk-into-a-personal-computing-revolution

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by @wilwheaton:

http://martinhench.com

This is the third Hench novel, following on from the nationally bestselling The Bezzle (2024) and Red Team Blues (2023). I wrote Red Team Blues with a funny conceit: what if I wrote the final volume of a beloved, long-running series, without writing the rest of the series? Turns out, the answer is: "Your editor will buy a whole bunch more books in the series!"

My solution to this happy conundrum? Write the Hench books out of chronological order. After all, Marty Hench is a financial hacker who's been in Silicon Valley since the days of the first PCs, so he's been there for all the weird scams tech bros have dreamed up since Jobs and Woz were laboring in their garage over the Apple I. He's the Zelig of high-tech fraud! Look hard at any computing-related scandal and you'll find Marty Hench in the picture, quietly and competently unraveling the scheme, dodging lawsuits and bullets with equal aplomb.

Which brings me to Picks and Shovels. In this volume, we travel back to Marty's first job, in the 1980s – the weird and heroic era of the PC. Marty ended up in the Bay Area after he flunked out of an MIT computer science degree (he was too busy programming computers to do his classwork), and earning his CPA at a community college.

Silicon Valley in the early eighties was wild: Reaganomics stalked the land, the AIDS crisis was in full swing, the Dead Kennedys played every weekend, and man were the PCs ever weird. This was before the industry crystalized into Mac vs PC, back when no one knew what they were supposed to look like, who was supposed to use them, and what they were for.

Marty's first job is working for one of the weirder companies: Fidelity Computing. They sound like a joke: a computer company run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi. But the joke's on their customers, because Fidelity Computing is a scam: a pyramid sales cult that exploits religious affinities to sell junk PCs that are designed to lock customers in and squeeze them for every dime. A Fidelity printer only works with Fidelity printer paper (they've gimmicked the sprockets on the tractor-feed). A Fidelity floppy drive only accepts Fidelity floppies (every disk is sold with a single, scratched-out sector and the drives check for an error on that sector every time they run).

Marty figures out he's working for the bad guys when they ask him to destroy Computing Freedom, a scrappy rival startup founded by three women who've escaped from Fidelity Computing's cult: a queer orthodox woman who's been kicked out of her family; a radical nun who's thrown in with the Liberation Theology movement in opposing America's Dirty Wars; and a Mormon woman who's quit the church in disgust at its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment. The women of Computing Freedom have a (ahem) holy mission: to free every Fidelity customer from the prison they were lured into.

Marty may be young and inexperienced, but he can spot a rebel alliance from a light year away and he knows what side he wants to be on. He joins the women in their mission, and we're deep into a computing war that quickly turns into a shooting war. Turns out the Reverend Sirs of Fidelity Computer aren't just scammers – they're mobbed up, and willing to turn to lethal violence to defend their racket.

This is a rollicking crime thriller, a science fiction novel about the dawn of the computing revolution. It's an archaeological expedition to uncover the fossil record of the first emergence of enshittification, a phenomenon that was born with the PC and its evil twin, the Reagan Revolution.

The book comes out on Feb 15 in hardcover and ebook from Macmillan (US/Canada) and Bloomsbury (UK), but neither publisher is doing the audiobook. That's my department.

Why? Well, I love audiobooks, and I especially love the audiobooks for this series, because they're read by the incredible Wil Wheaton, hands down my favorite audiobook narrator. But that's not why I retain my audiobook rights and produce my own audiobooks. I do that because Amazon's Audible service refuses to carry any of my audiobooks.

Here's how that works: Audible is a division of Amazon, and they've illegally obtained a monopoly over the audiobook market, controlling more than 90% of audiobook sales in many genres. That means that if your book isn't for sale on Audible, it might as well not exist.

But Amazon won't let you sell your books on Audible unless you let them wrap those books in "digital rights management," a kind of encryption that locks them to Audible's authorized players. Under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, it's a felony punishable with a 5-year sentence and a $500k fine to supply you with a tool to remove an audiobook from Audible and play it on a rival app. That applies even if the person who gives you the tool is the creator of the book!

You read that right: if I make an audiobook and then give you the tools to move it out of Amazon's walled garden, I could go to prison for five years! That's a stiffer sentence than you'd face if you were to just pirate the audiobook. It's a harsher penalty than you'd get for shoplifting the book on CD from a truck-stop. It's more draconian than the penalty for hijacking the truck that delivers the CDs!

Amazon knows that every time you buy an audiobook from Audible, you increase the cost you'll have to pay if you switch to a competitor. They use that fact to give readers a worse deal (last year they tried out ads in audiobooks!). But the people who really suffer under this arrangement are the writers, whom Amazon abuses with abandon, knowing they can't afford to leave the service because their readers are locked into it. That's why Amazon felt they could get away with stealing $100 million from indie audiobook creators (and yup, they got away with it):

https://www.audiblegate.com/about

Which is why none of my books can be sold with DRM. And that means that Audible won't carry any of them.

For more than a decade, I've been making my own audiobooks, in partnership with the wonderful studio Skyboat Media and their brilliant director, Gabrielle de Cuir:

https://skyboatmedia.com/

I pay fantastic narrators a fair wage for their work, then I pay John Taylor Williams, the engineer who masters my podcasts, to edit the books and compose bed music for the intro and outro. Then I sell the books at every store in the world – except Audible and Apple, who both have mandatory DRM. Because fuck DRM.

Paying everyone a fair wage is expensive. It's worth it: the books are great. But even though my books are sold at many stores online, being frozen out of Audible means that the sales barely register.

That's why I do these Kickstarter campaigns, to pre-sell thousands of audiobooks in advance of the release. I've done six of these now, and each one was a huge success, inspiring others to strike out on their own, sometimes with spectacular results:

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2022/04/01/brandon-sanderson-kickstarter-41-million-new-books/7243531001/

Today, I've launched the Kickstarter for Picks and Shovels. I'm selling the audiobook and ebook in DRM-form, without any "terms of service" or "license agreement." That means they're just like a print book: you buy them, you own them. You can read them on any equipment you choose to. You can sell them, give them away, or lend them to friends. Rather than making you submit to 20,000 words of insulting legalese, all I ask of you is that you don't violate copyright law. I trust you!

Speaking of print books: I'm also pre-selling the hardcover of Picks and Shovels and the paperbacks of The Bezzle and Red Team Blues, the other two Marty Hench books. I'll even sign and personalize them for you!

http://martinhench.com

I'm also offering five chances to commission your own Marty Hench story – pick your favorite high-tech finance scam from the past 40 years of tech history, and I'll have Marty bust it in a custom short story. Once the story is published, I'll make sure you get credit. Check out these two cool Little Brother stories my previous Kickstarter backers commissioned:

Spill

https://reactormag.com/spill-cory-doctorow/

Vigilant

https://reactormag.com/vigilant-cory-doctorow/

I'm heading out on tour this winter and spring with the book. I'll be in LA, San Francisco, San Diego, Burbank, Bloomington, Chicago, Richmond VA, Toronto, NYC, Boston, Austin, DC, Baltimore, Seattle, and other dates still added. I've got an incredible roster of conversation partners lined up, too: John Hodgman, Charlie Jane Anders, Dan Savage, Ken Liu, Peter Sagal, Wil Wheaton, and others.

I hope you'll check out this book, and come out to see me on tour and say hi. Before I go, I want to leave you with some words of advance praise for Picks and Shovels:

I hugely enjoyed Picks and Shovels. Cory Doctorow’s reconstruction of the age is note perfect: the detail, the atmosphere, ethos, flavour and smell of the age is perfectly conveyed. I love Marty and Art and all the main characters. The hope and the thrill that marks the opening section. The superb way he tells the story of the rise of Silicon Valley (to use the lazy metonym), inserting the stories of Shockley, IBM vs US Government, the rise of MS – all without turning journalistic or preachy.

The seeds of enshittification are all there… even in the sunlight of that time the shadows are lengthening. AIDS of course, and the coming scum tide of VCs. In Orwellian terms, the pigs are already rising up on two feet and starting to wear trousers. All that hope, all those ideals…

I love too the thesis that San Francisco always has failed and always will fail her suitors.

Despite cultural entropy, enshittification, corruption, greed and all the betrayals there’s a core of hope and honour in the story too.

-Stephen Fry

Cory Doctorow writes as few authors do, with tech world savvy and real world moral clarity. A true storyteller for our times.

-John Scalzi

A crackling, page-turning tumble into an unexpected underworld of queer coders, Mission burritos, and hacker nuns. You will fall in love with the righteous underdogs of Computing Freedom—and feel right at home in the holy place Doctorow has built for them far from Silicon Valley’s grabby, greedy hands."

-Claire Evans, editor of Motherboard Future, author of Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet.

"Wonderful…evokes the hacker spirit of the early personal computer era—and shows how the battle for software freedom is eternal."

-Steven Levy, author of Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution and Facebook: The Inside Story.

What could be better than a Martin Hench thriller set in 1980s San Francisco that mixes punk rock romance with Lotus spreadsheets, dot matrix printers and religious orders? You'll eat this up – I sure did.

-Tim Wu, Special Assistant to the President for Technology and Competition Policy, author of The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

Captures the look and feel of the PC era. Cory Doctorow draws a portrait of a Silicon Valley and San Francisco before the tech bros showed up — a startup world driven as much by open source ideals as venture capital gold.

-John Markoff, Pulitzer-winning tech columnist for the New York Times and author of What the Doormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry

You won't put this book down – it's too much fun. I was there when it all began. Doctorow's characters and their story are real.

-Dan'l Lewin, CEO and President of the Computer History Museum

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