#then this idea came to me and took me OUT

[mostlysignssomeportents]

With Great Power Came No Responsibility

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in NYC TONIGHT (26 Feb) with JOHN HODGMAN and at PENN STATE TOMORROW (Feb 27). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

Last night, I traveled to Toronto to deliver the annual Ursula Franklin Lecture at the University of Toronto's Innis College:

The lecture was called "With Great Power Came No Responsibility: How Enshittification Conquered the 21st Century and How We Can Overthrow It." It's the latest major speech in my series of talks on the subject, which started with last year's McLuhan Lecture in Berlin:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

And continued with a summer Defcon keynote:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

This speech specifically addresses the unique opportunities for disenshittification created by Trump's rapid unscheduled midair disassembly of the international free trade system. The US used trade deals to force nearly every country in the world to adopt the IP laws that make enshittification possible, and maybe even inevitable. As Trump burns these trade deals to the ground, the rest of the world has an unprecedented opportunity to retaliate against American bullying by getting rid of these laws and producing the tools, devices and services that can protect every tech user (including Americans) from being ripped off by US Big Tech companies.

I'm so grateful for the chance to give this talk. I was hosted for the day by the Centre for Culture and Technology, which was founded by Marshall McLuhan, and is housed in the coach house he used for his office. The talk itself took place in Innis College, named for Harold Innis, who is definitely the thinking person's Marshall McLuhan. What's more, I was mentored by Innis's daughter, Anne Innis Dagg, a radical, brilliant feminist biologist who pretty much invented the field of giraffology:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/#annedagg

But with all respect due to Anne and her dad, Ursula Franklin is the thinking person's Harold Innis. A brilliant scientist, activist and communicator who dedicated her life to the idea that the most important fact about a technology wasn't what it did, but who it did it for and who it did it to. Getting to work out of McLuhan's office to present a talk in Innis's theater that was named after Franklin? Swoon!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_Franklin

Here's the text of the talk, lightly edited:

I know tonight’s talk is supposed to be about decaying tech platforms, but I want to start by talking about nurses.

A January 2025 report from Groundwork Collective documents how increasingly nurses in the USA are hired through gig apps – "Uber for nurses” – so nurses never know from one day to the next whether they're going to work, or how much they'll get paid.

There's something high-tech going on here with those nurses' wages. These nursing apps – a cartel of three companies, Shiftkey, Shiftmed and Carerev – can play all kinds of games with labor pricing.

Before Shiftkey offers a nurse a shift, it purchases that worker's credit history from a data-broker. Specifically, it pays to find out how much credit-card debt the nurse is carrying, and whether it is overdue.

The more desperate the nurse's financial straits are, the lower the wage on offer. Because the more desperate you are, the less you'll accept to come and do the gruntwork of caring for the sick, the elderly, and the dying.

Now, there are lots of things going on here, and they're all terrible. What's more, they are emblematic of “enshittification,” the word I coined to describe the decay of online platforms.

When I first started writing about this, I focused on the external symptology of enshittification, a three stage process:

First, the platform is good to its end users, while finding a way to lock them in.

Like Google, which minimized ads and maximized spending on engineering for search results, even as they bought their way to dominance, bribing every service or product with a search box to make it a Google search box.

So no matter what browser you used, what mobile OS you used, what carrier you had, you would always be searching on Google by default. This got so batshit that by the early 2020s, Google was spending enough money to buy a whole-ass Twitter, every year or two, just to make sure that no one ever tried a search engine that wasn't Google.

That's stage one: be good to end users, lock in end users.

Stage two is when the platform starts to abuse end users to tempt in and enrich business customers. For Google, that’s advertisers and web publishers. An ever-larger fraction of a Google results page is given over to ads, which are marked with ever-subtler, ever smaller, ever grayer labels. Google uses its commercial surveillance data to target ads to us.

So that's stage two: things get worse for end users and get better for business customers.

But those business customers also get locked into the platform, dependent on those customers. Once businesses are getting as little as 10% of their revenue from Google, leaving Google becomes an existential risk. We talk a lot about Google's "monopoly" power, which is derived from its dominance as a seller. But Google is also a monopsony, a powerful buyer.

So now you have Google acting as a monopolist to its users (stage one), and a monoposonist for its business customers (stage two) and here comes stage three: where Google claws back all the value in the platform, save a homeopathic residue calculated to keep end users locked in, and business customers locked to those end users.

Google becomes enshittified.

In 2019, Google had a turning point. Search had grown as much as it possibly could. More than 90% of us used Google for search, and we searched for everything. Any thought or idle question that crossed our minds, we typed into Google.

How could Google grow? There were no more users left to switch to Google. We weren't going to search for more things. What could Google do?

Well, thanks to internal memos published during last year's monopoly trial against Google, we know what they did. They made search worse. They reduced the system's accuracy it so you had to search twice or more to get to the answer, thus doubling the number of queries, and doubling the number of ads.

Meanwhile, Google entered into a secret, illegal collusive arrangement with Facebook, codenamed Jedi Blue, to rig the ad market, fixing prices so advertisers paid more and publishers got less.

And that's how we get to the enshittified Google of today, where every query serves back a blob of AI slop, over five paid results tagged with the word AD in 8-point, 10% grey on white type, which is, in turn, over ten spammy links from SEO shovelware sites filled with more AI slop.

And yet, we still keep using Google, because we're locked into it. That's enshittification, from the outside. A company that's good to end users, while locking them in. Then it makes things worse for end users, to make things better for business customers, while locking them in. Then it takes all the value for itself and turns into a giant pile of shit.

Enshittification, a tragedy in three acts.

I started off focused on the outward signs of enshittification, but I think it's time we start thinking about what's going in inside the companies to make enshittification possible.

What is the technical mechanism for enshittification? I call it twiddling. Digital businesses have infinite flexibility, bequeathed to them by the marvellously flexible digital computers they run on. That means that firms can twiddle the knobs that control the fundamental aspects of their business. Every time you interact with a firm, everything is different: prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations.

Which takes me back to our nurses. This scam, where you look up the nurse's debt load and titer down the wage you offer based on it in realtime? That's twiddling. It's something you can only do with a computer. The bosses who are doing this aren't more evil than bosses of yore, they just have better tools.

Note that these aren't even tech bosses. These are health-care bosses, who happen to have tech.

Digitalization – weaving networked computers through a firm or a sector – enables this kind of twiddling that allows firms to shift value around, from end users to business customers, from business customers back to end users, and eventually, inevitably, to themselves.

And digitalization is coming to every sector – like nursing. Which means enshittification is coming to every sector – like nursing.

The legal scholar Veena Dubal coined a term to describe the twiddling that suppresses the wages of debt-burdened nurses. It's called "Algorithmic Wage Discrimination," and it follows the gig economy.

The gig economy is a major locus of enshittification, and it’s the largest tear in the membrane separating the virtual world from the real world. Gig work, where your shitty boss is a shitty app, and you aren't even allowed to call yourself an employee.

Uber invented this trick. Drivers who are picky about the jobs the app puts in front of them start to get higher wage offers. But if they yield to temptation and take some of those higher-waged option, then the wage starts to go down again, in random intervals, by small increments, designed to be below the threshold for human perception. Not so much boiling the frog as poaching it, until the Uber driver has gone into debt to buy a new car, and given up the side hustles that let them be picky about the rides they accepted. Then their wage goes down, and down, and down.

Twiddling is a crude trick done quickly. Any task that's simple but time consuming is a prime candidate for automation, and this kind of wage-theft would be unbearably tedious, labor-intensive and expensive to perform manually. No 19th century warehouse full of guys with green eyeshades slaving over ledgers could do this. You need digitalization.

Twiddling nurses' hourly wages is a perfect example of the role digitization pays in enshittification. Because this kind of thing isn't just bad for nurses – it's bad for patients, too. Do we really think that paying nurses based on how desperate they are, at a rate calculated to increase that desperation, and thus decrease the wage they are likely to work for, is going to result in nurses delivering the best care?

Do you want to your catheter inserted by a nurse on food stamps, who drove an Uber until midnight the night before, and skipped breakfast this morning in order to make rent?

This is why it’s so foolish to say "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." “If you’re not paying for the product” ascribes a mystical power to advertising-driven services: the power to bypass our critical faculties by surveilling us, and data-mining the resulting dossiers to locate our mental bind-spots, and weaponize them to get us to buy anything an advertiser is selling.

In this formulation, we are complicit in our own exploitation. By choosing to use "free" services, we invite our own exploitation by surveillance capitalists who have perfected a mind-control ray powered by the surveillance data we're voluntarily handing over by choosing ad-driven services.

The moral is that if we only went back to paying for things, instead of unrealistically demanding that everything be free, we would restore capitalism to its functional, non-surveillant state, and companies would start treating us better, because we'd be the customers, not the products.

That's why the surveillance capitalism hypothesis elevates companies like Apple as virtuous alternatives. Because Apple charges us money, rather than attention, it can focus on giving us better service, rather than exploiting us.

There's a superficially plausible logic to this. After all, in 2022, Apple updated its iOS operating system, which runs on iPhones and other mobile devices, introducing a tick box that allowed you to opt out of third-party surveillance, most notably Facebook’s.

96% of Apple customers ticked that box. The other 4% were, presumably drunk, or Facebook employees, or Facebook employees who were drunk. Which makes sense, because if I worked for Facebook, I'd be drunk all the time.

So on the face of it, it seems like Apple isn't treating its customers like "the product." But simultaneously with this privacy measure, Apple was secretly turning on its own surveillance system for iPhone owners, which would spy on them in exactly the way Facebook had, for exactly the same purpose: to target ads to you based on the places you'd been, the things you'd searched for, the communications you'd had, the links you'd clicked.

Apple didn't ask its customers for permission to spy on them. It didn't let opt out of this spying. It didn’t even tell them about it, and when it was caught, Apple lied about it.

It goes without saying that the $1000 Apple distraction rectangle in your pocket is something you paid for. The fact that you've paid for it doesn't stop Apple from treating you as the product. Apple treats its business customers – app vendors – like the product, screwing them out of 30 cents on every dollar they bring in, with mandatory payment processing fees that are 1,000% higher than the already extortionate industry norm.

Apple treats its end users – people who shell out a grand for a phone – like the product, spying on them to help target ads to them.

Apple treats everyone like the product.

This is what's going on with our gig-app nurses: the nurses are the product. The patients are the product. The hospitals are the product. In enshittification, "the product" is anyone who can be productized.

Fair and dignified treatment is not something you get as a customer loyalty perk, in exchange for parting with your money, rather than your attention. How do you get fair and dignified treatment? Well, I'm gonna get to that, but let's stay with our nurses for a while first.

The nurses are the product, and they're being twiddled, because they've been conscripted into the tech industry, via the digitalization of their own industry.

It's tempting to blame digitalization for this. But tech companies were not born enshittified. They spent years – decades – making pleasing products. If you're old enough to remember the launch of Google, you'll recall that, at the outset, Google was magic.

You could Ask Jeeves questions for a million years, you could load up Altavista with ten trillion boolean search operators meant to screen out low-grade results, and never come up with answers as crisp, as useful, as helpful, as the ones you'd get from a few vaguely descriptive words in a Google search-bar.

There's a reason we all switched to Google. Why so many of us bought iPhones. Why we joined our friends on Facebook. All of these services were born digital. They could have enshittified at any time. But they didn't – until they did. And they did it all at once.

If you were a nurse, and every patient that staggered into the ER had the same dreadful symptoms, you'd call the public health department and report a suspected outbreak of a new and dangerous epidemic.

Ursula Franklin held that technology's outcomes were not preordained. They are the result of deliberate choices. I like that very much, it's a very science fictional way of thinking about technology. Good science fiction isn't merely about what the technology does, but who it does it for, and who it does it to.

Those social factors are far more important than the mere technical specifications of a gadget. They're the difference between a system that warns you when you're about to drift out of your lane, and a system that tells your insurer that you nearly drifted out of your lane, so they can add $10 to your monthly premium.

They’re the difference between a spell checker that lets you know you've made a typo, and bossware that lets your manager use the number of typos you made this quarter so he can deny your bonus.

They’re the difference between an app that remembers where you parked your car, and an app that uses the location of your car as a criteria for including you in a reverse warrant for the identities of everyone in the vicinity of an anti-government protest.

I believe that enshittification is caused by changes not to technology, but to the policy environment. These are changes to the rules of the game, undertaken in living memory, by named parties, who were warned at the time about the likely outcomes of their actions, who are today very rich and respected, and face no consequences or accountability for their role in ushering in the enshittocene. They venture out into polite society without ever once wondering if someone is sizing them up for a pitchfork.

In other words: I think we created a crimogenic environment, a perfect breeding pool for the most pathogenic practices in our society, that have therefore multiplied, dominating decision-making in our firms and states, leading to a vast enshittening of everything.

And I think there's good news there, because if enshittification isn't the result a new kind of evil person, or the great forces of history bearing down on the moment to turn everything to shit, but rather the result of specific policy choices, then we can reverse those policies, make better ones and emerge from the enshittocene, consigning the enshitternet to the scrapheap of history, a mere transitional state between the old, good internet, and a new, good internet.

I'm not going to talk about AI today, because oh my god is AI a boring, overhyped subject. But I will use a metaphor about AI, about the limited liability company, which is a kind of immortal, artificial colony organism in which human beings serve as a kind of gut flora. My colleague Charlie Stross calls corporations "slow AI.”

So you've got these slow AIs whose guts are teeming with people, and the AI's imperative, the paperclip it wants to maximize, is profit. To maximize profits, you charge as much as you can, you pay your workers and suppliers as little as you can, you spend as little as possible on safety and quality.

Every dollar you don't spend on suppliers, workers, quality or safety is a dollar that can go to executives and shareholders. So there's a simple model of the corporation that could maximize its profits by charging infinity dollars, while paying nothing to its workers or suppliers, and ignoring quality and safety.

But that corporation wouldn't make any money, for the obvious reasons that none of us would buy what it was selling, and no one would work for it or supply it with goods. These constraints act as disciplining forces that tamp down the AI's impulse to charge infinity and pay nothing.

In tech, we have four of these constraints, anti-enshittificatory sources of discipline that make products and services better, pay workers more, and keep executives’ and shareholders' wealth from growing at the expense of customers, suppliers and labor.

The first of these constraints is markets. All other things being equal, a business that charges more and delivers less will lose customers to firms that are more generous about sharing value with workers, customers and suppliers.

This is the bedrock of capitalist theory, and it's the ideological basis for competition law, what our American cousins call "antitrust law."

The first antitrust law was 1890's Sherman Act, whose sponsor, Senator John Sherman, stumped for it from the senate floor, saying:

If we will not endure a King as a political power we should not endure a King over the production, transportation, and sale of the necessaries of life. If we would not submit to an emperor we should not submit to an autocrat of trade with power to prevent competition and to fix the price of any commodity. 

Senator Sherman was reflecting the outrage of the anitmonopolist movement of the day, when proprietors of monopolistic firms assumed the role of dictators, with the power to decide who would work, who would starve, what could be sold, and what it cost.

Lacking competitors, they were too big to fail, too big to jail, and too big to care. As Lily Tomlin used to put it in her spoof AT&T ads on SNL: "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.”

So what happened to the disciplining force of competition? We killed it. Starting 40-some years ago, the Reagaonomic views of the Chicago School economists transformed antitrust. They threw out John Sherman's idea that we need to keep companies competitive to prevent the emergence of "autocrats of trade,"and installed the idea that monopolies are efficient.

In other words, if Google has a 90% search market share, which it does, then we must infer that Google is the best search engine ever, and the best search engine possible. The only reason a better search engine hasn't stepped in is that Google is so skilled, so efficient, that there is no conceivable way to improve upon it.

We can tell that Google is the best because it has a monopoly, and we can tell that the monopoly is good because Google is the best.

So 40 years ago, the US – and its major trading partners – adopted an explicitly pro-monopoly competition policy.

Now, you'll be glad to hear that this isn't what happened to Canada. The US Trade Rep didn't come here and force us to neuter our competition laws. But don't get smug! The reason that didn't happen is that it didn't have to. Because Canada had no competition law to speak of, and never has.

In its entire history, the Competition Bureau has challenged three mergers, and it has halted precisely zero mergers, which is how we've ended up with a country that is beholden to the most mediocre plutocrats imaginable like the Irvings, the Westons, the Stronachs, the McCains and the Rogerses.

The only reason these chinless wonders were able to conquer this country Is that the Americans had been crushing their monopolists before they could conquer the US and move on to us. But 40 years ago, the rest of the world adopted the Chicago School's pro-monopoly "consumer welfare standard,” and we got…monopolies.

Monopolies in pharma, beer, glass bottles, vitamin C, athletic shoes, microchips, cars, mattresses, eyeglasses, and, of course, professional wrestling.

Remember: these are specific policies adopted in living memory, by named individuals, who were warned, and got rich, and never faced consequences. The economists who conceived of these policies are still around today, polishing their fake Nobel prizes, teaching at elite schools, making millions consulting for blue-chip firms.

When we confront them with the wreckage their policies created, they protest their innocence, maintaining – with a straight face – that there's no way to affirmatively connect pro-monopoly policies with the rise of monopolies.

It's like we used to put down rat poison and we didn't have a rat problem. Then these guys made us stop, and now rats are chewing our faces off, and they're making wide innocent eyes, saying, "How can you be sure that our anti-rat-poison policies are connected to global rat conquest? Maybe this is simply the Time of the Rat! Maybe sunspots caused rats to become more fecund than at any time in history! And if they bought the rat poison factories and shut them all down, well, so what of it? Shutting down rat poison factories after you've decided to stop putting down rat poison is an economically rational, Pareto-optimal decision."

Markets don't discipline tech companies because they don't compete with rivals, they buy them. That's a quote, from Mark Zuckerberg: “It is better to buy than to compete.”

Which is why Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram for a billion dollars, even though it only had 12 employees and 25m users. As he wrote in a spectacularly ill-advised middle-of-the-night email to his CFO, he had to buy Instagram, because Facebook users were leaving Facebook for Instagram. By buying Instagram, Zuck ensured that anyone who left Facebook – the platform – would still be a prisoner of Facebook – the company.

Despite the fact that Zuckerberg put this confession in writing, the Obama administration let him go ahead with the merger, because every government, of every political stripe, for 40 years, adopted the posture that monopolies were efficient.

Now, think about our twiddled, immiserated nurses. Hospitals are among the most consolidated sectors in the US. First, we deregulated pharma mergers, and the pharma companies gobbled each other up at the rate of naughts, and they jacked up the price of drugs. So hospitals also merged to monopoly, a defensive maneuver that let a single hospital chain corner the majority of a region or city and say to the pharma companies, "either you make your products cheaper, or you can't sell them to any of our hospitals."

Of course, once this mission was accomplished, the hospitals started screwing the insurers, who staged their own incestuous orgy, buying and merging until most Americans have just three or two insurance options. This let the insurers fight back against the hospitals, but left patients and health care workers defenseless against the consolidated power of hospitals, pharma companies, pharmacy benefit managers, group purchasing organizations, and other health industry cartels, duopolies and monopolies.

Which is why nurses end up signing on to work for hospitals that use these ghastly apps. Remember, there's just three of these apps, replacing dozens of staffing agencies that once competed for nurses' labor.

Meanwhile, on the patient side, competition has never exercised discipline. No one ever shopped around for a cheaper ambulance or a better ER while they were having a heart attack. The price that people are willing to pay to not die is “everything they have.”

So you have this sector that has no business being a commercial enterprise in the first place, losing what little discipline they faced from competition, paving the way for enshittification.

But I said there are four forces that discipline companies. The second one of these forces is regulation, discipline imposed by states.

It’s a mistake to see market discipline and state discipline as two isolated realms. They are intimately connected. Because competition is a necessary condition for effective regulation.

Let me put this in terms that even the most ideological libertarians can understand. Say you think there should be precisely one regulation that governments should enforce: honoring contracts. For the government to serve as referee in that game, it must have the power to compel the players to honor their contracts. Which means that the smallest government you can have is determined by the largest corporation you're willing to permit.

So even if you're the kind of Musk-addled libertarian who can no longer open your copy of Atlas Shrugged because the pages are all stuck together, who pines for markets for human kidneys, and demands the right to sell yourself into slavery, you should still want a robust antitrust regime, so that these contracts can be enforced.

When a sector cartelizes, when it collapses into oligarchy, when the internet turns into "five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four," then it captures its regulators.

After all, a sector with 100 competing companies is a rabble, at each others' throats. They can't agree on anything, especially how they're going to lobby.

While a sector of five companies – or four – or three – or two – or one – is a cartel, a racket, a conspiracy in waiting. A sector that has been boiled down to a mere handful of firms can agree on a common lobbying position.

What's more, they are so insulated from "wasteful competition" that they are aslosh in cash that they can mobilize to make their regulatory preferences into regulations. In other words, they can capture their regulators.

“Regulatory capture" may sound abstract and complicated, so let me put it in concrete terms. In the UK, the antitrust regulator is called the Competition and Markets Authority, run – until recently – by Marcus Bokkerink. The CMA has been one of the world's most effective investigators and regulators of Big Tech fuckery.

Last month, UK PM Keir Starmer fired Bokkerink and replaced him with Doug Gurr, the former head of Amazon UK. Hey, Starmer, the henhouse is on the line, they want their fox back.

But back to our nurses: there are plenty of examples of regulatory capture lurking in that example, but I'm going to pick the most egregious one, the fact that there are data brokers who will sell you information about the credit card debts of random Americans.

This is because the US Congress hasn't passed a new consumer privacy law since 1988, when Ronald Reagan signed a law called the Video Privacy Protection Act that bans video store clerks from telling newspapers which VHS cassettes you took home. The fact that Congress hasn't updated Americans' privacy protections since Die Hard was in theaters isn't a coincidence or an oversight. It is the expensively purchased inaction of a heavily concentrated – and thus wildly profitable – privacy-invasion industry that has monetized the abuse of human rights at unimaginable scale.

The coalition in favor of keeping privacy law frozen since the season finale of St Elsewhere keeps growing, because there is an unbounded set of way to transform the systematic invasion of our human rights into cash. There's a direct line from this phenomenon to nurses whose paychecks go down when they can't pay their credit-card bills.

So competition is dead, regulation is dead, and companies aren't disciplined by markets or by states.

But there are four forces that discipline firms, contributing to an inhospitable environment for the reproduction of sociopathic. enshittifying monsters.

So let's talk about those other two forces. The first is interoperability, the principle of two or more things working together. Like, you can put anyone's shoelaces in your shoes, anyone's gas in your gas tank, and anyone's lightbulbs in your light-socket. In the non-digital world, interop takes a lot of work, you have to agree on the direction, pitch, diameter, voltage, amperage and wattage for that light socket, or someone's gonna get their hand blown off.

But in the digital world, interop is built in, because there's only one kind of computer we know how to make, the Turing-complete, universal, von Neumann machine, a computing machine capable of executing every valid program.

Which means that for any enshittifying program, there's a counterenshittificatory program waiting to be run. When HP writes a program to ensure that its printers reject third-party ink, someone else can write a program to disable that checking.

For gig workers, antienshittificatory apps can do yeoman duty. For example, Indonesian gig drivers formed co-ops, that commission hackers to write modifications for their dispatch apps. For example, the taxi app won't book a driver to pick someone up at a train station, unless they're right outside, but when the big trains pull in that's a nightmare scene of total, lethal chaos.

So drivers have an app that lets them spoof their GPS, which lets them park up around the corner, but have the app tell their bosses that they're right out front of the station. When a fare arrives, they can zip around and pick them up, without contributing to the stationside mishegas.

In the USA, a company called Para shipped an app to help Doordash drivers get paid more. You see, Doordash drivers make most of their money on tips, and the Doordash driver app hides the tip amount until you accept a job, meaning you don't know whether you're accepting a job that pays $1.50 or $11.50 with tip, until you agree to take it. So Para made an app that extracted the tip amount and showed it to drivers before they clocked on.

But Doordash shut it down, because in America, apps like Para are illegal. In 1998, Bill Clinton signed a law called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and section 1201 of the DMCA makes is a felony to "bypass an access control for a copyrighted work," with penalties of $500k and a 5-year prison sentence for a first offense. So just the act of reverse-engineering an app like the Doordash app is a potential felony, which is why companies are so desperately horny to get you to use their apps rather than their websites.

The web is open, apps are closed. The majority of web users have installed an ad blocker (which is also a privacy blocker). But no one installs an ad blocker for an app, because it's a felony to distribute that tool, because you have to reverse-engineer the app to make it. An app is just a website wrapped in enough IP so that the company that made it can send you to prison if you dare to modify it so that it serves your interests rather than theirs.

Around the world, we have enacted a thicket of laws, we call “IP laws,” that make it illegal to modify services, products, and devices, so that they serve your interests, rather than the interests of the shareholders.

Like I said, these laws were enacted in living memory, by people who are among us, who were warned about the obvious, eminently foreseeable consequences of their reckless plans, who did it anyway.

Back in 2010, two ministers from Stephen Harper's government decided to copy-paste America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act into Canadian law. They consulted on the proposal to make it illegal to reverse engineer and modify services, products and devices, and they got an earful! 6,138 Canadians sent in negative comments on the consultation. They warned that making it illegal to bypass digital locks would interfere with repair of devices as diverse as tractors, cars, and medical equipment, from ventilators to insulin pumps.

These Canadians warned that laws banning tampering with digital locks would let American tech giants corner digital markets, forcing us to buy our apps and games from American app stores, that could cream off any commission they chose to levy. They warned that these laws were a gift to monopolists who wanted to jack up the price of ink; that these copyright laws, far from serving Canadian artists would lock us to American platforms. Because every time someone in our audience bought a book, a song, a game, a video, that was locked to an American app, it could never be unlocked.

So if we, the creative workers of Canada, tried to migrate to a Canadian store, our audience couldn't come with us. They couldn't move their purchases from the US app to a Canadian one.

6,138 Canadians told them this, while just 54 respondents sided with Heritage Minister James Moore and Industry Minister Tony Clement. Then, James Moore gave a speech, at the International Chamber of Commerce meeting here in Toronto, where he said he would only be listening to the 54 cranks who supported his terrible ideas, on the grounds that the 6,138 people who disagreed with him were "babyish…radical extremists."

So in 2012, we copied America's terrible digital locks law into the Canadian statute book, and now we live in James Moore and Tony Clement's world, where it is illegal to tamper with a digital lock. So if a company puts a digital lock on its product they can do anything behind that lock, and it's a crime to undo it.

For example, if HP puts a digital lock on its printers that verifies that you're not using third party ink cartridges, or refilling an HP cartridge, it's a crime to bypass that lock and use third party ink. Which is how HP has gotten away with ratcheting the price of ink up, and up, and up.

Printer ink is now the most expensive fluid that a civilian can purchase without a special permit. It's colored water that costs $10k/gallon, which means that you print out your grocery lists with liquid that costs more than the semen of a Kentucky Derby-winning stallion.

That's the world we got from Clement and Moore, in living memory, after they were warned, and did it anyway. The world where farmers can't fix their tractors, where independent mechanics can't fix your car, where hospitals during the pandemic lockdowns couldn't service their failing ventilators, where every time a Canadian iPhone user buys an app from a Canadian software author, every dollar they spend takes a round trip through Apple HQ in Cupertino, California and comes back 30 cents lighter.

Let me remind you this is the world where a nurse can't get a counter-app, a plug-in, for the “Uber for nurses” app they have to use to get work, that lets them coordinate with other nurses to refuse shifts until the wages on offer rise to a common level or to block surveillance of their movements and activity.

Interoperability was a major disciplining force on tech firms. After all, if you make the ads on your website sufficiently obnoxious, some fraction of your users will install an ad-blocker, and you will never earn another penny from them. Because no one in the history of ad-blockers has ever uninstalled an ad-blocker. But once it's illegal to make an ad-blocker, there's no reason not to make the ads as disgusting, invasive, obnoxious as you can, to shift all the value from the end user to shareholders and executives.

So we get monopolies and monopolies capture their regulators, and they can ignore the laws they don't like, and prevent laws that might interfere with their predatory conduct – like privacy laws – from being passed. They get new laws passed, laws that let them wield governmental power to prevent other companies from entering the market.

So three of the four forces are neutralized: competition, regulation, and interoperability. That left just one disciplining force holding enshittification at bay: labor.

Tech workers are a strange sort of workforce, because they have historically been very powerful, able to command high wages and respect, but they did it without joining unions. Union density in tech is abysmal, almost undetectable. Tech workers' power didn't come from solidarity, it came from scarcity. There weren't enough workers to fill the jobs going begging, and tech workers are unfathomnably productive. Even with the sky-high salaries tech workers commanded, every hour of labor they put in generated far more value for their employers.

Faced with a tight labor market, and the ability to turn every hour of tech worker overtime into gold, tech bosses pulled out all the stops to motivate that workforce. They appealed to workers' sense of mission, convinced them they were holy warriors, ushering in a new digital age. Google promised them they would "organize the world's information and make it useful.” Facebook promised them they would “make the world more open and connected."

There's a name for this tactic: the librarian Fobazi Ettarh calls it "vocational awe." That’s where an appeal to a sense of mission and pride is used to motivate workers to work for longer hours and worse pay.

There are all kinds of professions that run on vocational awe: teaching, daycares and eldercare, and, of course, nursing.

Techies are different from those other workers though, because they've historically been incredibly scarce, which meant that while bosses could motivate them to work on projects they believed in, for endless hours, the minute bosses ordered them to enshittify the projects they'd missed their mothers' funerals to ship on deadline these workers would tell their bosses to fuck off.

If their bosses persisted in these demands, the techies would walk off the job, cross the street, and get a better job the same day.

So for many years, tech workers were the fourth and final constraint, holding the line after the constraints of competition, regulation and interop slipped away. But then came the mass tech layoffs. 260,000 in 2023; 150,000 in 2024; tens of thousands this year, with Facebook planning a 5% headcount massacre while doubling its executive bonuses.

Tech workers can't tell their bosses to go fuck themselves anymore, because there's ten other workers waiting to take their jobs.

Now, I promised I wouldn't talk about AI, but I have to break that promise a little, just to point out that the reason tech bosses are so horny for AI Is because they think it'll let them fire tech workers and replace them with pliant chatbots who'll never tell them to fuck off.

So that's where enshittification comes from: multiple changes to the environment. The fourfold collapse of competition, regulation, interoperability and worker power creates an enshittogenic environment, where the greediest, most sociopathic elements in the body corporate thrive at the expense of those elements that act as moderators of their enshittificatory impulses.

We can try to cure these corporations. We can use antitrust law to break them up, fine them, force strictures upon them. But until we fix the environment, other the contagion will spread to other firms.

So let's talk about how we create a hostile environment for enshittifiers, so the population and importance of enshittifying agents in companies dwindles to 1990s levels. We won't get rid of these elements. So long as the profit motive is intact, there will be people whose pursuit of profit is pathological, unmoderated by shame or decency. But we can change the environment so that these don't dominate our lives.

Let's talk about antitrust. After 40 years of antitrust decline, this decade has seen a massive, global resurgence of antitrust vigor, one that comes in both left- and right-wing flavors.

Over the past four years, the Biden administration’s trustbusters at the Federal Trade Commission, Department of Justice and Consumer Finance Protection Bureau did more antitrust enforcement than all their predecessors for the past 40 years combined.

There's certainly factions of the Trump administration that are hostile to this agenda but Trump's antitrust enforcers at the DoJ and FTC now say that they'll preserve and enforce Biden's new merger guidelines, which stop companies from buying each other up, and they've already filed suit to block a giant tech merger.

Of course, last summer a judge found Google guilty of monopolization, and now they're facing a breakup, which explains why they've been so generous and friendly to the Trump administration.

Meanwhile, in Canada, our toothless Competition Bureau's got fitted for a set of titanium dentures last June, when Bill C59 passed Parliament, granting sweeping new powers to our antitrust regulator.

It's true that UK PM Keir Starmer just fired the head of the UK Competition and Markets Authority and replaced him with the ex-boss of Amazon UK boss.But the thing that makes that so tragic is that the UK CMA had been doing astonishingly great work under various conservative governments.

In the EU, they've passed the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and they're going after Big Tech with both barrels. Other countries around the world – Australia, Germany, France, Japan, South Korea and China (yes, China!) – have passed new antitrust laws, and launched major antitrust enforcement actions, often collaborating with each other.

So you have the UK Competition and Markets Authority using its investigatory powers to research and publish a deep market study on Apple's abusive 30% app tax, and then the EU uses that report as a roadmap for fining Apple, and then banning Apple's payments monopoly under new regulations.Then South Korea and Japan trustbusters translate the EU's case and win nearly identical cases in their courts

What about regulatory capture? Well, we're starting to see regulators get smarter about reining in Big Tech. For example, the EU's Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act were designed to bypass the national courts of EU member states, especially Ireland, the tax-haven where US tech companies pretend to have their EU headquarters.

The thing about tax havens is that they always turn into crime havens, because if Apple can pretend to be Irish this week, it can pretend to be Maltese or Cypriot or Luxembourgeois next week. So Ireland has to let US Big Tech companies ignore EU privacy laws and other regulations, or it'll lose them to sleazier, more biddable competitor nations.

So from now on, EU tech regulation is getting enforced in the EU's federal courts, not in national courts, treating the captured Irish courts as damage and routing around them.

Canada needs to strengthen its own tech regulation enforcement, unwinding monopolistic mergers from the likes of Bell and Rogers, but most of all, Canada needs to pursue an interoperability agenda.

Last year, Canada passed two very exciting bills: Bill C244, a national Right to Repair law; and Bill C294, an interoperability law. Nominally, both of these laws allow Canadians to fix everything from tractors to insulin pumps, and to modify the software in their devices from games consoles to printers, so they will work with third party app stores, consumables and add-ons.

However, these bills are essentially useless, because these bills don’t permit Canadians to acquire tools to break digital locks. So you can modify your printer to accept third party ink, or interpret a car's diagnostic codes so any mechanic can fix it, but only if there isn't a digital lock stopping you from doing so, because giving someone a tool to break a digital lock remains illegal thanks to the law that James Moore and Tony Clement shoved down the nation's throat in 2012.

And every single printer, smart speaker, car, tractor, appliance, medical implant and hospital medical device has a digital lock that stops you from fixing it, modifying it, or using third party parts, software, or consumables in it.

Which means that these two landmark laws on repair and interop are useless. So why not get rid of the 2012 law that bans breaking digital locks? Because these laws are part of our trade agreement with the USA. This is a law needed to maintain tariff-free access to US markets.

I don’t know if you've heard, but Donald Trump is going to impose a 25%, across-the-board tariff against Canadian exports. Trudeau's response is to impose retaliatory tariffs, which will make every American product that Canadians buy 25% more expensive. This is a very weird way to punish America!

You know what would be better? Abolish the Canadian laws that protect US Big Tech companies from Canadian competition. Make it legal to reverse-engineer, jailbreak and modify American technology products and services. Don't ask Facebook to pay a link tax to Canadian newspapers, make it legal to jailbreak all of Meta's apps and block all the ads in them, so Mark Zuckerberg doesn't make a dime off of us.

Make it legal for Canadian mechanics to jailbreak your Tesla and unlock every subscription feature, like autopilot and full access to your battery, for one price, forever. So you get more out of your car, and when you sell it, then next owner continues to enjoy those features, meaning they'll pay more for your used car.

That's how you hurt Elon Musk: not by being performatively appalled at his Nazi salutes. That doesn't cost him a dime. He loves the attention. No! Strike at the rent-extracting, insanely high-margin aftermarket subscriptions he relies on for his Swastikar business. Kick that guy right in the dongle!

Let Canadians stand up a Canadian app store for Apple devices, one that charges 3% to process transactions, not 30%. Then, every Canadian news outlet that sells subscriptions through an app, and every Canadian software author, musician and writer who sells through a mobile platform gets a 25% increase in revenues overnight, without signing up a single new customer.

But we can sign up new customers, by selling jailbreaking software and access to Canadian app stores, for every mobile device and games console to everyone in the world, and by pitching every games publisher and app maker on selling in the Canadian app store to customers anywhere without paying a 30% vig to American big tech companies.

We could sell every mechanic in the world a $100/month subscription to a universal diagnostic tool. Every farmer in the world could buy a kit that would let them fix their own John Deere tractors without paying a $200 callout charge for a Deere technician who inspects the repair the farmer is expected to perform.

They'd beat a path to our door. Canada could become a tech export powerhouse, while making everything cheaper for Canadian tech users, while making everything more profitable for anyone who sells media or software in an online store. And – this is the best part – it’s a frontal assault on the largest, most profitable US companies, the companies that are single-handedly keeping the S&P 500 in the black, striking directly at their most profitable lines of business, taking the revenues from those ripoff scams from hundreds of billions to zero, overnight, globally.

We don't have to stop at exporting reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to Americans! We could export the extremely lucrative tools of technological liberation to our American friends, too.

That's how you win a trade-war.

What about workers? Here we have good news and bad news.

The good news is that public approval for unions is at a high mark last seen in the early 1970s, and more workers want to join a union than at any time in generations, and unions themselves are sitting on record-breaking cash reserves they could be using to organize those workers.

But here's the bad news. The unions spent the Biden years, when they had the most favorable regulatory environment since the Carter administration, when public support for unions was at an all-time high, when more workers than ever wanted to join a union, when they had more money than ever to spend on unionizing those workers, doing fuck all. They allocatid mere pittances to union organizing efforts with the result that we finished the Biden years with fewer unionized workers than we started them with.

Then we got Trump, who illegally fired National Labor Relations Board member Gwynne Wilcox, leaving the NLRB without a quorum and thus unable to act on unfair labor practices or to certify union elections.

This is terrible. But it’s not game over. Trump fired the referees, and he thinks that this means the game has ended. But here's the thing: firing the referee doesn't end the game, it just means we're throwing out the rules. Trump thinks that labor law creates unions, but he's wrong. Unions are why we have labor law. Long before unions were legal, we had unions, who fought goons and ginks and company finks in` pitched battles in the streets.

That illegal solidarity resulted in the passage of labor law, which legalized unions. Labor law is passed because workers build power through solidarity. Law doesn't create that solidarity, it merely gives it a formal basis in law. Strip away that formal basis, and the worker power remains.

Worker power is the answer to vocational awe. After all, it's good for you and your fellow workers to feel a sense of mission about your jobs. If you feel that sense of mission, if you feel the duty to protect your users, your patients, your patrons, your students, a union lets you fulfill that duty.

We saw that in 2023 when Doug Ford promised to destroy the power of Ontario's public workers. Workers across the province rose up, promising a general strike, and Doug Ford folded like one of his cheap suits. Workers kicked the shit out of him, and we'll do it again. Promises made, promises kept.

The unscheduled midair disassembly of American labor law means that workers can have each others' backs again. Tech workers need other workers' help, because tech workers aren't scarce anymore, not after a half-million layoffs. Which means tech bosses aren't afraid of them anymore.

We know how tech bosses treat workers they aren't afraid of. Look at Jeff Bezos: the workers in his warehouses are injured on the job at 3 times the national rate, his delivery drivers have to pee in bottles, and they are monitored by AI cameras that snitch on them if their eyeballs aren't in the proscribed orientation or if their mouth is open too often while they drive, because policy forbids singing along to the radio.

By contrast, Amazon coders get to show up for work with pink mohawks, facial piercings, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don't understand. They get to pee whenever they want. Jeff Bezos isn't sentimental about tech workers, nor does he harbor a particularized hatred of warehouse workers and delivery drivers. He treats his workers as terribly as he can get away with. That means that the pee bottles are coming for the coders, too.

It's not just Amazon, of course. Take Apple. Tim Cook was elevated to CEO in 2011. Apple's board chose him to succeed founder Steve Jobs because he is the guy who figured out how to shift Apple's production to contract manufacturers in China, without skimping on quality assurance, or suffering leaks of product specifications ahead of the company's legendary showy launches.

Today, Apple's products are made in a gigantic Foxconn factory in Zhengzhou nicknamed "iPhone City.” Indeed, these devices arrive in shipping containers at the Port of Los Angeles in a state of pristine perfection, manufactured to the finest tolerances, and free of any PR leaks.

To achieve this miraculous supply chain, all Tim Cook had to do was to make iPhone City a living hell, a place that is so horrific to work that they had to install suicide nets around the worker dorms to catch the plummeting bodies of workers who were so brutalized by Tim Cook's sweatshop that they attempted to take their own lives.

Tim Cook is also not sentimentally attached to tech workers, nor is he hostile to Chinese assembly line workers. He just treats his workers as badly as he can get away with, and with mass layoffs in the tech sector he can treat his coders much, much worse

How do tech workers get unions? Well, there are tech-specific organizations like Tech Solidarity and the Tech Workers Coalition. But tech workers will only get unions by having solidarity with other workers and receiving solidarity back from them. We all need to support every union. All workers need to have each other's backs.

We are entering a period of omnishambolic polycrisis.The ominous rumble of climate change, authoritarianism, genocide, xenophobia and transphobia has turned into an avalanche. The perpetrators of these crimes against humanity have weaponized the internet, colonizing the 21st century's digital nervous system, using it to attack its host, threatening civilization itself.

The enshitternet was purpose-built for this kind of apocalyptic co-option, organized around giant corporations who will trade a habitable planet and human rights for a three percent tax cut, who default us all into twiddle-friendly algorithmic feed, and block the interoperability that would let us escape their clutches with the backing of powerful governments whom they can call upon to "protect their IP rights."

It didn't have to be this way. The enshitternet was not inevitable. It was the product of specific policy choices, made in living memory, by named individuals.

No one came down off a mountain with two stone tablets, intoning Tony Clement, James Moore: Thou shalt make it a crime for Canadians to jailbreak their phones. Those guys chose enshittification, throwing away thousands of comments from Canadians who warned them what would come of it.

We don't have to be eternal prisoners of the catastrophic policy blunders of mediocre Tory ministers. As the omnicrisis polyshambles unfolds around us, we have the means, motive and opportunity to craft Canadian policies that bolster our sovereignty, protect our rights, and help us to set every technology user, in every country (including the USA) free.

The Trump presidency is an existential crisis but it also presents opportunities. When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. We once had an old, good internet, whose major defect was that it required too much technical expertise to use, so all our normie friends were excluded from that wondrous playground.

Web 2.0's online services had greased slides that made it easy for anyone to get online, but escaping from those Web 2.0 walled gardens meant was like climbing out of a greased pit. A new, good internet is possible, and necessary. We can build it, with all the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the ease of use of Web 2.0.

A place where we can find each other, coordinate and mobilize to resist and survive climate collapse, fascism, genocide and authoritarianism. We can build that new, good internet, and we must.

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/2025/02/26/ursula-franklin/#enshittification-eh

[butts-bouncing-on-the-beltway]

I know I've commented on this before and I know it wasn't even a different comment, just said on a different day with different words.

But it is IMPORTANT that we can have this conversation. It's part of reconciling what we have been with what we might want to be.

At the time, Trump wasn't even a thing yet, I forget what it was exactly, but I **think** it was the Ferguson uprisings. My wife and I were living together for the first time and talking about this A LOT obviously because it was all anyone we knew was talking about and the stuff coming out of Ferguson was both exciting and terrifying. I think I asked her where she wanted to go if we decided to leave. And she just looked at me and asked "where is it you think we could go where this couldn't happen to me?"

I really hadn't understood what I was asking her until I got that reply. The idea that changing our environment wouldn't help her, was only about soothing MY feelings of safety, not about what would actually MAKE HER SAFER, had genuinely not occurred to me. I absolutely learned this from my mother, the whitest person in my family, who moved us every time shit got rocky. And for a minute as I thought about that, I remembered what it felt like the first time she took me away from the land I grew up on. We were not indigenous, but I was raised on Maidu land, and many local children's ecology and outdoor hobbiest programs were run by folks on the rez for their own kids, while being open to the wider community. I spent A LOT of time on Feather River with my friends learning about everything from basket making to fishing to the water table, to agricultural techniques, to beadwork, to more than I could ever remember. And I learned to see the land I lived on as part of me in the same way I was part of it. When that was taken from me, I quite literally destabilized and went....grief striken I guess. For a long time. And when I finally "got over it" I did so mostly by accepting that while I might never get to go home, that little valley was a huge part of what made me myself, and I would never let that go.

The fear, the sense of looming threat, it had made me vulnerable to the idea that fleeing would help, whether or not that was true, but more importantly it had beought me upsettingly close to forsaking something that quite literally I know I am not me without. And all so that in another ten years my wife might look at me and say "is anything different?"

And we had a really long talk after all this, with a ton more to it that is our business not the world's, but what we ultimately came to was "this is our home. And we will die here, be buried here, and be mourned and celebrated here. And if that means we have to fight the abuses and oppressive actions of the people who are here with us then we will, but our home is worth loving in that way."

Ever since, whenever I hear white usa citizens talk about fleeing to some perceived more progressive nation, I hear "where do you think I could go that this could not happen to me?" I think "why don't you love your home, the land, the people, the world that was built here, enough to fight for it when it is threatened?" I hear "it is easier to run than to resist."

And I think that's what people reacting poorly to this post don't get yet. Maybe never will, I don't know. "It is easier to run than to resist" is a terrifying thought that comes from a place of fear and helplessness. And it is difficult to hear the people who have benefitted the most from that thought being inflicted on others that they truly believe it. That they may truly and sincerely not understand how devastating it is to be forced to make such an unthinkable sacrifice only to have that sacrifice treated as rational and right by people who have never had to consider it before (even if perhaps their ancestors did).

Reconciling the racial history of this country will require all of us to stop being defensive about the emotional realities of indigenous people, people of color, the descendants of slaves and other owned/indentured people, and so many other communities in this country. The guilt and discomfort must become safe to experience or we will try to punish those who trigger it by asking to be treated as people.

Given the state of the world, that avoidance response is not one ANY of us can afford right now. If yours is still causing you to activate in response to conversations like OP is trying to have, then likely you are still very much at risk of radicalization in ways even you may not recognize.

the reason that white Americans going "I'm going to move to ___" during all this insults me so much is not bc I care whether they leave or go. I think it bothers me deeply bc it shows such a... Lack of attachment to the land that so so SO many people suffered and currently suffer for.

The indigenous peoples here were mass murdered for centuries for their own land. My people were brought here in chains for centuries, then bred like they were lower than animals, just to work this land. People of color here and abroad suffer just to maintain this place's spot in the global hierarchy.

A lot of BLOOD went into this soil that y'all's ancestors wanted so fucking bad, a lot of privilege (whether you want it or not) was built through so much suffering for you to have. And as soon as the going got tough, your only comment was "well, I wish I could settle somewhere else now". 😐 It just is truly a slap in the face, that y'all don't even care that much about what was committed for you to stand where you are.

And maybe if people acknowledged that privilege more I'd be less mad, but no. They claim to not even know 😭 like all right then

[kissylec]

TO THE PLACES WE'VE BEEN AND THE NIGHTS WE'VE HAD.

directed by love you goodbye...

pairing . . . rafe cameon x pogue!reader in which . . . the bonfire always has surprises, but you never thought that one of those surprises would be ending up in tannyhill with the kook prince warning .ᐟ . . . (18+) smut, alcohol consumption, curse words, enemies to lovers, tension, dirty talk, praise kink, making out, oral (f), unprotected sex (wrap it up), p in v, first time writing smut and english is not my first language, so please, bear with me w count . . . 1.5k (NO PROOFREAD) kissylec says . . . write this in 3 days and i dont really know if i like it or not. my frist time writing smut! im tweaking! thanks to @rafesheaven for the tips you gave me, i hope this is okay i love u. and thanks to @rafeysbabydoll for the idea of this first extra! i also love u. hope you guys like this 😭

masterlist .ᐟ 𝜗𝜚 navigation .ᐟ

YOU WERE DOING THIS FOR JJ, and you repeated that to yourself over and over again. the bonfire was the last thing on your mind after the day you'd had, having to put on makeup and get dressed made your head hurt and your feet felt tired just walking to the vanity. but everything went to shit in a short time, which you expected, but at least you had that slight glimmer of hope that it won't happen.

it all started when topper – because of course it was topper – started bothering sarah. your and your friends' irritation was instantly aired, creating a tense atmosphere that was not lost on anyone. and between john b complaining, jj trying to fight, and kiara trying to calm down everyone who came near, you couldn't take it anymore.

the overstimulation ate away at you to the point that you left without warning, a habit that was ingrained in you. the sound of voices grew farther away with each step you took, and the cold and salty breeze became more and more present. that's when you thought about the beach, and that maybe it would be a good idea to stop by there.

the sand on your feet felt colder than usual and the wind was a caress on your exposed skin. you took long, deep breaths, making circles in the palm of your left hand as you tried to maintain a calm that you were afraid would slip away. the sound of the sea was in the background, and a relaxation alien to you had found you. until.

you okay?

the thick, familiar voice startles you, causing you to bring a hand to your chest and open your eyes, your gaze traveling to the direction the voice came from.

rafe cameron.

"you scared the shit outta me," you say, your gaze traveling all over rafe's body. a bottle of alcohol in his hand, his brow furrowed. His curtain bangs were gone, replaced by a neat buzz cut, which made him look more... mature, older.

rafe continues to scowl, looking away from you. "yeah well, it's creepier when a girl stands next to you and closes her eyes and all that shit you were doing just now." his lips take a sip from what appears to be a bottle of whiskey, his eyes fixed on the water.

you just rolled your eyes, mimicking his action of looking away. you never gave rafe much importance, but your annoyance for him was no small thing. he was nothing sacred among pogues, as if his name were a curse. "i may be creepy but you're sad" you started saying. "drinking by yourself on the beach? not really a very fun activity."

rafe takes another long sip from the bottle, his muscles flexing as he raises his arm. “shouldn’t you be there?” he asks, still not looking at you.

rafe knew about you, not much, but he knew enough. he always insisted that you stood out from any friend sarah might have had, you were not overlooked, you always left a mark. you had that something that takes a person a while to figure out. you were different, and it sounds corny and repetitive, but you were, and rafe liked that.

for a split second you considered telling him why you left the bonfire, but you didn't. "i got bored," you said simply, feeling rafe turn his head and his eyes burn into your cheek. "what's your excuse?"

rafe swore his heart stopped for a second when you turned your head to make your first eye contact of the night, his lips felt dry but he didn't have the balls to lick them in front of you.

he just shrugged. "i don't want to be there" he says.

you slowly nod your head, your eyes locked on rafe's blue ones, who didn't seem to want to take his eyes off you. the sound of clothes rustling and him handing you the bottle of whiskey caught your attention, raising your eyebrows.

parting your lips you take the bottle, the contact with rafe’s fingers leaving a rough feeling on your skin. still looking into his eyes, you took an unexpectedly long sip, your throat burning instantly, making you grimace in disgust and drop the bottle. he couldn’t help but laugh.

“what was that?” he asks, following with his gaze as you spit the amber liquid into the sand.

“that shit is disgusting” you say, wiping your chin, which had dropped drops of the drink.

you shake your head, your eyes falling on his face. you allow yourself to analyze the small details, how his eyes close when he smiles, the occasional mark on his skin, his hand wrapped around most of the bottle as soon as you handed it back to him.

rafe parts his lips, you could see his eyes drop to his lap, as if he was hesitant. “i have more bottles in tannyhill, of… other things,” he says, hesitantly. "if you want."

your eyes widened, letting out a laugh you couldn’t control. “are you serious?” you said, your smile taken as mockery by rafe.

rafe frowns, his gaze going to you, making you erase your smile. a tension began to be felt between you two, that tension which anyone who was there could feel, that tension that makes your stomach hurt and your heart race.

"did you really just ask me what you just ask me?" you asked, your eyebrows raising as you looked at him.

“what’s wrong with what i said?” rafe asks, his tone of voice harsher than he intended.

you frown, careful not to fumble with your words. “no, absolutely not.”

“why not?"

“because it’s you,” you simply reply, looking at him. “and i would never do anything with you.”

your words seemed to trigger something in rafe, who raised an eyebrow and tilted his head, as if he were studying you. you felt your pulse quicken, his jaw suddenly looked attractive, and his challenging eyes made your lower stomach feel warm.

"never, huh?"

those were the last words you could remember coming out of his mouth, because all you were focused right now, was him. on his tongue expertly moving between your wet folds, on how he flicked it against your clit. his fingers gripped your thighs to keep you from moving, the pressure was so strong that you knew there would be marks, but you didn't care.

you had tears starting to form at the corners of your eyes, your o-shaped lips letting out moan after moan, babbling every now and then as you felt his tongue fucking you as if it were the only thing he was useful for.

"prettiest cunt" he grunts against your center, placing open-mouthed kisses over your clit.

"fuck–rafe" was the only thing that could come out of your mouth.

you start to rub your pussy against him when you feel close, that delicious pressure in your pelvis growing as does the burning in your clit, your moans turning into soft cries, desperate to cum, and rafe notices it, but that wasn't going to happen.

his mouth leaving you, automatically going to the level of your face. his lips, chin and nose glistening with your arousal, his pupils dilated with pleasure, his breathing accelerated, all so sexy that you could have cum just from him.

before you could even protest he crashed your lips against his, moaning as you tasted yourself. your tongues danced deliciously, making everything more disgusting.

"wan' you to cum on my cock" rafe manages to say between kisses, and you never wondered when he took off his pants, but he did. "you're capable of doing that? huh?"

he wrapped his hand around his heavy cock, pumping it slowly, guiding his tip to your puffy and achy clit, teasing it, coating his length with your slick. "fuck–could you be any more fucking wet?"

the tip traveled to your center, gasping as it entered inch by inch to the brim, forcing you to take him all. your eyes rolled back in your head, feeling his cock caress your insides. you could swear you felt him kiss your cervix.

"so tight, all f'me, isn't that right?" rafe purrs against your ear, his hips moving almost instantly after filling you.

your brain blanked out, letting him handle you as he pleased, your legs on his shoulders as his pace quickened. “rafe,” you stammered, your eyes squeezing shut.

"grippin' me so tight, you gonna cum?" rafe murmurs condescendingly. "this sweet pussy gonna cum? huh?"

it was ridiculous, almost pathetic, but his words and the way your sweet spot was hit over and over again had you cumming on his cock, your back arching and a small cry came out. rafe groans, his face hiding in your neck, his cock twitching and painting your insides with his cum.

you felt kisses on your neck, the thrusts fading in rhythm, his hands caressing your sides. your eyes slowly opened, your lips dry as the light from the nightstand made its presence felt beside you.

then, and just then, it clicked.

"we can't do this again" was the first thing that left your lips.

but rafe had already taken you over. and there was no escape from that.

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© kissylec. please do not plagiarize, repost, translate or claim any of my work as your own.

[pinkfishtank]

Back in your arms

Pairing:Bucky Barnes x Girlfriend!reader

Summary:Bucky finally comes back from the blip. And he seemed to have missed you a fuck ton.

Word count:3.5k

Warnings:smut/18+mdni/hickeys/shower sex/pet names (just baby)/fingering/a little angst/dirty talk/unprotective sex/female reader/ FIRST TIME WRITING SMUT IM SORRY.

Prompts:He be missing you a lot/“can you still take it?/fluff? and smut

Author’s Note:LIKE I SAID THIS IS NEW TO ME IM NOT USED TO WRITING SMUT. But this came in mind after I saw some post on here and was like “hehehehehheehhe”. So here I was writing till 5 in the morning. Anyways enjoy and like I said I love tips and advice.

The blip was…weird, terrifying, left the world confused and scared that maybe the rapture had came.

At first it was heartbreaking to you. Bucky had just never came back home. You were confused like many others and that lead you to so many stages of denial, like someone ghosting you or faking their death. Yet you never knew when he would come back. At least you knew it wasn’t just you who had lost the people they loved.

You even went to go see the wall of the vanished, hearing it apparently had everyone’s name on there that had completely vanished from the earth. God maybe this was the rapture, No, Bucky wouldn’t have disappeared. As you thought and constantly started checking the news of any updates like a stupid paranoid freak there was nothing. It’s not like the news could say anything I’m sure they had no idea where people had went. Then you had people who were incels who tried to make up theories, saying the Daily Bugle was always telling the truth, yet trying to watch it made your head spin worse then listening to an Australian accent.

In the end there wasn’t much people could do. Either wait till there was a solution, or accept this was a way of dying weirdly peacefully without torture or pain to them.

You tried to make the most of it. Getting therapy since you probably needed it, checking in on family and friends who had also lost many of the people who they truly cared about. While you sat there waiting at your door like a pet waiting for their owner to get home; weirdly kinky.

Five fucking years, five years of this crap. Useless bullshit of saying that their loved one’s have died in the rapture. You were in denial. Constantly remind you that Bucky was out there somewhere, looking for a way out. He wasn’t one to back down, maybe? No. But it had been five years what was the point of caring anymore at trying to find a way out. Maybe they were really dead, dying on the spot and everyone was just finding their way of mourning by using different predictions or theories since not much had ever been explained on it.

Acceptance was stupid, who needed it, you didn’t. You knew he was gone what was the point of waiting here in your Apartment to hear just that little click sound of the door being unlocked by the keys you gave him. You just needed him because during the night you were scared of the dark, ya that was definitely all of it. Not that he made you feel some sort of softness that made you wanna scream into you pillow; or that whenever you’d see each other some tight warm pit in your chest had you doing flips all day long. But mostly or some dark needy part of you couldn’t forget the amount of intimacy there was. You too were basically animals around each other. Every time you saw each other it was like something primal and hazy took over your mind, body, and soul. It was like you too were hungover each other, always getting lead to bed by him, his hands in your hair either in a nice soft way, or in a way that left you breathless, needy, begging for him to keep pulling until tears spilled down your face. No, this was stupid. Stupid stupid stupid lovey dovey shit he got you hooked onto like a fish before he said goodbye and went poof. And god how you wished it didn’t screw you up so much you had to start using a rose toy.

You sat on your bed, right in the middle instead of your designated side when that asshole was here. You watched some crappy reality tv show that made you think this is where people went when they were full on broke. This is really what you were doing on your Friday night; wrapped up in a big comforter snacking on anything. You got up since you were running out of snacks and you forced to pull yourself together as you walked to your fully lit kitchen, looking around at the empty space like a maniac who watched to much true crime.

Meanwhile your phone was buzzing like crazy.

As you got back you were met with newsletters you signed up for sending you a random breaking news emergency.

‘BREAKING NEWS! It seems to have been that all the sudden everyone from the snap of five years ago have been reappearing right where they were when they had left. This is not a drill people have been reappearing after all this time. Be aware of loved ones popping out of nowhere’

Oh what the fuck. No, that’s a lie this can’t all the sudden just be happening like the world just chose to bring everyone back. Yet again, it wasn’t April, as you quickly checked the date on your phone and sighed. Nope this was real this was pure fucking real shit happening right now. You looked around your room so many thoughts filling your head

What would happen if Bucky found you in this state?

Would he have changed?

Would he still like you?

Was he a zombie?

Okay now that’s just stupid. Right?

Next thing you know it you basically jumped up from your bed and started running around the room. You grabbed trash bags and threw any type of trash you found in your room, candy wrappers, soda cans, twisted tea cans, chip bags. Damn if crumbs were everywhere, you really let go when you lose someone don’t you?

It was like one of those stupid montages from a coming of age movie, music blared in your apartment as the loud sound of your vacuum seeped into the mix. The constant groans of how everywhere you looked there was a new messy problem you had to take care of by yourself. This news really just had to show up now didn’t it? Ya, to ruin your life and make you question everything. Hours and hours of cleaning while looking out at your window, then your door. Just need to hear a click, a sound of the door and you would be running to the door.

Yet after checking around the house to see if there were any more messy spots….nothing. There was nothing. Complete silence that scared you, making you run back in bed and turn on the tv again to the shitty tv. Knew it was a lie. Yet you saw so many post of people reconnecting with happiness in their eyes. That should be you. Where was Bucky? You felt like a puppy in a pound watching all the other pups get picked while you just sat there waiting for that right person to pick you up and praise you for being you. God maybe you were a pet.

It had been a week. All your friends had been reunited with their lovers and friends. When was it going to be your turn to see your man fly through that door and pick you up happy to see you for the first time in what? Five years? Or better he’d lift you up and take you to the bed, showing you how much he missed you. God you were fucked for that being one of your first thoughts. Your body tensed and ached just thinking about the stuff that would go on once he got here.

The day went on, work being…well work what were you expecting. It was boring with employees asking you the same question over and over, you trying to not lose your sanity and tell them to go ask someone else.

Yet once night set upon the city you look out the window, arms crossed as you stood there frozen in your pajamas and a little cardigan hiding any upper part of your body. Your body felt cold as your arms tightened around you like they were trying to replace Bucky’s arms when he held you, staring o ur this same big ass window; just enjoying the bliss.

‘Click.’

You were too in your head to pay attention to anything at the second. Like how your door was opening to a taller figure coming through the door looking around like the place was new.

“Baby?”

Your throat wasn’t letting you breathe, caught, like startled or surprised. You hadn’t even turned your body, not having too. That voice, deep pitched voice that filled the silence of the room. Before you could fully comprehend anything at the moment all you heard was the door carefully shut closed and the sound of step after hard step, getting closer. The air behind you made you shiver in your spine, gently stretching for a moment before the presence of familiarity was behind you lurking in for some sick joke.

“Sorry I’m late.” He whispered his voice just behind your ear, feeling the hot breath against the side of your neck. Until you finally spoke.

“Where were you?” Was that really all of what you had to stumble out of your mouth.

Bucky urged to not let his hands wander over your waist, to not pull you in so quickly. He fisted his hands up before finally speaking after one big hard sigh.

“I honestly got no fucking idea.” He murmured as he took in your full body. All he could think of was how god damn happy he was to see this body again, to have in right in front of him, and in the palm of his hands “but I missed you. Just had to get some stuff figured out before I came to see you.” He proceeded before looking down at his machine weapon hand, whatever you wanted to call his replacement to flesh.

Finally after a good couple of minutes you turned and looked at him, really looked. Seeing the way his muscular body hadn’t seemed to change, just seemed to be more worn out. Had he aged during the blip? There were so many questions going through your head yet you didn’t feel like reminding him of everything he had probably been through the night of the snap.

Before you could think of asking a soft breath left your mouth and your hand lifted up to his robotic arm. The metal cold and tired against your palm.

It was like Bucky’s arm was still there when he felt your touch. Even if that was lie and the machine was still well a machine, your touch, sense made him let out a shivery exhale. He swallowed any curses or words that would spill out and just looked up at your eyes interlocking with his.

“I know you probably have so many questions but I’d rather just enjoy this, enjoy everything curve and trace of your body I’ve been craving for so long.” He couldn’t hold his word anymore, he needed you to understand just how much of the your touch he had needed these past five years

Your breathing hitched and you bit the inside of your mouth, gnawing at the chewy flesh. It was hard not to give in, not to completely fall to your knees and become a stupid mess.

As his face got closer you could feel your breath mixing with his. They way yall looked at each other made sparks flare in each others eyes

“Have you moved on? Were you seeing anyone while I blipped with most of the world” he asked like he knew the answer, but wanted to hear come from your mouth, Hear you say those words that meant you belonged to him. Even when he was gone.

You shook your head slowly looking down and taking a moment before speaking up. “No.”

He nodded smiling a bit, taking a moment for those words to slip into his head. God it felt good to him knowing you were his.

“Join me in the shower.”

“Right now?”

“Mhm.”

And just like that he walked off expecting you to follow, in which you did. Why wouldn’t you? Your body felt warm, fuzzy, like every part of you wanted to remember that touch of his.

As yall got to the bathroom he slowly pulled off his shirt and so did you, pulling off your cardigan revealing the lacy tank top covering the bit of skin it could. As you stripped your eyes were locked on his body like a magnet or a fresh piece of meat. You looked at his arm and curiously tilted your head

“What about your arm….thingy machine.”

“Waterproof” He said firmly before continuing to strip until he was left in nothing. Both of your bare bodies. You watched as he walked into the shower and turned it on, the glass panels quick to fog up. You stood out for a moment watching as you could see him under the shower head getting his hair and body wet. Biting your lip you walked to the light switches and turned on the main light, dimming the room of only the light under the shower.

And once that was done you basically padded over to the shower, walking in before gently closing the door behind you. All you saw was the toned hard body of Bucky’s. Flexing not by command as he sighed into the relaxing heat. Next thing you know you were grabbing the body wash and gently pouring it into the palm of your hand.

“Lemme help.” You murmured as you walked behind him, your small form comparing to his tall rough one. Your hands made its way to his back and gently massaged the soap suds in. Getting every nook and cranny. All you could hear were the faint groans he let in pleasure of the heat. Bucky really didn’t wanna hurry things, but five years of pent up arousal was enough to make any man wild for his woman. With that he slowly turned looking down at your form. Taking in every beautifully curved body part of yours.

“I don’t wanna rush things.” He whispered before looking into your eyes before speaking his truth “but if you just say anything approving I will let go.”

That was enough to make your breath hitch and every part of yours body to tense up with the same arousal you had been feeling all these years. You stayed quiet for a moment trying to fully get your thoughts together before finally giving into everything you had been waiting for.

“Then let go.” You whispered and in seconds you felt those rough large hands wrapping around your waist, pulling you in like a lifeline. Like you were everything he ever wanted. As he looked down at you and took in all of you with his eyes he smiled and pushed his lips onto yours, needing to taste the sweetness of your lips. He didn’t stop, letting it start off soft and hazy, letting the passion drip into your mouth before basically devouring you. Bucky bit and nipped at your lip as you gasped into his sudden desire to make sure you knew who you belonged to, who you had been waiting for all this time.

“Is this what you’ve been needing” He asked in between him feeding his starvation

“Y-yes god yes.” You moaned as your breath hitched and lead to a little yelp but you felt his hands wander, his hot hands trailing up your back then down to your plump ass. He gave it a nice squeeze as he groaned. licking your licks, asking for permission to be let in you let out another quiet moan before you felt him devour it with his tongue diving into your mouth, exploring all he wanted.

His hands were a whole on their own mission though. One resting on your waist as he backed you under the stream of water, hot and nice, just like how y’all seemed to be at the moment. Once he had you all backed up the water flowed between both of y’all. The other hand of his went down your chest, and you knew exactly where the target was going for. Just as you thought of that the gentle circling of your clit started, and you gasped moaned into his mouth while he rubbed harder, quicker, and in all the right places.

One of your hands ran down the foggy glass panel while the other was on the toned muscles of his chest letting you feel him down.

“I missed this so much” you murmured as he groaned and nodded

“I could tell.” He said firmly with pride as he kept going before finding your pussy and gently sliding a finger into there. Your head laid against the tile of the shower wall and you bit your lip before looking up at him with those pleading eyes.

“Another.” You breathed as he nodded and dipped in another before finally curling his fingers, determined to find that sweet spot as he started pumping in and out. The stimulation of the pump and curling left me breathless. With his tongue deep in my mouth I whimpered as I felt those urges to let go, the need to release all over his hands.

“I think-I think I’m gonna”

“Come on baby let it get all over my fingers” He urged as he pumped harder until finally he noticed he hit that sweet spot and you arched your back against the tile, gasping as you felt yourself release and shiver against his touch.

For a moment you just leaned against the wall. Taking that all in for just a moment before looking up at him and his cheeky fucking smile. Bucky looked at you for a moment before pulling out the digits of his fingers out and bringing them to his mouth and licking the clean, not breaking eye contact once.

“You fucking taste delicious.” He murmured against his fingers. You couldn’t help but just watch and get all red in the face like an idiot before he finally ran a hand through his hair under the stream of water.

“Come on baby now I need my fill too.” He said firmly as you forgot about his erection. Your eyes lowered down and saw the thick veiny cock of his sprung against his stomach, already leaking with pre-cum. You couldn’t stop staring seeming like a perv but being in a trance thinking about all the thing he could do to you right here right now made you just wanna cum on the spot right here right now again.

Next thing you know his hands were on the back of your thighs gripping them as he lift them up into the air and against the wall. Making sure you were pinned up all nice with your legs now wrapped around him. Your arms snaked around his neck holding on, awaiting for him

“Think you can still take it?”

“I-I think so”

Bucky groaned and gently pumped his cock a couple of times before rubbing his pre-cum against your slit, making your head fall back from the teasing. You whimpered and squirmed as he chuckled before finally sliding his cock in, inch by aching inch. You could feel the way he stretched you out yet made sure in every way you were okay. He peppered your neck in light kiss and nips, leaving tiny hickeys everywhere over the neck.

“Tell me when to move” he whispered before you nodded and squirmed a bit

“Move please fuck move” you whimpered as a sudden gasp left you breathless while he started pumping into you, pulling out leaving just the tip in, just to pump into you with new found eager. Showing you how much he missed you, how much he was waiting till he’d get back to you.

Bucky cursed and groaned as he drove deep into your pussy looking down to see your pussy accommodating his size,stretching it out till it had a tint of red around the ring of your hole. You could tell he was getting closer, with the way he pumped into you harder and harder. And while he was close you were too, feeling that hot pit in your stomach needing to be emptied. You put your hand on the panel leaving a mark on the foggy glass.

“F-fuck! I need to cum, I need you to cum inside of me” you breathed out as you pulled his lips to yours for one last kiss before all you felt was the grip of his hold on you become harsher until you gasped and felt as the ropes of cum bursted inside of you, while you came on his cock, mixing your juices together in a mess. As he kept pumping into you, you fell limp in his arms, pressing your forehead against his as his hand went into your hair. His pace slowly down.

“I have a lot to explain.”

“Ya you fucking do.”

[81pastrys]

Lost at a Race

Summary— when Lando’s wife goes on a business trip, he has to bring his little girl to the paddock with him. However, when he got distracted she wondered off.

Warnings— none

A/N— I was inspired by someone else’s fic, if I find it I will be tagging the original!! I added a little Carbono too.

Lando didn’t like his wife’s idea of having his little girl at the paddock without her, but he had no choice. She was out for a business trip and he had free practices to do. When it came down to it he took his eyes off her for not even 10 seconds and she was gone.

“Where did she go?” He asked, slightly panicked. Hoping she just went to Oscar’s side of the garage. “I just had her next to me.” He went on. Oscar noticed his panicked teammate and trotted over.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost, mate.” Oscar stated. Then it hit him, where’s little Norris? “Wait, where’s your daughter?” His eyes widened and they split up to look for the little girl.

The garage hadn’t noticed their drivers disappear, let alone scrambling around looking for a toddler. When they did, the drivers were already jogging from garage to garage asking for her. “She looks just like me? Did she come in here?” Lando asked a Ferrari member. A shake of their head was all he needed to move on.

“Little curly headed baby, looks like Lando?” Oscar asked a RedBull mechanic. The guy looked towards the pit lane and then back to Oscar. “I need an answer Lando’s going nuts right now.” He spat out quickly to show the urgency. The mechanic shrugged his shoulders with a no.

However in the Williams garage, Carlos was holding the little girl. Her favorite uncle. He was showing her around and explaining things. Alex had joined in, seeing how adorable she was and couldn’t resist. “She’s adorable, Lily would die seeing me with her.” He joked.

Carlos took a picture of the three of them and it was sent to their girlfriends along with Lando. Lando had made it to Haas before he got the message, severely panicked and shaken up by losing his little girl. He had called his wife at this point and had her freaking out from a different country. “Fucking wanker.” Lando mumbled seeing the text.

“What?! Did you find her?” His wife rambled on, still freaking out. “Lando!” She yelled. He sighed before slowly making his way to William’s. He motioned to Oscar, who was confused seeing as he had no little girl.

“She’s at William’s with Carlos, my love.” Lando said defeated. “He just sent me a picture of him and Alex holding her.” He explained. She went on yelling at him about responsibility, she was so loud he put his phone on speaker, then turned the volume down. “I love you, but I’m at Williams though so I have to go get her.” He said tired of her nonsensical yelling.

“She’s not very happy.” Oscar mentioned walking to McLaren, leaving Lando at Williams hospitality. The Williams workers looked confused as Lando walked in like it was his team. His anxiety from his little girl missing was smashed by seeing her giggling in her uncles arms.

“Dada!!” She squeaked seeing him approaching. Carlos relinquished the baby to her father with a chuckle. “Uncle los!” She pointed to Carlos.

“Yeah?” Lando said with a smile. “I see uncle Carlos, sweetheart.” He nodded and she hugged his neck. “Please don’t ever do that again.” He whispered to himself sighing with relief to have her tiny arms wrapped around his neck.

“She’s a pleasure to have around.” Alex joined. Not understanding how the little girl even got into Carlos’s possession. “Why do you look so pale?” He asked Lando, who gave him a seriously mean look. Alex recoiled and walked off.

“Cabron, be glad she found me.” Carlos joked. “Liam would throw a tantrum if she found Max.” He stated, which was true. Liam wasn’t fond of anyone other than redbull employees strolling on in to their garage.

“I know, but she nearly gave me a heart attack.” Lando mentioned. He walked back to his garage and held her the rest of the evening until he had to get in the car. “If you lose her you’re dead meat.” He warned his trainer.

“Like you did?” Jon joked. The death stare he got was not worth it. Jon, in fact, did not lose the little girl. He sat in Lando’s driver room with her while they watched free practice.

Lost - Carlos pov

Carlos had went to Ferrari to wish Charles and Lewis luck during the practice. On his way back to Williams he spotted a little head with curls. He stopped and crouched down. “Los!” She squealed. Of course, McLaren and Ferrari were right next to each other. “Dada’s in there.” She explained in toddler babble. She was right near the exit of McLaren, how she got through the maze of an exit he’ll never know.

“Is he sobrina?” He asked. He picked the little girl up and went on his way to the Williams garage. He didn’t think it was too big of a deal. He showed her his helmet and Alex’s side of the garage. “This is Alex, sobrina.” He explained seeing Alex light up.

“Why hello!” He greeted her with a smile. “Sobrina? Is that her name?” He asked. The little girl giggled as Alex tickled her.

“No, it means niece in Spanish. This is Lando’s daughter.” Carlos explained. Alex had shown her his helmet and then they went on to take a picture and sent it to Lando and their girlfriends.

A few minutes later Lando was in his garage. “She nearly gave me a heart attack!” Lando explained. The little girl was returned unharmed.

Notes: ‘cabron’ means multiple things apparently, but it is used casually like dude in this fic 😳. ‘Sobrina’ means niece as Carlos mentions.

[libraford]

I've had some time to think about it a little more because the people who are angry with me say that people who were in cults like MAGA can't be fully rehabilitated and they'll just follow the next fascist that comes along with big promises.

I am thinking about my uncle.

He voted Trump in 2016. It was the expected thing to do as a farmer in a very rural town in southern Ohio. He was very much MAGA. So we're all of his friends. They always voted republican. They all watched fox news.

He didnt know much about the economy, but he was tired of politicians, I liked the idea of draining the swamp.

I think it clicked for him that something was amiss when tge deregulation of farming practices started having longterm effects. Which was sooner than most people! But he went to school for ag and knew about listeria and e.coli, and I think it got the wheels turning, even if it took longer than it could have.

And then covid. He was eligible to get vaccinated early because he was over 50, and he took that. Which was hard for him.

I can't remember how he voted, or if he voted at all in 2020, but I know he didn't vote for Trump because when January 6th came around he said 'well, glad I didn't vote for this shit.'

Maybe he hasn't gone full Democrat and maybe he's not 100% supportive of leftist things. But when his friends are talking about which of them got food poisoning this time, he's quick to point out what's causing the listeria outbreaks and start a conversation about deregulation. Because he might not know much about tge economy or gay rights or deportation, but he at least knows THAT.

People would look at this story and say that he's a piece of shit for not caring about kids in cages, or trans rights, or for not thinking about deregulation before it started causing problems. Or because he didnt do a 180 and go from MAGA to Lefty. Or because he was a republican in the first place.

I'm proud of him. He broke the spell.

I don't know if that's the same as rehabilitation. By some definitions maybe not. But he's more critical of his media intake now. I think you're supposed to want that.

[rocketbaby]

Heelloooo! I haven't ever really sent out a request of my own to any author so I'm not sure how it works wizhuejss but omgosh I love your writing so so much I cant help but atleast give it a chance yk :p

I was wondering if you could maybe write a bakugo x reader where the reader is an extremely girly girl and kinda like the total opposite of bakugo? Kinda like how his parents relationship is with mitski being all bash and loud and then theres masaru. I dont mind any scenario you have in mind whether its suggestive or not just have fun while you write it if you want to :p, that's all ty!

MHA master list

I hope it meets your expectations<3 I dunno exactly what you meant by extremly girly girl but I wrote what i thought of when you said that :( . Also please keep in mind I don't write for Kats that much so this is ass. I would say these are mostly some head cannons. Please excuse any grammar mistakes

trigger warning - vulgar words/swearing

Katsuki Bakugo x girly reader

Katsuki never thought he'd end up falling for a girl like you. He actually didn't think he'd fall for anyone at all but here we were.

You were such a sweetheart compared to his rough and mean personality. He honestly has no idea why you'd even like in the first place..when you guys had met he didn't like you at all.

Your personality and just you overall were the exact opposite of him which he hated back then. He told himself that if he'd end up dating someone it would be a person similar to him, with a tough personality and strong character..and then he met you.

It didn't take long for you both to fall in love. He started finding you somewhat cute and he cringed at that thought at first. He couldn't lie though, katsuki kinda liked how you dressed. You would mostly only wear cute,fancy outfits, usually containing of white/pink thigh warmers with a pretty little Skirt and a cute top. You'd also wear lots of accessories like bows, jewelery and more.

Most of the times you wear your outfits in warm,cute colors like red white pink yellow and maybe even light blue/baby blue. Well surprisingly, Katsuki caught a liking for it,for your outfits.

Head cannon that this man becomes a lover boy when he meets the right person

You love him and his personality too even though he's sometimes embarrassing you in public. You'd go out with him on dates and he would randomly start a fight with one of the waitress's there because he thought the food wasn't cooked properly.

You being a sweetheart,tried to calm him down and assure him that it's not the waitress's fault. Of course Katsuki didn't really listen,he made a scene there while the whole restaurant was staring and whispering.

Obviously,you tried interfering.

"Not now,babe. I need to have a talk with the dude who cooked this shit right here. It doesn't even look edible"

You didn't know what to do anymore and you could just stand back and look at him being a dumbass. He was so fuckin embarrassing.

"You expect us to eat this bull crap?! Even a seven year old kid could do better than this!"

"I came out here with my girl so we could enjoy a good meal and this is what we get? They should hire me,for fucks sake! I'll do the cooking!"

He has absolutely no shame.

This took you by surprise but you found out Katsuki loves to watch you do your make up. He often compliments you on it, alongside with your outfits. That's one of the main reasons why he loves taking you out, because he adores seeing you get all pretty for him.

"The makeup really fits you,love. And that little shit you put on your lips,that glossy thingy,it makes your lips look so much more kissable"

Another thing that he really loves about you is your voice. God it sounds so sweet and nice,he definitely forces you to whisper or talk to him while he falls asleep.

You just sound so feminine and that attracts him. He never thought he'd be into that.

It was so calming to him because his voice is rough and sounds mean. He's loud and vulgar and you with your voice are exactly the opposite,that's what makes it so special to him.

Also because he is a fuckin dumbass and a rude bitch, people are never being kind to him and they also speak poorly to him and about him, he's not used to anyone talking so sweetly..so when you did,he immediately fell in love even harder.

He'd lay his head on your chest, getting comfortable and he would just tap your forearm to get your attention properly.

"Mmh..I wanna go to sleep..do your thing baby, please"

You giggle, knowing what he wants. You were confused on why he'd find this so pleasing but it's not like you mind.

He falls asleep the next second. He can't stay up late,never. Not when he hears your pretty voice.

[obsessedhoneycomb]

Teamwork - part two

George Russell x fem!reader, Max Verstappen x fem!reader

Summary: smutty part two of this

Warnings: 18+!, degradation, double penetration, oral (m receiving), p in v, p in a, explicit language, unprotected sex

Word count: 1.7k

A/N: Whooof... I don't know what to say, this idea came today in the morning and it made me feel many things. Sometimes I struggle with words or how to put things together, but I hope you’re gonna enjoy it anyway. Read warnings, because it's filthy and naughty. But you wanted it. ;)

Any feedback is welcomed. :)

---

“It’s too-“ your whines were silenced by Max holding a handful of your hair, pushing his thick cock down your throat. George sat on the bed, palming his hard dick, watching how you were on your knees, your nails digging into Max’s thighs as you tried your best not to gag on his length, which was really not easy task.

“Fuck, I don’t know how can you even think straight when she’s good at this…” Max moaned loudly, his brows furrowed from the intensity of your warm and wet mouth.

George just chuckled darkly, biting into his lip, finding this situation scandalous but arousing at the same time.

“Maybe we should use her more often to clear the bad blood between us.”

You were about to protest, moving your head away from Max’s hardness, but he was in no mood to let you go. 

“Just take it, baby, get used to being our little slut.” Max huffed, sticking himself as far as he could in your throat.

George moved closer to kneel behind you, pulling your skirt over your ass, spanking it, your throat forcing out the gagging sounds, one of your hands trying to pry him off.

He took your hand and placed it around Max’s cock, helping you to pump it while Max was moving your head at a torturous pace.

“Take care of him, nice and slow. Just like you treat me all the time.” George whispered into your hair, looking up at Max to see his shocked expression. Sight of you and George being on your knees for him shot a strange bolt of satisfaction through his body, making him smirk.

Your body shivered, mind filled with many things you wanted to scream out but at the same time you were so turned on, and you started to melt to what is just happening. And the fact that George just ripped your panties off of you wasn’t helping much. 

Pushing two fingers into your gushing pussy, George let out a loud groan. “Love, you’re so freaking wet, unbelievable.” 

Max was still fucking your throat, drool dripping down staining your white shirt. “Prepare her. She’s gonna take us both.” 

Your eyes went wide when you felt George’s thumb circling your butthole. Trying to wiggle yourself away, he grabbed your hips to steady you in place, his other hand still deep in your pussy.

“Don’t worry baby. I’ll make you open and relaxed.” George spit on your lower back only for the fluid to get down between your ass cheeks to lubricate his thumb. With a little pressure he started to probe your tight hole.

“She never let me use her ass before. I'm gonna enjoy this so much.” He shot a brief look of excitement at Max, then he averted his attention back to you, to stretch both of your holes.

Overwhelmed and breathless you started to pass out, Max noticing so and pulling your head gently from him to allow you to take a breath. A loud gasp is heard as your body falls against George’s chest, his thumb now deep inside your tight ass. 

“I c-can’t-“ you manage to whisper, your body trembling violently, eyes half lidded. 

Max took off all his clothes, now standing naked in front of you both, watching you. George moved his fingers slowly but firmly, forcing you to moan softly, leaving your cheeks flushed at the embarrassment of how much you love the position you’re in.

“You like it, don’t you? I knew you’d love this. You’re my filthy girl.” George whispered with a victorious smile, his hard dick pressing against your ass cheek, leaking with precum. 

“N-no-“ you tried to oppose but it was pointless since your body craved to be taken like that.

“Don’t lie. I can see it in your eyes.” Max rumbled under his breath, stroking his cock. You shot him a sharp glare, thinking that if it wasn’t for his talking mouth, they wouldn’t be doing this.

While you were distracted by him, George took advantage of it to replace his thumb with his length, pressing it against the tight entrance of your ass, your body reacting by moving away from him, eyes full of tears, a loud panicked squeak leaving your mouth. “George! No-“ 

“Shhhhh. Relax baby. Or I’ll hurt you and I don’t want to do that. Take it easy.” He pressed a kiss against your temple, one of his hands wandering under your drool stained shirt to grab your breast while his other was on your hip, keeping you in place.

You tried to relax, huffing, your brows furrowing, biting on your lip to leave it swollen, after he was finally fully in. It was like something switched inside your brain, you looked up at Max, eyes filled with filth and lust. 

“You just made her so fucking cock drunk, George.” Max chuckled, his fingers sliding along your jaw taking in your expression. 

“F-fuck, mate, she’s clenching like crazy around me. Come on, help me get her up, and you're gonna fill her pussy.” George grunted, trying to get up, while being deep in your ass when Max grabbed you under your thighs. They were now standing, you between them, George holding you up under your knees, your legs parted widely for Max to look at your leaking pussy. 

“I want to hear her say it.” he stared into your eyes with a wide smirk, while George was railing your ass like there was no tomorrow. 

“I’m not-” you were breathless, tears of pleasure smudging your makeup more than it already was, not able to put in a coherent sentence.

“Say ‘Please, Max, fuck me.’” his sinister expression flipped your stomach around.

George bit onto your shoulder and groaned into your ear. “Just say it, love. And let him finally fuck you, hm? He’s gonna do that anyway, you’re not gonna get out of it.” 

Shiver went down your spine, your face twisting in distaste but the feeling of George being so deep inside you, you simply missed another man in your other hole. 

With a frustrated sigh you moaned desperately. “Max, please. Just fuck me.” 

Max nodded, completely ready to fuck your brains out, he stepped closer, slapping his swollen cock against your clit, making you whimper. George behind you groaned at your clenches of pleasure, feeling it tight. 

Within the moment, you were filled by two men at once. While George held you up from behind, Max gripped your waist, grunting with each thrust. You were losing your mind, moaning and gasping for air, your lungs on fire same as your throat. 

“F-fuck… this is… fuuuck….” was all you could muster out of your mouth and it made the two of them laugh softly.

Max and George found the same pace, thrusting in you in unison, ripping through your insides. 

“How’s that baby girl, huh? Still wanna listen to your shit talking boyfriend?” the fourth time champion mocked you, his hand finding a way to rub that sensitive bundle of nerves of yours, which shot a bolt of pleasure through your body and you squealed loudly. 

“Are you for real right now Max?” George moaned breathlessly, his brows furrowed and he pounded into you more and more due to his annoyance.

“I am so real. You’re full of shit, Russell.” Max chuckled viciously, pulling in and out of you, always getting back harder and harder. 

Your mouth was wide open, eyes rolled to the back of your head as you were nearly limp against George.

“Like if you’re any better, Verstappen. Just stop with this nonsense. Focus on making her cum, she may enjoy this to the fullest, but taking her to her high, that's a real challenge.” George smirked, remembering his own hard way to find the right spot to make you come.

“Hm… Easy.” Max grunted, his cock growing even more harder at the amount of sloppines of your pussy. You suddenly came back to your senses, wrapping your hands around Max’s neck, staring deep into his eyes.

“Make me cum, champion.” 

And well, that was like some kind of drug and he obeyed, flicking your clit like crazy along with deep thrusts. You let out a desperate huff, frowning, not really happy with how he was doing it. Even if he was behind you, George could see your face and he chuckled.

“I bet I can make her come just by fucking her ass. You can’t do a shit, Max.” he picked up the pace, abusing your tight hole, the pleasure pooling in your belly. 

“Fuckfuckfuck, no, I'm gonna make her come!” Max nearly yelled in absolute madness, the grip on your waist endless, as he pushed into you with all his might and he stopped in his tracks, twitching inside you, to make you feel how huge he really was, while circling your clit in different angle. That made you nearly see stars, biting into your lip, avoiding his look.

“Look at me. Fucking look at me.” Max gritted through his teeth, and you turned your head to look at him. “You’re a fucking slut, taking us both, look how freaking soaked you are, you’re all over my cock, darling.” 

You whined, rolling your eyes. 

“That’s it, baby, let go, mhm, yes, yes. Just like that.” his devilish laugh rumbled through his chest, and as he flicked your clit again you were done.

Your shameful screams filled the hotel room, your drenched cunt squeezing Max tight the same as your ass did to George. It was so intense, that you all nearly lost it.

“Shit, dude. I’m gonna get there soon.” George groaned, his hips carving into yours. Max only huffed with a nod. “Let’s fill her to the brim together.” 

A few moans and huffs later, they managed to come together, filling you with their seed. 

Standing at the edge of the bed, watching you laying there on your side, their cum oozing from your holes, seeping to the silky sheets, while you were still breathing heavily, your gaze hazed from the overstimulation, George shot a look at his rival.

“Was it worth it?” 

“Absofuckinglutely.” 

While they chuckled, you lifted your gaze at them with an annoyed and croaked voice. “I’m gonna kill you both.”

“I guess that she needs to be reminded again that her words mean nothing.” Max smirked, his cock getting hard again.

George let out a soft laugh, looking at you, grabbing you by your ankle. “You’re right, let's shut that pretty mouth of hers.” 

———

Please don’t use my writings without my permission! Pictures found on Pinterest.

-

Tags: @chilling-seavey , @tammyfortis , @gracie23x

[merinarasauce]

Well, this is it, then.

It wasn't like Yaron hadn't... expected this. No-one on her father's side of the family made it to twenty revolutions. They just... wilted. To humans, they were remarkably long-lived, but any other member of her species would have a good thirty revolutions left.

She laid on the hot pavement as the humans shouted at her desperately, thinking to herself, what a fiasco this would be. Not only would her body have to be shipped to the nearest Jakta station for autopsy, they'd have to launch an investigation as per interstellar law, and then they'd have to transport her six hundred light years to her home planet so her family could bury her...

It was a shame. Really.

Yaron wasn't afraid to die. She'd had to confront the idea as a mere sapling, and she'd come to accept it. But still, knowing that the grieving process of her friends and family would have to be disrupted by lawkeepers, that broke her heart.

There was nothing to be done about it. She couldn't speak, couldn't move, so... she just let go.

~~~

Yaron came to with a raging headache, and she shot upright with an alarmed warble. It was so bright. There were tubes and wires running all over her body, and she felt a bandage taped over the left side of her torso.

A human in the corner wearing dull, stiff clothing yelped, dropping a tray full of tools. "Ambassador Yaron-!"

"What happened!?" she demanded, trying to stand. "Why am I not dead??"

"Please calm down-"

"Am I dead? Can't you tell me anyth-"

As soon as Yaron put her full weight on her feet, her joints gave out, and she crumpled.

Lying face-first on the ground, she cursed after a few seconds. "Is nothing simple with you humans?"

Yaron figured pretty quickly that this was a human hospital. It wasn't too far off from those built by her kind- clean, sterile, well-lit. It was much louder, that was certain. And cold.

The humans settled her back into the bed rather quickly, and as they ran some tests, someone in a white coat walked in and sat next to her. She had a round face and dark eyes, her hair pulled back neatly.

"Ambassador Yaron? I'm Dr. Nadia Mundell. I'd like to inform you about the surgery you received."

She extended a hand, which Yaron ignored, feeling sick. "Surgery? You mean- you cut me open?"

Dr. Mundell seemed a bit nervous at that. "Well- uh- it's not quite that simple. I assure you, it was a lifesaving procedure, and we took all possible measures to prevent infection."

Yaron groaned, lacing her fingers through the dense leaves on the nape of her neck. "Of course. Out of anyone, I had to be the unlucky machtarak who collapsed on the human homeworld...!"

The doctor raised a placating hand. "Let me explain what happened and what we did, alright?"

She was met with a huff and a grumbled "Fine."

Dr. Mundell reached over and took a clipboard from a nearby table, flipping through it. "We found out the reason for your collapse was an arrhythmia in your vascular heart. We performed an ultrasound scan- it's just reflected sound waves, completely harmless- and discovered a hard burl nearly blocking your aortic artery."

Yaron watched as the doctor showed her a black-and-white image, and though she didn't know much about anatomy, she could tell the bright white thing circled in red probably wasn't normal.

"It's likely your heart was working much harder than normal to maintain proper blood flow. And, thanks to your venous system, you likely didn't experience many symptoms beyond some mild pain now and again. Does that sound right?"

The ambassador just stared, dumbfounded. "...yeah, I- I guess so..."

"From what I can tell, you were probably born with a thin arterial wall, and micro-tears caused the burl to form. I know the Galactic Council finds it... uh, what did they say... barbaric. But in order to save your life, we had to remove it. Thankfully, it was a success. We'll have to keep an eye on you for a few days. I'd prefer if you kept activity levels fairly low while your artery heals and your heart recovers."

Yaron could barely process all this. Dr. Mundell spoke about it like it was normal. Like it was no big deal. Like causing harm to heal wasn't akin to the witchcraft of a thousand revolutions past. Had she not felt their blades simply because she was unconscious? Or was there more human insanity that she wasn't privy to? How, after opening their eyes to a universe of technology beyond their wildest imaginations, could the humans have known that their methods could still save lives?

All that came out of her mouth was a hoarse "Okay."

Despite medicine reaching its near pinnacle form, humanity still prefers to practice surgery. It is seen as barbaric, invasive even by other alien civilizations. One day, an alien diplomat collapses on human soil and wakes up in a bed with small stitches on their body.

[anniebeckcalla]

you're always there...in my sleep

resting with the dreamies

(bf! dream x reader) ◦ ₊ wc: 858 ◦ ₊ cw: fluff, light skinship. lowercase on purpose! ◦ ₊ navigation

ღ calla's note: hope you enjoy this !! thank you so much for your support !!

mark

the room was warm, comfy, and filled with a soft illumination from the night lamp that was kept on through the night at your request. it obviously worked wonders, as you were asleep now, your face in a peaceful smile as your breath came out in small snores. mark lay next to you, but he wasn't in slumber. instead, he watched your eyelashes flutter as you steeped further into limbo. gently, he reached out his hand and used his finger to outline your eyelids, nose, and lips, deliberately taking his time to appreciate every scar and mole. at last, he cupped your face, his thumb caressing your cheek. “i’m so glad that i get to call you mine, y/n,” he whispered.

jeno

“still can't sleep?” jeno rubbed his eyes, hair tousled from being under the duvets. you shrugged, tears in your eyes. “it's no use. i've counted sheep, rubbed behind my ears, and sprayed lavender on the pillows. i’ll never get a good night's rest!” jeno sat up, throwing back the duvet. “let's go on a walk.” you stared at him, not sure whether to laugh or continue crying. “a walk? are you just trying to be funny?” jeno crossed over to your side of the bed, and held out his hand. “the night air will do you good, i promise. it's full moon tonight as well, don't you want to enjoy that together?” sighing, you took jeno's hand. “i'll admit that you haven't had a bad idea yet.”

calla's note: I feel like this is slightly ooc because jeno does NOT like going out :( anyway i hope that segment was nice

chenle

“see the way that draymond dodged the opponent?” chenle laughed as he reached for more popcorn from the bucket that you two were sharing. chenle had managed to get you to watch an nba match with him instead of a film that friday night, but instead of enjoying the match, all you two had done was laugh at the players' every move. chenle frowned when you didn't respond. “y/n?” he turned his head from the television to see you fast asleep, head lolled on his shoulder, your blanket wrapped around your shoulders. “oh, y/n,” he laughed softly. “let's get you to bed.” gently, as not to wake you, he lifted you in a blankety heap and carried you to your room.

renjun

your heart thudded loudly in your chest, your eyes wide in the pitch black. your limbs flailed, sending the duvet to the floor. “renjun,” you whispered. “renjun, where are you?” you reached out for him, but all that met you was the expanse of the mattress. stretching out for what felt like miles. Just then, the bedroom door opened and the room was flooded with light as renjun shuffled in with his phone torch. “ i was just using the toilet,” he began, but stopped when he saw your face. “why do you look so terrified?” he said. “i was scared that you'd just disappeared,” you muttered as renjun pulled the duvet back over the two of you. “you say funny things sometimes,” he chuckled as he pulled you close. “I wasn’t joking,” you mumbled, your eyes closing as you nestled in the crook of his neck.

haechan

it was a light spring afternoon, the sunshine streaming in through an open window. you stroked haechan's chestnut hair as he slept, his head on your chest, body nestled comfortably between your legs. there was a drama on the television that you'd been meaning to start a while ago, but you were distracted by haechan's soft snores and sweet-smelling hair. you bent down and pressed a kiss to the top of his head, and he stirred slightly, nestling his head down further into you.

jisung

“...but ron gasped, ‘get away from me, werewolf!’” jisung had one arm wrapped around your shoulders, the other holding the book. “your turn to read, love.” you shook your head, tightening your arms around his waist. “keep reading. it's nice.” “jisung sighed. “we're taking turns, y/n. it's not fair that i have to do all the reading before bedtime.” you frowned. “your voice is the only one that gets me to sleep at night, though! wouldn't you just do me that favour?” jisung sighed. “fine. i'm only doing this for tonight, though, okay?” “thank you, dearest,” you smiled. jisung rolled his eyes in response, but hugged you a little tighter as he resumed the story.

jaemin

the doorbell rang, cutting through the silent peace of the apartment. you jolted from your sleep, rolling over to compose yourself. as you rubbed your eyes, jaemin's voice came from beside you. “what was that?” he muttered, his eyes closed. “someone's at the door, you replied, sitting up. “were we expecting any visitors?” jaemin opened his eyes slightly. “no,” you shrugged. “then there's no reason to get up,” jaemin replied. “just ignore them. he took your arm and pulled you towards him, but then the doorbell sounded again. “i have to get it,” you said. “no you don't,” jaemin said. “just stay here. you know you want to.” you slid back under the covers, giggling when jaemin dipped his head to press his lips to your neck.

♡

comments and reblogs greatly appreciated !! (ФωФ)

masterlist

taglist: @cigsaftersuh @jenoleeaesthetic @pl4netx1a @jeonghansshitester @herjaemin @chenlezip

click!

[cloudcountry]

full moon — being in love. being married. being together forever.

with ritsu shinjo.

Husband, husband, husband.

It was like you couldn’t stop saying it. The single word filled you with more joy than you ever thought possible. To be so loved by someone that they’d want to spend the rest of their life with you was something you believed to be far out of your reach.

But it came to you in the form of Ritsu Shinjo.

He’d looked so dashing in his suit, standing at the altar with his rigid posture. You could see his chest heaving as he watched you walk down the aisle, his eyes widening as he took you in. Surely, it must be getting to him too. Surely, he could feel how the rest of the world was melting away, and how hard it was to take things slow instead of just running into his arms and kissing him silly. Imagine tripping! What a nightmare that would be.

Husband, husband, husband!

I do.

I do.

“I love you,” you say, cupping his cheeks.

Ritsu looks at you, and you have the urge to kiss him all over again. The first dance had been magical, the reception even more so. You could still feel the warmth of his arms around your waist, guiding you through the first steps as he always did. You took the backseat, staring into his eyes as he spun and turned and swayed with you. He looked so beautiful, he always did.

“I love you too,” he says softly, sweeping you up into his arms, gathering every piece of you that has ever broken off and piecing them back together.

Safe, he felt so safe. It felt so good to be loved by him, and to love him in return.

“You’re my husband,” you laugh breathlessly, squeezing him back, “We’re married. I’m yours. I can’t believe it.”

“I can,” he says, so matter of fact it makes you swoon, “Andas per our partnership, we have been each other’s for a long time now.”

“Ritsu, you have no idea how charming you are,” you groan, letting your head fall onto his shoulder.

His arms go rigid and you know you’ve embarrassed him, so you tilt your head to peak up at his face. It’s dusted with the same pretty pink you saw at the altar, after the cake had been cut, and all throughout your friends and family congratulations. You’d fed each other little bits of cake and he’d blushed through that, too, a beautiful picture of the perfect husband.

“I...ahem, I’m flattered,” he stumbles, still so nervous even with the ring on his finger.

Even with the ring on your finger that you’d accepted from him.

“I can’t wait to go grocery shopping with you,” you murmur, trailing your hand over his cheek, “And wake up next to you. And paint the walls of our house together.”

He swallows and holds you tighter.

“That sounds nice, doesn’t it?” you ask.

“It sounds lovely,” he responds immediately, eyes flickering down at where you rest on his shoulder, “If...you would make a special exception, I...”

“Ritsu, darling, you are my husband. You’re the most special exception there is,” you whisper, words soaked in pure affection.

“Right,” he swallows again, thumbs absentmindedly rubbing circles on your waist, “Well, if I may...”

You wait for him to gather himself as his hands peel themselves from your waist and rest on your cheeks. He tilts your head to face him, eyes dragging over your features.

He sighs.

“I want to do this right.” he murmurs, “And if you’ll have me, I’d appreciate your partnership on this endeavor.”

“Ritsu, I married you. I’m your partner for life,” you beam, and at that, he leans in to kiss you.

[starconstruction]

Well, I wanted to post a few random pictures and ask for your thoughts on any of them, but I can’t add them in anon mode? App is no fun. Still like the multithousand-word posts for them! Loona has become a bore with no posts anywhere👎

heya again, its because photos censor if u dont follow the tumblr.

I didnt really know what you wanted and i didnt have thoughts for every image, but i did have for some!

been a huge fan of these non fic asks if anyone has any other ideas

A string of thoughts

Your co-worker Choerry was an absolute delinquent, you had no idea how she even kept this job. Frequently late and not following any ounce of dress code, especially today. Her entire stomach visible to the world, You wouldn't say that you didn't like Choerry. That would be unjust, especially considering what you two get up to at the office.

You and Choerry were on opposite ends of the spectrum, you'd finish all your work instantly and she wouldn't finish it at all. Instead finding anyone in order to do it for her, which typically ended up being you. There was no reason to complain, as she always made it worth it.

Take right now, in the private bathroom you had access to, her body laid naked as she blew you. She knew how to drive you wild, glasses fake as they held to her head. Sinful noises coming from her mouth as she gagged on your length, always taking your load like she would die without it.

"Don't I deserve a little bit more? I mean, it was a big project.." You asked, Choerry smiled "You are right, take me home!" and that you did, her arms laid encased in string, legs wide as you pleasured yourself with her body until the sun came up.

A very horrible day for both of you followed with no sleep.

You were going around the forest, exploring the verdant scenery as you went on your daily walk. You've ran into some oddities before, like the time you saw a can of sprite inside a branch. But nothing quite compared to what you were about to see.

A large burst of light came out from in between the trees, you ran over and there was a strange woman. Wearing a crop-top and a pair of wings, her body was simply divine. Her outfit hung to her body as she looked at you like a deer in headlights. "Erm... Hello. You weren't really supposed to see me like this." The strange woman said "But i guess you can be my test subject!" Her body appeared right besides you.

Turns out being her test-subject meant a lot of things, going on long walks to the beach. Climbing random mountains, people watching and trying all kinds of foods. She took notes on some celestial scroll, observing humanity for whoever sent her. Your time with her was the most enjoyable time you've had in years, doing things you'd never dream of.

You learned her name was Choerry, or atleast what she told you. You had a feeling she wasn't entirely honest with you.

Turns out however, whoever sent Choerry down to earth was interested in learning everything. You were suddenly happy to be her scapegoat as her hand stroked your cock up and down, making out with your dripping tip. She looked at you with doe eyes, her wings were retractable but in every night of intimacy she had them on full display. After a particularly soft kiss you painted her lips white with semen, adding even more paleness to her already pale complexion.

That was the first thing, but by no means the last. The next night Choerry was bent over the kitchen, graciously accepting your tongue as you massaged her folds with it. She tasted strongly of sweet vanilla, her supernatural body accepted every humble offering you gave it.

Choerry felt insane as your tip penetrated her asshole, near inescapable as you fucked her. Her moans a heavenly choir that filled the room, complemented by the soft slapping of skin. You always went soft on her, she felt too good to be rough with.

Eventually, after a few passion filled months you had completed her objective. She flew back up into the sky, you expected to never see her again. However that wasn't the case, Choerry would abduct you from your boring mundane life whenever she desired more intimacy.

cw: feet worship, ass eating

Being an idol is stressful work, hours of practices and hundred of schedules to attend to. All while having to do it with a smile on their face.

Jungeun and Choerry found a solution to that, you.

You three met at a fan-sign, they were eying up anyone they thought could be a good choice for some good old fashion stress-relief. You arent entirely sure what their criteria was, but when their number appeared in your album. You called frantically.

You three met up for the first time a few weeks later, Jungeun welcoming you in through the back door of the hidden door they rented.

They treated you roughly, pulling at your hair when they took turns grinding your tongue against their backdoor. Melting their stress away as you ate their ass. They alternated between riding your face and riding your cock, leaving you struggling for breath as they emptied you dry.

Anytime they were in the area they would seek you out, the most recent time came directly after a long public outing. Responding to press and fans, you were her favourite fan. Hands pulling off their heels as you kissed their feet, licking them clean as you soothed their sore muscles which walked too long.

They rewarded you the same way they always did, riding you till you launched into orbit.

[nanenna]

Playing with the timeline a little, and costumes, and everything really. So... you know... #canon divergence

---

Robin, the Robin of Batman and Robin fame, was lounging on a pile of pillows and blankets that Danny’s pretty sure were mostly stolen from other rooms in the keep, he recognizes the fur blanket as something Frostbite had gifted him specifically. No, not important. “Why is Robin here?” Danny looked over at the skeletons that were gathered around, one holding a plate with food on it.

Where did they get normal human food? Was that one of his sacrifices? Danny wanted to eat that!

No wait, not important. The skeletons were all staring at him with wide sockets, he could practically hear their bones rattling.

Robin stood up from his plush nest. “Are you… the ghost king’s secretary?” he asked skeptically.

Danny’s lips thinned, probably best to just stick with the truth for now. “No.” He turned back to the skeletons, “Okay, no one’s in trouble, you guys did the best you could. But new rule, from now on any live sacrifices need to be reported to me immediately.”

The skeletons all nodded and then gathered around Danny so he could reach up and pat them all on the head, they rattled their bones in happiness. Danny grabbed the plate of food, a steak with a loaded baked potato and roasted veggies for sides of all things, and carried it over to his desk. “Oh nice, someone really wants to get on my good side.” He set the plate on the desk’s corner and started sorting through the notes to find the request attached to it.

Robin hesitantly followed Danny to his desk. “Are you the ghost king?”

Danny heaved a sigh, “Unfortunately. I tried to get out of it, but it was me or Plasmius and the last thing anyone needs is to give him any power at all.” Danny frowned at the note that went with the steak dinner. “Ugh, gross, no.” He pulled out his stationary and quickly wrote “No.” on a sticky note and sent it on its way.

“Who… nevermind, not what I’m here for.”

“Right,” Danny agreed, he really didn’t want to explain the intricacies (or lack thereof) of Realms politics to Robin. “Where’s the note that came from whoever sacrificed you?” Danny hadn’t found it yet in the pile on his desk, which was weird.

“Oh uh… that was me.”

Danny looked up at Robin, who was staring Danny dead in the eyes. “What?”

“I sacrificed myself.”

Danny could not possibly have heard that right, that made no sense! “What????”

“Well I wasn’t going to go sacrifice some innocent person just to get your attention,” Robin snapped before softening his voice and adding on, “your majesty.”

It seemed Danny had heard right. But still: what?! “Who would… why! Do you have any idea?! Did you even know who I am?!”

“Pariah Dark, tyrant-”

Danny shoved a gloved hand into Robin’s face, “No, ew. I am not Pariah Dark, and you’re very lucky he’s not the king anymore. Ancients!” He left his hand in Robin’s face as he took a moment to try to gather his thoughts into something a bit more coherent. “Okay, let’s just… start from the beginning I guess. Why did you sacrifice yourself to the ghost king?”

Robin shoved Danny’s hand out of his face, “Batman was killed by Darkseid-”

“What?! No way!” Danny grabbed Robin’s hand and started dragging him out of the room. “That whole thing was a few months ago now, right? Not long after I had to go through that stupid coronation and was still getting used to things.”

“I don’t know when you were coronated.”

“Not important, the important thing is I’m pretty sure the whole world would know if Batman died. Or least everyone would be gossiping about him going missing.”

“Oh, so news of the battle hasn’t gotten out of Gotham.”

“What battle?”

“Not important,” Robin said dismissively with a wave of his free hand.

And well, they had arrived at the archives, so Danny shifted his focus to navigating the many tall shelves laid out in some kind of book labyrinth with a sorting system that only made sense to the lunatic that designed it. Or maybe it made sense in their native language, it certainly wasn’t alphabetical in English. He took Robin down a corridor that was actually a dead end, a huge book on a pedestal enshrined in its own little section. “Alright, this is the ledger of the dead.” Danny let go of Robin’s hand and started flipping through it.

“Oh,” was all Robin said, staring down at it in… some kind of emotion. It was hard to tell with most of his upper face hidden by a mask.

“Batman… Batman… Batman… yup, not here. See? Batman’s not dead.”

“First of all, he’d probably be under his real name. Second of all, I already knew that. If you’d let me finish explaining…”

Danny sighed, “Alright, explain then.”

“Everyone else believes Batman’s dead, but I know he isn’t. I found evidence he’s lost in time and I need help getting him out before something awful happens.”

“Sorry, not my domain.”

“What?”

“Not my domain, I’m the ghost king, not the time king.” Danny crossed his arms and raised a brow at Robin.

“But the book said you have access to every era and every dimension.”

“More accurately the Realms as a whole does, but I’m not in charge of the Realms, I’m in charge of the ghosts. It’s all political stuff, making laws, collecting taxes, stopping the various groups from going to war against each other, that sort of thing.”

“Taxes?”

“Only two guarantees, death and taxes. Or however that saying goes.” Danny wasn’t sure with his blank expression, but Danny’s pretty sure that one broke Robin’s brain a little. Good, payback and all that. “So sorry about going through all this for nothing, but I’m sure there’s some kind of time god or something you can pray to for help.”

“When Batman stops bouncing around time and gets back to now the bomb Darkseid stuck in his is going to go off and destroy the whole world.”

Danny froze, staring at Robin with wide eyes. “Shit.”

Robin nodded solemnly, “Shit.”

“Okay, alright, I can fix this.” Danny ran a hand through his hair and tried not to start giggling hysterically. “Good news, I know who to go to for help.” Danny grabbed Robin’s hand and started dragging him again, Robin seemingly happy to go along.

DPxDC Prompt #17

There is a room Danny's Keep he set up shortly after defeating Pariah Dark. It became necessary when the broader magical community realized Pariah had be defeated and therefore a new King took his throne. Danny found himself briefly bombarded with waves of attempted summonings.

Which, the summonings themselves, wouldn't have been so bad. Turns out people can't just drag the King of Ghosts to themselves on a whim. Danny has to actively accept a summoning to get pulled to it. And if he just decides "No," the pull and whispers go away. No problem there.

No, the problem is the offerings. And sacrifices. The things that people put in the circle as payment for even attempting to summon him. Like having to put a quarter in the payphone just to listen to it ring and ring and ring as the person on the other end of the call doesn't pick up. Since the summoning magic regarded these things as belonging to Danny even if he rejected the summons, they usually ended up just materializing in front of him if he didn't go to them.

Which, okay. It was funny that time he got to end a fight with Vlad very fast when a whole gold bar materialized and dropped on his head. And the food was nice sometimes when it was late and everywhere was closed and his parents had left samples in the fridge to contaminate everything into animation again. But the goat head dropping from the ceiling onto his desk during on of Lancer's English tests was not appreciated. Even if it did get the test rescheduled and the whole school shut down for a few days to investigate the "potentially satanic activity."

So, yeah, it was a bit of a problem. Fortunately, it was a problem with a relatively simple solution. Danny set up an inbox. With a bit of help from Tucker and Pandora, and a couple tips from Clockwork; all summoning offerings and sacrifices would now go straight to the dedicated room in the Keep.

And! As a special touch, the summoners would also get a chipper, automated voice saying, "The Ghost King you are trying to summon has more important things to do than answer you right now. Please leave a message in the circle with your name, date, location, contact information, and reason for summoning. The Ghost King will get back to you at his earliest convenience." Sam's stupid fancy girl gala voice had been perfect for that little message.

It was the perfect solution. Danny no longer had to deal with randomly materializing offerings putting his secret identity at risk. Pariah's skeletons, who had been antsy for something to do now that they were no longer bent under the thumb of a cruel tyrant, were instructed to take care of all the offerings; making sure everything was always cleaned up and put away. And all Danny had to do was stop by periodically to check in and "Officially respond" -ie, write a fuck off note- to the summoning messages (Clockwork's insistence).

A perfect solution. Up until Danny checked in one day to find the skellies pampering a whole ass boy. No. Not just any boy. Danny recognizes that costume.

"Why is Robin here?"

[v4mpire45]

The Things He Doesn't Know — K. Bakugo

This is part 8 of the series, so other parts will be on the m.list.

☞ Link: click here.

Pairing: Katsuki Bakugo x Jealous female reader

Synopsis: When you realize you're in love with your childhood best friend, but force you're feeling's down for the sake of your friendship.

Author's note: I'm so sorry this took so long to get out, I needed time to think about ideas. And I'm working on other works at the moment. This is also a bit short, but only because the next part will be juciy.

Things have been good, or as good as they can be.

You and Bakugo have kept your promise to each other. The two of you have been spending more time together, slipping back into the familiar rhythm of your friendship.

And honestly? It feels like you've gotten your best friend back.

You've missed this. A lot more than you'd like to admit.

Maybe it was stupid, holding onto something like this so tightly. But Bakugo had been there for you through everything. Before the war, before all the chaos. When you met, you butted heads just as much as you got along, but somehow, through all the fights and challenges, he became your person.

The one who understood you without needing to say much at all.

And after everything, after the war, after all the distance that formed between you, getting him back felt like getting a part of yourself back.

Not that you'd ever tell him that.

But there's a shift you can’t quite put into words. Maybe it’s just in your head, maybe it’s nothing at all, maybe it's been here all along and you’ve been ignoring it, but when you’re with him, there’s this... awareness.

This weight in your chest tightens when he’s close loosens when he laughs, and straight-up betrays you when he does something as simple as calling you by your first name.

But lately, Kimiko's been watching. Not just Bakugo, you. And you don’t like what’s behind those eyes.

Today, training drills had been assigned. Nothing new, just the usual combat sparring to sharpen reflexes and adapt to different fighting styles.

You were heading toward Mina, already expecting to pair up with her, when a familiar voice grunted behind you.

"You. Me. Partners."

You turned, blinking as Bakugo stood there, arms crossed, already walking off like your answer was obvious.

"Oh. Okay...!"  You tried to sound casual, but your voice had a little too much enthusiasm to pass as apathetic.

Before the war, you and Bakugo were almost always partners for these kinds of things. Sure, sometimes he’d go with Kirishima, and you’d switch it up with Mina or Jirou, but you were a duo.

Then the war happened.

And after that, Kimiko came along, sliding into the space beside him like it was hers to claim. You stopped partnering with Bakugo. Maybe you didn’t even realize how much you missed it until now.

Out of the corner of your eye, you caught Kimiko’s gaze, her expression unreadable. She had been heading toward Bakugo, too, but he hadn’t even looked her way. Instead, he had gone straight to you.

Not your fault. He made his choice.

Still, you felt her eyes on you like a weight.

The spar was intense.

Bakugo never held back. Not with you. Not with anyone. But today, it felt different. More focused. Like he was pushing you, not just physically, but daring you to keep up. And you did.

Sweat beaded on your forehead as you dodged another one of his attacks, skidding back just in time to avoid the explosive blast.

You shot forward, aiming a kick toward his side, but he blocked, catching your ankle with a firm grip before shoving you back.

"Too slow,"  he taunted, a smirk pulling at his lips.

"You’re just fast," you shot back, adjusting your stance.

"Damn right I am," he said, rolling his shoulders before lunging again.

The tension was there, thick, buzzing. Maybe it was just your own head making it worse, but every time he moved closer, every time his eyes locked onto yours with that sharp intensity, your breath caught for half a second too long.

And every time you caught a glimpse of Kimiko watching. You waved at her when Bakugo wasn’t looking. She only narrowed her eyes and turned back to her own partner.

The match ended when Bakugo finally got the upper hand, knocking you onto your back with a hard sweep of his leg. He loomed over you, hands on his hips, panting slightly.

"You finally tired yet, dumbass?" he muttered.

"Not even close," you lied through your teeth, even as you struggled to catch your breath.

His smirk widened, but he didn’t press it. Instead, he just held out a hand, which you grabbed without hesitation. His grip was firm, warm, steady.

And maybe you held on half a second longer than necessary.

After training, everyone had packed up, heading back to the locker rooms. You took your time, changing into your uniform, running a towel over your damp hair before slinging your bag over your shoulder. As you stepped out of the girls’ locker room, a voice called out behind you.

"Hey, can I talk to you for a sec?"

You turned to see Kimiko, standing a few feet away, hands on her hips, her expression unreadable.

"Oh, um... sure?"

She smiled, but there was something off about it. Before you could react, she grabbed your wrist and pulled you aside, leading you into a quieter corner of the hallway.

Then, she let go. Crossed her arms. Tilted her head. And that fake little smile faded.

"So," she said, voice deceptively light. "What’s going on with you and Bakugo, hmm? Do you like him or something?"

Your throat went dry. "What? No, I—" You let out an awkward laugh. "That’s— what are you even talking about?"

Kimiko huffed, unimpressed. "Hmph. Yeah, sure."

For a second, she just stared at you, then sighed. "Y’know, I’ve been meaning to ask since that party. The one where you told me to ‘hop off Bakugo’s balls.’" She raised an eyebrow. "Kinda funny, isn’t it? Considering you’re the one acting all territorial now."

Your stomach dropped. "I—I didn’t mean—"

"Save it," she cut you off with a wave of her hand. "You already apologized once, remember? I don’t need you groveling again."

You hesitated. "Then why bring it up?"

Her expression shifted, something unreadable behind her eyes. She glanced away for a moment before exhaling sharply.

"Because," she said slowly, "I think you and I both know you’re full of shit."

And with that, she turned on her heel and walked off, leaving you standing there.

You didn't know what was worse, the fact that she called you out so easily.

Or the fact she might be right.

© 2025 v4mpire45 — All rights reserved. Please don't post my work as your own on any other sites.

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[tuesdaykiss]

bad idea, right?

rafe cameron one shot, inspired by ‘bad idea, right?’ by olivia rodrigo.

warnings: swearing, mentions/implied sex

a/n: i don’t know if i love or hate this, i fear i tried to reference the song too much…

you were currently sat on the bathroom counter; legs crossed and crammed into the sink, makeup sporadically placed around you and mouth slightly open as you applied your mascara inches away from the mirror.

“oh, you’re here!” you smiled, as sarah appeared in the reflection behind you. attempting to free yourself from the confines of the sink quickly, to hug your best friend, you almost toppled over.

“careful there, sunshine,” the blonde came straight to your support, laughing in the process, “drunk already?”

“i wish,” you sighed, a serious edge to your tone as you began adjusting your position on the counter to face sarah.

she immediately noticed the way your face faltered and let out a knowing sigh, “don’t even think about him, he doesn’t deserve the time of day.”

“i know, i know,” you brushed her off, turning to apply your lip gloss. she was right, rafe hadn’t even attempted to contact you since ending things, a couple of months ago. and yet, you couldn’t shake him from your thoughts.

sweat radiated from your skin — a mixture of yours and those around you. the room was hot and clammy, but you were just too drunk to care; hair plastered to your forehead from the heat.

rihanna, beyoncé and lady gaga songs took over the speaker; reigniting your inner ‘it’ girl persona. the music was so loud you couldn’t even hear your thoughts as you and sarah sang into each other’s faces; an extravagant performance from both sides, just absorbing one another’s positive energy.

“shots?” sarah interrupted, despite you both being completely wasted. before you could respond, she had disappeared into the sea of people behind her.

buzz. buzz.

a faint vibration shot through your leg, from your jean pocket, though it left you completely unfazed. continuing to dance, you felt the sensation again…

buzz. buzz.

your head scanned the surrounding people, completely oblivious to the cause of the buzzing. a clear representation of your drunken state.

buzz. buzz.

a string of laughter escaped your lips as you internally noted your foolishness, pulling your phone from your back pocket. with the phone held close to your face, to aid your reading of the caller, your smile wavered.

there, in bold letters, was the one name you had not expected to see tonight. the one name you had used all of your willpower to completely forget for the time being.

rafe cameron — or, as he is still saved in your phone, ‘rafey’.

what the fuck.

you shouldn’t answer him, you were well aware of that. your friends’ opinions audible in your mind as you battled the urge to pick up. what’s the worst that can happen?

checking that sarah hadn’t returned, you excused yourself from the dance floor: needing a quieter place, a place no one could stop you from what you were about to do.

“hello?” you hesitated, entering the disabled toilet down the hall. you fumbled with the lock, ensuring you wouldn’t be disturbed.

“hey baby.”

“why are you calling?” a hint of worry laced your voice, despite your attempts to hide it.

“jus’ missing you is all.”

you couldn’t prevent the smile that spread across your face; pink dusting your cheeks.

“where you at?”

“party,” you simply said, “with sar.”

“she know you talking to me?”

“no.”

“good girl.”

your phone pinged. pulling it away from your ear, you were surprised to be faced with a text from rafe — he was literally on the phone to you, why text you?

“sent you my new address, get here as quick as you can yeah?”

you should have denied his offer — ended the phone right there. but you didn’t.

in fact, you were unlocking the restroom door and calling yourself an uber within seconds. you took no time to notify sarah of your departure: it’s a bad idea, right?

it wasn’t long before you were standing outside the address rafe had sent. you knew you should stop�� but you couldn’t.

“i only see him as a friend,” you breathed to yourself, almost as a reminder — like you were trying to use the power of affirmations… anything… to justify your presence here.

as your knuckles collided with the wood of the door, there was no going back.

rafe answered the door in no time, his signature smirk plastered on his face when his eyes met yours. when you look at him, it’s hard to tell yourself you’re still done… god. tousled hair, slightly pink cheeks and piercing eyes; you instantly felt those months of no contact wash away.

“biggest lie i ever said,” you thought, as you followed rafe up to his room. he had this power over you, an undeniable chemistry that forced you to gravitate towards him… every single time.

the night was a blur of passion, reminiscence and rebellion. you woke up; tangled in the linen sheets of rafe’s bed, your head pressed softly on his chest as you listened to the rhythmic beat of his heart. it all felt familar… right.

sarah had sent you a flood of messages, worrying of your whereabouts. you apologised, letting her know that you fallen asleep… but you never said where, or in who’s sheets.

“morning princess,” rafe mumbled, his voice low as his fingers danced along the skin of your back.

“morning,” you moved to look at him, kissing his nose.

“good night, yeah?” he chuckled to himself, “you sleep well?”

you internally cursed yourself, at the reminder of last night’s events. how would you explain this to sarah? just tripped and fell into his bed.

rafe pulled you from your thoughts, brushing your hair from your face.

fuck it, it’s fine… that was a problem for another day: can’t two people reconnect?

[beekeeperspicnic]

This is a really interesting point, and I genuinely don't know? There is a huge history of derivative works or works inspired by for Sherlock Holmes of course, and I can't really say whether this little burst of indie-creator led projects is something unique or not.

To address some of the ideas raised in this with regards to myself personally -

I wasn't particularly a BBC Sherlock fan (I was 18 when it first came out, I saw the first few seasons when they aired fairly casually, I didn't participate in the fandom) so on a personal level it's not really part of my identity as a Sherlock Holmes fan, but perhaps its shadow isn't looming as much as it would have done if I were making this game 10 years ago which makes me feel more comfortable playing in this particular sandpit.

I never directly thought "aha, the copyright on the last few Sherlock Holmes stories is running out in the US, I shall make a game!"but in 2022 was inspired by the first run of Dracula Daily to run my own email book club starting in 2023 (Letters from Watson), and I chose Sherlock Holmes partially because of the copyright thing, and partially because I'd loved those stories as a young tween/teenager and wanted to return to them. This made me reread the stories so I could break them up into suitable chunks and schedule them, and THAT got me making the game.

When that second run of Dracula Daily REALLY took off, LfW got to ride its coat tails a little bit. I would be delighted to think that any of the other projects you mention were inspired by it even partially, but I have a feeling that most of them predate it too.

Genuine question here !

I'm seeing a bunch of recent content creators and artists making new adaptations or media inspired by Sherlock Holmes.

There's Fawx and Stallion ( @224bbaker ) , Watson's Sketchbook by @contact-guy, Fogtown (@fogtown-sleuth-society), The Beekeeper's Picnic game (@beekeeperspicnic) and the web-series I am currently working on : @thebakerstreetproject

(Probably others too that I am forgetting about !)

I was wondering, has it always been like that ? Or has something triggered some form of resurgence of the "old-as-time" Sherlock Holmes fandom ?

Does it have to do with a story that has -rather obviously- been queer for ages but that people finally feel free exploring ?

Or is it just because everything hit public domain...?

What do you think ?