#this old man is a goddamn problem

[lastweeksshirttonight]

I found a thing that I'm really excited to share and write in depth about later this week, but for now, please take this humble homemade gif of my man stealing my heart for the 9 billionth time

(2008)

[paintedcrows]

Totally Normal Trigonometry Things

[glockmonkey]

I will never shut up about this country hick motherfucker. dick faulkner drives a stick shift and has never recycled a day in his fucking life!!!!

[marsreds]

demons in sousou no frieren:

we do not understand human emotions, we do not feel them, to us it's all a game and even when we try it will inevitably lead to death, destruction and human suffering

also demons in sousou no frieren:

[blujayonthewing]

the worst thing about putting together OC playlists is when the song is perfect in theory but you cannot for the life of you find a rendition with the right vibe

[cesium-sheep]

no yeah pretty sure it's a trauma response thing.

the whole year has been so very very very bad, so as the end gets nearer I get counterintuitively more anxious, both because I become more afraid something else will come along to kick me back into the pit and because I have a little more room to breathe instead of just having to grit my teeth and carry on. (this is pretty normal in the context of prolonged stress and long-term traumatic situations (as opposed to singular Events))

[drop-dead-dropout]

oh my god no shut up that is not the point. this is about who should be allowed to RUN THE ENTIRE GODDAMN FUCKING COUNTRY not that we should, like— murder old people?? what do you think the word "eugenics" means?????

[goose-books]

The Ghost of Christmas Past shows up and you’re like, “Ohhhhh for fuck’s sake,” but you’re in your childhood bedroom so it’s kind of on you. The ghost seems offended. She crosses her arms. She looks like you used to, with the pigtails.

“No way,” you say. “Don’t start.”

“I am the—”

“The Ghost of Christmas Past, I know, I know.” Because she looks like you, and it’s Christmas Eve, so what else. Your parents used to read you the story every year. Even when you were old enough to read on your own, it was better in your dad’s voice.

“You came home for your parents,” the ghost says, solemn. “It’s time to tell them.”

“No, like, ‘when you’re ready’?”

“You are ready,” she says, “or you wouldn’t have come back.”

Which is so stupid, because you weren’t on the moon, you were at college, and it’s only been two months of shots, you don’t even have a mustache. “Fucking leave me alone,” you say, so she does the ghost thing and takes you to a ten-years-ago Christmas. The living room. Your parents. Your fledgling self on the carpet with your stocking, the one you can’t look at anymore because when you were a baby your parents patiently hand-stitched the fucking name.

“Maybe they’ll make you a new one,” says the ghost.

“You don’t know that.” Bullshit ghost powers.

“You were happier back then. When they knew you.”

“Everyone was happier back then. It was, like, 2008.”

“There was a recession,” says the ghost.

“Shut up! Shut up!” You turn over in bed. For a second you expect to roll onto child-self-you curled up next to you. Probably crush the life out of her. You got good at that. It’s her bed, her room, pink covers, cat posters.

“This is so stupid, this Dickens thing,” you say. “I’m not even Christian anymore.”

“Tell your parents that second,” the ghost suggests.

“Oh my fucking God I’m not telling them anything can’t you go bother Jeff Bezos.”

“I’m just doing my job,” says the ghost, and vanishes.

#

The Ghost of Christmas Present has an acne problem. As soon as you open your eyes you say, “Oh my God,” and they say, “Hi,” and you say, “You better not be the fucking Ghost of Christmas Present,” and the Ghost of Christmas Present says, “I am.”

Which you knew.

“Why me?” you say, pink comforter bunched around your waist. “I didn’t do anything. Scrooge was mean to orphans.”

The Ghost of Christmas Present shrugs. “It’s the job.”

“Are you gonna show me my parents now?”

That makes them look kind of embarrassed.

“Well, don’t,” you say. If your parents are talking in the other room, huddled up conferencing with the lights off, you can’t hear it over the heater buzz. But you can guess what they’re saying: you went to school with a shitty pixie cut and worse eyeliner, and you came back with a real haircut and a permanent frown and a bunch of new friends you play sentence Twister to avoid pronouning. “I know they’re nice people, I got it. I’m just not ready.”

“It’s just—you’re kind of waiting for them to ask?” says the Ghost of Christmas Present. They scratch their face, where they have spectral sideburns coming in. “Your dad thinks you have a head cold. ‘Cause of your voice. But your mom’s starting to get it.”

You pull the covers over your head. “Cool, awesome, didn’t ask.”

“She isn’t going to ask,” the ghost says. “She wants you to tell her.”

You stick your middle finger out from underneath the covers. When you check, the room is empty again.

#

The Ghost of Christmas Future doesn’t say anything. Just looks at you. You look back. You probably have bedhead. You fixed your daytime wardrobe but your pajamas are still lacy and purple.

“How come you’re a man?” you say.

He says, “I think you know.”

“Fucking—go away.”

“I have something to show you first.”

“Are we going to the goddamn graveyard?”

He doesn’t say anything but then you’re in the goddamn graveyard. Together. Looking at your headstone. The dates are close enough together to make you kind of sick.

“They went with the full name,” you say.

The ghost nods.

“Not even the nickname. My nice gender neutral nickname.”

The ghost shrugs. You kind of want to throw something at him but you’re just looking at it now. Chiseled in marble. Immovable. What’s that thing bigots on the internet say, about someone digging up your jawbone two hundred years from now? You always wanted to think you wouldn’t care.

The Ghost of Christmas Future’s pretty quiet. This is the part where Scrooge goes full breakdown. Tears, begging, promises.

“I’m not gonna cry on you,” you say.

“Okay.”

So neutral. “Man, what do you want me to say?”

“Nothing,” says the ghost. “I think you’re there.”

You can’t stop looking at the headstone. “God fucking damnit shit. You promise they’ll be cool?”

“Nothing’s promised,” the ghost says. He gestures at the graveyard. “Except for this.”

“Awesome.” Cryptic cliche philosophical ghost bullshit. Yada yada. Death and taxes. Not with that name on your headstone, though. Not with that name on your tax forms, either.

You turn to tell him that and then you’re blinking in bed. There’s still one glow-in-the-dark star stuck to your ceiling where the glue never wore out. You put those up like ten years ago. Maybe longer. The light in the room says it’s morning. You swing your lacy-pajama legs over the side of the bed and go to ruin Christmas.

[fungateshortcakes]

Munch Munch

OMG I FORGOT I HAD THIS IN MY DRAFTS FORGIVE ME

Just a lil old man Logan drabble bc UGHHH he can crush my head with those juicy arms AHHH

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Logan never understood why you looked at him the way you did.

He was old. He was tired. His body was breaking down from the inside, poisoned by the very thing that once made him invincible. His hands shook more than they used to and no matter how hard he tried to hide it, you saw. You saw everything.

And yet there you were, leaning against the doorframe with your arms crossed, giving him that look again. Like he was something worth staring at. Logan wasn’t used to being wanted. Not like this.

He could feel your gaze tracing over his arms as he sat in his white wifebeater at the kitchen table. This was by far not the first time he caught you staring at him like that. He noticed it every time. The way you would watch the flex of his biceps beneath his shirt, the way his forearms tensed whenever he clenched his fists. He wasn’t blind. And if he had any doubts, well, the way you were looking at him right now? Like you wanted to sink your teeth into him? Yeah. That cleared things up really fast.

"You’re staring again" he muttered, though he didn’t cover up, just took another sip of his drink. "Mhm" you hummed completely unapologetic in how you were goggling his arms. You pushed yourself away from the doorframe and stepped in closer, fingers reaching out to lightly drag over his arm, just enough to make his skin prickle.

Logan exhaled sharply through his nose, setting the beer can in his hand down on the table "You got a problem?"

"Yeah, actually" you said, tilting your head. "These arms? They’re just sitting there. Not being held. Not being bitten. Wasted potential, really."

Logan choked on a laugh, a rare sound from him "Bitten? What do you-?" before he could finish his sentence, you leaned in and without hesitation you pressed your teeth lightly against his bicep. Not hard enough to hurt, just enough to make him feel it. A playful little bite that was gone as fast as it came.

Logan went completely still. The only sound was the sharp breath he sucked in through his teeth. You pulled back again and watched his reaction, your lips curling into a satisfied smirk. "Huh, that shut you up really quick."

Logan finally blinked, looking up at you like he wasn’t quite sure what the hell just happened. He opened his mouth but closed it before any words came out, rubbing a hand over his beard and sighing deeply.

"You just bit me" he said, like he was still trying to process it.

You grinned "Yeah. You act like you can just sit here with these babies out and expect me not to."

Logan huffed, shaking his head at your words, but the corner of his mouth twitched. He almost a smiled. Almost. But you counted it as a win nonetheless "You’re goddamn ridiculous" he muttered.

"Maybe" you mused with a pout, poking at his arm again. "Now flex for me, old man. Let me see the goods." you demanded, already munching on your bottom lip in anticipation. You just couldn't help it. You knew he was starting to feel his age, to look it, too. But damn, his arms were still plumb 'n thick. Just how you liked them.

Logan let out a low groan and for a second you thought he would just ignore you, but to your absolute delight, he sat up a little more straight, rolled his shoulders back and flexed- just a little, as if to tease. Just enough to make the veins in his forearms pop, to make the muscles in his biceps shift under his skin.

And goddamn, you swore you felt lightheaded...and how your panties were getting wet. You bit your lip at the sight "Shit" you breathed, your eyes fighting from rolling back because good god "You are so hot."

Logan narrowed his eyes at your praise, grumbling something under his breath, but you caught the way his ears burned just a little bit pink. He could act all gruff and broody, but you knew the truth now.

You were disappointed as he lowered his arm again. You stepped closer, placing your hands on his arms, fingers tracing the muscle slowly, deliberately. A shudder ran up his spine at your touch. He tried to play it down, but he couldn't hide the obvious goosebumps explodig over his scarred skin "Do it again, baby. " you murmured, smoothing over his shoulder and arms.

Logan arched a brow "Again?"

"Again" you stated firmly, it sounded like a command to him. And maybe he would follow it. He rolled his eyes, but you were able to catch the slightest smile on his lips that seemed a little proud, flattered even. It was balm for the soul, your words. You actually wanted to see him, worship something he thought no one cared for anymore. But here you were.

Acting as if he was annoyed by your persistance, he lifted his arm and flexed, this time for real. The muscle in his biceps tensed, thick and solid beneath your hands that wandered over the firm muscle. His forearms flexed, veins running up his skin like a goddamn work of art. The old scars, the roughness, the strength, it was all so perfect. Your forearm next to his biceps looked so small, it made your mouth water.

And you couldn’t help it. You made a sound. A tiny, helpless whimper that you couldn’t stop even if you tried.

Logan froze and his arm lowered slightly "Did you just-?"

"Shut up" you giggled, pressing your face against his shoulder to hide the absolute mess he was making of you "Nah, sweetheart" he said, his voice downright smug and a grin spreading across his face while he stood up, towering over you, wrapping his strong arms around your neck, making you groan as pure, firm muscle surrounded your flushed face "What was that sound?" he teased, his voice low and raspy against your ear

You whined annoyed against his broad chest, wanting him to drop it "Logan"

But he wasn't letting up "You whimpered" he stated matter of factly, clearly enjoying himself "Over my arms."

Your hands slid up his sides, squeezing him. You looked up through your eyelashes, a suggestive grin on your lips "Well, you could just shut me up with these big, strong arms of yours" you purred, leaning up to kiss him. And Logan could already picture the way your teeth would sink into his flesh as he held you in a headlock while pounding his cock into you from behind, leaving deep bite marks on his arms that wouldn’t start to fade until the next morning. He grinned back down at you, capturing your lips in a kiss.

"Let's give you a reason to bite, bub"

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Fuck me he is so hot the best he ever looked and I will DIE on that hill. One chance, ONE FUCKING CHANCE!!!! I am not rlly the girly to randomly bite my partner but istg I would munch and nibble and gnaw on his arms FOREVER they are so big and manly and mhmm and yummy and BARK BARK

I have two more old man Logan drafts I completely forgot about- should I post them too?

[jay-catsby]

i deleted the wholeass post i initially wrote bc i realized the much more interesting story was in the tags. read on for mouse-in-house drama

[storiesforallfandoms]

new toy ~ felix catton;saltburn

word count: 5901

request?: no

description: when he brings a girl home for the summer, she finds herself struggling to fit into his lifestyle

pairing: felix catton x female!reader

warnings: swearing, mentions of parent deaths, farleigh being a catty rich bitch (affectionate), feelings of insecurity and inadequacy, little bit of angst, things get steamy but no actual smut in this one

masterlist (one, two, three)

Venetia rushed to the window of her bedroom as she heard the car carrying her brother pulling up the drive. The family had been made aware that Felix was bringing a friend home for the summer. Not that anyone had to tell them. Felix often had a new sad sack in tow whenever he came home from school, who would never be seen again once they returned to school at the end of the summer. Venetia had tried to get some information on this new friend from Farleigh, but her cousin said he hadn't seen anyone new hanging out with Felix during the school year. She was itching to get a peak at Felix's newest toy.

She gasped and turned to Farleigh, who was looking at her in curiosity. "It's a girl!"

(Y/N) stepped out of the car as Felix excitedly talked away. She looked at the giant house with wide eyes. She knew Felix had money; his parents were paying his way through college after all, meanwhile (Y/N) was a scholarship kid. But she never could've imagined he was this level of rich. His house was a goddamn castle!

She was wondering if it was too late to back out of Felix's offer to stay over.

An older man dressed in a black suit opened the front door as (Y/N) and Felix approached. (Y/N) stopped suddenly as the man's glare landed on her.

"Duncan!" Felix exclaimed. "How are you, you serious old brute?"

"Good to see you, master Felix. This is your new...friend?"

The way he said it made (Y/N) wince.

Felix turned to her and threw an arm around her shoulders. "Don't be frightened, (Y/N). This is my family butler, Duncan. He looks terrifying, but his bark is worse than his bite."

(Y/N) tried to smile at Duncan, but he merely continued to stare her down. She shrunk into Felix's embrace, which, luckily, the taller boy noticed her discomfort and brought her into the house. With his arm still around her, Felix brought (Y/N) around the giant house. There was so much to see, so much to know. There was simply no way she'd remember it all. She expected to get lost just trying to get to the bathroom.

Luckily, that wouldn't be a problem at least, as Felix led her into his room. "Your room is just through here. We'll be sharing a bathroom. Hope you don't mind."

She was glad he wasn't facing her so he missed the look on her face at his statement.

Felix threw the door to her room open with a flourish before turning to her. "And this is where you'll be staying. Don't worry about unpacking, the butlers will do that for you. It has a nice view of the garden and such, and I'm just next door past the bathroom, as you've already seen."

He flopped down onto her bed and stretched out so he was taking up the entire bed. (Y/N) pushed his leg over a bit so she could sit next to him. "It's a lot to take in."

"I know," Felix said. He rolled onto his side to look up at her. "It'll feel like a lot, but I promise my family will love you. And if it gets overwhelming, I'll be here."

He put his hand on her leg. She looked down at it, the heat from where his hand was touching rising from that spot all the way up to her face. Her entire body felt like it had been ignited by a simple gesture to try and bring her comfort. She wondered if Felix knew what he did to her.

She tried not to let her disappointment show as Felix stood, removing his hand from her leg.

"I'll let you unwind or whatever," he said. "Dinner isn't until 5, so you have plenty of time to yourself until then. You brought a dress, right?" She nodded. "Good. Mum and dad insist on fancy dinner wear. It's a little embarrassing. I'll be in my room if you need anything."

And just like that, he was gone. (Y/N) sighed and fell back onto the bed.

This definitely was not how she expected to spend her summer. She had started her time at Oxford as an outcast, a scholarship loser among a sea of rich kids. She tired not to let it get to her. Getting into Oxford at all was a big deal, (Y/N) knew to be proud of that. But that didn't make the whispers and dirty looks directed towards her any easier to take.

She didn't seek out friendship with anyone, let alone with Felix. Of course, she had noticed Felix. Who wouldn't? He was beautiful and had charm for days. Everyone loved him. But (Y/N) knew better than to try and approach him. They were from two completely different worlds, and (Y/N) knew she didn't belong in his world.

To her surprise, it was Felix who initiated first contact.

They were in an English class together. Felix had sat next to her one day and asked, "Did you finish the reading for today?" (Y/N) was so shocked that he had spoken to her that she could only nod in response. "Can you summarize it for me? I tried to read it but it was so fucking boring."

Apparently, that one act of kindness was enough to consider (Y/N) a friend. Felix invited her to sit with him at the bar, to come study in his room, to go to the "invite only" parties on campus. His other rich friends didn't seem to enjoy her company, but he did and that's all that mattered.

When (Y/N) told Felix she had nowhere to go for the summer, he invited her to come stay with him and his family in Saltburn. He refused to take no for an answer. So now here she was, in a bedroom that only had a bathroom to separate her and the boy she had started developing feelings for but knew she couldn't have, in a house the size of a castle owned by a family who mad more money than she'd ever see in her life.

She let out another sigh for good measure before sitting up. She still had plenty of time before dinner, but she wanted to make sure she was presentable to meet Felix's family for the first time. She got up and went to the bathroom, locking the door that led to Felix's room just in case. There was no shower, so she had to opt for a bath. She tried to be quick, but once she had laid in the oversized tub and allowed the hot water to engulf her, she never wanted to get out. Maybe she could spend the entire summer in the tub instead of dealing with Felix's family.

When the water began to go cold, she reluctantly got out and returned to her room. She had packed the limited amount of makeup she owned just in case there were any formal gatherings she needed to dress up for. Now she was definitely glad she had if dinner was meant to be a formal thing. She did her makeup carefully to make sure it was perfect, then dug through her bag for the dress she had packed. It wasn't anything super fancy, just a royal blue, off the shoulder dress with a pleated skirt that came down just above the knee. It was the nicest dress she owned, so eh hoped it would suffice.

There was still some time before dinner, but (Y/N) figured it was time to meet the family.

She stepped out of her room and realized she had no idea where to go to find the dining room.

"Need help?"

(Y/N) jumped and turned to see Duncan stood, blank faced yet again, looking at her,

"Yes please," she responded, her voice soft.

"Follow me," Duncan told her. He didn't wait to see if she was following, she she quickly troted along behind him to keep up.

The Catton family was sat around the dinner table already when Duncan led (Y/N) into the room. All eyes turned to her when she walked in. She suddenly felt very self conscious and wished she was back in the hot, welcoming bath tub.

Until she caught Felix looking at her as if she were the most beautiful thing he had ever laid his eyes on.

"Oh, Felix, darling," an older woman sat at the head of the table - Felix's mom - said. "She is absolutely beautiful."

His mom stood from her seat and quickly approached (Y/N). She gently cupped (Y/N)'s cheeks. (Y/N) tensed, unsure of what to do. Mrs. Catton didn't seem to notice, or if she did she didn't let on.

"Honey, you didn't tell us how beautiful she was," Mrs. Catton said to her son.

"You never believe me," Felix retorted.

Mrs. Catton turned back to (Y/N). "Welcome, darling. We're very happy to have you here. You can call me Lady Elspeth." She took (Y/N)'s hands and squeezed them, then gestured towards the table. "We left a seat free next to Felix for you. Come, sit. Dinner will be served soon."

(Y/N) quickly moved to the table, oping to no longer be the center of attention. Felix was still smiling at her as she sat down next to him.

"You do look beautiful," he said.

Her face started heating up. "Thank you."

Across from them, a throat cleared. Felix glanced up at his cousin. (Y/N) didn't miss the subtle change in Felix's expression. "(Y/N), this is my cousin, Farleigh, and my sister, Venetia."

"Oh, I know Farleigh," she said, looking over at the other young man. He gave her an obviously forced smile. "I-I mean, I know of Farleigh. I've seen you around on campus."

"Weird that I haven't seen you. It's not like Felix to hide his friends away," Farleigh said.

"I wasn't hiding her away." Felix's face was tense. (Y/N) wondered what the story between him and Farleigh was. They seemed to get along well on campus, or at least Farleigh was in Felix's friend group.

Dinner was served, thus breaking up the tense moment. A plate was placed in front of everyone and they all began to eat. (Y/N) tried not to draw too much attention to herself, but she knew her presence alone was drawing attention. Both Farleigh and Venetia weren't very subtle with the way they were staring at her.

"So, (Y/N)," Elspeth said after a few moments of silence, "what is it you're studying at Oxford?"

"English," (Y/N) responded. "I'd like to be a writer when I graduate, but I know that's not an entirely realistic dream so I'm aiming to be an English teacher as a backup."

"Oh, writing! That's wonderful, darling!" Elspeth said. (Y/N) was somewhat shocked that Elspeth seemed genuine with her interest. "Have you written anything yet?"

"A few short stories." She shrugged. "Nothing major."

"'Nothing major'?" Felix questioned. "She's won contests with her short stories! Remember, you told me one of your stories was published in an anthology of short stories when you were still in high school?"

Elspeth and Felix's dad, Sir James, were impressed, while (Y/N) was surprised that Felix had remembered her telling him that. He was smiling down at her in pride and she couldn't help but smile back at him.

"Is that how you got your scholarship?" Farleigh asked. The look on his face told (Y/N) that his question wasn't as genuine as Elspeth's had been.

"Farleigh," Felix sneered.

"What? I was just asking. It's not like it's a secret that she's a scholarship kid. There's no shame in needing some financial help."

"You would know, wouldn't you?"

"Boys," James said, his voice stern in warning.

Dinner fell quiet after that. (Y/N) pushed her food around her plate, suddenly no longer hungry. She was back to wishing she could melt away into the floor and never be seen again. Maybe it wasn't too late to just go back to the school and stay in the dorms alone for the summer.

Once she had finished eating, she politely excused herself and went back to her room. She had paid enough attention when Duncan showed her to the dining room that she made it back with no issue. The minute the door closed behind her, she let out a sigh. A lump had started to form in her throat, but she was refusing to let herself cry. Even now while she was alone, she didn't want to give in to these feelings. She had to be strong, at least until she could get her things together and figure out a way back to the school.

As Felix had told her, the butlers had unpacked her bag while she was at dinner. It took her a moment to find her pajamas and makeup remover. She pulled on an oversized shirt she had packed to wear on the warm nights and was leaned over the dresser to start taking off her makeup, the shirt riding up just enough, when the door connecting her and Felix suddenly opened. Felix walked in, still in his suit from dinner, except he had removed his tie and the top few buttons had been undone. (Y/N) quickly stood up straight, pulling her shirt down to cover her ass.

"Don't you knock?" she asked.

"No, why would I?" he said.

"What if I was changing?"

"You weren't."

She rolled her eyes and went back to taking her makeup off, this time more cautious about how much of her was being exposed with Felix in the room.

"I just wanted to say I'm sorry about how Farleigh acted during dinner," Felix said.

(Y/N) paused for a moment. She glanced at Felix through the mirror. He was looking up at her with an expression that told her his apology was genuine.

"It's alright," she said.

"No, it wasn't alright. He shouldn't be saying those things about you. It's not like he's much different. My parents have financially supported him for years and let him stay here for free. At least you earned your scholarship, he only got his way in life because of his family."

"So did you, though." There was a beat, and (Y/N) quickly turned to face Felix. "Wait, I didn't mean - "

"No, you're right," he cut her off. "My parents have financially helped me, too. You're the only one among us who has really earned your spot at Oxford. It's not fair of Farleigh to try and make you feel small because you come from a different background."

(Y/N) wanted to tell him it wasn't just Farleigh, it was everyone at Oxford. Even Felix's own friend group had shunned (Y/N) when he introduced her to them. It felt like Felix was the only one who truly wanted to befriend (Y/N).

"You don't have to apologize for him," she said instead. "But I appreciate that you'd want to."

"You're my friend. I didn't bring you here to be insulted by my obnoxious cousin, I brought you here because I wanted you to spend the summer with us."

Friend.

Even though she knew that's all they were, it still stung to hear him say it. She wanted so much more than that, but it was wishful thinking to believe that Felix cause ever want more than that.

"I...I think I'm gonna just...get in bed."

He raised an eyebrow at her. "It's still only early."

"I know. All the travel just has me feeling pretty worn out."

"Okay."

He stood and (Y/N) expected him to go back to his room. When he started to unbutton his shirt more, her eyes nearly popped out of her head.

"What are you doing?!"

"I was going to stay over here tonight. If you were okay with that, that is."

"You're supposed to ask these things before you just start undressing."

Felix chuckled as (Y/N) turned her back to him. "You really don't want to watch as I undress?"

Of course I want to watch! "I'm just...trying to be courteous."

He laughed again. (Y/N) could hear the sounds of his clothes hitting the floor. She wondered why he hadn't at least gone back to his room to get a pair of pajamas. At least pajama pants. She was starting to get the feeling that at home, Felix didn't have to ask many questions, and that also extended towards his guests.

"Okay, I am covered."

When she turned back, he was under the covers of her bed, his hands behind his head so she could see that he was at least shirtless under there.

"The bed is big enough for us to share," he said, reading the shocked look on her face. "That is, again, if you don't mind."

"N-No. I-I guess that's fine."

(Y/N) crawled into bed next to Felix. She tried to put as much distance between the two of them as she could but, despite what Felix said, the bed certainly was not that big. She could still feel the heat from his body as she turned onto her side, her back to him. She could feel his nearness. And she could feel the fact that he was only wearing his boxers.

"You don't have to stay, you know," she said. "I'm not going to slip away during the night or something."

He bed shook a little as he laughed. "I know. I just wanted to stay over here. At the very least, I want to make sure you don't have any issues sleeping. I always find I struggle when I'm trying to sleep in a new place."

(Y/N) rolled onto her other side so that she could face Felix. The full moon was shining through the window, illuminating his face. He turned his head to look down at her.

"I really appreciate everything you've done for me, Felix," she said, her voice so soft it was nearly a whisper.

He smiled. "Get some sleep, (Y/N). I don't intend on having a boring day tomorrow if the weather is nice."

~~~~~~

When (Y/N) woke up the next morning, she completely forgot where she was. The bed was far too soft to be the one in her dorm at Oxford, and it was certainly too hot to be just a normal day during the schooling semester.

Not to mention the fact that there was a body laying under her.

(Y/N)'s eyes snapped open as she realized her head was resting on Felix's chest, and his arm around wrapped around her. At some point in the night, they must've shifted so that they were cuddling. (Y/N) wasn't sure if she should pull away or stay where she was. What would Felix's reaction be when he woke up and found them both in such a compromising position?

A knock came at her door. "Miss. (Y/N)?"

It was Duncan's voice. Now she was definitely panicking.

"Just checking if you're awake," he added.

"Uh...yeah! I am Duncan!" she called back.

"Breakfast is being served in ten minutes. Do wake up master Felix and let him know as well. His mother will want him to punctual since she didn't get as much time with him last night."

Her face burned. She wondered if Duncan knew Felix was in here with her, or if he meant for her to go over to Felix's room to wake him.

The sound of footsteps retreating down the hallway told her that Duncan had walked away. She let out a breath, relaxing into Felix's side yet again. She felt him move beneath her and she quickly pulled out of his arms before he started to wake up.

She was shocked at how beautiful he looked in the morning. The same perfect beauty he had when he fell asleep. Not a single hair out of place, no drool on his lips, no sleepy gunk in his eyes. It was really unfair just how perfect he really was.

His eyes slowly blinked open and he smiled when he saw (Y/N) looking down at him. "Good morning."

"Morning," she said. "Uh, Duncan was just here. He said breakfast is in ten minutes."

Felix groaned. "I don't want to get up yet. Why does mum have to have breakfast so early?"

(Y/N) looked at the clock hung on the wall. "It's almost 10am."

"Far too early to wake up in the summer."

She couldn't help but chuckle a little. Felix stretched his arms out and sat up as well. His face was suddenly very close to hers, almost too close.

"I suppose I should get ready for breakfast then," he said.

"Is there any dress code for breakfast?"

He shook his head. "Not for breakfast, but the dress code for today's events is a bathing suit. Once we finish eating, I'm taking you down to the lake."

~~~~~~

A few hours later, (Y/N) was following Felix towards the lake next to his house. It was a scorching hot day outside. One that was definitely better spent in the cooling water instead of cooped up inside.

Farleigh and Venetia were already by the lake. Farleigh was laid back on a towel, reading some book, while Venetia was sat by the lake with her feet in the water. She looked over her shoulder as she heard the two approach and smiled.

"Well, here they are!" she announced. "Finally you're here."

"Pull up a towel," Farleigh said, not looking up from his book.

(Y/N) went to sit on the grass, but Venetia called, "Not you! You're joining me down here. I've been surrounded by this testosterone for far too long."

She wasn't about to argue. She was already coated in sweat just from walking down from the house. (Y/N) sat beside Venetia and placed her feet in the water. The sudden cold was like a shock to her system, but definitely a welcome one.

"So, (Y/N)," Venetia said, "tell me, how did you and my brother meet?"

"We were in class together," (Y/N) responded. "I helped him with an assigned reading he had trouble with."

"Saved my ass from failing that surprise test the professor gave us," Felix added.

"It wasn't a surprise, he told us about it the class before," (Y/N) said.

"I wasn't there that class, so it was a surprise to me."

"Was that the day you were too hungover after a dorm party on a Sunday night?" Farleigh asked.

"A Sunday?!" (Y/N) laughed.

"It was a surprise party for one of my friends in the dorm," Felix responded. "He had gone home for the weekend so we had to have the party that Sunday. I didn't plan to get fucked up that night."

"You never do," Farleigh commented.

"What about your family, (Y/N)?" Venetia interrupted. "Are they okay with you spending your summer with a load of strangers?"

Felix opened his mouth to deter his sister from asking, but (Y/N) cut him off by saying, "My parents are dead."

A silence fell over them. Venetia looked a mixture of horrified and sad. Farleigh lowered his book to look over at (Y/N). Felix was trying not to look at any of them while (Y/N) was fixing her attention on the water in front of her. She was running her feet back and forth, disrupting the otherwise calm water.

"They died when I was ten," she continued. "Car accident, drunk driver. I've lived with my grandparents since then, but my grandpa died a year ago and my gran is starting to develop dementia. When I got accepted into Oxford, I made a deal with the Dean that I could stay on campus during the summers until I could afford my own place."

Venetia looked like she was about to cry. (Y/N) suddenly wished she had lied and made up some story about her parents.

"Way to ruin the moon, V," Farleigh commented.

"I didn't know!" Venetia retorted.

"No, it's fine," (Y/N) cut off their bickering. "It's tough, but I've had years to come to terms with all the death, and gran is in a nursing home now so she's being taken care of. I don't want anyone to tip toe around me like I'm made of glass."

As if to make her point, (Y/N) pushed off the edge of the lake and into the water. She shrieked as the cold engulfed her. Venetia followed suit, and soon enough both of them had convinced Farleigh and Felix to get into the water as well. The conversation was long forgotten as they swam around, splashing one another as if they were children.

~~~~~~

That night, (Y/N) was sat in the garden underneath her bedroom window. With the sun gone down, the air had cooled off, but only slightly. The room was still too stuffy for her, and opening the window just made it worse, so she opted to sit out in the cool air before she tried to sleep again.

Footsteps approached and she expected it to be Felix. When she turned, she was surprised to see Venetia instead, dressed in a sheer nightgown and carrying a lit cigarette between her fingers.

"Mind if I sit?" Venetia asked.

"I feel like I should be the one asking you that, considering it's your house."

Venetia chuckled and sat next to her.

(Y/N)'s first impression of Venetia had been wrong, and she was kind of glad it had been. She thought that, like Farleigh, Venetia was also going to be a little catty and condescending towards her. But after their day by the lake, she felt a sort of kinship with Venetia. They were the only two young girls at Saltburn, they had to look out for one another at the very least.

"So, how are you enjoying your stay so far?" Venetia asked.

"It's lovely here," (Y/N) said. "Much better than spending the summer at the Oxford campus along. At least there's a lot of the house to explore, and at least two people who seem to want me here."

"Three, if you count mum. She's ecstatic to have you. If you're not careful, she might just try and adopt you."

"I wouldn't complain."

Venetia took a drag from her cigarette and blew the smoke into the air. "And, um...has Felix been treating you well?"

(Y/N) looked over at her with confusion. "I'd...say more than well. Why?"

"I just..." Venetia leaned over, resting her arms against her legs. "I'm not saying this to try and scare you or anything. I truly like you, (Y/N), and I just want to warn you because I know how my brother is. He often takes someone who is a little more...damaged than him under his wing and brings them back here for a few months. But once the summer ends, or once he's lost interest, he casts them aside for whatever new shiny toy catches his attention."

Venetia's words hit (Y/N) like a ton of bricks. She had been telling herself for months since meeting Felix that their friendship was too good to be true, that he was going to realize he was making a mistake and move on. But when he didn't, when he asked her back to his house for the summer, she thought that maybe she was wrong. Maybe he actually did care for her and wanted to be friends with her. She had a tiny glimmer of hope that maybe this summer would bring them closer together, that they could become more than just friends.

If anyone would know how Felix was, it would be Venetia. She was his sister. She had seen a lifetime of the way Felix acted with friends. If she was warning her of the possibility that Felix might toss her aside once the summer ended, then she felt inclined to believe Venetia.

"Again, I'm not telling you this as a way to make you upset," Venetia added. "Trust me, I want nothing more than for you to stay with us for the summer. I just really do not want you to get hurt if that's what happens with Felix."

Tears were forming in (Y/N)'s eyes again. She was having a harder time at fighting them than the night before after all Farleigh had said to her. She quickly stood and murmured a "goodnight" to Venetia before rushing back inside the house. She got to her bedroom just in time for the tears to start falling.

Stupid! You're so stupid for thinking you belonged here in his world. You're nothing more than a charity case for him!

(Y/N) sunk to the floor and buried her head in her hands. She cried and cried until the tears dried up and she was essentially dry sobbing. Her eyes felt heavy and her body was aching from being on the floor for so long. She just wanted to go to back to the school and pretend this entire trip never happened.

When she finally coaxed herself to stand, (Y/N) went to the bathroom to wash her face and brush her teeth before bed. She looked at herself in the mirror and winced. Her eyes were swollen and red, her cheeks were flush, and there were tear stains on her cheeks from crying. She grabbed a face cloth and wet it down with warm water. Before she could start wiping her face, the door leading to Felix's room opened. She froze, the wet cloth in her hands.

"Hey," Felix said. She thought for a moment that he hadn't noticed her state, until suddenly he was beside her. "What happened? Are you alright?"

"I'm fine," she said, wincing again at the sound of her horse voice.

"You don't look or sound fine."

She began to wipe her face, trying to ignore Felix's presence. As she rinsed the face cloth again, she said, "I think I'm going to call the Dean tomorrow to ask if my room is still available at the school, then look into getting the next train back to Oxford as soon as possible."

"What? Why? I thought you wanted to stay."

(Y/N) shook her head. "I don't belong here, Felix. This is your world, not mine. I'm just the girl with dead parents and a scholarship, struggling to figure out how or if I'll ever be financially stable enough to live on my own once the school kicks me out."

"What did Farleigh say to you?"

"It wasn't Farleigh!" she snapped, finally turning to face him. "It was Venetia! She told me that you don't let people stick around for long. That you take in the charity cases and toss them aside when you're bored. And I knew that's what was happening with me, I knew there was no way you could possibly want to be friends with me, but I was also stupid enough to let myself believe that maybe it was all real. That maybe you actually cared and you actually wanted me here!"

She was crying again. She must've looked and sounded insane. She wished she had never accepted Felix's offer to come here. She could only imagine what he would say about her when she left the next day.

"I'm not staying here and waiting to be hurt, Felix," she said. "You may think it's fun to toy with people's emotions, but I don't. Not when I trusted you in telling you about my parents, about my stories, about my sad little poor life."

She had more to say, although she wasn't sure if any of it would've made sense, but Felix cut her off before she could. He took hold of her face and pulled her in for a kiss. It surprised her at first and she pulled away almost immediately. He looked down at her, worried, like he was scared he had just crossed a line. When her brain finally caught up to what was happening, she quickly leaned back in to kiss him again.

Her hands held on to his shirt while one of his still cupped her face and the other started to move down her body. With one quick movement, he had lifted her up onto the counter and wrapped her legs around his waist. Her hands moved to tangle into his hair. His tongue moved across her bottom lip, silently asking for entrance to her mouth. She realized he was commando under his pajama pants when she felt him pressed against her, the only layer between being her panties as she was once again in the oversized shirt she had worn the night before.

Felix broke away first. She tried to follow him, but he held her back, a playful grin on his face.

"I don't want you to go," he said. "I want you here. Not just for this summer, but every summer from now on. I want you in my dorm room back at school, and eventually in my own place when we finish with school. I want you, (Y/N). You're not some toy to me."

"How long have you felt like this?" she asked.

"Since before I spoke to you in class that first day."

"Why did you wait so long to tell me?"

"I kept chickening out. Every girl I've been with has only wanted me for my money, or my looks, or both. No one has ever really cared for me as a person. When you did, it almost intimidated me. I needed to know for sure you'd be here for the long run, so I brought you home to see how you'd react to everything."

"Am I passing the test?"

He chuckled and kissed her again. "With flying colors."

She couldn't get enough of him; of his lips, his smile, his body against hers, his hands on her. She wanted all of him all the time. She suddenly never wanted to leave either of their rooms for the rest of the summer.

"You can still go back to school if you feel uncomfortable here. I wouldn't blame you there," he said. "But if you're going back, I'm coming with you."

She shook her head. "I couldn't take you away from your family."

"Then stay. I want you to be here, too. I want to be with you."

She grinned cheekily back at him. "If you're going to beg, you should be on your knees at least."

He raised an eyebrow at her. "If that's what you want."

She wanted all of him all the time, but she decided not to say that just yet. She was still a little cautious. She had to make sure Felix meant what he was saying, even if she felt deep down that he was. He needed to prove himself to her before she opened up that much to him.

But for now, she would definitely take the sight of him on his knees, his face between her legs as his hands pushed the shirt up around her hips.

[joemama-2]

thinking about dating an older man.

one who’s gruff, big, never really likes to smile. his hands are rough and calloused and the stubble growing on his chin is his number one enemy. he’s always tired from work, never really has any down time. when he’s tired or stressed, he just runs a hand through his hair, sighing.

he wears some rings, specially just on his middle and pinky finger. and specially silver.

the last time he was in a serious relationship was his thirties, most people his age would be married, with kids. not him. he’s started to think it’s just a him problem, but even then, he’s not sure if he could do a relationship. he feels too old, too busy with work. his priorities are set.

but that all changes when he meets you. as funny as it is, you make him feel young again. you smile so perfectly at him, and your politeness truly makes him feel an all too familiar warmth in the depths of his stomach. he finds that he seeks you out during the day, even the simplest of glimpses will make him feel complete.

he wants to touch you so bad. just wants to feel that soft, beautiful skin you always show off to him. he starts to think it’s intentional.

and when he finally gets his hands on you, he’s in heaven. his hands can cover your own completely. cupping your pretty tit in his palm while the other splays across your stomach flat as he feels the bulge of his hard cock pounding into your all too sweet pussy.

the hand that can also wrap around your throat, squeezing gently as the words that spout from his dirty, experienced mouth are anything but gentle. the one that sometimes covers your mouth when he’s fucking you in his office that’s full of prying ears because you just can’t keep fucking quiet.

the hands that have a bruising grip on your hips while he guides them up and down, forcing you to continue to ride him even after you cried out your knees hurt, even after your third orgasm of the night.

some may think that being older will make the sex boring, shorter. not him. if anything, it’s the complete opposite. he knows what he likes, knows what women like, knows what you like. he loves to tease and edge you for as much as he could until you’re practically crying out and begging him to finally fuck you right.

maybe he’s a sadist. maybe he’s a masochist. or maybe he just loves you so fucking much that he wants to savor every last moment with you like it’s his last.

you know, it’s not really his height, the muscles, or facial expressions that intimidate you. it’s his goddamn experience.

sometimes you even get jealous and force out the image of what he does to you, to other women in the past.

the way he does things so naturally and almost nonchalantly, has you pooling in your panties, cheeks flushed. you just want to moan from what he says. he doesn’t even have to touch you to get you going.

and like the smart bastard he is, he uses this against you every single time.

—————————

jjk: toji, nanami, higuruma, getou, sukuna, choso

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“Disenshittify or Die”

I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).

Last weekend, I traveled to Las Vegas for Defcon 32, where I had the immense privilege of giving a solo talk on Track 1, entitled "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification":

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861

This was a followup to last year's talk, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification," a talk that kicked off a lot of international interest in my analysis of platform decay ("enshittification"):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4

The Defcon organizers have earned a restful week or two, and that means that the video of my talk hasn't yet been posted to Defcon's Youtube channel, so in the meantime, I thought I'd post a lightly edited version of my speech crib. If you're headed to Burning Man, you can hear me reprise this talk at Palenque Norte (7&E); I'm kicking off their lecture series on Tuesday, Aug 27 at 1PM.

==

What the fuck happened to the old, good internet?

I mean, sure, our bosses were a little surveillance-happy, and they were usually up for sharing their data with the NSA, and whenever there was a tossup between user security and growth, it was always YOLO time.

But Google Search used to work. Facebook used to show you posts from people you followed. Uber used to be cheaper than a taxi and pay the driver more than a cabbie made. Amazon used to sell products, not Shein-grade self-destructing dropshipped garbage from all-consonant brands. Apple used to defend your privacy, rather than spying on you with your no-modifications-allowed Iphone.

There was a time when you searching for an album on Spotify would get you that album – not a playlist of insipid AI-generated covers with the same name and art.

Microsoft used to sell you software – sure, it was buggy – but now they just let you access apps in the cloud, so they can watch how you use those apps and strip the features you use the most out of the basic tier and turn them into an upcharge.

What – and I cannot stress this enough – the fuck happened?!

I’m talking about enshittification.

Here’s what enshittification looks like from the outside: First, you see a company that’s being good to its end users. Google puts the best search results at the top; Facebook shows you a feed of posts from people and groups you followl; Uber charges small dollars for a cab; Amazon subsidizes goods and returns and shipping and puts the best match for your product search at the top of the page.

That’s stage one, being good to end users. But there’s another part of this stage, call it stage 1a). That’s figuring out how to lock in those users.

There’s so many ways to lock in users.

If you’re Facebook, the users do it for you. You joined Facebook because there were people there you wanted to hang out with, and other people joined Facebook to hang out with you.

That’s the old “network effects” in action, and with network effects come “the collective action problem." Because you love your friends, but goddamn are they a pain in the ass! You all agree that FB sucks, sure, but can you all agree on when it’s time to leave?

No way.

Can you agree on where to go next?

Hell no.

You’re there because that’s where the support group for your rare disease hangs out, and your bestie is there because that’s where they talk with the people in the country they moved away from, then there’s that friend who coordinates their kid’s little league car pools on FB, and the best dungeon master you know isn’t gonna leave FB because that’s where her customers are.

So you’re stuck, because even though FB use comes at a high cost – your privacy, your dignity and your sanity – that’s still less than the switching cost you’d have to bear if you left: namely, all those friends who have taken you hostage, and whom you are holding hostage

Now, sometimes companies lock you in with money, like Amazon getting you to prepay for a year’s shipping with Prime, or to buy your Audible books on a monthly subscription, which virtually guarantees that every shopping search will start on Amazon, after all, you’ve already paid for it.

Sometimes, they lock you in with DRM, like HP selling you a printer with four ink cartridges filled with fluid that retails for more than $10,000/gallon, and using DRM to stop you from refilling any of those ink carts or using a third-party cartridge. So when one cart runs dry, you have to refill it or throw away your investment in the remaining three cartridges and the printer itself.

Sometimes, it’s a grab bag:

You can’t run your Ios apps without Apple hardware;

you can’t run your Apple music, books and movies on anything except an Ios app;

your iPhone uses parts pairing – DRM handshakes between replacement parts and the main system – so you can’t use third-party parts to fix it; and

every OEM iPhone part has a microscopic Apple logo engraved on it, so Apple can demand that the US Customs and Border Service seize any shipment of refurb Iphone parts as trademark violations.

Think Different, amirite?

Getting you locked in completes phase one of the enshittification cycle and signals the start of phase two: making things worse for you to make things better for business customers.

For example, a platform might poison its search results, like Google selling more and more of its results pages to ads that are identified with lighter and lighter tinier and tinier type.

Or Amazon selling off search results and calling it an “ad” business. They make $38b/year on this scam. The first result for your search is, on average, 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The first row is 25% more expensive than the best match. On average, the best match for your search is likely to be found seventeen places down on the results page.

Other platforms sell off your feed, like Facebook, which started off showing you the things you asked to see, but now the quantum of content from the people you follow has dwindled to a homeopathic residue, leaving a void that Facebook fills with things that people pay to show you: boosted posts from publishers you haven’t subscribed to, and, of course, ads.

Now at this point you might be thinking ‘sure, if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.'

Bullshit!

Bull.

Shit.

The people who buy those Google ads? They pay more every year for worse ad-targeting and more ad-fraud

Those publishers paying to nonconsensually cram their content into your Facebook feed? They have to do that because FB suppresses their ability to reach the people who actually subscribed to them

The Amazon sellers with the best match for your query have to outbid everyone else just to show up on the first page of results. It costs so much to sell on Amazon that between 45-51% of every dollar an independent seller brings in has to be kicked up to Don Bezos and the Amazon crime family. Those sellers don’t have the kind of margins that let them pay 51% They have to raise prices in order to avoid losing money on every sale.

"But wait!" I hear you say!

[Come on, say it!]

"But wait! Things on Amazon aren’t more expensive that things at Target, or Walmart, or at a mom and pop store, or direct from the manufacturer.

"How can sellers be raising prices on Amazon if the price at Amazon is the same as at is everywhere else?"

[Any guesses?!]

That’s right, they charge more everywhere. They have to. Amazon binds its sellers to a policy called “most favored nation status,” which says they can’t charge more on Amazon than they charge elsewhere, including direct from their own factory store.

So every seller that wants to sell on Amazon has to raise their prices everywhere else.

Now, these sellers are Amazon’s best customers. They’re paying for the product, and they’re still getting screwed.

Paying for the product doesn’t fill your vapid boss’s shriveled heart with so much joy that he decides to stop trying to think of ways to fuck you over.

Look at Apple. Remember when Apple offered every Ios user a one-click opt out for app-based surveillance? And 96% of users clicked that box?

(The other four percent were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees.)

That cost Facebook at least ten billion dollars per year in lost surveillance revenue?

I mean, you love to see it.

But did you know that at the same time Apple started spying on Ios users in the same way that Facebook had been, for surveillance data to use to target users for its competing advertising product?

Your Iphone isn’t an ad-supported gimme. You paid a thousand fucking dollars for that distraction rectangle in your pocket, and you’re still the product. What’s more, Apple has rigged Ios so that you can’t mod the OS to block its spying.

If you’re not not paying for the product, you’re the product, and if you are paying for the product, you’re still the product.

Just ask the farmers who are expected to swap parts into their own busted half-million dollar, mission-critical tractors, but can’t actually use those parts until a technician charges them $200 to drive out to the farm and type a parts pairing unlock code into their console.

John Deere’s not giving away tractors. Give John Deere a half mil for a tractor and you will be the product.

Please, my brothers and sisters in Christ. Please! Stop saying ‘if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.’

OK, OK, so that’s phase two of enshittification.

Phase one: be good to users while locking them in.

Phase two: screw the users a little to you can good to business customers while locking them in.

Phase three: screw everybody and take all the value for yourself. Leave behind the absolute bare minimum of utility so that everyone stays locked into your pile of shit.

Enshittification: a tragedy in three acts.

That’s what enshittification looks like from the outside, but what’s going on inside the company? What is the pathological mechanism? What sci-fi entropy ray converts the excellent and useful service into a pile of shit?

That mechanism is called twiddling. Twiddling is when someone alters the back end of a service to change how its business operates, changing prices, costs, search ranking, recommendation criteria and other foundational aspects of the system.

Digital platforms are a twiddler’s utopia. A grocer would need an army of teenagers with pricing guns on rollerblades to reprice everything in the building when someone arrives who’s extra hungry.

Whereas the McDonald’s Investments portfolio company Plexure advertises that it can use surveillance data to predict when an app user has just gotten paid so the seller can tack an extra couple bucks onto the price of their breakfast sandwich.

And of course, as the prophet William Gibson warned us, ‘cyberspace is everting.' With digital shelf tags, grocers can change prices whenever they feel like, like the grocers in Norway, whose e-ink shelf tags change the prices 2,000 times per day.

Every Uber driver is offered a different wage for every job. If a driver has been picky lately, the job pays more. But if the driver has been desperate enough to grab every ride the app offers, the pay goes down, and down, and down.

The law professor Veena Dubal calls this ‘algorithmic wage discrimination.' It’s a prime example of twiddling.

Every youtuber knows what it’s like to be twiddled. You work for weeks or months, spend thousands of dollars to make a video, then the algorithm decides that no one – not your own subscribers, not searchers who type in the exact name of your video – will see it.

Why? Who knows? The algorithm’s rules are not public.

Because content moderation is the last redoubt of security through obscurit: they can’t tell you what the como algorithm is downranking because then you’d cheat.

Youtube is the kind of shitty boss who docks every paycheck for all the rules you’ve broken, but won’t tell you what those rules were, lest you figure out how to break those rules next time without your boss catching you.

Twiddling can also work in some users’ favor, of course. Sometimes platforms twiddle to make things better for end users or business customers.

For example, Emily Baker-White from Forbes revealed the existence of a back-end feature that Tiktok’s management can access they call the “heating tool.”

When a manager applies the heating toll to a performer’s account, that performer’s videos are thrust into the feeds of millions of users, without regard to whether the recommendation algorithm predicts they will enjoy that video.

Why would they do this? Well, here’s an analogy from my boyhood I used to go to this traveling fair that would come to Toronto at the end of every summer, the Canadian National Exhibition. If you’ve been to a fair like the Ex, you know that you can always spot some guy lugging around a comedically huge teddy bear.

Nominally, you win that teddy bear by throwing five balls in a peach-basket, but to a first approximation, no one has ever gotten five balls to stay in that peach-basket.

That guy “won” the teddy bear when a carny on the midway singled him out and said, "fella, I like your face. Tell you what I’m gonna do: You get just one ball in the basket and I’ll give you this keychain, and if you amass two keychains, I’ll let you trade them in for one of these galactic-scale teddy-bears."

That’s how the guy got his teddy bear, which he now has to drag up and down the midway for the rest of the day.

Why the hell did that carny give away the teddy bear? Because it turns the guy into a walking billboard for the midway games. If that dopey-looking Judas Goat can get five balls into a peach basket, then so can you.

Except you can’t.

Tiktok’s heating tool is a way to give away tactical giant teddy bears. When someone in the TikTok brain trust decides they need more sports bros on the platform, they pick one bro out at random and make him king for the day, heating the shit out of his account.

That guy gets a bazillion views and he starts running around on all the sports bro forums trumpeting his success: *I am the Louis Pasteur of sports bro influencers!"

The other sports bros pile in and start retooling to make content that conforms to the idiosyncratic Tiktok format. When they fail to get giant teddy bears of their own, they assume that it’s because they’re doing Tiktok wrong, because they don’t know about the heating tool.

But then comes the day when the TikTok Star Chamber decides they need to lure in more astrologers, so they take the heat off that one lucky sports bro, and start heating up some lucky astrologer.

Giant teddy bears are all over the place: those Uber drivers who were boasting to the NYT ten years ago about earning $50/hour? The Substackers who were rolling in dough? Joe Rogan and his hundred million dollar Spotify payout? Those people are all the proud owners of giant teddy bears, and they’re a steal.

Because every dollar they get from the platform turns into five dollars worth of free labor from suckers who think they just internetting wrong.

Giant teddy bears are just one way of twiddling. Platforms can play games with every part of their business logic, in highly automated ways, that allows them to quickly and efficiently siphon value from end users to business customers and back again, hiding the pea in a shell game conducted at machine speeds, until they’ve got everyone so turned around that they take all the value for themselves.

That’s the how: How the platforms do the trick where they are good to users, then lock users in, then maltreat users to be good to business customers, then lock in those business customers, then take all the value for themselves.

So now we know what is happening, and how it is happening, all that’s left is why it’s happening.

Now, on the one hand, the why is pretty obvious. The less value that end-users and business customers capture, the more value there is left to divide up among the shareholders and the executives.

That’s why, but it doesn’t tell you why now. Companies could have done this shit at any time in the past 20 years, but they didn’t. Or at least, the successful ones didn’t. The ones that turned themselves into piles of shit got treated like piles of shit. We avoided them and they died.

Remember Myspace? Yahoo Search? Livejournal? Sure, they’re still serving some kind of AI slop or programmatic ad junk if you hit those domains, but they’re gone.

And there’s the clue: It used to be that if you enshittified your product, bad things happened to your company. Now, there are no consequences for enshittification, so everyone’s doing it.

Let’s break that down: What stops a company from enshittifying?

There are four forces that discipline tech companies. The first one is, obviously, competition.

If your customers find it easy to leave, then you have to worry about them leaving

Many factors can contribute to how hard or easy it is to depart a platform, like the network effects that Facebook has going for it. But the most important factor is whether there is anywhere to go.

Back in 2012, Facebook bought Insta for a billion dollars. That may seem like chump-change in these days of eleven-digit Big Tech acquisitions, but that was a big sum in those innocent days, and it was an especially big sum to pay for Insta. The company only had 13 employees, and a mere 25 million registered users.

But what mattered to Zuckerberg wasn’t how many users Insta had, it was where those users came from.

[Does anyone know where those Insta users came from?]

That’s right, they left Facebook and joined Insta. They were sick of FB, even though they liked the people there, they hated creepy Zuck, they hated the platform, so they left and they didn’t come back.

So Zuck spent a cool billion to recapture them, A fact he put in writing in a midnight email to CFO David Ebersman, explaining that he was paying over the odds for Insta because his users hated him, and loved Insta. So even if they quit Facebook (the platform), they would still be captured Facebook (the company).

Now, on paper, Zuck’s Instagram acquisition is illegal, but normally, that would be hard to stop, because you’d have to prove that he bought Insta with the intention of curtailing competition.

But in this case, Zuck tripped over his own dick: he put it in writing.

But Obama’s DoJ and FTC just let that one slide, following the pro-monopoly policies of Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, and setting an example that Trump would follow, greenlighting gigamergers like the catastrophic, incestuous Warner-Discovery marriage.

Indeed, for 40 years, starting with Carter, and accelerating through Reagan, the US has encouraged monopoly formation, as an official policy, on the grounds that monopolies are “efficient.”

If everyone is using Google Search, that’s something we should celebrate. It means they’ve got the very best search and wouldn’t it be perverse to spend public funds to punish them for making the best product?

But as we all know, Google didn’t maintain search dominance by being best. They did it by paying bribes. More than 20 billion per year to Apple alone to be the default Ios search, plus billions more to Samsung, Mozilla, and anyone else making a product or service with a search-box on it, ensuring that you never stumble on a search engine that’s better than theirs.

Which, in turn, ensured that no one smart invested big in rival search engines, even if they were visibly, obviously superior. Why bother making something better if Google’s buying up all the market oxygen before it can kindle your product to life?

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon – they’re not “making things” companies, they’re “buying things” companies, taking advantage of official tolerance for anticompetitive acquisitions, predatory pricing, market distorting exclusivity deals and other acts specifically prohibited by existing antitrust law.

Their goal is to become too big to fail, because that makes them too big to jail, and that means they can be too big to care.

Which is why Google Search is a pile of shit and everything on Amazon is dropshipped garbage that instantly disintegrates in a cloud of offgassed volatile organic compounds when you open the box.

Once companies no longer fear losing your business to a competitor, it’s much easier for them to treat you badly, because what’re you gonna do?

Remember Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator in those old SNL sketches? “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”

Competition is the first force that serves to discipline companies and the enshittificatory impulses of their leadership, and we just stopped enforcing competition law.

It takes a special kind of smooth-brained asshole – that is, an establishment economist – to insist that the collapse of every industry from eyeglasses to vitamin C into a cartel of five or fewer companies has nothing to do with policies that officially encouraged monopolization.

It’s like we used to put down rat poison and we didn’t have a rat problem. Then these dickheads convinced us that rats were good for us and we stopped putting down rat poison, and now rats are gnawing our faces off and they’re all running around saying, "Who’s to say where all these rats came from? Maybe it was that we stopped putting down poison, but maybe it’s just the Time of the Rats. The Great Forces of History bearing down on this moment to multiply rats beyond all measure!"

Antitrust didn’t slip down that staircase and fall spine-first on that stiletto: they stabbed it in the back and then they pushed it.

And when they killed antitrust, they also killed regulation, the second force that disciplines companies. Regulation is possible, but only when the regulator is more powerful than the regulated entities. When a company is bigger than the government, it gets damned hard to credibly threaten to punish that company, no matter what its sins.

That’s what protected IBM for all those years when it had its boot on the throat of the American tech sector. Do you know, the DOJ fought to break up IBM in the courts from 1970-1982, and that every year, for 12 consecutive years, IBM spent more on lawyers to fight the USG than the DOJ Antitrust Division spent on all the lawyers fighting every antitrust case in the entire USA?

IBM outspent Uncle Sam for 12 years. People called it “Antitrust’s Vietnam.” All that money paid off, because by 1982, the president was Ronald Reagan, a man whose official policy was that monopolies were “efficient." So he dropped the case, and Big Blue wriggled off the hook.

It’s hard to regulate a monopolist, and it’s hard to regulate a cartel. When a sector is composed of hundreds of competing companies, they compete. They genuinely fight with one another, trying to poach each others’ customers and workers. They are at each others’ throats.

It’s hard enough for a couple hundred executives to agree on anything. But when they’re legitimately competing with one another, really obsessing about how to eat each others’ lunches, they can’t agree on anything.

The instant one of them goes to their regulator with some bullshit story, about how it’s impossible to have a decent search engine without fine-grained commercial surveillance; or how it’s impossible to have a secure and easy to use mobile device without a total veto over which software can run on it; or how it’s impossible to administer an ISP’s network unless you can slow down connections to servers whose owners aren’t paying bribes for “premium carriage"; there’s some *other company saying, “That’s bullshit”

“We’ve managed it! Here’s our server logs, our quarterly financials and our customer testimonials to prove it.”

100 companies are a rabble, they're a mob. They can’t agree on a lobbying position. They’re too busy eating each others’ lunch to agree on how to cater a meeting to discuss it.

But let those hundred companies merge to monopoly, absorb one another in an incestuous orgy, turn into five giant companies, so inbred they’ve got a corporate Habsburg jaw, and they become a cartel.

It’s easy for a cartel to agree on what bullshit they’re all going to feed their regulator, and to mobilize some of the excess billions they’ve reaped through consolidation, which freed them from “wasteful competition," sp they can capture their regulators completely.

You know, Congress used to pass federal consumer privacy laws? Not anymore.

The last time Congress managed to pass a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988: The Video Privacy Protection Act. That’s a law that bans video-store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS cassettes you take home. In other words, it regulates three things that have effectively ceased to exist.

The threat of having your video rental history out there in the public eye was not the last or most urgent threat the American public faced, and yet, Congress is deadlocked on passing a privacy law.

Tech companies’ regulatory capture involves a risible and transparent gambit, that is so stupid, it’s an insult to all the good hardworking risible transparent ruses out there.

Namely, they claim that when they violate your consumer, privacy or labor rights, It’s not a crime, because they do it with an app.

Algorithmic wage discrimination isn’t illegal wage theft: we do it with an app.

Spying on you from asshole to appetite isn’t a privacy violation: we do it with an app.

And Amazon’s scam search tool that tricks you into paying 29% more than the best match for your query? Not a ripoff. We do it with an app.

Once we killed competition – stopped putting down rat poison – we got cartels – the rats ate our faces. And the cartels captured their regulators – the rats bought out the poison factory and shut it down.

So companies aren’t constrained by competition or regulation.

But you know what? This is tech, and tech is different.IIt’s different because it’s flexible. Because our computers are Turing-complete universal von Neumann machines. That means that any enshittificatory alteration to a program can be disenshittified with another program.

Every time HP jacks up the price of ink , they invite a competitor to market a refill kit or a compatible cartridge.

When Tesla installs code that says you have to pay an extra monthly fee to use your whole battery, they invite a modder to start selling a kit to jailbreak that battery and charge it all the way up.

Lemme take you through a little example of how that works: Imagine this is a product design meeting for our company’s website, and the guy leading the meeting says “Dudes, you know how our KPI is topline ad-revenue? Well, I’ve calculated that if we make the ads just 20% more invasive and obnoxious, we’ll boost ad rev by 2%”

This is a good pitch. Hit that KPI and everyone gets a fat bonus. We can all take our families on a luxury ski vacation in Switzerland.

But here’s the thing: someone’s gonna stick their arm up – someone who doesn’t give a shit about user well-being, and that person is gonna say, “I love how you think, Elon. But has it occurred to you that if we make the ads 20% more obnoxious, then 40% of our users will go to a search engine and type 'How do I block ads?'"

I mean, what a nightmare! Because once a user does that, the revenue from that user doesn’t rise to 102%. It doesn’t stay at 100% It falls to zero, forever.

[Any guesses why?]

Because no user ever went back to the search engine and typed, 'How do I start seeing ads again?'

Once the user jailbreaks their phone or discovers third party ink, or develops a relationship with an independent Tesla mechanic who’ll unlock all the DLC in their car, that user is gone, forever.

Interoperability – that latent property bequeathed to us courtesy of Herrs Turing and Von Neumann and their infinitely flexible, universal machines – that is a serious check on enshittification.

The fact that Congress hasn’t passed a privacy law since 1988 Is countered, at least in part, by the fact that the majority of web users are now running ad-blockers, which are also tracker-blockers.

But no one’s ever installed a tracker-blocker for an app. Because reverse engineering an app puts in you jeopardy of criminal and civil prosecution under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with penalties of a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.

And violating its terms of service puts you in jeopardy under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which is the law that Ronald Reagan signed in a panic after watching Wargames (seriously!).

Helping other users violate the terms of service can get you hit with a lawsuit for tortious interference with contract. And then there’s trademark, copyright and patent.

All that nonsense we call “IP,” but which Jay Freeman of Cydia calls “Felony Contempt of Business Model."

So if we’re still at that product planning meeting and now it’s time to talk about our app, the guy leading the meeting says, “OK, so we’ll make the ads in the app 20% more obnoxious to pull a 2% increase in topline ad rev?”

And that person who objected to making the website 20% worse? Their hand goes back up. Only this time they say “Why don’t we make the ads 100% more invasive and get a 10% increase in ad rev?"

Because it doesn't matter if a user goes to a search engine and types, “How do I block ads in an app." The answer is: you can't. So YOLO, enshittify away.

“IP” is just a euphemism for “any law that lets me reach outside my company’s walls to exert coercive control over my critics, competitors and customers,” and “app” is just a euphemism for “A web page skinned with the right IP so that protecting your privacy while you use it is a felony.”

Interop used to keep companies from enshittifying. If a company made its client suck, someone would roll out an alternative client, if they ripped a feature out and wanted to sell it back to you as a monthly subscription, someone would make a compatible plugin that restored it for a one-time fee, or for free.

To help people flee Myspace, FB gave them bots that you’d load with your login credentials. It would scrape your waiting Myspace messages and put ‘em in your FB inbox, and login to Myspace and paste your replies into your Myspace outbox. So you didn’t have to choose between the people you loved on Myspace, and Facebook, which launched with a promise never to spy on you. Remember that?!

Thanks to the metastasis of IP, all that is off the table today. Apple owes its very existence to iWork Suite, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote are file-compatible with Microsoft’s Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But make an IOS runtime that’ll play back the files you bought from Apple’s stores on other platforms, and they’ll nuke you til you glow.

FB wouldn’t have had a hope of breaking Myspace’s grip on social media without that scrape, but scrape FB today in support of an alternative client and their lawyers will bomb you til the rubble bounces.

Google scraped every website in the world to create its search index. Try and scrape Google and they’ll have your head on a pike.

When they did it, it was progress. When you do it to them, that’s piracy. Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

Because this handful of companies has so thoroughly captured their regulators, they can wield the power of the state against you when you try to break their grip on power, even as their own flagrant violations of our rights go unpunished. Because they do them with an app.

Tech lost its fear of competitin it neutralized the threat from regulators, and then put them in harness to attack new startups that might do unto them as they did unto the companies that came before them.

But even so, there was a force that kept our bosses in check That force was us. Tech workers.

Tech workers have historically been in short supply, which gave us power, and our bosses knew it.

To get us to work crazy hours, they came up with a trick. They appealed to our love of technology, and told us that we were heroes of a digital revolution, who would “organize the world’s information and make it useful,” who would “bring the world closer together.”

They brought in expert set-dressers to turn our workplaces into whimsical campuses with free laundry, gourmet cafeterias, massages, and kombucha, and a surgeon on hand to freeze our eggs so that we could work through our fertile years.

They convinced us that we were being pampered, rather than being worked like government mules.

This trick has a name. Fobazi Ettarh, the librarian-theorist, calls it “vocational awe, and Elon Musk calls it being “extremely hardcore.”

This worked very well. Boy did we put in some long-ass hours!

But for our bosses, this trick failed badly. Because if you miss your mother’s funeral and to hit a deadline, and then your boss orders you to enshittify that product, you are gonna experience a profound moral injury, which you are absolutely gonna make your boss share.

Because what are they gonna do? Fire you? They can’t hire someone else to do your job, and you can get a job that’s even better at the shop across the street.

So workers held the line when competition, regulation and interop failed.

But eventually, supply caught up with demand. Tech laid off 260,000 of us last year, and another 100,000 in the first half of this year.

You can’t tell your bosses to go fuck themselves, because they’ll fire your ass and give your job to someone who’ll be only too happy to enshittify that product you built.

That’s why this is all happening right now. Our bosses aren’t different. They didn’t catch a mind-virus that turned them into greedy assholes who don’t care about our users’ wellbeing or the quality of our products.

As far as our bosses have always been concerned, the point of the business was to charge the most, and deliver the least, while sharing as little as possible with suppliers, workers, users and customers. They’re not running charities.

Since day one, our bosses have shown up for work and yanked as hard as they can on the big ENSHITTIFICATION lever behind their desks, only that lever didn’t move much. It was all gummed up by competition, regulation, interop and workers.

As those sources of friction melted away, the enshittification lever started moving very freely.

Which sucks, I know. But think about this for a sec: our bosses, despite being wildly imperfect vessels capable of rationalizing endless greed and cheating, nevertheless oversaw a series of actually great products and services.

Not because they used to be better people, but because they used to be subjected to discipline.

So it follows that if we want to end the enshittocene, dismantle the enshitternet, and build a new, good internet that our bosses can’t wreck, we need to make sure that these constraints are durably installed on that internet, wound around its very roots and nerves. And we have to stand guard over it so that it can’t be dismantled again.

A new, good internet is one that has the positive aspects of the old, good internet: an ethic of technological self-determination, where users of technology (and hackers, tinkerers, startups and others serving as their proxies) can reconfigure and mod the technology they use, so that it does what they need it to do, and so that it can’t be used against them.

But the new, good internet will fix the defects of the old, good internet, the part that made it hard to use for anyone who wasn’t us. And hell yeah we can do that. Tech bosses swear that it’s impossible, that you can’t have a conversation friend without sharing it with Zuck; or search the web without letting Google scrape you down to the viscera; or have a phone that works reliably without giving Apple a veto over the software you install.

They claim that it’s a nonsense to even ponder this kind of thing. It’s like making water that’s not wet. But that’s bullshit. We can have nice things. We can build for the people we love, and give them a place that’s worth of their time and attention.

To do that, we have to install constraints.

The first constraint, remember, is competition. We’re living through a epochal shift in competition policy. After 40 years with antitrust enforcement in an induced coma, a wave of antitrust vigor has swept through governments all over the world. Regulators are stepping in to ban monopolistic practices, open up walled gardens, block anticompetitive mergers, and even unwind corrupt mergers that were undertaken on false pretenses.

Normally this is the place in the speech where I’d list out all the amazing things that have happened over the past four years. The enforcement actions that blocked companies from becoming too big to care, and that scared companies away from even trying.

Like Wiz, which just noped out of the largest acquisition offer in history, turning down Google’s $23b cashout, and deciding to, you know, just be a fucking business that makes money by producing a product that people want and selling it at a competitive price.

Normally, I’d be listing out FTC rulemakings that banned noncompetes nationwid. Or the new merger guidelines the FTC and DOJ cooked up, which – among other things – establish that the agencies should be considering whether a merger will negatively impact privacy.

I had a whole section of this stuff in my notes, a real victory lap, but I deleted it all this week.

[Can anyone guess why?]

That’s right! This week, Judge Amit Mehta, ruling for the DC Circuit of these United States of America, In the docket 20-3010 a case known as United States v. Google LLC, found that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," and ordered Google and the DOJ to propose a schedule for a remedy, like breaking the company up.

So yeah, that was pretty fucking epic.

Now, this antitrust stuff is pretty esoteric, and I won’t gatekeep you or shame you if you wanna keep a little distance on this subject. Nearly everyone is an antitrust normie, and that's OK. But if you’re a normie, you’re probably only catching little bits and pieces of the narrative, and let me tell you, the monopolists know it and they are flooding the zone.

The Wall Street Journal has published over 100 editorials condemning FTC Chair Lina Khan, saying she’s an ineffectual do-nothing, wasting public funds chasing doomed, quixotic adventures against poor, innocent businesses accomplishing nothing

[Does anyone out there know who owns the Wall Street Journal?]

That’s right, it’s Rupert Murdoch. Do you really think Rupert Murdoch pays his editorial board to write one hundred editorials about someone who’s not getting anything done?

The reality is that in the USA, in the UK, in the EU, in Australia, in Canada, in Japan, in South Korea, even in China, we are seeing more antitrust action over the past four years than over the preceding forty years.

Remember, competition law is actually pretty robust. The problem isn’t the law, It’s the enforcement priorities. Reagan put antitrust in mothballs 40 years ago, but that elegant weapon from a more civilized age is now back in the hands of people who know how to use it, and they’re swinging for the fences.

Next up: regulation.

As the seemingly inescapable power of the tech giants is revealed for the sham it always was, governments and regulators are finally gonna kill the “one weird trick” of violating the law, and saying “It doesn’t count, we did it with an app.”

Like in the EU, they’re rolling out the Digital Markets Act this year. That’s a law requiring dominant platforms to stand up APIs so that third parties can offer interoperable services.

So a co-op, a nonprofit, a hobbyist, a startup, or a local government agency wil eventuallyl be able to offer, say, a social media server that can interconnect with one of the dominant social media silos, and users who switch to that new platform will be able to continue to exchange messages with the users they follow and groups they belong to, so the switching costs will fall to damned near zero.

That’s a very cool rule, but what’s even cooler is how it’s gonna be enforced. Previous EU tech rules were “regulations” as in the GDPR – the General Data Privacy Regulation. EU regs need to be “transposed” into laws in each of the 27 EU member states, so they become national laws that get enforced by national courts.

For Big Tech, that means all previous tech regulations are enforced in Ireland, because Ireland is a tax haven, and all the tech companies fly Irish flags of convenience.

Here’s the thing: every tax haven is also a crime haven. After all, if Google can pretend it’s Irish this week, it can pretend to be Cypriot, or Maltese, or Luxembougeious next week. So Ireland has to keep these footloose criminal enterprises happy, or they’ll up sticks and go somewhere else.

This is why the GDPR is such a goddamned joke in practice. Big tech wipes its ass with the GDPR, and the only way to punish them starts with Ireland’s privacy commissioner, who barely bothers to get out of bed. This is an agency that spends most of its time watching cartoons on TV in its pajamas and eating breakfast cereal. So all of the big GDPR cases go to Ireland and they die there.

This is hardly a secret. The European Commission knows it’s going on. So with the DMA, the Commission has changed things up: The DMA is an “Act,” not a “Regulation.” Meaning it gets enforced in the EU’s federal courts, bypassing the national courts in crime-havens like Ireland.

In other words, the “we violate privacy law, but we do it with an app” gambit that worked on Ireland’s toothless privacy watchdog is now a dead letter, because EU federal judges have no reason to swallow that obvious bullshit.

Here in the US, the dam is breaking on federal consumer privacy law – at last!

Remember, our last privacy law was passed in 1988 to protect the sanctity of VHS rental history. It's been a minute.

And the thing is, there's a lot of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden? Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google? Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics? Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms? Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?

A federal privacy law with a private right of action – which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy – would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems

There's a pretty big coalition for that kind of privacy law! Which is why we have seen a procession of imperfect (but steadily improving) privacy laws working their way through Congress.

If you sign up for EFF’s mailing list at eff.org we’ll send you an email when these come up, so you can call your Congressjerk or Senator and talk to them about it. Or better yet, make an appointment to drop by their offices when they’re in their districts, and explain to them that you’re not just a registered voter from their district, you’re the kind of elite tech person who goes to Defcon, and then explain the bill to them. That stuff makes a difference.

What about self-help? How are we doing on making interoperability legal again, so hackers can just fix shit without waiting for Congress or a federal agency to act?

All the action here these day is in the state Right to Repair fight. We’re getting state R2R bills, like the one that passed this year in Oregon that bans parts pairing, where DRM is used to keep a device from using a new part until it gets an authorized technician’s unlock code.

These bills are pushed by a fantastic group of organizations called the Repair Coalition, at Repair.org, and they’ll email you when one of these laws is going through your statehouse, so you can meet with your state reps and explain to the JV squad the same thing you told your federal reps.

Repair.org’s prime mover is Ifixit, who are genuine heroes of the repair revolution, and Ifixit’s founder, Kyle Wiens, is here at the con. When you see him, you can shake his hand and tell him thanks, and that’ll be even better if you tell him that you’ve signed up to get alerts at repair.org!

Now, on to the final way that we reverse enhittification and build that new, good internet: you, the tech labor force.

For years, your bosses tricked you into thinking you were founders in waiting, temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs who were only momentarily drawing a salary.

You certainly weren’t workers. Your power came from your intrinsic virtue, not like those lazy slobs in unions who have to get their power through that kumbaya solidarity nonsense.

It was a trick. You were scammed. The power you had came from scarcity, and so when the scarcity ended, when the industry started ringing up six-figure annual layoffs, your power went away with it.

The only durable source of power for tech workers is as workers, in a union.

Think about Amazon. Warehouse workers have to piss in bottles and have the highest rate of on-the-job maimings of any competing business. Whereas Amazon coders get to show up for work with facial piercings, green mohawks, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don’t understand. They can piss whenever they want!

That’s not because Jeff Bezos or Andy Jassy loves you guys. It’s because they’re scared you’ll quit and they don’t know how to replace you.

Time for the second obligatory William Gibson quote: “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” You know who’s living in the future?. Those Amazon blue-collar workers. They are the bleeding edge.

Drivers whose eyeballs are monitored by AI cameras that do digital phrenology on their faces to figure out whether to dock their pay, warehouse workers whose bodies are ruined in just months.

As tech bosses beef up that reserve army of unemployed, skilled tech workers, then those tech workers – you all – will arrive at the same future as them.

Look, I know that you’ve spent your careers explaining in words so small your boss could understand them that you refuse to enshittify the company’s products, and I thank you for your service.

But if you want to go on fighting for the user, you need power that’s more durable than scarcity. You need a union. Wanna learn how? Check out the Tech Workers Coalition and Tech Solidarity, and get organized.

Enshittification didn’t arise because our bosses changed. They were always that guy.

They were always yankin’ on that enshittification lever in the C-suite.

What changed was the environment, everything that kept that switch from moving.

And that’s good news, in a bankshot way, because it means we can make good services out of imperfect people. As a wildly imperfect person myself, I find this heartening.

The new good internet is in our grasp: an internet that has the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the greased-skids simplicity of Web 2.0 that let all our normie friends get in on the fun.

Tech bosses want you to think that good UX and enshittification can’t ever be separated. That’s such a self-serving proposition you can spot it from orbit. We know it, 'cause we built the old good internet, and we’ve been fighting a rear-guard action to preserve it for the past two decades.

It’s time to stop playing defense. It's time to go on the offensive. To restore competition, regulation, interop and tech worker power so that we can create the new, good internet we’ll need to fight fascism, the climate emergency, and genocide.

To build a digital nervous system for a 21st century in which our children can thrive and prosper.

Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear RIDA QADRI and me talk about how GIG WORKERS can DISENSHITTIFY their jobs with INTEROPERABILITY, VOTE FOR THIS ONE!

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

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

Image: https://twitter.com/igama/status/1822347578094043435/ (cropped)

@fak3r@mastodon.social (cropped)

https://mamot.fr/@fak3r@mastodon.social/112963252835869648

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.pt

[drewsbraziliangf]

nothing to say when heaven falls | Drew Starkey x black!reader

summary: what can you do when the person that’s supposed to understand and be on your side chooses to doubt your fears?

Word count: 1388

a/n: not edited, we die like soldiers!!!!! pls let me know if you wish to be added to my taglist

"How can't you see how disrespectful this is to me, Drew?" You ask with a strained voice and teary eyes. "Everywhere you go she's looming like a shadow."

"She's my friend, what do you want me to do?" Exasperated, he asks.

"I don't know. Maybe tell her that your fiancé doesn't feel comfortable with her following you around, traveling abroad to see you or fuck, being all fucking touchy and handsy with you in public."

My throat was burning as the words slipped my mouth but I simply couldn't avoid it any longer. I am so tired of this whole situation and it has been going on for far too long. I just can't hold it back anymore.

"Can't exactly tell her what to do," he rolled his eyes this time.

"Really? Am I really asking for that much?" I look at the man in front of me with disbelief, "I just want to feel like I'm not invisible in my own goddamn relationship. She sees you more than I do and I am the one with a ring on my finger. How is this fair?" 

"Babe, listen, there's nothing going on between me and her. You have to believe me," he pleads as he runs his hands through his hair.

"You don't think I'm trying to believe you? I'm in the trenches everyday telling myself this over and over again, but how can I turn a blind eye to it when the first thing I see whenever I'm online is that you're both coincidently in the same city. For the millionth time."

I know that pulling this out in the open this way isn't the best option. But how could I keep bottling all of this up when it's causing such a heavy pain in my chest every time I see their names together?

It was always clear the perks of dating a public figure and I never backed out on it. Now seeing the man who asked me to spend the rest of my life with him and have his babies walking around with the woman everyone swears he was romantically involved with is messed up.

“I don’t know what you want me to do,” he admits as he walks away from me.

That felt like a punch. Because how could I make it anymore obvious? Do I have to draw it to a thirty year old why he should respect the woman he chose to propose to? 

“Are you for real right now?” I asked as I follow him into the kitchen of our shared apartment. “Did you really just said that to me, Joseph?”

At this point it felt like there was no going back anymore, either this was going to be totally fixed here or it wouldn’t at all. The bandaid was ripped and the wound was open and burning.

“How can you be so dull? You really can’t see what the problem here is?” 

I watch as he fills a glass with water and turns his back to me. He did it twice already. The off white walls of the kitchen lacked the warm they always brought when we were in it together. It felt claustrophobic and like the roof was going to fall over our heads at any given minute.

“You’re acting like I’m cheating on you. Like this is some major fuck up. It isn’t, you’re turning it into something it isn’t.” His tone was cold but looking at his posture it was clear that he was trying to maintain his calm.

The condescending tone in his voice made me want to shrink into myself and hide away from the world.

“Oh, right. Yeah, blame it on me for thinking that my fiancé going out of his way to be with his ex fuck buddy isn’t normal.”

“Careful,” he warns once finally looks at me.

“Or what, Drew? What else could you possibly do that will make me feel worse than I already do?” I challenge, my gaze locked on him as I wait.

After a few minutes of us staring down at each other, he shakes his head and sighs. 

“I’m not doing whatever this is. I’m done entertaining this,” he declares and he leans against the countertop.

Drew and I met around two years ago through a mutual friend. We instantly hit off and after a few dates, he officially asked me to be his girlfriend - which I obviously accepted. We had this instant connection that isn’t common. At first I was terrified of it, I knew who he was and the fact that his life was always being scrutinized by thousands of people. I knew what people said online about him and as we got closer and closer I couldn’t help but lose myself in the speculations about him even more.

Our relationship was great and we always made sure that each others boundaries were respected, so color me stoked to be in this situation right now. I am not dumb and every single day there is a needle pinching me making me think of stuff and situations like the one we find ourselves right now just indulge those thoughts.

In the early days of our relationship we made sure there were no secrets between us and past relationships. I knew I was his first black girlfriend, I knew he was born and raised in the South too. So joining that and the fact that I am an immigrant did make me scared of a lot of things, the main of them being the fact that it isn’t uncommon at all for men to always find their way back to that they are used to. 

So seeing her upon him all the time while people online barely know about our relationship feels like hell. Because even though I’m in family pictures that his sisters post online, and the very visible ring on my finger I am never considered the option of being his significant other. She is. Every single time. And he never did anything about it - hell, he never even set boundaries with her and she knows that we’re together. Am I really reading too much into things? 

Being three months away from our wedding day, this isn’t the kind of thought or conversations I would like to be having. I should be fucking excited and dress hunting, but lately the only thing that I feel like doing is swallowing lumps and holding back tears, faking smiles and pretending I’m fine. I’m not, I’m fucking falling apart and I’m so tired of begging to be seen. 

“I don’t know how else to tell you that I am not comfortable with this and that you shouldn’t be either,” I point out as the first tear cross the edges of my cheeks. “I don’t know how else to ask you to respect our relationship.”

“I respect our relationship, I always did. I just don’t think that what you’re saying right now makes any sense. Whatever I had with her in the past is over.” He says as he runs one of his hands through his face.

“Drew, honey, you’re not seeing things from my point of view. Imagine if it was me catching planes every other day to be with someone that I was involved in with in the past. And all of our friends know that you and I are together. How would that make you feel?”

At that he says nothing but silence can mean many things, and in this case it means consent. 

Tired of this back in forth conversation, I reach for my phone that was besides his on the counter and as if the timing couldn’t be more right, the screen of his phone lights up with an incoming call. No surprise flashes through my features as I see the picture on the caller id, both of them in a mirror picture as they brush their teeth.

“I can’t do this anymore,” I confess watching as he reaches for his phone quickly declining the call. “Not when you’re up to your eyeballs into whatever this is. I’ll make the calls tomorrow and cancel the dates with the venue.”

I grab my phone and my purse and I walk towards the front door before he can say anything else, I’m closing it behind me. 

[avelera]

Viktor and Jayce both need to take some non-STEM classes

I'm joking but also a little not-joking that this is in fact, a theme in the show.

In Season 1.08, Ambessa meets Jayce for the first time after he's become a councilor. One of the first questions she asks him is, "Do they teach military history at your Academy, Mr. Talis?"

Jayce takes this as a set up for an insult against him. He's rattled by the bathhouse and braced for a fight. He's so riled, in fact, that he completely misses what Ambessa is probing him for there.

Ambessa wasn't setting him up to make him feel small, like Jayce feared, she wanted to know if he had a military history background or even the beginnings of the skills needed as an engineer to understand or counter some of the political manipulations she's about to pull on him.

Jayce answers: I'm not sure.

Not only has Jayce never taken a military class, he as a scientist doesn't even know if his school offers it.

That made him easy pickings for Ambessa. She wouldn't even need to be subtle, she could use the most basic tricks in the book against a proud young man with only a scientific background and know he wouldn't even begin to have the tools to pick up let alone counter what she's doing to him.

And then we get to Viktor in S2. Now, I think "How much of Cult Leader Viktor is even Viktor?" is a fair question. But the whole Machine Herald ethos he seems to be working towards in his inner monologue in 2.06 is yet another example of "Won't someone PLEASE make these boys take some sort of liberal arts class? An ethics course? SOMETHING?"

Viktor is working his way (Hexcore influence or no) to the conclusion that many frustrated young activists have hit upon when their activism doesn't work.

He tried to help people. But people didn't want to be helped or didn't cooperate with the way he wanted to help them.

His conclusion? Clearly it's the people who are wrong. It's the people who need to be changed.

To quote Pratchett, "“People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.”

And of course, once you start to see people as the problem, that people need to be fundamentally changed, added, or subtracted from, when you treat people as things, that is when the real evil begins.

You have to accept people as they are and work within those bounds, because otherwise you have to change people and that pretty much always leads to the sort of atrocities that the Machine Herald seems gearing up to do. Namely, add and subtract away the people, or the characteristics of people, that don't fit his vision for the world.

And all I can think is: won't Piltover Academy please for the love of god make your tech bros take some goddamn history and philosophy classes please??

[starmapz]

THREE'S A CROWD

𓉸 toji fushiguro x shiu kong x f!reader

𓉸 kinktober smut oneshot

❝ you've been working with shiu and toji long enough to know that they both have eyes for you and after a particularly bloody and frustrating mission, you give in to their teasing for the first time. you know two things for sure. shiu needs a bigger car, and it won't be the last time you give in. ❞

𓉸 warnings ; 18+ only. contains explicit content. threesome. spit roasting. marking. biting. slight voyeurism. rough car sex. p in v. oral (f! and m! receiving). manhandling. fingering. mild size kink. throat fucking. nipple play (f! receiving). mild praise. mild degradation. mild dacryphilia. mild choking. pet names (doll, girl, pretty, baby, sweetheart). use of cigarettes. toji's dirty talk is a warning in itself.

𓉸 words ; 3.9k.

masterlist || kinktober 2024 masterlist

Seeing Shiu’s car is a goddamn relief. Blood drips from your cheek to your sleeve and you can feel the crimson that coats your gloves and pants seeping through the material. Sure, the blood doesn’t phase you anymore, but it doesn’t make soaked clothing any more comfortable.

Toji rolls down the passenger window as you approach in Shiu’s largest car, the one he usually uses for kidnappings and hostages and the sight of Toji likely means that’s just what they’ve returned from.

“Shiu, I swear to god if there’s a person in the trunk on top of my clean clothes, I’ll lose it,” you grumble, leaning forward to glance into the back. At least there’s no one tied up in the back.

“Don’t worry, doll. He was in the back and the job’s done,” Shiu’s words are slightly muffled as he lights his cigarette.

Letting out a sigh, you nod. “Pop the trunk?”

A puff of smoke leaves Shiu’s lips as he leans down to flick the lock for the trunk of the car. It opens with a thud, revealing your duffle bag with a fresh change of clothes. You had requested Shiu pick you up in a fairly remote location, shrouded by trees on every side to allow you some privacy to change rather than painting the inside of his car crimson.

If Toji were a better man, he would keep his eyes on the shroud of trees ahead. Alas, that’s not the case as Toji’s eyes stray to the side view mirror as he shamelessly watches as you pull your black compression shirt up over your head. He shuffles in his seat, attempting to adjust his cock as it hardens at the sight of your cleavage bouncing in your bra.

You pull your gloves off and let your hair down and if Toji didn’t know you were an assassin, he might think you’re an angel. You wipe some blood from your hair and forehead with the old shirt before pulling on a new black low-cut top. Sliding out of your pants, you slip into a pair of gray sweatpants before slamming the trunk and groaning as you finally sit down in the back seat.

“How was the job?” Toji asks, clearing his throat as he brings a foot up onto the seat to hide his… problem.

“How many guards does one person need?” You groan, rolling your eyes as you slouch back into the leather. “It was such a pain, I didn’t think it would take so long.”

“Mm,” Toji hums a response, unable to keep his thoughts straight. “Stressed?” He asks, shooting a glance at Shiu. He barely manages to contain his scoff when he catches the strained look on his handler’s face as the man keeps his eyes set dead ahead. Oh he’s as bricked up as Toji is right now and it doesn’t do the assassin any favors as his cock jumps at the lewd thoughts running through his mind.

“You have no idea,” you grumble, throwing your head back as you stare at the car’s roof.

Toji takes a pause before deciding to get a bit brazen, wondering if Shiu’s noticed he’s not alone. “Y’know,” Toji begins, the smirk on his lips audible in his voice, “I have an idea that could help with that.”

Catching the obvious innuendo held within Toji’s tone, Shiu finally shoots him a glance. It’s hard not to notice the tent in Toji’s pants even with his leg up on the seat in an attempt to block it. The handler takes a long drag of his cigarette, equally unable to stop his cock from growing harder in his slacks just as he was beginning to get it under control.

Toji shuffles to get a better look at you in the back seat as the gears in your mind turn. Shiu is close behind, moving his head more subtly to stare at you in his peripherals. You’re not oblivious to the deeper meaning behind Toji’s words and you can’t deny that they’re both attractive. Both men have also made their attraction to you fairly obvious over the past few months of working with them. In fact, it’s hardly a debate in your mind whether you want to have sex with them. The real question is whether the car can handle both of them. Or if you can.

“Care to enlighten me?” You play along with Toji’s words, a sly smirk donning your lips.

The assassin grins, eyes darkening as his pupils blow with lust. “Y’know, you gave Shiu and I a bit of a show back there, n’ we both seem to be havin’ a bit of a problem.”

Your brow raises as you fight the urge to call them out for watching you, but you bite your tongue given that you were equally guilty in this scenario, having purposefully made a show out of changing for both men. Had you truly wanted to, you could have absolutely stood closer to the trunk to change but you made sure you were in view of the sideview mirrors, just as you know Toji has done in the past.

“I’m thinkin’ we could help with that stress, n’ you could help with our problems,” Toji shrugs like it’s all a simple exchange.

“You’ve been awfully quiet, Shiu. You gonna help with all my stress?” You purr, watching as he stubs out his cigarette in an ashtray sitting in the center of the car with a smirk.

He’s out of the car in a second, back door open as he slides into the back seat with you. His lips eagerly collide with yours just as you see Toji slide between the gap in the front seats with a grunt of effort. Though you can’t see him, you can hear him shuffling around, knocking both you and Shiu in his effort to slip into the back seat with you.

Shiu pulls back, ready to spout irritated words at Toji, but a single tug on his tie from your eager fingers pulls him back down to you. He gives in immediately, shoulders relaxing as your fingers rake through the short hair at the base of his scalp.

You gasp into the kiss as Toji’s large hand grips your thigh, a row of sloppy kisses planted along the column of your neck. His scar brushes against your skin as he focuses his attention at the base of your neck. Shiu swallows your whimper when Toji begins to suck on the sensitive spot at the base of your neck.

Shiu doesn’t break the kiss as he easily shuffles out of his suit jacket. The clanking of a belt cuts through the lewd sounds painting the air as he tosses that into the front as well.

“Such a dirty little thing, aren’t ya?” Toji hums, groping your breast with one hand as he covertly slips you onto his lap. His hardened length tents his pants and rubs against the swell of your ass as he not-so-subtly ruts his hips against you.

With each roll of Toji’s hips and sloppy kiss left on your neck, you shuffle and whine into Shiu’s mouth. The handler sighs, pulling back to shoot Toji a look. “Fushiguro, stop moving her around so much, I’m practically up against the seat.”

Toji clicks his tongue. “Not my problem,” he gruffs.

“It will be when you’re the one shoved up against the seat.”

“Boys, there’s enough of me to go around. You can both have your turn,” you purr, squeezing Toji’s thigh as you press a chaste kiss to Shiu’s lips. It seems to satisfy them both as Toji’s hands grip your hips while he continues to grind against you while Shiu loosens his tie and discards his shirt.

As Shiu undresses, Toji uses his thumb and forefinger to turn your chin to him, capturing your lips in a sloppy kiss. By comparison to Shiu, Toji’s lips are rough and he moves against you with fervor as though he’s been waiting his entire life for this moment. He commands you with his tongue rather than moving with you. Toji wants control.

With your attention on Toji, Shiu’s hands wander over your thighs before sliding along the band of your sweatpants as he begins to work them down your legs, lifting you briefly off of Toji’s lap. Your attention is pulled to the handler as you let out a surprised yelp at being lifted so suddenly, but Toji’s having none of that as he tightens his grip on your chin and pulls you back to him.

“Ah-ah,” Toji tuts, squeezing your cheeks with his forefinger and thumb. “Eyes on me, girl.” He stares at your puckered lips, running his thumb over the lower one as you stare into his emerald eyes, obediently keeping your attention on him. Shiu pushes your thighs open, resting them on either side of Toji’s knees beneath you. He begins to kiss up your inner thighs, sucking and nipping at the sensitive skin.

You bite back a moan but Toji grins as your eyes glaze over with need, growing more lidded by the second. “You wet for Shiu already, pretty lil’ thing?” Toji drawls, a puff of air leaving his nose in a dry laugh when all you can manage is a moan.

“Words, doll,” Shiu instructs, equally as pushy as Toji even as he looks up at you from between your thighs.

“Y-Yes,” you manage, lips parting as Shiu licks a long stripe up your clothed pussy.

The handler smirks, fingers digging into your skin as his tongue swipes over his lower lip. “She’s fucking soaked for us, Fushiguro.”

Toji finally lets your chin go, your head falling back onto his shoulder as he moves his attention to your breasts. Large, rough, hands knead the plush of your breasts as Shiu hooks two fingers beneath the fabric of your panties and moves it aside.

You wouldn’t know with your head thrown back on Toji’s shoulder but they exchange a look as Toji flicks your nipple and Shiu gives your clit a couple of kitten licks at the same time. A shrill gasp leaves your lips followed by a whimper as you arch your back against Toji at the sudden sensation. The assassin’s cock twitches against your ass as he hums in your ear, pleased with your moans.

Shiu occupies himself with your pleasure as he plunges his tongue into your core, lidded mahogany eyes focused on your reactions as he flicks the muscle within your gummy walls in search of what sends your eyes rolling into the back of your head. Your lips are parted as you lean your full weight back against Toji, his hands continuing to pinch, flick and tug on your nipples. Both men’s actions send pleasure straight to your throbbing pussy but it’s when Shiu withdraws and slides his middle finger deep within your walls that you jolt and your hands go out in search of something to grab onto.

“Easy, girl,” Toji chuckles at your reaction, rutting his hips against your ass as your sudden movement teases his pulsing cock with friction. His lips attach to your neck as he sucks and bites at the tender skin, leaving behind marks that you know will turn purple in a matter of moments.

Clutching onto Toji’s thick forearm and the seat in front of you, you whimper as Shiu curls his finger within you. It’s only a matter of moments before he’s found your sweet spot and begins to rhythmically bully your walls.

“Shit, doll, you’ve got a pretty moan,” Shiu groans as he begins to palm his hardened erection through his boxers. The shuffling of fabric tells you that endeavor doesn't last long as he pulls his cock from his slacks to slowly pump himself as he reattaches his lips to your clit, sucking and swirling his tongue around the bundle of nerves. He moans against your cunt, the vibrations sending a chill straight up your spine as you arch your back for him.

“You close already?” Toji teases as he continues to palm your breasts with one hand, moving the other to hold your hips in place as you begin to squirm on his lap. The movement of your hips is driving him crazy, but he resists the urge to flip you and bully his cock into you right then and there out of fear of breaking you.

“Ah- f-faster-!” you whimper, legs quivering on either side of Toji’s knees as you attempt to fasten them around Shiu’s head. The handler chuckles once more, sliding a second finger easily past your folds and adding to the intense pleasure coiling in your abdomen. Your nails dig hard into the leather of Shiu’s front seat and Toji’s forearm as the digits within your walls pick up their pace, moving faster and harder.

“Cum on your handler’s face f’r me,” Toji coaxes in your ear, his voice low and sultry in tone, sending you crashing into your climax like a ton of bricks.

“Shiu-! Shit- haah-” you babble and moan as your back arches and your walls pulse around his digits. Toji holds you firmly in place with one hand as Shiu doesn’t relent, only slowing his movements to draw wave after wave of your orgasm out of you. When you slump back against Toji with a pant, Shiu finally withdraws his fingers, getting to a hunched standing position. He leans over you, gripping your chin as he slides his slick-covered fingers between your lips.

“Good girl,” Shiu praises, wiping your arousal from his chin with the back of his other hand. You suck his fingers, the taste of your climax sending heat between your thighs once more. You subconsciously attempt to close your legs again, catching Toji’s attention.

“Still horny after that, eh?”

“Don’t be a tease, Toj’,” you groan breathlessly.

“Dunno, think you might deserve it after the show you gave us earlier,” Shiu comments as he lights a cigarette.

“Open a window, asshole,” Toji growls with a huff. Shiu shrugs, a puff of smoke leaving his lips as he cracks the window behind him.

Your chest still heaves, completely blissed out as Toji easily lifts you from his lap and sets you down on all fours on the back seat. Your legs are still trembling from your orgasm as you struggle to hold yourself upright on shaky limbs.

“Still sensitive, doll?” Shiu teases as he blows a puff of smoke out the window and gives you a moment to come down from your high. You nod as you look up at him before your attention is drawn to his cock. You blink a few times as you take in Shiu’s size. His shaft is of fairly average girth, but he’s long. You inadvertently bite your lip, catching the handler’s eye. “See something you like?” He grins, holding his cigarette off to the side as smoke cascades up to the roof and out the window.

“‘M thinking we should have done this a while ago,” you purr, aiming to sit down on your knees in an attempt to tease the man, but you’re immediately pulled back up into your original position. You yelp in surprise, turning your attention to Toji, who’s now mostly undressed with his shirt tossed aside and pants pulled down enough that you can see the tent in his boxers.

“Nah, stay on your hands and knees,” he chides, getting on his knees behind you, although he’s forced to bend over your back to avoid hitting his head on the car’s roof. His breath is warm on your back as you feel him pull his length from his black boxers. The weight of his cock on your ass makes you swallow as you turn your head to catch a glimpse of the bulky man behind you.

Toji is grinning as he slowly pumps his length, eyes lidded as he watches the way you take in just how thick and long he is. A pulsing vein runs up the side of his length up to his swollen tip, dripping with pre-cum that damn near makes your mouth water.

“As much as I like havin’ you ogle me, I wanna see that pretty lil’ mouth of yours wrapped around a cock while I rail ya from behind.” Toji’s words are filthy as he lines himself up with your sopping lips.

Shiu’s fingers grab your chin as he guides you back to him. He twitches at the mere sight of you, a puff of smoke leaving him as he pushes his tip between your lips.

“Shiiit, doll,” Shiu groans as you obediently hollow your cheeks and swirl your tongue over his swollen head. He leans his knee on the seat to support his weight as he slowly pushes himself into you while Toji ruts his length through your folds, covering it in the slick that still drips from your previous orgasm.

“D’ya think Shiu prepared you well enough f’r me?” Toji teases, and you half expect him to push in right then and there, but it’s his long and thick finger that slips easily into your cunt.

“T-To-!” You cry out around Shiu’s cock, but you don’t manage to finish the assassin’s name when Shiu pushes to the back of your throat, holding you in place by your chin and stifling your cry.

“Hah- Fuck.” A puff of smoke leaves his lips as he moans and throws his head back. “Bein’ such a good girl for me,” he groans, leaning over to stub out the last of his cigarette as he gives you his full attention.

He doesn’t move for a moment, his length pressed to the back of your throat restricting your breathing as tears form in the corners of your eyes.

“Too much, pretty girl?” Shiu taunts, lidded eyes admiring the look of your mouth stuffed full of him. He pulls back just enough to let you breathe and barely mutter out a no. “Tch.” Shiu smirks, bringing a finger to your cheek to wipe the first tear that falls.

Behind you, Toji slips a second finger into your cunt, curling his fingers so expertly it sends a spark of electricity up your spine and heat straight to your core. You moan around Shiu, grinding your hips back against Toji as he teases your clit with the rough pad of his thumb, but just as quickly as he begins to rub circles over the bundle of nerves, he pulls his digits out.

Your muffled whine barely hits the air before Toji sinks his tip in and forces a gasp from deep in your throat. You collapse forward onto your forearms as pain and pleasure mix and coil in your abdomen, forcing Shiu to lower himself with you, though he doesn’t mind now that his head isn’t hitting the ceiling.

Why the fuck did you decide to do this in the car?

Leaning over you, Toji moves his hips as he feeds you his length inch by inch, slowly so as not to split you in half.

“Shit, y’re tight,” he groans, one arm on the back of the seat while his other hand rests by your elbow. When Toji bottoms out, he waits for a moment as he allows you to adjust to just how full you are with his cock. Shiu doesn’t move either as both men give you a chance to take a breath before they ravage you with need. Your handler’s length twitches when you swipe your tongue over the tip teasingly as the pain in your stomach dissolves into nothing but pleasure.

“Hah, you being a tease right now, doll?” Shiu breathes out as he holds your head in place and pushes his cock deep into your throat, moving rhythmically as he fucks into you relentlessly. Toji takes that as his sign to move as well, his cock jerking as he watches you choke on Shiu’s cock.

The assassin rams into you, his length brushing your sweet spot with every thrust. Both men use you so meanly that you’re being shoved back onto each cock in both directions as though they’re competing with one another.

“Mmf-!” You barely manage to choke out a cry as your climax approaches quickly.

“Y’like being used like that, baby?” Toji mutters from above your shoulder. “Y’like bein’ a little toy f’r us?” He pulls out fully before ramming his full length deep into your cunt and pulling a cry from you again as Shiu continues to bully the back of your throat. “Clampin’ down on me, y’re close already, aren’t ya?”

You can barely manage a whimper when your high hits hard and fast, your stomach knotting and releasing in a wave of pure bliss. You see stars as neither man relents, chasing their own orgasms without giving you a break as you gush around Toji’s girthy shaft.

“Gonna make me cum with that mouth of yours,” Shiu moans, his cock jerking and twitching as your throat contracts around him with each whimper and whine that you release. He follows shortly after you, his release painting the back of your throat white as you swallow every drop, your tongue swiping his sensitive tip and pulling a moan from him as he jerks and slumps back into the seat with an arm over the back of the seat and one over the ledge of the window.

Toji becomes surprisingly quiet and although he doesn’t say much, his movements grow sloppy and imprecise and it’s barely a moment before his arousal fills you up and seeps out around his base, leaving a ring of white at the base of his cock as he pulls out.

He gives himself a couple of last pumps as he licks your back once before sitting back on the seat, mirroring Shiu’s actions.

At last, you collapse forward, curled into the seat as you pant to catch your breath. Your tear-filled eyes are blurred with pleasure as you come down from the high of being with Toji and Shiu.

Shiu rakes a hand through your hair so tenderly you almost wouldn’t know he’d just pounded your throat raw barely a minute ago. “How are you feeling?” He asks, tilting your head subtly to get your honest reaction.

You shoot him a smile. “Might be the best dick I’ve gotten in my life.”

Both men chuckle. “Good to hear,” Shiu replies, reaching forward for another cigarette. As he lights it and smoke begins to curl from the ashen tip, he turns his head to blow smoke out the window. “I think I owe you both a night at a hotel,” he comments.

“For the threesome or the job?” Toji chuckles.

“For the job, dumbass.”

You let out an exhausted, breathy laugh as you force yourself to sit up. Shiu grabs his suit jacket and drapes it over your shoulders, his cigarette balanced between his lips.

“You know, you could lie and say it was the threesome and make us feel good,” you tease.

“I think I made you feel plenty good, sweetheart.”

You roll your eyes. “Dunno. Maybe you could show me what you mean at this hotel you’re talking about?”

Toji scoffs, a grin on his scarred lips. “Such a greedy lil’ thing. Already lookin’ for round two?”

You put your hands up defensively. “What can I say?” You smirk, falling back into the seat to catch your breath. “Oh, and Shiu? You need a bigger car.”

masterlist || kinktober 2024 masterlist

𓉸 a/n ; ugh i hoped this would come out way earlier but ended up getting sick among other things. finally starting to feel better though so i hope you enjoyed! as always likes, reblogs, and comments are super appreciated ♡

𓉸 taglist ; currently open. please comment here or on the masterlist to be tagged in the last of my kinktober work ♡

@fushitoru @tojis-ball-sack @rathreads @sukunadckrider @nxcxllxsevens

@r0ckst4rjk