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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 months ago

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“Disenshittify or Die”

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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)

@[email protected] (cropped)

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/112963252835869648

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

#pluralistic #defcon #defcon 32 #hackers #enshittification #speeches #transcripts #disenshittify or die #Youtube

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nadianova · 27 days ago

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welcome to surprise nadia nova how to make a visual novel tutorial

you want to 100% use ren'py i dont make the rules

its straightforward enough that simply downloading, installing and hitting the "create new project" and spamming through the menu and then opening script.rpy to see the code which will tell you like 70% of what you need to make your first vn. there no need to be afraid just because the word 'code' was mentioned. ren'py's own language is just copy pasting stuff back and forth and inserting your own names and pictures. its nothing like C# or java or whatever languages exist cause i know jackshit about any of that and dont know how to do programming

anyway, inside the main script file, script.rpy, are commented instructions on how to name a character, place a sprite, place a background, and put in text and you can basically make a vn with these things. i can not stress it enough KEEP IT SIMPLE, especially if you're starting out. making things complicated or planning massive projects is just shooting yourself in the foot. better to make 2 minute game than get stuck trying to make a epic masterpiece

writing a story is its own thing. however anyone can write and its better to write a shit story than no story. that way you have something to build on and get more comfy with your own art process. its what me and everyone else who makes vns and any other art or skill or hobby have done too.

if you like what some other vn/manga/anime/story does copy it and smash these inspirations together to make your own thing. save pictures and lines you see that get you inspired if you need inspiration and references for your own story. everything in this world is inspired by other things someone else has made. its not stealing unless you get absurd and download someone elses game and take out half the assets and put them in your own game and pretend you didnt

if you have interest do yourself a favour and make a vn. as far as game development goes its one of the most accessible options out there . ren'py is an amazing engine having all the vn necessities already in place since that allows you to just focus on the story and not have to worry about setting things up yourself and scrambling with advanced code unless you really want to

i know the jam is just ending in the following weeks and depending on when you see this post this might be outdated as hell but my yurijam server is still going and will be going until people simmer out and something new shiny takes their attention. still, its a server an people post gay shit there occasionally even outside of jams so me and many others are helpful and like answering questions to help otehrs make stuff. so i think the best way is to join the server rn and just ask questions in the help channel. better to ask stupid questions than no questions

now go make a visual novel im holding a whip and making those scary crack sounds and aiming just close enough to your feet that youre almost convinced it hit you despite your jumping and dancing and DANCE NOW DANCE MAKE A VISUAL NOVEL DANCE GET TO IT MAKE A VISUAL NOVEL DO IT NOW OR ILL GET YOUR FACE NEXT MAKE A VISUAL NOV-

anyway but for real if you really are interested make a vn cause im holding a whip and making thOSE SCARY CR-

#ren'py #renpy #visual novel #gamedev #vndev #tutorial #go maKE A VISUAL NOVEL IM HOLDING A WHIP AND NOT AFRAID OT USE IT

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raguiras · 6 months ago

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Join "Ramshackle Isn't on Fire (Yet)"!

Hosted by @raguiras.

SHARING IS APPRECIATED! ♡

OUR BLOG: @riofy-ramshackle

In this timeline, there isn't one Yuu — no, there are MANY, and as a result, things never get boring at Ramshackle...

Applications open!

All about my Twisted Wonderland fan project under the cut!

First off, who am I?

I'm Mionn, a TWST-obsessed artist who recently started posting art here and is planning to make a ton of Twisted Wonderland content in the future.

Said content is going to include a fair share of comics and OC content, which is why I came up with this project.

I also have a meme blog, @twistedmionn, and a blog devoted to my Deuce x Allen ship, @spade-of-storms.

I love hosting projects, and I hope this will be enjoyable for everyone who decides to join!

What is the purpose of the project?

connecting with others in the fandom & making friends

sharing your own OCs and discovering the ones of other members

fun shenanigans with canons & OCs

developing OC relationships

I'm planning to make short comics based on this project, so your OC will occasionally appear in them!

there's going to be a Tumblr blog where I reblog content involving the OCs participating in the project (= serves as a "library" for the OCs)

What exactly is going to be done?

I'm going to make occasional short comics involving the OCs from the project, and they might also make cameos in my usual art.

Outside of that, this project is meant for making friends with fellow OC havers or strengthening already existing friendships! You can also build relationships between your OCs and the ones made by other members.

Additionally, we're going to have a Discord server that allows members to freely ramble about TWST and our OCs. If you don't have Discord, that's totally fine as well!

How do I join? What do I have to do?

It's easy! Send me a DM asking me to join the project and submit all the OCs you want to be a part of it. We will work on further important details then!

Who can join?

Anyone who isn't a proshipper/racist/anti-LGBTQ+.

If I join, do I have to draw/write/do anything for this project?

Unless you want to, not at all! It's meant to be a fun project, not a duty.

Does this project involve roleplay?

No! However, we will have an optional roleplay channel in the Discord server.

Do I need Discord to join the project?

It's preferred, but not necessary in the slightest!

Is there anything monetary about this project?

Nope! It's entirely for shits and giggles.

Can I submit Yuu/Ramshackle OCs only?

While the project is going to focus on the Yuus/Ramshackle students, all types of OCs (except for fandorm ones) are welcome!

How many of my OCs can be included?

As many as you want to.

Is there anything else of note? What's the plot?

Since there are going to be multiple Yuus, Ramshackle doesn't have an official prefect in this project.

None of the Yuus presently know why they're in TWST or what their purpose is.

Are there going to be ships canon to this project?

Yes, and they're actually fairly relevant!

Unless the owners of two OCs decide on making a poly ship, only one OC x canon ship is allowed per canon character.

For the sake of fairness, please submit one OC x canon ship only (maybe your Yumeship/the one that matters the most to you).

OC x OC ships are allowed!

OC x faculty ships are allowed as long as the OC is of age!

OC x side character ships are allowed, too.

Official OC x canon list

Riddle x Grace (@/cyn-write)

Ace x Ashi (@/ashipiko)

Deuce x Allen (@/raguiras / me)

Trey x Haru (@/vanrouge13)

Cater x Vizzie (@/symphonicmetal101)

Leona x Yuuta (@/bunnwich)

Ruggie x Ivy (@/cherrytreegrove)

Jack x Kiyuu (@/skriblee-ksk)

Azul x Taru (@/taruruchi)

Floyd x Yuhua (@/distant-velleity)

Jade x Celes (@/celestelunia)

Kalim x Spider (@/driedupeyeballs)

Jamil x Yulla (@/grimmxelor)

Vil x Bram (@/valy-gc)

Rook x Soleil (@/nyx-of-night)

Epel x Yuuma (@/ollieeyy)

Idia x Yume (@/comingyourlugubriousness)

Malleus x Reina (@/inkblot-mirror)

Silver x Yuukuro (@/beneathsakurashade)

Sebek x Thea (@/althea-and-alcestris)

Lilia x Via (@/galacticstationsblog)

Crowley x Tammy (@/miss-atena)

Crewel x Ezra (@/boopshoops)

Trein x

Sam x

Vargas x

Neige x Beiyuu (@/silksatinbonnet)

Rollo x Beto

Che'nya x Rem

Fellow x Polaris (@/nerdazzler)

Is there a deadline for submitting OCs? Can I join even weeks after the project starts?

You can join anytime or, if you're already a member, add new OCs! There is no deadline.

Can I leave the project?

I'd be sad to see you leave, but it's entirely your choice!

♤♡◇♧♤♡◇♧♤♡◇♧♤♡◇♧♤♡◇♧♤♡◇♧

OCs in the project

We currently have 100+ OCs made by more than 70 creators in the project. They include Yuus, NRC students, faculty, and even some friends from RSA! Join in on the fun and include your own OCs in the project. (✿◕‿◕)

#twisted wonderland #twst #disney twst #twst art #twst fanart #twisted wonderland fanart #yuu twst #yuu twisted wonderland #twisted wonderland yuu #twst yuu #twst mc #twst oc #oc twisted wonderland #twst fan event #twst fandom #twst original character

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salmonskinrolltf · 11 months ago

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Soulmates 2

[Here's a sequel of sorts to my previous story Soulmates (you don't need to have read it to understand this story). With thanks to @guytransformedforever, @beardobession, @tf-vigilante, @maletransformationlover, @clevertreephilosopher, @scorpionofredsand, and @maletffanatic for providing the photos used as inspiration.]

Hello, my name is Tyler. This is me:

And this is my roommate, Dylan:

Now look, I don’t have a problem with gay people. My cousin is a lesbian. And Dylan is a great roommate. Stays out of my way when we’re not gymming together, but is always down to hang when I need someone to talk to. I just wish he would be less in my face with all his gay shit. Rainbow flags everywhere, blasting Ariana Grande at all hours, constantly bringing new Grindr hookups back to the apartment but giving me side-eye when I ogle women. It’s just… too much for me.

Here’s the thing. I might actually be able to change that. I have this friend Evan, who I’ve wingmanned for on a few occasions over the past year. One night, when we were getting drunk together, he shared his secret with me. He has a magic gift. He clasped my hand and said “tomorrow, you will wake up and have this magic too.” And sure enough, the next day I could feel a tingle coursing through my veins, and I automatically had the knowledge of how to channel it.

Now I have the ability to change somebody’s future. I can’t fiddle with anything that’s innate or has already happened to them. Like, I can’t just make Dylan straight. But I can shape his future decisions or actions, and my magic will make alterations to speed the process along. Like if I made him decide to work out more, he would basically become a muscle beast within the week. Not that I’d do that. I still gotta be the alpha here. I just want to make him a little more… palatable. Someone cool to kick back with all the time, even if he sucks dick. Let’s see... I think I know what will work.

TOMORROW, DYLAN WILL BECOME OBSESSED WITH SPORTS

———————————

Hello, my name is Dylan:

Sports are my LIFE. I never cared about them much growing up, but about a month ago I felt the urge to join my local queer volleyball team and never looked back. It became my everything. It’s been great exercise, but on top of playing volleyball and getting totally jacked off of it, I’ve loved the sense of camaraderie. I love my team. So much so that I even pierced my nipples on a dare when we lost the semifinals. My teammate River also recommended I stop dyeing my hair, and I think the look is really working for me. For some reason, even though it’s only been a month, my hair has grown out significantly since then. Was the red dye stunting its growth or something? Anyway. I also feel like my roommate Tyler and I have really bonded. We’ve been watching baseball games together and I think he appreciates how into it I am. He says he’s excited to bro out while watching football together in the fall.

I love Tyler, but here’s the thing. Maybe I love him too much. I’ve always had this huge crush on him, and no matter how many random Grindr hookups I try to distract myself with, I just can’t stop hoping that one day he’ll give up women for good and decide he loves me. Especially now that we’re spending all this time together, bumping chests when our team wins and shit.

I know us getting together is never going to happen, but I have this… temptation. I was born with a gift. Or maybe I wasn’t. Something my twink friend Paul told me made me think maybe he had something to do with it. Anyway, I have the ability to reshape someone’s past. I change just one thing about their past, and everything about their present just ripples forward to reflect that change. It’s a delicate art. Changing something big can have huge effects that are totally unpredictable. It’s a major temptation to make Tyler gay, but who knows how he’d turn out. Plus, I think that’s just too invasive.

But… Maybe I could change something small about him. Something that would make him less my type, and allow me to move on and focus on finding a boyfriend who would actually be into me. I’m into nice guys. I really love how kind and caring he is. And come on, he’s a FIREFIGHTER. So maybe I can try…

TYLER GREW UP SELFISH AND SPOILED

———————————

What’s up, I’m Tyler.

You dig the jacket? Yeah, I’m still a firefighter, I’m just off duty. But babes dig whatever look I rock, you know what I mean? I get what I want, and what I want is a lot of one night stands. I know how to get ‘em, too. I’m so glad I made the decision to grow this beard out a year ago, it’s opened so many doors for me. And opened a lot of legs.

I’m getting what I want from Dylan, too. Finally, I have a roommate who’s willing to grab brews and watch the game with me. But I think I fucked up when I changed him. Queer volleyball isn’t exactly “sports,” at least not in my book. I thought he’d come out like a linebacker or something! I mean, nipple rings were never part of the plan. The gay guys seem to really go for them, too, so he’s got an even steadier stream of Grindr hookups coming in and out of the place.

On top of that, I’m a little sick of his shit. He’s always giving me lip about stupid stuff like leaving my dishes in the sink or dropping my unwashed uniform on the bathroom floor. He says it’s unsanitary. Like his parade of twinks aren’t dying to sniff that shit anyway. He just doesn’t get it. I think his volleyball teammates are a bad influence too. They’re all so obsessed with aesthetic and anti-hetero rhetoric. I still can’t make him straight, but I can definitely make him less… annoying.

TOMORROW, DYLAN WILL START HANGING OUT WITH MORE STRAIGHT PEOPLE WHO WILL HELP HIM STOP WORRYING ABOUT STUPID SHIT AND BE LESS PRISSY, WELL-GROOMED, AND UPTIGHT

———————————

Yo, I’m Dylan.

Yeah, I cut my hair shorter than the last time you saw me. The upkeep was just getting to be too much, y’know? A couple weeks ago, about the time I dumped that lame-ass volleyball team I was on, I just got bored with shaving every day, too. I invested in a trimmer and now I rock the stubble look, and it’s working for me. I’ve gained a bit of weight since then, and it’s all for the better because I joined my local football league. Having a few extra beers with my new buds afterward just adds to my potential as a linebacker, anyway.

I thought hanging out with more straight people would make me get used to their vibe and kinda inoculate me against Tyler, but I’m still totally obsessed with him. He’s more of a bad boy now, but I’m finding that less unappealing than I used to. Plus, he’s still parading around in his uniform all the time. I can’t help it! I’ve jerked off more times that I can count to his Mr. June photos in the local firefighter calendar.

Whenever I see his mom, she’s constantly going on about how, out of all his Tonka toys growing up, the fire truck was always his favorite. She thinks that’s why he grew up to be a firefighter. Maybe I can change that core memory into something a little more… disreputable. That would definitely make him not my type anymore. I hope.

TYLER’S FAVORITE TOY GROWING UP WAS A TONKA MOTORCYCLE

———————————

Fuckin’ A, man, I’m Tyler.

God, I love my hog. She’s a beaut, ain’t she? My parents wanted me to grow up to be a doctor or a lawyer or a firefighter or some shit, but all I ever wanted to do was ride my hog. Chicks want to ride my hog too, and I let them. As long as they don’t go near my bike! Hahaha, get it? Fuck, I love life. Let me take another drag on this stogie real quick.

Where was I? Oh yeah, my roommate, Dylan. I wish I didn’t have to room with anyone, but my boss at the garage keeps refusing to promote me. I should knock him around one of these days, see if that changes his mind. Anyway, sure, Dylan isn’t so much of a priss anymore. He doesn’t give me shit if I leave my grease-stained clothes on the couch or light up when we’re watching a football game.

But I wanted him to be straight-acting, you know? I tried to train him up as my wingman but he wore a super gay shirt with all these see-through holes to the party, and all the chicks kept their eyes on him the whole time! Fucker. Why can’t he be more like his brother? I’ve seen pictures. That dude is a full on redneck slob, got a Confederate tattoo and everything. I know they had the same backwater-ass trailer trash upbringing, why can’t he be rougher around the edges? You know what… maybe he can!

TOMORROW, DYLAN WILL REALIZE HE WANTS TO EMBRACE HIS WHITE TRASH UPBRINGING

———————————

Hey y’all, I’m Dylan.

Hoo-ee, life has been good lately. I dunno why I resisted my good ol’ boy roots for so long. This goatee really makes me look rugged, dunnit? Also the chest hair. So grabbable. I decided to stop shaving my body, and poof! There it went. A full rug, within like two days I reckon. Like a sign from God. This is how I was always meant to be.

I know I was trying to push away my crush on Tyler by making him not my type, but what’s the fuckin’ point? I need someone who can handle me, and this hot as fuck biker dude I’ve created might be the only one who can handle me at this point. I ride ‘em rough and bareback, just like the horses back home, and weak city dudes just can’t handle it.

Will he be the same if he’s not straight? Maybe not. But as long as he can take my eight inches, I’ll keep him around. I vaguely remember having some sort of compunction about changing him so drastically, but I’m too horny to remember what it was.

Fuck it.

TYLER WAS BORN GAY

———————————

Uh… hi. I’m Tyler. Who are you again?

Sorry, I’m pretty forgetful. Daddy Dylan says I don’t gotta remember shit though, as long as I let him ride me as rough and as long as he likes. He’ll do all the rest for me. He tells me where to go, what to do, who to do. There are so many nice, hot guys who are willing to pay our rent if I turn a few tricks. I love it.

I’ve been like this as long as I can remember. My mom and dad kicked me out when I was 18, in my senior year of high school. I was caught sucking my English teacher’s dick behind the locker rooms. I never went to college after that, but it’s not like I was getting good grades anyway. Sucking Mr. Brentmon’s cock wasn’t for my health, you know. He had a nice juicy one, too. I still dream about it sometimes.

What was I saying? Oh yeah, I took up with this biker gang for a while after getting kicked out. I’ve always had a thing for bikers. But once they got through using my ass, they got bored. It was hard for a while, but now things are oh, so easy. I get all the dick I could ever want. I have a roof over my head, and no job to worry about. All I do is go to the gym and eat and fuck and I never have to think. Dylan said he might take me out muddin’ sometime too. I don’t know what that is, but anything Dylan does is fun. Fuck, I love the way his goatee tickles my skin when he kisses me, so rough, so manly. Way manlier than I’ve ever been. It’s so fucking hot. I love how he takes care of me.

I really have no complaints. I wouldn’t change anything about my life, even if I could remember how…

#roommates #straight to gay #masculinization #biker #redneck #jock #IQ drain

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smoshyourheadin · 8 months ago

Note

Maybe u could do a Spencer besties to lovers? Like they've known each other a long time yk

Thankssss no pressure if ur busy ofc <3

It’s Always Been You

cw: reader has a boyf who she breaks up w bc he’s an alchaholic!! don’t read if you aren’t comfortable, i’ll catch you another time ml 💛

a/n: EEK IM SO SORRY THIS TOOK SO LONG THANK YOU FOR BEING PATIENT ANON 🫶🫶💛💛 also im taking this as smosh spence not cm spence so feel free to re-request if you’d like <33 ps, ive written that he listens to pink floyd here so thats who syd barrett is if you don’t know :))

requests r open!!

///

pairing: spencer agnew x fem!reader

florida, 2002

you and spencer were scurrying around in the freshly mown grass of his backyard, playing tag.

“you didn’t get me, you cheated!” you exclaim, ducking as he reaches out to get you again, tumbling to the floor.

“did too!” spencer retorts, his grazed knees dropping to the floor so he can lean over you. he meets your eyes, pulls a tongue, and hoists himself back up to run to his tyre swing.

all 11 years you’d known, you’d known them with spencer. your moms had been great friends since way before you were born, being in the same book club. or was it an art night? you didn’t exactly know, but you did know that because your moms were best friends, so were you and spencer.

as you sprung back up to your feet, your moms watched your antics through the kitchen window.

“whoever can swing the other the highest gets to have the last red popsicle!” he yelled as you ran over

“oh you’re so on!”

your hands gripped the tyre and you pushed like your life depended on it.

“y’know,” your mom said “one day, they’re going to end up together.”

his mom looked over at yours and smiled,

“i’d be surprised if they didnt honestly.”

los angeles, 2024

you walk through the door of your apartment, and you kick the door closed behind you. your bag slides off your shoulder, and you throw your keys onto the dresser next to the door. you only manage a long groan before flopping onto the couch.

“heya, charlie!” you scrunch your face up as you feel your dog’s cold, wet nose press against your cheek, as he gently wags his tail

“i missed you too boy, work was so tiring today.” you work at smosh with spencer, and have done for the past seven years after you left your job at another channel to join him. it was basically the best decision you’d ever made, every day filled with laughs; practically just a 24/7 hangout. you work with spencer on smosh games, but rarely ever go on camera, even if spencer’s there. you enjoy it anyway though.

you sit up and scratch behind his ears. he wiggles his body contently at your fondness. and then your stomach growls. it made sense, it was currently 6:43pm, and you last ate at noon, so you get up and drag yourself to make some mac n cheese.

as the pasta boils your phone starts ringing.

it’s james.

rubbing your hands over your face, you answer the dreaded call from your boyfriend james.

“heyyy~ sweetheart, y’doin okay? you were hic bein’ a bit of a bitch today, didnt answer my calls, what, you hate me or sumn?” he rambles, most of his words just slurring off.

“james, are you drinking again?” your voice is agitated, hearing the chattering and the low bass of a bar in the background.

you know he has a problem, and you’ve tried to get him to stop so many times. but you just can’t. he just won’t take your help.

“wha- i mean- well- no- but um- well y’r just gonna be mad at me like y’allways are” he stammers, not wanting to tell you the truth.

“no, i’m done with this. you say all this to me when you’re drunk, and then act like everything is fine! i’m sick of it! you spend so much time at the bar, and its the only place we ever go on dates, and i just end up babysitting you! so yeah i am mad! but for the last time! fuck you james.”

you hang up.

you start to tear up, the knot in your chest tight as your emotions come rushing to you, face heating up as tears begin to fall. the hissing of something behind you snaps you out of it.

“shit!” you rush over to to your stove, where the water from your pasta spills over the sides, the flames licking at the bottom of the pan.you take it off the heat and turn it off. it looks done anyway. you add some butter, and, of course, cheese. stirring gently, you sob.

james was so nice to you, always showering you with gifts and praise and love. but it was all for nothing. he just didn’t love you like he loved drinking in the end.

pouring the mac n cheese into a bowl, you call spencer.

“hey lemon! how’s my favourite person this fine evening?” you smile at the nickname.

florida, 2007

“spencer, you’re a boy. why are you so complicated? i mean, its just annoying!” you walk into his bedroom after his mom let you in, clearly pissed off. being 16 isn’t fun, especially when boys you like are rude to you.

“what did he do?” spencer doesn’t look up from his computer, just slightly turn his head.

“he said that i must eat lemons because of how bitter i am. i mean come on!” you lie on his bed and watch him play runescape.

“lemon… hmph” he just smiles and continues whatever he was doing on his game.

“what? nothing to say? ugh! you suuuuuck!”

los angeles, 2024

“yeah, i mean, no. i broke up with james.” you sniffle, and eat a forkfull of your food, elbows resting on the cold marble of the kitchen island.

“i mean- um- yeah thats horrible…” he says

“you’re allowed to celebrate, i know you hated him. and so did everyone. but still. im fragile right now!” you giggle through your gentle tears

“well, i mean, honestly? glad he’s gone. he sucked dude. not sure why you didn’t do it sooner. well, one positive to come of this, your pillows won’t stink of beer next time i nap at yours!” he replies, clearly happy for you.

“yeah,” you chuckle at the memory of spencer falling asleep on your bed, then completing his hair smelt like budweiser “that is true.”

“all seriousness though, are you okay?” his voice is genuine this time, filled with concern.

“no, not really. it’s just… different i guess. but, not much has changed y’know? like, it already felt like he wasn’t my boyfriend anymore…” you begin to ramble for at least 20 minutes, only to be met with the occasional ‘mhmn’ and ‘yeah’ from spencer. mid sentence, there’s a knock at your door.

“oh one sec, someone’s here.” you get up from your table and swing the door open to see a very sympathetic looking spencer, two target bags in his hands.

your jaw is on the floor. you were just crying to him over the phone, and he’d stayed whilst going out to get what you can only assume is things like sour patch kids and vanilla ice cream, which you could see at the top of the bag. your favourites.

“girls night?” he smirked and raised the bags at his sides.

all you can do is smile ear to ear, and wrap him in a tight hug. he leaned into you, basking in your sweet citrusy perfume.

“you’re my favourite, spencie.” you say into his shoulder.

as you both walk inside, charlie comes bounding over to spencer, his favourite person.

“who’s a good boy! charlie is!” spencer was now crouchedby your kitchen island, fussing over your dog as you walked to put on something more comfortable. you slid on some track pants and an old atari hoodie. walking back into your kitchen, spencer has unpacked the bags, and is creating his favourite conconction, The Agnew Sundae. basically the most sickeningly sweet ice cream ever. his dad made it for you both in the summer, and it consisted of:

vanilla ice cream

chocolate syrup

caramel sauce

whipped cream

sprinkles

mini marshmallows

chocolate chips

m&ms

and some crushed oreos to finish.

god, you know you’re going to regret this later, but boy was it a good way to cheer you up.

also strewn on the counter was his switch and copy of animal crossing, a few of his dvd’s for you to watch, and his mom’s chocolate chip cookies.

“spencer, how on earth did you get these? your mom lives across the country!” you hold up the baggie, and raise an eyebrow.

he looks up from his ice cream assembly station, and smirks.

“a magician never- ow!”

you cut him off by lightly jabbing his arm

“okay okay, she visited not to long ago - when she took you to the mall? and she gave me these to freeze and keep for an important event. i think she’d agree this is important.” you cant help but smile at his remark. you missed you moms.

“i’ll have to ring her later to thank her.” you say.

the night goes on, and you and spencer sit on the couch under a blanket watching barbie princess charm school. because what else are you going to watch?

as the movie goes on, and the effects of the agnew sundae kick in; you were dozing off on his shoulder. towards the end of the movie, so does he. he drifts off, comforted by your soft hair occasionally brushing against his face.

you stir awake, the sun beaming into your eyes through your semi-open blinds, and you’re hit by a wave of memory. everything that happened last night comes flooding back.

james’ call.

spencer’s call.

spencer showing up for you.

at the latter, you smile slightly. you prop yourself up on the sofa, and notice the absence of spencer’s warmth by you. frowning slightly, you walk into the kitchen.

“morning sleepyhead” his sweet voice rings through the room

“hey. i thought you’d’ve gone home”

“no, im not that mean! who do you take me for?” he retorts, his attention turning back to the pancakes on the stove.

“pancakes? what time is it?” you come up behind him, putting your chin on his shoulder.

“yeah, and it’s about 10:30.” he leant his head on yours, flipping one. you had to admit, they look pretty good.

“10:30!?” you lift you head in surprise, looking at your phone “shouldn’t we be in work?”

“nope, i called us in sick. said my mom was having surgery. which she is, but i made it sound dramatic so we could stay off.” he looks at you, and smiles slightly.

“well, send her my love! i think i’ll go get dressed now.” he hummed, and you left the room.

opening your closet, you pick out a yellow baggy t-shirt and some grey sweatpants. you pull on some fluffy socks, and slip on a zip up hoodie. walking back out into the living room, spencer walks in with two plates piled high with pancakes, drenched in syrup and strawberries

“so,” you say, a fork full of pancakes in your mouth. “whats the plan for today?”

he looks over at you, and shrugs slightly. “not sure, we could go to the book store you like?”

“ah, you know the way to a girl’s heart“ you put a hand over your chest and giggle a bit.

a few hours later, you walk into the store, door creaking just a bit as a small brass bell chimes overhead. the air is filled with a comforting mix of old paper, leather bindings, and a hint of freshly brewed coffee from the corner cafe that you and spencer like to get tea from. you breathe it in deeply, a sense of calm washing over you. as you walk over the creaky wooden floorboards beneath you, soft warm light filters down from antique lamps, and cast a gentle glow over the rows of books. you ghost your fingertips over the cloth spines while the quiet murmur of whispered conversations and the occasional rustling of pages create a soothing background noise, almost like a lullaby. through spencer’s airpods, syd barrett serenades you both, and his voice blends seamlessly with the ambiance of the store.

“anything good today lemon?” spencer says as he shimmies up next to you in the aisle of towering book shelves, his voice like honey rolling off his tongue. his hair was unruly as always, but he looked so pretty in this light. his face was littered with freckles that you wish you could kiss. he’s smiling at you, and it snaps you back to reality, and reminds you of the fact you’re staring at him

“uh, yeah, i think i’ll get this one” you smile back, holding up a copy of memoirs of a geisha by arthur golden

“cool, shayne likes that one i think. but he likes every book so…” he smiles at his own remark “um, you want me to grab our normal seats in the cafe while you pay for that?”

“yes, please!” you reply eagerly, smiling as he walked off.

you walk up to the cashier, an older lady who always gives you a bookmark.

“thank you m’darlin’, have a lovely day!”

“you too mrs bryson!” you reply, heading over to spencer who’s sat in some plush leather armchairs. as you sit in comfortable silence with him, time seems to slow down, and for a moment, it's just you, spencer, the books, and the comforting atmosphere of this charming bookstore.

“i got you your sweet tea.” he says, handing you a plastic cup filled with your favourite tea.

he remembered.

fuck.

you were in love with spencer agnew, and it took you him handing you your favourite tea to realise it.

“thanks spence.” you say, still grasping the feelings in your chest.

while you read you book and drink your tea, you feel your attention drifting to him. you can't help but glance up from the pages every now and then, watching him as he sits across from you, his focus on his own book. his fingers absently tracing the rim of his coffee mug, his brow furrowing as he reads. the way the sunlight filters through the small window, casting a warm glow across his hair, highlighting the subtle streaks of lighter brown among his dark curls. you find yourself smiling at the sight of him, wondering when these small, mundane moments began to mean so much to you. the bookstore is quiet, aside for the murmur of others reading or talking in hushed tones. yet, with spencer sitting just a few feet away, the world feels like it's faded to the background. it's just you and him, sharing this space, this moment. you watch the way his lips move slightly as he reads, how he occasionally tilts his head in concentration, and the way his eyes light up when he finds something particularly interesting. as he looks up and catches you watching him, you feel a rush of warmth spreading through your chest. he smiles at you, a slow, easy smile that makes your heart skip a beat. he raises an eyebrow, and you quickly look back down at your book, feeling your cheeks flush. but you can't help it; your gaze finds its way back to him, like he's the most interesting story in the room. he seems to notice the shift in the air between you. he closes his book and leans forward slightly, his elbows resting on his knees.

“everything okay?” he asks, his voice gentle, his eyes filled with genuine curiosity.

“yeah,” you reply, trying to sound casual, though your heart is racing. “just... glad to be here with you.”

he nods, his smile growing a bit wider. “me too.”

as he settles back into his chair, you realize that this simple exchange has changed something. the air feels lighter, the connection between you stronger. you may have come here to read and relax, but now, sitting across from spencer, you know you've found something else entirely - something you never want to let go of.

as you leave the store, you’re panicking slightly as you realise you don’t know what to do. so instead you make up an excuse.

“i forgot my keys ," you blurt out, looking back at the bookstore. it's a thin excuse, but spencer doesn't seem to notice. he simply nods, a hint of concern in his eyes.

"do you want me to wait for you?" he asks, already reaching for his phone to check the time.

"no, it's fine," you reply quickly. "you can go ahead. i’ll just be a minute."

spencer seems reluctant to leave, but he nods, offering a warm smile before stepping out onto the street. you watch him walk away, his figure blending into the crowd as he heads toward the main crossing. your heart sinks a little as he disappears from view, and you take a deep breath, trying to steady your racing pulse.

the bookstore feels different now. the warm glow and soft murmurs are still there, but without spencer, it's like the color has faded a bit. you stand by the door, uncertain of what to do next. you could go back outside, catch up with him, and just say it. tell him how you feel. but the words seem stuck in your throat, and the thought of laying your feelings bare feels like too much, too soon.

you step back inside, pretending to look for something you might have left behind. the stacks of books seem to stretch endlessly in front of you, a maze of comforting distractions. you wander through the aisles, hoping to calm your racing thoughts, but all you can think about is spencer - his smile, the way his eyes crinkle when he laughs, the warmth of his voice.

eventually, you find a quiet corner and sit down, closing your eyes for a moment. you know you have to do something. you can't just let him walk away without knowing how much he means to you. but the fear of rejection, of changing everything, feels overwhelming.

you realize you need time to sort through your feelings, to figure out the best way to approach this. with a heavy heart, you decide to make your way home, hoping the familiar surroundings will bring clarity. as you step out onto the street, the cool breeze brushes against your skin, and you take a deep breath, trying to calm the storm of emotions raging inside you.

on the journey home, you replay the moments with spencer in your mind, each one a bittersweet reminder of how much he means to you. you know you can't keep hiding your feelings, but you also know you need to approach this with caution. as you unlock the door to your apartment, you make a silent promise to yourself—to take the time you need, to listen to your heart, and to find the courage to follow where it leads, even if it means risking everything for him.

when you get home, spencer tries calling you as he paces around his bedroom, his phone pressed against his ear. the ringing continues, but there's no answer. he frowns, feeling an uneasy twist in his stomach. maybe you're still in the bookstore. maybe your phone is on silent, or maybe you're just busy. he tells himself there's a reasonable explanation, but the doubt lingers.

as he walks to his kitchen, he dials again. this time, the call goes straight to voicemail. his instincts tell him something isn't right. the keys excuse felt odd, and your hurried departure only amplifies his worry. he takes a moment to think, then leaves his apartment, jumps in his car, starts the engine, and drives toward your apartment.

the streets pass in a blur as he navigates through the evening traffic, his mind racing with possibilities. he finds a parking spot near your building and heads to your door. the hallway is quiet, save for the distant sound of a tv from a neighbouring apartment. he takes a deep breath and knocks.

nothing.

he knocks again, this time a little louder. the knot in his stomach tightens. what if something's wrong? what if he's too late? he knocks a third time, and this time, he hears a faint rustling from inside. the door opens slowly, and there you are, standing in the doorway with a look of surprise and confusion.

"spence?" you say, blinking at him as if he's the last person you expected to see.

"i - i was worried," he stammers, rubbing the back of his neck. "you didn't answer your phone, and i - i didn't know if you were okay."

you tilt your head, trying to process why he's here. his eyes search yours, and you can tell he's anxious, almost desperate to explain himself. "i'm fine," you say, "just had some stuff to think about."

he nods, but you can see he's not entirely convinced. there's something else, something deeper. he takes a step back, as if he's about to leave, but then he hesitates. "i - i have to tell you something," he blurts out, his words coming out in a rush. "i like you. like a lot. like i think i love you? and i know it might be weird, and i don't want to mess things up, but I just had to say it - because i couldn't keep it to myself anymore.”

he looks at you, his eyes full of emotions you can't quite decipher yet. you nod, urging him to continue, even though your own heart is racing. there's something in his gaze that makes you realize this isn't just any confession - this is something that's been building for a long time.

"i've liked you since we were kids," he says, almost breathlessly. "i mean, you were always the coolest person I knew. you didn't care what anyone else thought. you were smart and funny and just... so genuinely kind. i remember when we used to ride our bikes around the neighbourhood, and you'd always be the first one to try something new. like, remember when you climbed that huge tree in mr lawson's yard just because you wanted to see the view from the top? i thought you were so brave."

he chuckles softly, his gaze softening as he reminisces. "and then, when we got older, you were always there for me. when my parents split up, and i felt like everything was falling apart, you were the one who came over with a pizza and just listened. you didn't try to fix it; you just let me talk. that's something i've always loved about you. you're a great listener, and you care about people. like, really care."

he shifts his weight from one foot to the other, his eyes locking with yours. "it's not just that, though. It's the little things, too. the way you laugh at the dumbest of angela’s jokes, the way you get excited about your favorite books, and how you always know the right thing to say when I'm feeling down. you make everything feel... lighter, you know? like, even when things are tough, you find a way to make it better."

spencer pauses, his voice growing more earnest. "so yeah, i've um, been holding onto this for a while, and i just, couldn't keep pretending that i didn't feel this way. i like you - a lot. and i don't know if you feel the same way, but i just couldn't not tell you anymore."

he takes a step back, the tension in his shoulders indicating that he's prepared to leave if needed. "i don't want to make things weird between us. if you don't feel the same, that's okay. i just had to say it, because you're the best thing in my life, and i can't keep acting like you aren't."

his confession takes you by surprise, but as he speaks, you feel a surge of warmth in your chest. the words you were struggling to say are suddenly so clear, so obvious. you watch as he starts to turn away, his shoulders slumping in resignation. before he can take another step, you grab his arm and pull him back, your lips pressing against his in a gentle, yet desperate kiss.

he freezes for a moment, stunned by your sudden action, then his arms wrap around you, pulling you close. when you finally break the kiss, you look into his eyes, and there's no doubt, no hesitation.

"it's always been you," you whisper, your voice soft but sure. "you're my person, spencer."

he hugs you tightly, his grip firm and comforting, as if he's afraid you'll disappear if he lets go. you rest your head on his shoulder, feeling the steady beat of his heart against your cheek. it's a perfect moment, one that feels like the beginning of something new, something beautiful.

and as you stand there in each other's embrace, you know that everything's going to be okay, because you have each other. and that's all that matters.

#spencer agnew x reader #spencer agnew #smosh #smoshyourheadin #angela giarratana #amanda lehan canto #arasha lalani #courtney miller #shayne topp

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tolkienpinupcalendar · 16 days ago

Text

Sluttiest Tolkien Character: THE SEMIFINALS (Round 6)

Finwe vs Turin

art by @fil3t ; @redreyenotarget

Propaganda under the cut ↓

Finwe:

Listen...I wouldn't fuck him, but he's the only canonical elf who could reasonably be accused of sluttiness, LaCE compliant

The only elf to canonically have two spouses. Also, the dude had five kids when all the other Unbegotten Elves had 1-3 (Elwë & Luthien, Ingwë & Ingwion. Olwë had 3 kids). Also also, he basically let his kids do whatever they wanted, even withholding a scolding when Kid #1 pointed a sword at Kid #3. It seems like Finwë just had kids for the sake of Doing The Do with his wife and having a big family for no canonical reason.

Literally petitioned the Valar to change the law to allow him to marry again

#the gods literally rewrote elven law because of this guy's dick. cmon. #he couldn't keep it in his pants to save his (or miriel's) life

#he changed the history of the elves by not being able to leave his d in his pants #like he didn't have some special power or a world changing plan he just wanted to do the deed lmao

#channeling my inner valinorean aristocrat hearing of the noldor king's scandalous remarriage for the first time and voting finwe

#guys PLZ finwe was the first slut he invented it

#we gotta respect the OG #known mostly for fathering kids with multiple women?!

#i barely go here and dven I know finwe deserves this

Turin:

he’s got more hoes than names. almost everybody he meets immediately wants to fuck him. man or woman, elf or human, noldo or sinda, none are immune to joining his army of simps. elves don’t even care if he’s a doom magnet bc he’s just too irresistible to them. they’ll choose his hot human ass over wisdom any day. both a father and his daughter want him. elves see him and immediately forget about the laws and customs. WHO else is doing it like him?

#EVERYONE who met turin wanted him #wherever he went he got people fucked over because they were so Down Bad for him

#androg was not Like That over turin and beleg for turin not to win

#turin’s sluttiness has a body count both ways

#turin’s so irresistible he banged his own sister #granted neither knew they were siblings #but dude had everyone ready to risk it all(and die horribly usually because of it) for him

every single elf Túrin meets either wants to adopt him or get in his pants. everyone who fucks him dies horribly, but #worthit. an engaged couple broke up because they both wanted a piece of that hot human ass. his dick caused the fall of a kingdom. literally so sexy he caused political turmoil. he died young but he made every slutty, slutty year count. he’s also pretty heavily queer coded, as close to bisexual as you can get in a story written in 1917.

#tpcbracket #finwe #turin #turin turambar #silmarillion

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demaparbat-hp · 2 months ago

Note

First, omg YOUR ZUTARA ART! It's so so beautiful I want to weep.

Do you have any Zutara fic recs? I need some more Zutara in my life lol

Hi! That's so sweet, thank you ❤️

Most of my free time is spent reading, but I almost never save the links...and can never seem to remember the names and/or authors of the fics.

Luckily I saved the links for some of my absolute favorite fics! There are a lot of truly breathtaking works out there and, sadly, I can't mention them all. These are some names in a very long list of favorites. I hope you enjoy them ❤️

Vermillion Seas, Cardinal Skies by @geothewriter

New directions and re-imagined canon events race toward a different endgame. From lighting bending to bloodbending and deal-making in the Spirit World, this canon-divergent/adjacent AU travels a new road, where unforeseen experiences shape who our heroes are, and who they will become. A Zutara slowburn.

Forgetting is a kind of mercy by @nerdylizj

It's death by a thousand cuts, Katara thinks. Saying goodbye to their old lives, forging ahead with whatever amalgamation of reality once they both fully remember everything, whatever reality that may be. Yet, two tethers between them will remain. Or, Five years after Katara and Zuko go missing in Ba Sing Se, Kya and Lee are found living peacefully in the Earth Kingdom countryside.

Eight Years Later by @starlight-tea-writing

Eight years after Sozin’s Comet, everyone’s lives have begun to take shape, their responsibilities pulling them further and further apart. The last three years have been broken up with infrequent and hurried meetings and get togethers, but by happenstance, things play out a little differently for the eighth anniversary of the End of War. Follow what happens in the year after all of Team Avatar gets together again and the found family re-finds each other and grows even larger. Zutara centric, Sukka, Toph/OC, Aang/OC Irregular updates, Saturdays only.

The White Lotus Zuko series by @calcliffbas

Zuko becomes one of the good guys a little earlier than usual, and joins Aang, Sokka and Katara in Omashu. A canon-adjacent series featuring friendship, humor, and romance.

The Spirit Trap by @leradny

In the Southern Water Tribe, Hakoda teaches his second son Katara to channel the grief over the death of his mother in a healthy way. In the Fire Nation Capital, Ozai tries to betroth his eldest daughter Princess Zuko to Iroh's son, and Ursa has to explain why that's not a good idea. [AU: Switched Genders, but just for Zuko and Katara]

Everything I Am by we-were-angels(untilwefallinlove)

There is something inevitable about them; like the certainty of the sun in the morning and the moon and all her stars at night. After all is said in done, how will history tell their stories? (Set after the One Hundred Year War and the years following.)

#dema answers #zutara #atla #zutara fic #zutara fanfiction #fanfiction rec list #Vermillion Seas Cardinal Skies #forgetting is a kind of mercy #Eight years later #The White Lotus Zuko series #The Spirit Trap #Everything I Am #zutara au

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musashi · 8 months ago

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⚖️ MY TUMBLR-EXCLUSIVE ACE ATTORNEY FAN DISCORD IS OPEN TO THE PUBLIC! ⚖️

Hi all! Welcome to AAblr: Germany. A bunch of AA fans here on tumblr were unhappy with how a previous server of ours was handled, so we all fled to Franziska's (my) party mansion in Germany and now we're straight fucking chilling. And you should come join us!

Here's some cool stuff you can find in AAblr 2:

Channels for every single game, ship, and character you can think of! Hang out in the blorbozone, mute the character channels you hate, meet like-minded people who are insane about all the same things as you.

Weekly calls! We have multiple voice channels and chat daily! Don't want to be on mic? Hey, no worries, we have a TTS bot so you can still be included!

Member-run events! Do you wanna stream your favourite show? Are you making your way through AA and want to voice act it sillystyle with people who love it? Feel free!

Big voice channels as well as small, member-restricted alternatives for people who don't like crowds!

Constantly active chats! We have members in nearly every timezone, so there's always someone to hang with.

Writing/Drawing sprints! Body double with fellow creatives and make some art!

Kin-friendly! We actually started as a kin server, and still have a whole section for kinfolks.

Plural-accessible! We got pluralkit & tupperbox for you and anyone else chilling in your mind palace.

Free of exclusionary bullshit! All are welcome and everyone is kind. Exclusionists and discourse-brainers get flogged.

Open to new fans and oldies! Spoiler-conscious, so don't even sweat!

All ages! I said all are welcome, I meant it!

Tons more fun! Literally too much to list! And so much more to come!

⚖️ JOIN TODAY! I LOVE YOU! ⚖️

#pwaa #ace attorney #aablr germany #just so we're clear: unaffiliated with the original AAblr server #i have mods that actually mod :) they were hired for their prior experience and picked to do a job #and they do a wonderful job!#a good 40+ of our members are from the original server because it was so bad we all left 😜🤙 but none of the admins came lol

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warper-in-training · 9 months ago

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damn who made you mad bro

click 4 better quality. another version cause i disgustingly spent too much time for that piece of hair.

I was bored. I'm making a new telegram art channel since i deleted the last one in a shutdown but I'm now ready to create a new one since I got my motivation for drawing back. its still a wip and i drew this for my intro, but if you want to join its link is RealityWarperBakery.

#im pretty proud of it. i love these typa arts lol #kizhu #my art #obey me #om #obey me swd #obey me shall we date #om swd #obey me nb #obey me nightbringer #om nb #obey me barbatos #om barbatos #obey me barbatos art #obey me barbatos fanart #obey me art #obey me fanart #art #digital art

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vigilxnte-shit · 4 months ago

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join the tuna team!

ever wanted to join a discord server full of people who share your love for one specific, depressed, hot martial artist with a lot of catholic guilt? do you have other interests such as baldur's gate 3 and musical theatre? if so, the tuna team is the place for you!

the tuna team began with the intention of a server where daredevil writers could unite to share our writing, beta read for each other, and just talk about our favorite blind lawyer/vigilante. since then, it has morphed into a place where we all talk to each other about our lives, share pictures of pets, and scream into the void about everything we love.

the tuna team welcomes anyone of any age (well, any age 18 and over), religion, gender, etc. etc. and we would love to have you! if you want to join, message me your discord username and i'll send you a friend request!

be advised that the server is 18+ and although we love charlie and his characters, we do NOT allow speculation on his personal life. we ask that anyone who joins be respectful of others' pronouns, identity, and boundaries- specifics on this are available upon request!

members of the tuna team:

here is a brief introduction to each current member of the tuna team! i am relatively new to interacting with the DD fandom (i've been a fan since 2022, but only just recently started talking with other fans online) and am frankly stunned that so many cool, talented, amazing writers who i look up to are in this server. everyone in here is inspiring and supportive, and contributes to the great vibe we have going in the server!

~~moderators~~

vienna @vigilxnte-shit: hi, as you may have noticed, this is me. i'm the owner of the server, i'm mostly here to write, talk about husband!matt, and send pictures of my cat, coconut.

brooklyn @jazerno: brooke is my irl best friend and roommate, as well as coconut's technical legal mother. brooke originally joined to be a moderator, but has since fallen for frank castle, as one tends to do.

mar @mar-thewriter: mar is a very good friend of mine who i met via another server of people i love. mar doesn't talk much here, but is a great moderator who i love dearly.

mads @madschiavelique: mads is the one who made our gorgeous get roles channel and is our coding genius. they are the ones to thank for

~~tunas~~

leg @a-leg-without-fear: leg is hysterical and our resident emoji artist. she has created all of our emoji in the server and also the lovely art featured above, as well as countless other fun works!

yuna @yarrystyleeza: yuna is the sweetest person you will ever meet and fun fact: tuna team comes from her name! yuna always has the best headcanons and her oc, madilyn, is DARLING.

sapph aka sunshine @sunflowersandsapphires: sapph is the mama of our server, she is sunshine incarnate and always has the best writing prompts + blesses our eyes with her pets!

hira aka robin @amphitrite-5: hira is a very soft and kind soul who regularly makes everyone's day with her kind words. she's also one of our best gamers and doesn't like to sleep (though really, none of us do)

via @zomtart: via is the #1 frank castle character defender and i have no choice but to respect that. they're hilarious and we love having them in the server!

i cant find mariam's tumblr: i was scrolling through mariam's messages and literally fighting the urge to laugh in the office. mariam is hysterical and our representative elektra fan.

eclipse @ecxlipse: eclipse is the baby of our server (i think) but has sent us plenty of gorgeous art and wonderful matt headcanons, and they always have the best contributions to our conversations!

crys @what-i-call-men: crys is responsible for several of the best, spiciest headcanons that have come about on the server. they also have sent the best photo of themselves wearing a DD mask.

zena @coxology101: zena is a busy bee and running her own server, but when we do hear from them, we get some of the best thoughts and BTS dardevil pictures.

ivy @catholicguiltboi: ivy is hysterical and has blessed is with photos of their son, yoshi (who i think is a lizard but i am not very smart).

pasta @pastafossa: my jaw dropped when i saw pasta wanted to join. they contribute so much laughter, many great ideas, and the best advice to the server and we are thrilled they're here.

sybil @gracethyomen: brooke and i have spent several nights since the server started laughing in our apartment over something sybil has said. they are genuinely one of the funniest people ever.

shiori @shiorimakibawrites: shiori has blessed us with some of the best matt thoughts time and time again. like pasta, their name is so recognizable to me that i was genuinely shocked when they asked to join, but i'm so grateful they did!

bella @bellaxgiornata: you'll be sick of hearing this but i genuinely could not believe bella wanted to join the server. in my eyes, she is like the taylor swift of the daredevil fandom (and for clarity's sake, that is the highest compliment i can give). in the server she constantly has the best ideas and is always so supportive of everything we all write.

lindsay @shouldbestudying41: much like bella, this is someone who i very much look up to and respect in the daredevil community. having her in the server is a blessing and they are insanely good at time management- i'm incredibly amazed by their ability to juggle so much at one time!

we also have a couple without blogs; aspen and paris. they are good irl friends of mine who don't say much, but are a joy to have in the server anyway :)

divider on top by @sister-lucifer

tuna team art by @a-leg-without-fear

#vienna speaks #matt murdock #charlie cox #daredevil #matt murdock <3 #netflix daredevil #murdock’s tuna team 🐟

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the-centennial-husbands-bigbang · 1 year ago

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We are happy to introduce you all to the Centennial Husbands' Big Bang!

We wish you a warm welcome to the Centennial Husbands Big Bang!

This is a Big Bang challenge focused around all things Dreamling (Dream of the Endless/Hob Gadling) from the Sandman comics and show, brought to you by the @mr-sadman Modteam!

Without further adue, here are all of the details!!

Our stance on plagiarism and AI

We do not accept nor condone the use of plagiarism, including the use of AI, whether in writing or art. If you are caught using either, you will be disqualified from the current event and barred entry for the other events the Mr. Sadman team puts forward.

General Rules and Informations

Anyone is welcome to participate!

Fear you can’t make it yet? Sign-ups for pinch-hitters will be open later during the event!

You can sign up both as an artist and a writer!! That said, we do not want you to bite more than you can chew, be careful and conscious of the event’s schedule!

Joining the Mr. Sadman discord is strongly advised, as there will be event related channels and roles available, but not required. Please make sure to give us another reliable and quick way to get a hold of you in the case that you don’t join the server/don’t use discord often!

If you are under the age of 18, you will not be able to create explicit content for the event. As a general rule, Mr. Sadman is a 16+ server, be aware of this fact!

The Mr. Sadman Modteam is a firm believer of “ship and let ship” as well as the kinktomato (https://fanlore.org/wiki/Kinktomato). As such, and in accordance with the Server’s existing rules, we will not tolerate any discrimination and harassment in any forms whatsoever. This includes : queerphobia, homophobia, racism, content policing, hate speech, doxxing, shaming, etc.

What’s a Big Bang?

Glad you asked! This is a challenge where writers come up with a 15k+ words fic and get paired with a just-as-enthusiastic artist that accompanies their written work with a piece of art! A detailed schedule spanning around 4 months will be available down this post, fear not!

15k is a lot of words, is there any other way that, as a writer, I can participate?

There is! We are offering a beta-reader partnering system as well as a Mini Bang!

What’s a Mini Bang?

This is a challenge similar to a Big Bang where you write a piece under 15k words! Do note that the Mini Bang does not come with art like the Big Bang does!

Why does the Mini Bang don’t include art?

This is the less stressful option for writers who still want to participate in the event! Less stress for the writers and none for the artists! That said, this might be revised if an important number of artists sign up!

I don’t think my Big Bang fic is gonna reach 15k, can I downgrade to the Mini Bang?

Yes! You will be able to downgrade until December 2nd, a few weeks before drafts are due and artist pairing starts!

I think my Mini Bang fic is gonna be longer than 15k, can I upgrade to the Big Bang?

Yes! You will be able to upgrade until December 2nd, a few weeks before drafts are due and artist pairing starts!

Rules and requirements

For Writers

What are the requirements for my fic?

Your fic must be an unpublished, completely new work! It needs to be able to stand on its own (meaning that sequels and crossovers/fusions are allowed, but your fic must be able to be read on its own!) and must meet the minimum word count requirement, which is 15k words. It is also strongly recommended for no parts of your work to have been already published elsewhere (even small snippets)!

It is also mandatory that you keep your work a secret - this is to assure an anonymous art claim process and is very important. If you talk about your work in any public way (this includes our discord server), your violation will be discussed amongst the mod team and could result in potential removal from the event!

Does it have to focus on a romantic pairing?

Not at all! Your fic can be platonic, romantic, neither or all of the above, as long as it focuses on the relationship between Dream and Hob!

Does my fic have to be beta-read?

While it is not mandatory, we strongly encourage you to use a beta reader during your writing process! Don’t have a beta reader already? We offer a beta-reader pairing system! Just make sure to fill in the appropriate section in the sign-up form to indicate that you are in need of betaing!

My friend and I want to co-author a fic, is that alright?

Hell yeah! We love collaboration! Simply make sure to indicate it on each of your sign-up forms (meaning that each one of you needs to fill a form)!! The word count requirement is still 15k (even if you are one, two, three or more, yes!) and keep in mind, though, that you will not receive more art because there are more authors!

Can I have a secondary pairing in my fic?

Yes! As long as the focus of your fic is Dream/Hob, go ham!

Can I write threesomes, foursomes, polycules?

Yes! As long as the focus of your fic is Dream/Hob, please do!!

Can I write RPF (Tom Sturridge/Ferdinand Kingsley)?

Yes!

What can’t I write, then?

Anything is fair game as long as it is properly tagged and/or warned for! Major content warnings (such as AO3 dictates) must also be applied properly! There is only one exception to this : work depicting real life children (such as the actors’), which is not allowed.

What if I have a fic that I’ve been working on but never posted?

You can totally use it! As long as your work remains unpublished, it’s fair game!

Can I write something for NaNoWriMo and use it as my submission?

Hell yeah!! As long as it’s unpublished and meets the word requirements!!

I’m so excited for this event that I want to write two fics, is that all right?

We never say no to more cake! Please do keep in mind that you’ll still have to respect the schedule for both works at the same time!

As the author, do I have a say in what my paired artist creates?

In short : no. While we do encourage collaboration, this is not a commission process. The artist has free reign on what they want to create that is inspired by your fic. If you can write what you want, then your artist can create what they want!

Can I already pair up with an artist friend?

Absolutely! Just make sure you tell us in the sign up form!

I don’t like my paired artist and/or what my artist has created.

While this is unfortunate, your artist has spent their own energy and free time to create their piece. To dismiss them and their efforts is plain rude. The mods will not step in and give you another artist simply because you are not pleased with your match. Your artist deserves your thanks, not your ire.

What are authors check-ins?

Be not afraid! These are mostly touch points for the modteam to make sure everyone is still on board and on schedule! That said, these are mandatory! Failure to respond to check-ins will disqualify you from participating in the current event.

What if I can’t meet a deadline?

Please make sure to inform a mod as soon as you know! Accommodations might be worked out depending on the situation. We simply ask you to be considerate to your fellow artists, it is unfair to them to back out as they had already started working on their pieces!

Where do I post my fic?

We ask you to post your story to the AO3 collection! You are free, after that, to post it anywhere else you’d like and/or prefer! There, you will also be able to embed and link to your artist’s piece(s)!

For Artists

What kind of art can I make?

Anything from traditional or digital drawing, to photomanips, fanvids, podfics, songwriting, book binding and more! We only ask you to put some effort into it, after all, your author has worked hard on their piece as well!

A few exceptions include : playlists, icons and banners. These, while being a nice and fun bonus for your author, can’t be counted as your primary piece!

How much art do I have to make?

You are required to make one piece of art! But if you are inspired, more are definitely welcome!

What are the minimum requirements for my art?

A minimum of 500px by 500px piece for visual pieces. A minimum of 2 minutes for digital pieces.

*If your art doesn’t fit within these parameters, an agreement can be reached between mod, author and artist as to what could be considered equivalent/sufficient.

How will I be able to claim a fic?

Art claims will be held from January 6th to 10th to give authors the time to complete a first draft as well as send in a summary of their work. We ask you to be readily available to answer messages during that time period as the process will be held on a “first come first served” basis. You will receive a link to the claiming form at the beginning of this period.

Can I already pair up with a writer friend?

Absolutely! Just make sure to tell us in the signing up form!

How do I get in touch with my writer?

Fear not, the mods will place you in contact with your partner once pairing is done!

What are artists’ check-ins?

What if I can’t meet a deadline?

Please make sure to inform a mod as soon as you know! Accommodations might be worked out depending on the situation. We simply ask you to be considerate to your fellow writers, it is unfair to them to back out as they had already started working on their pieces!

Where do I post my art?

From your designated host (whether that’s tumblr, pillowfort, etc.) so that it can be embedded into AO3! We simply ask you to use the relevant tags and link back to your writer’s story!

I’m not a writer nor an artist, but I wish to help. What can I do?

You are very welcome to join us as a beta reader! Every author has different betaing needs, but betaing ranges from cheering your author on, to making sure their grammar and spelling is tip-top! This is an event-long commitment, so make sure you know this before signing up! You are also very welcome to share any relevant information about the Big Bang and join us on Mr. Sadman for all things Sandman!!

Event Schedule

Sign-ups : September 18th to October 21rst First Check-in : October 28th Second Check-in : November 18th Upgrade/Downgrade for Mini Bang/Big Bang : December 2nd Third Check-in/First Draft+Summary due : December 22nd Holiday Pause : December 23rd to January 3rd Art claims : January 6th-10th Art Pairings Masterpost : January 11th Pinch-hitter Signups : January 29th to February 2nd Fourth Check-in : February 3rd Pinch-hitter post : February 4th Final draft : February 25th Posting dates : March 1rst to 3rd

I want to Sign Up!!

You can fill the form and sign up here : https://forms.gle/2RwZrPNxs4Y95oLS9

I need help, how do I reach a mod?

If there is something that is not covered by our rules masterpost and/or FAQ, you are very free to DM us here, on tumblr!

We are also available on email at [email protected] and on discord at Mr. Sadman

That said, the dedicated mods for this event are Winter, Aria, Ches and Britt!

Have fun and keep the Dreamling on!!

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