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lance-thunder-reporting-live · 4 months

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Good morning Amity Park, I'm your ghostly weatherman, Lance Thunder. Today's Saturday, December 30, and there’s a 10% chance of rain. Highs are in the high thirties and the lows are in the high twenties.

Booty McTooty has returned, though it seems that this time, he had not disappeared on his own free will. The Fentons apparently captured Booty McTooty in a thermos around mid November. They planned to conduct experiments on him, but got distracted and forgot that they had him. Booty McTooty stayed there until Daniel Fenton brought the thermos to school as a self defence tool. The thermos was then stolen by a classmate, who accidentally released Booty McTooty along with some small harmless blob ghosts. Booty McTooty has quickly returned to his favourite pastime.

A person in a purple cat costume was seen yesterday stealing jewelry from the JCPenny in the mall. Their face was not seen, but the costume had a few identifiable features, such as one red eye and one yellow eye, long canines, ram horns, and an upside down star on the back. If you have any information please contact APPD.

The Fentons will likely not be driving today.

#danny phantom #lance thunder #unreality #daily report #12/30/06

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alpha-mag-media · 4 months

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10 Timeless Items French Women Have in Their Capsule Wardrobes | 666M87U | 2023-12-30 06:08:01 | December 30, 2023 at 07:08AM

10 Timeless Items French Women Have in Their Capsule Wardrobes | 666M87U | 2023-12-30 06:08:01 Read More … Check full articles at Source: ALPHA MAG

View On WordPress

#10 Timeless Items French Women Have in Their Capsule Wardrobes | 666M87U | 2023-12-30 06:08:01 #Politics #ShowBiz #Sport #Tech #UK #US #World

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maypop-the-dragon · 5 months

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I think I haven’t posted this before?

My brother told me that my dad got mad about this drawing (he’s lame) and stopped being mad when he found out it was a German flag?

#2023-12-14 #actually drawn 2023-06-30 #196 #pride #pride flag #flags #lgbt #germany #art #doodle #meme #chalk

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jius-sims · 1 year

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Men's shoes Collection 03

[Jius] Leather Slip-on Sandals 01-Male

5 swatches

9k+ Polygons

---------------------------------

[Jius] Suede Ankle Boots 06-Male

10 swatches

10k+ Polygons

---------------------------------

[Jius] Leather Derby Shoes 01-Male

2 swatches

8k+ Polygons

----------------------------------

[Jius] Suede Trainers 01-Male

12 swatches

8k+ Polygons

----------------------------------

[Jius] Leather Loafers 03-Male

10 swatches

14k+ Polygons

HQ✔️ Custom thumbnail✔️ All lods✔️

Patreon ( Early access )

❤️Public release on 30 May, 2023❤️

#sims #TheSims #sims4 #the sims 4 #thesim #thesims4 #thesims4cc #sims4shoes #thesims4shoe #TS4 #ts4cc #ts4 shoes #ts4 cc #ts4 custom content #download #jius-sims

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blondrichclosetwitch · 1 year

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I think making up, faking up stories is all right, TikTok, stop the clock, fiction is my thing

I let my lawyer do the talking

I had this niece

I heard you call from across the city through the stereo sound so I crawled there sickeningly pretty as the money went round

and I feel that when I’m with you it’s all right

That kid was so talented, man his potential was so off the charts

The big top

Your devotion has the look of a lunatics gaze

Can’t take it back once it’s been set in motion

What would people say if they listen through the wall

“When I was told you lied to me I hung my head in shame.”

It’s just a den for those who hide and ruin dreams that we all knew so, babe

Babe, you love me cause I’m playing on the radio

“Sing it to me”

Come down and have a little stew

You dirty rat, you made us what we are today

I wanna spend my life with a girl like you and do all the things that you want me to

Some people say it's just rock and roll

Oh but it gets you right down to your soul

Not your sweetheart at all stages:

“Can I see you?”

“maybe later” (this is the sotd)

There's always a chance somebody watchin'

You ain’t seen nothin yet

Now I've tried so hard to be your good boy, good God almighty, don't you know, mama

I can never sleep, but I'm brain-dead branded with a piece of you

Break on through to the other side

You were always on my mind

You can find the key and I can find the way out

Chloe, we don't need permission, so get that through your thick skull

I shouldn’t have done it, but I read it in your letter

Knowing this may help you to open your eyes: spies.

I lived like an island, punished you with silence

Mmh, the insecurities you got won't mind-fuck me

Stop tap-dancin around the conversation

All of us are done for

I'll stick with you, baby, for a thousand years

For tonight keep the crime window closed

We've come to tell you that she's evil

Most definitely

“I’m sick, and I’m wrong.”

See, I don’t know why you like playin head games with me

“I’ve had this plan for many years.”

Ring ring phone—“I’m all nerves.” Back to work, Chloe in the afternoon.

#12/03 #today is a 15/06 #17/8 #11/02 #29/11 #38/11 #28/1 #46/01 #22/04 #sotd #20/02 #14/05 #23/05 #numerology #24/06 #30/03 #15/06 #31/4 #33/6 #34/7 #35/8 #40/4 #16/07 #44/8 #45/9 #17/08 #18/09 #19/10 #36/9

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hoonvrs · 8 months

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CIGARETTES — s. jaeyun smau

PAIRING jake x fmr

SYNOPSIS where university student jake develops a little crush on the girl he sees with a cigarette between her lips in the smoking area and decides he needs to impress her. how else would he do that except calling his smoker friend to teach him how to smoke ( spoiler: it doesn’t go so well. )

GENRE smau, fluff, crack, sprinkle of angst if you read it upside down, golden retriever x black cat duo

FEATURING ( enha ) all, ( ive ) gaeul, yujin, ( nct ) chenle, jisung

WARNING smoking [ don’t smoke kids ], swearing, kys/kms/suicide jokes, friendly bullying, dirty/sex jokes ( more will be added if necessary)

STATUS completed

TAGLIST ( CLOSED )

S. NOTE JAKE MY MANNN ( hoon look away ) as an 02z girl i finally have an smau for each bias so i feel v complete

also please don't spam like as it shadowbans me and lessens engagement <3

PROFILES

virgin mary’s | smoking HAWT | privs

CHAPTERS

01 BI yourself

02 we found love in the smoking area

03 life is roblox

04 you white whore

05 jake you beautiful bastard

06 are we rush houring rn

07 it’s the dawg in me

08 yuh :3

09 the brit

10 what if i was suicidal .

11 here comes christian bale

12 i don’t trust him. weird fella

13 give us another sonnet english boy

14 bros from yapan

15 he thinks he’s a 90s babe

16 i’m just a girl

17 i’m sat.

18 go piss girl

↳ extra: did life360 tell you that.

19 i got my peaches out in jojo

20 okayy little miss poet

21 i’m built different

22 WAHHHHHHW WAAHHH

23 i want you

24 why are u bricked up

25 PUKA PUKA POW POW

26 jake in his flop era

27 this is getting too homoerotic

28 they go low i go lowER

29 inshallah he will eat

30 hello ross lynch

31 filthy omega

32 u r sobir. die (+written 0.8k)

33 she shoiodv be inde clubbb…..

34 when he makes you his girlfriend

35 can’t take me anywhere

36 noo you’re so sexy haha

37 no. (+written 0.7k)

38 i feel so kawaii today

39 come home fat

40 wasn’t very dabatayo of you jay.

↳ extra: it’s actually dattebayo*

41 ur man can’t drive manual

42 i Want you so bad

43 hawk putuh

44 okay blondie

45 though shalt not fail, but prevail

↳ extra: random

EP1 upset my girl. i’m gonna Kms

EP2 im not smoking that shit

EP3 OUR girlfriend ☭

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jayflrt · 2 months

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yours forever in 786

PAIRING ▸ private investigator!jay park x fem!reader

GENRES ▸ social media au (smau), smut, fluff, angst, mystery, drama, enemies to lovers au, college au, rich kid au

SUMMARY ▸ after being blackmailed into accepting an assignment, jay park, a young private detective, is thrown back into college. this time, though, he’s at an ivy league and tasked to follow you to uncover what dark secrets your old money family is hiding. in doing this, jay must fraternize with your inner circle by joining a secret society called the "order of kryptos.” what he doesn’t realize is that the deeper he gets into his mission, the more he starts to lose himself.

WARNINGS ▸ profanity, slowburn, alcohol/drug consumption, portrayals of addiction, sexual jokes, sexual content, betrayals!! backstabbing!!, toxic relationships, order of kryptos isn’t a real secret society but heavily inspired by the ivy league secret societies, emotional cheating (BOOOO! not from mc or jay tho), jay and mc have a small age gap (2 years), most of the characters are pretty toxic so please note that this is not attune to their real life personalities at ALL

UPDATE SCHEDULE ▸ every day

PLAYLIST ▸ still sane by lorde • this is what makes us girls by lana del rey • too good by troye sivan • paparazzi by lady gaga • old money by lana del rey • i was never there by the weeknd, gesaffelstein • prisoner by the weeknd, lana del rey

AUTHOR’S NOTE ▸ hello !! i’m back with another smau but this one’s less lighthearted and more heavy ? sort of an experiment let's see how it goes, but hope u enjoy and lmk what u think !! ♡

CHATROOMS !

TEASER

PROFILES ONE | TWO

ACT ONE: THE TRANSFER

01. skip tracer to millionaire pipeline

02. besties with testes

03. who the fuck is princessyuna

04. the world of the elite

05. please don't the tom nook

06. standing on business (vlog boycott)

07. friend (noun.) not heeseung

08. boo boo the fool

09. professional haters debut

10. 21 jump street for nepo babies

11. how to not bleed to death

12. jay/n train

13. leather jacket

14. no goodbye sucks or fucks

15. ugly truths

16. girlfriend but the girl is silent

17. justice for stress shitters

18. alcohol shortage when

ACT TWO: THE INVITATION

19. attention seeker

20. and there was one bed

21. every boy for himself

22. rhymes with loona

23. out-testosteroned

24. white lies

25. heart-to-heart

26. the athenaeum

27. sock sock shoe shoe

28. group ass fucking

29. post defamation dinner date

30. final verdict

31. do you have time to talk about our lord and savior

32. tap to get tapped back

33. mad as fuck (the remix)

34. in too deep

35. change my world

UNCUTS !

TBD.

ONGOING 4/27/24

#enhypen #enhypen imagines #enhypen smut #enhypen smau #jay smut #jay smau #jay imagines #enhypen social media au #jay x reader #enhypen x reader #enhypen scenarios #jay scenarios #jongseong smut #park jongseong #jay park #jay hard hours #enhypen hard hours

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jjunieworld · 5 months

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ALL FOR A BET ⸝ ˚⋆

pairing: choi soobin x fem!reader

featuring — the rest of txt, yunjin & sakura from le sserafim, jake & sunghoon from enhypen

genre: smau + written, non!idol au, college au, angst, slight unrequited love, fluff, eventual smut

synopsis: choi soobin has always been the popular kid surrounded by his popular friends. you... not so much. one night, soobin and his friends make bet that soobin can't get you to date him in a month. unfortunately for you, you're a hopeless romantic.

warnings: swearing, some bullying, drinking/alcohol, sexual innuendos, lots of love confessions, at some point soobin gets on his knees and begs, some blackmailing, lots of fighting (check chapters for warnings!)

status: complete┊schedule: thurdays, sundays, whenever started: 12/16/23┊ended: 2/22/24 taglist: closed. note: inspired by pink in the night by mitski (more of the general vibes than an actual inspiration)

profiles. the romantics┊the it group

00. prologue ⸝ ˚⋆ 01. oh “dear diary” ⸝ ˚⋆ 02. at 6pm tomorrow ⸝ ˚⋆ 03. spongebob character headass ⸝ ˚⋆ 04. tainted ⸝ ˚⋆ 05. white girl wasted!!!! ⸝ ˚⋆ 06. ghosting ⸝ ˚⋆ 07. wtf is your issue? ⸝ ˚⋆ 08. empty ⸝ ˚⋆ 09. more than anything ⸝ ˚⋆ 10. my beautiful y/n ⸝ ˚⋆ 11. coolest kidz on da block! ⸝ ˚⋆ 12. can you fight?? ⸝ ˚⋆ 13. heart eyes ⸝ ˚⋆ 14. analyzed ⸝ ˚⋆ 15. pink in the night ⸝ ˚⋆ 16. i’ve hacked the system ⸝ ˚⋆ 17. sighs loudly ⸝ ˚⋆ 18. in the clouds ⸝ ˚⋆ 19. backup plan ⸝ ˚⋆ 20. icarus ⸝ ˚⋆ 21. half alive ⸝ ˚⋆ 22. safe space ⸝ ˚⋆ 23. spontaneous movie night ⸝ ˚⋆ 24. the beating heart ⸝ ˚⋆ 25. operation: get him back ⸝ ˚⋆ 26. cmon carrie underwood! ⸝ ˚⋆ 27. the elevator ⸝ ˚⋆ 28. i was right ⸝ ˚⋆ 29. a serious chat ⸝ ˚⋆ 30. it’s not love ⸝ ˚⋆ 31. we are so back!!! ⸝ ˚⋆ 32. just ask and i’ll show you ⸝ ˚⋆ 33. cornered me ⸝ ˚⋆ 34. get a room ⸝ ˚⋆ 35. at 6pm tomorrow (reprise) ⸝ ˚⋆

epilogue. notes between the fabrics

masterlist┊request rules

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alpha-mag-media · 4 months

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13 Anti-Trend Basics That Will Become the Foundation of My 2024 Wardrobe | 666M87U | 2023-12-30 06:08:01 | December 30, 2023 at 07:08AM

13 Anti-Trend Basics That Will Become the Foundation of My 2024 Wardrobe | 666M87U | 2023-12-30 06:08:01 Read More … Check full articles at Source: ALPHA MAG

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#13 Anti-Trend Basics That Will Become the Foundation of My 2024 Wardrobe | 666M87U | 2023-12-30 06:08:01 #Politics #ShowBiz #Sport #Tech #UK #US #World

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tojisun · 4 months

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doo-be-di-boy — simon (ghost) riley

simon (ghost) riley x fem bimbo!reader

> simon and his unabashed adoration for his princess <33

!! suggestive - minors dni (ratings change but overall, simon’s thirst is unmatched); age gap (30s v 20s); no chronological order (loosely-tied worldbuilding)

: another series i didnt expect to gain traction or for me to actually write so much for!! i adore bimbo!reader, she deserves the world :’>

for all posts, pls click at the bimbo!reader tag <33

part 01 - intro post; smut

part 02 - strawberry shortcake perfume

part 03 - simon sonny; ask

part 04 - his thumb on her lips; ask (p link!); smut

part 05 - reduced to whimpers; ask (p link!); smut

part 06 - boo tomato tomato tomato @fratboy; suggestive

part 07 - christina n kisses; smut

part 08 - instagram account <33

part 09 - trembling hands and crochets

part 10 - his darling petal; ask (p link!); smut

part 11 - do you love me?

part 12 - simmy, penguin, rocks!; ask

part 13 - acrylics and surprises; ask | recent

extra 01 - her hyperfixations; ask

extra 02 - jewels n cuffs; ask

extra 03 - super shy!!

extra 04 - chupi chapa

extra 05 - johnny as her bff; ask

extra 06 - dick grabbers <3; ask

extra 07 - kuromi pillow for u!!; ask

extra 08 - their radio (a ramble); ask

extra 09 - clingy!!; ask

extra 10 - little touches; ask

extra 11 - her little swatching palette; ask

extra 12 - the toughest baby girl; ask | recent

i have a short taglist so pls lmk if you would like to be tagged too ^v^

(updated 30 mar 2024)

#bimbo!reader #simon ghost riley x reader #simon ghost riley #female reader #cod masterlist #suns #shes here n shes so gorgeouzz

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inverttheory · 1 year

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howevr the flip side is i get weird on the birthdays of people who aren't in my life any more .

#happy 04/04 happy 06/09 happy 12/30 happy 05/27 happy 03/11 yeah i still think about you .

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mooooonnnzz · 11 months

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don’t text and swing! // miles morales x reader

miles loves texting and he loves you, what could go wrong?

cute lil miles texting headcanons

sum short n simple

readers gender not rlly specified

ooc miles?? idfk how he would text so i tried my best 😭

requests r open!!

miles says mentirosa that jus means liar

⊱ ────── {⋅. ✯ .⋅} ────── ⊰

🕷️ You’re never guaranteed a full on conversation with Miles because most the time he leaves you on open. He doesn’t do it on purpose, really. He just so happens to be a very busy man so trying to talk to him when he isn’t saving New York is pretty difficult.

9:55 pm [ miles <3 ]: Hey did u still one of my jackets

9:55 pm [ miles <3 ]: *steal idk how i got still

9:55 pm [ miles <3 ]: Anyways I cant find it anywhere and ik u have something to with it

10:00 pm [ miles <3 ]: I know ur not ignoring me rn…

10:01 pm [ you ]: oh wow of course im the first person you blame

10:01 pm [ you ]: also i dont have it ☝️

10:02 pm [ miles <3 ]: Who else would take my jackets??

10:02 pm [ miles <3 ]: This also isn’t the first time my jackets OR hoodies have gone missing

10:02 pm [ miles <3 ]: And somehow they always end up in your room

10:03 pm [ miles <3 ]: Suspicious right…🤨

10:06 pm [ you ]: oh shit by some magical force

10:06 pm [ you ]: your jacket managed to teleport to my bed!!

10:07 pm [ you ]: and somehow…IT FLEW ON ME?? AND NOW IM WEARING IT?

10:07 pm [ you ]: this is actually crazy…

10:15 pm [ you ]: wait miles where did you go

10:25 pm [ you ]: are you mad?

10:30 pm [ you ]: no way ur mad

10:40 pm [ you ]: MILES

10:42 pm [ you ]: HELLO

10:43 pm [ you ]: MILESSSS

10:56 pm [ you ]: oh wait mb you’re probably busy saving somebody

10:56 pm [ you ]: got a lil crazy there

10:57 pm [ you ]: ignore all that

1:00 am [ miles <3 ]: I KNEW IT

1:00 am [ miles <3 ]: It’s okay i like you a little deranged 😩

1:03 am [ you ]: why are you texting me at one in the morning

1:04 am [ miles <3 ]: Why are you replying?

1:05 am [ you ]: have you been fighting since 10?

1:12 am [ miles <3 ]: I’ve been studying! 🤓

1:12 am [ you ]: LIAR i know what you are…

🕷️ You text him while he’s in the middle of fighting? You bet he’s going to respond. While giving himself a reasonable distance away from the villian, he holds out his pointer finger and says; “Hold on, let me respond to them real quick…” While they’re throwing punches at Miles, he’s dodging all of them while texting you back. Though, he’s text aren’t legible. At least he thinks they are! All Miles wants to do is talk to you, even if you don’t understand half the things he’s typing. Texting him while he’s swinging has the same effect. He has dropped his phone multiple times and he’s always caught it before it could land on the street, though when his webs come in contact with his screen it registers as someone typing so without even knowing he’s spamming you a whole bunch of jumbled letters.

3:45 pm [ you ]: hey miles can i come over for dinner

3:45 pm [ you ]: im craving ur moms food 😍

3:46 pm [ miles <3 ]: oys of cours

3:48 pm [ you ]: did u just have a stroke

3:53 pm [ miles <3 ]: noi busy

3:53 pm [ you ]: if you’re busy why r u texting me 😭

3:53 pm [ you ]: go back to fighting or wtv ur doing

3:56 pm [ miles <3 ]: i wMt to talk toyj

3:58 pm [ you ]: u can talk to me later miles

3:58 pm [ you ]: im not going away

4:00 pm [ miles <3 ]: hatr

5:46 pm [ miles <3 ]: HEYYY

5:46 pm [ you ]: HII are you not busy anymore

5:47 pm [ miles <3 ]: Yeah

5:48 pm [ miles <3 ]: How’s your day been?

5:49 pm [ you ]: it’s been ehhhhh

5:49 pm [ you ]: i’ve been missing you 😔

5:51 pm [ miles <3 ]: ooajbdko092828900

5:51 pm [ miles <3 ]: 08:$jjaoppapp

5:52 pm [ miles <3 ]: !!!!!

5:54 pm [ you ]: what

6:00 pm [ miles <3 ]: I DROPPED MY PHONE

6:01 pm [ miles <3 ]: ANYWAYS back to what you were saying

6:02 pm [ miles <3]: I’ve been missing you too

6:04 pm [ you ]: youre no better than those people who text and drive 😐

6:05 pm [ you ]: don’t text and swing miles

🕷️ He loves sending you videos of him showing off in his suit. He did a cool trick midair? He’s going to prop up his phone somewhere and start recording, once he perfects the move and edits out any unneeded footage and he sends them to you. He’s all giddy when he does, in his head he’s like, “Will that impress them?” “Do they think that’s cool?” “They’re going to love this!”

11:00 am [ miles <3 ]: (1 attachment video)

11:00 am [ miles <3 ]: What do you think??

11:00 am [ miles <3 ]: Pretty cool right

11:03 am [ you ]: (1 attachment photo)

11:04 am [ you ]: LOOK AT THE FACE YOU MADE WHWN YOU JUMPEDD AHHHHH 💀

11:04 am [ you ]: this is going to be my new lock screen

11:05 am [ miles <3 ]: 😐

11:06 am [ miles <3 ]: Are you going to ignore the cool spin i did?

11:07 am [ you ]: oh sorey

11:08 am [ you ]: THAT WAS A REALLY SICK SPIN

11:09 am [ miles <3 ]: Mentirosa 😒

🕷️ Miles also sends you photos. It ranges from him swinging in midair or him relaxing on top of a building with his lunch in hand. He loves to keep you updated on his life. You’re the only one in this universe that knows his secret, so he texts or shows you everything he comes across as SpiderMan.

3:00 pm [ miles <3 ]: (1 attachment photo)

3:00 pm [ miles <3 ]: Look how pretty the view is from up here

3:00 pm [ you ]: oooh that’s actually so pretty

3:01 pm [ you ]: who knew new york could actually look nice for once?

3:02 pm [ miles <3 ]: I’m going to take you here one day for lunch

6:54 pm [ miles <3 ]: (1 attachment photo)

6:54 pm [ miles <3 ]: You should put this as your lock screen

6:55 pm [ you ]: it’s just you doing the peace sign while swinging

6:55 pm [ miles <3 ]: You said that like it’s a bad thing

6:55 pm [ miles <3 ]: It’s a nice photo :(

6:58 pm [ you ]: look i set it as my lock screen

6:58 pm [ you ]: (1 screenshot)

6:59 pm [ you ]: everyones gonna see that i know spiderman

6:59 pm [ miles <3 ]: YES GOOD

🕷️ He texts you nonsense sometimes. You could be chilling, watching something to pass the time and he will text you something so utterly stupid you would have to take a moment to process it.

10:00 am [ miles <3]: (1 attachment photo)

10:00 am [ you ]: u just sent an empty plate of food?

10:00 am [ miles <3 ]: Yeah cuz I ate 😜

10:01 am [ miles <3 ]: Like literally

10:03 am [ you ]: enough.

fanks to everyone who sent in requests IM WIRITN G THEM RN ✍️

#into the spider verse #miles morales x reader #miles morales #across the spiderverse #miles morales head cannons #miles morales fanfic #miles morales fic #miles morales hc #miles morales text fic #spiderman across the spiderverse #across the spiderverse x reader

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Gig apps trap reverse centaurs in Skinner boxes

Enshittification is the process by which digital platforms devour themselves: first they dangle goodies in front of end users. Once users are locked in, the goodies are taken away and dangled before business customers who supply goods to the users. Once those business customers are stuck on the platform, the goodies are clawed away and showered on the platform’s shareholders:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

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/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Enshittification isn’t just another way of saying “fraud” or “price gouging” or “wage theft.” Enshittification is intrinsically digital, because moving all those goodies around requires the flexibility that only comes with a digital businesses. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can’t rapidly change the price of eggs at Whole Foods without an army of kids with pricing guns on roller-skates. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can change the price of eggs on Amazon Fresh just by twiddling a knob on the service’s back-end.

Twiddling is the key to enshittification: rapidly adjusting prices, conditions and offers. As with any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Tech monopolists aren’t smarter than the Gilded Age sociopaths who monopolized rail or coal — they use the same tricks as those monsters of history, but they do them faster and with computers:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

If Rockefeller wanted to crush a freight company, he couldn’t just click a mouse and lay down a pipeline that ran on the same route, and then click another mouse to make it go away when he was done. When Bezos wants to bankrupt Diapers.com — a company that refused to sell itself to Amazon — he just moved a slider so that diapers on Amazon were being sold below cost. Amazon lost $100m over three months, diapers.com went bankrupt, and every investor learned that competing with Amazon was a losing bet:

https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-bezos-went-thermonuclear-on-diapers-com.html

That’s the power of twiddling — but twiddling cuts both ways. The same flexibility that digital businesses enjoy is hypothetically available to workers and users. The airlines pioneered twiddling ticket prices, and that naturally gave rise to countertwiddling, in the form of comparison shopping sites that scraped the airlines’ sites to predict when tickets would be cheapest:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin

The airlines — like all abusive businesses — refused to tolerate this. They were allowed to touch their knobs as much as they wanted — indeed, they couldn’t stop touching those knobs — but when we tried to twiddle back, that was “felony contempt of business model,” and the airlines sued:

https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/30/airline-sues-man-for-founding-a-cheap-flights-website.html

And sued:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/business/southwest-airlines-lawsuit-prices.html

Platforms don’t just hate it when end-users twiddle back — if anything they are even more aggressive when their business-users dare to twiddle. Take Para, an app that Doordash drivers used to get a peek at the wages offered for jobs before they accepted them — something that Doordash hid from its workers. Doordash ruthlessly attacked Para, saying that by letting drivers know how much they’d earn before they did the work, Para was violating the law:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition

Which law? Well, take your pick. The modern meaning of “IP” is “any law that lets me use the law to control my competitors, competition or customers.” Platforms use a mix of anticircumvention law, patent, copyright, contract, cybersecurity and other legal systems to weave together a thicket of rules that allow them to shut down rivals for their Felony Contempt of Business Model:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Enshittification relies on unlimited twiddling (by platforms), and a general prohibition on countertwiddling (by platform users). Enshittification is a form of fishing, in which bait is dangled before different groups of users and then nimbly withdrawn when they lunge for it. Twiddling puts the suppleness into the enshittifier’s fishing-rod, and a ban on countertwiddling weighs down platform users so they’re always a bit too slow to catch the bait.

Nowhere do we see twiddling’s impact more than in the “gig economy,” where workers are misclassified as independent contractors and put to work for an app that scripts their every move to the finest degree. When an app is your boss, you work for an employer who docks your pay for violating rules that you aren’t allowed to know — and where your attempts to learn those rules are constantly frustrated by the endless back-end twiddling that changes the rules faster than you can learn them.

As with every question of technology, the issue isn’t twiddling per se — it’s who does the twiddling and who gets twiddled. A worker armed with digital tools can play gig work employers off each other and force them to bid up the price of their labor; they can form co-ops with other workers that auto-refuse jobs that don’t pay enough, and use digital tools to organize to shift power from bosses to workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to

Take “reverse centaurs.” In AI research, a “centaur” is a human assisted by a machine that does more than either could do on their own. For example, a chess master and a chess program can play a better game together than either could play separately. A reverse centaur is a machine assisted by a human, where the machine is in charge and the human is a meat-puppet.

Think of Amazon warehouse workers wearing haptic location-aware wristbands that buzz at them continuously dictating where their hands must be; or Amazon drivers whose eye-movements are continuously tracked in order to penalize drivers who look in the “wrong” direction:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur

The difference between a centaur and a reverse centaur is the difference between a machine that makes your life better and a machine that makes your life worse so that your boss gets richer. Reverse centaurism is the 21st Century’s answer to Taylorism, the pseudoscience that saw white-coated “experts” subject workers to humiliating choreography down to the smallest movement of your fingertip:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

While reverse centaurism was born in warehouses and other company-owned facilities, gig work let it make the leap into workers’ homes and cars. The 21st century has seen a return to the cottage industry — a form of production that once saw workers labor far from their bosses and thus beyond their control — but shriven of the autonomy and dignity that working from home once afforded:

https://doctorow.medium.com/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk-463e2730ef0d

The rise and rise of bossware — which allows for remote surveillance of workers in their homes and cars — has turned “work from home” into “live at work.” Reverse centaurs can now be chickenized — a term from labor economics that describes how poultry farmers, who sell their birds to one of three vast poultry processors who have divided up the country like the Pope dividing up the “New World,” are uniquely exploited:

https://onezero.medium.com/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs-b2e8d5cda826

A chickenized reverse centaur has it rough: they must pay for the machines they use to make money for their bosses, they must obey the orders of the app that controls their work, and they are denied any of the protections that a traditional worker might enjoy, even as they are prohibited from deploying digital self-help measures that let them twiddle back to bargain for a better wage.

All of this sets the stage for a phenomenon called algorithmic wage discrimination, in which two workers doing the same job under the same conditions will see radically different payouts for that work. These payouts are continuously tweaked in the background by an algorithm that tries to predict the minimum sum a worker will accept to remain available without payment, to ensure sufficient workers to pick up jobs as they arise.

This phenomenon — and proposed policy and labor solutions to it — is expertly analyzed in “On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination,” a superb paper by UC Law San Franciscos Veena Dubal:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

Dubal uses empirical data and enthnographic accounts from Uber drivers and other gig workers to explain how endless, self-directed twiddling allows gig companies pay workers less and pay themselves more. As @[email protected] explains in his LA Times article on Dubal’s research, the goal of the payment algorithm is to guess how often a given driver needs to receive fair compensation in order to keep them driving when the payments are unfair:

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-04-11/algorithmic-wage-discrimination

The algorithm combines nonconsensual dossiers compiled on individual drivers with population-scale data to seek an equilibrium between keeping drivers waiting, unpaid, for a job; and how much a driver needs to be paid for an individual job, in order to keep that driver from clocking out and doing something else. @ Here’s how that works. Sergio Avedian, a writer for The Rideshare Guy, ran an experiment with two brothers who both drove for Uber; one drove a Tesla and drove intermittently, the other brother rented a hybrid sedan and drove frequently. Sitting side-by-side with the brothers, Avedian showed how the brother with the Tesla was offered more for every trip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UADTiL3S67I

Uber wants to lure intermittent drivers into becoming frequent drivers. Uber doesn’t pay for an oversupply of drivers, because it only pays drivers when they have a passenger in the car. Having drivers on call — but idle — is a way for Uber to shift the cost of maintaining a capacity cushion to its workers.

What’s more, what Uber charges customers is not based on how much it pays its workers. As Uber’s head of product explained: Uber uses “machine-learning techniques to estimate how much groups of customers are willing to shell out for a ride. Uber calculates riders’ propensity for paying a higher price for a particular route at a certain time of day. For instance, someone traveling from a wealthy neighborhood to another tony spot might be asked to pay more than another person heading to a poorer part of town, even if demand, traffic and distance are the same.”

https://qz.com/990131/uber-is-practicing-price-discrimination-economists-say-that-might-not-be-a-bad-thing/

Uber has historically described its business a pure supply-and-demand matching system, where a rush of demand for rides triggers surge pricing, which lures out drivers, which takes care of the demand. That’s not how it works today, and it’s unclear if it ever worked that way. Today, a driver who consults the rider version of the Uber app before accepting a job — to compare how much the rider is paying to how much they stand to earn — is booted off the app and denied further journeys.

Surging, instead, has become just another way to twiddle drivers. One of Dubal’s subjects, Derrick, describes how Uber uses fake surges to lure drivers to airports: “You go to the airport, once the lot get kind of full, then the surge go away.” Other drivers describe how they use groupchats to call out fake surges: “I’m in the Marina. It’s dead. Fake surge.”

That’s pure twiddling. Twiddling turns gamification into gamblification, where your labor buys you a spin on a roulette wheel in a rigged casino. As a driver called Melissa, who had doubled down on her availability to earn a $100 bonus awarded for clocking a certain number of rides, told Dubal, “When you get close to the bonus, the rides start trickling in more slowly…. And it makes sense. It’s really the type of shit that they can do when it’s okay to have a surplus labor force that is just sitting there that they don’t have to pay for.”

Wherever you find reverse-centaurs, you get this kind of gamblification, where the rules are twiddled continuously to make sure that the house always wins. As a contract driver Amazon reverse centaur told Lauren Gurley for Motherboard, “Amazon uses these cameras allegedly to make sure they have a safer driving workforce, but they’re actually using them not to pay delivery companies”:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88npjv/amazons-ai-cameras-are-punishing-drivers-for-mistakes-they-didnt-make

Algorithmic wage discrimination is the robot overlord of our nightmares: its job is to relentlessly quest for vulnerabilities and exploit them. Drivers divide themselves into “ants” (drivers who take every job) and “pickers” (drivers who cherry-pick high-paying jobs). The algorithm’s job is ensuring that pickers get the plum assignments, not the ants, in the hopes of converting those pickers to app-dependent ants.

In my work on enshittification, I call this the “giant teddy bear” gambit. At every county fair, you’ll always spot some poor jerk carrying around a giant teddy-bear they “won” on the midway. But they didn’t win it — not by getting three balls in the peach-basket. Rather, the carny running the rigged game either chose not to operate the “scissor” that kicks balls out of the basket. Or, if the game is “honest” (that is, merely impossible to win, rather than gimmicked), the operator will make a too-good-to-refuse offer: “Get one ball in and I’ll give you this keychain. Win two keychains and I’ll let you trade them for this giant teddy bear.”

Carnies aren’t in the business of giving away giant teddy bears — rather, the gambit is an investment. Giving a mark a giant teddy bear to carry around the midway all day acts as a convincer, luring other marks to try to land three balls in the basket and win their own teddy bear.

In the same way, platforms like Uber distribute giant teddy bears to pickers, as a way of keeping the ants scurrying from job to job, and as a way of convincing the pickers to give up whatever work allows them to discriminate among Uber’s offers and hold out for the plum deals, whereupon then can be transmogrified into ants themselves.

Dubal describes the experience of Adil, a Syrian refugee who drives for Uber in the Bay Area. His colleagues are pickers, and showed him screenshots of how much they earned. Determined to get a share of that money, Adil became a model ant, driving two hours to San Francisco, driving three days straight, napping in his car, spending only one day per week with his family. The algorithm noticed that Adil needed the work, so it paid him less.

Adil responded the way the system predicted he would, by driving even more: “My friends they make it, so I keep going, maybe I can figure it out. It’s unsecure, and I don’t know how people they do it. I don’t know how I am doing it, but I have to. I mean, I don’t find another option. In a minute, if I find something else, oh man, I will be out immediately. I am a very patient person, that’s why I can continue.”

Another driver, Diego, told Dubal about how the winners of the giant teddy bears fell into the trap of thinking that they were “good at the app”: “Any time there’s some big shot getting high pay outs, they always shame everyone else and say you don’t know how to use the app. I think there’s secret PR campaigns going on that gives targeted payouts to select workers, and they just think it’s all them.”

That’s the power of twiddling: by hoarding all the flexibility offered by digital tools, the management at platforms can become centaurs, able to string along thousands of workers, while the workers are reverse-centaurs, puppeteered by the apps.

As the example of Adil shows, the algorithm doesn’t need to be very sophisticated in order to figure out which workers it can underpay. The system automates the kind of racial and gender discrimination that is formally illegal, but which is masked by the smokescreen of digitization. An employer who systematically paid women less than men, or Black people less than white people, would be liable to criminal and civil sanctions. But if an algorithm simply notices that people who have fewer job prospects drive more and will thus accept lower wages, that’s just “optimization,” not racism or sexism.

This is the key to understanding the AI hype bubble: when ghouls from multinational banks predict 13 trillion dollar markets for “AI,” what they mean is that digital tools will speed up the twiddling and other wage-suppression techniques to transfer $13T in value from workers and consumers to shareholders.

The American business lobby is relentlessly focused on the goal of reducing wages. That’s the force behind “free trade,” “right to work,” and other codewords for “paying workers less,” including “gig work.” Tech workers long saw themselves as above this fray, immune to labor exploitation because they worked for a noble profession that took care of its own.

But the epidemic of mass tech-worker layoffs, following on the heels of massive stock buybacks, has demonstrated that tech bosses are just like any other boss: willing to pay as little as they can get away with, and no more. Tech bosses are so comfortable with their market dominance and the lock-in of their customers that they are happy to turn out hundreds of thousands of skilled workers, convinced that the twiddling systems they’ve built are the kinds of self-licking ice-cream cones that are so simple even a manager can use them — no morlocks required.

The tech worker layoffs are best understood as an all-out war on tech worker morale, because that morale is the source of tech workers’ confidence and thus their demands for a larger share of the value generated by their labor. The current tech layoff template is very different from previous tech layoffs: today’s layoffs are taking place over a period of months, long after they are announced, and laid off tech worker is likely to be offered a months of paid post-layoff work, rather than severance. This means that tech workplaces are now haunted by the walking dead, workers who have been laid off but need to come into the office for months, even as the threat of layoffs looms over the heads of the workers who remain. As an old friend, recently laid off from Microsoft after decades of service, wrote to me, this is “a new arrow in the quiver of bringing tech workers to heel and ensuring that we’re properly thankful for the jobs we have (had?).”

Dubal is interested in more than analysis, she’s interested in action. She looks at the tactics already deployed by gig workers, who have not taken all this abuse lying down. Workers in the UK and EU organized through Worker Info Exchange and the App Drivers and Couriers Union have used the GDPR (the EU’s privacy law) to demand “algorithmic transparency,” as well as access to their data. In California, drivers hope to use similar provisions in the CCPA (a state privacy law) to do the same.

These efforts have borne fruit. When Cornell economists, led by Louis Hyman, published research (paid for by Uber) claiming that Uber drivers earned an average of $23/hour, it was data from these efforts that revealed the true average Uber driver’s wage was $9.74. Subsequent research in California found that Uber drivers’ wage fell to $6.22/hour after the passage of Prop 22, a worker misclassification law that gig companies spent $225m to pass, only to have the law struck down because of a careless drafting error:

https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2021-08-23/proposition-22-lyft-uber-decision-essential-california

But Dubal is skeptical that data-coops and transparency will achieve transformative change and build real worker power. Knowing how the algorithm works is useful, but it doesn’t mean you can do anything about it, not least because the platform owners can keep touching their knobs, twiddling the payout schedule on their rigged slot-machines.

Data co-ops start from the proposition that “data extraction is an inevitable form of labor for which workers should be remunerated.” It makes on-the-job surveillance acceptable, provided that workers are compensated for the spying. But co-ops aren’t unions, and they don’t have the power to bargain for a fair price for that data, and coops themselves lack the vast resources — “to store, clean, and understand” — data.

Co-ops are also badly situated to understand the true value of the data that is extracted from their members: “Workers cannot know whether the data collected will, at the population level, violate the civil rights of others or amplifies their own social oppression.”

Instead, Dubal wants an outright, nonwaivable prohibition on algorithmic wage discrimination. Just make it illegal. If firms cannot use gambling mechanisms to control worker behavior through variable pay systems, they will have to find ways to maintain flexible workforces while paying their workforce predictable wages under an employment model. If a firm cannot manage wages through digitally-determined variable pay systems, then the firm is less likely to employ algorithmic management.”

In other words, rather than using market mechanisms too constrain platform twiddling, Dubal just wants to make certain kinds of twiddling illegal. This is a growing trend in legal scholarship. For example, the economist Ramsi Woodcock has proposed a ban on surge pricing as a per se violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act:

https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-105-issue-4/the-efficient-queue-and-the-case-against-dynamic-pricing

Similarly, Dubal proposes that algorithmic wage discrimination violates another antitrust law: the Robinson-Patman Act, which “bans sellers from charging competing buyers different prices for the same commodity. Robinson-Patman enforcement was effectively halted under Reagan, kicking off a host of pathologies, like the rise of Walmart:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

I really liked Dubal’s legal reasoning and argument, and to it I would add a call to reinvigorate countertwiddling: reforming laws that get in the way of workers who want to reverse-engineer, spoof, and control the apps that currently control them. Adversarial interoperability (AKA competitive compatibility or comcom) is key tool for building worker power in an era of digital Taylorism:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

To see how that works, look to other jursidictions where workers have leapfrogged their European and American cousins, such as Indonesia, where gig workers and toolsmiths collaborate to make a whole suite of “tuyul apps,” which let them override the apps that gig companies expect them to use.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

For example, ride-hailing companies won’t assign a train-station pickup to a driver unless they’re circling the station — which is incredibly dangerous during the congested moments after a train arrives. A tuyul app lets a driver park nearby and then spoof their phone’s GPS fix to the ridehailing company so that they appear to be right out front of the station.

In an ideal world, those workers would have a union, and be able to dictate the app’s functionality to their bosses. But workers shouldn’t have to wait for an ideal world: they don’t just need jam tomorrow — they need jam today. Tuyul apps, and apps like Para, which allow workers to extract more money under better working conditions, are a prelude to unionization and employer regulation, not a substitute for it.

Employers will not give workers one iota more power than they have to. Just look at the asymmetry between the regulation of union employees versus union busters. Under US law, employees of a union need to account for every single hour they work, every mile they drive, every location they visit, in public filings. Meanwhile, the union-busting industry — far larger and richer than unions — operate under a cloak of total secrecy, Workers aren’t even told which union busters their employers have hired — let alone get an accounting of how those union busters spend money, or how many of them are working undercover, pretending to be workers in order to sabotage the union.

Twiddling will only get an employer so far. Twiddling — like all “AI” — is based on analyzing the past to predict the future. The heuristics an algorithm creates to lure workers into their cars can’t account for rapid changes in the wider world, which is why companies who relied on “AI” scheduling apps (for example, to prevent their employees from logging enough hours to be entitled to benefits) were caught flatfooted by the Great Resignation.

Workers suddenly found themselves with bargaining power thanks to the departure of millions of workers — a mix of early retirees and workers who were killed or permanently disabled by covid — and they used that shortage to demand a larger share of the fruits of their labor. The outraged howls of the capital class at this development were telling: these companies are operated by the kinds of “capitalists” that MLK once identified, who want “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.”

https://twitter.com/KaseyKlimes/status/821836823022354432/

There's only 5 days left in the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon's Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they're DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

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