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#go do that right now it’s fabulous
stevethehairington · 3 months
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just left the theater after seeing wonka and..... that.... that was a movie. that i saw. in a theater. fjsjsksksk
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hellbatschilt · 10 months
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I'm not going to spend 20+ million gil on an outfit for a job I don't play (lying)
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nerdie-faerie · 1 year
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Well that’s good that you’ve got a lot of steps ahead so it’s not gonna be too stressful, and yeah 1000 words should be a breeze, but like get on it now, or tomorrow cause it’s getting late now so then you can rest and focus on the next one
Maybe set yourself a goal of when to get it done by and then reward yourself, I would suggest something for a reward but I don’t know what to suggest 😂
And what strikes are happening?
I got it done on time unnecessary complaining but its done. The next one is similarly short but one of the experiments we have to include in the portfolio isn't even scheduled until the day before its due so it will be done last minute regardless
I'm not great with setting myself rewards, they don't motivate me. I usually end up being like 'okay you can't eat/sleep until you finish this' which is probably not very healthy but I haven't found a better method to force engagement
Idk there's been strikes the entire time I've been at uni, my sociology teacher was on strike for 7 weeks straight second semester and my flatmate didn't have classes for months cus all his classes were in the same department. But I think it might be a uni wide strike this time. They're striking for pay, pension and 2 other things..... hold on I got an email about it. Oh also causilation and pay gap
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sassysnowperson · 9 months
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How Not to Read Terry Pratchett's Discworld Novels
With the very exciting fantasy books poll bracket going on Discworld and how to read it is in the zeitgeist again. I figured I would take a crack at adding to this important topic with a guide drawn from my own chaotic mess of a reading journey:
Learn that Terry Pratchett is a fantasy author that several people whose reading taste you admire enjoy. He apparently blends comedy, good plotting, and a world that is both grounded and satirical and you're a big fan of all those things.
Fabulous! Decide to read some of his work.
Go to your local library. Love a good library. You're new to the area, so you're also exploring the library for the first time, too.
You have found Terry Pratchett! Points to you! Pull a book off the shelf at random. It's called The Dark Side of the Sun.
Start reading. Realize that this feels more like sci-fi than fantasy. Sigh in smug superiority about people who get the two confused.
Realize about halfway through that this is not, in fact, a Discworld book.
Nobody warned you the guy wrote other things!
It's still good, tho. Maybe a little rough but this was an older book and the author clearly has potential. Let's try again.
Review his works. The vast majority are Discworld. You are highly unlikely to grab another non-Discworld book. Go back to the Terry Pratchett section of the library.
Oh hey he wrote a book with Neil Gaiman! You've hears of that guy!
Grab Good Omens off the shelf.
Take it home, realize, much sooner, that this is also not a Discworld book. Still enjoy yourself thoroughly. You should read more of this Gaiman dude, too.
But okay. For real this time. Go back to the library and don't leave without *CONFIRMING* you have a Discworld book this time.
Grab a book. Look at the cover. Read the back Discworld! Ha HA! You've done it!
It's called Thud.
You are utterly gripped by a story of a man wrestling with himself, his growing child, the political tensions of a city and extremism that echoes reality beautifully while still being entirely true to itself. It's a story of responsibility and love and building communities and Fantasy Chess. You are driven nearly to tears by the sentence *WHERE IS MY COW?*
You emerge from the book fundamentally changed as a person, and finally understanding what all the fuss is about. You are now a Terry Pratchett reader for life.
You realize Thud was in the middle of a series. That was a part of another series. That explains why there was a feeling that you were supposed to know some of these people already.
You finally find one of those flowcharts and figure out a more sensible reading order.
I always sort of laugh when people ask where to start reading Discworld, because Thud would be first on absolutely nobody's sensible Terry Pratchett reading order. I'm still tempted to recommend it though!
(My actual advice: Going Postal if you love con men being stuck doing the right thing, Wee Free Men if you like YA and smart angry girls owning their own power, Guards! Guards! *and* Men at Arms if you like crime shows with heart and are okay giving earlier work a try (the quality gets better and better, but I think it needs at least two books to get you into it), and Monstrous Regiment if you like gender and queer feelings, anti-war books told in the middle of a war, and/or would prefer a stand alone novel...and, you know, Thud if you want a great read and don't mind some chaos.)
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foldingfittedsheets · 3 months
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When I was young I was dating this absolute cocknob right as I graduated high school. More on that later.
As a present ostensibly to me (but mostly my folks) I was whisked away after graduation to spend two weeks in Europe with my parents. The plan was to see London, Paris, and Heidelberg.
I was moody and a teenager and was largely disgruntled by this fabulous adventure. I went along with sullen foot dragging and black looks. I commandeered my reprehensible boyfriends enormous black hoodie and wore it on the trip. At the start of our jaunt into London I mentioned offhandedly to my mom that it was burning when I peed.
“You’re just dehydrated, and your period is about to start.”
She was right on both counts. I upped my water content, and had my period (which may have contributed to my overall ill humors.)
So we found ourselves in a tiny hotel in Paris, a week into our jaunt, when I repeated, “Man, it just really burns when I pee.”
“What?!” my mom demanded.
“I told you like a week ago that it was burning.”
“Augh! Now we have to go to the hospital!” she proclaimed.
“What?! Why?”
“Because,” she snapped, “You have a bladder infection.”
More bickering ensued, and my temperament was not improved by knowing I’d told her I was having an issue a week ago and been ignored.
My dad heard about the itinerary shift with resignation and we trooped down the narrow stairs as a family to ask the concierge where the nearest hospital was.
The absolutely lovely man at the desk was immediately so concerned when we asked for directions. “Is everything okay?” he asked with very genuine sympathy and I muttered that everything was fine, we just needed a quick visit.
Lucky for us the hospital was only a few blocks away. We walked there and the building was massive, home to what appeared to be several separate wings but no obvious main entrance.
We wandered inside and it was like a weird dream. There was no one around. Huge echoing corridors met us as we peered in vain for a front desk or possibly signs. We searched with increasing frustration for anyone to talk to and somehow found ourselves in some tiny back offices.
A woman sat at her desk and looked bewildered to see three lost Americans approaching her. She greeted us and as a family we all simultaneously realized the massive flaw in our current course.
You see, dear reader, we did not speak French. My dad and I both spoke German. I inquired politely if she also spoke German and she shook her head looking increasingly cornered. We asked if she spoke English.
“Leetle…?” she replied.
“My daughter has a bladder infection! Blad-der?” My mother declared this at a high volume as if volume alone could bridge the communication gap, while simultaneously miming over my stomach, circling where she presumed my pelvis was under the gigantic black sweatshirt.
The woman’s expression turned extremely skeptical and she slowly repeated “Bladder…” She scrutinized me for a moment then said, “You go…. This?” And pointed to something purple on her desk.
“The purple signs?” my dad asked.
She nodded and we set off. I was stewing with resentment at my mom for having ignored my first complaint when we were in a country that spoke English. And also generalized hostility about being on the trip and the object of miming. Now here we were in a French hospital, lost and unable to communicate. I also was under no illusions that someone who didn’t know the word for purple would have any clue what bladder meant.
And slowly I realized what had actually happened as I peered at the purple signs. My mother circling my stomach with her hands, gesturing to my middle. The woman’s skeptical face.
“Hey mom,” I chirped, syrupy and smug. “I don’t speak French. But I do know that it’s a Latin based language. And wouldn’t you know, but that purple sign looks an awful lot like it says ‘maternity’ to me.”
“Shut up!” she snapped.
A few minutes later we stood surrounded by the moans of pregnant people and the cries of fresh new lungs wailing at their first taste of cold air.
I smiled sweetly at my disgruntled mother.
Luck was with us however. A nearby father noticed us and came over to ask if we needed help. With perfect English he gave us clear directions.
As we finally approached the right area for walk in services it was clear how we’d missed it the first time. A large swathe of the front of the building was covered in tarps. A huge wall sized window was broken, and construction was taking place, but at least it had a bustle of people and a clear line. We sat down in the queue of chairs.
While we sat some police officers came in. They walked up to a man ahead of us in line and with few words exchanged they handcuffed and led him politely away.
I was genuinely so out of reality. Every new thing that happened was like a bizarre dream from the empty hallways to the maternity ward and now this tarp strewn waiting room in which people could just be calmly arrested.
It was a shock to me then when we reached the front and the nurse spoke with perfectly unaccented English to assess me. Not only did she know bladder but a whole slew of other medical words I couldn’t guess at. I peed on a stick and we waited.
When we got the results she told me it was good because they could give me antibiotics today for my now confirmed infection, but bad because I’d need the doctor to sign off. I nodded and my mom and I were escorted to yet another small room to wait.
When the doctor arrived I felt suddenly gangly and awkward. I’m not tall but I towered over this tiny French woman who radiated calm composure. She seemed to be around my grandmothers age. She looked up at my blushing face and said, “Bladder infection?” Her English had a much stronger accent than the nurse but with the same medical competence.
I nodded.
She nodded too and we sat in a still contemplative moment on my UTI.
“Do you have… boyfriend?”
My face was on fire, every cell of me wanting to flee from this tiny perfect old woman. I nodded.
She nodded too. We sat still in the knowledge that I had a boyfriend and a UTI.
“Do you and your boyfriend do… it?” Her delicate accent stretched it into “eet.”
I don’t know if she didn’t know the word for sex or if she thought saying “it” was kinder but I wanted to melt into the floor and cease to exist to escape my increasing mortification and her meaningful pause. I nodded.
“Okay,” she said kindly. “When you and your boyfriend do… it… you must make pee pee.”
I writhed slightly under the psychic damage of this elegant medical professional saying “pee pee” and I nodded more emphatically hoping she’d desist this torture.
She continued. “If you and your boyfriend do… it… five times? You make five pee pees. If you do it ten times, you make ten pee pees.”
My face had never been hotter, all the blood in my body had volcanoed to my head, pounding in my ears and valiantly attempting to give me an aneurism to end my suffering. There is no mortification as acute to a teenager as an adult talking about sex and here was this medical professional telling me about… it.
Meanwhile, my mother. Who should have been regretting her poor parenting and reflecting on her neglect in failing impart this vital part piece of sex ed to her kid. Alas, she was laughing herself sick the corner. She added to my embarrassment by quietly repeating “pee pee” and “it” under her breath as she wheezed and chortled.
The doctor patted my hand kindly and handed me the antibiotics. I got to spend the rest of my trip in Europe avoiding direct sunlight and listening to my mother parrot “Do you do… eet?”
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lackadaisycats · 10 months
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I’m so sorry if you’ve already answered this somewhere, but how do you design your characters?
I’ve been trying to make an OC from the prohibition era and it turns out there’s basically nothing to work with for men’s outfits, so I’m curious how you made this many that look unique and fitting to the characters
There is so much to work with, though! You will tend to find more of a focus on variety in women's fashion, but there is still quite a lot of menswear to ogle too. I suppose it's just a matter of searching out ideas and inspiration in the rights corners. Here are a few suggestions:
Old Clothing Catalogues -
Collections from Sears-Roebuck and other popular clothing retailers are pretty easy to find compiled into relatively inexpensive books, or just floating online.
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A fair bit of it is in the public domain now.
--Here's an entire 1922 catalogue of stuff to flip through.
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Contemporary Artwork -
Some phenomenal illustrators were working in this field amidst the "Golden Age of Illustration" and featured prominently on the covers of magazines and on the ads inside. There was a lot of emphasis on fashion.
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Collier's and The Saturday Evening Post are a couple of the more prominent and easily searchable resources. The costuming on the cover art always has a lot of personality.
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There's Rockwell, of course, and it's almost impossible to go wrong with J. C. Leyendecker. He's probably best known for his Arrow Collar ad art, but even his sock ads are like…
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There were numerous other amazing and influential illustrators working at the time too. Here's a list of some of them. Here's a bonus Henry Raleigh featuring some of his fabulously-dressed people.
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Blogs and Articles -
There are so many of them! If you want historical accuracy, be wary of write-ups pulling all of their references from film and television. There's nothing wrong with using those for inspiration if you aren't too concerned with historicity, but there are some pretty comprehensive and well-researched things out there with more of an eye on actual fashion history too:
--Gentleman's Gazette - What Men Really Wore in the 1920s
--The Fashionisto - 1920s Men's Fashion
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Digital Collections -
There are numerous digital historic image collections stemming from universities, museums, libraries, and the government that are free to peruse too.
--The Metropolitan Museum has a searchable catalog of exhibits that includes fashion and photos
--Here's some things from the New York Public Library
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Photos at Large -
If you aren't sure where to start, image searching for any of Hollywood's early celebrities will typically turn up a bevy of production stills and promotional photography featuring a variety of fashions. Here's a random Getty images search for Harold Lloyd. A lot of standard 3 piece suits, but a lot of stuff with added character too.
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Photography was generally quite accessible by the 1920s, though, and you can find a lot of authentic photos of people from all walks of life, out in the wild wearing all sorts of clothes.
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This is by no means the limit to the resources available, but hopefully it'll provide some leaping-off points for designing looks for your characters!
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indominusgay · 10 months
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If I could get sentimental for a second:
It means so, so much to me that Dimension 20 is doing a season with drag during this particular political climate. The world is a horribly scary place for queer folks right now, and so many so-called "allies" have pulled back to not take the heat, and I love that Dropout and Dimension 20 are like "No, fuck you, queer is beautiful, drag is beautiful, and we're going to tell our stories and look fucking fabulous doing it."
I wouldn't expect anything less from this crew, but still - I am emotional.
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empresskylo · 8 months
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beneath the mask ✩ chapter 2 ⬅ ch. 1
➠𝐌𝐃𝐍𝐈; 𝟏𝟖+ 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐓; 𝐄𝐗𝐏𝐋𝐈𝐂𝐈𝐓 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐓 ➠SIMON "GHOST" RILEY X AFAB!READER ➠CHAPTER TAGS | afab!reader. kinda mean!ghost. drinking. wc 2.3k. ➠AUTHOR'S NOTE | so glad you're all liking the story so far! hope you like this chapter as well. like i mentioned before, i havent actually played this game lmao so pls excuse any plot inaccuracies. i'm going off of wikipedia and lets plays of the game on youtube. there will definitely be plot points that don't quite line up with the actual game. oh and just fyi, i do not have a tag list. sorry!!
𝐛𝐞𝐧𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐡 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐚𝐬𝐤 𝐦𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 ✩ 𝐜𝐨𝐝 𝐦𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭 ✩ 𝐦𝐚𝐢𝐧 𝐦𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭
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you awoke the following morning with a splitting headache, someone shaking you back and forth only increasing the pain. you squinted your eyes open to see your friend leaning over you. 
“what?” you said through gritted teeth, not holding back any snark. 
“smith and jamerson got pulled into something early this morning. you’re the only medic on base and gaz is bleeding out in the infirmary.”
you shot up in bed, almost slamming foreheads with your friend. “shit. why didn’t you start with that?” you hissed, stumbling out of bed and blindly yanking on clothes.
it didn’t take you long to appear in the cold and barren infirmary, a laughing gaz stretched out on a bed filling your vision when you came storming in. 
he was laughing?  
“gaz,” you began, approaching him. he looked away from ghost, who had apparently been bearable enough to make kyle laugh whilst ‘bleeding out’. 
gaz mimicked you and repeated your name, a stupid grin on his face. 
“i was told you were bleeding out,” you said with a bit of annoyance on your tongue as you slowly strolled up to the man. 
“well, i am bleeding,” he said, holding his hand up, poorly wrapped in white linen that had turned a rusty red. 
you rolled your eyes and grabbed his hand, turning it over in your own. “did you do this?” you asked, referring to the shitty bandage job. 
“not bad, right?” he said with a cheeky grin.
“you’ve got to be kidding, gaz,” your fingers came up to grip the bridge of your nose. “look at it. it's so loose that dirt and debris have gotten into it. you’ll get an infection if i don’t redo it.” you shook your head. “how long has it been like this?”
“several hours, i think.” gaz looked at ghost who ever so slightly shook with a silent laugh. “i dont know, i think i did a pretty fabulous job, but if you insist.” his words were soft and airy and you cocked a brow at him. 
“he’s doped up,” ghost’s guttural voice said from beside you. that would explain gaz’s nonchalance. “got properly decked in the ribs. wouldn’t be surprised if he broke a couple.”
your eyes narrowed at gaz. “gaz,” you said exhaustedly with a hint of reprimand. he looked at you with puppy-dog eyes and you stifled a giggle. 
you went to work on gaz, checking his ribs for fractures and cleaning and rebandaging his hand. you were trying excruciatingly hard to not think about ghost’s eyes on you as you moved about the room. you could feel his glare like flames licking your skin.
finished with gaz, you switched gears and went to ghost’s bedside. he had refused to sit still and had his feet hanging over the edge while he cleaned one of his guns. he looked up at you and you could have sworn you saw something like reverence in his eyes. 
you went to change ghost’s bandages now, gaz already snoring behind you, making you smile to yourself. 
“goin’ back t’my room today,” ghost told you.
“that’s not a good idea, l.t.” you gently nudged his chest and he sat the gun down beside him and laid back. your fingertips lit like a match at just the small physical contact. 
“well good thing I wasn’t askin’.”
why did he always have to be so blunt? you grit your teeth as you finished up, avoiding any unnecessary contact with his skin. 
“i’ll only need to keep an eye on you the next two days. just to make sure there's no infection. then it’s easy sailing from there. i’ll show you how to clean–”
“i’m not daft. been hurt before. didn’t have some medic on call then, either.”
some medic. you weren’t sure why that stung. you felt stupid all of a sudden; of course he’s been injured before. he likely knew the drill like the back of his hand. you suspected under all his gear there were battle wounds that would take a full day just for him to go over the story behind each one.
“well, only two more days with me. then i’ll be out of your hair,” you mumbled.
you felt pathetic for wanting him to reply. to assure you that you didn’t annoy him or that he didn’t mind seeing you. but he just remained silent until you turned and left the room. 
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you found soap later that day digging through papers sprawled out on the coffee table before him. “didn’t know you could read,” you teased. 
he looked up at you with a grin. you stood behind him to get a look at what he was reading. “jus’ goin’ over the dossier for our next mission.”
“ our ?” you questioned.
“since you’re the only medic available at the moment. yes, you’ll be coming along for the ride.”
“oh, don’t i feel so special,” you said sarcastically. 
“i woulda asked for you regardless.”
“didn’t know you could make medic requests.”
“ya can’t.”
you collapsed next to him on the couch, sighing before you glazed over the words on the sheets. 
“wait, ‘Hassan’?” you said perking up and pointing to the man’s name. “this seems serious.” you looked at soap with concern. 
“not gonna be an easy one, that’s for sure.”
“but, soap, i can barely use a gun, let alone fight. this seems like i might get killed if…” you trailed off, your heart beginning to race. you weren’t used to going along for intimate missions like this. you usually were held back at base or brought alongside a slew of other medics. but with everyone else gone… 
“don’t worry, lass,” he said bumping your shoulder with his own. “we’ll get ya trained up. it’s not for another two weeks when Hassan should be in Al Mazrah.”
that didn’t exactly make you feel any better. these men have been training their whole life. and you got two weeks?
soap could see the worry spread across your visage. “you’ll have me, gaz, price, and ghost to protect ya.”
“no,” you shook your head. “i can’t become a liability. you guys will have far more important things to focus on.”
“yer not a liability . we need you. there's a good chance that if we capture Hassan, he’ll be hurt. it’s crucial we keep him alive.”
“and that’s where i come in,” you said gloomily. 
“you’re there for us too,” he said smiling at you. soap always did appreciate everything the medics did for the team. he never treated you any differently than the other soldiers. you leaned against him, your heart racing at the idea of what was to come. 
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it was late at night when ghost was due for another cleaning. you made it to his door and softly knocked. you paused a moment but didn’t hear anything in return so you quietly pushed the door open. 
the room was dark but you could see the faint silhouette of ghost hunched over on the edge of his bed. your hand hit the wall, searching for the light switch.
“wait,” his deep voice rumbled. you paused all movement and heard the soft rustle of fabric as ghost shuffled. you saw the illuminated outline of him as he pulled his mask over his face. your heart skipped a beat realizing he was sitting in here without it on. “okay.”
you ticked the light switch and met his eyes immediately. he had on his thin balaclava as opposed to the usual hard plastic of his skull mask. it felt like he was naked.
“why don’t you let anyone see you?” you asked timidly. 
“why do you wanna see so bad?” he retorted, clearly already irritated with you. 
“i..” you paused, thinking momentarily. “it’s not that i want to see what you look like. but don’t you find it, i don’t know,” you gestured your hands around nervously, “a bit lonely?”
“lonely?”
“i feel like i’d be lonely if i was always guarded.”
ghost appraised you for a moment, making you squirm uncomfortably. “well, i’m not lonely,” he grunted. okay, end of conversation, you thought. 
you shifted the strap of your bag on your shoulder, “right. i’m sorry. i didn’t mean–”
“quit fuckin’ apologizing.”
you sucked in a sharp breath. “okay. sor–” before you could finish your sentence you stopped yourself. 
you watched ghost roll his eyes. why did upsetting him make you feel so disconcerted? you tried to wipe your face of all expression but you knew he would be able to tell his words wounded you. it wasn’t fair– he could read everything on your face, but all he gave you was his eyes.
you bit your lip then approached him, wanting to get this over with. “if you wanna take off your shirt,” you said absentmindedly as you set your med bag down on his bed beside him. 
he sat back slightly and hiked up his shirt, obviously not wanting to remove it fully. you weren’t sure why, but that made your face heat. it was a statement you’ve made a thousand times to men who had injuries on their torso or when you had to examine their chest. you hadn’t even thought about it when you said it. but when ghost clearly didn’t want to completely shed his clothes, you felt embarrassed, like you had asked for too much. and in a way, he was right. he didn’t need to completely be bare-chested for you to work on him. the wound was quite low on his abdomen. 
you swallowed your embarrassment and cleaned and rebandaged his stitches. you saw an array of goosebumps rise on ghost’s skin from your featherlight touches as you worked. you finished quickly before shoving all your supplies forcibly in your med bag. you needed out of there asap. 
you threw your bag on your shoulder and went to leave when ghost’s bare hands grabbed your wrist. he twirled you so effortlessly to face him again that it almost infuriated you. 
you sucked in a breath of air as you looked at him a bit dumbfounded. ghost thought for a moment, his hand still firmly around your wrist. 
“i don’t mean to be such an arse,” he grunted.
in a breathy tone you spoke back, “it’s fine. i don’t think that, you’re just—“
he cut you off. “no. i don’t have to be so fuckin' upfront with you all the time. you’re just tryin’ to do your job. i gotta remind myself your not one of my men.”
you nodded, holding in the hurt that echoed through you. he was being upfront with you? what did that mean? that he regrets just being honest? that wasn’t what you wanted to hear. you hated yourself for wanting him to say something along the lines of him just lashing out and he didn’t mean the shit he said to you. but he did mean the shit he said, he just regretted saying it out loud.
“not one of your men, right,” you repeated back. you weren’t one of his men. you were just a starstruck woman who had no fucking business working with the most elite men in the world. awesome. 
ghost’s eyes darted between yours as if he wanted to say something more. that maybe he didn’t like the sullen tone you used when repeating his words back to him. as if he might have actually not intended for that implication. you could have sworn you saw his lips move under his mask like he was contemplating telling you he didn’t mean it like that.
but he was silent. 
“really. it’s fine,” you mumbled. “i’ll see you tomorrow.” 
ghost breathed your name, all too easily deciphering the hurt in your words. you wanted to bash your head against the wall for being so obvious. he was right. you weren’t meant for this line of work. you were too soft.
oh my god, were you going to cry?!
you ignored the flutter in your belly when he said your name and scurried out of the room, wanting to drown out your embarrassment with a swig of whiskey. this seemed to be a pattern with you two–ghost saying something a bit too real, you getting hurt and running out of the room like a baby.
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you found soap back where you left him and you waltzed over to him with a bottle of whiskey in hand. he looked up at you and gave you a cheeky grin. 
his smile shifted to something of concern when you deflated next to him on the sectional. 
“ghost give ya a hard time?” 
“no,” you lied. “just been a long day.”
soap took the bottle from you and took a drag. “long week, more like it.” 
you chuckled before taking a sip. you passed the bottle back and forth a few more times until your body buzzed and your mouth wouldn’t let you swallow any more of the foul liquid.
“how do you guys drink this shit?” you asked, making a face of disgust.
“years of self-hatred,” he grinned.
you slouched against him. 
“do you think i’m cut out for this? 
he flipped through the pages of the dossier before glancing at you. “cut out for what?”
you gestured around you. “this. working with you guys. working for the best of the best.”
“'course i fuckin’ do.” he gave you a quizzical look. “why would you even ask that?”
you shrugged, keeping your eyes off of him.
your name escaped his lips making you finally look up at him. “you’re here for a reason. price doesn’t let just anyone join his team. i’ve seen what you can do, lass. you’re part of the best of the best .”
you smiled making him grin at you in return. “no more of this shit, okay?” he said softly, his scottish accent getting heavier the more he drank. you found it comforting.
“okay,” you agreed. 
“now, lets find price so we can steal all his money with a few games of cards,” he said, lightly tapping your shoulder with his fist.
you laughed knowing good and well price could beat the two of you blindfolded.
chapter 3 ➡
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books-and-omens · 8 months
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God. I. I absolutely cannot sleep. And it’s nearly morning.
GOD.
Aziraphale, no.
Aziraphale. You are being manipulated. You are being showered with praise and acceptance that you have never received before, not like this. You are being told that you did extremely well, that you are the best of the best. This is *deliberate*. Metatron has never been on your side, he is telling you exactly what you want to hear. What you’ve been craving for the last four years, and for the six thousand years prior.
But they have plans for you, Aziraphale. They want you Upstairs so that you could do exactly what they need.
Aziraphale, stop.
(I’ll have to rewatch this. Have to collect the instances where Aziraphale is looking for approval. Fiercely hoping for approval. Throughout history, yes, and recently, too: those telephone calls after the Armageddon’t where he wanted Crowley to witness the good he’d s been doing. That burning need to tell someone that he did well and to hear it acknowledged.
Oh, Aziraphale is not at all taking his retirement from Heaven well.)
GOD.
You know what, I think Aziraphale is absolutely coming undone by the end. That process is certainly in full swing by the ball.
Because seriously.
The ball. The absolute fabulous madness of it. The drapery. The chandelier. Aziraphale going all-out with the miracles, retreating to the safety of Jane Austen where things go right and love prevails.
(Inviting Crowley to dance, too. Pulling him by the hand.)
Notice, too, Aziraphale’s desperate insistence that things cannot possibly be as bad as Crowley thinks they are. What a level of denial. Everything is fine, he is telling himself. Everything will be fine. I’m setting everything up perfectly to explain the big miracle, to avoid the existential threat we are both facing. We will be fine, nothing will really have to change, and I will still have Crowley.
(Oh, the vehemence. Close your eyes and pretend you are in another century. Don’t open them. Do not open them. Everything is fine.)
And—
Aziraphale is not handling retirement from Heaven well, but that’s only one of the things that are happening, isn’t it.
The danger to both of them is real. Crowley, too, is under existential threat (which Shax has helpfully reminds Aziraphale of, of course she does). They are not safe; they will never be safe while they are exiles, while Heaven and Hell can threaten both of them on a whim, while shining archangels can drop by at any point.
So what Metatron is offering at the very end is the power to do good and be appreciated, but also safety. You can be safe, he promises, your demon can be safe. You can even be with him, just as you are now—except you won’t be powerless against the rest of the world.
You won’t have to be fugitives, not any more. Not like you are now.
(It’s a lie. We know it’s a lie.
And Metatron must know full well that Crowley would never accept the terms as stated.)
They witness another thing, of course. Gabe and Beez. Their happily-ever-after.
There in the moment, Crowley is probably looking at them and thinking: we could do this. We could go off together. Yes?
Except this kind of a happy ending, Gabe and Beez being left alone but exiled, wouldn’t be a happy ending for Aziraphale and Crowley.
They’ve been in this exact place before. “We can go off together!”
And as before, this won’t work.
They have the Earth. They care about the Earth a lot, both of them. Aziraphale wants to win approval, yes, but he also very sincerely wants to make things better, to do what’s right, to be the change. And he wants, too, to win safety for him and Crowley. Wants them to be together, side by side; wants that to be allowed.
Wants them to do the right thing together. To have the power to do the right thing.
And everything they have built together falls apart.
(Angel.
Fucking Hell.
Stop the elevator between the floors. Get out. Get the fuck out. Get back.
Angel. You haven’t even seen what Crowley has seen in Heaven. What they were planning. What they need you for.
Angel.
NOT. LIKE. THAT.)
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etfrin · 2 months
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❝ꜱᴏᴜʟꜱ ᴛᴏ ᴄʀᴜꜱʜ❞ — chapter nine | coriolanus snow
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「ᴡᴀʀɴɪɴɢ:」 SFW | Coriolanus, hints of somnophilia/non-con [spoiler! Coriolanus steals some kisses while reader is asleep, and reader kinda does the same] | lmk if I missed anything
「ᴘᴀɪʀɪɴɢ:」 young! Coriolanus Snow x fem! Reader
「ꜱᴜᴍᴍᴀʀʏ:」 Coriolanus leaves you to check out the arena, the night before the games and... WELL... WELL... you find him!
「ᴀ/ɴ:」 for those who asked, i tried my best to deliver, please give me your feedback and reblog! Thank you!
Beta read by the FABULOUS @nowitsmissing
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Coriolanus Snow left you alone. He had to sneak out and check out the arena. The Hunger Games would continue forward. He needed any leverage he could get. Even if it meant to leave your side for the night. He found his clothes in the same bag that you had kept empty of food in. He changed into them.
He bites his lower lip to distract himself from the pain. This was of higher priority. He could rest when he wins. At least, that's what he tells himself as he finishes buttoning off his shirt. Before he could walk out of the room, he leaned down. Your eyelashes were big up close, and so, so enchanting. He felt annoyed that he noticed such a minuscule thing. It was not of importance how long or short your eyelashes are, they added to your beauty.
He couldn't talk himself out of it, he pressed his lips to yours. Your lips were soft. Your lips were perfect. Your lips were poisonous, and addicting because how could he ever stop himself after he already had a taste? So he pressed another kiss to your lips, a bit harder than the previous peck. He pulls away with a gasp and swallows his shame roughly.
“I'll be back,” he whispered to you before he pressed another kiss, unable to stop himself. There was nothing friendly about this. This was a man at the edge of the cliff, one more step and he would fall into a pit of obsession. Nobody can drag him out of it. He barely stops himself from stealing another kiss from you. He forces his legs to walk away from you, it pained him more than any of his physical wounds.
The security around the arena was nonexistent, each peacekeeper in guard sleeping. He slipped right in, checking out the debris. The middle of the arena had huge blocks of fallen pieces of debris, all the weapons will be placed there tomorrow. He checked out around the area and found tunnels to go under and even a vent to hide in.
He turned around ready to leave and relay all of this to Lucy Gray Baird. However, an uncharacteristic yell leaves his lips as he sees you. Your arms are crossed in front of your chest and your face in a frown. So unlike how he left you on the bed resting. He swallows and wonders briefly if you informed anyone of his breaking. He was also curious about how you found him.
It's not like he has a tracker on him, right?
“How did you find me here?” He asked, nervous and tried not to fidget too much.
“I just thought ‘What is the most stupid thing Coriolanus can do?’” your voice turns sarcastic, “Surprise! It led me here.”
“Very funny,” he mutters, not amused at all, “And it's Coryo now.”
“You lost your ‘Coryo’ privilege, Snow.”
Guess he will just have to earn it back.
He pouts, knowing exactly why you were mad. But certainly, you could see the reason why he had to leave despite being freshly injured. He had to survey the place! Get leverage! He has to win at all, otherwise, what's the price of his life?
You walked up to him, pulling him down by his shirt collar. His breath hits your lips. And he could kiss you again. Of course, he didn't. He wanted to steal another kiss so bad that a soft nearly audible whisper of your name fills the air.
“You didn't even leave a note or a warning or anything.”
“Sorry,” he whispered, hoping that apologizing despite not regretting his actions would fix everything. Or at least get his nickname privileges back.
You scoff, “You don't even mean it, Coryo.”
You called him Coryo again, he didn't need to mean it. He would take the win. He gives you a small smile. “I am sorry,” he repeated, trying to put some heart into it.
“A liar and a thief,” you whispered, your eyes glinting with an emotion he couldn't decipher, “Truly one of a kind you are, Coriolanus.”
He frowned. He understood the fact he was indeed a liar. But where did the talk of being a thief come from? Before he could question you further about calling him a thief. You begin to drag him back into your car on the cold night. He sits at the window seat in the front, you beside him. He didn't ask if you had a driver's license. He felt like he was better without knowing.
“Was the Zoo the next location?” You asked your tone on edge with leftover anger over his actions.
“Yes,” he replied with the gentlest tone possible, not wanting anything to trigger an eruption. He fidgeted with his hands, wondering why he had come here when he could have used the night to steal kisses instead. When he could have slept with you, his arm around you and your heartbeat matching his. Such an ideal night, and he ruined it.
“So what did you find, pretty boy?” You asked.
He blushed at the nickname you called him. He doesn't give attention to his heated cheeks as he replies rather enthusiastically about everything (not everything, he kept some places a secret, only for Lucy Gray's ears to hear) and strategies (again not all of them).
You even add some pointers along the way. And he enjoyed the conversation thoroughly. He never thought he could connect with you like this, but he couldn't deny that he was happy about it. His lips stretched in a grin as you both discussed plans for Lucy Gray to win.
“Don't you care about Jessup?” He asked, the chain of conversation interrupted because he wasn't the only one with tribute. So why were you helping him?
You looked at him briefly before looking forward again. “You and I both know that poor boy is as good as dead,” you said, your voice hard, “I would rather let you win instead if I am out of the games.”
Coriolanus nods at the answer. That was understandable. “I am sorry,” this time he meant it, “I should have woken you up,” he looked at the window, ashamed, “It was a foolish thing to do to leave you alone without warning.”
“I am glad you have the brains to understand what you did wrong, and the guts to admit it,” you said, and he felt proud like he got the hardest question in an exam right. “You're forgiven as long as you don't do it again.”
He nods but doesn't make any promises. He did what he had to do. He will do it again, and take you as company the next time. That way he's not fucking up.
Soon, the car reaches its destination. He gets out of the car and you decide to stay, parked in front of the zoo gates. He quickly decided to only tell the key points to Lucy Gray because he refused to let you be alone for too long at night.
He walked into the zoo and reached the cage where he called out the Songbirds’ name. Lucy Gray appears before him with a concerned look. “Is everything alright?” She asked.
“Yes,” he confirmed and began to explain. He said not to run towards the weapons first and go to the hiding place. He tells her to wait it out and a few more strategies so she has better chances to survive and he has better chances to win. He doesn't notice Lucy Gray's tears but a sob catches his attention.
He's annoyed because it's time to listen to him and not be a child if she wants to survive tomorrow. Instead, he gives her a handkerchief he found in his pants pocket and hands it to her to wipe away her tears. He softens his tone and speaks slower. Even using easier terms to make it look like child's play.
Lucy Gray nods and agrees to his plans. She returns the handkerchief and he stuffs it back in. “It's going to be fine,” he said, “You're going to win, Lucy Gray.”
“I can pray, Coriolanus,” Lucy replied, her voice vulnerable in a way that reminded him of the fact she was a teenager like him. She even had a soulmate, Sejanus Plinth. And she loses it all if she doesn't win tomorrow.
“You will win.” He will win.
And with that, it's goodbye and Coriolanus leaves the zoo. The ride back home is quiet. You don't ask what he and Lucy Gray talked about. He doesn't offer any information either. It was a comfortable silence that he needed. He went to his old habit of stroking his soulmate's scar. Was it just him or did the scar seem to be healing?
He couldn't check it out in front of you. Within minutes you parked in front of the penthouse, and he wanted to ask you inside. There's no way he wanted you to drive alone at such late night.
But inviting you inside would mean revealing his secret. The secret that he kept for a decade. The secret was his motivation for everything. The secret that could ruin him.
Was ensuring your safety worth revealing it? He could ask you to call his landline when you reached home, but each minute until you called would be nothing less of hell for him. His mind overthinking possibilities with the result of you being hurt. He wasn't sure his poor heart could take it.
Both of you step out of the car. He can't make up his mind. He opens his mouth to invite you in or say goodbye he doesn't know. You speak first instead. Your eyes meet his blue ones.
“How many kisses did you steal, Coryo?”
He wants to lie. He knew in his mind that it wouldn't do him any good. He feels his palm sweat, his fingers itching to touch the scar to calm himself down. He was sure that he was going to have a heart attack in the next minute or so.
“Three,” he answered, ready for whatever curses and punishment you would give him for his sins. He would go on his knees for you, let the cold street scrap his skin and crimson stain the spot if it meant your forgiveness. He would grovel, and beg, strip himself of his pride for you.
Or he could manipulate you. Fill your mind with lies that it's what friends do. Being district, he doubted you had many friends of Capitol culture. He could lie, lie, and lie. It's what friends do.
As his mind fights to choose his next course of action. You flash him a vixen smile, and whisper, “You didn't have to steal them.”
He couldn't even process what you meant before you pressed a kiss on his jaw. His eyes closed and let out a shaky breath. He gasps softly when the next press of your lips is so close to his lips.
Fuck, fuck, fuck, please, kiss him.
You don't. You pull back and grin. It takes him an embarrassing moment to come back to reality. His ear burning, and his lips parted waiting for the third kiss you never gave him.
“It's what friends do,” you shrugged, lying to yourself and him. Both of you had to, there's no other way around it. Coriolanus knew why for him, but what about you? Were you simply playing with the strings of his heart? He would allow it for now.
For after the Plinth Prize, you will be his.
“Come with me,” he said, “It's not safe to be traveling so late at night.”
You agree with him without much protest. He noticed your discomfort as both of you walked up the twelve flights to reach his broken, shameful, secret home. He grits his teeth, awaiting your reaction to the truth of the Snow family.
You don't say anything. “Show me where I will be sleeping, Coryo,” you yawn instead, not even disgust on your face from the rotting wallpapers.
He is surprised and grateful. He feels an uncontrollable urge to hug you, and barely keeps himself from not wrapping his arms around you.
“I suppose you wouldn't mind sharing a bed with me,” he said, quietly, not wanting Tigris or Grandma’am to wake up. You nod in affirmation and he shows you his room with a bit of confidence. It was just as horrible as the rest of the house but it was his.
The bed in the corner with clean bed sheets. The stack of books and finished assignments on his desk. His wardrobe, the wood old and chipped. But all of it was his.
You immediately made your way to the bed and made yourself wholly comfortable. Like it was yours. And in a way, everything of his is yours. He would give it to you if you asked nicely enough, maybe throw in a kiss or two.
You pull the covers up and wait for Coryo to sleep in. Usually, he would wear his pajamas, but right now he couldn't bring himself to care. He lays down, mindful of his injury. He turns towards you. His eyes searched for yours, and the air mixed with both of your shared breaths. Not even an inch apart were both of you due to how small his bed was.
He closed his eyes and whispered goodnight. He doesn't get a reply. He fills his mind quickly falling back to the darkness as his actions catch up to him, taking away whatever strength he had left.
The last thing he feels, which surely is a dream, is a press of your lips against his. Stealing a kiss. And he hears you whisper, unsure if it's a dream or not but he will remember the words until he dies.
“I have you now, Coriolanus Snow. I won't let you go.”
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NEXT PART
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piastree · 3 months
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Take a Chance with Me | OP81
oscar piastri x reader (fc: huh yunjin)
— Part 2
Previous Part | Next Part
Summary : They are a couple caught in the chaos of a love filled with randomness and quirks. Their relationship is marked by funny and unpredictable moments, where each day feels like a new adventure. Despite frequently engaging in amusing and spirited bickering, beneath the banter lies a deep and meaningful romance. noted: idk i decided to make the part 2 haha. Enjoyyy!!<3
yourusername
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tagged oscarpiastri
liked by charles_leclerc, oscarpiastri, and 15,397 others
yourusername what is life if not to love and be loved
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user just hit a morning, and she's already dropping bangers
oscarpiastri well i can do both
yourusername lucky me!🥰
user aww they're the cutest<3 :( I FEEL SO SINGLE
user i’m mister steal your girl @/oscarpiastri
user you guys are so freakin cute
yourusername cute has four letters, so does meeee
oscarpiastri liked the comments
user OMGGGG I LOVE HER
user cutie patooties button >>>>>>
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yourusername on duty🏁🏎️
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user supportive gf out there
mclaren oscar's serotonin booster💪🧡
user not a good day for oscar, but at least he had you by his side
user sadly the luck was not here with him
yourusername the luck just took a vacation for today :(
oscarpiastri
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liked by mclaren, yourusername, landonorris, and 80,987 others
oscarpiastri Gracias México 🇲🇽 Not the Sunday we planned but more points on the board. Onwards to 🇧🇷
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mclaren Let’s go after it again in Brazil! 👊
user you did an amazing job right here!!!! We love you, Oscar!!🇲🇽🧡 hope you enjoyed your time here
user they look so so so cute together😭❤️
yourusername always proud of you❤️
oscarpiastri thankyou, love ❤️
user idk if i want her or to be her
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yourusername
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liked by landonorris, oscarpiastri, and 20,997 others
yourusername farewell to the my ginger hair era
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user i can fight oscar
user MARRY ME Y/N
user the ginger hair really suited you perfectly, but the new one looks good on you as well<333
oscarpiastri lost in ur beauty
yourusername oh nooo, i'll be there to rescue you :(
landonorris get a room
mclaren we miss you, y/n! comeback sooner🧡
yourusername i will🥺
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yourusername added a story
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caption: send me the photo right awayyyyy @/landonorris
user my papaya boys<3
landonorris there's a small fee for this exclusive content yourusername you're charging me for a pic of my own boyfriend? landonorris his fame comes at a cost, you know yourusername fine, you'll get your donuts landonorris deal! He's officially part of my portfolio now
oscarpiastri lando must be took a lot of photos yourusername he just charged me for a photo of you oscarpiastri Oh, did he? Well, next time, tell him I charge extra for my fabulous poses yourusername haha, you're not helping :(
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oscarpiastri
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liked by maxverstappen1, yourusername, landonorris and 119,992 others
oscarpiastri Rolled the dice and bagged some points 🎲 Vegas, you were fun!
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user and bagged fastest lap🙌🏼🧡
user bad strategy but incredible pace
user A BIG THANKYOU Y/N FOR GIVING MY GIFT TO OSCAR!! YOU ARE TRULY AMAZINGGG<3 @/yourusername
user aww she's the kindest
user you were great, deserved more than p10🧡
user wishing lando a speedy recovery❤️🙏
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yourusername lv dumps
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lilymhe you are so lovelyyy! can't wait to see you again❤️
yourusername see u in monaco! pstt don't tell albono
alexalbon I AM NOT BLIND
user i guess the exhausting night unexpectedly brought a new friendship!!
yourusername YESS that was kind of random night
oscarpiastri my it girl❤️
yourusername ❤️
I don't know why I wrote part 2 but I enjoyed writing this, I hope you also enjoy reading this
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sleeplesssmoll · 4 months
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I think Vertin might be a tactile person.
Here are examples taken from the voice lines and context clues.  This isn't an all conclusive list of touchy interactions, just what I could find. Someone stop her before she gets hurt. Update: I'm going to keep adding on as we find more interactions together because this is really fun.
Sotheby (hat and hair): Stop it! You can't just touch an adult's head! (She is 13. Vertin probably sees her as a baby and pat her head).
Bette (hands): Ha ha ... They might be a little rough. To tightly grab the eave does require abundant practice. (assuming Vertin is holding her hand. Don’t ask me how we got here.)
Rabies (clothing and torso): Straws ... be hugged. Rabies ... feels it. (she hugged him 🥹)
A Knight (hat and hair): One step further, and you will be in close contact with Someone's nose... As long as you can hit Someone's head. (how close is Vertin standing to the AK? Or maybe she was looking for an invisible head to pat.)
Mesmer Jr (Hands) :Compared to the incurable anxiety, these wounds are minor. Oh, watch your distance. (smh Vertin not everyone likes being touched.)
Melania (hat and hair): "Well done. Please keep on." ...Aren't you going to say that? (more headpats but Melania needs vocal praise too.)
Lilya
Clothing and torso:  Feel awesome? Now it's my turn to pet you. (...what is Vertin petting? This is clothing and torso but I'm lost.)
Hat and hair: You should be grateful that I am too lazy to move now. Or you should know that the first-class pilot’s got a first-glass head-butt, too. (Vertin taking advantage of the moment to give headpats. I'm telling you, its a THING)
Leilani (Hands): Shaka brah! Ooh! Do you want a handshake or a high-five, my friend? I'm fine with either! (She’s so wholesome)
Cristallo 
hat and hair: Are you patting my head? The doctor says, this is a reward for good children. Have I done something right? 
Hands and sleeves: Would you like to hold my hands? I could be with you anytime. (Cristallo is weak and frail. The nurses say she could be blown away by a gust of wind. Despite this she says she’ll be with Vertin anytime. To me it reads as Vertin being worried Cristallo will disappear too. Cristallo notices so she offers to hold hands and says she will always be here as a way to comfort her.)
Darley Clatter
Hat and Hair:  Oh ... I can't deny you are really good at patting.
Clothing and Torso: Take a look at my beautiful muscles! I don't need to explain how fabulous I am. Hey, watch out! Rub me in the direction my mane grows.
Bonus Intimacy : Adorable? Ahh? You don't even have a taste! (Vertin pets him and calls him adorable. Darley, don’t let the girlies know. They might end your noble bloodline.)
Pavia (Hat and Hair): Wanna know how many holes I've made on others' heads? No? Then stop it. (What possessed her to give Pavia headpats?)
Dikke (hat and hair): Thou art overstepping my boundaries, arcanist. (I’m guessing Vertin is at it again with the headpats. Dikke smiles when she says this so she isn’t offended. If anything, she seems amused. )
Eternity (hands and sleeves): Go on, try holding it, and feel its temperature rising in your hand… Easy, sweetheart… take it easy, heh heh… (more hand holding but Vertin wasn’t prepared this time)
An-an Lee (hands and sleeves): What? You want a palm reading? (Vertin, why are you like this? Are you randomly touching people's hands?)
I feel like I should have picked up on this sooner. Gift-giving, hand holding, and headpats. This is the Timekeeper way.
Regulus (hands and sleeves): What do you want? I don't have any spare scratch. (I'm sure she knows you're broke since she's your boss. Vertin's just being Vertin at this point.
Vertin leads Regulus by the hand into her Suitcase in the prologue
Blonney (hands): Interesting! It's been a while since I last met someone who would start with holding hands.
She also holds Blonney's hand as she calms her down during the green lake event.
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My McLuhan lecture on enshittification
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IT'S THE LAST DAY for the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.
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youtube
Last night, I gave the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Transmediale festival in Berlin. The event was sold out and while there's a video that'll be posted soon, they couldn't get a streaming setup installed in the Canadian embassy, where the talk was held:
https://transmediale.de/en/2024/event/mcluhan-2024
The talk went of fabulously, and was followed by commentary from Frederike Kaltheuner (Human Rights Watch) and a discussion moderated by Helen Starr. While you'll have to wait a bit for the video, I thought that I'd post my talk notes from last night for the impatient among you.
I want to thank the festival and the embassy staff for their hard work on an excellent event. And now, on to the talk!
Last year, I coined the term 'enshittification,' to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers, it really hit the zeitgeist. I mean, the American Dialect Society made it their Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I'm definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).
So what's enshittification and why did it catch fire? It's my theory explaining how the internet was colonized by platforms, and why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, and why it matters – and what we can do about it.
We're all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.
It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying.
I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the 'great forces of history,' and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.
Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für Englisch Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).
But in case you want to use enshittification in a more precise, technical way, let's examine how enshittification works.
It's a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Let's do a case study. What could be better than Facebook?
Facebook is a company that was founded to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that.
When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and k-12.us addresses. But in 2006, it opened up to the general public. It told them: “Yes, I know you’re all using Myspace. But Myspace is owned by Rupert Murdoch, an evil, crapulent senescent Australian billionaire, who spies on you with every hour that God sends.
“Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world, and we will compose a personal feed consisting solely of what those people post for consumption by those who choose to follow them.”
That was stage one. Facebook had a surplus — its investors’ cash — and it allocated that surplus to its end-users. Those end-users proceeded to lock themselves into FB. FB — like most tech businesses — has network effects on its side. A product or service enjoys network effects when it improves as more people sign up to use it. You joined FB because your friends were there, and then others signed up because you were there.
But FB didn’t just have high network effects, it had high switching costs. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you leave a product or service. In Facebook’s case, it was all the friends there that you followed and who followed you. In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem.
It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time. You and your six friends here are going to struggle to agree on where to get drinks after tonight's lecture. How were you and your 200 Facebook friends ever gonna agree on when it was time to leave Facebook, and where to go?
So FB’s end-users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform. Then FB exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end-users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers, and publishers.
To the advertisers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? We lied. We spy on them from asshole to appetite. We will sell you access to that surveillance data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting, and we will devote substantial engineering resources to thwarting ad-fraud. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it.'
To the publishers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we would only show them the things they asked to see? We lied!Upload short excerpts from your website, append a link, and we will nonconsensually cram it into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see it. We are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users to your website to monetize as you please, and those users will become stuck to you when they subscribe to your feed.' And so advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too, dependent on those users.
The users held each other hostage, and those hostages took the publishers and advertisers hostage, too, so that everyone was locked in.
Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders.
For the users, that meant dialing down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers.
For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen by a person.
For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt, until anything less than fulltext was likely to be be disqualified from being sent to your subscribers, let alone included in algorithmic suggestion feeds.
And then FB started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting fulltext feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetization, via the increasingly crooked advertising service.
When any of these groups squawked, FB just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learned in the Darth Vader MBA: 'I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.'
Facebook now enters the most dangerous phase of enshittification. It wants to withdraw all available surplus, and leave just enough residual value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other, and business customers stuck to end users, without leaving anything extra on the table, so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its shareholders.
But that’s a very brittle equilibrium, because the difference between “I hate this service but I can’t bring myself to quit it,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit? Get me the hell out of here!” is razor thin
All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then FB discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword.
If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go, too.
That’s terminal enshittification, the phase when a platform becomes a pile of shit. This phase is usually accompanied by panic, which tech bros euphemistically call 'pivoting.'
Which is how we get pivots like, 'In the future, all internet users will be transformed into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters in a virtual world called "metaverse," that we ripped off from a 25-year-old satirical cyberpunk novel.'
That's the procession of enshittification. If enshittification were a disease, we'd call that enshittification's "natural history." But that doesn't tell you how the enshittification works, nor why everything is enshittifying right now, and without those details, we can't know what to do about it.
What led to the enshittocene? What is it about this moment that led to the Great Enshittening? Was it the end of the Zero Interest Rate Policy? Was it a change in leadership at the tech giants? Is Mercury in retrograde?
None of the above.
The period of free fed money certainly led to tech companies having a lot of surplus to toss around. But Facebook started enshittifying long before ZIRP ended, so did Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
Some of the tech giants got new leaders. But Google's enshittification got worse when the founders came back to oversee the company's AI panic (excuse me, 'AI pivot').
And it can't be Mercury in retrograde, because I'm a cancer, and as everyone knows, cancers don't believe in astrology.
When a whole bunch of independent entities all change in the same way at once, that's a sign that the environment has changed, and that's what happened to tech.
Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.
The equilibrium in which companies produce things we like in honorable ways at a fair price is one in which charging more, worsening quality, and harming workers costs more than the company would make by playing dirty.
There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses.
First: competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices.
Second: regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less.
These two forces affect all industries, but the next two are far more tech-specific.
Third: self-help. Computers are extremely flexible, and so are the digital products and services we make from them. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing-complete Von Neumann machine, a computer that can run every valid program.
That means that users can always avail themselves of programs that undo the anti-features that shift value from them to a company's shareholders. Think of a board-room table where someone says, 'I've calculated that making our ads 20% more invasive will net us 2% more revenue per user.'
In a digital world, someone else might well say 'Yes, but if we do that, 20% of our users will install ad-blockers, and our revenue from those users will drop to zero, forever.'
This means that digital companies are constrained by the fear that some enshittificatory maneuver will prompt their users to google, 'How do I disenshittify this?'
Fourth and finally: workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn't mean that tech workers don't have labor power. The historical "talent shortage" of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage over their bosses. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another job – a better job.
They knew it, and their bosses knew it. Ironically, this made tech workers highly exploitable. Tech workers overwhelmingly saw themselves as founders in waiting, entrepreneurs who were temporarily drawing a salary, heroic figures of the tech mission.
That's why mottoes like Google's 'don't be evil' and Facebook's 'make the world more open and connected' mattered: they instilled a sense of mission in workers. It's what Fobazi Ettarh calls 'vocational awe, 'or Elon Musk calls being 'extremely hardcore.'
Tech workers had lots of bargaining power, but they didn't flex it when their bosses demanded that they sacrifice their health, their families, their sleep to meet arbitrary deadlines.
So long as their bosses transformed their workplaces into whimsical 'campuses,' with gyms, gourmet cafeterias, laundry service, massages and egg-freezing, workers could tell themselves that they were being pampered – rather than being made to work like government mules.
But for bosses, there's a downside to motivating your workers with appeals to a sense of mission, namely: your workers will feel a sense of mission. So when you ask them to enshittify the products they ruined their health to ship, workers will experience a sense of profound moral injury, respond with outrage, and threaten to quit.
Thus tech workers themselves were the final bulwark against enshittification,
The pre-enshittification era wasn't a time of better leadership. The executives weren't better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power.
So what happened?
One by one, each of these constraints was eroded until it dissolved, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittoscene.
It started with competition. From the Gilded Age until the Reagan years, the purpose of competition law was to promote competition. US antitrust law treated corporate power as dangerous and sought to blunt it. European antitrust laws were modeled on US ones, imported by the architects of the Marshall Plan.
But starting in the neoliberal era, competition authorities all over the world adopted a doctrine called 'consumer welfare,' which held that monopolies were evidence of quality. If everyone was shopping at the same store and buying the same product, that meant it was the best store, selling the best product – not that anyone was cheating.
And so all over the world, governments stopped enforcing their competition laws. They just ignored them as companies flouted them. Those companies merged with their major competitors, absorbed small companies before they could grow to be big threats. They held an orgy of consolidation that produced the most inbred industries imaginable, whole sectors grown so incestuous they developed Habsburg jaws, from eyeglasses to sea freight, glass bottles to payment processing, vitamin C to beer.
Most of our global economy is dominated by five or fewer global companies. If smaller companies refuse to sell themselves to these cartels, the giants have free rein to flout competition law further, with 'predatory pricing' that keeps an independent rival from gaining a foothold.
When Diapers.com refused Amazon's acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100m on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until diapers.com went bust, and Amazon bought them for pennies on the dollar, and shut them down.
Competition is a distant memory. As Tom Eastman says, the web has devolved into 'five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four,' so these giant companies no longer fear losing our business.
Lily Tomlin used to do a character on the TV show Laugh In, an AT&T telephone operator who'd do commercials for the Bell system. Each one would end with her saying 'We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.'
Today's giants are not constrained by competition.
They don't care. They don't have to. They're Google.
That's the first constraint gone, and as it slipped away, the second constraint – regulation – was also doomed.
When an industry consists of hundreds of small- and medium-sized enterprises, it is a mob, a rabble. Hundreds of companies can't agree on what to tell Parliament or Congress or the Commission. They can't even agree on how to cater a meeting where they'd discuss the matter.
But when a sector dwindles to a bare handful of dominant firms, it ceases to be a rabble and it becomes a cartel.
Five companies, or four, or three, or two, or just one company finds it easy to converge on a single message for their regulators, and without "wasteful competition" eroding their profits, they have plenty of cash to spread around.
Like Facebook, handing former UK deputy PM Nick Clegg millions every year to sleaze around Europe, telling his former colleagues that Facebook is the only thing standing between 'European Cyberspace' and the Chinese Communist Party.
Tech's regulatory capture allows it to flout the rules that constrain less concentrated sectors. They can pretend that violating labor, consumer and privacy laws is fine, because they violate them with an app.
This is why competition matters: it's not just because competition makes companies work harder and share value with customers and workers, it's because competition keeps companies from becoming too big to fail, and too big to jail.
Now, there's plenty of things we don't want improved through competition, like privacy invasions. After the EU passed its landmark privacy law, the GDPR, there was a mass-extinction event for small EU ad-tech companies. These companies disappeared en masse, and that's fine.
They were even more invasive and reckless than US-based Big Tech companies. After all, they had less to lose. We don't want competition in commercial surveillance. We don't want to produce increasing efficiency in violating our human rights.
But: Google and Facebook – who pretend they are called Alphabet and Meta – have been unscathed by European privacy law. That's not because they don't violate the GDPR (they do!). It's because they pretend they are headquartered in Ireland, one of the EU's most notorious corporate crime-havens.
And Ireland competes with the EU other crime havens – Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and sometimes the Netherlands – to see which country can offer the most hospitable environment for all sorts of crimes. Because the kind of company that can fly an Irish flag of convenience is mobile enough to change to a Maltese flag if the Irish start enforcing EU laws.
Which is how you get an Irish Data Protection Commission that processes fewer than 20 major cases per year, while Germany's data commissioner handles more than 500 major cases, even though Ireland is nominal home to the most privacy-invasive companies on the continent.
So Google and Facebook get to act as though they are immune to privacy law, because they violate the law with an app; just like Uber can violate labor law and claim it doesn't count because they do it with an app.
Uber's labor-pricing algorithm offers different drivers different payments for the same job, something Veena Dubal calls 'algorithmic wage discrimination.' If you're more selective about which jobs you'll take, Uber will pay you more for every ride.
But if you take those higher payouts and ditch whatever side-hustle let you cover your bills which being picky about your Uber drives, Uber will incrementally reduce the payment, toggling up and down as you grow more or less selective, playing you like a fish on a line until you eventually – inevitably – lose to the tireless pricing robot, and end up stuck with low wages and all your side-hustles gone.
Then there's Amazon, which violates consumer protection laws, but says it doesn't matter, because they do it with an app. Amazon makes $38b/year from its 'advertising' system. 'Advertising' in quotes because they're not selling ads, they're selling placements in search results.
The companies that spend the most on 'ads' go to the top, even if they're offering worse products at higher prices. If you click the first link in an Amazon search result, on average you will pay a 29% premium over the best price on the service. Click one of the first four items and you'll pay a 25% premium. On average you have to go seventeen items down to find the best deal on Amazon.
Any merchant that did this to you in a physical storefront would be fined into oblivion. But Amazon has captured its regulators, so it can violate your rights, and say, "it doesn't count, we did it with an app"
This is where that third constraint, self-help, would sure come in handy. If you don't want your privacy violated, you don't need to wait for the Irish privacy regulator to act, you can just install an ad-blocker.
More than half of all web users are blocking ads. But the web is an open platform, developed in the age when tech was hundreds of companies at each others' throats, unable to capture their regulators.
Today, the web is being devoured by apps, and apps are ripe for enshittification. Regulatory capture isn't just the ability to flout regulation, it's also the ability to co-opt regulation, to wield regulation against your adversaries.
Today's tech giants got big by exploiting self-help measures. When Facebook was telling Myspace users they needed to escape Rupert Murdoch’s evil crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, 'Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here'
It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your Myspace username and password, and it would login to Myspace and pretend to be you, and scrape everything waiting in your inbox, copying it to your FB inbox, and you could reply to it and it would autopilot your replies back to Myspace.
When Microsoft was choking off Apple's market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac – so that offices were throwing away their designers' Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator – Steve Jobs didn't beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office.
He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office, and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could perfectly read and write Microsoft's Word, Excel and Powerpoint files.
When Google entered the market, it sent its crawler to every web server on Earth, where it presented itself as a web-user: 'Hi! Hello! Do you have any web pages? Thanks! How about some more? How about more?'
But every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Facebook, Apple and Google were doing this adversarial interoperability, that was progress. If you try to do it to them, that's piracy.
Try to make an alternative client for Facebook and they'll say you violated US laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and EU laws like Article 6 of the EUCD.
Try to make an Android program that can run iPhone apps and play back the data from Apple's media stores and they'd bomb you until the rubble bounced.
Try to scrape all of Google and they'll nuke you until you glowed.
Tech's regulatory capture is mind-boggling. Take that law I mentioned earlier, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. Bill Clinton signed it in 1998, and the EU imported it as Article 6 of the EUCD in 2001
It is a blanket prohibition on removing any kind of encryption that restricts access to a copyrighted work – things like ripping DVDs or jailbreaking a phone – with penalties of a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.
This law has been so broadened that it can be used to imprison creators for granting access to their own creations
Here's how that works: In 2008, Amazon bought Audible, an audiobook platform, in an anticompetitive acquisition. Today, Audible is a monopolist with more than 90% of the audiobook market. Audible requires that all creators on their platform sell with Amazon's "digital rights management," which locks it to Amazon's apps.
So say I write a book, then I read it into a mic, then I pay a director and an engineer thousands of dollars to turn that into an audiobook, and sell it to you on the monopoly platform, Audible, that controls more than 90% of the market.
If I later decide to leave Amazon and want to let you come with me to a rival platform, I am out of luck. If I supply you with a tool to remove Amazon's encryption from my audiobook, so you can play it in another app, I commit a felony, punishable by a 5-year sentence and a half-million-dollar fine, for a first offense.
That's a stiffer penalty than you would face if you simply pirated the audiobook from a torrent site. But it's also harsher than the punishment you'd get for shoplifting the audiobook on CD from a truck-stop. It's harsher than the sentence you'd get for hijacking the truck that delivered the CD.
So think of our ad-blockers again. 50% of web users are running ad-blockers. 0% of app users are running ad-blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that's a felony (Jay Freeman calls this 'felony contempt of business-model').
So when someone in a board-room says, 'let's make our ads 20% more obnoxious and get a 2% revenue increase,' no one objects that this might prompt users to google, 'how do I block ads?' After all, the answer is, 'you can't.'
Indeed, it's more likely that someone in that board room will say, 'let's make our ads 100% more obnoxious and get a 10% revenue increase' (this is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website).
There's no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn't install a counter-app that coordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold.
No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete, or in other words: 'IP law.'
'IP' is just a euphemism for 'a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers.' And 'app' is just a euphemism for 'a web-page wrapped enough IP to make it a felony to mod it to protect the labor, consumer and privacy rights of its user.'
We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.
But what about that fourth constraint: workers?
For decades, tech workers' high degrees of bargaining power and vocational awe put a ceiling on enshittification. Even after the tech sector shrank to a handful of giants. Even after they captured their regulators so they could violate our consumer, privacy and labor rights. Even after they created 'felony contempt of business model' and extinguished self-help for tech users. Tech was still constrained by their workers' sense of moral injury in the face of the imperative to enshittify.
Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?
Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.
Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.
And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired last year six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.
Workers are no longer a check on their bosses' worst impulses
Today, the response to 'I refuse to make this product worse' is, 'turn in your badge and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.'
I get that this is all a little depressing
OK, really depressing.
But hear me out! We've identified the disease. We've traced its natural history. We've identified its underlying mechanism. Now we can get to work on a cure.
There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labor.
To reverse enshittification and guard against its reemergence, we must restore and strengthen each of these.
On competition, it's actually looking pretty good. The EU, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and China are all doing more on competition than they have in two generations. They're blocking mergers, unwinding existing ones, taking action on predatory pricing and other sleazy tactics.
Remember, in the US and Europe, we already have the laws to do this – we just stopped enforcing them in the Helmut Kohl era.
I've been fighting these fights with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 22 years now, and I've never seen a more hopeful moment for sound, informed tech policy.
Now, the enshittifiers aren't taking this laying down. The business press can't stop talking about how stupid and old-fashioned all this stuff is. They call people like me 'hipster antitrust,' and they hate any regulator who actually does their job.
Take Lina Khan, the brilliant head of the US Federal Trade Commission, who has done more in three years on antitrust than the combined efforts of all her predecessors over the past 40 years. Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal has run more than 80 editorials trashing Khan, insisting that she's an ineffectual ideologue who can't get anything done.
Sure, Rupert, that's why you ran 80 editorials about her.
Because she can't get anything done.
Even Canada is stepping up on competition. Canada! Land of the evil billionaire! From Ted Rogers, who owns the country's telecoms; to Galen Weston, who owns the country's grocery stores; to the Irvings, who basically own the entire province of New Brunswick.
Even Canada is doing something about this. Last autumn, Trudeau's government promised to update Canada's creaking competition law to finally ban 'abuse of dominance.'
I mean, wow. I guess when Galen Weston decided to engage in a criminal conspiracy to fix the price of bread – the most Les Miz-ass crime imaginable – it finally got someone's attention, eh?
Competition has a long way to go, but all over the world, competition law is seeing a massive revitalization. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put antitrust law in a coma in the 80s – but it's awake, it's back, and it's pissed.
What about regulation? How will we get tech companies to stop doing that one weird trick of adding 'with an app' to their crimes and escaping enforcement?
Well, here in the EU, they're starting to figure it out. This year, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act went into effect, and they let people who get screwed by tech companies go straight to the federal European courts, bypassing the toothless watchdogs in Europe's notorious corporate crime havens like Ireland.
In America, they might finally get a digital privacy law. You people have no idea how backwards US privacy law is. The last time the US Congress enacted a broadly applicable privacy law was in 1988.
The Video Privacy Protection Act makes it a crime for video-store clerks to leak your video-rental history. It was passed after a right-wing judge who was up for the Supreme Court had his rentals published in a DC newspaper. The rentals weren't even all that embarrassing!
Sure, that judge, Robert Bork, wasn't confirmed for the Supreme Court, but that was because he was a virulently racist loudmouth and a crook who served as Nixon's Solicitor General.
But Congress got the idea that their video records might be next, freaked out, and passed the VPPA.
That was the last time Americans got a big, national privacy law. Nineteen. Eighty. Eight.
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?
Having 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 big coalition for that kind of privacy law.
What about self-help? That's a lot farther away, alas.
The EU's DMA will force tech companies to open up their walled gardens for interoperation. You'll be able to use Whatsapp to message people on iMessage, or quit Facebook and move to Mastodon, but still send messages to the people left behind.
But if you want to reverse-engineer one of those Big Tech products and mod it to work for you, not them, the EU's got nothing for you.
This is an area ripe for improvement, and I think the US might be the first ones to open this up.
It's certainly on-brand for the EU to be forcing tech companies to do things a certain way, while the US simply takes away tech companies' abilities to prevent others from changing how their stuff works.
My big hope here is that Stein's Law will take hold: 'Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop'
Letting companies decide how their customers must use their products is simply too tempting an invitation to mischief. HP has a whole building full of engineers thinking of new ways to lock your printer to its official ink cartridges, forcing you to spend $10,000/gallon on ink to print your boarding passes and shopping lists.
It's offensive. The only people who don't agree are the people running the monopolies in all the other industries, like the med-tech monopolists who are locking their insulin pumps to their glucose monitors, turning people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers.
Finally, there's labor. Here in Europe, there's much higher union density than in the US, which American tech barons are learning the hard way. There is nothing more satisfying in the daily news than the latest salvo by Nordic unions against that Tesla guy (Musk is the most Edison-ass Tesla guy imaginable).
But even in the USA, there's a massive surge in tech unions. Tech workers are realizing that they aren't founders in waiting. The days of free massages and facial piercings and getting to wear black tee shirts that say things your boss doesn't understand are coming to an end.
In Seattle, Amazon's tech workers walked out in sympathy with Amazon's warehouse workers, because they're all workers.
The only reason the tech workers aren't monitored by AI that notifies their managers if they visit the toilet during working hours is their rapidly dwindling bargaining power. The way things are going, Amazon programmers are going to be pissing in bottles next to their workstations (for a guy who built a penis-shaped rocket, Jeff Bezos really hates our kidneys).
We're seeing bold, muscular, global action on competition, regulation and labor, with self-help bringing up the rear. It's not a moment too soon, because the bad news is, enshittification is coming to every industry.
If it's got a networked computer in it, the people who made it can run the Darth Vader MBA playbook on it, changing the rules from moment to moment, violating your rights and then saying 'It's OK, we did it with an app.'
From Mercedes renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dishsoap, enshittification is metastasizing into every corner of our lives.
Software doesn't eat the world, it enshittifies it
But there's a bright side to all this: if everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification.
Just as with privacy law in the US, the potential anti-enshittification coalition is massive, it's unstoppable.
The cynics among you might be skeptical that this will make a difference. After all, isn't "enshittification" the same as "capitalism"?
Well, no.
Look, I'm not going to cape for capitalism here. I'm hardly a true believer in markets as the most efficient allocators of resources and arbiters of policy – if there was ever any doubt, capitalism's total failure to grapple with the climate emergency surely erases it.
But the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and wooly internet, a space where people with disfavored views could find each other, offer mutual aid, and organize.
The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crapgadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand-names, and cryptocurrency scams.
The internet isn't more important than the climate emergency, nor gender justice, racial justice, genocide, or inequality.
But the internet is the terrain we'll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it's joined.
We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device.
We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to coordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, and save our planet and our species.
Martin Luther King said 'It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.'
And it may be true that the law can't force corporate sociopaths to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut-bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation.
But it can make that exec fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity, even if he doesn't think you deserve it.
And I think that's pretty important.
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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/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel/a>
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vidavalor · 4 months
Text
You can leave your hat on
So Crowley comes up for a nightcap in The Blitz, Part 2 and takes off the wool overcoat the minisode introduced but leaves his hat on.
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If you then go backwards and look at what he had on and when in The Blitz, Parts 1 & 2, it gets even more amusingly Ineffable Husbands pretty quickly...
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When Crowley shows up in the church in The Blitz, Part 1 in his suit with the hat on, he's the last character to arrive in the scene but the clinch of a subtle commentary happening via the costuming by way of hats. Until the early 1960s, as you probably already know, a man didn't leave the house without a hat on, but they would take them off as a sign of respect in different places indoors-- churches and theatres among them. Women were not expected to do so, largely because the style of women's hats were often the kind that were pinned into their hair and to take it off was a whole damn thing that required more extensive grooming than is possible when just entering/exiting a place. As a result, the Nazis in the church scene are following social custom-- the male Nazis have their hats off because they're inside a church but Greta is not violating anything by having her (rather fabulous, ngl) hat on. Aziraphale, of course, took his hat off and has it in his hand for the duration of the scene.
Crowley kept his on and we're bemused more than anything because we know that while this is technically impolite, Crowley is far more of a good presently-man-shaped-being than these half-witted Nazi spies, right? Which is basically the point of the commentary-- that the rebels are often more morally sound than the conformers. Also goes without saying that Crowley shouldn't have the sunglasses on in church either (and that this is all set at night and during a blackout makes the fact that he does all the funnier) but Crowley can't take the glasses off around humans so... but then, after the rest of The Blitz, Part 1, we then hop into The Bentley with Crowley & Aziraphale at the start of The Blitz, Part 2 and find that Crowley has a new wardrobe addition:
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Crowley is now wearing a black wool dress overcoat over his suit. Yes, they're magical and can regulate their body temperatures without actually needing the clothes they wear but the clothes they wear are also part of blending in with the humans of their day and we're now reminded that the 1941 part of The Blitz was going on over the winter into the early spring, something we could forget about momentarily when everyone had their coats off in the church but for Aziraphale, who has just worn the same coat for awhile now. This then serves to show us that Crowley got out of The Bentley outside of the church to go rescue Aziraphale and stopped to take his winter coat off and leave it in the car before doing so, all while choosing to not leave his hat behind as well. Yeah, wearing your hat into a church as a demon could be-- or only be-- about being a demon but we're going to see pretty soon that it's not *just* about that. So, why take his coat off?
Because he wants his angel to see his suit.
Crowley wears a lot of black and he had to be careful not to be mistaken for SS, so he's added in some color. He has some angelic white in the form of a hankerchief and a shirt that's a shade of grey that makes it actually look blue-- wearing his Aziraphale colors, we see-- and a snazzy red tie. You can't see this very well if he has his overcoat on so he left the coat in the car, consciously wanting to look as dashing as possible when showing up to grand romantic gesture Aziraphale.
When they get to the Windmill Theatre, Crowley wears both the hat and coat into the theatre-- but he takes the hat off once they're inside. Churches can go pound sand but Mrs. H? Crowley wouldn't dare disrespect her or her theatre lol. Aziraphale also takes his hat off in the theatre and we see that he does in every place of reverence to him, as he also takes his hat off in the magic shop later on. Crowley then wears the hat and coat both back from the theatre to the bookshop and once he settles in there to help Aziraphale prepare for his magic show, he *settles in*, as we know, tossing his hat on an angel statue, hanging up his overcoat, and unbuttoning and opening up his suit jacket as he sits down. The jacket now open, the design on his tie is now visible for the first time. Aziraphale is amusingly invested in his magic but when he does get around to unburying his nose from his autographed Prof. Hoff magic book, he can look his full at Crowley's whole ensemble here, which Crowley has been alternately hiding and revealing in bits and pieces so far (like a certain show we know lol.)
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Crowley wears all of it on their date to the magic shop but keeps his overcoat open and takes his hat off again at The Windmill when he's in the audience and on stage with Aziraphale. However, after the performance, when Furfur confronts them, Crowley has the hat back on-- while he's lounging on the couch, alone with Aziraphale in the dressing room. They weren't exactly about to leave in that moment when Furfur showed up. Aziraphale is still in costume and they're still chatting about the performance. Crowley isn't standing by the door waiting for him to get his stuff so they can go and so already has his hat on. He's sitting on the couch. But the hat's back.
After Aziraphale manages to set Furfur up in this scene, we then next see them again in the bookshop, drinking Chateauneuf-du-Pape and talking about how Aziraphale saved the photo. Crowley's overcoat is nowhere to be seen, presumably hung up on the coat rack in the front part of the shop, but he's kept the hat on and, at this point, there's no other possible reason to not have taken it off but for that Aziraphale likes the hat. A lot.
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(And yes, before anyone messages me, I know that's Terry Pratchett's hat. In the context of GO, though, that's Crowley's 1941 hat.)
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kittievampire · 11 months
Note
Nightbringer! Virgin! Asmo’s first time is with MC? And once he realizes how HEAVENLY MC feels it’s almost as if he can’t stop?
Absolutely 🥵🥵🥵
Lemme see what I have in my bag, my dear~
Click here if ya wanna request!
Lust's First
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Warnings: Cursing, Smut, Virgin!Asmodeus x Fem!MC, Switch!Asmodeus, Face-Fucking, Overstim, Light teasing, Asmodeus is very fucking horny
Enjoy.
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It was only logical that the Avatar of Lust was a virgin at one point, right?
It was logical, yet the concept still confused you. Asmodeus was standing before you in your room, late at night, a tent in his pants, and a blush on his face. He was trying to read your expression at the news of his innocence, feeling embarrassed despite only being given his title of sin fairly recently.
"MC?" He called out softly, making you snap out of your thoughts. The two of you locked eyes in the dark room. You could barely make out the outline of his figure, yet his eyes glowed, and you could see that he'd shifted into his demon form. You could feel it too. The aura of raw lust couldn't be more evident, what with how it plunged the entire room in its sweet aroma.
In his sweet aroma.
"I think the Demon King mentioned something like this... That my body would do something weird like this every now and then," He shook his head, running his fingers through his hair. "But I wasn't paying attention! I was too busy trying to figure out how to make my wings look more fabulous with gemstones and now I don't know what to do!" He rambled, not even paying any mind to his, now messy, hair.
You breathed in his scent, the calming air filling your lungs and coursing through your body, arousal beginning to pool in your gut. You were familiar with this kind of thing, Asmodeus from the present would talk to you about his ability to charm in multiple different ways, some less controllable than others. He'd explained that every now and then, his body will release pheremones similar to aphrodisiac perfume. Over the years, he'd learned how to detect and control this odd happening, so he'd only release such strong chemicals purposefully.
One of the key details that you remembered was that this can affect himself as well if not controlled.
"And you're a virgin," You repeated softly, earning a nod from the Avatar of Lust. "I can't go around, being the sin I am, asking for someone to take my virginity! Do you understand how compromising that'd be? Besides, I want to remember my first time!" You didn't even see him move toward you, you only felt him grasp your hands, shakily placing one at his crotch. "Please, MC? Would you be my first, Darling?" You could see the way his eyes glowed in the room that had been plunged in darkness, the sweet smell that lingered making you shiver under its weight. You couldn't deny him if you wanted to, not that you did.
_
You never took Asmodeus for being loud in bed, mainly because the one you'd grown to know was experienced and knew how to keep his voice in check, but this one? His sounds made your pussy clench around nothing, and you only sucked more of his cock into your mouth. You lathered his length in your saliva, pressing a sloppy kiss to the tip before taking it into your mouth once more.
His fingers were tangled in the locks of your hair, tugging on it as he whined and cried out incoherent sentences. Asmo bucked his hips, his tip hitting the back of your throat as his free hand joined the other in your hair. "So good! So goooood!" He whined, his head pushing against the wooden headboard as he thrusted his hips upward and into your mouth, seeking more of the warmth it provided. You'd manage to catch a glimpse of his expression, and the sight almost made you cum on the spot. His eyes were rolled back and teary, his cheeks were a bright red, his forehead had beads of sweat forming, and there was saliva running down his chin. "M'almost there! Almost there, please!"
You'd be lying if you said this wasn't out of the ordinary. When you'd spend nights with Asmodeus from the present, he'd only submit to you if you begged him to. Even then, he'd never allow himself to look this unkempt. The smell that had overwhelmed your senses prior to the events unfolding had yet to dissipate, making your body even more hot, your pussy even more wet.
The fourth-born sin was fucking your face mercilessly, his length pushing down your throat, making you gag. "Your mouth, it— Nnnh!— Feels so good, Darling!" He mewled out, balls clapping against your chin as more saliva was fucked out of your mouth. "Yes, yes, yes!" He shoved his entire length down your throat, making your throat constrict around his cock as he came. Thick white ropes of his seed gushed down your throat, and the grip he had on the back of your head kept you down, so all you could do was swallow.
He bucked his hips a few more times, clenching his teeth in an attempt to regain control of at least his voice, before he slowly pulled out. You coughed a few times, trying to clear your lungs so you could breathe properly. Once you caught your breath, you saw Asmodeus on his knees before you, eyes glowing, and a blush dusting across his face. "MC," He muttered out softly, dazed smile unwavering. "Let me take you now! I don't think I can hold back any longer!"
The Avatar of Lust leaned forward, tugging on your legs so you'd fall to your back on the bed with his hard cock grinding against your sopping folds. He let out a lewd noise that was between a moan and a shaky sigh, completely dazed from the pleasure you brought to him. "Wanna feel... This tight pussy around me," He whimpered out, gripping your thighs and spreading them. Hesitantly, his gaze flicked upward to look at you. The pure, raw lust that was emitted from his form, the thing that filled your senses so sweetly, the thing that made his eyes glow brightly in the dark and his wings flap excitedly. You couldn't deny him. You wanted him just as badly as he wanted you.
With a slow nod of your head, Asmodeus leaned forward to capture your lips in a sweet kiss, gripping your hips tightly as he pushed the blunt tip of his cock into you slowly. The warmth of your walls enveloped his cock, greeting him in it's tight velvet.
You grasped Asmo's shoulders tightly, pulling away from him and letting out a sharp gasp at the stretch as he bottomed out. He let out a sigh in bliss, blush darkening along with his eyes. "You feel amazing, Darling!" He moaned out, leaning forward to attack your neck with his teeth as he bucked his hips forward. His pace was erratic and desperate, almost as if he'd die if he didn't fuck you. The flapping of his wings only caused the tainted air around you to circulate, the sweet aroma of lust and sex filling your senses just as his cock filled your tight cunt deliciously. His moans were on par with yours, your mixed cries of ecstasy bouncing off of the walls, no doubt alerting anyone nearby.
But you didn't care.
At this point, all your fuzzy mind could think about was how fucking deep his cock was driving into you. The brutal pace didn't help your situation whatsoever, and you were reduced to tears, saliva, and lewd cries of his name.
Asmodeus found it difficult not to get off on your noises alone; They were like a forbidden melody to his ears that he didn't want to end. He couldn't stop. He didn't want to stop. He wanted to stay buried deep inside of the sweet warmth that your pussy provided for all eternity, figuring that he'd die happy if he died at all. His erratic thrusting didn't cease, and the number of marks he left on your neck and clavicle was evidence enough of his raging lust for you. "You feel so good, MC!" He declared once more, letting out a soft whine. "M'already s-so close, Darling," He whimpered, slamming the tip of his cock against the spongey spot that made you scream. You arched your back, breasts pushing against his chest as you wrapped your legs around him, digging your fingers into the bedsheets with gritted teeth. "You want me to fill you up?" He gasped out, bringing your hand up to his face and gently nibbling on your knuckle. "Or maybe you'd prefer I cover you in my cum, hm?"
Both options sounded amazing, but there was something about the second option that made your walls flutter around his cock, and for your arm to shoot up over your eyes in embarrassment. Asmodeus gasped. "I see," His cock twitched, and his hips slammed against yours even faster. "You'll look so beautiful, Darling! Absolutely— Nnhh!— Stunning!" His voice quivered.
His cock's relentless pace, the bullying of his tip against your cervix, and the pressure that his lust put you under made you scream his name as your orgasm racked through your body. Your legs trembled as your juices coated his cock in your essence.
Asmo's grip on your thighs was unwavering as he leaned back to angle himself properly. He thrusted into you a few more times before pulling out, pushing your thighs together around his cock to give it a nice cushion before cumming. He let out lewd gasps as thick, white ropes of his cum shot out onto your stomach and breasts, his cock twitching as his orgasm washed over him.
You were left panting heavily. Your throat was still raw from his face-fucking earlier, and now, your pussy was wrecked as well. You felt him push passed your folds again and you gripped the sheets, letting out a sharp gasp as he plunged deep inside of your warmth once more.
It suddenly felt like the heat around you only increased in temperature, the sweet smell from earlier becoming ten times as intoxicating. He looked down at you, lust filling his expression alongside an apologetic look.
"I'm sorry, MC. Could we maybe do just a few more rounds? I can't seem to calm down." You would have rolled your eyes at the fact that he asked for permission after doing the deed, but the way your pussy clenched in reaction to the overstimulation made your head all fuzzy again.
"Fuck," You whimpered out, knowing that this would be a long night.
He really did try to stop after the seventh round, but fuck. Your pussy just felt too good.
Whimpered apologies and the sound of skin slapping against skin went through the door from the small crack at the bottom.
That's when Lucifer decided that maybe it was best to install sound-proof walls and doors.
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Hope you liked it, anon!
Masterlist
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totaly-obsessed · 4 months
Note
Could you write for Ella where reader is also a footballer but reader tears her ACL
Jersey Dispute
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Ella Toone x reader request
-> Reader tears her ACL - sending Ella into panic - fluffy
-> probably not the correct timeline of a healing ACL
-> Combined with this request!
-> I hope this is okay, @ anon's!
➳ Masterlist
•─────⋅☾ ☽⋅─────•
Ella hated knees. She really did.
Your girlfriend had been on the pitch, not too far away from you when you had gone down in a Manchester derby. Forgotten was the color of your shirt as Ella rushed to you. To her surprise you weren’t crying, you just sat there, waiting for the medics. “I tore it.” Those words still haunt her in her sleep.
You had waited for her outside of the changing room and together you slowly walked to the car. The ride was tense, the brunette not too sure how to approach the situation, but you cracked joke after joke, trying to loosen her up.
Sure this was bad, you knew it meant nearly a year of no football for you but in the end, there was nothing that you could do right now – you were just glad that the World Cup was just over, giving you a slim chance of getting ft for the Olympics.
Waiting for the surgery was the worst but Ella gave it her best to fill the house with laughter. And she did it fabulously. Quite a few of you and her teammates showed up, wanting to see how you were doing, which led to many fun evenings playing Mario Cart and watching movies.
After a month, it finally came; the surgery to make everything worse so that you could get better again. Your girlfriend was nervous, much more than you were, running around in circles in your hospital room. She had taken the week off from training and everyone understood that she wanted to be with you.
“Ella, please baby sit down. You’re driving me nuts!” With a shamed look, she sat down in a chair next to your bed, hands pressed between her knees but she couldn’t hold it, jumping up again, going back to pacing. 
“Ells, please…” You patted the space next to you, scooching over so that she fit. Now wrapped in your arms, tucked under a blanket she was finally able to breathe. “I’ll go into surgery in two hours when no emergency comes in. Mary will be here so-“ You could see her trying to defend herself, that she didn’t need a babysitter, but you put your hand over her mouth. “Shhh. Mary will come and you will go eat something. Then I‘ll come out of surgery and everything will be absolutely fine.”
Mary had arrived just in time when they took you for surgery so that she could take your frantic girlfriend out.
Just as you had predicted, everything had been fine.
Now, nearly a month later you had started physio-therapy and rehab at the Manchester City facility, leaving Ella to worry at Manchester United – so you called her every time you could to reassure her.
In the evenings it was hard for your girlfriend to let you help her cook. “Love, no! Sit back down, hmm?” Most of the time she just kidnapped you to the living room, sat you down on the couch, and went back to cook.
It was great, being able to spend so much time with your girlfriend and being able to catch up on Uni work – you loved it, Ella loved it, everybody loved it. The bickering was kept to a minimum with evenings spent curled up in each other’s arms. It was perfect, almost too perfect…
Nearly two months of pure bliss were interrupted by the first disagreement.
Manchester derbies were ferocious and the atmosphere electric, they were great. Ella saw your inability to play the match, as her opportunity to get you to wear her very red ‘Toone’ jersey. “Babe – pleaseee! You’ll look so good in it!” She had flung open the bedroom door, where you were currently sorting through the huge closet for clothes to donate. In her hands was a huge box, containing a whole stack of her shirts. “Ells we’ve been over this. I will not wear a Man United jersey.”
The brunette was whining and pouting letting the box fall to the ground, eventually flinging herself on the bed – desperate to get your attention. But you prevailed, having your back towards your girlfriend helping with that. You couldn’t cave – no way. “Quit it, Ella.”
Oof. That first name hit.
“But Baby-“ She was quickly shut up with a deep kiss after you had finally turned around, gracing the stunned midfielder with your attention. “I’ll wear your England jersey, yeah?” and with a pat to her cheek, you were gone again, leaving a stunned Ella behind.
Gameday came and Ella played her best game of the season – a hat trick and an assist, beating Manchester City four to one. Her motivation? You. Sat in the family section wearing an England jersey that had her name on the back.
And while you were sad that your team lost, there was just no way you could be mad when a grinning Ella came out of the changing room, match ball in hand, falling into your open and waiting arms, littering your face in tiny kisses.
“Ya’ gonna have to wear this every game day now – would’ve been better in a United shirt though.” With a disgusted groan, you shoved her off, but there was no chance to get the teasing smirk off her face for the whole day.
Five months later it was Ellas' turn to sit in the family section, wearing an England jersey with your name. Her legs bounced up and down, nervously waiting for you to get subbed on.
When you did, she couldn’t do anything else but grin – seeing you back on the pitch, knowing how hard you worked for this made her prouder than she had ever been.
She blissfully ignored Alessia taking a video of you coming on for Alanna Kennedy, and then turning the camera to a teary-eyed Tooney, clutching your jersey in her hands.
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