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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Gig apps trap reverse centaurs in Skinner boxes

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

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

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And sued:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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transportedaudio · 2 years

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agoofyannoyancetolaw · 5 months

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a/n: I heard y’all were going insane for a/b/o. So enjoy 😔. Also this was originally price x reader but I changed it to graves for fun and I wrote this at a family party so-

minors DNI

you and graves had been pent up on your ruts all week and god was the entire shadow company was tired of It. Getting yelled at by both of their two commanders constantly for simple mistakes, even when you two were alone you still somehow managed to be pent up even against each other.

so? Like any good team, they locked you two in a room to chill the hell out of your rutts. They knew it was a bad idea to put two alphas in a room, but it was also better then two alphas running around all pent up. And they let you spend hours in there.

You two had been sparring to calm down till you had pinned him down, and both of you were much too in rut to really think about the idea of simply stopping- you pulled down his camo pants, the cold air hitting his legs and making him whimper as he saw you spit on two of your fingers and slowly work him open.

Graves soft moans and gasps filled the air as he felt your soft digits work him open. Making him feel so damn full without even doing anything, the smell of your mixed cologne and scents driving you two further as you moved out your fingers and slid in your length. Thrusting into him as his walls clenched around you and his hands moved to your shoulders, desperate for any kind of purchase.

he knew he shouldn’t be dealing with his rut this way, and he knew he should be around some omega.. but this felt so much better, to be lavished and taken care of and feeling the burn twist in his mind be soothed by the feeling of your lips peppering kisses along his neck

he could feel your thrusts get erratic and bruising his prostate, and your knot hitting right next to his rim, about to catch the side. His mind drifting in and out of focus as he could only think about his approaching release.

he was barely even awake when he felt your knot catch, the warm feeling of you painting his walls white earning a soft hum from him, his own painting both of your stomachs with cum.

he could barely catch his breath by the time you pulled you, a soft “we’re doing this again, darlin’-“ falling from his lips. God he was glad his shadows locked him in here.

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xstevex-world · 1 year

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Steve Harrington’s favourite musician has been the same since he was 17.

He distinctly remembers hearing Chrissy Cunningham play in his car radio during his senior year, subsequently listening to nothing but her breakout EP for a week straight - and that was just the beginning.

He followed all of work for over the past 7 years: bought physical and digital copies of all her albums, watched every music video multiple times, read every interview, saved up enough while working weekend shifts at scoops to get tickets to her sold out shows in Indiana - he had so much merch that Jonathan Byers once joked that Steve could probably make a shrine to his idol.

He had even kept up during her hitatus, almost two full years of radio silence from the star, like she had disappeared off the face of the earth. It wasn’t the worst thing that had ever happened, but it didn’t help that it overlapped with him dropping out of business school to pursue a career in cosmetology and that final falling out he had with his father over his choice in education.

The day she came back felt like Christmas.

Her comeback announcement dropped on June 13th - and it wasn’t just a new post on social media or a candid shot online someone managed to snap.

It was a whole EP drop, 4 entire songs (and a music video) that he knew he was going to play on repeat after 716 days of radio silence.

That opened the floodgates for everything to start again: she went back on social media, thanked her fans for their wholehearted response to her new releases. She started doing interviews again: discussing her mental health and the impact of her mothers control in her life; her reunion with her best friend (and apparent ex) from high school; her label dropping her after it was found that her “momager” had embezzled a huge amount of money from said company, releasing her from her contract early and allowing her to find new partners, new producers, new projects.

She talks about how she’s never been happier, and Steve can’t help but beam at it. He can hear it in her music, how it’s going more against the grain of what’s popular, opting instead for etherial synths mixed with heavy guitars. She sings about heartbreak and moving on and being better than then the people who brought her down for long, now that she’s starting fresh.

Steve loves it, thinks some of the changes have something to with Eddie Munson’s name appearing in the credits of all her new material.

Truthfully, he got curious after someone on Twitter posted a screengrab of cameos made by Munson and his own bandmates in all of her new music videos. He thankful someone else made the connection, and although he’s not the biggest fan of Corroded Coffin’s music (apart from the collaboration EP they did with Chrissy: “CCxCC presents Satanic Slumber Party”, that was incredible), he would lying if he didn’t say he was totally enamoured by Eddie goddamn Munson.

Let alone the fact that he’s totally Steve’s type (big hair, bigger eyes, a complete dork with a heart of gold but who also looks like he would bite someone in both a feral dog and a “please take me to your bedroom right now” kind of way), the guy is a genius when it comes to music, spending interviews talking about the process of artistry and the importance of storytelling - even when they’re discussing songs about him, written by Chrissy about their break up, he’s still so passionate and witty, the two of them spending interviews bouncing off each other in a way that would rival his relationship Robin.

He’s fine, really, he knows logically this is just a celebrity crush that will pass if he stops thinking about it for long enough, but he’s certain that this could develop into one of those all encompassing obsessions if he doesn’t curb it now- and that’s exact what he does. He tries to put that energy into school, excelling more than he ever did in an academic setting. He meets up more often with Nancy, Jonathan, Argyle and Barb, inviting them over more often for dinner or drinks, sometimes even just because he wants to make a breakfast feast and need someone else to eat it.

It’s at times like this that he misses Robin, who only has about 6 weeks left of her internship in Paris - he hasn’t seen her in person since he went to visit her a few months ago during spring break. He wishes she was her to openly judge him over this, before rambling on about her own current hyperfixation or moaning about her lack of romantic adventures since she and Vickie broke up.

They still talk on the phone every afternoon (nighttime for her), ranting to each other about their perspective day and sharing any worthwhile gossip.

Tonight’s no different, he’s telling her about the current drama happening in his classes when Robin says:

“I met someone today.”

He’s ecstatic - in his opinion robin deserves the world and the fact she’s met someone on her own in a city where she has been finding it hard interacting with people outside of her placement is a miracle in itself.

She tells him more: how she met this girl that morning at café, acting as a knight in shining armour (Robin’s words, not Steve’s) when the girl got flustered trying to order her coffee in broken French; how she spent the day showing this girl around to her favourite shops and parks and museums; how they spent hours talking about everything and nothing; how Robin hasn’t felt this way about someone since Vickie.

“So then we had dinner at that Italian place, the one I took you to, and, Steve, oh my goddess, she has the cutest little laugh-“

“Did you get her name?”

“Oh, sorry” he can hear her move the phone from one ear to the other. “Yeah it’s Chrissy.”

Steve stops his pacing. That would be one hell of a coincidence, if it was Chrissy Cunningham. She is playing in Paris the following night, the penultimate stop of her current tour. (The very show that he had been tempted to go to, since he could stay with Robin. It absolutely wasn’t because Corroded Coffin was joining her for the European leg of the tour - acting as her band, as well as performing songs from their collaboration as the encore - something that did not happen at any of the American shows). It couldn’t be the same Chrissy that Robin had fallen head over heels for in the space of a few hours, right?

“Did you get any of her socials?” He asks, cautiously.

“Nope,” she answers, popping the p for emphasis. “I didn’t think to ask, because I’m an idiot and all that-“

“Robs,” he interrupts, trying to keep his voice steady. “You’re not an idiot.”

Her hears her laugh on the other end of the line, the same kind of self-deprecating giggle she uses when she’s nervous. He wishes he was there with her so she could see him roll his eyes at her, their main way of communicating their love.

“What did she look like?”

“Oh!” She exclaims as he hears her tumbling over something (knowing Robin, probably herself). “We took a picture together, hold on, I’ll send it over.”

His phone vibrates against his ear, so he brings it in front of him, putting Robin on speaker so he can see the photo.

And.

Holy fuck.

“Robin,” he says slowly, because he actually can’t believe it himself. “Do you know who that is?”

((Part 2))

#stranger things #stranger things au #steve harrington #eddie munson #robin buckley #chrissy cunningham #Steddie #steve x eddie #steve harrington x eddie munson #Buckingham #bandcheer #robin x chrissy #robin buckley x chrissy cunningham #Luci’s ST thoughts

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vanessagillings · 9 months

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I love your art so much!!! I've also been starting to paint with gouache, and I'd love to know a little more about your process! What kind of paints do you use, do you sketch first or start with paint, do you paint in layers over several day or all at once?

Hi and thank you! I hope you don't mind me answering this publicly and apologies for length, but:

MY ART PROCESS!

Supplies: I use winsor and newton gouache and arches cold press paper blocks, usually 140 lbs (the lime green ones) and sometimes 300 lbs (the teal green ones). Even though this paper comes pre-stretched in blocks, I actually take the sheets off and stretch them myself because I've found arches' glue isn't as strong as it used to be. This is how you get watercolor paper to lay flat! I recommend youtubing some videos on how to do it -- there's a lot of great tutorials out there. Also, I use princeton brushes, and kraft paper tape and these boards to stretch my paper. (these aren't affiliate links, I just shop at blick)

A word about art supplies: these are the exact tools I use but everyone uses supplies differently and two people with the exact same supplies might get different results! A lot of it is about what works for you and what you like, so I always suggest that gouache/watercolor beginners just buy a few tubes from a couple of different paint companies and some small pieces of paper from different manufacturers to see what you like. Just changing one ingredient in the above has created massively different results for me, but maybe that'll end up being something you'd like! The first step in learning a new medium imo is to play. Just have fun!

ALSO: gouache isn't super light permanent, check your tubes for which ones hold up to sunlight. Here is winsor and newton's color chart explaining which ones will fade when exposed to sunlight -- all manufacturers will give you this. I only use the colors rated A and AA, and I still frame my pieces with UV glass just to be safe. Not all gouache is re-wettable, but winsor and newton is. I just put it in my palettes and refill my palettes if it runs low. AND SOME PAINT IS TOXIC. A lot of paints have cadmium and cobalt in them. I don't use any of the toxic colors, but if you do, make sure you don't eat while working and wash your hands thoroughly afterwards. This information is also usually available on manufacturer's websites. As more people are rejecting cadmium paint, you'll see more tubes labeled things like cadmium-free yellow. This is why. More artists should be aware that their tools can be dangerous. You don't need that many tubes of paint to begin, just a warm and cool red, warm and cool yellow, warm and cool blue, white and black. I have around 50 colors and use 20 regularly. I always mix all my colors myself, and never use straight tube paint. Most of my colors have about 5-6 different tube colors mixed together. If you use re-wettable paint a tube of paint will last you years; even as a professional I only buy new paints every 5 years or so.

Process: I ALWAYS start with a sketch first. Not everyone has to, but because I do illustration work -- where sometimes a client gets input on a drawing -- I always do a lot of preliminary work before I even begin to paint. At this point, even my personal work usually involves the exact same process:

I start with a 3" or so thumbnail that I scan (left; I traced it quickly digtally for clarity to myself here) and then either clean up digitally or print out and clean up traditionally with tracing paper (right):

Then I scan the cleaned sketch in and color rough it digitally (left, this was for a gallery show, so no one had to approve my color roughs, so it's messy!) then I transfer my sketch to my paper (with either carbon transfer paper or a light table), stretch my paper, and paint (right):

I obviously changed my mind about the color of the ribbon in the trees, ha, and made everything a lot more vibrant. The benefit again of gallery work is no pre-approval!

You are correct, I paint in a series of washes, going from lightest to darkest, where I apply the same color beneath all shapes that are the same warmth (cools under all upcoming cools, warms under all upcoming warms). I paint a piece usually in one or two days, depending on complexity. I didn't take pictures of the above painting, but here's a different painting to show you a little bit what I mean:

I painted the peach color under everything (and twice for skin tones), and the gray color of the sky under everything that would be grayish (the rocks, trees, her pants, her skirt, and coat). I do this to stop me from getting darker lines where two different colors butt up against each other, and also for color harmony. I have step by step photos of this in my process stories highlight on my instagram; also check my FAQ and tip highlights for more info on all this stuff. Most pieces take around 25-30 washes before I start adding in the details (sometimes I add in face details early though because if I mess those up it's not worth finishing the rest of the painting! 😅)

All this might seem like a lot of work (...it is) but I do it so that I can show clients previews of the final piece and so I don't have to repaint the finals. I also used to pre-test all of my washes on scrap paper like this:

I still recommend doing this if you're just beginning! But at this point I only do it when testing techniques because I know my paints really well. (the above was my test for the pine boughs in this piece)

Painting by far is the longest part of the process, so I do more work up front to not have to do it twice. Every piece takes about 6-24 hrs of actual work time to produce. Stretching watercolor paper takes about 24 hrs to dry, and because I sell most of my originals in galleries, they need to be flawless, so planning ahead is useful and in the end saves me time.

And to conclude this novel of an explanation, don't be overwhelmed by all the information I've given you! I put it here so that people at various stages of their artistic journey can maybe find something useful in it. But seriously, the first step to learning how to paint whether it's traditionally or digitally is just to have fun. Try it out, see what's working and what isn't, and then try to solve specific issues that you're struggling with. I've been doing this for a loooooong time at this point, but here's my first watercolor piece from when I was re-teaching myself how to paint traditionally nine years ago:

Obviously, I was destined for greatness. Ha, yeah, no. If you scroll back through my tumblr archive, you can see me learning how to use these paints in real time. And keep in mind that I'd been working digitally for years before then, and years before that where I didn't post my work online at all.

So for anyone who needs to hear it: there's no such thing as talent, just hard work, patience, and trying again and again and again...and sometimes again. What I do is a skill and anyone can learn it. Sometimes, progress is slow. I'm 38. I only really feel like my art was half-way decent starting a few years ago, but I've been making art my entire life, and I went to art school at 18. 20 years later I'm kind of figuring it out.

The best advice I can give, whether it's about art or not, is find the thing you love so much that you'll keep at it even when you suck at it, because most skills you'll suck at to begin with -- and perhaps for a long time. I sucked at art for yeeeaaaaarrrrs. On top of the usual learning curve, I struggled with fine motor control and dexterity. But I loved it so much I kept trying every time I failed. If I can do it, so can all of you, no matter what stage of art you're at now, and no matter how old you are.

Anyway, thank you to those still reading this deep in. I wish you all the best on your artistic journey. Art can kick your butt sometimes, but it's also pretty dang rewarding 💛

#art tips #process #art tutorial #asks

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tinydefector · 29 days

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Hi!! 😆

Can I have Soundwave x human reader (smut pls (ง ͠° ͟ل͜ ͡°)ง)?

People didn't write him much, my husband need more love 😔🤌❤️✨

Thank for reading this!!

Stress relief

Soundwave x human reader

Warnings: Smut, Oral, Cockwarning

Word count: 1.5K

Request and ask open, read pinned post

__________________

"Soundwave can you re-check that scanner for me, I can't reach it to recalibrate its systems from here" the human's voice calls out to the intelligence officer, as they move around Soundwave desk in a scattered fashion trying to find maps and energon signals.

Soundwave helm tilts slightly at the request as he turns to observe his human.he runs his own diagnostics, clearly indicating the scanner does not need recalibration. Soundwave almost uncanny mix of voices patch together speak: " assistance not required. Scanner functioning adequately." He remains standing quietly, typing away at the large computer with his servos while his tendrils rearrange scattered data pads.

Their eyes meet his visor, looking up at him slightly frazzled. "Are you sure they are?"

With a sigh, he re reviews the scanner readings again, analysing more closely given the human's evident fatigue. His displays flash as data is processed. "Confirmation: scanner calibration within normal parameters. However, you appear in need of recharge." The mixed voices of Knockout, Starscream and their own voice echoes back at them as He awaits a response, sensors attuned to subtle cues that could indicate the depth of exhaustion and other issues requiring assistance.

"I'm fine soundwave" they call out while moving back to continue working, soundwave wraps his digits around them, pulling them back against his form, his visor tilted down to look at their eyes, he knows full well they are exhausted and Fatigue was catching up to their smaller frame. "I promise soundwave, I'm fine"

Soundwave detects elevated stress levels and the possibility of accident or harm at the current state of exhaustion. Soft ventilations cycle through his frame as his digits gently but firmly enfold the human in a protective hold. "Statement: physiological indicators suggest otherwise." His visor dims softly. Forcing the issue would risk negative impact, not only on his work but their work too.

"I'm not gonna win this argument with you am I?"

Soundwave's visor remains dimmed calmly as the human speaks. He processes their words carefully before responding. "Negative." They sigh softly and press their head against Soundwave's shoulder plating, each of his steps echoing throughout the halls. "Are you going to stay with me tonight, or does megatron have you working even more?" Soundwave processes the question, sensing his partner's wish for company while recharging.

A brief comm link check confirms he has no urgent tasks requiring his attention for night's cycle. "Megatron: aware of mission status. No tasks assigned to Soundwave at this time. I will remain for your recharge cycle" he responds as the doors to his quarters slide open upon their arrival.

A soft nod comes from his little lover as they lay against him. Their body is exhausted, but their brain isn't willing to shut off. After laying against soundwave for another ten minutes with no luck with falling asleep, they sigh, fidgeting around while trying to get comfortable.

His vocalizer hums a deep, resonant tone, One digit begins tracing lazy circles on the back, slowly tracing their spinal column, "Systems are monitoring. Please attempt to rest," comes another of his recordings.

"Not tired," they whisper while looking up at Soundwave, leaning into his touch, enjoying having him focus on them instead of work. They had both been overrun with work as of recent.

helm tilting minutely as nonverbal concern radiates through his plating. " Do you require distraction from responsibilities through additional stimuli?"

They sit up resting on Soundwave's lower torso, hands spread out across the Decepticons chassis. "I am tired, horny and frustrated, soundwave, and with everything happening, when we get even a small amount of time together, you get called away," they mumble.

Soundwave cycles a calm ventilated sigh, processing their words. His field pulses with understanding and care for their concerns. "Your doubts are logical. However, my function is to maximise efficiency of all personnel. A brief interface encounter now could provide valuable recharge. I will ensure we are not disturbed." His field and plating radiate gentle invitation.

A soft gasp escapes their lips as soundwave pulls them further up his body. The Decepticon's digits caressing their body. Leaning in closer, they press their lips to his visor. A low hum resonates from Soundwave's vocoder. One digit trails tenderly down a flank as another cradles them, holding their form against plating of his chest as a loud purring sound vibrates from him.

A small squeal leaves their lips as Soundwave discards their clothing quickly with nimble digits. Dimming the lights, Soundwave carefully lowers his battle-mask with a soft hiss, His purple optics glow softly in the darkness, as a talon traces down his lovers form, tracing patterns into their skin.

Leaning close 'til his ex-vents whisper against skin, Pressing a gentle kiss to willing lips in silent promise, he commits this moment to memory. A soft content sigh falls from the human's lips as they kiss him back. It's slightly awkward but neither cares at that moment.

Soundwave runs soft kisses along their neck, chest, and hips as he brings them closer.

At the human's content sigh, gentle pulses from his plating as cooling ex-vents whisper against sensitised skin, his touches trailing softly yet deliberately to relax tense muscles and ease away lingering worries.

As Soundwave’s glossa finds its way between their legs, soft moans fall from their lips. Small hands move to grip his helm. "Soundwave." At the human's soft calling of his name, Soundwave rumbles acknowledgment against flesh, his servos gripping hips to hold them steady as he runs his glossa across their needy sex. drinking in their essence, committing every hitch of their breath, and fluttered responses to permanent memory files saved only for him.

As warmth spreads within the human's pliant frame, Soundwave's field surges in adoring pulses, lips, and glossa blessing willing flesh in turn as his devotion shows through electronic hums and tender strokes. Their head rolls back as their back arches, soft whines leaving them with each stroke of Soundwave’s Glossa as it presses into their sweet form. "Soundwave, please," they whine out, their hands attempting to pull the mech's face closer.

At their breathless plea, Soundwave rumbles acknowledgment, Talons gently part willing thighs as his glossa delves with new focus, oral prehensors savouring each hitching gasp and soft cry his ministrations draw forth. As warmth peaks within the willing human, Soundwave dedicates all sensors to saturating their body. It doesn't take long for them to reach release, so much pent up energy, stress and frustration slips away as they go boneless in the Decepticon's hands. Soft pants leaving their parted lips as soundwave cleans up the mess with his mouth. Gentle affectionate rumbles leave him, field swelling with pulses of devotion and gratitude as he cleans every trace of pleasures with care. His glossa traces tender after-touches as their body goes lax in his hold.

Optics remain darkened as he simply dedicates sensors to monitoring each slowing ventilation and relaxing muscle, wishing only to ensure their full tranquillity. Soundwave raises his helm to cradled hips,kissing it lightly and nuzzling farewell against flushed skin beneath laboured breaths, inhaling the musk of their sex and skin.

A final hum resounds through his plating, and powerful yet delicate digits stroke through human hair with utmost care. his array's interface plaque shifts aside, hisses open and pressurises his spike.Optics flare softly to gaze upon at his lover's relaxed features. Secured in cradling servos and pulsing field, the human's lax yet willing frame I'd slowly pressed against his body, content simply to maintain sensory contact,

soft whines fall From his human's lips, as they take him in their body stretching with a loud moan. A few soft thrusts are all it takes for Soundwave to settle into them, cradling their body close, At his lovers soft sounds of pleasure, Soundwave rumbles gentle reciprocation, cradling their sated form securely against his form with one arm as his other arm retrieves a datapad

Ever once in a while his optics flicker down to monitoring his partner's relaxation even as his digits skillfully operate the pad's controls. Data streams across the display - ship schematics, translation algorithms, delicate encryption sequences - yet his true focus remains solely on the human resting atop his array.

Here in isolated peace, all doubts dissolve. His frame supports theirs. Tired eyes slowly drift closer as soft breath even out, indicating they had fallen asleep, small hands are spread out across his chassis, their body moving slightly with each breath they take. This was true contentment. At the human's soft, steady ex-vents and relaxing muscles, Soundwave's field cycles in waves of tranquil pulsations, a digit gently strokes their hair, back and shoulders as his embrace holds them securely.

“rest well little one” his voice mumbles softly for no one to hear but himself.

#transformers #transformers x human #transformers x reader #transformers prime #soundwave tfp #soundwave transformers #soundwave #soundwave x reader #Soundwave x human #valveplug

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indigosunsetao3 · 2 months

Text

Ex-Husband Price

This came to me in another bout of insomnia. I like it enough this may turn into it's own story and not...whatever this is.

NSFW - 18+

Perspective: Female Reader

ExH!Price - Shows up when you aren’t home to do the lawn work. He knows you hate doing it and you haven’t hired a company to have it done to piss him off. He’s gone when you return and the lawn is pristine much to your chagrin.

ExH!Price - Sends checks for his half of the bills in the mail. He refuses to use digital payments because he knows it annoys you to have to go to the bank. It’s enough to agitate you but not enough for you to say anything.

ExH!Price - Who fought tooth and nail for the stupid couch. It ended up being a matter of principle for you to keep it. Then one night he bent you over the back and fucked you so hard you were gripping the cushions for some sort of grounding sanity. He left you teary and perfectly stated saying to keep it as he walked out the front door. He knew you’d think of him every time you sat on it. That was the greater victory to him. (The Couch scene can be found here)

ExH!Price - Picks you up on the side of the road when your car started doing that weird thing again. He smirks knowing you had no one else to call as you climb in the car in silence. The next day he’s in the driveway fixing it because he knows exactly what is wrong. He was the one who pulled the fuse after all.

ExH!Price - Walks inside covered in grease and dirt from doing a full tune up on your engine. You watch him as he dawdles in the kitchen washing his hands. You tell him to just go shower and he strips right in front of you as you get him a towel. He sees you swallow hard before dragging you in the shower with him. You swear you see God as he pins you to the tiled wall as he eats you so expertly, his tongue knowing just where to go and his goddamn teeth nipping at the sensitive skin at the right moment. He leaves you wanton, shaking and grabbing his shoulders to beg for more as he leaves you there. He has places to be. (The Car scene can be found here).

ExH!Price - Has been gone for weeks. The lawn is overgrown and the checks stop coming. A payment appears in your account on time every two weeks when his check would normally arrive in the mail. You have no one to call, no one that would answer. You have no idea where he is, if he’s even alive. You won't admit you miss him or worry, he has every right to disappear. You divorced him after all.

ExH!Price - Is still radio silent going on four months. You decide to dip your foot into the dating pool. One man has caught your eye enough to bring home after multiple failed dates with others. When you pull up to the drive the car lights fall on John’s car. He’s there smoking a cigar as he leans on the trunk watching.

ExH!Price - Walks in the house dismissing and your date without a word. You give an excuse to the man who is confused but leaves saying he’ll call you, he won’t. You storm angrily into the dark house after John only to find him in the dimly lit bedroom, the hallway light the only light source.

ExH!Price - Has you under him with your legs propped on his shoulders in a matter of a few minutes. His hands are vices on your thighs as he fucks into you. He’s making the most delicious groans and uttering filthy praises to mix with the obscene wet noises as he already got you to come on his fingers. So touch starved for him you fall over the edge again around his cock and it’s not the last time that night.

ExH!Price - Is gone from the bed in the morning. But he’s slipped your wedding ring back on your finger. You hadn’t seen it in almost a year. The last time you had worn it you had flung it at his chest. Twisting it around your finger you find you aren’t that upset about it.

ExH!Price - Waits in the kitchen with a cup of black coffee. He has his wedding band back on as well. You wander in, trying to not wince at how sore you are between your legs. He knows and he smirks watching you grab your own coffee he made for you just the way you like.

ExH!Price - Tells you to lose the other men’s numbers. No one will be replacing him and you both know it. He sets his coffee down on the counter and has you out of your sleep shorts in a matter of moments. You're panting his name as he demands to know exactly who you belong to as he drives into you, your hips digging into the counter as you hold the sink for balance.

ExH!Price - Stays for the next three days. You rechristen half the house, even going as far as riding him on the stairs as he makes you watch yourself in the hallway mirror.

ExH!Price - Leaves again. You haven’t taken the ring back off this time but you’ll be damned if he thinks he can keep walking out for work without notice. He’ll stay your ex-husband until he decides you’re the priority.

ExH!Price - Never officially signed those original divorce papers. They're sitting on the boxes of stuff he didn't bother to unpack in his apartment because he knew he'd be back home soon enough.

#call of duty #call of duty fanfic #fanfic #cod #cod fanfic #ExH!Price #john price cod #cod john price #captain john price #john price x reader #captain price x reader #18+ content #18+ only

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xcarlet1211 · 5 months

Text

Hii I offer to you Showtime. Believe me they are Pomni and Caine (I mixed traditional sketch and digital paint uu)

To explain this I like to see when voice actors make reference to the characters they give voice so i imagine an AU

A programmer who works in a videogame company , she is sent to check certain game files for errors. Watching the audio files she finds that they added audio tracks for one of the characters, casually heard as a guy from the creative team who always talks to her when he finds her.

As time goes by they become friends, talking about their respective jobs. Until, as a joke, she decides to ask about certain voices of the characters.

Apologies if you found some mistakes, I am new at this (and I never made and AU before)

#xcarlet #art #ibispaintdrawing #tadc #the amazing digital circus #showtime #pomni #caine #AnAU #Im new at this sorry

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notknickers · 8 months

Text

this fic took too long to commit to digital paper than it should have, but it's done, so let's focus on that. i have incorporated a few of the headcanons i listed in another dedicated post. or, at least, i tried. synopsis: a strange routine has settled between you and colonel könig, your direct superior. one unexpected, but not entirely unwelcome, after you got over the shock elicited by the reserved, dreadful giant seeking you out for comfort you did not imagine him needing… and the fact that he seems to need it from you more often than you from him. but an unspoken agreement is still an agreement.

warnings: unethical power imbalance, ptsd, dub con to full con, muffdiving for comfort, maledom to malesub, crying, heavy petting, orgasm control and denial, könig is a pet, slight degradation, praising, humping, cum eating, dispassionate fingering, second-person narration in present tense, no gender mention, but reader assumed to be afab, military-related inaccuracies, probably.

word count: 3887

A/N: if you're unsure whether to read this fic or not, here's something about me that might help you decide:

i like my porn grotesque and sentimental;

i like my men dangerous, submissive, pathetic (affectionate) and in tears.

a less blurry tentakönig than his previous appearance is once again here to kindly remind us that the following is aimed at an adult audience. please, respect this.

you are walking with a couple of new recruits along one of the corridors of the base’s building. from out the windows, the light hardly makes a difference, too weak at this early hour to lighten the interiors. chill still blankets you like dew on the grass outside: it hasn’t abandoned you since you woke up for drills.

this isn’t the fastest route to report for training, but there is still time, so you don’t fret. you chat lightly, nodding here and there in spite of the little interest you have for the banality of the noobies’ small talk, when the sound of heavy footfalls echoes ahead.

you hear him before you can see, the sight of colonel könig’s imposing frame following close behind the sound of his stomping gait. your comrades hesitate only a moment, going quiet and halting to salute the higher-ranking official. you don’t.

you are too busy taking in könig’s haunted eyes locking on you, a shiver running down your spine as soon as you notice how crazed they look. two dark pits in the holes of his mask, staring ahead through heavy eyelids smudged in black. your body has stopped moving before your brain could take stock of it; his pace has only increased.

there is not a doubt left: you are his target.

the colonel ignores the recruits and, without even slowing, seizes you by the waist with an arm, lifting you bodily and dragging you along with him. you do not fight it. instead, you gesture towards the hesitant others to go on without you and, after an awkward glance exchanged with one another, they are swift to follow your unspoken advice.

if something unethical is going on between an official and a private, neither of them wishes to witness it. the less they know, the safer their positions within their employer’s company.

you watch their shadows disappear on the wall, behind a sharp corner, and the bitter stench of tobacco mixed with acrid breath hits your nostrils, even through the fabric of the colonel’s mask. it makes you think how many hours he has been up, how long he has been storming the base looking for you, how many times he has choked the desire to drag you from your cot in the middle of the night with yet another cigarette for that smell to linger so thickly…

until the distraction of smoking stopped being enough to help him hold back.

he drops you to your feet, unceremonious, back against wall and falls to his knees, masked head reaching above your waist as he hastily unbuckles your belt. it jingles sharply in the gloom of early morning quiet, the padding of his thick gloves hindering the deftness of his movements, but not his will.

«colonel…», you hazard, voice small. but all you receive in response is more of his frenzied panting and a jolt as your belt is finally torn from your trouser’s loops.

one of his hands disappears under the trail of his mask, teeth pulling at glove, before brash fingers are back to tug at your button and zipper. you relent, disliking the idea of having to request another standard-issue uniform so soon and manage to get your hand under his, removing every obstacle along his way.

könig barely glances up at you in approval. he swipes down trousers and underwear in one pull with a groan. you barely see the pale, scarred skin of his lower face flash in the dim light as he lifts the dangling ends of his mask just enough, that his head already dives between your legs.

his thick fingers hold the softer flesh on your inner-thighs apart with such urge you sense with certainty you will find them bruised, as the colonel easily covers the length of your cunt with the flat of his tongue, uses it to spread your lips, so his can attach to your soft, delicate folds and suck enough to make you ache in both discomfort and desire.

«colonel…», you try again to little avail, the wet, smacking sound of his mouth on yours getting louder as he presses his lips, his chin, hard against you, his panting soon turning to satisfied groaning.

«make me…», he rasps hot against your skin while snatching one of your hands and planting it firmly on top of his own head, pale stubble of hair stinging your palm through the neck-hole of his t-shirt-mask.

as if you could really make colonel könig do anything in this state.

so desperate that his hips thrust back and forth of their own accord. they have been since the moment the colonel dropped in front of you to lose himself in his self-assigned task. they always do when his lips can taste your juices – or those of any other, you presume. they fuck empty air, occasionally swatting your legs as he laps at your cunt with wanton greed unknown to you before you and the colonel were introduced, large, gloved hand still covering yours, squeezing your fingers as he fantasises about you forcing him to pleasure you, like he requested.

it’s more of an instinct, an uncontrollable tic for him, than a genuine attempt at release for himself. he doesn’t even register how he could dry-hump your boot to get himself off, so completely taken by his visceral hunger for you while in the unshakable grip of whatever darkness stirs within.

the one that guided his actions so far. the one that guides his actions often.

you are certain he revels in the feel of your sex against his tongue more than you in the feel of his tongue against it; as if every lick and suck brought him closer to a salvation otherwise denied.

this confirms the initial suspicion that formed in your head as soon as you looked at his grey, dire eyes as he came at you like a battering ram: another one of his night terrors. another phantom lingering in his wake.

you don’t know what it is he sees in the back of his skull every time he blinds himself from sight, when exhaustion claims him and he has no choice but to succumb to it. that is the one thing that still remains a mystery and you won’t prise. you can imagine the horrors, you have seen it before, and that is not the kind of information you force out of someone, no matter how erratic they behave because of it.

his messy slurping is getting out of hand; the way he traps your lips and folds in his teeth and pulls on them, before burying his tongue in your slit to harangue your too-sensitive nub with his nose becoming unbearable; his feasting off of you far rougher than usual.

«col--- könig!», you finally call, voice stern, and his head lifts, chin glistening with spit, before the lower hem of his mask falls back down, sticking to it.

he looks at you as if he were seeing you for the first time today, fury, if not sated, at least subdued, for now. the troubled look so vivid in his eyes moments ago dulls enough that it’s only a pale, threatening glimmer on their glassy surface.

you carefully pinch the hem of your clothes, slowly lifting them to cover up. he stops forcing your thighs apart, so you can adjust your uniform around your hips, gaze still boring into his as you refuse to avert it from his unreliable nature, hoping it will be enough to stay his brash hand.

instead, he helps you with the button, then shuffles back a little, signalling he is no threat to you. he never really was. not willingly, at least.

«belt!»

he swiftly collects it from where he discarded it earlier in his state of rash lust and mysterious turmoil and coils it tidily around his fist, before placing it in your outstretched hand.

he watches, still on his knees, as you loop it back in place and buckle it close, his breathing quiet again.

«könig», his eyes are back to yours as he expectantly awaits for your next words, «to your quarters, colonel.»

you are the one to lock the door behind the two of you with the colonel’s implicit blessings. both of you know what comes next, yet könig does not move, waiting for your say.

so you do. you inhale deeply, closing your eyes for a moment to recollect yourself, knowing now that the distance between you, modest though it may be, will still be the same when you reopen them.

«kit off, colonel», there is no harshness in your voice, but it sounds authoritative all the same.

könig complies, ridding himself of any encumbrance save for his mask, then stands there, further waiting. you don’t allow yourself to indulge in his attractive figure too long, even when his arousal is difficult to ignore, pointing straight at you, leaking thickly.

«come», you barely open your arms and he goes down to the floor, crawling towards you. you meet him on the tiles, slipping your back against the door and settling in a squat as you invite him to join you, invite him closer.

now he can touch you.

he hugs your waist tight, almost dragging you down with him, but careful not to. his head immediately finds shelter in the hollow of your neck, silently begging for comforting touch you are now willing to provide. your hand is soon going through his short-cropped hair, mindful not to lift his mask.

not until he is ready to do it himself, or give you leave to.

there, on the floor, you both find your peace. the peace of liminality: fleeting, for it won’t last and, therefore, all the more precious. he barely moves, trying not to burden you with his conspicuous weight, even when, after a while, even your well-trained thighs and knees need reprieve from the squatting.

you sit down, legs spread wide to make room for könig as he slots himself between them, ruined, scarred lips tracing your throat downwards, then up again as his hands open the top of your fatigues, where more of your skin can be freed for him, covered only by your tank top.

he needs that contact. close. warm. reassuring. even when he unshackles your breasts from the trappings of your attire, mandated down to your underclothes, it is not out of need of his loins that he does so.

you hold him to your chest and soon, you feel his throat tremble. hot, wet tears melt his face, safely hidden against you, breaking the soft murmur of quiet breathing in low, reluctant and shameful sobs the colonel holds in until he cannot any more. a litany of exhalations and mutterings in his native tongue pushes out of him to take their place.

delirium

you hold him tighter as one of your hands finds its way under his mask to contour the battlefield that is his face. unevenly raised scars older and newer that litter his skin welcome the pads of your fingers as you wipe the tears with your palms, gently stroking.

he glances up at you, miserable, bloodshot eyes supplicating for things he couldn’t name if he knew what they were called.

«shhhh», you reassure him that there is no need to ask for anything as you begin to lift his mask, slowly enough to give the colonel time to object. he doesn’t and the fabric swishes off his head quietly.

now he is fully bare. a level of nakedness that you are sure not many have had the chance to witness.

your hold tightens around him and your hand runs through his matted hair, his damp cheeks, contouring the crooked shape of the left cheekbone, the one that broke and never healed right, dabbing at ever-renewing tears as he curses a past to you unknown.

the colonel shifts his heavy eyes, voice louder as he hisses at an invisible figure that hangs in the air of his memory, right next to your head, then shelters his face in your bosom again, crumpled on his knees, fingers digging the sides of your back, which he easily hugs.

you haven’t stopped stroking his hair a moment, holding the colonel as tightly as you’re capable of, trying to hush his whimpering with voice steady and secure.

you don’t know what could reduce the epitome of man such the colonel is, or at least, presents as, to this shaky mess and, at this point, you hope you never learn. the slump of his otherwise proud, muscled back looks pitiful as you stare at it. it brings a bitter scowl to your lips. what, indeed, could possibly have brought reserved and competent könig this low, in front of you?

you remember a tune you once heard him hum when he thought no one was there, or when he was so lost in thought that he did not even realise doing it, more likely. you intone it to the best of your memory.

this seems to soothe the colonel, enough that he is quiet, save for the occasional shaky gasp that still seizes his throat. he soon joins you, voice off-key and hoarse, to complete it with sparse words you couldn’t possibly know.

you try not to think of the consequences of missing the daily training, yet have no intention to ask the colonel to vouch for you. you want to keep this strange moment all to yourself, separate from your quotidian routine. a slice of time in an alternate place, cut away from your everyday reality.

yours and könig’s alone.

your thoughts are interrupted by the colonel’s mouth, warm and hungry. it wraps about the tips of your tear-stained tits and sucks, finally driven by different needs than consolation. your body responds right away to the ravenous love bites he marks on your skin, another blemish of his you will carry with yourself. a memento that this was not some daydream that never really was outside of your imagination.

your nipples pebble in his mouth and, as he steals another gasp from your throat, his demeanour emboldens. his large, rough hands cup your breasts while his teeth move to your neck, your jaw, your lips.

you are weak to his advances. you don’t deny him. yet it leaves you wondering who is taking advantage of whom.

«turn around, colonel», you forcefully grab a tuft of könig’s hair and pull the roots to show him you meant it. again, he complies, even though you can sense a note of disappointment.

he sits in front of you and you kneel at his back, bodies pressed tightly together as you reach around to knead his stomach, muscles flexing involuntarily as your hands descend. the thickness of könig’s abdomen forces you to struggle to reach his cock, but you can work with it. you already have in the past and the fingers now curling around the root of it confirm it.

your hand barely contains his heft, but it is quick to move along the heavy organ all the same. you squeeze, a groan reaching your ears as his flesh throbs back your touch, fingers tracing pulsing veins along it until they come away wet, foreskin rolling down softly almost on its own.

enough with the toying. you want to hear the colonel, könig, gasp and whimper as desperately as when he was weeping, but for rather different reasons. your determination spurs your movements and you start stroking his cock in earnest, wasting no more time.

it feels more aggression than service, almost violent, the way you abuse his cock with your hand, but you know he can take it. can take it. the man demands it. you know by the way, uncomfortable though it is sitting on the floor like that, he bucks his hips into your fist, meeting your downward slide with a jolt from his loins.

and when you torture him with your delightful touch, only to open your fist, enough for him to feel the silky warmth of your palm, but none of the friction, he whines for your hand back. he wines oh-so-sweetly for it as you mock him in pointed whispers in his ear.

this only riles him up more, forcing the most endearing of sounds through his broken lips. so you grant him his wish, hugging his girth in your fist and returning to your task, skin sliding smoothly with könig’s own wetness.

you repeat one, two, three more times, delighting each one in his reactions, until you force him to pleasure himself with your hand.

you hold it still around him, making him work for his release, his hips back to their frantic bucking, until you cheat him out of his pleasure one last infuriating time.

he curses in his tongue, that much you understand without need for translation, as you rise from the floor to stand a little distance away, in front of him.

«silence, dog! you know what i want, now.»

his chest heaves visibly as he peers at you from below, almost hateful in the intensity of his leer, but he obeys. back on all fours, he crawls towards your outstretched hand, seeking contact once more.

you stroke his face, damp and exhausted-looking, by now: «you’re a good, obedient dog, colonel.»

he hums at the praise and lets you guide him closer to you by his hair as you extend your left leg towards him, planting the heel of your boot to the floor. he observes while you let a glob of saliva trickle down on its tip and shuffle your foot to spread it on the rest of the black leather surface.

you lean towards him: «you know what i want from you now, pup.»

könig nods, then positions himself atop your boot, thighs straddling each side of it, disappearing it from sight with their large, powerful muscles. he stares up at you as he rubs his cock against the squeaky-clean, smooth leather you maintain in impeccable condition. he would do so even if that hand of yours caught in his hair weren’t twisting his neck backwards enough to relish in the sight of him.

his slower, sensuous movements begin to grow more haphazard once more. you are sure he will give himself rope burns with the laces if you don’t let him find relief.

«go on, colonel. i want you to come. now.»

he buries his face between your thighs as his hips keep working your boot, rubbing his cheeks against the rough fabric of your fatigues, lapping at it with his tongue, mouth hungry for the warmth and sweet taste of your cunt, just below the clothes, yet out of reach for the colonel until you decree otherwise.

he will have to settle for breathing in its scent, especially after those theatrics of his, earlier this morning.

finally, his penance is served in full. he moans against your crotch as he floods your boot with his seed, breath scorching as his mouth seals against your trousers to quiet his pleasured utterings.

his tongue is dry when he sits on his haunches to recover his breath.

you pet könig’s head, sweat wetting your palm as you run it along his skull: «you are a good pup, colonel», he basks in your praises, eyes almost beaming, «but do you know what a really good pup would do, now?»

he nods, sparing you the breath to tell him and immediately goes down to your boot again, lips and tongue working, relentless, to clean it from his mess. he doesn’t come up until not a single trace of his juices is left on your footwear, nor the floor around it, where it trickled.

you watch him swallow the last of it. No complaints.

that’s when you kneel to encase his jaws in your hands, so you can tilt his head towards you: «you were perfect, colonel.»

you can feel all the tension leave könig’s body. as for the anguish that plagues his spirit, you have done what you could.

colonel könig’s uniform looks impeccable on him. it hugs him perfectly, as if every piece of it were not lying crumpled on the floortiles only minutes ago. his mask is back on his head, shrouding his face as he likes. he waits by the door, gaze illegible, with a glass of apricot brandy in hand whose bottle he retrieved from one of the drawers.

he offered you some, but you declined. even if you could bear its taste, you don’t feel like indulging in spirits when your day has yet to begin. he shrugged and went to lean against the egress wall. he’s still sipping on it to rinse his mouth as you readjust your own fatigues.

you nod your head in goodbye and make to leave, but his figure doesn’t budge. you wait for an explanation. all you get is his gaze trailing behind you as he eyes his large desk, instead.

you sigh, considering what he is offering. your absence must have been noticed, by now and you don’t think a few more minutes will make a difference. in truth, your unsatisfied arousal is probably tainting your common sense, but you already said no to the brandy. it wouldn’t do to leave you superior without saying yes to a kindness he offers.

you nod and he sets his glass aside after emptying it. the temperamental giant easily lifts you again, this time much calmer and gentler, allowing you to find balance by gripping his shoulders as he walks towards the elegant wooden surface.

he rests you on it, sheltering your head with his arm and taking a few steps back as he waits for you to undo your trousers and pull them down enough. you do, clumsily, but quickly and you see him return, towering from above, eyes vacuous and inexpressive now that his mask is back on his face.

he repositions you to his liking, bending your knees to your chest to grant himself a nice view of both your face and your cunt, dripping from all the pent-up energy you accumulated during your session.

he ungloves his right hand, bringing the fingers to his mouth to wet them more out of habit than need, then plants the left one beside your face as he leans over you, mask hovering above you, brushing your face as his fingers find easy way inside you.

he gets working right away, no preambles, rather utilitarian in his approach. his thick index and middle finger squelch rhythmically inside you as his thumb covers your clit. he attacks your sweet spot right away, curling his fingertips as you bite hard on your lower lip to stifle your noises.

the recent memory of him kneeling at your feet, obedient and desperate, coupled with a few more pointed, circular motions and you’re convulsing around his hand, arms instinctively sheltering your eyes from his as your back arches. you feel him retreat right away, his job done and you can finally readjust your clothes for good.

you glimpse könig sneak the fingers he used on you under the hem of his mask, the sucking sounds you hear as you buckle your belt around your waist eloquent enough. he doesn’t seem satisfied until he has licked all of your humours from them, then his glove is fitted back on.

now you can leave.

thank you for reading. let me know what you thought, if you feel like it. and please, if you enjoyed it, consider reblogging.

#call of duty #cod #cod fanfic #könig #konig #könig cod #konig cod #könig mw2 #konig mw2 #könig mwii #konig mwii #könig x reader #konig x reader #könig smut #konig smut #submissive!könig #minors dni

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zapreportsblog · 9 months

Note

Wolf pack X Gn!reader prompt

Reader can’t sleep so they decided to text (your preferred characters) that they aren’t tired.

It was only soon after sent as ‘seen’ and the reader is confused why, that was until they hear a knock on their window only to see them shirtless.

Reader opens the door and lets them in only to be pushed in bed and starts cuddling each other!

Reader then falls asleep beside them😌

We will be using Seth because he gives off major puppy vibes like he would be there in a heartbeat

↱ whenever, wherever, however ↰

➘ summary : Seth will always be there for his partner, no matter how faraway they maybe, where their at or who their with. If there’s a will then theirs a way

➘ Seth Clearwater x gender neutral reader

➘ a/n : remember guys, if he wanted to he would find a way

The room was shrouded in darkness, illuminated only by the faint glow of a phone screen. (Y/N) lay in bed, tossing and turning as sleep eluded them. The soft hum of the night surrounded them, and the digital clock on the bedside table blinked 1:23 AM.

With a sigh, (Y/N) reached for their phone, their fingers dancing across the screen as they opened a message to their boyfriend, Seth.

(Y/N): Hey, you up?

It didn't take long for a reply to come through, the notification casting a pale light across the room.

Seth: Yeah, I'm still awake. Why're you up?

(Y/N) hesitated, fingers hovering over the virtual keyboard before they started typing.

(Y/N): I can't seem to sleep. Just not tired, I guess.

(Y/N) stared at their phone for a moment after sending the text, a flicker of confusion crossing their features. Seth's usually swift responses were nowhere to be found, leaving them wondering if he had indeed fallen asleep.

Just as they were about to set their phone aside and attempt to get some rest, a soft but distinct tapping sound echoed in the quiet of the night. The noise was coming from their window. (Y/N)'s eyes widened, their heart pounding with surprise as they glanced towards the source of the sound.

Hesitating only for a moment, (Y/N) got up from their bed, their feet padding softly across the floor. Their curiosity piqued, they approached the window cautiously, pulling back the curtain to reveal the unexpected sight.

There, outside the window, stood Seth. His bare chest was illuminated by the moonlight, his breath visible in the crisp night air. His out-of-breath grin was infectious, and (Y/N) couldn't help but feel a mixture of surprise and amusement.

As their eyes met, Seth's grin widened, and he pressed his hand against the glass as if reaching out to them. "Let me in, babe. It's cold out here."

(Y/N)'s surprise gave way to a bemused smile as they quickly unlocked the window and pushed it open. The cool night air rushed in, but it was accompanied by the warmth of Seth's presence. "What on earth are you doing here?"

Seth climbed through the window, his movements slightly awkward due to his haste. Once he was inside, he stood up straight, his expression a mix of sheepishness and excitement. "Well, since you said you couldn't sleep, I thought I'd bring the company to you."

(Y/N)'s amusement grew, and they couldn't help but shake their head at his antics. "You couldn't just send another text?"

Seth chuckled, his eyes locking onto theirs with affection. "Where's the fun in that?"

With a soft laugh, (Y/N) closed the window behind Seth, the warmth of their room enveloping them both. "You're something else, you know that?"

Seth's grin remained as he stepped closer, his arms wrapping around (Y/N)'s waist. "Just doing my part to make sure you're not up alone."

As his warmth seeped into (Y/N), they leaned into his embrace, their forehead resting against his. "I appreciate it, Seth. It's nice to have you here."

Seth's gaze softened, his fingers gently lifting their chin. "I'll always be here for you, (Y/N). Even if it means showing up at your window in the middle of the night."

The tenderness in his words was undeniable, and (Y/N) felt a rush of gratitude for the unity they shared. With Seth by their side, even the sleepless nights seemed a little less daunting.

As they stood there, wrapped in each other's arms, the world outside seemed to fade away. The night was cold, but their connection was warm, reminding them that even in the darkness, unity and love had the power to light up their lives.

Seth's playful strength surprised (Y/N) as he gently pushed them both back onto the bed, their laughter filling the room. Their bodies relaxed into the mattress, the comfort of their shared space enveloping them.

As their laughter subsided, Seth's head lowered, coming to rest against (Y/N)'s. He looked at them with a mixture of fondness and concern. "You know, we should really try to get some sleep. Staying up too late can mess with your everyday routine."

(Y/N) couldn't help but chuckle at his earnestness, his concern endearing. "Oh, come on, Seth. One restless night won't harm me."

Seth's lips curved into a smile, and he let out a gentle sigh. "You're probably right, but I still don't want you to be tired. You know how important it is to take care of yourself."

(Y/N) met his gaze, their fingers reaching out to gently brush against his cheek. "I appreciate your concern, Seth. It's sweet.”

Seth's eyes held a warmth that mirrored the depth of his feelings. "I care about you, (Y/N). Your well-being matters to me."

The sincerity in his voice tugged at (Y/N)'s heartstrings, reminding them of the unity they shared and the depth of their connection. "I know, and I'm lucky to have you looking out for me."

Seth's fingers intertwined with theirs, their hands creating a bridge between them. "Just promise me that if you start feeling too tired, you'll take a break and rest."

(Y/N) leaned in, their foreheads touching once again as they smiled at each other. "Deal. I'll take care of myself."

Seth's smile widened, and he pressed a soft kiss to their forehead. "Good. Now, let's try to get some sleep, okay?"

With Seth's presence beside them, (Y/N) felt a sense of reassurance. As they closed their eyes, they could feel the weight of the night lifting, replaced by a soothing calm. The unity they shared wasn't just about being together; it was about caring for each other's well-being, understanding the importance of rest and rejuvenation.

In the darkness of the room, (Y/N) felt Seth's presence beside them, a reminder that they were never alone. The world outside might be quiet, but the unity they shared spoke volumes, promising that no matter what challenges lay ahead, they would face them together.

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tofu83 · 13 days

Text

The new cybersuit

The hacker tried on the new cybersuit and helmet given by his scientist friend. He was told that the suit could help him sneak into the "Enterprise's" database more secretly and escape quickly, making it safer than ever. And it was made of a new material mixed with metal and rubber, which maintained body temperature and was fireproof, waterproof, alkali-proof and bulletproof, ensuring that his body would not be harmed.

Little did he know that his scientist friend had already fallen into cooperating with the Enterprise. This was a trap designed by his friend to show his sincerity to them. After he sneaked into the database, his digital consciousness would be captured by the anti-virus software and rewritten by the company's engineers. Dissatisfaction with the Enterprise will be rewritten into loyalty to the them, and his yearning for freedom would be transformed into support for order. Other hobbies and interests will become beneficial to the enterprise, too.

When his consciousness was transferred back to the chip in his brain, his original personality had been completely overwritten. The freedom fighters died and the corporate warriors were born. He was better called a drone or a robot than a human being now. He would serve as a super soldier of the Enterprise, pulling out all his past companions and converting them.

Without the Enterprise there is no order, without order there is no peace, and without peace no one can live, so the Enterprise will ensure that they remain standing. Do you agree or disagree? The Enterprise welcomes you to challenge their super soldiers and looks forward to your joining. The order and harmony of society need your strength.!

#ai image #reprogramming #cyberpunk #rubber suit #drone #super soldier #science fiction #scifi story #rubber #tofu83 #cybersuit

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years

Text

Why none of my books are available on Audible (and why Amazon owes me $3,218.55)

I love audiobooks. When I was a high-school-aged page at a public library in the 1980s, I would pass endless hours shelving and repairing books while listening to “books on tape” from the library’s collection. By the time iTunes came along, I’d amassed a huge collection of cassette and CD audiobooks and I painstakingly ripped them to my collection.

Then came Audible, and I was in heaven — all the audiobooks, none of the hassle of ripping CDs. There was only one problem: the Digital Rights Management (DRM). You see, I’ve spent most of my adult life campaigning against DRM, because I think it’s an existential danger to all computer users — and because it’s a way for tech companies to hijack the relationship between creators and their audiences.

In 2011, I gave a speech at Berlin’s Chaos Communications Congress called “The Coming War on General Purpose Computing.” In it, I explained that Digital Rights Management was technologically incoherent, a bizarre fantasy in which untrusted users of computers could be given encrypted files and all the tools needed to decrypt them, but somehow be prevented from using those decrypted files in ways that conflicted with the preferences of the company that supplied those files.

As I said then, computers are stubbornly, inescapably “general purpose.” The only computer we know how to make — the Turing-complete von Neumann machine — is the computer that can run all the programs we know how to write. When someone claims to have built a computer-powered “appliance” — say, a smart speaker or (God help us all) a smart toaster — that can only run certain programs, what they mean is that they’ve designed a computer that can run every program, but which will refuse to run programs unless the manufacturer approves them.

But this is also technological nonsense. The program that checks to see whether other programs are approved by the manufacturer is also running on an untrusted adversary’s computer (with DRM, you are the manufacturer’s untrusted adversary). Because that overseer program is running on a computer you own, you can replace it, alter it, or subvert it, allowing you to run programs that the manufacturer doesn’t like. That would include (for example) a modified DRM program that unscrambles the manufacturer-supplied video, audio or text file and then, rather than throwing away the unscrambled copy when you’re done with it, saves it so you can open it with a program that doesn’t restrict you from sharing it.

As a technical matter, DRM can’t work. Once one person figures out how to patch a DRM program so that it saves the files it descrambles, they can share that knowledge (or a program they’ve written based on that knowledge) with everyone in the world, instantaneously, at the push of a button. Anyone who has that new program can save unscrambled copies of the files they’ve bought and share those, too.

DRM vendors hand-wave this away, saying things like “this just keeps honest users honest.” As Ed Felten once said, “Keeping honest users honest is like keeping tall users tall.”

In reality, DRM vendors know that technical countermeasures aren’t the bulwark against unauthorized reproduction of their files. They aren’t technology companies at all — they’re legal companies.

In 1998, Bill Clinton signed the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) into law. This is a complex law and a decidedly mixed bag, but of all the impacts that the DMCA’s many clauses have had on the world, none have been so quietly, profoundly terrible as Section 1201, the “anti-circumvention” clause that protects DRM.

Under DMCA 1201, it is a felony to “traffick” in tools that bypass DRM. Doing so can land you in prison for five years and hit you with a fine of up to $500,000 (for a first offense). This clause is so broadly written that merely passing on factual information about bugs in a system with DRM can put you in hot water.

Here’s where we get to the existential risk to all computer users part. As a technology, DRM has to run as code that is beyond your observation and control. If there’s a program running on your computer or phone called “DRM” you can delete it, or go into your process manager and force-quit it. No one wants DRM. No one woke up this morning and said, “Dammit, I wish there was a way I could do less with the entertainment files I buy online.” DRM has to hide itself from you, or the first time it gets in your way, you’ll get rid of it.

The proliferation of DRM means that all the commercial operating systems now have a way to run programs that the owners of computers can’t observe or control. Anything that a technologist does to weaken that sneaky, hidden facility risks DMCA 1201 prosecution — and half a decade in prison.

That means that every device with DRM is designed to run programs you can’t see or kill, and no one is allowed to investigate these devices and warn you if they have defects that would allow malicious software to run in that deliberately obscured part of your computer, stealing your data and covertly operating your device’s sensors and actuators. This isn’t just about hacking your camera and microphone: remember, every computerized “appliance” is capable of running every program, which means that your car’s steering and brakes are at risk from malicious software, as are your medical implants and the smart thermostat in your home.

A device that is designed for sneaky code execution and is legally off-limits to independent auditing is bad. A world of those devices — devices we put inside our bodies and put our bodies inside of — is fucking terrifying.

DRM is bad news for our technological future, but it’s also terrible news for our commercial future. Because DMCA 1201 bans trafficking in circumvention devices under any circumstances, manufacturers who design their products with a thin skin of DRM around them can make using those products in the ways you prefer into a literal crime — what Jay Freeman calls “felony contempt of business model.”

The most obvious example of this is in the Right to Repair fight. Devices from tractors and cars to insulin pumps, wheelchairs and ventilators have been redesigned to use DRM to detect and block independent repair, even when the technician uses the manufacturer’s own parts. These devices are booby-trapped so that any “tampering” requires a new authorization code from the manufacturer, which is only given to the manufacturer’s own service technicians.

This allows manufacturers to gouge you on repair and parts, or to simply declare your device to be beyond repair and sell you a new one. Global, monopolistic corporations are drowning the planet in e-waste as a side-effect of their desire to block refurbished devices and parts from cutting into their sales of replacements:.

DRM laws like DMCA 1201 are now all over the world, spread by the US Trade Representative, who made DRM laws a condition of trading with the USA, and a feature of the WTO agreement. Whether you’re in South America, Australia, Europe, Canada, Japan, or even China, DRM-breaking tools are illegal. But remember: DRM is a technological fool’s errand. So while there is no above-ground, legal market for DRM-breaking tools, there is still a thriving underground for them.

For example, farmers all over the world replace the software on their John Deere tractors with software of rumored Ukrainian origin that floats around on the internet. This software lets them fix their tractors without having to wait days for a $200 visit from a John Deere technician, but no one knows what’s in the software, or who made it, or whether it has sneaky back-doors or other malicious code.

And yet, manufacturers keep putting DRM in their products. The prospect of making it a felony to displease your corporate shareholders is just too much to resist.

Which brings me back to Audible. Back before Amazon owned Audible, I bought thousands of dollars’ worth of Audible audiobooks, and they worked great — but they failed badly. When I switched operating systems and could no longer get an Audible playback program, I was in danger of losing my audibook investment. In the end, I had to rig up three old computers to play my Audible audiobooks out in real time and recapture them as plain old MP3s. It took weeks. If I’d made the switch a couple years later, it would have been months (the “audiobooks” folder on my current system has 281 days’ worth of audio!).

Amazon bought Audible during a brief interval in which the company was taking on DRM. They had just launched the Amazon MP3 store, as a rival to Apple’s iTunes Store, which sold music without DRM, so users wouldn’t be locked to Apple’s platform. This was a problem the music industry had just woken up to, after years of demanding DRM, they realized that nearly all the digital music they’d ever sold was locked to Apple’s platform, and that meant that Apple got to decide whether and how their catalog was sold.

Amazon’s MP3 store’s slogan was “DRM: Don’t Restrict Me.” They even sent me a free t-shirt to promote the launch, because they knew my feelings on DRM.

When Amazon announced its Audible acquisition, they promised that they would remove DRM from the Audible store, and I rejoiced. Then, after the acquisition…nothing. Not a word about DRM. The Amazon PR people who’d once enthusiastically pitched me on Amazon’s DRM-free virtue stopped answering my email.

When I got new PR pitches from Amazon, I’d reply by asking about DRM and I’d never hear from those PR people again. I got invited to give a talk at Amazon and I said sure, I’d do it for free — but I wanted to talk to someone from Audible about DRM. The invitation was rescinded.

Once on a book-tour, I gave a talk at Goodreads — another Amazon division — about my work and when they asked if I had any questions for them, I raised Audible’s DRM and the senior managers in the audience promised to look into it. I never heard from them again.

Today, Audible dominates the audiobook market. In some verticals, their market-share is over 90 percent! And Audible will not let authors or publishers opt out of DRM. If you want to publish an audiobook with Audible, you must let them add their DRM to it. That means that every time one of your readers buys one of your books, they’re locking themselves further into Audible. If you sell a million bucks’ worth of audiobooks on Audible, that’s a million bucks your readers have to forfeit to follow you to a rival platform.

As a rightsholder, I can’t authorize my users to strip off Audible’s DRM and switch to a competitor. I can’t even find out which of my readers bought my books from Audible and send them a download code for a free MP3. Even when I invest tens of thousands of dollars of my own money to hire professional narrators to record my audiobooks, if I sell them on Audible, they get the final say in how my readers use the product I paid to create. If I provide my readers with a tool to unwrap Audible’s DRM from my copyrighted books, I become a copyright infringer! I violate Section 1201 of the DMCA and I can go to prison for five years and face a $500,000 fine. For a first offense.

All of this is so glaringly terrible that it prompted me to coin Doctorow’s First Law:

“Any time someone puts a lock on something that belongs to you, but won’t give you the key, that lock is not there for your benefit.”

It’s been more than a decade since Amazon bought Audible and it’s clear that their DRM policy isn’t going anywhere.

Which is why none of my audiobooks are available on Audible.

I don’t want to contribute to the DRM-ification of our devices, turning them into a vast, unauditable attack-surface that is designed to run programs that we can’t see or terminate. I don’t want my work to be a lure into a DRM-poisoned platform. I don’t want to make myself beholden to Amazon, locking my customers to its platform with every sale.

This doesn’t mean I don’t have audiobooks — I do! Early on, I worked with great audiobook publishers like Random House and Blackstone and Macmillan to produce DRM-free audiobooks which were sold everywhere except Audible. But Audible has the vast majority of the market, and it just didn’t make financial sense for these publishers to pay me a decent sum for my audio rights and then pay great narrators and engineers to produce books.

So I started retaining my audio rights in my book deals, and paying to record my own audiobooks. The first one was Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, recorded by @wilwheaton, with introductions by @neil-gaiman and Amanda Palmer, which explains Doctorow’s First Law in detail.

Since then, I’ve produced many more independent audiobooks, including the audio for Homeland (the bestselling sequel to my YA novel Little Brother, also narrated by Wil), Walkaway (a fabulous multi-cast audiobook starring Amber Benson, Wil Wheaton, Amanda Palmer, Miron Willis, Gabrielle de Cuir and others), and Attack Surface (the third Little Brother book, narrated by Amber Benson).

Generally, these books recoup and make a little money besides, but not nearly so much as I’d make if I sold through Audible. My agent tells me that if I’d been willing to set aside my ethics and allow Audible to slap DRM on my books, I’d have made enough money to pay off my mortgage and save enough to pay for my kid’s entire college education.

That’s a price I’m willing to pay. In the years since the Amazon acquisition, Audible has become the 800-pound gorilla of audiobooks. They have done all kinds of underhanded things — like buying up the first couple books in a series and releasing them as Audible-only recordings, then refusing to record the rest of the series, orphaning it. They’re also notorious among narrators for squeezing their hourly rates lower than anyone else. Audible also refuses to sell into libraries, so all the “Audible Original” titles are blocked from our public library systems.

I think audiences get that there’s something really wrong with a system where a single company controls an entire literary format. In 2020, I Kickstarted the independent audiobook of Attack Surface and broke every record for audiobook crowdfunding, raising $276,000.

But Audible continues to dominate. It is the only digital audiobook channel Amazon will allow, so anyone who searches Amazon for a book will only see the Audible audio edition. It’s also the exclusive audio partner for Apple’s iTunes/Apple Books channel, which is the only iOS audiobook store that doesn’t have to pay Apple a 30 percent commission on all its sales, so it’s the only audiobook store that lets you actually buy new audiobooks.

Other audiobook stores require you to buy your books with a web-browser (which avoids Apple’s sky-high commissions) and then switch back to the app to download them — a clunky experience that has ensured that Apple’s own audiobook channel — with its mandatory DRM — is the only one iOS customers really use.

Not surprisingly, a lot of people assume that if an Audible search for an author or book comes up empty, that means there is no audiobook available. They don’t think of searching for the book on Google Books, or Libro.fm, or Downpour. They never think to check to see whether the author maintains their own storefront, as I do, where you can get all their ebooks and audiobooks without DRM.

That’s bad enough, but it gets worse. So much worse.

Audible has a side-hustle called ACX: it’s a “self-serve” platform where writers and narrators can team up to self-produce their own audiobooks, which are locked to Audible’s platform and encumbered with Audible’s DRM.

ACX has some nominal checks to ensure that the audiobooks that land on its platform are duly licensed from the rightsholders, but these are trivial to circumvent. Here’s how I know that: on multiple occasions, I’ve discovered that my own books have been turned into unauthorized audiobooks over ACX.

Scammers claiming to have the rights to my books commission narrators to record them on the cheap, with the promise of a royalty split when they are live. Inexperienced narrators, excited at the prospect of recording a major book by a bestselling author, put long, grueling hours into recording them. Then the book goes live, and I discover it, and have it taken down. The scammer disappears with the profits from the sales in the interim, and the narrator is screwed.

As am I.

Because these illegal ACX audiobooks compete with my own, self-produced editions, for which I pay narrators, directors and editors a fair wage for their creative labor. These unauthorized ACX audiobooks show up in searches for my name on Audible and Amazon, where my own (vastly superior, authorized) DRM-free audiobooks are not allowed.

This isn’t an isolated incident. It’s happened over and over again. It just happened again.

Last week, I heard from Shawn Hartel, a narrator who got scammed on ACX by someone calling themself “Barbara M. Rushing,” who told Hartel that they held the audio rights to my 2017 novel Walkaway. They do not have those rights.

I spent about $50,000 recording a stupendous audiobook edition of Walkaway, which you can buy here for $24.95.

This audiobook has met with widespread critical acclaim and the print edition has been translated and celebrated around the world. But Hartel didn’t know that.

On January 11, 2021, he accepted an offer from “Barbara M. Rushing” to record the book and worked long hours to produce a 16-hour narration. On February 1, 2021, the book was accepted by Rushing. On July 7, 2021, ACX listed Walkaway for sale. On November 9, 2021, ACX took the book down, having figured out that it was infringing.

In the meantime, Rushing sold 119 copies and gave away ten more, diverting people from buying my own, DRM-free edition.

129 times $24.95 is $3,218.55, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s what Amazon owes me.

Now, I’m not going to sue them (probably). I don’t have the money or time to fight that kind of battle. For one thing, I have eight books (four novels, a YA graphic novel, a short story collection and two nonfiction books) in various stages of production right now, and I’m going to be producing my own audio editions for them, which is going to suck up a lot of time.

But Amazon does owe me $3,218.55.

I don’t expect they’ll pay it.

Anyone who’s paid attention to Audiblegate knows about Amazon’s dirty ACX dealing. The company has been credibly accused of more than $100 million in wage-theft from ACX authors and narrators, whom it has scammed with a combination of a one-sided refunds policy and out-and-out accounting fraud.

I know a lot about Audiblegate because there’s a whole chapter about it in Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back, the book on creative labor markets that Rebecca Giblin and I wrote for Beacon Press:

Chokepoint Capitalism explains how large media and tech companies have cornered the markets for creative labor, and why giving creators more copyright won’t unrig this rigged game. The tech and entertainment giants are like bullies at the school gate who shake down creators for their lunch money every day.

To reach your audience you have to go through the chokepoints they have erected, and when you do, any additional copyright powers Congress has granted you is taken away as a condition of entry (think of how Audible nonconsensually takes away your right to use DRM law if you want to list your audiobooks).

If you give your bullied kid more lunch money, you won’t buy them lunch — you’ll just make the bullies at the school-gate richer. Giving creators more copyright inevitably results in those copyrights being transferred to Amazon and other monopolists. To get lunch for your kid — or justice for creators — you have to get rid of the chokepoints.

That’s what Chokepoint Capitalism is really about — not just how the markets got rigged, but how to fix them, with a list of shovel-ready, practical actions for local governments, national legislatures, artists’ groups, as well as creators, technologists and audiences.

We’re going to be rolling out a crowdfunding campaign for the Chokepoint Capitalism audiobook in a couple of weeks (the book comes out in mid-September). We’ve scored an incredible narrator, Stefans Rudnicki, who you may have heard on the Ender’s Game books, Hubris by Michael Isikoff and David Corn, or any of 1,000 other audiobooks. Stefan’s won a Stoker, a Bradbury, dozens of Audies and Earphones, two Grammys, and two Hugos. It’s gonna be fucking great.

And it won’t be available on Audible. Who owe me $3,218.55.

But you know what will*be available on Audible?

This. This essay, which I am about to record as an audiobook, to be mastered by my brilliant sound engineer John Taylor Williams, and will thereafter upload to ACX as a self-published, free audiobook.

Perhaps you aren’t reading these words off your screen. Perhaps you are an Audible customer who searched for my books and only found this odd, short audiobook entitled: “Why none of my books are available on Audible: And why Amazon owes me $3,218.55.”

I send you greetings, fellow audiobook listener!

I invite you to buy all my audiobooks at prices lower than Amazon’s, free from DRM and unencumbered by comedy-of-the-absurd “user agreements” that no one in their right mind would ever*agree to. They are for sale at craphound.com/shop.

Among those audiobooks, the $15 edition of Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free, where I explain not just Doctorow’s First Law, but also my Second and Third Laws (my agent was Arthur C. Clarke’s agent; when I told him I had come up with “Doctorow’s Law,” he told me that I needed three laws). As noted, this is superbly read by Wil Wheaton, and Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer read their own intros:

Of course, you will only find this book if Amazon ACX accepts it. I’ve combed quite carefully through their terms of service and I don’t see anything that would disqualify this from being listed as an ACX book.

But then again, they say they ban books produced without permission from the copyright holder and we’ve seen how that works out, right? From poking around on ACX, it looks like Amazon’s main way of checking whether a user has the rights to a book is by looking in Amazon’s catalog to see if there’s already an audiobook edition. That means that if a writer refuses to sell on Audible because of their DRM policies, Audible will use that boycott as an excuse to let ripoff artists bilk the writer, the narrator and the listeners — because if there’s no Audible edition, they assume that the audio rights must be up for grabs.

Will Audible let me use its platform to give away a book that criticizes Audible? Or will they exercise their overwhelming market power to both abet a $3,218.55 ripoff and suppress a critique of their role in that ripoff?

Only time will tell.

[Image ID: A screengrab of the ACX page for the audiobook, showing that it is 'pending audio review]

Addendum: I wrote the above on July 4, 2022, just before submitting the audiobook to Amazon and leaving for a holiday. Over the past two weeks, I've checked in with ACX daily, but the audiobook still shows as "Pending Audio Review." ACX advises that this process should take a maximum of ten business days. It's been 15. Perhaps they're very backlogged.

Or maybe they're hoping that if they delay the process long enough, I'll give up. In the meantime, there is now a Kindle edition of this text:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B5RWTPR7/

I had to put this up, it's a prerequisite for posting the audio to ACX. I hadn't planned on posting it, but since they made me, I did.

[Image ID: A screengrab of the Kindle listing page for my ebook showing it as the number one new release in antitrust.]

Bizarrely, this is currently the number one new Amazon book on Antitrust Law!

Also bizarrely - given the context - this book was taken down for several days due to a spurious copyright issue over the cover art, a cack-handed collage of some Creative Commons icons I put together with The GIMP. Amazon flagged this as a copyright violation (despite correct Creative Commons attribution) and took the book down, demanding that I change the cover art, ignoring my explanations. I was ultimately able to get the book restored by contacting someone I know at Amazon legal, who intervened.

I don't know if Amazon will ever release my audiobook, but I hope they do. In the meantime, you can listen to the audiobook of this essay for free via my podcast:

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_431/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_431_-_Why_none_of_my_books_are_available_on_Audible.mp3

ETA: Within a few hours of my publishing this thread, ACX released my audiobook. https://audible.com/pd/B0B7KH8KSD

Image: Paris 16 (modified)/CC BY-SA 4.0; Dmitry Baranovskiy (modified) CC BY 4.0

[Image ID: An anti-pickpocketing graphic featuring a stick figure reaching into an adjacent stick-figure's shoulder-bag. The robber's chest is emblazoned with an Amazon 'a' logo. The victim's chest is emblazoned with an icon of a fountain-pen. The robber's face has an Amazon 'smile' logo. The victim's face has an inverted Amazon 'smile' logo (and is thus frowning). Beneath these two figures is a wordmark reading 'Audible: Am Amazon Company.']

#audible #amazon #amazongate #creator economy #ripoffs #drm #digital rights management #audiobooks #books #publishing #writing #monopoly #doctorow's first law #pluralistic

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