#big store con

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tiktok's enshittification

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

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/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results.

This was a hell of a good deal for Amazon’s customers. Lots of us piled in, and lots of brick-and-mortar retailers withered and died, making it hard to go elsewhere. Amazon sold us ebooks and audiobooks that were permanently locked to its platform with DRM, so that every dollar we spent on media was a dollar we’d have to give up if we deleted Amazon and its apps. And Amazon sold us Prime, getting us to pre-pay for a year’s worth of shipping. Prime customers start their shopping on Amazon, and 90% of the time, they don’t search anywhere else.

That tempted in lots of business customers — Marketplace sellers who turned Amazon into the “everything store” it had promised from the beginning. As these sellers piled in, Amazon shifted to subsidizing suppliers. Kindle and Audible creators got generous packages. Marketplace sellers reached huge audiences and Amazon took low commissions from them.

This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon.

That’s when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon’s shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company’s $31b “advertising” program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search.

Searching Amazon doesn’t produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon’s “Most Favored Nation” requirement sellers means that they can’t sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.

Search Amazon for “cat beds” and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn’t charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for “cat bed” are 50% ads.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

This is why — as Cat Valente wrote in her magesterial pre-Christmas essay — platforms like Prodigy transformed themselves overnight, from a place where you went for social connection to a place where you were expected to “stop talking to each other and start buying things”:

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

This shell-game with surpluses is what happened to Facebook. First, Facebook was good to you: it showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook, it became effectively impossible to leave, because you’d have to convince all of them to leave too, and agree on where to go. You may love your friends, but half the time you can’t agree on what movie to see and where to go for dinner. Forget it.

Then, it started to cram your feed full of posts from accounts you didn’t follow. At first, it was media companies, who Facebook preferentially crammed down its users’ throats so that they would click on articles and send traffic to newspapers, magazines and blogs.

Then, once those publications were dependent on Facebook for their traffic, it dialed down their traffic. First, it choked off traffic to publications that used Facebook to run excerpts with links to their own sites, as a way of driving publications into supplying fulltext feeds inside Facebook’s walled garden.

This made publications truly dependent on Facebook — their readers no longer visited the publications’ websites, they just tuned into them on Facebook. The publications were hostage to those readers, who were hostage to each other. Facebook stopped showing readers the articles publications ran, tuning The Algorithm to suppress posts from publications unless they paid to “boost” their articles to the readers who had explicitly subscribed to them and asked Facebook to put them in their feeds.

Now, Facebook started to cram more ads into the feed, mixing payola from people you wanted to hear from with payola from strangers who wanted to commandeer your eyeballs. It gave those advertisers a great deal, charging a pittance to target their ads based on the dossiers of nonconsensually harvested personal data they’d stolen from you.

Sellers became dependent on Facebook, too, unable to carry on business without access to those targeted pitches. That was Facebook’s cue to jack up ad prices, stop worrying so much about ad fraud, and to collude with Google to rig the ad market through an illegal program called Jedi Blue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

Today, Facebook is terminally enshittified, a terrible place to be whether you’re a user, a media company, or an advertiser. It’s a company that deliberately demolished a huge fraction of the publishers it relied on, defrauding them into a “pivot to video” based on false claims of the popularity of video among Facebook users. Companies threw billions into the pivot, but the viewers never materialized, and media outlets folded in droves:

https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-pivot-metrics-false.html

But Facebook has a new pitch. It claims to be called Meta, and it has demanded that we live out the rest of our days as legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-poly cartoon characters.

It has promised companies that make apps for this metaverse that it won’t rug them the way it did the publishers on the old Facebook. It remains to be seen whether they’ll get any takers. As Mark Zuckerberg once candidly confessed to a peer, marvelling at all of his fellow Harvard students who sent their personal information to his new website “TheFacebook”:

> I don’t know why.

> They “trust me”

> Dumb fucks.

https://doctorow.medium.com/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video-adbe09319038

Once you understand the enshittification pattern, a lot of the platform mysteries solve themselves. Think of the SEO market, or the whole energetic world of online creators who spend endless hours engaged in useless platform Kremlinology, hoping to locate the algorithmic tripwires, which, if crossed, doom the creative works they pour their money, time and energy into:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/11/coercion-v-cooperation/#the-machine-is-listening

Working for the platform can be like working for a boss who takes money out of every paycheck for all the rules you broke, but who won’t tell you what those rules are because if he told you that, then you’d figure out how to break those rules without him noticing and docking your pay. Content moderation is the only domain where security through obscurity is considered a best practice:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

The situation is so dire that organizations like Tracking Exposed have enlisted an human army of volunteers and a robot army of headless browsers to try to unwind the logic behind the arbitrary machine judgments of The Algorithm, both to give users the option to tune the recommendations they receive, and to help creators avoid the wage theft that comes from being shadow banned:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/tracking-exposed-demanding-gods-explain-themselves

But what if there is no underlying logic? Or, more to the point, what if the logic shifts based on the platform’s priorities? If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you’ll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he’d carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers — as a convincer in a “Big Store” con, a way to rope in other suckers who’ll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.

Which brings me to Tiktok. Tiktok is many different things, including “a free Adobe Premiere for teenagers that live on their phones.”

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-fragments-of-media-you-consume

But what made it such a success early on was the power of its recommendation system. From the start, Tiktok was really, really good at recommending things to its users. Eerily good:

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1093882880

By making good-faith recommendations of things it thought its users would like, Tiktok built a mass audience, larger than many thought possible, given the death grip of its competitors, like Youtube and Instagram. Now that Tiktok has the audience, it is consolidating its gains and seeking to lure away the media companies and creators who are still stubbornly attached to Youtube and Insta.

Yesterday, Forbes’s Emily Baker-White broke a fantastic story about how that actually works inside of Bytedance, Tiktok’s parent company, citing multiple internal sources, revealing the existence of a “heating tool” that Tiktok employees use push videos from select accounts into millions of viewers’ feeds:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

These videos go into Tiktok users’ ForYou feeds, which Tiktok misleadingly describes as being populated by videos “ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app.” In reality, For You is only sometimes composed of videos that Tiktok thinks will add value to your experience — the rest of the time, it’s full of videos that Tiktok has inserted in order to make creators think that Tiktok is a great place to reach an audience.

“Sources told Forbes that TikTok has often used heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them into partnerships by inflating their videos’ view count. This suggests that heating has potentially benefitted some influencers and brands — those with whom TikTok has sought business relationships — at the expense of others with whom it has not.”

In other words, Tiktok is handing out giant teddy bears.

But Tiktok is not in the business of giving away giant teddy bears. Tiktok, for all that its origins are in the quasi-capitalist Chinese economy, is just another paperclip-maximizing artificial colony organism that treats human beings as inconvenient gut flora. Tiktok is only going to funnel free attention to the people it wants to entrap until they are entrapped, then it will withdraw that attention and begin to monetize it.

“Monetize” is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an “Attention Economy.” You can’t use attention as a medium of exchange. You can’t use it as a store of value. You can’t use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with “fiat” currency in exchange for it. You have to “monetize” it — that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

In the case of cryptos, the main monetization strategy was deception-based. Exchanges and “projects” handed out a bunch of giant teddy-bears, creating an army of true-believer Judas goats who convinced their peers to hand the carny their money and try to get some balls into the peach-basket themselves.

But deception only produces so much “liquidity provision.” Eventually, you run out of suckers. To get lots of people to try the ball-toss, you need coercion, not persuasion. Think of how US companies ended the defined benefits pension that guaranteed you a dignified retirement, replacing it with market-based 401(k) pensions that forced you to gamble your savings in a rigged casino, making you the sucker at the table, ripe for the picking:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

Early crypto liquidity came from ransomware. The existence of a pool of desperate, panicked companies and individuals whose data had been stolen by criminals created a baseline of crypto liquidity because they could only get their data back by trading real money for fake crypto money.

The next phase of crypto coercion was Web3: converting the web into a series of tollbooths that you could only pass through by trading real money for fake crypto money. The internet is a must-have, not a nice-to-have, a prerequisite for full participation in employment, education, family life, health, politics, civics, even romance. By holding all those things to ransom behind crypto tollbooths, the hodlers hoped to convert their tokens to real money:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

For Tiktok, handing out free teddy-bears by “heating” the videos posted by skeptical performers and media companies is a way to convert them to true believers, getting them to push all their chips into the middle of the table, abandoning their efforts to build audiences on other platforms (it helps that Tiktok’s format is distinctive, making it hard to repurpose videos for Tiktok to circulate on rival platforms).

Once those performers and media companies are hooked, the next phase will begin: Tiktok will withdraw the “heating” that sticks their videos in front of people who never heard of them and haven’t asked to see their videos. Tiktok is performing a delicate dance here: there’s only so much enshittification they can visit upon their users’ feeds, and Tiktok has lots of other performers they want to give giant teddy-bears to.

Tiktok won’t just starve performers of the “free” attention by depreferencing them in the algorithm, it will actively punish them by failing to deliver their videos to the users who subscribed to them. After all, every time Tiktok shows you a video you asked to see, it loses a chance to show you a video it wants you to see, because your attention is a giant teddy-bear it can give away to a performer it is wooing.

This is just what Twitter has done as part of its march to enshittification: thanks to its “monetization” changes, the majority of people who follow you will never see the things you post. I have ~500k followers on Twitter and my threads used to routinely get hundreds of thousands or even millions of reads. Today, it’s hundreds, perhaps thousands.

I just handed Twitter $8 for Twitter Blue, because the company has strongly implied that it will only show the things I post to the people who asked to see them if I pay ransom money. This is the latest battle in one of the internet’s longest-simmering wars: the fight over end-to-end:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

In the beginning, there were Bellheads and Netheads. The Bellheads worked for big telcos, and they believed that all the value of the network rightly belonged to the carrier. If someone invented a new feature — say, Caller ID — it should only be rolled out in a way that allows the carrier to charge you every month for its use. This is Software-As-a-Service, Ma Bell style.

The Netheads, by contrast, believed that value should move to the edges of the network — spread out, pluralized. In theory, Compuserve could have “monetized” its own version of Caller ID by making you pay $2.99 extra to see the “From:” line on email before you opened the message — charging you to know who was speaking before you started listening — but they didn’t.

The Netheads wanted to build diverse networks with lots of offers, lots of competition, and easy, low-cost switching between competitors (thanks to interoperability). Some wanted this because they believed that the net would someday be woven into the world, and they didn’t want to live in a world of rent-seeking landlords. Others were true believers in market competition as a source of innovation. Some believed both things. Either way, they saw the risk of network capture, the drive to monetization through trickery and coercion, and they wanted to head it off.

They conceived of the end-to-end principle: the idea that networks should be designed so that willing speakers’ messages would be delivered to willing listeners’ end-points as quickly and reliably as they could be. That is, irrespective of whether a network operator could make money by sending you the data it wanted to receive, its duty would be to provide you with the data you wanted to see.

The end-to-end principle is dead at the service level today. Useful idiots on the right were tricked into thinking that the risk of Twitter mismanagement was “woke shadowbanning,” whereby the things you said wouldn’t reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter’s deep state didn’t like your opinions. The real risk, of course, is that the things you say won’t reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter can make more money by enshittifying their feeds and charging you ransom for the privilege to be included in them.

As I said at the start of this essay, enshittification exerts a nearly irresistible gravity on platform capitalism. It’s just too easy to turn the enshittification dial up to eleven. Twitter was able to fire the majority of its skilled staff and still crank the dial all the way over, even with a skeleton crew of desperate, demoralized H1B workers who are shackled to Twitter’s sinking ship by the threat of deportation.

The temptation to enshittify is magnified by the blocks on interoperability: when Twitter bans interoperable clients, nerfs its APIs, and periodically terrorizes its users by suspending them for including their Mastodon handles in their bios, it makes it harder to leave Twitter, and thus increases the amount of enshittification users can be force-fed without risking their departure.

Twitter is not going to be a “protocol.” I’ll bet you a testicle¹ that projects like Bluesky will find no meaningful purchase on the platform, because if Bluesky were implemented and Twitter users could order their feeds for minimal enshittification and leave the service without sacrificing their social networks, it would kill the majority of Twitter’s “monetization” strategies.

¹Not one of mine.

An enshittification strategy only succeeds if it is pursued in measured amounts. Even the most locked-in user eventually reaches a breaking-point and walks away, or gets pushed. The villagers of Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof tolerated the cossacks' violent raids and pogroms for years, until they were finally forced to flee to Krakow, New York and Chicago:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

For enshittification-addled companies, that balance is hard to strike. Individual product managers, executives, and activist shareholders all give preference to quick returns at the cost of sustainability, and are in a race to see who can eat their seed-corn first. Enshittification has only lasted for as long as it has because the internet has devolved into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”:

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

With the market sewn up by a group of cozy monopolists, better alternatives don’t pop up and lure us away, and if they do, the monopolists just buy them out and integrate them into your enshittification strategies, like when Mark Zuckerberg noticed a mass exodus of Facebook users who were switching to Instagram, and so he bought Instagram. As Zuck says, “It is better to buy than to compete.”

This is the hidden dynamic behind the rise and fall of Amazon Smile, the program whereby Amazon gave a small amount of money to charities of your choice when you shopped there, but only if you used Amazon’s own search tool to locate the products you purchased. This provided an incentive for Amazon customers to use its own increasingly enshittified search, which it could cram full of products from sellers who coughed up payola, as well as its own lookalike products. The alternative was to use Google, whose search tool would send you directly to the product you were looking for, and then charge Amazon a commission for sending you to it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/comment/j4znb8y/

The demise of Amazon Smile coincides with the increasing enshittification of Google Search, the only successful product the company managed to build in-house. All its other successes were bought from other companies: video, docs, cloud, ads, mobile; while its own products are either flops like Google Video, clones (Gmail is a Hotmail clone), or adapted from other companies’ products, like Chrome.

Google Search was based on principles set out in founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s landmark 1998 paper, “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/361/

Even with that foundational understanding of enshittification, Google has been unable to resist its siren song. Today’s Google results are an increasingly useless morass of self-preferencing links to its own products, ads for products that aren’t good enough to float to the top of the list on its own, and parasitic SEO junk piggybacking on the former.

Enshittification kills. Google just laid off 12,000 employees, and the company is in a full-blown “panic” over the rise of “AI” chatbots, and is making a full-court press for an AI-driven search tool — that is, a tool that won’t show you what you ask for, but rather, what it thinks you should see:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/20/23563851/google-search-ai-chatbot-demo-chatgpt

Now, it’s possible to imagine that such a tool will produce good recommendations, like Tiktok’s pre-enshittified algorithm did. But it’s hard to see how Google will be able to design a non-enshittified chatbot front-end to search, given the strong incentives for product managers, executives, and shareholders to enshittify results to the precise threshold at which users are nearly pissed off enough to leave, but not quite.

Even if it manages the trick, this-almost-but-not-quite-unusuable equilibrium is fragile. Any exogenous shock — a new competitor like Tiktok that penetrates the anticompetitive “moats and walls” of Big Tech, a privacy scandal, a worker uprising — can send it into wild oscillations:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/watch-the-surpluses/#exogenous-shocks

Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That’s fine, actually. We don’t need eternal rulers of the internet. It’s okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn’t be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms. Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to users when these firms reach their expiry date: enshrining rights like end-to-end would mean that no matter how autocannibalistic a zombie platform became, willing speakers and willing listeners would still connect with each other:

https://doctorow.medium.com/end-to-end-d6046dca366f

And policymakers should focus on freedom of exit — the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought, and preserving the data you created:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

The Netheads were right: technological self-determination is at odds with the natural imperatives of tech businesses. They make more money when they take away our freedom — our freedom to speak, to leave, to connect.

For many years, even Tiktok’s critics grudgingly admitted that no matter how surveillant and creepy it was, it was really good at guessing what you wanted to see. But Tiktok couldn’t resist the temptation to show you the things it wants you to see, rather than what you want to see. The enshittification has begun, and now it is unlikely to stop.

It's too late to save Tiktok. Now that it has been infected by enshittifcation, the only thing left is to kill it with fire.

[Image ID: Hansel and Gretel in front of the witch's candy house. Hansel and Gretel have been replaced with line-drawings of influencers, taking selfies of themselves with the candy house. In front of the candy house stands a portly man in a business suit; his head is a sack of money with a dollar-sign on it. He wears a crooked witch's hat. The cottage has the Tiktok logo on it.]

#pluralistic #Lauren Leffer #tiktok #surplus allocation #fauximation #potemkin ai #the algorithm #creative labor #algorithms exposed #enshittification #bytedance #giant teddy bears #convincers #big store con #pivot to video #scissor bucket #Emily Baker-White

[armadillorollup]

la vie en rose

#izzy hands #ofmd #ofmd season 2 #con o'neill #was gonna make this a big ol lino print but my art supply store is closed #so for no here's the digital #mine #my art

[autistic-shaiapouf]

Alright beginning work on moth outfit and:

1) fought to load the bobbin for 20 minutes

2) gave up on sleeves bc every piece of fabric is a different size

3) began shaping the wings with wire and found out I don't have anything to cut them with

#i hope the drug store has pliers or bolt cutters or w/e bc im not going back to the fabric store for anything other than fabric #i wanna shape the wings and then see how much fabric i actually need for them and THEN start gathering that up #i uh. have no idea where I'll put these or how I'll get them in my car for this con lmao #i. kinda wanna keep them up on the wall in front of my trans flag hehe #big pink wings with hearts.. #shai speaks

[monster-noises]

I love second hand book shops, I got to them frequently and always leave with Something and have a good time just peakin around

But i gotta say

It's one of the Worst spots for me in terms of imposter syndrome

I feel like everyone's uneasey with my presence as though i'm a stranger who just stumbled into their inner sanctum and they're.. they're gunna let me stay but they're gunna be weirded out the whole time and breath a sigh of relief when the Strange Unwelcome Freak Leaves

It also happens at record shops and sometimes at small antique shops or cons+festivals

Just this immediate foreboding of being Angrily Tolerated in a Space I Don't Belong

#monster noises #it's Incalculably stupid because 1) it's a store. anyone can go in there. #and 2) in all those locations... I do beling there!!!!!!!! not even in the sense of point 1 where it's a retail location but like!!!! #Book shops Record shops Antique malls Cons... are all like super 100% right up my alley nerd shit these Should be like '''''my people''''''' #which is i think a strong contributing factor to this pervasive feeling like #there's an underlying current of not just being in there to Shop but that i want the other people there to Like Me? I guess? #in our limited interaction? #i want them to see that i'm One Of Them and it makes me nervous #because whenever i am trying to be a Part of something i Immediately feel like some kind of isolated hollow fraud #like i'm worried that i not only Look like a poser #but that i Am #secretly #a Poser #so secretly that I don't even relaiE i'm a poser #it probably doesn't help that i also always have The most off-kilter interactions with the staff in these scenerios #it's never anything truly embarassing #but it's always like i try to be as nice as possible but their reaction is never what i expect #and it throws me off #it's a hard thing to pin down in words but like.. it feels like they are more than anything just Waiting for me to leave #if not from the get-go then from the moment i open my mouth to answer a question #and like idk !!! i'm trying so hard to be open and friendly and not just use canned response but also not be Too weird or too loud #and be engaged in conversation but it never works! #it's like i ooze some deeply unpleasant vibe and it turns everyone off me immediately when i enter their space #i'll see other customers having lovely conversations with staff and stuff and then when it's me it's like Cold #truly it does nothing for my self esteem #not everyone has yo or is going to like me but i really don't think it's too big an ask to not be scrutinized by store staff Constantly ;<;

[toruvi]

Have you ever seen any of you merch out in the wild? How would you feel if you did? (:

not really in the wild but i did have someone tell me they bought my hange charm at a thrift store and then they found me at a con gfjkdghjkdfgh

also some cons i come back to repeatedly there's a small group of aot fans that show me their aot ita bags and i see all my charms on it and it literally brings me to tears ;;; aot is very small at cons and usually im the only artist selling aot stuff so idjghsjkdghsd (at least all the ones I've tabled at)

it makes me very very happy when people come back to see if i added more aot stuff ahh

oops i got sidetracked LMAO if i saw it in the wild though id probably just internally freak out and be super giddy about it ;;;;

#didnt feel too good knowing someone dropped it at a thrift store but ig it's better than throwing it out?? LOL #but it was a very funny coincidence they found me at a con #the ones that surprise me the most are the eruri stans #i feel like a huge amount of eruri fans are actually outside of the u.s so to meet one irl for me is like...SO rare #but last con someone recognized my eruri heart buttons and we had a whole convo about them for a while :') #i feel very lucky bc while im not a big artist i think a lot of people who buy my stuff come back #even online..it makes me so so happy i cannot emphasize how thankful i am

[cinna-bunnie]

bleh i wish hearing was something u could turn off 100% at will (⁠´⁠-⁠﹏⁠-⁠`⁠；⁠) how am i overstimulated at 12:15am

#i mean #i know why lol last night and today gave been HELL and it's hot and i didn't eat enough and have been suuuuper busy n things r taking #SO MUCH LONGER THAN THEY SHOULD'VE!! SIMPLE STUPID THINGS!! I HAD TO GO TO 8 DIFFERENT STORES FOR #A FUCKING APRON!! at first only 2 had a single kind of apron for $15 before fucking Daiso saved the day finally #and then i was busy until like 11:30 making an ad-hoc mount for my switch's dock so i can play it on the projector #and I'm glad that's there now. but (⁠´⁠-⁠﹏⁠-⁠`⁠；⁠) i still also have to bake and shower n make frosting and then frost the cupcakes #and it won't rly b until that's done that I can truly relax but rn “everyone and everything shut the fuck UP!!!!!!” is such a BIG mood #i need 30m-1hr of absolute silence with nothing bothering me at all. we'll see if Bandit will cooperate e.e she has def not been helping #aaaaaaaaaa #I'll feel better after sleeping but I'm also NOT sleeping out of spite bc I've been so busy n had so much time wasted like nah #i gotta enjoy at least A Bit of my night. Sunday can't be my only good day this weekend before i gotta work for a whole week again. #technically by now Sunday will be the only good day (⁠｡⁠ﾉ⁠ω⁠＼⁠｡⁠) #my only silver linings r the ppl who were nicey 2 me yesterday ‚ the cutie at the body jewelry shop today n the con tomorrow #(⁠´⁠-⁠﹏⁠-⁠`⁠；⁠) kinda want to schedule at least one day off this week actually... like nah...

[madigoround]

Feeling a little manic and unsupervised but I’m jiving with it

#am I about to make a big purchase that normally I would really hesitate to make? perhaps #see the thing is is that this morning my grandma texted me asking if it was possible to get my sunrise ticket changed to the Raleigh show #this Friday since that’s a lot closer to Virginia and it’s not but I could buy a ticket for the Raleigh show in addition to the Florida show #even though I would be spending 150+ extra dollars I hadn’t previously planned to spend but for so long I was disappointed that I would #never be able to see them in concert because they broke up before I could go so this really feels like a once in a lifetime chance to me #even though I literally have tickets to see them in a month lol and they’ve been doing a lot more shows recently so maybe they’re going to #start regularly putting on concerts now and it would be silly of me to buy two tickets for the same tour #I’ve made a little pros and cons list but I don’t think it actually matters what I put down because I want it so bad #that being said the pros and cons list is extensive but the pros are winning #I had been talking with my therapist a few weeks ago about how I was grumpy towards the teenage dirtbag trend on tiktok because I never got #to have my teenage dirtbag wild child era because I wasn’t allowed to be a kid when I was a kid but I just keep thinking that this could be #a little piece of that wild child era I missed out on and something something about healing your inner child #anyways anyone wanna come to the Raleigh show with me lol #my chemical romance #honestly usually I have panic attacks about spending money yesterday I almost fell out in the grocery store over the inflated prices and the #fact that I’m so easily considering spending more than 150 dollars just for something that I know will make my heart happy and will give #such great memories is an improvement for my fear of spending money lol

[chronomally]

Making a pros and cons list of feeding pigeons from my balcony

#please feel free to ignore this #Jake meets world #I want to befriend some pigeons sooo bad #Apparently they sell dove food at pet stores and this is a good starter because it has all the things pigeons love to eat #I am admittedly worried about the shitting which is I think the biggest con #Also my balcony is not very big so it may not be comfy for them #At the same time though I think it would be nice for them it's safe up here and I have some plants

[cat-eared-rose]

Back from my trip to Canada. Sad to leave all my cute partners, but so so so so happy I got to see them 🥺

#rose bud #i love them all so much #it was great #im so happy i went #i was really scared #it was ny first time flying international #and it was the first time ive been out of the country #AND first time i was in a big city @~@ #but everything kinda came naturally #the airports were really accommodating #the public transport was nice #i liked being able to walk to stores #because i live in the middle of nowhere and have to drive literally everywhere #the con was super fub 👀 #got a lot of cool shit #some from LCSkeleton my cool ass talented partner :3 #go check them out! #im glad i overcame all the anxiety and just enjoyed nyself for a week #no work #no school #just the people around me and myself #i had a blast 💖

[vanillajunmyeon]

i'm listening to one of my playlists and i'm suddenly reminded of that fact that i would watch anime openings/endings every single day like a normal person on my iPod nano (that i still have too) but in a super normal way aka earbuds in while going to school, even when i was doing an exchange in Germany (watching the saiyuki openings and endings like my life depended on it)

i also did that with kpop mvs for a long while too. I'm not saying it's weird but also I'm listening to chAngE by miwa and remembering that yes. i did watch that everyday to cope with the fact that i couldn't watch bleach episodes. for 1 WEEK mind you. not as if i would have missed more than 1 ep.

#im such a funny little guy #now of course it's a lot more normalized to consume anime or kpop content #as in you see anime merch in big stores now. before it was like. almost con exclusive. everyone knows at least 2 kpop groups now #before i could watch my little kpop mvs quietly (me watching first love by after school on the bus like a normal person) #or flashback by after school. totally fine #racontage de vie

[akiraofthefour]

uhhhhh I think my boyfriend suggested roleplay lol whuh dude??

#(spits out Dr Pepper but slow and steady like) #I was talking about how I was hoping that I'd get recognized by SOMEBODY at the big anime con next year as Otacon now that the collection i #out #cause I'm definitely pulling it out again. it's such a fun/easy cosplay plus I have the right face shape and bedhead. it's like zero effort #it rules #but anyways he was like oh I bet I could find a headband and grow my hair out by then and be Solid Snake #and he is so not into cosplay at all so I was like WHAT! that would be so fun! ok!!! #but he went on and he was like yeah... an eyepatch wouldn't be too bad. I bet they have those at the party store #(which like yeah they do but also I still have one from a Snake Plissken one I did a full ass 10 years ago jfc) #But I was like wait? Big Boss? But Snake? #and without thinking I was like okay wait BB doesn't really make sense with Otacon. Also wearing eyepatches for cosplays fucking sucks big #time and I told him straight up #and he was like well you know... I could just try the eyepatch and get used to it.... maybe #like... kind of saucily (I guess? not going into exact language here tho lol) #and my brain went O_O ??????????????????????? #fellas not to TMI here #but we've been deadbedrooming it for some time now #my brain just short circuited big time #like sir you best not just be stringing words together here. the circuitry and programming would not be able to take it

[ikiprian]

Ghost Kitchen (brought to you by criminal entrepreneur, Red Hood)

Danny’s got the easiest job in Gotham.

He works as a fry cook at a shoddily-run, independent burger joint. Hardly anyone comes in, despite prices being criminally low, and portions insanely large, and while the manager looks like the average tough-as-nails ex-con, he lets Danny mess around in the kitchen whenever the place is empty. (Which is often. This place has to be the city’s hidden gem or something!)

Mr. Manager’s the only one ever there with Danny, except for sometimes when his buddies come over to smoke and play cards. Danny would find it shady, except part of his job is not to ask questions. Literally, he was told during the interview.

(It was a weird interview. Why would they need to hire someone who’s been in a gunfight before? Like, he has, but Gotham’s idea of “hirable qualities” is so bizarre.)

So instead he whips up some killer burgers with the frozen ingredients, and basks in the praise as the guys tell him he shouldn’t have, he does too much for this joint, ain’t that friendly!

Now, Danny’s a chef on the newer side. As a teen he’d preferred the look of Nasty Burger over anything with Michelin stars, and he only really took up cooking after Jazz moved out for college. But just like ecto-exposure used to turn the groceries sentient, Danny’s low-level ecto signature imbues all his food with something historically haunted Gothamites just love! And Danny’s never been one to half-ass a job when it makes people happy.

With fresher produce, real meat, Danny’s sure he can take his dishes to the next level. It takes a couple months of badgering, but his manager finally agrees to contact the mysterious store owner, who keeps the place going, despite profits Danny knows have to be in the red.

Danny spends the morning prepping. He pours his heart into his food, eager to impress. The big boss will be here soon, and he wants to prove that despite the dangerous location, this place has real potential!

It isn’t until the Red Hood shows up that Danny realizes he’s been working for a money laundering scheme.

#ecto has a weird effect on them actually. a lot like how danielle drinks ecto to keep her stable #ecto has positive health benefits for gothamites! it boosts their immune system gives them a little more energy makes them less irritable #silly hc but i think its fun #also danny just. thought it was a normal ass interview. the person who hired him was heavily hinting at the criminal element of his job the #whole time. danny just kept thinking man i cant believe all interviews are like this in gotham. every one of the #m asks if im okay lying to cops. i am but its weird i never got asked this in amity #dpxdc #dcxdp #dc x dp #dp x dc #dead on main #ghost kitchen au #danny fenton #jason todd #kipwrite

[mostlysignssomeportents]

What kind of bubble is AI?

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.

Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.

Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.

AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.

So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.

Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).

Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).

Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.

These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html

The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.

What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.

Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.

The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.

If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:

https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509

These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.

Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.

These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).

So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.

But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.

This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"

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/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

tom_bullock (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/25173469495/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#pluralistic #ai #economics #business #hype #bubbles #bubblenomics #residue

[boneless-mika]

You make a good argument Good Smile Company…

#maybe if I don’t get anything at narcon I will buy them #maybe if I’m really lucky I can find them at narcon #I’m too tired to do anything so I’m window shopping online #wishing I could do it irl but narcon and comic con are the closest I’ll get #(I mean maybe there are some figurine stores in Stockholm but that is a terrifying place) #(bc it’s so big and stressful to take transportation or even drive a car)

[lacroixwh0r3]

Blow My Load

DBF!Joel Miller x F!Reader

Summary: For the last two year, you and Joel have been secretly hooking up behind your fathers back. One night when your dad goes out on a date, you and Joel spend the night together and Joel gets carried away.

Warnings: SMUT!! DUB CON, petnames (pretty tame ones), doggystyle, oral sex (f recieving), PiV, creampie, crying, pregnancy mention, abortion mentioned at the end, overstimulation, Joel is a little bit of an asshole in this (I am so sorry), age gap (Joel is 40 and reader is around 25), (aged up) Sarah mentioned, no outbreak

Song inspo (Feel free to listen if you want): Blow my load by Tyler, The Creator

A/N: Enjoy! Please reblog, share, like, and comment if you want. <333

"Oh, baby," Joel moans as he breaks the kiss between you two. You look down at his lips, which are now bright red and slightly plumped. His tongue quickly licks off the mix of both of your spits from his bottom lip. His hands were still holding your head in place as he looked at you. "I wanna cum in that tight little pussy so bad, darlin."

Normally, the two of you would have to be quiet, but because your dad had decided last minute to go on a date, it was just you and Joel in the house. Or you might even go over to Joel's house, which was five minutes away, if Sarah wasn't home, but tonight the young girl was at the house with three of her friends having a sleepover doing, lord knows, what. Joel was adamant about staying over to watch the four girls, but you quickly reminded him that they're 18 years old and could easily take care of themselves. You were also going to be home alone, and you wanted him all to yourself.

As soon as your dad pulled out of the driveway, you and Joel ran to your bedroom and stripped out of your clothing.

You couldn't help but let out a whimper. "Joel, you know you can't do that." You tell him as you bring your hands up to grip his wrist. You weren't on birth control, and Joel wasn't a big fan of condoms. When the two of you did have sex together, Joel would usually pull out at the very last second, which would lead to you giving him a lecture as you both came down from the intense orgasm you both had.

Sure, it was hot when Joel did it, but you would rather not have to tell your dad that you were pregnant with his best friend's baby, and you didn't want Joel to tell Sarah that he had gotten the girl she looked up to the most pregnant.

"I know, darlin', I know, but imagine how fuckin' good it must feel." Joel whispered to you as he groans out. He brings his head close to yours again. You could feel his lips ghosting over yours.

"I'm fucking you until you can't think straight, begging me to dump my warm load deep into your pussy." Joel says before he sticks his tongue out again, only this time his tongue strokes against my top lip. You felt a strong pull in your stomach as your pussy clenched around nothing, causing you to push your hips into Joel's. "Maybe even put a baby in there." He says it lightly. It was almost as if he was saying it to himself, but somehow you still heard it but didn't comment on it.

You couldn't help but think about earlier, when Joel had lifted your dress up and ate you out on your family's couch in the living room while your dad ran to the store to restock on beer and some food for dinner. The way he sat down on the floor as he wrapped his large hands around your ankles to keep your legs from closing or falling off the couch Or the way he slurped, licked, and sucked on your clit to the point you almost wanted to scream at the top of your lungs.

You parted your lips to allow Joel's tongue to invade your mouth. Joel cocks his head to the side a bit and sucks on your tongue before letting it go and French kissing you. You can feel it as the drool slides down your chin, getting onto his beard. You feel Joel's hands release your face and move down your neck, stopping at your breast. He fondles them and thumbs your nipples. They were painfully hard now.

You wanted nothing more than for Joel to fuck you senselessly until you couldn't think of anything but him. Joel always turned you on when he talked to you like this, but you were ovulating right now, and his words weren't helping.

You pull away from the kiss. "Fuck me, Joel," You mutter against his lips. "I want you to fuck me hard, daddy."

"Yeah, you want me to fuck you nice and hard? Get on the bed so Daddy can fuck you," He says sternly. "I want you face down, ass up, darlin'." You immediately get to the edge of the bed, just as Joel told you to, with your feet hanging off.

You can feel Joel close behind you in between your legs as he reaches over your naked body and grabs the pillow near your head. "Get on your hands for me real quick," He tells you. Again, you do what he says, and he stuffs the pillow underneath your stomach. "Good girl, now lay back down on your chest." He tells you once more. You lay back down and realized that your hips were now elevated, allowing Joel to easily access your pussy.

"Oh, look at you, so fuckin' sexy with your ass in the air, just ready for me to fuck you," He teases you. "You want me to fuck that pretty pussy, doll?" Joel asked. You felt your pussy clenching around nothing. Begging for your hole to be fucked

"Mmmhm." You whimper at Joel as you nuzzle your face into the soft sheets beneath you. However, your response did not satisfy him because he spanked your ass with his large hand. Your head pops off the bed, causing you to look back at him over your shoulder.

"Say it." Joel demanded it from you. "Tell me how much you want me to fuck you."

"I've wanted you since you got here, baby. I've been so fucking wet for that big cock." You whimpered as you wiggled your ass in the air, causing him to strike your ass again.

"Oh, I know you want my cock, honey. You want me to fuck my cum into you? Hmm?" He spanked you multiple times. You let out soft whines as you shook my head.

"Hmm? What's that, baby? You want me to cum in you?" He not-so-jokingly asked:

"I mean it, Joel. You can't cum inside of me or I'm gonna kill you, old man." You give him a pointed look over your shoulder, causing him to raise his hand in defense with his eyebrows raised. You meant it jokingly, but also not jokingly.

"I promise I won't, baby." He tells you.

"Mmhm, now I want you to fuck me, Joel." You demand him. His left hand grips your waist as the other wraps around his cock as he strokes it, getting ready to slide it into you. You feel him rub his cock against your clit as he gathers the arousal that seeps out of your hole. You moan out his name as he hisses.

Joel then points the head of his cock at your pussy and slowly slides inside. Letting out a deep groan as he does so. "Oh f-fuck, baby," He shudders. Your toes had curled up in pleasure as you dropped your head onto the sheets. "Pussy so fucking tight and warm... I might just have to cum in this pussy and make you a momma, huh?" He questions you as he slowly begins to push in and out of you. Joel felt the flutter after he said that.

"Oh, you liked that, baby?" Joel teases you. His slow strokes began to form a hard, fast pounding. "Tell me."

"I am going to fu-Oh fuck me-I'm gonna fuckin' kill you, Joel!" You moan out to him as he continues his furious strokes. His balls slapped against your clit as he pushed your waist into the pillow beneath you. "Y-you have to fucking pull out," You plead with Joel. You knew that he wasn't listening as he continued to pound his cock in and out of you.

"You promised me!" You squeal out. Joel only grunted in reply and spanked your ass with full force as his left hand gripped your hips.

Somehow, Joel's thrust had only gotten faster. You could hear your headboard hitting against your wall and the sound of my ass slapping against Joel's hips. It was all too much. Your knees began to burn from the friction, your hips began to grow sore as he tightened his grip on them, and with each hit to your ass, there was a sharp sting that lingered. That's when you knew that both you and Joel were close to orgasming.

"Oh, J-Joel, baby, please!" Suddenly, it hit you. You were cumming so hard that you didn't know what to do with yourself. The combined feeling of Joel's heavy balls slapping against your clit and his cock rubbing the spot deep within you was overpowering, causing tears to form.

You grabbed the pillow that sat near your head and brought it close to your face. You bite down on the pillow as your eyes roll to the back of your head, letting out loud moans into it.

"Oh my fucking god, baby..." Joel strains out his sexy, deep voice. He spanks you again as you cum around his cock and rub your ass cheek to soothe the pain. "Come on, sweet girl, tell me who's making you feel good." His strokes had begun to slow down now.

You release the pillow from between your teeth. You were so far gone from your ongoing orgasm that you couldn't even form words. Goosebumps had formed around your whole body as you shaked and quivered.

You feel him bring his hand up and smack your ass hard again, causing your body to jerk in response. "Tell me, girl! Who's makin' you cum this hard?" Joel grits his teeth as he slowly thrusts into you.

"It's you, Daddy!" You moan out to him as you reach your arm around you to grab onto his fingers on your waist. Joel moans and slowly picks up the pace of his thrust. You could feel his balls tighten against your clit, letting you know that he was nearly cumming. You look over your shoulder at him.

"That's fuckin' right, daddy is fucking you." He fucks himself into you. "O-Oh fuck, I'm gonna fuckin' cum soon, my sweet girl." Joel continues to hold onto your hand while his other hand lazily spanks your ass some more. You watch as his head falls back and his eyes close. You feel yourself close to another orgasm as well, but you can't help but worry that Joel isn't going to pull out on time.

"J-Joel," You moan to him as you grip the sheets on the bed. "You have to pull out; I'm ovulating, and you're gonna get me pregnant if you don't." You tried to tell him so that he could pull out. However, this only seemed to turn him on more. His cock strained in you all while he continued to stroke against the spot inside of you. You released his hand, slipped it between the pillow, and onto your clit. You rubbed your clit fast as he fucked you.

Joel looked like he had been transported to heaven. He looked down at you with both hands on your hips, gripping them hard. It hurt, but you didn't care.

"Oh, baby, I love you so fuckin' much," he whimpered as he looked into your eyes. "I'm so sorry," He says, looking down at his cock going in and out of your pussy. The sight of your juices covering his cock made his body go stiff. That's when you knew he wasn't going to pull out.

"I can't stop; I need to fuckin' cum in this tight pussy right now."

"Joel! No, pull out now." You told him as you tried to move your body away from his, but his grip was too tight around you. "You promised me, Joel!" You moaned loudly.

You weren't sure how many times you had orgasmed today, but you knew that you were cumming again. Joel moans as he feels you tighten around him. His cock begins to spurt his warm cum into your womb. You were so overstimulated that your eyes leaked tears and your ears rang loudly as your cunt welcomed Joel's cum and fluttered around his cock. Over the ringing in your ears, you can hear Joel whimpering out soft appologies as he continued to cum.

With his cock still inside you as you leaked out cum from your pussy, he laid his warm body on top of your back. His chest was damp with sweat from pounding into you. You could feel his warm breath by your ear as he took a minute to gather himself together. He still felt your walls fluttering around him. "It's okay, babydoll. I got you," He whispered gently as he stroked your bare side. You couldn't speak or think; all you could do was shiver underneath his body, even though you were far from cold.

Moments later, Joel pushes up from the bed and slowly pulls his cock from you with a slight hiss and groan. Joel bends down to get a look at your cum-filled pussy with his hands resting on your ass. "Oh doll, look at that pretty pussy," He whispers as he strokes his thumb against your sore ass. "I'll be back, okay, baby?" You let out a soft hum, letting him know he heard you.

When he went to the bathroom to clean you off and get something to clean you off, he didn't hear you burst into tears. When he came back, you were now sitting in the middle of the bed, crying with your head in your hands.

He rushes into the room, places the water bottle and towel on the bed, and embraces you. You couldn't help but cry harder as you cried into his neck. "Oh, baby, I'm so sorry." He apologized as he kissed and rubbed your head. "I'm so fuckin' sorry, I don't even know what I was thinking."

You continued to cry for a few more moments before speaking up. "Joel, what if you did get me pregnant? What are we going to tell my dad and Sarah?" You look up at him with worry. He could tell you were stressed over this and couldn't help but feel his heart pull in his chest. Joel honestly didn't know what came over him during sex.

"Doll," He grabs your hand from your lap and gives it a quick kiss. "If you do get pregnant and you decide that you want to get rid of it, I will be there along the way, but if you want to keep it, then I will be sure to take care of you and the baby no matter what." Joel says it truthfully.

You stroked his hand with your thumb. "Joel, I'm not getting rid of it, but we're gonna be so fucked when my dad finds out his best friend of four years has been boning his daughter for the last two years and got her pregnant..." You say this to him as you look down at his hand in yours. "He'll fucking probably end up kicking me out and then kicking your ass."

"Don't you worry your pretty little head 'bout that darlin'; you're always welcomed at my house." With his other hand, he holds your head and kisses the crown of your head. "As for him kicking my ass, that ain't happening, sweetheart," He says sternly, as if he is sure. You let out a snort as you laughed.

"Oh really?" You back away from him to get a look at the cocky look on his face. He just looks down at your face with admiration.

"I'm certain, darlin'," He tells you, causing you to let out a loud giggle. That beautiful giggle overwhelmed Joel with love. He knew he loved you before, and he always made sure that you knew he loved you, but he knew right there that there would be another compared to you. You were it for him.

After your giggles had died down, you noticed that he was looking at you with a sparkling look in his eyes. "What?" You asked him softly as you played with his fingers.

"You know I love you, right?" He asked you. You felt yourself beginning to get shy. The both of you always told each other how much you loved each other, but something about this was different.

"Of course I know, Joel. Do you know I love you more, though?" You lean over and plant a soft kiss on his cheek. You then pull back to take a look at his face. The way his hard eyes softened when he looked at you made you weak in the knees. "So fuckin' handsome!" Joel's cheeks turned a soft pink color.

"And you're the most beautiful thing on earth," He whispers to you. "You're mine forever; don't ever forget it, darlin'." You wish this moment could last forever.

You released his hands from yours and brought them to your stomach. "I can't believe we might be having a baby, Joel," You whispered as you stroked your stomach. You could see you and Joel sharing a child together and even getting married whenever the time is right. He puts his hand over yours as well and rubs his thumb against your hand.

"You want me to cum in you again so we know we're successful, baby?" He suggested it with a smug tone. The soft look on your face immediately dropped and was replaced with a blank one instead.

"You're such a dirty old man," You tell him. "But yes, I do." You give him a quick peck on the lips before laying back down on the bed.

================================================

A/N: I kinda hate this, but its been on my mind and I wanted to write.

#smut #the last of us #joel x reader #joel miller #joel the last of us #joel miller smut #tlou fanfiction #joel miller x reader #neighbor!joel #pedro pascal #pedro pascal fanfiction #pedro pascal characters #dads best friend #dbf!joel #dbf!joel miller #dbf!joel miller x reader #dbf!joel x you

[gremlingottoosilly]

Nature vs Nurture (monster!Konig x fem!Reader)

The new world order - monsters on top, creating the perfect dystopia for humans. You are nothing but a pet to them, a breeding mare for their perverse desires…and now you've finally been claimed by their colonel. Good luck.

Tags and TW: Dub-con, monster fucking, size kink, power imbalance, dumbification, pet play, dystopia, obsessive Konig, tentacle monster Konig, oviposition, breeding. AO3

It was supposed to be a supply run. Fast, quick, stealthy. In and out, the ruins of the abandoned store not so far from your hiding spot. Whatever you could find, some canned food – maybe, but not realistically. Some rubble and garbage that could be exchanged for food for triple the price it was – possible. Realistic. 

It was supposed to be a quick supply run. Like a rabbit out of her hole – but not really a rabbit, not even having the courtesy of strong legs and long ears that could spot anyone from a mile away. No, of course not – the universe wasn’t feeling particularly merciful when you were born a human in the age before monsters decided they didn’t want to be servants anymore. You think you remember going to the store like a normal person. Picking up a cart, hauling anything you could afford – not bothering about a lot of things. 

There are still stores, you think. Remesances of capitalism, working only for monsters – whatever crude economy they were building, it stayed in the cities. In the military bases, were filled with monsters even before the uprising. Not here, in the wasteland – it belongs to humans, as little as there were left. 

It was supposed to be a quick supply run for you and your friends – but you were dumb, but you were careless, but you grew accustomed to being the only one here, you didn’t even spot a patrol. Nasty fuckers, getting humans off the abandoned streets – you tried to fight and it didn’t work. Tried to run, and they were faster. Always faster. You should have been quicker, you shouldn’t have been a human – but you are, your soft self still not hardened by the life on the run, so you weren’t put out of your misery as you saw some other humans who got caught. Monsters took pity on you – or, perhaps, your submissiveness finally paid off. You were shown off the corner of a store – a human store, as you read, the words burning in your mind. You heard the stories about humans – attractive, soft people, mostly weak and obedient – who were snatched off the streets to do god knows what. Monsters can’t breed on their own, you remembered. 

You can hear the voices coming somewhere in the hallway, a good few meters away from your cage. You force yourself to stay as far from the bars as possible, not wanting to attract attention. Not even want to bother yourself with trying to see what your captors look like – monsters can take on human appearance and you’d rather live without seeing a human pet trader looking like someone who could have been your neighbor before the uprising. You curl in a ball, hugging your knees. Sobbing softly, quietly – knowing that there is no way out of here now. Not even other humans would help you now. “Just got new batch, colonel. Doesn’t look like a resistance member” “Ja, I heard that the last time. Schlampe killed all the hatchlings the second they were born.” “W…we didn’t know, sir! I promise, it was a…” “You can’t even breed them properly. There wasn’t any new humans in months, wolf” “Humans are…delicate, sir. They don’t want to breed in captivity.” “Make them then.” You hear something heavy shuffling around. You hear heavy footsteps that are making the flimsy flor of your cage shake. Even monsters have their disputes – but you can’t bother with caring when you hear footsteps approaching. Large shadow casting down on you. Making you feel even more small and miserable than you did before. Your head hurts. Your stomach hurts. Your everything hurts. 

Someone is staring at you. You see…someone. Humanoid silhouette – too big to belong to a human, at least 7 feet tall and broader than the entirety of your cage. You whimper when the creature tilts its head to the side, a surprisingly boyish tone of his voice grasping on your panicking mind. It isn’t the one that captured you but, for some reason, you can sense that he is even more dangerous. There is something on his uniform – some decorations, you think. Soldiers from the age before the uprising are all have quite high ranks in the new society – if they are monsters, that is. Large, droopy red tentacle falls from the guy’s hood. Definitely a monster. 

— Come closer, human. You whimper, trying to get up – only to get as far away from him as possible. You’re terrified, but he only hums in acknowledgment. A group of tentacles rising from under his hood, pushing you towards him through the bars. You were never more thankful for being locked away. 

— Disobedient. Or just dumb? 

— I d…don’t…

You cry, not wanting to give an answer – too disoriented, your nostrils are filled with the smell of sea and blood. You feel light-headed, dizzy, you’re hungry and dehydrated and you don’t know how could you even proceed to resist when one of his tentacles goes through the bars of your cage. Caresses your face, surprisingly gentle. Smearing cold slime around your skin, but even this is a welcoming feeling – you’d take everything that isn’t damp air of the human compound and the old sweat tattering your skin. You’d give anything for a bath right now. At least a few wet wipes, to wash the grime off your face – to stop feeling like an animal even though you know you’re already been reduced to one. — Just dumb, then. Gut. Monster caresses your face for a while, admiring your features. Salty tears feel like heaven on his tentacles – you can’t possibly see him, but he is grinning under that weird hood of his, adoring how obedient you are. It might be just exhaustion, but he missed humans like this – broken and abandoned. Soft and adorable, crying at the brim of a hat. König is going to have a lot of fun breaking you in – you couldn’t possibly be worse than the last wife he took. He wants to see you round and filled with his eggs. He wants you to see you cry for his cock, begging him to fill you up like the dumb, pathetic human you are. He wants to lay in the nest with you, pressing his body against yours – stealing the coolness of your body, covering you with his tentacles like a perfect chewing toy. He wants to… — Ah, sir. This is the new one. Just took her yesterday. 

A merchant smiles, slimy face spreading in a wide grin. Tentacles retreat from your face and shoulders immediately, only leaving a small trace of liquid over your features. If you were dumb enough, you could have sworn the monster was affectionate – but you don’t want to be dumb. Can’t survive in this world only on silliness, unfortunately. — I will take this one. — B…but it isn’t properly domesticated yet! You know how wild strays can be, colonel… — I thought you said all pets were properly obedient? 

— W…well, of course, sir, but… — I don’t need a trained slut to carry my eggs. This one would do nicely. Consider this your sacrifice to the order, ja? Before you know it, the merchant showed you in the hands of a giant man. Colonel, as you heard – not knowing proper military ranks, you wonder how high it can be. Or low. Monsters only value power and personal strength – and the merchant was fucking terrified of the tentacle creature who was holding you right now. Perhaps, you should have tried your chances of running away and being killed. Perhaps, you should have slowly died of hunger instead of coming out for supplies. `You’re held high in the air – too high for your liking. The monster presses you against his chest like he expects you to run away any second now – and you want to, really, nothing you’d love more but to simply jump off and run for the hills. But you’re too exhausted, the hunger sitting deep in your empty stomach makes you think that, maybe, for whatever reason this monster bought you for, he’d at least feed you. Maybe turn you into a pet – this is why there are stores for captured humans, right? Humans were treating their pets nicely, maybe the monster wouldn’t be too far off. Tentacles are swirling around your legs, around your hands – now you can’t even move your neck properly, cheek squished against a warm chest. This monster is a weird one – it’s like he can’t stop his tentacles from touching you, the cold tips of his tendrils spreading slime on the dryness of your skin. His body is warmer than any human would be, and his tentacles are cold – the contrast against your naked skin, barely covered by your torn clothes, is making you crazy. Making you think about weird things – like the monster reproduction again. Like your empty tummy, like the friends you left at the compound when you were supposed to go for supplies. Not getting captured by one of the monster higher-ups.

— You’re soft for a human. You weren’t even sure he was talking to you at first. You’ve been walking for a couple of minutes before you could finally hear some traces of civilization. Roaring vehicles. Gunfire. Laugh and groans – moans, too, to your surprise, not all of them very pain-induced. Your face is still pressed in his chest, you can’t see anything meaningful – but he stops in some corner, you think, covering you in his arms like a package he needed to deliver. You aren’t sure if you remember what the word “package” means. Something naughty, you think. — Quiet, too. 

You still don’t answer, and he hums. Pushes you on the ground, suddenly – you fall on your ass, yelping in pain and surprise as you lay on something softer than a concrete floor. It’s a pile of mattresses, you realize. You’re in a room, you realize – still too dizzy after everything that’s happened, you didn’t even notice when he entered the building and pushed you away from the sounds of life you wanted to hear so much of. You’re sitting on your ass on the pile of soft, rotten mattresses – a faint smell of decay builds up in your nose, but you can’t even concentrate. The tentacles are spreading your legs suddenly – you cry and whimper, your walls breaking down to reveal a soft center because the monster tears away your pants with ease. Your clothes weren’t much, to begin with, dirty and torn after the capture – still, you don’t want to be naked in front of him. You don’t want to be naked in front of anyone. 

— Spread your legs, human. You don’t want to, but you obey – you don’t wish to give him an opportunity to pry your legs open, to use force and make your life even more miserable. You know that being so obedient is kind of pathetic but, honestly, you couldn’t care less at this point. If being pathetic would save you from a broken leg, you will spread yourself open. Place each ankle on the side of the rotten mattress, not even caring that the thing fabric of your clothes – whatever little is left there – is slowly whiskered away by the tentacles. His hands are worse, somehow. He pushes your legs a bit wider, making you hiss from the stretch – and then he tears off your underwear. Not even letting you a chance to save your dignity – before you could cover yourself with your hands, at least, he is already launched at your cunt, smaller tendrils swirling around your core. You’re dry, obviously – and the monster tilts his head to the side. Acknowledging. Looking. He isn’t soft in his movements and the prying attention makes you embarrassed – if your legs weren’t in hid hold already, you’d try to close them. To save yourself. His motives are obvious, his intentions are clear – still, you sob and whine i his hold when his hand slowly presses on the button of your clit. The colonel – you try to remember this, it’s probably important –  is somewhat slow – he pushes your inner lips, spreads your hole as much as you can with a meager amount of fluid from the slime of his tendrils and, somehow, you find yourself getting aroused. Maybe, it’s his attention – he isn’t laying his eyes off you, and it almost makes you blush too much. He is adorable in this way if a monster of his regard can even be called this – and you’re freaking terrified when he goes closer, looks at you even more. 

His hand is making squelching sounds as your cunt becomes wetter by the second – it’s the first time in forever you had this kind of attention, and surviving the monster revolution didn’t exactly help with getting the edge off. You’re desperate for anyone to touch you – and the monster has beautiful hands. Big and burly, with tendrils sometimes running around to add even more lube – you know you’d never get anything like this with a normal human. — Need to check you first, Maus. The merchant keeps sending me infertile ones. You don’t know what he is talking about – but his hand lays flat on your tummy, putting you in place, and the larger tentacle – big, slimy one, with uneven structure with little bumps that made you wonder how it’s even going to fit inside – slowly creps to your sloppy, wet opening. It doesn’t hurt, you’re wet and open – something in the lube he extracted made you dizzy, dumb, you don’t even know when you spread your legs a bit more and welcomed the intrusion. It feels right, it feels wrong, it feels like the thing to die for – it feels like something that could kill you. He laughs and it sends slow rumbles right to the tendril penetrating your pussy. The pressure on your clit is too much – and your brain is to foggy to think that it reminds you more of a medical exam than actual sex. The tentacle inside is vibrating, twisting and turning, pressing on your cervix – it should feel painful, it can’t be this good but, somehow, you welcome the feeling of being this fucking full. You don’t buck your hips, but you cry and moan – and it’s enough of an indication of your pleasure. Monster laughs, his other hand goes to lay on your face – a surprisingly gentle gesture. Short-lived, but you could still feel the warmness lingering on your tattered skin. It’s hot and cold with him – you aren’t sure what comes next, but the tendrils are sliding in and out, probing at the entrance of your womb and, despite everything, you feel the knot in your stomach untying. The orgasm is a quiet one – build up is slow and small, and it doesn’t make you black out – but you whimper nonetheless, the tight embrace of his hands on your body feeling more like a cage than a normal hug. He is too powerful, probably not sure about his strength – you feel him squishing you like a fruit. The slime is leaking from your empty pussy, clenching around nothing. — Obedient. You’d be a good vessel for my eggs, human. You whine, turning away from him. He chuckles, pressing you in his arms again. Like a child with his favorite new toy – you feel squeezed and touched in various places, his tentacles having a mind on their own. Not an inch of flesh getting ungroped. — Ar…are you going to kill me? — Ach. You can talk after all. — Are you going to… — No. Have a much better way to use you. He chuckles in your hair, pressing his face in it. Inhales the scent – if he has nose, of course. This stupid hood conceals everything, not letting you know anything besides his rank. Which makes you think about…

— What is your name? 

A stupid question, really. You shouldn’t care about the name of a monster who bought you – still, you don’t want to refer to him as just “a monster”. This dumb part of your brain wants closure. — König. Remember it, little human. Oh. So his name is König. Somehow, it doesn’t make you feel any better. 

#cod #konig x reader #konig #yandere konig #cod x reader #call of duty #monster!konig #yandere cod #tw: monster fucking #cod x you #yandere imagines #male yandere #yandere male #yandere