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yandere-writer-momo · 4 months

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Yandere Baki Head Canon: Let’s Play A Game

Yandere Reverse Baki Harem x Afab fighter Reader

Otome Game AU

TW: unhealthy behavior, yandere themes, stalking, obsession, HORROR, etc

You, a famous fighter, had accidentally died in a horrific car accident by saving the life of a child that was supposed to pass away. Luckily, a deity had taken pity on you and decided to give you a second chance at life. One where you must play a game in order to go back to your world. Romance five of the male leads and you’ll be able to return to your world. Katsumi Orochi, Baki Hanma, Kaioh Retsu, Hanayama Kaoru, and Jack Hanma are the five main males you must romance in order to go home but the deity had thrown in some other mystery men just for shits and giggles. He even gave you a house that’s exactly like your old one! Just don’t invite anyone over… Sounds simple enough right? Wrong. How were you to know these emotionally constipated men have never experienced love before?

Katsumi Orochi

The first man you met when you landed in this strange world. His eyes were wide when you suddenly appeared in the rain before him. What on earth was a woman doing in the rain by herself? He rushes over with his umbrella to place it over your head. He’s surprised by how attractive you are. How soft you look… he doesn’t realize he’s staring until you place your hands over his cheek and smile at him.

There was a bar above his head that rapidly began to grow pink when you touched him. He must be one of the male leads you had to romance… perfect!

“I’m a bit lost… can you help me?” Katsumi was quick to offer you his coat when he saw you shiver. There was something almost magical about you… he was a moth to your flame.

“Of course, here. Let’s head into the dojo.” Katsumi ushered you into Shinshinkai while the rain continued to pour. He was immediately smitten with you.

Katsumi offers you a Karate uniform to wear since your clothes are wet. The two of you share small talk and he’s excited to learn that you’re a practitioner of taekwondo. You were pretty and you could fight? It must have been destiny for the two of you to meet!

He by far was the easiest to romance or so you thought… poor you had gotten a little in over your head about this particular man. He’s so obsessive and delusional. A horrible combination but one he developed due to dedicating his entire life to karate.

Katsumi offered free training at Shinshinkai and he was always eager to spar with you. It wasn’t uncommon for him to wrestle with you or to take you out to eat after training. You didn’t notice the way he’d slowly become more and more touchy. Nor did you notice how weird he was when babies were around.

“Don’t you think that baby is so cute?” Katsumi asked when a baby was sat with its mother in a table near the two of you. The baby was super cute with their chubby cheeks. “(Your name), would you ever want to have kids?”

And you stupidly told this man yes… you shared how you wanted to get married one day and have kids that hopefully wanted to be marital artists. You stupid girl! You didn’t even notice the obsession that lied behind his chocolate eyes or the lingering touches whenever he’d pin you to the floor beneath him when you sparred. Not until it was too late. Not until you’re introduced to his parents as his future wife. And there no way to run from him. He has over a million members at Shinshinkai and they’d hunt you down if you ever tried to escape from your doting fiancé.

Hanayama Kaoru

Once you had settled into your house (and carefully made sure not to invite the overly friendly Katsumi over), you ran into him on the street. It was just a chance meeting, but it was one that caught Hanayama by surprise. You had bumped into him and knocked his cigar onto him.

“I’m sorry, sir. I wasn’t looking where I was going-“ You were shocked to see such a tall man covered in scars. The heart bar above his head was slightly pink by the small encounter with him. Neither one of you looked away from each other’s eyes.

Hanayama nodded his head and went to turn away but he was surprised when he heard your voice again. “You have ashes all over your jacket… please let me at least brush you off.” Hanayama blushed when you quickly brushed the ashes off him without his answer. How brazen of you! He’s never been hit on first like this…

When you walk away, you noticed his romance bar is already at twenty percent. Perhaps you’d be able to go home sooner than you thought if you kept this up?

A shame you didn’t notice the blush on Hanayama’s face. He’s never been so excited in his life… and now it was your problem. How were you to know how possessive he was?

He was a silent presence compared to the chatty Katsumi and Baki. He would randomly sit beside you when you weren’t preoccupied by the other men which wouldn’t have been such a bad thing if he didn’t stare at you. His gaze was unnerving and terrifying. Yet you must accept him in order to go home. So you tolerated his presence with gentle smiles and one sided small talk. You didn’t realize how much Hanayama truly enjoyed your company.

He began to bring you gifts. Roses, jewelry, and clothing. Loud gestures of adoration despite his stoic exterior. You’d always thank him with a smile because his romance bar would rise with each gift… but his pink bar was the first to reach a blood red. Why was his bar so red? And why did you always feel as if someone was watching you?

His gifts began to become inappropriate. Rather than regular clothes, he’d gift you red, black, and violet lingerie. And then it was chocolates and invitations to fancy dinners where oysters were almost always served. You were starting to become really scared when you found out what his occupation was. How were you to know he was a yakuza boss?! And there was no escape from Hanayama, he was too powerful and he was too obsessed with you to share you.

Baki Hanma

You were on a jog when you met the twenty year old. He was sitting on a bench all alone looking so down. The heart bar above his head was a depressing shade of blue. Oh no! Why did he look so sad?

Baki was shocked when you sat beside him with a smile. You offer him your hand to introduce yourself and you offered to listen to him since he looked so sad. He instantly clung to you like a tick. You were so warm and sweet… he adored it. He’s never had affection like this since his ex girlfriend… you’re warm like a mom!

You pat Baki’s head as he cries in your arms. You’re shocked by how his heart bar sky rockets to a sixty percent with this small interaction. Holy smokes! You were crushing this game!

You exchanged numbers with him and offered him solace so kindly. Baki was so thrilled to finally have someone care about him. It was what he has always wanted…

Baki spent almost as much time with you as Katsumi did. The two friendly men running around you like little kids as they excitedly would take you on lots of dates. It was a little overwhelming.

But you didn’t think Baki would be so clingy… please don’t leave him! Don’t leave him, he’d do anything for you! Please only look at him! Love him!

Jack Hanma

The hardest to romance. This man was mean. Mean as hell. He had no interest in you whatsoever, he only had his goal of strength in mind. Jack constantly rebuffed you, but your persistence began to wear down his walls

Why did you insist on being so close to him anyways? He was a mess. He was always sweaty and he would train to the point of incontinence… did you have a piss kink? You were weird as hell and he didn’t like the way the other fighters hovered around you like helicopters. You were nothing special… at least that’s what he told himself until he overheard you defend him when someone bad mouthed him.

“Sure Jack can be a little rough around the edges, but he works harder than any of you!” Jack clenched his jaw when he heard you berate some of the fighters who commented on his methods for strength. “You don’t have half of what it takes to want to be the best.” Your words made something flutter in his heart. It was a weird feeling but it wasn’t something entirely unwelcomed.

Jack’s presence usually sent the other men running away with their tails between their legs but he began to like the way you smiled so warmly at him. For the first time in years, someone didn’t look at him like he was a monster. And he didn’t ever want you to disappear. No. Jack wouldn’t ever let anything happen to you. He’d rather die.

You became as important to him as his journey to strength. You were his one and only friend. His companion. It didn’t matter to him that there were others. Jack was just happy to have you by his side.

Jack enjoyed how you’d sit beside him whenever he sat alone or how you’d occasionally lean on him when it was cold. Jack slowly warmed up to you and his romance bar slowly began to rise. He took the longest to romance out of all the others but he’s the most normal out of all of them. Jack rarely sought you out unless he had a gut feeling you needed him. Jack slowly began to become easier to talk to… and you made the mistake of venting to him. Of showing him your most vulnerable side.

So when he saw you crying for the first time about how weird everyone was to you, something in him snapped. How dare they make you uncomfortable. How dare they make you cry! And now you realized just how over protective Jack was of you…

And from that day forth, Jack began to protect you. He was like a giant, blonde tank that shoved the other men out of the way. You didn’t have to worry anymore. Jack would protect you!

Kaioh Retsu

You met him at the dojo. Retsu was very nice to you. He was a voice of reason and usually would step between you and Katsumi when he noticed Katsumi being particularly weird to you.

You’d spar with Retsu and you were always awestruck by his Kenpo. Retsu enjoyed your compliments and even taught you some Kenpo. He was thrilled that someone was interested in his martial art. To have it be appreciated.

His romance bar was hidden from you, which was strange. Occasionally it would pop up with a high percentage but then it would fade into obscurity. Retsu would always give you a soft smile and reassure you whenever you were particularly overwhelmed. He was a really good friend.

Retsu was easy to talk to and he made the best tea. And Retsu always had a logical response whenever you vented about the other men. You felt safe with Retsu… like you could trust him.

And so you shared with him the truth of you situation. Which made the Chinese man sympathize with you. He’d help you get home!

A shame you didn’t realize how he secretly manipulated you. How he pretended to be reasonable and level headed. He used his maturity and kindness to lower your guard but he didn’t realize just how much you were hiding. You’re from another world? That would explain why you were so unique compared to everyone else in this world of his… Retsu found you fascinating.

Now Retsu was going to help you leave this world… but he was going with you. You entrusted him with such precious information and didn’t he deserve a reward for helping you?

Pickle

A wild card. You will only meet him if you decide to go hiking on a Thursday.

You were not supposed to meet him but you did. On a complete accident too. You decided to go on a hike in the forest to get away from your… suitors.

He was just hunting in the forest when he noticed you. And he was curious about you. He began to follow you around like a lost dog. It would take a few miles of hiking to notice him but once you did, you were very puzzled. Who was this guy and why was his romance bar red from the get go? And that’s when you finally put together that the red bars that were above all the men you have been around meant danger.

Pickle was quick to snatch you up in his arms but rather than attack you, he sniffed you. He was surprised to smell all those fighters he’s fought on you! It fascinated him.

You were quick to escape him and run but he chased after you. He was so happy to play! If he caught you, could he keep you? Pickle would like a mate.

A shame Baki was waiting for you at the edge of the forest. The redhead glared at Pickle who began to throw a tantrum. No fair! Pickle wanted to play with you too! To keep you and to mate with you! That wasn’t fair.

Now you didn’t leave the city often because Pickle was always watching… always waiting to strike. For you had caught his eye.

Hector Doyle

Another wild card. You weren’t supposed to meet him but you did at the dojo. He was supposedly a reformed convict, one that didn’t have much of an interest in you… at first.

Doyle was kind of mean but in a snarky way. He always had something smart to say whenever you’d talk to Katsumi. You thought he was gay when you first met him since he liked Katsumi so much. But after you got to know him, you realized he was just attached to the Karateka since he defeated him.

Doyle slowly opened up to you since you were a constant presence in Katsumi’s life. You were very nice to him despite his sharp tongue so Doyle respected you. The two of you slowly became friends… but you constantly had to stop him from stealing products from the mall. Doyle had sticky fingers despite being blind. He insisted he knew the quality of what he took by the way it smelled and felt in his fingers. It was kind of silly.

Doyle’s romance bar slowly rises up the more you go out with him. He’s secretly a softie beneath his rough exterior. (If you’re a touchy person, it’ll shoot up faster. Doyle is easily flustered). Doyle is also very jealous of Katsumi

You seemed to make his friend happy so he was happy with you… until he noticed a change in Katsumi. The Karateka was obsessed with you to the point it was concerning. At least in the way Katsumi spoke of you, since Doyle was blind.

“Katsumi told everyone that you’re his fiancée but I never heard you talk about it.” Doyle whispered to you as the two of you stretched in a corner in the dojo. The blind assassin adjusted his blindfold. “I may be blind, but I’m not stupid. Are you okay?”

Doyle was shocked when you answered back in a choked sob. “No, I’ve tried to get away but he’s sent the whole dojo after me… I’m scared, Doyle.”

Doyle was so shocked when you hugged him. His body shook when he felt his first hug since he was a child. He instantly wrapped his arms around you and lost himself within you. He could imagine a life with you. You were so sweet and you were capable… he had money from his old job as an assassin and he had favors he was owed by people. Doyle could help you escape.

You pulled away and you felt your blood run cold at the red bar that was now above Doyle’s head. Oh no…

“I’ll help you escape.” Doyle whispered in your ear. “But we’d constantly be on the run. Would you want to live like that, darling?”

The choice is up to you with him. Doyle will help you but you’d lose your opportunity to go home… forever.

Jun Guevara

Another wild card. This dashing man can be found on Fridays at the docks by his boat. He’s usually shirtless with a jacket draped over his shoulders and a cigarette between his lips. He is also very easy to attract if you ask him about the ocean. This man loves the ocean. He won’t stop talking about it and he may even give you a shell if you’re extra sweet.

Jun is incredibly flirtatious but don’t let that fool you, he’s also extremely possessive. His heart bar will only rise if you’re charismatic. You have to be able to talk the talk too. And once you successfully romance him, you have the opportunity to get onto his ship! Hurray!

Jun will share rum and stories with you if you sneak off to come see him. He’ll even drape his jacket around you and call you, “Meu amor” or “Meu anjo.” You don’t have a clue what that means but it seems like a nickname!

Jun is great to use as an escape option if the other men become overwhelming. Just keep in mind that he won’t let you off that boat, because he’s determined to make you his wife! And eventually the mother of his four children.

Biscuit Oliva

Another wild card but can be encountered if you interact with criminals (Jun or Doyle). Biscuit may ask you about their whereabouts but you should lie to him to save your friends. Compliment this man to distract him! He’s a pretty revered bounty hunter so it won’t take much.

He’s recently a widow and he’s easily flustered since he’s never been flirted with before. Oliva is very easy to romance once you stoke the fires of his ego.

Oliva is a gift giver just like Hanayama except his gifts are more from the heart rather than his pants…

Oliva will buy you very nice clothes and offer to take you abroad. His romance bar will only ever turn red if you share your woes with him.

Just like Jack, Oliva is extremely protective. And he will not lose another love so he’s willing to whisk you away and lock you up forever.

Just be his cute sugar baby and everything will be okay! So long as the other men don’t crash your date… then you may never get home.

Once you successfully romance all the men, the deity will appear to you. But sadly they won’t be able to send you home anyways because you’ve ruined the story here since all their bars all turned red. Sorry toots, but he can’t take you away from these men who are willing to kill each other to have you. The deity just hopes you can make a choice.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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My McLuhan lecture on enshittification

IT'S THE LAST DAY for the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

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Last night, I gave the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Transmediale festival in Berlin. The event was sold out and while there's a video that'll be posted soon, they couldn't get a streaming setup installed in the Canadian embassy, where the talk was held:

https://transmediale.de/en/2024/event/mcluhan-2024

The talk went of fabulously, and was followed by commentary from Frederike Kaltheuner (Human Rights Watch) and a discussion moderated by Helen Starr. While you'll have to wait a bit for the video, I thought that I'd post my talk notes from last night for the impatient among you.

I want to thank the festival and the embassy staff for their hard work on an excellent event. And now, on to the talk!

Last year, I coined the term 'enshittification,' to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers, it really hit the zeitgeist. I mean, the American Dialect Society made it their Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I'm definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).

So what's enshittification and why did it catch fire? It's my theory explaining how the internet was colonized by platforms, and why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, and why it matters – and what we can do about it.

We're all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.

It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying.

I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the 'great forces of history,' and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für Englisch Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).

But in case you want to use enshittification in a more precise, technical way, let's examine how enshittification works.

It's a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Let's do a case study. What could be better than Facebook?

Facebook is a company that was founded to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that.

When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and k-12.us addresses. But in 2006, it opened up to the general public. It told them: “Yes, I know you’re all using Myspace. But Myspace is owned by Rupert Murdoch, an evil, crapulent senescent Australian billionaire, who spies on you with every hour that God sends.

“Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world, and we will compose a personal feed consisting solely of what those people post for consumption by those who choose to follow them.”

That was stage one. Facebook had a surplus — its investors’ cash — and it allocated that surplus to its end-users. Those end-users proceeded to lock themselves into FB. FB — like most tech businesses — has network effects on its side. A product or service enjoys network effects when it improves as more people sign up to use it. You joined FB because your friends were there, and then others signed up because you were there.

But FB didn’t just have high network effects, it had high switching costs. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you leave a product or service. In Facebook’s case, it was all the friends there that you followed and who followed you. In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem.

It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time. You and your six friends here are going to struggle to agree on where to get drinks after tonight's lecture. How were you and your 200 Facebook friends ever gonna agree on when it was time to leave Facebook, and where to go?

So FB’s end-users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform. Then FB exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end-users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers, and publishers.

To the advertisers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? We lied. We spy on them from asshole to appetite. We will sell you access to that surveillance data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting, and we will devote substantial engineering resources to thwarting ad-fraud. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it.'

To the publishers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we would only show them the things they asked to see? We lied!Upload short excerpts from your website, append a link, and we will nonconsensually cram it into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see it. We are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users to your website to monetize as you please, and those users will become stuck to you when they subscribe to your feed.' And so advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too, dependent on those users.

The users held each other hostage, and those hostages took the publishers and advertisers hostage, too, so that everyone was locked in.

Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders.

For the users, that meant dialing down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers.

For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen by a person.

For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt, until anything less than fulltext was likely to be be disqualified from being sent to your subscribers, let alone included in algorithmic suggestion feeds.

And then FB started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting fulltext feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetization, via the increasingly crooked advertising service.

When any of these groups squawked, FB just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learned in the Darth Vader MBA: 'I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.'

Facebook now enters the most dangerous phase of enshittification. It wants to withdraw all available surplus, and leave just enough residual value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other, and business customers stuck to end users, without leaving anything extra on the table, so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its shareholders.

But that’s a very brittle equilibrium, because the difference between “I hate this service but I can’t bring myself to quit it,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit? Get me the hell out of here!” is razor thin

All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then FB discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword.

If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go, too.

That’s terminal enshittification, the phase when a platform becomes a pile of shit. This phase is usually accompanied by panic, which tech bros euphemistically call 'pivoting.'

Which is how we get pivots like, 'In the future, all internet users will be transformed into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters in a virtual world called "metaverse," that we ripped off from a 25-year-old satirical cyberpunk novel.'

That's the procession of enshittification. If enshittification were a disease, we'd call that enshittification's "natural history." But that doesn't tell you how the enshittification works, nor why everything is enshittifying right now, and without those details, we can't know what to do about it.

What led to the enshittocene? What is it about this moment that led to the Great Enshittening? Was it the end of the Zero Interest Rate Policy? Was it a change in leadership at the tech giants? Is Mercury in retrograde?

None of the above.

The period of free fed money certainly led to tech companies having a lot of surplus to toss around. But Facebook started enshittifying long before ZIRP ended, so did Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Some of the tech giants got new leaders. But Google's enshittification got worse when the founders came back to oversee the company's AI panic (excuse me, 'AI pivot').

And it can't be Mercury in retrograde, because I'm a cancer, and as everyone knows, cancers don't believe in astrology.

When a whole bunch of independent entities all change in the same way at once, that's a sign that the environment has changed, and that's what happened to tech.

Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.

The equilibrium in which companies produce things we like in honorable ways at a fair price is one in which charging more, worsening quality, and harming workers costs more than the company would make by playing dirty.

There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses.

First: competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices.

Second: regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less.

These two forces affect all industries, but the next two are far more tech-specific.

Third: self-help. Computers are extremely flexible, and so are the digital products and services we make from them. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing-complete Von Neumann machine, a computer that can run every valid program.

That means that users can always avail themselves of programs that undo the anti-features that shift value from them to a company's shareholders. Think of a board-room table where someone says, 'I've calculated that making our ads 20% more invasive will net us 2% more revenue per user.'

In a digital world, someone else might well say 'Yes, but if we do that, 20% of our users will install ad-blockers, and our revenue from those users will drop to zero, forever.'

This means that digital companies are constrained by the fear that some enshittificatory maneuver will prompt their users to google, 'How do I disenshittify this?'

Fourth and finally: workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn't mean that tech workers don't have labor power. The historical "talent shortage" of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage over their bosses. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another job – a better job.

They knew it, and their bosses knew it. Ironically, this made tech workers highly exploitable. Tech workers overwhelmingly saw themselves as founders in waiting, entrepreneurs who were temporarily drawing a salary, heroic figures of the tech mission.

That's why mottoes like Google's 'don't be evil' and Facebook's 'make the world more open and connected' mattered: they instilled a sense of mission in workers. It's what Fobazi Ettarh calls 'vocational awe, 'or Elon Musk calls being 'extremely hardcore.'

Tech workers had lots of bargaining power, but they didn't flex it when their bosses demanded that they sacrifice their health, their families, their sleep to meet arbitrary deadlines.

So long as their bosses transformed their workplaces into whimsical 'campuses,' with gyms, gourmet cafeterias, laundry service, massages and egg-freezing, workers could tell themselves that they were being pampered – rather than being made to work like government mules.

But for bosses, there's a downside to motivating your workers with appeals to a sense of mission, namely: your workers will feel a sense of mission. So when you ask them to enshittify the products they ruined their health to ship, workers will experience a sense of profound moral injury, respond with outrage, and threaten to quit.

Thus tech workers themselves were the final bulwark against enshittification,

The pre-enshittification era wasn't a time of better leadership. The executives weren't better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power.

So what happened?

One by one, each of these constraints was eroded until it dissolved, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittoscene.

It started with competition. From the Gilded Age until the Reagan years, the purpose of competition law was to promote competition. US antitrust law treated corporate power as dangerous and sought to blunt it. European antitrust laws were modeled on US ones, imported by the architects of the Marshall Plan.

But starting in the neoliberal era, competition authorities all over the world adopted a doctrine called 'consumer welfare,' which held that monopolies were evidence of quality. If everyone was shopping at the same store and buying the same product, that meant it was the best store, selling the best product – not that anyone was cheating.

And so all over the world, governments stopped enforcing their competition laws. They just ignored them as companies flouted them. Those companies merged with their major competitors, absorbed small companies before they could grow to be big threats. They held an orgy of consolidation that produced the most inbred industries imaginable, whole sectors grown so incestuous they developed Habsburg jaws, from eyeglasses to sea freight, glass bottles to payment processing, vitamin C to beer.

Most of our global economy is dominated by five or fewer global companies. If smaller companies refuse to sell themselves to these cartels, the giants have free rein to flout competition law further, with 'predatory pricing' that keeps an independent rival from gaining a foothold.

When Diapers.com refused Amazon's acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100m on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until diapers.com went bust, and Amazon bought them for pennies on the dollar, and shut them down.

Competition is a distant memory. As Tom Eastman says, the web has devolved into 'five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four,' so these giant companies no longer fear losing our business.

Lily Tomlin used to do a character on the TV show Laugh In, an AT&T telephone operator who'd do commercials for the Bell system. Each one would end with her saying 'We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.'

Today's giants are not constrained by competition.

They don't care. They don't have to. They're Google.

That's the first constraint gone, and as it slipped away, the second constraint – regulation – was also doomed.

When an industry consists of hundreds of small- and medium-sized enterprises, it is a mob, a rabble. Hundreds of companies can't agree on what to tell Parliament or Congress or the Commission. They can't even agree on how to cater a meeting where they'd discuss the matter.

But when a sector dwindles to a bare handful of dominant firms, it ceases to be a rabble and it becomes a cartel.

Five companies, or four, or three, or two, or just one company finds it easy to converge on a single message for their regulators, and without "wasteful competition" eroding their profits, they have plenty of cash to spread around.

Like Facebook, handing former UK deputy PM Nick Clegg millions every year to sleaze around Europe, telling his former colleagues that Facebook is the only thing standing between 'European Cyberspace' and the Chinese Communist Party.

Tech's regulatory capture allows it to flout the rules that constrain less concentrated sectors. They can pretend that violating labor, consumer and privacy laws is fine, because they violate them with an app.

This is why competition matters: it's not just because competition makes companies work harder and share value with customers and workers, it's because competition keeps companies from becoming too big to fail, and too big to jail.

Now, there's plenty of things we don't want improved through competition, like privacy invasions. After the EU passed its landmark privacy law, the GDPR, there was a mass-extinction event for small EU ad-tech companies. These companies disappeared en masse, and that's fine.

They were even more invasive and reckless than US-based Big Tech companies. After all, they had less to lose. We don't want competition in commercial surveillance. We don't want to produce increasing efficiency in violating our human rights.

But: Google and Facebook – who pretend they are called Alphabet and Meta – have been unscathed by European privacy law. That's not because they don't violate the GDPR (they do!). It's because they pretend they are headquartered in Ireland, one of the EU's most notorious corporate crime-havens.

And Ireland competes with the EU other crime havens – Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and sometimes the Netherlands – to see which country can offer the most hospitable environment for all sorts of crimes. Because the kind of company that can fly an Irish flag of convenience is mobile enough to change to a Maltese flag if the Irish start enforcing EU laws.

Which is how you get an Irish Data Protection Commission that processes fewer than 20 major cases per year, while Germany's data commissioner handles more than 500 major cases, even though Ireland is nominal home to the most privacy-invasive companies on the continent.

So Google and Facebook get to act as though they are immune to privacy law, because they violate the law with an app; just like Uber can violate labor law and claim it doesn't count because they do it with an app.

Uber's labor-pricing algorithm offers different drivers different payments for the same job, something Veena Dubal calls 'algorithmic wage discrimination.' If you're more selective about which jobs you'll take, Uber will pay you more for every ride.

But if you take those higher payouts and ditch whatever side-hustle let you cover your bills which being picky about your Uber drives, Uber will incrementally reduce the payment, toggling up and down as you grow more or less selective, playing you like a fish on a line until you eventually – inevitably – lose to the tireless pricing robot, and end up stuck with low wages and all your side-hustles gone.

Then there's Amazon, which violates consumer protection laws, but says it doesn't matter, because they do it with an app. Amazon makes $38b/year from its 'advertising' system. 'Advertising' in quotes because they're not selling ads, they're selling placements in search results.

The companies that spend the most on 'ads' go to the top, even if they're offering worse products at higher prices. If you click the first link in an Amazon search result, on average you will pay a 29% premium over the best price on the service. Click one of the first four items and you'll pay a 25% premium. On average you have to go seventeen items down to find the best deal on Amazon.

Any merchant that did this to you in a physical storefront would be fined into oblivion. But Amazon has captured its regulators, so it can violate your rights, and say, "it doesn't count, we did it with an app"

This is where that third constraint, self-help, would sure come in handy. If you don't want your privacy violated, you don't need to wait for the Irish privacy regulator to act, you can just install an ad-blocker.

More than half of all web users are blocking ads. But the web is an open platform, developed in the age when tech was hundreds of companies at each others' throats, unable to capture their regulators.

Today, the web is being devoured by apps, and apps are ripe for enshittification. Regulatory capture isn't just the ability to flout regulation, it's also the ability to co-opt regulation, to wield regulation against your adversaries.

Today's tech giants got big by exploiting self-help measures. When Facebook was telling Myspace users they needed to escape Rupert Murdoch’s evil crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, 'Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here'

It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your Myspace username and password, and it would login to Myspace and pretend to be you, and scrape everything waiting in your inbox, copying it to your FB inbox, and you could reply to it and it would autopilot your replies back to Myspace.

When Microsoft was choking off Apple's market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac – so that offices were throwing away their designers' Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator – Steve Jobs didn't beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office.

He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office, and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could perfectly read and write Microsoft's Word, Excel and Powerpoint files.

When Google entered the market, it sent its crawler to every web server on Earth, where it presented itself as a web-user: 'Hi! Hello! Do you have any web pages? Thanks! How about some more? How about more?'

But every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Facebook, Apple and Google were doing this adversarial interoperability, that was progress. If you try to do it to them, that's piracy.

Try to make an alternative client for Facebook and they'll say you violated US laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and EU laws like Article 6 of the EUCD.

Try to make an Android program that can run iPhone apps and play back the data from Apple's media stores and they'd bomb you until the rubble bounced.

Try to scrape all of Google and they'll nuke you until you glowed.

Tech's regulatory capture is mind-boggling. Take that law I mentioned earlier, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. Bill Clinton signed it in 1998, and the EU imported it as Article 6 of the EUCD in 2001

It is a blanket prohibition on removing any kind of encryption that restricts access to a copyrighted work – things like ripping DVDs or jailbreaking a phone – with penalties of a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.

This law has been so broadened that it can be used to imprison creators for granting access to their own creations

Here's how that works: In 2008, Amazon bought Audible, an audiobook platform, in an anticompetitive acquisition. Today, Audible is a monopolist with more than 90% of the audiobook market. Audible requires that all creators on their platform sell with Amazon's "digital rights management," which locks it to Amazon's apps.

So say I write a book, then I read it into a mic, then I pay a director and an engineer thousands of dollars to turn that into an audiobook, and sell it to you on the monopoly platform, Audible, that controls more than 90% of the market.

If I later decide to leave Amazon and want to let you come with me to a rival platform, I am out of luck. If I supply you with a tool to remove Amazon's encryption from my audiobook, so you can play it in another app, I commit a felony, punishable by a 5-year sentence and a half-million-dollar fine, for a first offense.

That's a stiffer penalty than you would face if you simply pirated the audiobook from a torrent site. But it's also harsher than the punishment you'd get for shoplifting the audiobook on CD from a truck-stop. It's harsher than the sentence you'd get for hijacking the truck that delivered the CD.

So think of our ad-blockers again. 50% of web users are running ad-blockers. 0% of app users are running ad-blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that's a felony (Jay Freeman calls this 'felony contempt of business-model').

So when someone in a board-room says, 'let's make our ads 20% more obnoxious and get a 2% revenue increase,' no one objects that this might prompt users to google, 'how do I block ads?' After all, the answer is, 'you can't.'

Indeed, it's more likely that someone in that board room will say, 'let's make our ads 100% more obnoxious and get a 10% revenue increase' (this is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website).

There's no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn't install a counter-app that coordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold.

No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete, or in other words: 'IP law.'

'IP' is just a euphemism for 'a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers.' And 'app' is just a euphemism for 'a web-page wrapped enough IP to make it a felony to mod it to protect the labor, consumer and privacy rights of its user.'

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.

But what about that fourth constraint: workers?

For decades, tech workers' high degrees of bargaining power and vocational awe put a ceiling on enshittification. Even after the tech sector shrank to a handful of giants. Even after they captured their regulators so they could violate our consumer, privacy and labor rights. Even after they created 'felony contempt of business model' and extinguished self-help for tech users. Tech was still constrained by their workers' sense of moral injury in the face of the imperative to enshittify.

Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?

Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.

Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.

And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired last year six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.

Workers are no longer a check on their bosses' worst impulses

Today, the response to 'I refuse to make this product worse' is, 'turn in your badge and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.'

I get that this is all a little depressing

OK, really depressing.

But hear me out! We've identified the disease. We've traced its natural history. We've identified its underlying mechanism. Now we can get to work on a cure.

There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labor.

To reverse enshittification and guard against its reemergence, we must restore and strengthen each of these.

On competition, it's actually looking pretty good. The EU, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and China are all doing more on competition than they have in two generations. They're blocking mergers, unwinding existing ones, taking action on predatory pricing and other sleazy tactics.

Remember, in the US and Europe, we already have the laws to do this – we just stopped enforcing them in the Helmut Kohl era.

I've been fighting these fights with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 22 years now, and I've never seen a more hopeful moment for sound, informed tech policy.

Now, the enshittifiers aren't taking this laying down. The business press can't stop talking about how stupid and old-fashioned all this stuff is. They call people like me 'hipster antitrust,' and they hate any regulator who actually does their job.

Take Lina Khan, the brilliant head of the US Federal Trade Commission, who has done more in three years on antitrust than the combined efforts of all her predecessors over the past 40 years. Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal has run more than 80 editorials trashing Khan, insisting that she's an ineffectual ideologue who can't get anything done.

Sure, Rupert, that's why you ran 80 editorials about her.

Because she can't get anything done.

Even Canada is stepping up on competition. Canada! Land of the evil billionaire! From Ted Rogers, who owns the country's telecoms; to Galen Weston, who owns the country's grocery stores; to the Irvings, who basically own the entire province of New Brunswick.

Even Canada is doing something about this. Last autumn, Trudeau's government promised to update Canada's creaking competition law to finally ban 'abuse of dominance.'

I mean, wow. I guess when Galen Weston decided to engage in a criminal conspiracy to fix the price of bread – the most Les Miz-ass crime imaginable – it finally got someone's attention, eh?

Competition has a long way to go, but all over the world, competition law is seeing a massive revitalization. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put antitrust law in a coma in the 80s – but it's awake, it's back, and it's pissed.

What about regulation? How will we get tech companies to stop doing that one weird trick of adding 'with an app' to their crimes and escaping enforcement?

Well, here in the EU, they're starting to figure it out. This year, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act went into effect, and they let people who get screwed by tech companies go straight to the federal European courts, bypassing the toothless watchdogs in Europe's notorious corporate crime havens like Ireland.

In America, they might finally get a digital privacy law. You people have no idea how backwards US privacy law is. The last time the US Congress enacted a broadly applicable privacy law was in 1988.

The Video Privacy Protection Act makes it a crime for video-store clerks to leak your video-rental history. It was passed after a right-wing judge who was up for the Supreme Court had his rentals published in a DC newspaper. The rentals weren't even all that embarrassing!

Sure, that judge, Robert Bork, wasn't confirmed for the Supreme Court, but that was because he was a virulently racist loudmouth and a crook who served as Nixon's Solicitor General.

But Congress got the idea that their video records might be next, freaked out, and passed the VPPA.

That was the last time Americans got a big, national privacy law. Nineteen. Eighty. Eight.

It's been a minute.

And the thing is, there's a lot of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned Grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden?

Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google?

Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics?

Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms?

Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?

Having a federal privacy law with a private right of action – which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy – would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems. There's a big coalition for that kind of privacy law.

What about self-help? That's a lot farther away, alas.

The EU's DMA will force tech companies to open up their walled gardens for interoperation. You'll be able to use Whatsapp to message people on iMessage, or quit Facebook and move to Mastodon, but still send messages to the people left behind.

But if you want to reverse-engineer one of those Big Tech products and mod it to work for you, not them, the EU's got nothing for you.

This is an area ripe for improvement, and I think the US might be the first ones to open this up.

It's certainly on-brand for the EU to be forcing tech companies to do things a certain way, while the US simply takes away tech companies' abilities to prevent others from changing how their stuff works.

My big hope here is that Stein's Law will take hold: 'Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop'

Letting companies decide how their customers must use their products is simply too tempting an invitation to mischief. HP has a whole building full of engineers thinking of new ways to lock your printer to its official ink cartridges, forcing you to spend $10,000/gallon on ink to print your boarding passes and shopping lists.

It's offensive. The only people who don't agree are the people running the monopolies in all the other industries, like the med-tech monopolists who are locking their insulin pumps to their glucose monitors, turning people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers.

Finally, there's labor. Here in Europe, there's much higher union density than in the US, which American tech barons are learning the hard way. There is nothing more satisfying in the daily news than the latest salvo by Nordic unions against that Tesla guy (Musk is the most Edison-ass Tesla guy imaginable).

But even in the USA, there's a massive surge in tech unions. Tech workers are realizing that they aren't founders in waiting. The days of free massages and facial piercings and getting to wear black tee shirts that say things your boss doesn't understand are coming to an end.

In Seattle, Amazon's tech workers walked out in sympathy with Amazon's warehouse workers, because they're all workers.

The only reason the tech workers aren't monitored by AI that notifies their managers if they visit the toilet during working hours is their rapidly dwindling bargaining power. The way things are going, Amazon programmers are going to be pissing in bottles next to their workstations (for a guy who built a penis-shaped rocket, Jeff Bezos really hates our kidneys).

We're seeing bold, muscular, global action on competition, regulation and labor, with self-help bringing up the rear. It's not a moment too soon, because the bad news is, enshittification is coming to every industry.

If it's got a networked computer in it, the people who made it can run the Darth Vader MBA playbook on it, changing the rules from moment to moment, violating your rights and then saying 'It's OK, we did it with an app.'

From Mercedes renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dishsoap, enshittification is metastasizing into every corner of our lives.

Software doesn't eat the world, it enshittifies it

But there's a bright side to all this: if everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification.

Just as with privacy law in the US, the potential anti-enshittification coalition is massive, it's unstoppable.

The cynics among you might be skeptical that this will make a difference. After all, isn't "enshittification" the same as "capitalism"?

Well, no.

Look, I'm not going to cape for capitalism here. I'm hardly a true believer in markets as the most efficient allocators of resources and arbiters of policy – if there was ever any doubt, capitalism's total failure to grapple with the climate emergency surely erases it.

But the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and wooly internet, a space where people with disfavored views could find each other, offer mutual aid, and organize.

The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crapgadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand-names, and cryptocurrency scams.

The internet isn't more important than the climate emergency, nor gender justice, racial justice, genocide, or inequality.

But the internet is the terrain we'll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it's joined.

We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device.

We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to coordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, and save our planet and our species.

Martin Luther King said 'It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.'

And it may be true that the law can't force corporate sociopaths to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut-bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation.

But it can make that exec fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity, even if he doesn't think you deserve it.

And I think that's pretty important.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel/a>

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

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#pluralistic #transmediale #lectures #enshittification #big tech #berlin #mcluhan lecture #Youtube

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satoshy12 · 9 months

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Danny learned from the Ghost Writer that other worlds exist, even his favorite world. The Justice League!

However, Ghost Writer has always been hesitant to use his portals to explore other realms. This is due to the immense power and danger lurking on the other side.

Danny's curiosity gets the better of him, and he can't resist using Ghost Writer's portals to go into the DC universe.

Danny was here to have fun, so he decides to dress up as various DC villains, but with his young age, it has an adorable twist: he appears as a tiny child version of them.

To his surprise, Danny realizes that these costumes give him access to the powers of the villains. He seemed to mimic them, like he did in a few of his fights against his enemies attacks.

Like Ghostly wails with Dan or Cloning with Vlad.

And just seeing this would be much more fun! He started his playful journey to meet iconic heroes and villains.

The first one Danny met was the Flash family while dressed as Reverse Flash. He stumbles upon a face-off between Flash, Kid Flash, and the real Reverse Flash. With his childlike innocence, Danny manages to confuse all three speedsters, much to Kid Flash's chagrin. Danny began to tease Kid Flash about a prank he played on him. "It was me, Wally; I shoved the coffee table ever so slightly so that you would stub your toe right before you were sent off to school." "It was me who made your mother and father see your adult magazine!" Thawne laughed as he heard what the boy did. Leaving after Eobard was defeated, leaving very confused Speedsters behind.

Next, Danny decides to become Ares, the God of War. This leads to a comical confrontation with Wonder Woman. Ares is perplexed by how this young boy possesses his godly powers, and Diana is equally confused by the mysterious demigod child.

The one he had most fun was the Ra's al Ghul cosplay, complete with a sword. Danny found himself entangled in a battle between the League of Assassins and Green Arrow with his sidekick Speedy. Ra's was puzzled by this unexpected child version of himself, and Green Arrow can't help but be amused and confused by the whole situation. After the battle, Danny poured the ectoplasm from his bottle on the ground and jumped into it. Which made it look like Green Arrow and Ra's that Danny just jumped into Lazarus water and was swallowed by it.

Sinestro and Hal Jordan were bewildered by the appearance of a child wearing a Yellow Lantern ring. The notion of such a young Yellow Lantern throws them off balance during their battle. Sinestro and Hal Jordan are utterly baffled as to why a child could even wield the power of fear.

Dressed up as the Ocean Master, Danny intervenes in a conflict between Aquaman and Aqualad against the vengeful Ocean Master. Initially mistaking him for Orm's son, Arthur planned to talk with the boy, only for him to leave after the fight.

When Danny dons the Lex Luthor Warsuit, he finds himself in a confrontation with Superman, catching the attention of Lex Luthor. Lex is intrigued by the young boy's capabilities and is somehow proud of him, even though they aren't fighting on the same side. If Lex sees potential in him and contemplates offering some guidance, the boy would go far. The Suit was like his own.

At Last, The Mr. Freeze Costume, Danny intervenes in a showdown between Batman, Robin, and Mr. Freeze in Gotham City. The Caped Crusader is intrigued by this young "villain" and contemplates whether the boy can be taught to use his abilities responsibly. As Danny was just talking about Dr. Victor Fries inventions and theories, Victor saw that the boy had good ideas and theories.

Danny had his fun, and he tried to return home, only for the portal not to work.

He used it many times and had to wait a short time. Well, what are a few days here?

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homely-lunatic · 6 months

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one of the things I think is rly interesting about the usher kids' deaths is that there's a clear linear pattern in how much influence verna has on the way they die, starting with virtually no influence and ending in a death 100% orchestrated by her.

like okay. perry's death? completely his fault. the only influence we see verna have on him is in her attempts at convincing him to call off the party and not blackmail people. the acid was already in the tanks, he made the negligent decision to hook up the tanks to the water system without testing them. if he'd never met verna, the party would have gone on exactly as planned and he would have died via acid rain anyways.

then there's camille. her death is similar to perry's in that there's a clear cause -> effect of her breaking into a lab full of chimps hyped up on adrenaline -> being mauled by a chimp, but there's also little hints at verna's interference. camille talks to verna right before she dies, its implied via the photo she takes that the chimp that killed her appeared to her as verna for a moment, and there's also the question of how the chimp got out in the first place. yes she probably would have died in this manner anyways based on her own decisions, but there's slightly more of a direct influence from verna than perry got.

with leo, we know that him initially killing pluto was a hallucination thanks to his drug use, but I get the impression that everything that follows is a blend of verna messing with him and further drug-induced hallucinations. the pet store he visits is actually an abandoned building full of rats that verna alters his perception of, and his visions of her in his apartment definitely feel more verna-induced than drug-induced, yet there's also kind of the implication that all the stuff with the hammer leading up to leo's death is drug hallucination-related. we also see verna appear to him multiple times; she's not just a single mysterious figure at a party or a lone security guard, she's now running a store and coming to his house and talking to him on multiple occasions.

vic is similar to leo in that her death is caused by a slow descent into madness, but the way in which this plays out is directly caused by verna. yes vic was planning on going forward with human trials, but verna is the one who shows up and poses as a test subject. there's still ambiguity when it fully comes to the question of supernatural influence, and verna's insertion into vic's life was more specific than leo's but also broad enough that its reasonable to argue that things might have played out the same had she not been there. would everything with ally dying and vic spiraling have played out the exact same way if the human trial had happened later, or if another test subject had showed up? maybe, but the actual course of events that transpired only happened because of verna's direct influence on them.

but tammy was terrorized for weeks by verna before she died. verna shows up as a replacement escort, then continues to show up in the background of tammy's life. she shows up in her apartment, appears to her in a supernatural-ish way at the goldbug launch, and when it comes to tammy's actual death she's in there fucking with her through the mirrors. I guess you could argue that she still wouldve gotten super paranoid over the launch and maybe started to hallucinate the original escort following her? but unlike the rest of them (except vic, who I feel also falls into this category), her death doesn't feel like it would have necessarily played out the exact same way it did had verna not been there. she only dies because she smashes a mirror that verna is taunting her from.

and then finally frederick, who didnt get a choice (not that he deserved one), verna steps in and 100% causes his death in a very specific way that wouldnt have happened had she not directly interfered with his life.

and then you look at the fact that the siblings died in reverse order of age, which is also in the order of shortest amount of time spent as a member of the usher family to longest, and the fact that the two who objectively had the most interference from verna in their respective deaths were the only two who were actually alive when roderick made the deal..... idk I feel like there's something there.

#fall of the house of usher #the fall of the house of usher

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thestitchywitchy · 1 year

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Future Spouse: First Impressions Pt 1

Hello my dears! Here’s a little PAC I’ve been working on…. This is going to be a 2 part (possibly a third, 18+ post, depending on how well these do) series as this one became a lot longer than I intended it to lol. This one will be about your future spouse’s first impression of you. The next one will be your first impression of them. Please leave feedback 😁

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To book a reading with me, please DM or send an email to [email protected] with your inquiry 💌

My Links <- 🔮please support your witch💕 -> Masterlist

Please donate if you’re able to 🙏

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Here we go! Shake it out, take a breath, close your eyes, and choose one of my favorite movie couples that calls out most to you. This is a general reading, so take what resonates and leave what doesn’t. If you feel inclined to choose more than one group, please feel free to do so.

Pictures are from Pinterest, credit to the owners. Editing was done by me, Stitchy!

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Gomez & Morticia - Pile One

6 of cups reversed, Queen of Swords, Page of Pentacles

All right, pile one, welcome to your reading! You will strike your future spouse as a complex individual from the very first moment. You may have seemed a bit guarded and reserved, which made them immediately think “💡I need to see what’s past that guard”. Aw cute lol. Some of you have a femme fatale thing going on and some of you are incredibly private or reserved, so you give off this mysterious vibe to your FS. The energy is as if you were carrying a heavy emotional burden from your past experiences on your shoulder, which makes you seem hesitant to open up to someone new.

As you two start conversing, they notice that you may have an air of authority about you. You may even be a manger/boss. Could even own your business or attempting to at the point of meeting them. This is only for some of you, but I’m also seeing kids? So you may be a parent or work with kids often. Teenagers/middle school age, specifically. They will also notice that you are very clear and precise in the way you communicate, and you seemingly have a sharp mind and quick wit about you. You may talk with your hands a lot too. They can tell that you’re someone who values honesty and straightforwardness above all else, and you are not someone who would suffer fools gladly. Get it, boo! Show those suckers what you’re made of 😉 But there was also something very innocent and curious about you under the surface that they are going to be intrigued by. Despite your guarded nature and no-nonsense attitude…you still seemed eager to learn and grow. They like that you may be open to new experiences and perspectives. You may have even called them out playfully or wasn’t afraid to stand up to them when they said something out of pocket. They aren’t typically used to receiving that energy so you made them go a bit gaga (even turned on for some of you lol) with this display of power.

Im sensing that, for a lot of you at least, you guys may really gravitate towards each other when you first meet because it seems like they were able to get to know you better on a deeper level right off the bat. They see that your past experiences have indeed left a deep mark on you and that you may be struggling to move past them. You may even bring up an ex or family issues during your conversation? But They also see that you had the strength and resilience to face your pain head-on and work towards healing and growth. They have/had no doubt that you have the intelligence and determination to make progress. They were inspired by your willingness to learn and explore new ways of thinking. You inspire them to become a better version of themselves. They may be going through some personal issues of their own at the time and the way you tackle issues may differ from they way they would usually do it. But they prefer your outlook on life so they may get inspired to take a page out of your playbook.

By the end of your meeting, they were left with a deep respect for this complex and multifaceted individual standing before them. You may have had a guarded and stand offish first impression, but they could see that beneath the surface was a person with a strong will, an open mind, and the courage to face your past and move towards a brighter future….and they would do anything in their power to be apart of it. Aww I love that for you, pile one! I hope you enjoyed your reading.

∘°∘♡∘°∘

Adam & Barbara - Pile Two

4 of pentacles, Ace of swords reversed, 9 of cups

Hey pile two, thanks for joining! Upon first meeting, you left a deep impression on your future spouse. To them, you seem to have an air of wealth and luxury about you. You may be dressed in your finest clothes or rockin your most expensive jewelry. Lmaooo I just heard “they’re bangin!” Sooo they’re really going to like your body, pile 2! 😂 can't get enough of it, apparently! That night/day, you will just all around be dressed to the nines and that will catch your FS’s attention right away. They may have noticed you right away, but it’s going to take them a little time to approach you. So as they continue to examine you from afar, they could sense something underneath all of the pretty wrapping paper. They feel a sense of possessiveness emanating from you. Like you’re holding on too tightly to your material possessions. It’s like…though you’re dressed to kill, they catch on to your insecurities beneath the surface. They’re trying to get familiar with your poker tells, basically.

Oop. Ok….Your FS may think that you might be having an identity crisis. Not necessarily in a negative way (although it might be for some of you who chose this pile), but it is apparent to them. You may be the type of person that struggles with their decision-making abilities. You may even seem lost and unsure of yourself, even though you’re dressed confidently. Like you don’t really belong in that setting, but you’re trying to fake it until you make it for whatever reason. This lack of clarity may also hinder you from making better choices for yourself. What I’m getting is like a nightclub, bar, or busy restaurant setting (take what resonates). You may have a lot of suitors physically surrounding you before your FS gets to you, so they’re still watching you from afar. They may see someone flirting with you and you’re eating up the attention and they’re just thinking to themselves… “really? You’re impressed by *that*?” Lmao your future spouse cracks me up. They’re a cerebral person, that’s for sure. They take in their surroundings before doing anything.

To them, it seems as though you are trying to use your wealth or material possessions to fill a void within yourself. Your future spouse feels like you’re trying to find emotional fulfillment in all the wrong places. They may also think you may be hard to satisfy or please, but are still not entirely sure what you really want. They see that you are seeking happiness but are met with fleeting moments instead and may even have lost touch with your emotional well-being. But they’re thinking that you’re knock out gorgeous, so why are you so sad?

Overall, their first impression of you is that you are struggling to find true happiness and emotional fulfillment in your life. While you may have amassed great wealth, luxury, and success ( whatever that means to you), you still seem to be missing something important in your day to day. They may have a fleeting thought of “ could it be me that’s missing from this equation?” Aww cute 🥰 hope you enjoyed your reading, pile 2!

∘°∘♡∘°∘

Seymour & Audrey - Pile Three

4 of Pentacles, Queen of Cups, Knight of Pentacles reversed

Hello pile 3, ready for your reading? Your future spouse’s first impression of you would be one of complexity and depth. They would see in you someone who is highly guarded and may be struggling with a fear of financial insecurity. You may be going through some difficulty at the time of meeting your future spouse and you may wear your worry on your face. For some of you, they felt your energy before they laid eyes on you. You may have been in a whirlwind of panic or frustration, maybe even tripping over yourself a bit, and they picked up on it before you even entered the room. Fear not, they will think your dishevelment is rather adorable lol awww!

However, they would also sense a deep emotional intelligence and sensitivity in you, much like the Queen of Cups. They would think that you’re someone who is highly empathetic and in tune with your and other’s emotions, but you may also be very protective of your feelings and hesitant to fully open up to others. I see a lot of nervous chuckling happening when you’re around them. They may have approached you in a teasing manner and you reacted shyly and a bit embarrassed. That’s so adorable pile 3! But remember, you’re the prize…no need to be nervous 😉 oh, I’m getting that they really like your smile! They instantly see in you someone they can start a life/family with. There’s just something about you that tick off all their boxes.

Your FS will also feel that you may be resistant to change and may prefer to stick to a routine or maintain the status quo. They see you as the type of person who doesn’t want to step on any toes, even in detriment to yourself. They feel that you may be cautious when it comes to taking risks or trying new things, but this energy can also indicate a strong sense of dedication and a willingness to work hard and persevere. They see that you like things done a certain way so that’s how you’re going to do it.

Overall, their first impression of you would be that you’re a person with a complex and multi-layered personality. They would see someone who is both highly sensitive and guarded. They want to tear your walls down. Make you feel safe with them. Hmm…Your fear of financial security keeps coming up… like you fear financial instability, so you’ve married yourself to your work to never see your bank account dip lower than a certain amount. It may worry them a bit that you may not have room for a relationship (with them) in your life because of this. However, On the same note, they would also see someone who is dedicated and hard-working… Someone who has the potential to break through their blocks and achieve success and fulfillment in life. Your FS would be drawn to your emotional depth and dedication, and would be eager to help you navigate any challenges that may arise….they’re just hoping you’ll make a little bit of space for them in order to do that. Aw, congrats pile 3. That sounds sweet!!

∘°∘♡∘°∘

All rights reserved to @thestitchywitchy . Thank you for participating in this pick a card reading 😊 if you liked this reading and would like to dive in further, please DM me for a $7.77 extended reading 💞

#pac #pac reading #tarot pac #pick a card #pick an image #pick a pile #pick a pic #pick a picture #pick a number #tarot reading #free tarot #future spouse #future spouse pac #tarot #divination #pick a card readings #pick a deck #pick a photo #cartomancy

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writersblg · 7 months

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how the cod characters would react to their partner being a true crime junkie

The sun was starting to set when your partner came back from training. They closed the door behind them and made their way to the living room where you were already wrapped up in a blanket. The music suggested you were watching a normal mystery show but the wholesome scenario your partner thought they found themselves in quickly crumbled as the presenter said “after taking off the skin and hanging it to dry she chopped up the body”

Simon

Unfortunately, doesn’t enjoy it as much as you do. For obvious reasons.

He’d give you the nastiest side eye and will just retreat to another room to solve a crossword or something.

Finds these shows incredibly disrespectful and really doesn’t get why you’d watch this.

ALTHOUGH he knows you’ll cuddle up beside him in the night and hide behind his big muscles (I’m deceased) so that’s kinda cute but that only adds to him not knowing why you’d watch true crime in the first place.

Soap

Watches everything with you

Will be mad if you do it on your own even if he’s on a mission

Enjoys the stories of female killers the most (if it’s out of revenge he’d cheer for them)

CONTRA he’d talk all the time about the nitty gritty of murders (basically plays the UNO reverse to Keegan; you’ll be afraid of him)

Gaz

It took a lot of time or convincing to make this happen but he now watches these shows with you.

Rarely talks; “hope they rot in hell” is all you’d get out of him.

Holds you very nicely though and gets up during commercials to get you two snacks <3.

Tells you about the super weird things that happened in his hometown when he was a kid and expects you to be normal about it.

Price

Falls asleep during the first 10 minutes

There’s nothing he hasn’t seen and no matter how brutal these attacks on the shows were he finds them tame

He won’t spoil your watching experience though and lets you lean on him if you’re getting tired

He won’t do true crime marathons with you but might compromise on watching 6h of government conspiracies or something instead

Alex

The most interesting part to him is the reasoning for the killers and silently does psycho analysis’ of them

If he has heard about the case before he’d add some information the presenter hasn’t talked about

You two just vibe

He lays on you and occasionally raises his head at particularly interesting scenes

Very much a true crime enthusiast himself

Also very much no expression on his face as they describe the attacks

Farah

SIDE EYE

Watches with you but the way she judges you for watching this is crazy

Blames it on your culture

Farah: “I can fix them”

Valeria

Sometimes laughs out of nowhere when she’s watching with you 😭 (would honestly destroy my psyche)

Loves to hear when the police messed up so badly they could’ve prevented more deaths but failed to do so

Watches the most gruesome way to attack someone and goes like “Haha I did this once.”

Gives you self defense tips according to the cases

Alejandro

Gets so invested in it

Gives you all the crime statistics if the case happened in Mexico

Randomly dropped that he knew the killer personally more than once

Happily talks about it at work the next day

Rudy

Sometimes curses in Spanish because he gets too worked up over this

Cannot watch unsolved cases; will think about it all night

Looks the cases up on the internet while the show is still on

Just deepens his perspective of there being more bad people than good people in this world

Keegan

He’s actually scared of you if you watch this without any reactions

Reminds me of that one AITA story

Accidentally told his friends he’s scared of you (but with heart eyes)

He’d watch it with you but mostly watches your reaction from a safe distance (the other end of the couch)

If you chop something in the kitchen later he’d gently take the knife from you and do it himself; you think he’s being funny but it’s just self preservation

Will still cuddle with you <3 later that night

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fordtato · 1 year

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I excluded Mystery Trio because of course that's everyone's favorite, who am I kidding (leave in the tags if you think I'm wrong on that one), and also leave in the tags which of these you've never heard of.

This is for a future Gravity Falls video essay, please reblog if you can.

#gravity falls #stanley pines #stanford pines #grunkle ford #grunkle stan #bill cipher #monster falls #dipper pines #mabel pines #will cipher #drifting stars #grifting stars #blind faith au

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earlgreyinpajamas · 1 year

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00q fic rec masterlist

last updated: 21 Oct 2023

authors

beaubete

beginte

SvengoolieCat

Tokyo_the_Glaive

aus and fusions

author au

coffee shop au

different first meeting, pt 2, pt 3

fantasy au

his dark materials fusion

historical au

m lives

nttd fix-it

q doesn’t work for the mi6

role reversal

soulmate au, pt 2, pt 3

spectre fix it, pt 2

wing fic, pt 2

bond

jealous!bond, pt 2, pt 3

pining!bond, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4, pt 5, pt 6, pt 7, pt 8

protective!bond, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4, pt 5

retired!bond

bamf!q, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4, pt 5, pt 6, pt 7

competent!q

god!q

holmes!q

jealous!q

kidnapped!q, pt 2

oblivious!q, pt 2, pt 3

pining!q, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4, pt 5

protective!q

holiday themed fics

christmas fic, pt 2

valentine’s day fic

other tropes and categories

5 + 1 things

amnesia

auction

bets

bond’s break ins

bond’s souvenirs

bond’s swimming trunks, pt 2

bond the conspiracy theory

comfort fics

cooking, pt 2

crack, pt 2

domestic fluff , pt 2, pt 3, pt 4, pt 5

epistolatory

emotional hurt no comfort

fake relationship, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4

fandom iconic fics

fics with good mysteries

fluff, pt 2

friends with benefits

forced proximity

funny fics, pt 2

games

getting back together

getting together, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4, pt 5, pt 6

gift giving, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4

hurt/comfort, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4

insomnia

kid fic

kinktober

knitting

longfics

madeleine pov

meddling!moneypenny, pt 2

miscommunication

mission fic, pt 2, pt 3, pt 4

non slow burn long fics

not actually unrequited love

other 00s

outsider pov, pt 2, pt 3

pets

post nttd

q centric

q has a family

q’s name, pt 2, pt 3

q rennovating skyfall

safe houses

secret relationship

sick fics

smut with a side of relationship development

theatre/drama

#00q fic #00Q #00q fanfiction #00q fanfic #00q fic recs #00Q fic rec #q #james bond #James Bond 007 #pining james bond #pining james #pining bond #bond #craig bond #craig!bond #Craig Bond Films #craig!bond films #craig!bond film

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aspirationalpeony · 4 months

Text

Quit Playin' Games (With My Heart)

Summary: While you're trying to puzzle out the mysterious Ms. Schemmenti, Janine invites you to a dinner party--at Melissa's house. Board games, bonding, and lasagna... What could go wrong? (See author's note at the end for prompt credit.) Content Warnings: A brief paragraph discussing homophobia. AO3 Link

Does Melissa Schemmenti like you?

You've got everyone else figured out. Janine would befriend an electrical pole if it had a smiley face stapled to it; Jacob befriends anyone Janine befriends. Gregory stays a little aloof, but he's been warming up the more you show him your LEGO sets. Barbara--well, she sees you as another one of the kids, you think, but you know she appreciates your self-sufficiency, tolerates you with a smile when you're in the conversation. And Ava is... Ava.

Melissa? Who knows? She called you by the wrong name the first month you were at Abbott, knowingly, watching your face with a wry twist to her mouth, waiting for you to take the bait. When you didn't, you earned your name back. She started making dry comments to you, like "You got enough glitter glue there, Martha Stewart?" as you passed her in the hall, arms full of art supplies. She saw you struggling with the copy machine one day and said, "Here," giving it a swift kick that brought it wheezing to life, but followed up with, "Thought your generation was good with tech. What do we keep you around for, huh?"

After those backhands you'd be in a spin, wondering and confused; then later that day or the day after she'd say something else, like, "Hey, not bad, shortstop," when you got something off a high shelf for her (why shortstop when you’re taller than her? Reverse psychology?), or "Good job on lunch duty. They didn't kill ya," and you'd go warm all over and your confusion would deepen and all you would think was: does she like me or not?

You’re just not sure. So you try not to listen the day they’re all in the break room, talking about a party at Melissa’s house. You can’t help but overhear snatches—Janine insisting she’ll bring lasagna, Jacob saying he’ll do dessert, Melissa saying “oh, brother” and Barbara assuring her gently, a smile in her voice, “And I’ll bring the wine”—but you keep your head down over your lunch and turn the page of your lesson plan and ignore them until Janine realizes, suddenly, that the room isn’t empty, that you’re at the table just next to them, and burbles, “Hey, you should come, too!”

Your eyes go to Melissa right away. She glances up over her cat-eye glasses and her look is inscrutable.

“Oh,” you say, “um, I don’t know. I have, like, a thing—“

“C’mon, it’ll be fun!” Janine says. “We’ll eat some amazing food—“ she flicks a curl over her shoulder, playing at an Ava-like preen—“we’ll play board games, we’ll bond…”

“I don’t want to intrude.”

“You’re not intruding!” Janine looks imploringly at her friends. “Right?”

“Yeah,” Melissa says at last, still looking at you. Your heart thumps. “You should come.”

And that’s how you end up here: Melissa’s house. You crossed the welcome mat reading GO AWAY, a cheesecake in your hands, and tried not to make it obvious how badly you wanted to stare around yourself, scrutinize every photo and every piece of furniture, trying to get a window onto this woman you can’t figure out. Everyone’s piled onto the couch or onto chairs, plastic creaking under them as they lean forward to the table to swipe a snack or their glass of wine, and there’s an open box, a few stacks of cards.

“I found this amazing get-to-know-you game,” Janine declares, sliding down to sit on Mel’s carpeted floor. “So, you spin the spinner, right, and whatever it lands on, you take a card with the same color, and then you ask the question that’s on it, and everybody answers, and—“

“How do you win?” Melissa says. She’s holding a glass of wine, its rim printed with her pink lipstick. She’s got her hair in a ponytail that leaves lots of little curls hanging everywhere. She’s wearing a tank top. These details feel incredibly important; you try not to think about them.

“Oh, uh…” Janine frowns at the instruction booklet. “I don’t think you win.”

“What’s the point of a game if nobody wins?” Melissa leans over to the coffee table, grabs a grape off a serving plate, pops it into her mouth. She glances over at Barbara, who’s perched very straight-backed in a plastic-covered armchair, nursing a little bit of wine.

“I, for one,” Jacob says, “think competition is over-valued in our society. American individualism—"

“Just spin it, Janine,” Barbara says.

Beaming at the approval of her mentor, Janine spins. She plucks a blue card: “What’s your favorite sexual—“ her eyes widen. “Uh.”

“Oh, this just got interestin’,” Melissa says, and sits up straighter.

“Let me take another one.” Janine puts that card aside. “Have you ever had a threes—okay, no. Are they all like this?”

Gregory, a silent presence sitting stiffly alongside Janine, turns over a card from the green and red piles. He reads one: “How do you like your partner to style their pubic hair?” Then, the red: “Confess to a sexual fantasy you’ve had about… A member of the group.” The questions sound even more bizarre in his level voice, although his lifted eyebrows and widened eyes telegraph his discomfort. His gaze darts to Janine, then away.

“Janine, what’s the name of this game, please,” Barbara says, looking as though she’s one syllable from combustion.

Janine lifts the lid of the box. “Adult Dinner Party. But I thought, you know, adult dinner party, a classy kind of—oh.”

Jacob picks up a blue card gingerly and turns it over. “Have you ever had sex in a public place?”

“I have,” you say. Every face in the room turns toward you. Your cheeks heat. Your eyes flicker between each incredulous look. “What? We’re supposed to answer them, aren’t we?”

“This just got interestin’,” Melissa repeats. There’s a strange look on her face, not quite amusement; you wonder if it’s respect. “Me, too.”

“Melissa!” Barbara gasps.

“What? You never got fingered in a dark ride at an amusement park?”

Barbara stands up with her wine and walks out of the room, muttering to herself. Glances pass between the rest of you. The corner of Melissa’s mouth curves up. “Spin again,” she says.

The next few questions are mercifully tamer: do you think French kissing is overrated, what’s one thing you’ll never do for a partner? More wine is poured, Melissa going around and topping off each glass, saying to Gregory and Janine, “Lighten up a little, will you?” Eventually she comes to sit on the floor with everyone else, four people around the coffee table. She’s picked a spot right at your side, your knees bumping, thighs aligned.

“Is Barbara okay?” you ask. You can smell her perfume; it’s spicy and floral and it makes you feel tipsier than you are.

“Oh, she’ll be fine,” Melissa says. “You don’t wanna know how many of my parties she’s walked out of. Hey, Barb!” She bellows it close to your ear, making you wince; it’s followed by a twinge of peculiar affection that so much volume can come from one little woman. “Check the lasagna, will ya!”

There’s an indistinct answer from the other room, full of barely-contained irritation. Melissa slugs back another swallow of wine as Jacob flicks the spinner.

He draws a card and reads, “Have you ever kissed a member of the same sex? Oh, well—obviously.”

Gregory and Janine shake their heads.

Melissa says, “Listen, what happens in cheer squad stays in cheer squad, alright,” to scandalized gasps from her audience. She looks at you. “How about you? No girls, huh?”

You’re arrested by her green gaze so close, the wine on her breath, the question itself. You start to tell her, yes, plenty of girls, but you’re blushing again, embarrassed, all your bravado from earlier draining away into the floorboards.

“Here,” she says, and leans in. You register the thought Holy shit in the moment before her lips touch yours. Her nose brushes your cheek. Her mouth is very soft and a hot breath puffs over you in the instant before she delicately parts her lips and you feel the sweet flick of her tongue. She leans back again. “Now you’ve kissed a girl.”

“Melissa!” Janine says, outraged, bewildered.

“I bet Ava would have come, if she’d known it was this kind of party,” Jacob mumbles to the bowl of pretzels in front of him.

“I’m going to go check on Barbara,” Gregory says, his shellshocked eyes firmly on the ground as he gets up.

“Hey, I’ll come with you,” Janine says, all nerves, “maybe the lasagna needs more parm,” and scrambles up after him.

Melissa’s pouring herself the last of the wine. She’s smiling to herself. You don’t get it: what was that for? Was it bait, like your name, like the ribbing comments, trying to get a rise out of you? Or maybe just out of the people around you—trying to be the most shocking in the room? You stare, trying to read the look of satisfaction on her face.

"I'll--the bathroom," you say, and get to your feet. "'Scuse me."

You've got kind of an idea where it is. The problem, you realize, is that you have to cut through the kitchen to get there. It's savory-smelling, rich with tomato scent, and full of furious whispering that dies instantly as you cross the threshold; Janine, intently grating parmigiano into a bowl, gives you a guilty look as Gregory quickly parts from her side. Barbara is at the island counter, maybe only half-participating, but she looks at you, too, and you know they've told her.

You feel it all over again: these are people who've had years to get to know each other. Who are you to them? Not really a friend, just a colleague, half-acquaintance. You're the new invitee, the odd one out, and even though it was Melissa that kissed you, you'll be the one who gets the blame for the ruined party, the awkwardness now swamping Mel's rowhouse. Your gut clenches. "Excuse me," you repeat and dart past them to the bathroom.

You run cold water from the tap and stick your wrists underneath the faucet, like you've got heatstroke. You wet your hands and press them to your cheeks, your neck, your nape, trying to quiet your thumping heart. You look in the mirror: there's a glazed look in your eye; you're conscious your lips are tingling. Why'd she do that?

You've been played with by straight women before. Not always out of conscious cruelty: some women, you've realized, are hungry for a kind of attraction that doesn't have fear and imbalance, and they can't always have that with men. They want to be wanted by someone they think won't hurt them, and they pick you--never thinking about what it does to your heart; never imagining that desire for a woman can be real, that it can mean anything to anyone.

Is that Melissa? She said that thing about the cheer squad. If she likes women, too, why would she mess with you? If she thinks you're straight, is she just trying to shock, the way she did Barb with that dirty answer about fingering, needling at what she thinks are your reservations and limitations? Because that's what she does, what she's been doing. Poking and poking, trying to get a rise. Should you have shouted? Should you have cried? What would satisfy her?

"Melissa Ann Schemmenti," you hear Barb say from the kitchen, muffled on the other side of the door. You freeze a moment, heart pounding all over again, then turn the water down to a trickle and inch toward the door, leaning closer. All you can hear are bits and pieces of what must be a thunderous lecture: "That girl... Well, I won't... You know that... Sweet, but... Learn to behave."

There's a sulky rumble in Mel's voice in answer.

You're going to have to go out there eventually. You listen a few more seconds, but if there's footsteps of people dispersing, or more conversation as they linger, you can't hear it. You resign yourself, turn off the water, dry off your hands. You give your cheeks a last press with your cold fingers, trying to ground yourself. You'll go out there and pretend it didn't happen. You'll make it through the night and see what happens tomorrow. That's all you can do.

Of course, you go out into the kitchen, and everyone else is gone, and Melissa's there.

She's frowning deeply and scrupulously wrapping the parmigiano in plastic. She says something under her breath; you catch a Sicilian curse and a "kids don't know..." When she hears the bathroom door click, her head goes up, and there's a moment, her eyes meeting yours, where she looks as nervous as you feel. She looks back down at the cheese, tightly sealing and wrapping its edges, then crosses to the big stainless fridge to put it away.

"Guess I scared you back there," she says. There's a challenge in her voice. Suddenly, your fear and loneliness uncoil; they spool out into anger. It's one thing to mess with you in words. You could call that friendliness, call it teasing. It's not fair to mess with you like this.

"You didn't scare me," you say. Your voice is stronger than you expected. Not loud, but sure. "I've kissed more girls than a cheer squad."

"Huh, look at you," Melissa says, "big player."

"What is your problem with me?"

The question catches her in the act of moving to the oven. She looks sharply at you--then away. There's something strangely un-Melissa about the act. She fiddles with the oven dial, then leans her hip against the counter and folds her arms over her chest. "Hon, if I had a problem with you, you'd know."

"Then what the hell was that?" You catch yourself starting to cross your arms, to mirror her, and lower them to your sides, where your hands clench tightly.

"I kissed ya." She lifts her chin and looks at you. "What, you didn't like it?"

Your anger wobbles; the question stumps you. "It--that doesn't--look, you've been doing this all year. Pushing me around. I don't get it. I didn't do anything to you. Maybe you think I'm annoying, or stupid, or--"

"Pushing you around?" Mel moves closer. Her voice gets a little tighter, a little louder. Her eyes glitter with challenge. "I invited you to my house."

"Yeah, you invited Jacob and Janine to your house, too."

"I don't like them the way I like you," she says, and freezes. You have a sense she's blurted something she didn't mean to say. It's stopped her right in the tracks of what she might have made an argument, draining the confidence out of her posture.

Your heart is thundering in your ears again. You replay that delicate, barely-there kiss: her face leaning toward yours, spicy scent of her perfume, wine on her breath, her green eyes, her soft, hot mouth. Her tongue. "What?" you say.

Her mouth twists. There's something faintly absurd about it, how it turns a grown woman toddleresque, and you get another pang of that strange affection from before, when she yelled right in your ear. It's strong enough to filter through your anger.

She shifts from foot to foot. With her shoes off in her own home, she suddenly looks half her usual height. Fondness washes against you. "Look," she says, "I'm forget-about-it years older'n you and I don't have time to play games, so--"

"This isn't playing games?"

She ducks her chin toward her chest. It's another gesture that's strangely unlike her. You hear Barbara's voice in your head: Melissa Ann Schemmenti... Learn to behave.

You move closer again. Her eyes flick up to yours and there's a sulky defiance in them, even when they drop briefly to your lips.

"Is this..." You don't know how to ask it. How do you ask Melissa Schemmenti do you want me in her own kitchen? "Melissa, what do you want?"

"C'mere," she says. She takes your chin in her grasp and brings you closer and kisses you again.

Wine, perfume, her skin. This time, it's not some playful schoolgirl thing. You can feel intention behind the slow press of her lips against yours. She lets it linger for a second, two, then leans back, looking into your eyes.

Whatever she sees has her turning you, your back against the counter, a hard line of granite. This time, you lean forward into her kiss. Her body presses into yours, all hips, soft belly, breasts. Her hands bracket your body against the edge of the countertop. Her way of deepening the kiss is to nip your lower lip and make you gasp, so that her tongue can flick into your mouth, brushing against yours and sending tingling ripples through your whole body.

You cup her jaw. She’s so, so warm. You slide a hand back and brush some of those loose, careless locks of red hair behind her ear. You kiss her and kiss her; when your tongue teases against hers, deliberately now, she makes a sound like a whimper that you feel head to toe, like a current of lightning passing through you, dispersing into the ground.

“So,” she says, with you securely pinned, flushed, breathing hard, “what do you think?”

What do you think? You go back in for another kiss. She chuckles against your mouth and can barely kiss you back for her smug smile. This time, it’s your kiss, not hers, and you explore exactly how you want to: sucking and nibbling her lower lip, licking into her mouth, your hands dropping to her waist, pulling her against you. She melts into you, and there’s a thunderous sense of power and desire in you, tied to how her arms come up to loop around your neck, how her spine softens and her body sways into yours.

When you’ve got your breath back, you ask her, “Should we go back out there?” You know you have to, but you don’t know how you’ll manage it. You’re sure you have this moment written all over your face, glassy-eyed and out of breath. Melissa does, too: her lipstick is smeared. “Maybe in a few minutes?”

“I think,” she says, “I should kick all of ‘em outta here, and you’n’me keep the game and the lasagna, and we have some fun.” Her hand drops, intervening between your body and the counter so she can firmly grab your ass. You squeak. “Huh?”

“I—I think that would be pretty rude.”

She rolls her eyes. “Yeah, yeah,” she says, though she doesn’t let go of your ass. “And they planned this whole thing for us, so…”

“Wait—” you lean back a little to get a clear picture of her face. “What?”

“Janine’s idea,” she says. “I found out after they invited you. They knew I thought you were cute—“

“You told them that?”

“Course I didn’t,” Melissa says, “I look like somebody who goes splashin’ their business everywhere? ‘Specially where Janine can hear it? I’ll tell you about what she did to me’n my sister some time. They figured it out on their own. I mighta been lookin’ at your ass at work.” She gives it a pinch.

“So the board game…” You frown.

“I think that was an accident for real.” Her face pinches in a frown. “‘Magine Janine tryin’ to get us to talk dirty to each other out there?” The frown vanishes and the leer she gives you makes you feel very, very naked. “We could talk dirty in here, if you wanna.”

“Okay,” you say, “I think we have to go serve dinner.” If you let her keep going, you don’t know if you’ll have the will to stop her. You hear the next thought in her voice: What? You never got fingered in a kitchen with all your coworkers right outside? “Wait—“ your brow creases. “Did Barbara seriously go along with this?”

Melissa clears her throat. “She didn’t know at first—and then, I wanted her here, y’know, in case, uh…”

“Things went badly?” you supply. Melissa pinks. You smile at the sweet strangeness of it. “Were you guys going to drink a bottle of wine so you could… Mope about me?”

“I wasn’t gonna mope about ya,” Mel says, “because I knew you weren’t gonna turn me down, and you’d be an idiot if you did, so.”

“I would,” you agree, and have to go back in for another kiss, two, three. “I would be an idiot,” you murmur against her.

“Okay,” she says when you can finally stop kissing her, “okay.” She gives your ass a slap that makes you gasp. Her eyes narrow, cataloguing that response, and her smirk, of course, resurfaces. “You take the lasagna out of the oven. I gotta fix my lipstick.” She steps away, and pauses. “You might wanna…” She gestures to her mouth.

You rub your tingling lips and your fingers come away with the pink of her lipstick. Your face heats.

“Or keep it,” Melissa says, “looks good on you,” and she gives a preening toss of her high ponytail as she turns away to the bathroom.

You watch her go, her hips swaying as she moves. You have a sense of the world tilted on its axis: all that teasing and game-playing—because she likes you? More than likes you—wants you? Janine inviting you, Jacob and Gregory playing along—because they really do care? Barbara scolding Melissa in this kitchen—because she wants her best friend to treat you right?

You find a napkin and scrub the lipstick off your mouth. Each step you take across the kitchen feels like levitation, an inch or two above the floor. You check the lasagna. There’s two: one big lasagna, and another small, plain one for Gregory. You lift each casserole dish out of the oven, and they smell better than ever in a house full of friends.

You cross to the doorway and peek out into the living room. “Lasagna’s ready,” you say to the four faces that turn to yours, and you know you’re smiling like an idiot, but you can’t help it.

Janine bounces up. “I can’t wait for you to tryyyy itttttt,” she sing-songs. “I learned from the best!”

Barbara passes you to find plates and ready the table. She gives your arm a little pat as she goes—the first time she’s ever touched you. You feel a Janine-like burst of effervescence at the thought that Melissa’s best friend approves.

Melissa reappears. She picks up a cutter for each lasagna, an armful of cloth napkins, another bottle of wine. Jacob and Gregory gather the glasses from the coffee table. You stick your hands back into the oven mitts to carry each dish in.

As everybody gets settled in, pulling out chairs, Janine proudly adding her bowl of grated parmigiano to the table (“just in case!” she burbles), you catch Melissa’s eye. She’s looking at you, a soft fondness in the gaze; the tender creases at the corners of her eyes make your chest squeeze around your heart, which feels three, four times as large as it was before.

“What do you think?” you ask the table. “Should we bring over the cards?”

Your friends laugh. Barbara shakes her head and rolls her eyes. Melissa Schemmenti, looking at you, smiles.

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

Author's Note:

My next fic was intended to be a sadder hurt/comfort fic, but I received the following prompt from @morgana-larkin:

I love your first fic and I wanted to know if you could do one more on the fun side. Where the whole group goes to either Melissa or reader’s place for game night and they all end up playing truth or dare while drunk and someone dares one of them to kiss the other. Then after everyone leaves the two of them end up admitting their feelings. Thank you!

I did make some tweaks to the premise to suit my storytelling style, which I hope is okay. I did my best to honor this fun and lovely prompt. Thank you so much!

#melissa schemmenti #melissa schemmenti x you #melissa schemmenti x reader

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