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copperbadge · 1 year

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Hey Sam! Since it's currently AO3 donation time, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on it? I'm asking because you've written RPF and it's one of many "anti-AO3/anti-AO3 donations" people's favourite things to bring up when they're complaining about AO3 getting so many donations that it continuously obtains an excess of its donation goal whenever donation time rolls around? (Wow, how many times can I say "donation" in an ask?) Sorry if this question bothers you! I don't mean to offend or annoy.

Hey anon! Sorry it took a while to get to this, I don't even know if the drive is still going on, but the question came in while I was traveling and I didn't really have the time for stuff that wasn't travel-related. In any case, let's dig in! (I am not offended, no worries.)

So really there are two issues here and as much as some people who are critical of AO3 want to conflate them, they are different. While some criticism of AO3 may be valid, rhetoric against AO3 tends to misinterpret both in separate ways.

First there's the issue of what AO3 hosts -- RPF, yes, but more broadly, varied content that some people find distasteful or think should be illegal, which is a misunderstanding of the purpose of the archive and more broadly a dangerous attitude towards the concept of freedom of expression.

Second, there's the issue of AO3 generally outpacing its fundraising goals while not allowing monetization, which is a misunderstanding of the legal status of AO3 and to an extent a misunderstanding of philanthropy as a whole.

The longer I watch debates about content go on, the more I come to the conclusion that I was fortunate to have a teacher who really wanted to instill in us an understanding of free speech not as a policy but as an ongoing dialogue. It's not only that freedom of expression "protects you from the government, not the Justin" as the meme goes, but also that freedom of expression is not a static thing. It's an ongoing process of identifying what we find harmful in society and what we want to do about it.

Should the freedom to shout "Fire!" in a crowded theater be restricted? Should the freedom to yell slurs at drag performers? Should the freedom to teach prepubescent kids about gender, sexuality, and/or safe sex? Should the freedom to wear a leather puppy hood at Pride? Who gets to say, and why?

I was nine when my teacher did a unit on freedom of speech and the intersection of "harm prevention" and "censorship", which is (and should be) a discussion, not a set of ironclad rules. This ambiguity has thus been with me for over thirty years, and I'm comfortable with the ambiguity, with the process; I'm not sure a lot of people critical of AO3's content truly are. Perhaps some can't be, especially those affected by hate speech, but RPF is not hate speech. It's just fiction. Or is fiction "just fiction"? This is a question society as a whole is grappling with, although fandom seems to be a little out ahead of society in terms of how explicitly we discuss it.

The idea that prose can incite violence or cause harm is both valid to examine (witness the rise of fascism on the radio in the 20s, on Facebook and Twitter in the past ten years; they're very similar processes) and a very slippery slope. Because again: who decides what harm is, and what causes it, and what we do about it? Our values align us with certain beliefs, but those are only our values, not universal truths. So AO3 is part of the ongoing question of harm and benefit both to society and individuals.

AO3 itself, however, has a fairly defined policy that it is not meant to police content; it is an archive, not a bookstore or a school board. AO3 refines its TOS and policies as necessary, but the goal is always open access and as much freedom of expression as possible, and if that's uncomfortable for some people then that's a discussion we have to have; ignoring it won't make it go away. But it has to be a discussion, it can't be a unilateral change to the archive's TOS or a series of snaps and clapbacks, and I don't see a lot of people ready to move beyond flinging insults. Perhaps because they were taught a much more binary view of freedom of expression than I was.

So, self-evidently, I support AO3 and I don't have a problem with RPF. Whether other people do is something we're going to have to get to grips with, and that's likely to be a process that is still going on when most of us are dust. I'd rather have a century of ambiguity than a wrong answer tomorrow, anyway.

But whether AO3 hosts RPF is truly a separate issue from its donation drives, because it's a criticism some people level at the site which exists whether it's fundraising or not. So people can criticize AO3's open policy and they can give it as a reason not to support the site, but it's just one aspect of the archive and the fundraising as a whole should be examined separately.

I think AO3's fundraisers are deeply misunderstood (sometimes on purpose) because even people who are anticapitalist get a little crazy when money gets involved, and this is, to fandom, a lot of money -- a few hundred thousand, reliably, every fundraiser. To me, a fundraiser that pulls in three hundred grand is almost quaint; my current nonprofit pulls in better than ten million a year and my previous employer had an endowment of several billion dollars. At my old job I didn't even bother researching people who couldn't give us a hundred grand.

On the other hand, AO3 is an extreme and astounding outlier in the nonprofit world, because basically it's the only one of its kind to work the way it does. It is entirely volunteer-run on the operational side (ie: tag wranglers, coders, lawyers, etc) and has no fundraising staff (gift officers, researchers, outreach officers) as far as I'm aware. To pull in three hundred grand from individual one-time donations, without any paid staff and without even a volunteer fundraising officer? That's insane. That doesn't happen. Except at AO3.

What people misunderstand, however, is the basic status of a nonprofit, which is a legal status, not simply a social one. (I'm adding in some corrections here since it gets complicated and the terminology can be important!) The Organization for Transformative Works, the parent of AO3, is a nonprofit, which indicates how it was incorporated as an organization; additionally it is registered federally as tax-exempt, which carries certain perks, like not paying sales tax, and certain duties, like making their financials transparent to a certain extent. (Religious nonprofits are exempt from the transparency requirement.) If you're interested in more about nonprofits and tax-exempt status a reader dropped a great article here.

Nonprofits, unlike for-profit companies, cannot pay a share of their income to stakeholders. Nonprofits don't have financial stakeholders, only donors. They can have employees and pay them a salary -- that's me, for example -- but if a nonprofit pulls in $10M in donations, my salary is paid from that, I don't get a percentage and nobody else does either. That's what it means to be a nonprofit -- the money above operational costs goes back into the organization. The donations we (and AO3) receive must be plowed under and used for outreach, server maintenance, further fundraising, services expansion, et cetera. You can see this in the 990 forms on Guidestar or ProPublica, or in their more accessible breakdowns on Charity Navigator. Nonprofits that do not put the majority of their income towards service provision tend to get audited and lose their nonprofit status. So nobody's getting paid from all that money, and the overage that isn't spent goes into what is basically a savings account in the name of the nonprofit. (I'm vastly simplifying but that's the gist.) Using that money for personal purposes is illegal. It's called "private inurement" and there's a good article here about it. The money belongs to the OTW as a concept, not to anyone in or of the OTW.

So the biggest misunderstanding that I see in people who are mad at AO3 fundraisers is that "they" are getting all this money (who "they" are is never clearly stated but I'm pretty sure people think @astolat has a special wifi router that runs on burning hundred dollar bills) while "we" can't monetize our fanfic. But "they" get nothing -- nobody even earns a salary from AO3 -- and you can easily prove that by looking at the 990 forms they file with the government, which are required to be made public. You can see the most recently available 990, from 2020, here at Guidestar. Page seven will show you the "highest compensated" employees, all of whom are earning zero dollars or nonmonetary perks (that's the three columns on the right).

Either AO3 is entirely volunteer-run or someone's Doing A Real Fraud. The money the OTW spends is documented (that's page 10 and 11 primarily) and while they may pay for, say, the travel and lodging expenses of a lawyer going to DC to defend a freedom-of-expression case, they don't pay the lawyer for their time, or give them a cut of the income.

Despite what you've read, the reason "we" can't monetize our fanfics on AO3 has nothing to do with the site being the product of volunteer handiwork or AO3 having it in their terms of service or it being considered gauche by some to do so; it's because

IT'S ILLEGAL.

I cannot say this loudly enough: It is against the law for a nonprofit to be used by its staff, volunteers, or beneficiaries to earn direct profit from the services provided by the nonprofit.

You can be paid to work at one, but you cannot side-hustle by selling your handmade friendship bracelets for personal gain on the nonprofit's website. If the nonprofit knowingly allows monetization of its services, it can lose nonprofit status, be fined, be hit with back taxes, and a lot of other unpleasant bullshit can go down, including prosecution of those involved for fraud. If you put a ko-fi link on your fanfic, you are breaking the law, and if AO3 allows it, they are too.

Okay, that was a sidebar, but in some ways not, because it gets to the heart of the real complaints about AO3 fundraising, which is that people in fandom are sick or unhoused or in some form of need and other people in fandom are giving to AO3, a fan site that is financially stable, instead of giving to peoples' gofundmes or dropping money in their Ko-Fi or Paypal. And while it is a legitimate grievance that there are people who are in such desperate need while we live in an era of unprecedented abundance, that's not AO3's fault. AO3 doesn't solicit actively, there's no unasked-for mailings or calls from a gift officer. They just put a banner up on their website, and people give. (Again, this is incredibly outlier behavior in the nonprofit world, I'd do a case study on it but the conclusion would just be "shit's real, yo.") You might as well be mad that people give to their local food bank instead of someone's ko-fi.

You cannot lay at AO3's feet the fact that people want to give to AO3 instead of to your fundraiser. That's a choice individuals have made, and while you can engage with them in terms of why they made the philanthropic choices they did, to blame an organization they supported rather than the person who made the choice to give is not only incorrect but futile, and unlikely to win anyone over to supporting you. We know from research that guilt is not a tremendous motivator of philanthropy.

It is also not necessarily a binary choice; just because AO3 gets a hundred grand in $5 donations doesn't mean most of the people giving don't also give $5 elsewhere. I support the OTW on occasion, and I also fundraise for UNICEF and the Chicago Parks Foundation and BAGLY and others, in addition to giving monthly to several nonprofits that I have longterm relationships with -- my alma mater, the animal rescue where I got the Cryptids, my shul. And I give, occasionally and anonymously, to fundraisers that pass through Radio Free Monday, which are mainly individuals in need, because I was once in need and now I pay it forward. These are the choices I have made. Nobody twisted my arm. I respond poorly to someone making the attempt to do so by attacking places I've given.

I think the upshot is, after all of this that I've written, that we cannot begin to come to grips with questions of institutional inequality in philanthropy, or freedom of expression and censorship, until people actually understand what's going on, and too few do. So all I can do is try and explain, and hopefully create a forum for people to learn and grow when it comes to charitable giving.

Archive Of Our Own and the Organization for Transformative Works are products of our community and as that community changes, we will necessarily continue to re-evaluate what aspects of it mean and how AO3/OTW express the community sentiment. I hope that the ongoing discussion of support for AO3 also leads to people learning more about their philanthropic options. But criticizing AO3 for fundraising by attacking it for fulfilling one of its stated purposes is silly, and attempting to guilt people into giving in the ways one thinks they should give rather than how they do give is just going to make one extremely unlikable.

As members of this community, we have to be a part of the push and pull, but it's difficult to do that competently in ignorance. So, I do my best to be knowledgeable and to educate my readers, and I hope others will do the same.

#ao3 #otw #nonprofit #fundraisers #ao3 nonprofit #that's my new tag for posts like this #if anyone has any of the earlier posts I've done drop a comment in them so I see the post and can tag it #archive

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five-thousand-loaves-of-bread · 3 months

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…something been in draft for while:

idk how say this exactly but often like. use what look like binary clear cut dichotomy that have set definition this is this that is that. because oftentimes call “cake” “cake” instead of “flour milk egg baking powder salt etc etc” that kind language faster simplier and nuance can easily put word count 10k+. and. with language communication disabilities not always able translate all nuance into tangible word on paper/screen/type sometimes have to call something with imperfect blanket word. and then you find out other people not really hold as much nuance as you & still simplify your nuance into something binary this this that that

but reality rarely that binary— say on here that nonverbal mean not mouth speak at all all time & semiverbal is struggle all time but can mouth speak some & verbal but actually more nuanced than that like some severely apraxic people who mouth do say thing but not in their control not what they want say & they still call self nonspeaking because it not intentional meaningful speech; or someone labeled nonverbal who actually do commmunicate with mouth words just not full sentence & not full clear pronounce but still labeled nonverbal anyway as almost like microaggression of not recognize their single or two word mouth word phrase as valid enough communication worth listen to; or someone with echolalia that not mean anything with it (vs someone with echolalia that is use echolalia as communication (think gestalts, etc)); or some research showing even able say 1-2 words more ability than those with 0 word; or research debate about where minimally verbal end is it 20 words 30 words 50 words

when combat “go nonverbal” crowd often say there is clear cut about what nonverbal and what isn’t and yeah there is clear cut but also is there

many not ready for this level muddiness & nuance because some take bring nuance as invite to say like “i nonverbal but can still (intentionally) mouth speak” or gateway to claim nonverbality as if fun new identity collect instead of some complicated complex experience with mixed emotion but often some level of grief at some point that get lot targeted awful ableism & discrimination like denied education refuse accommodation like IEP or put in segregated classroom without even consider accommodation in general ed to isolate away from peers n not actual to help nonverbal person where they best thrive, or secluded or restrained, or denied healthcare, denied communication, which all still happen now btw it still common now it not rare obsolete it majority still

which make me feel like this image

[id: meme. left side is philosophers (school of athens painting) with caption “talking about nonverbal nonspeaking with other nonverbal people”. middle say “vs”. right side image is parent guiding infant to look play at toy and captioned “talking about nonverbal nonspeaking with not nonverbal people. end id]

because sometimes really is that but also even this is binary. thinking about how some motor nonspeaking people without intellectual disability who language okay say their mind intact that they not stupid thus deserve education and not deserve abuse and throw people with ID & language impairment. or how nonverbal nonspeaking from autism so different from (but so similar to) from motor apraxia from cerebral palsy from intellectual disability from genetic or chromosomal disorders from stroke from TBI from aphasia from vocal cord dysfunction from dementia from from from… how talking to someone nonspeaking from primarily motor reasons without cognitive intellectual language disabilities as someone nonverbal because high level autism cognitive language disabilities, we not guarantee understand eachother experience, same with talk someone from acquired things vs mine neurodevelopmental, how what i say about nonverbal here may not apply to someone who not speak not because autism etc

but “if words so meaningless if experiences so boundless let abolish all” not helpful because for all kind way be nonverbal there experiences that 100% not nonverbal there experiences so different from nonverbal “not able meaningfully intentionally speak all the time” for every meaningless there meaningful reason nonverbal people use nonverbal and deserve word “nonverbal” for ourselves and how this difference in experience is intracommunity issue issue within nonverbal nonspeaking community something we have to grapple with and not invitation for people outside to talk about how “if nonverbal so wide, drawing line at going nonverbal & say that isn’t nonverbal is ridiculous and gatekeep” because as much vast different experience there is reason why there community why there this word we all call ourselves and. not one. of the reason is we can slide in and out of not speak and speak daily or weekly or monthly or regularly. there still common theme to what we call nonverbal despite different

wide word isn’t “functionally useless” it just you not know how n when use it

& this conversation not just apply to nonverbal but many other words n other things as well

#loaf screm #nonverbal

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thatdeadaquarius · 1 year

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m thinkin abt the “blunt vs flowery” language thing and…… in the year of our lord 2023, i don't even want to imagine how far back we'd have to go in genshins timeline until we see ‘hey shawty' written on a cave wall-

you try to be better about it, sometimes, using only the fanciest words and the most floral of tones, but all you ever succeed in doing is giving zhongli flashbacks to the archon war-

in the same vein: modern humor. would literally make them think "is this some sort of divine joke im too mortal to understand?" except even the archons need to cite sources on why a piece of bread falling over would be funny- maybe you slip sometimes, but you only ever get halfway through like “i’m neurodivergent and a minor” before you realize they don’t know what that means— “what if i had blue hair and pronouns” but they’re just sitting there like… doesn’t everybody have pronouns….? and kaeya has blue hair- are you implying he’s divine? what about chongyun?? xingqiu??????

anyway um. this is me bringing up my unfortunate (but very funny) habit of saying “i’ll boil you like soup” whenever i’m mildly inconvenienced and hoping it triggers Thoughts about the casual/slang threats we make and how they cope

sorry if this reads incoherently it’s 1am for me rn— also i’m debating becoming a regular anon here, are your applications open? 👉👈

SORRY IF I RAN U OFF BY NOT REPLYING QUICKLY!! BUT I’D LOVE TO HAVE LABELLED ANONS! I’ve already added some taken name I could see in my mailbox so check the pinned post and choose whatever isn’t taken! phrase or emoji, etc.! :)

this isnt super long bc ur stuff seemed chill on its own/idk what I could add! So I just focused on one aspect

gif is literally everyone reacting to you trying to speak “flowery” like them lol

ALSO u guys probably dont remember bc I took so long but I’m still writing/going to post that Blunt Lang. AU Fanfic One-Shot! so here’s some quick headcanons ill add on ive got anon!!

No TWs/Content Warnings. SFW.

so this was gonna be chill but-

BESDIES RANDOM SHIT LIKE MEME REFERENCES

THAT WONT MAKE SENSE TO THEM BC INHERENT INTERNET/DIGITAL UNDERSTANDING NEEDED

WHAT IF ALL UR JOKES OR REFERENCES ARE QUITE LITERALLY, ANCIENT??

like anon said about even the archons having to pull out sources/cite your stuff to understand it, like finding really old tablets/scrolls/carved wall words 😭

u giving Zhongli a history lesson/brush up LMAO

If ur annoyed at them u just need to make more jokes, leave em scrambling for their pocket notes LOL

I like to think since you sound the OLDEST

that the ancient shit like Phanes/Four Shades/Seven Sovereigns are the closest in speech

(look theyre all alive and shit for my genshin, goddamit i still gotta tell u guys abt my genshin fill-in lore au)

and they’re closer to the “beginning of history” in teyvat so theyd get more references

theyd literally understand u the best and they like, all in the Abyss or like deep in Teyvat,

so u just casually strolling up to Azdaha’s place instead like

“How’s your day been Azhy?”

“Same as the days many before, my lord. How are thee?”

“Good enough, hey, why don’t I bring some food from my old world by that I’ve made for you to try out? Something new, y’know?”

camera pan left to see Zhongli looking up, then back down as he scribbles notes trying to better understand, Xiao has crossed his arms and is squinting, Ganyu is behind Zhongli and is trying to peek over his shoulder, Cloud Retainer and other adepti have like hidden nearby to overhear lol

♤

FLASHBACKS FOR ZHONGLI-

HE’S OVER HERE LIKE

“Please do not disturb your countenance my Wànsuìyé, the vernacular is pleasant to mine ears and sufficient for speech.”

“I shall, uh, try my best Zhongli, thought I know ye have- wait- thy have? Whatever, accepted it, I shall keep attempting to better match thee!”

HIS FACE-

He’s literally just → 😰😣💀

(flashback to at least 1 really ancient/old god he had to fight for his life against, they were the hardest battle he’s ever faced, and Azhdaha was helping him by that point too, so it wasn’t even like he won alone… rip zhongli got ptsd)

He keeps trying to subtly stop you from practicing it, he also desperately discourages others from helping you 😭

(Zhongli was about to be called Rex Lapis again when Venti was trying to get on his last nerve by constantly encouraging you to speak fancier, but in the incorrect way, at dinner with them one time)

Like that last content with them pretending not to kow each other but 5x the tension and Venti is fooling around even more so than usual lol

THANKS FOR SENDING IN YOUR IDEAS!! I FUCKING LOVE HEARING OTHER PPLS BRAINROTS OVER STUFF!! AND SORRY AGAIN IT TOOK FOREVER!! ITS BEEN A ROUGH YEAR OF UNI FOR ME/IM GRADUATING!! <333 TYSM ANON!!

Safe Travels,

💀 ♒

♡the beloveds♡

@karmawonderss / @0rah-s / @randomnatics / @glxssynarvi / @nexylazaa / @genshin-impacts-mee / @wholesomey-artistt / @thedevioussmirk

#fuck my tags #I hate that tumblr doesn't remember for me #im not a machine dammit i cant remember all this shit #genshin isekai #genshin impact #genshin impact sagau #sagau #genshin sagau #genshin reader insert #genshin imagines #genshin god reader #my asks #rip to ppl who wanted longer content from me srry #its coming soon i promise #trying to post p2 of possession au and get that one shot blunt lang au posted :D

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dinisuciyanti · 3 months

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Debat capres #3 [FINAL]

Akhirnya sesi debat pamungkas hadir, membawa meme-meme lucu di bumi X wkwkwk.

Performa Pak ganjar bagus, lebih bagus malah dari sesi terakhir, takjub dengan counter argumen beliau soal isu stunting makan gratis. Kasih paham PAKKKKKK!!!!! Kalo bukan Pak ganjar yang mulai nyerang, mungkin sesi debat 2.5 jam itu anyep kek sayur kurang garem. Closingnya bagus banget, nyindir petahana, dan mengingatkan masyarakat bahwa seseorang itu pasti berubah, menjadi lebih buruk lebih tepatnya.

Sementara, bapak kemeja biru, yang kalau ditanya A, jawabnya B, ngalor ngidul kemana-mana, duh kasihan, udahlah pak miara ayam aja di rumah, istirahat. Kalo HILIRISASI jadi kata favorit nepo baby, MAKAN GRATIS adalah jawaban pamungkas beliau. MAKAN. MAKAN. MAKAN. Ya memang sih urusan perut itu penting, tapi ratusan trilliun untuk program makan siang? udah kebayang jadi lahan korupsi. Hadeh.

Hampir 3x debat, kaya gak niat debat, atau emang kapasitas nya hanya segitu? gak ngerti dah. Tapi di saat yang sama, banyak banget influencer yang dukung, yang meskipun bukan sekelas Dian Sastro atau Daniel Mananta :) yang penting kan influencer jutaan followers yah? hehe.

Juga seperti biasa, Pak anies selalu bagus dengan kalimat dan gagasan yang ciamik. Opening statement bagus, ada bahasa isyarat juga! Keren! Jawaban soal bansos, apalagi, JLEB banget. Lebih dari itu, isu perlindungan perempuan dan UKT yang diangkat, brilliant banget. Closing speech nya juga bagus. Gak ada nyerang-nyerang kinerja kaya sesi terakhir, dan berhasil mengambil hati banyak penduduk Indonesia yang bisa berpikir.

Yah, udahlah, he is only 1 out of million Indonesian people, yang terlalu cemerlang untuk dilewatkan. Kalau menang, alhamdulillah, kalau enggak, mungkin memang negara ini belum siap jadi negara yang membahagiakan rakyatnya.

Oya, resume ada disini ya:

Debat capres 1

Debat capres 2

Debat cawapres 1

Debat cawapres 2

6 Februari 2024

#randomthoughts

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mostlysignssomeportents · 10 months

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Linkty Dumpty

I was supposed to be on vacation, and while I didn’t do any blogging for a month, that didn’t mean that I stopped looking at my distraction rectangle and making a list of things I wanted to write about. Consequentially, the link backlog is massive, so it’s time to declare bankruptcy with another linkdump:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

[Image ID: John Holbo’s ‘trolley problem’ art, a repeating pattern of trolleys, tracks, people on tracks, and people standing at track switches]++

Let’s kick things off with a little graphic whimsy. You’ve doubtless seen the endless Trolley Problem memes, working from the same crude line drawings? Well, philosopher John Holbo got tired of that artwork, and he whomped up a fantastic alternative, which you can get as a poster, duvet, sticker, tee, etc:

https://www.redbubble.com/shop/ap/145078097

The trolley problem has been with us since 1967, but it’s enjoying a renaissance thanks to the insistence of “AI” weirdos that it is very relevant to our AI debate. A few years back, you could impress uninformed people by dropping the Trolley Problem into a discussion:

https://memex.craphound.com/2016/10/25/mercedes-weird-trolley-problem-announcement-continues-dumb-debate-about-self-driving-cars/

Amazingly, the “AI” debate has only gotten more tedious since the middle of the past decade. But every now and again, someone gets a stochastic parrot to do something genuinely delightful, like the Jolly Roger Telephone Company, who sell chatbots that will pretend to be tantalyzingly confused marks in order to tie up telemarketers and waste their time:

https://jollyrogertelephone.com/

Jolly Roger sells different personas: “Whitebeard” is a confused senior who keeps asking the caller’s name, drops nonsequiturs into the conversation, and can’t remember how many credit-cards he has. “Salty Sally” is a single mom with a houseful of screaming, demanding children who keep distracting her every time the con artist is on the verge of getting her to give up compromising data. “Whiskey Jack” is drunk:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/people-hire-phone-bots-to-torture-telemarketers-2dbb8457

The bots take a couple minutes to get the sense of the conversation going. During that initial lag, they have a bunch of stock responses like “there’s a bee on my arm, but keep going,” or grunts like “huh,” and “uh-huh.” The bots can keep telemarketers and scammers on the line for quite a long time. Scambaiting is an old and honorable vocation, and it’s good that it has received a massive productivity gain from automation. This is the AI Dividend I dream of.

The less-fun AI debate is the one over artists’ rights and tech. I am foresquare for the artists here, but I think that the preferred solutions (like creating a new copyright over the right to train a model with your work) will not lead to the hoped-for outcome. As with other copyright expansions — 40 years’ worth of them now — this right will be immediately transferred to the highly concentrated media sector, who will simply amend their standard, non-negotiable contracting terms to require that “training rights” be irrevocably assigned to them as a condition of working.

The real solution isn’t to treat artists as atomic individuals — LLCs with an MFA — who bargain, business-to-business, with corporations. Rather, the solutions are in collective power, like unions. You’ve probably heard about the SAG-AFTRA actors’ strike, in which creative workers are bargaining as a group to demand fair treatment in an age of generative models. SAG-AFTRA president Fran Drescher’s speech announcing the strike made me want to stand up and salute:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4SAPOX7R5M

The actors’ strike is historic: it marks the first time actors have struck since 2000, and it’s the first time actors and writers have co-struck since 1960. Of course, writers in the Writers Guild of America (West and East) have been picketing since since April, and one of their best spokespeople has been Adam Conover, a WGA board member who serves on the negotiating committee. Conover is best known for his stellar Adam Ruins Everything comedy-explainer TV show, which pioneered a technique for breaking down complex forms of corporate fuckery and making you laugh while he does it. Small wonder that he’s been so effective at conveying the strike issues while he pickets.

Writing for Jacobin, Alex N Press profiles Conover and interviews him about the strike, under the excellent headline, “Adam Pickets Everything.” Conover is characteristically funny, smart, and incisive — do read:

https://jacobin.com/2023/07/adam-conover-wga-strike

Of course, not everyone in Hollywood is striking. In late June, the DGA accepted a studio deal with an anemic 41% vote turnout:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/26/23773926/dga-amptp-new-deal-strike

They probably shouldn’t have. In this interview with The American Prospect’s Peter Hong, the brilliant documentary director Amy Ziering breaks down how Netflix and the other streamers have rugged documentarians in a classic enshittification ploy that lured in filmmakers, extracted everything they had, and then discarded the husks:

https://prospect.org/culture/2023-06-21-drowned-in-the-stream/

Now, the streaming cartel stands poised to all but kill off documentary filmmaking. Pressured by Wall Street to drive high returns, they’ve become ultraconservative in their editorial decisions, making programs and films that are as similar as possible to existing successes, that are unchallenging, and that are cheap. We’ve gone directly from a golden age of docs to a dark age.

In a time of monopolies, it’s tempting to form countermonopolies to keep them in check. Yesterday, I wrote about why the FTC and Lina Khan were right to try to block the Microsoft/Activision merger, and I heard from a lot of people saying this merger was the only way to check Sony’s reign of terror over video games:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

But replacing one monopolist with another isn’t good for anyone (except the monopolists’ shareholders). If we want audiences and workers — and society — to benefit, we have to de-monopolize the sector. Last month, I published a series with EFF about how we should save the news from Big Tech:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

After that came out, the EU Observer asked me to write up version of it with direct reference to the EU, where there are a lot of (in my opinion, ill-conceived but well-intentioned) efforts to pry Big Tech’s boot off the news media’s face. I’m really happy with how it came out, and the header graphic is awesome:

https://euobserver.com/opinion/157187

De-monopolizing tech has become my life’s work, both because tech is foundational (tech is how we organize to fight over labor, gender and race equality, and climate justice), and because tech has all of these technical aspects, which open up new avenues for shrinking Big Tech, without waiting decades for traditional antitrust breakups to run their course (we need these too, though!).

I’ve written a book laying out a shovel-ready plan to give tech back to its users through interoperability, explaining how to make new regulations (and reform old ones), what they should say, how to enforce them, and how to detect and stop cheating. It’s called “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation” and it’s coming from Verso Books this September:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

[Image ID: The cover of the Verso Books hardcover of ‘The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation]

I just got my first copy in the mail yesterday, and it’s a gorgeous little package. The timing was great, because I spent the whole week in the studio at Skyboat Media recording the audiobook — the first audiobook of mine that I’ve narrated. It was a fantastic experience, and I’ll be launching a Kickstarter to presell the DRM-free audio and ebooks as well as hardcovers, in a couple weeks.

Though I like doing these crowdfunders, I do them because I have to. Amazon’s Audible division, the monopolist that controls >90% of the audiobook market, refuses to carry my work because it is DRM-free. When you buy a DRM-free audiobook, that means that you can play it on anyone’s app, not just Amazon’s. Every audiobook you’ve ever bought from Audible will disappear the moment you decide to break up with Amazon, which means that Amazon can absolutely screw authors and audiobook publishers because they’ve taken our customers hostage.

If you are unwise enough to pursue an MBA, you will learn a term of art for this kind of market structure: it’s a “moat,” that is, an element of the market that makes it hard for new firms to enter the market and compete with you. Warren Buffett pioneered the use of this term, and now it’s all but mandatory for anyone launching a business or new product to explain where their moat will come from.

As Dan Davies writes, these “moats” aren’t really moats in the Buffett sense. With Coke and Disney, he says, a “moat” was “the fact that nobody else could make such a great product that everyone wanted.” In other words, “making a good product,” is a great moat:

https://backofmind.substack.com/p/stuck-in-the-moat

But making a good product is a lot of work and not everyone is capable of it. Instead, “moat” now just means some form of lock in. Davies counsels us to replace “moat” with:

our subscription system and proprietary interface mean that our return on capital is protected by a strong Berlin Wall, preventing our customers from getting out to a freer society and forcing them to consume our inferior products for lack of alternative.

I really like this. It pairs well with my 2020 observation that the fight over whether “IP” is a meaningful term can be settled by recognizing that IP has a precise meaning in business: “Any policy that lets me reach beyond the walls of my firm to control the conduct of my competitors, critics and customers”:

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

To see how that works in the real world, check out “The Anti-Ownership Ebook Economy,” a magisterial piece of scholarship from Sarah Lamdan, Jason M. Schultz, Michael Weinberg and Claire Woodcock:

https://www.nyuengelberg.org/outputs/the-anti-ownership-ebook-economy/

Something happened when we shifted to digital formats that created a loss of rights for readers. Pulling back the curtain on the evolution of ebooks offers some clarity to how the shift to digital left ownership behind in the analog world.

The research methodology combines both anonymous and named sources in publishing, bookselling and librarianship, as well as expert legal and economic analysis. This is an eminently readable, extremely smart, and really useful contribution to the scholarship on how “IP” (in the modern sense) has transformed books from something you own to something that you can never own.

The truth is, capitalists hate capitalism. Inevitably, the kind of person who presides over a giant corporation and wields power over millions of lives — workers, suppliers and customers — believes themselves to be uniquely and supremely qualified to be a wise dictator. For this kind of person, competition is “wasteful” and distracts them from the important business of making everyone’s life better by handing down unilateral — but wise and clever — edits. Think of Peter Thiel’s maxim, “competition is for losers.”

That’s why giant companies love to merge with each other, and buy out nascent competitors. By rolling up the power to decide how you and I and everyone else live our lives, these executives ensure that they can help us little people live the best lives possible. The traditional role of antitrust enforcement is to prevent this from happening, countering the delusions of would-be life-tenured autocrats of trade with public accountability and enforcement:

https://marker.medium.com/we-should-not-endure-a-king-dfef34628153

Of course, for 40 years, we’ve had neoliberal, Reaganomics-poisoned antitrust, where monopolies are celebrated as “efficient” and their leaders exalted as geniuses whose commercial empires are evidence of merit, not savagery. That era is, thankfully, coming to an end, and not a moment too soon.

Leading the fight is the aforementioned FTC chair Lina Khan, who is taking huge swings at even bigger mergers. But the EU is no slouch in this department: they’re challenging the Adobe/Figma merger, a $20b transaction that is obviously and solely designed to recapture customers who left Adobe because they didn’t want to struggle under its yoke any longer:

https://gizmodo.com/adobe-figma-acquisition-likely-to-face-eu-investigation-1850555562

For autocrats of trade, this is an intolerable act of disloyalty. We owe them our fealty and subservience, because they are self-evidently better at understanding what we need than we could ever be. This unwarranted self-confidence from the ordinary mediocrities who end up running giant tech companies gets them into a whole lot of hot water.

One keen observer of the mind-palaces that tech leaders trap themselves in is Anil Dash, who describes the conspiratorial, far-right turn of the most powerful men (almost all men!) in Silicon Valley in a piece called “‘VC Qanon’ and the radicalization of the tech tycoons”:

https://www.anildash.com/2023/07/07/vc-qanon/

Dash builds on an editorial he published in Feb, “The tech tycoon martyrdom charade,” which explores the sense of victimhood the most powerful, wealthiest people in the Valley project:

https://www.anildash.com/2023/02/27/tycoon-martyrdom-charade/

These dudes are prisoners of their Great Man myth, and leads them badly astray. And while all of us are prone to lapses in judgment and discernment, Dash makes the case that tech leaders are especially prone to it:

Nobody becomes a billionaire by accident. You have to have wanted that level of power, control and wealth more than you wanted anything else in your life. They all sacrifice family, relationships, stability, community, connection, and belonging in service of keeping score on a scale that actually yields no additional real-world benefits on the path from that first $100 million to the tens of billions.

This makes billionaires “a cohort that is, counterintutively, very easily manipulated.” What’s more, they’re all master manipulators, and they all hang out with each other, which means that when a conspiratorial belief takes root in one billionaire’s brain, it spreads to the rest of them like wildfire.

Then, billionaires “push each other further and further into extreme ideas because their entire careers have been predicated on the idea that they’re genius outliers who can see things others can’t, and that their wealth is a reward for that imagined merit.”

They live in privileged bubbles, which insulates them from disconfirming evidence — ironic, given how many of these bros think they are wise senators in the agora.

There are examples of billionaires’ folly all around us today, of course. Take privacy: the idea that we can — we should — we must — spy on everyone, all the time, in every way, to eke out tiny gains in ad performance is objectively batshit. And yet, wealthy people decreed this should be so, and it was, and made them far richer.

Leaked data from Microsoft’s Xandr ad-targeting database reveals how the commercial surveillance delusion led us to a bizarre and terrible place, as reported on by The Markup:

https://themarkup.org/privacy/2023/06/08/from-heavy-purchasers-of-pregnancy-tests-to-the-depression-prone-we-found-650000-ways-advertisers-label-you

The Markup’s report lets you plumb 650,000 targeting categories, searching by keyword or loading random sets, 20 at a time. Do you want to target gambling addicts, people taking depression meds or Jews? Xandr’s got you covered. What could possibly go wrong?

The Xandr files come from German security researcher Wolfie Christl from Cracked Labs. Christi is a European, and he’s working with the German digital rights group Netzpolitik to get the EU to scrutinize all the ways that Xandr is flouting EU privacy laws.

Billionaires’ big ideas lead us astray in more tangible ways, of course. Writing in The Conversation, John Quiggin asks us to take a hard look at the much ballyhooed (and expensively ballyhooed) “nuclear renaissance”:

https://theconversation.com/dutton-wants-australia-to-join-the-nuclear-renaissance-but-this-dream-has-failed-before-209584

Despite the rhetoric, nukes aren’t cheap, and they aren’t coming back. Georgia’s new nuclear power is behind schedule and over budget, but it’s still better off than South Carolina’s nukes, which were so over budget that they were abandoned in 2017. France’s nuke is a decade behind schedule. Finland’s opened this year — 14 years late. The UK’s Hinkley Point C reactor is massively behind schedule and over budget (and when it’s done, it will be owned by the French government!).

China’s nuclear success story also doesn’t hold up to scrutiny — they’ve brought 50GW of nukes online, sure, but they’re building 95–120GW of solar every year.

Solar is the clear winner here, along with other renewables, which are plummeting in cost (while nukes soar) and are accelerating in deployments (while nukes are plagued with ever-worsening delays).

This is the second nuclear renaissance — the last one, 20 years ago, was a bust, and that was before renewables got cheap, reliable and easy to manufacture and deploy. You’ll hear fairy-tales about how the early 2000s bust was caused by political headwinds, but that’s simply untrue: there were almost no anti-nuke marches then, and governments were scrambling to figure out low-carbon alternatives to fossil fuels (this was before the latest round of fossil fuel sabotage).

The current renaissance is also doomed. Yes, new reactors are smaller and safer and won’t have the problems intrinsic to all megaprojects, but designs like VOYGR have virtually no signed deals. Even if they do get built, their capacity will be dwarfed by renewables — a Gen III nuke will generate 710MW of power. Globally, we add that much solar every single day.

And solar power is cheap. Even after US subsidies, a Gen III reactor would charge A$132/MWh — current prices are as low as A$64-$114/MWh.

Nukes are getting a charm offensive because wealthy people are investing in hype as a way of reaping profits — not as a way of generating safe, cheap, reliable energy.

Here in the latest stage of capitalism, value and profit are fully decoupled. Monopolists are shifting more and more value from suppliers and customers to their shareholders every day. And when the customer is the government, the depravity knows no bounds. In Responsible Statecraft, Connor Echols describes how military contractors like Boeing are able to bill the Pentagon $52,000 for a trash can:

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/06/20/the-pentagons-52000-trash-can/

Military Beltway Bandits are nothing new, of course, but they’ve gotten far more virulent since the Obama era, when Obama’s DoD demanded that the primary contractors merge to a bare handful of giant firms, in the name of “efficiency.” As David Dayen writes in his must-read 2020 book Monopolized, this opened the door to a new kind of predator:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

The Obama defense rollups were quickly followed by another wave of rollups, these ones driven by Private Equity firms who cataloged which subcontractors were “sole suppliers” of components used by the big guys. These companies were all acquired by PE funds, who then lowered the price of their products, selling them below cost.

This maximized the use of those parts in weapons and aircraft sold by primary contractors like Boeing, which created a durable, long-lasting demand for fresh parts for DoD maintenance of its materiel. PE-owned suppliers hits Uncle Sucker with multi-thousand-percent markups for these parts, which have now wormed their way into every corner of the US arsenal.

Yes, this is infuriating as hell, but it’s also so grotesquely wrong that it’s impossible to defend, as we see in this hilarious clip of Rep Katie Porter grilling witnesses on US military waste:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJhf6l1nB9A

Porter pulls out the best version yet of her infamous white-board and makes her witnesses play defense ripoff Jepoardy!, providing answers to a series of indefensible practices.

It’s sure nice when our government does something for us, isn’t it? We absolutely can have nice things, and we’re about to get them. The Infrastructure Bill contains $42B in subsidies for fiber rollouts across the country, which will be given to states to spend. Ars Technica’s Jon Brodkin breaks down the state-by-state spending:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/us-allocates-42b-in-broadband-funding-find-out-how-much-your-state-will-get/

Texas will get $3.31B, California will get $1.86B, and 17 other states will get $1B or more. As the White House announcement put it, “High-speed Internet is no longer a luxury.”

To understand how radical this is, you need to know that for decades, the cable and telco sector has grabbed billions in subsidies for rural and underserved communities, and then either stole the money outright, or wasted it building copper networks that run at a fraction of a percent of fiber speeds.

This is how America — the birthplace of the internet — ended up with some of the world’s slowest, most expensive broadband, even after handing out tens of billions of dollars in subsidies. Those subsidies were gobbled up by greedy, awful phone companies — these ones must be spent wisely, on long-lasting, long-overdue fiber infrastructure.

That’s a good note to end on, but I’ve got an even better one: birds in the Netherlands are tearing apart anti-bird strips and using them to build their nests. Wonderful creatures 1, hostile architecture, 0. Nature is healing:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/11/crows-and-magpies-show-their-metal-by-using-anti-bird-spikes-to-build-nests

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/15/in-the-dumps/#what-vacation

Next Tues, Jul 18, I'm hosting the first Clarion Summer Write-In Series, an hour-long, free drop-in group writing and discussion session. It's in support of the Clarion SF/F writing workshop's fundraiser to offer tuition support to students:

https://mailchi.mp/theclarionfoundation/clarion-write-ins

[Image iD: A dump-truck, dumping out a load of gravel. A caricature of Humpty Dumpty clings to its lip, restrained by a group of straining, Lilliputian men.]

114 notes · View notes

cariantha · 6 months

Text

Hunger Pains

Book: Open Heart, Post-Series

Pairing: Dr. Ethan Ramsey x F!MC (Dr. Sawyer Brooks)

Rating: Explicit

Warning: 🔥NSFW, ⛔18+ Only, contains explicit sexual content

Category: Fluff, Smut, Halloween

Word count: 2.6K

Summary: Sawyer is in a bad mood. Ethan helps her calm down.

Prompts:

🫦From Anon: Can I get a fic with Ethan giving MC a love bite or hickey?

☀️From @peonierose: Ethan & Sawyer + “sunshine”

🍬From @jerzwriter: "Actually, I like candy corn!"

Events:

🎃For @choicesoctober event: Costume / Halloween / Vampire / Meme

🥰For @choicesprompts Flufftober 2023 event: I want to take care of you.

“Mr. Cox. An appropriate name for such a dick,” Sawyer thought to herself, blood boiling as she exited Room 513.

The patient being cared for inside could easily steal the title of “Biggest PITA” away from the infamous Nigel Platt. And only making matters worse, her consultation had been interrupted multiple times by a cocky intern eager to show off.

Once the door closed behind her, she spun on Dr. Perkins.

“How many times have we told you not to interrupt when your resident or attending is speaking with a patient? If you do that again, I’ll make sure you are written up.”

Sawyer strode to the nearby nurses’ station to update Mr. Cox’s chart. The obstinate intern followed.

“How am I supposed to learn anything around here if I’m not allowed to ask questions?” he argued.

“You start by shutting the hell up and listening. Had you done that in the first place, we wouldn’t be standing here having this conversation. If you were really trying to understand something back there, you would have directed your questions to me. Instead you attempted to conduct a medical history interview, on an extremely agitated patient, minutes before he goes to surgery,” she scolded.

“This is–”

Her patience wearing thin, Sawyer spoke over him. “Jaaackie, get Dr. Know-It-All away from me before I go all Ramsey on his ass,” she demanded through gritted teeth.

Jackie, having caught the tail end of the exchange, looked up from her tablet.

“I think you just did,” she answered, “...and Perkins, the patient in 506 needs a new catheter. Now.”

“But that’s not even my pati-” he started to complain.

With one harsh look from the Chief Resident, Dr. Perkins finally tucked his tail between his legs and sulked down the hall.

"You're breathing fire today," Jackie quipped as she rounded the desk to leave.

Sawyer ignored her and continued typing furiously on her tablet.

Down the hall, Jackie and Bryce traded places getting on and off the elevator.

“Hey, have you seen Brooks? I mean Ramsey. Brooks-Ramsey?” Bryce guessed, not sure what to call his friend since she and Ethan surprised everyone by eloping a couple weeks ago.

Jackie pointed in the direction of the nurses’ desk. “I hope you brought snacks. She’s in a mood again,” she warned as the steel doors closed between them.

A minute later, Bryce slunk next to Sawyer, bumping shoulders to get her attention.

“Finally. What took you so long?” Sawyer rebuked, shoving the tablet towards him. “Here, take this guy away. And while you have his head open, feel free to poke the part of his brain that disables his speech.”

“Well, aren’t you a pocketful of sunshine this morning,” he teased.

“After a few minutes with this asshole and you’ll understand why,” she said, storming off.

“Annnd, Dr. Ramsey it is,” he decided.

🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸

Shortly thereafter, Sawyer sat in the diagnostics office and stewed in silence as the team meeting ran over schedule. Her annoyance grew more intense with each passing minute as Ethan and Harper debated, and Tobias egged them on for his own amusement. No longer able to take it, she interrupted.

“Do you need me? Because, if not, I have patients who do.”

Her three colleagues snapped their heads in her direction, surprised by the bite in her tone. With raised eyebrows, she looked at the team leader and challenged him to respond.

Ethan cleared his throat. “Uh, let’s see how the labs come back and continue this discussion when we have more information.”

Harper and Tobias quickly got out of Dodge as Sawyer stacked her notes and gathered her things. When she stood to follow, Ethan reached for her hand and held her back.

“Hey, what’s wrong? What’s got you so wound up?”

She exhaled deeply, his touch instantly calming her.

“I’m sorry.” Frustrated tears welled in her witch-green eyes. “I'm super cranky. These third-trimester hormones are no joke. My mood the last few days has been…”

A single teardrop fell down her cheek.

“Come here,” he urged, pulling her into his lap. “It’s been, what?”

“It’s either been hangry or hornery or both,” she pouted and sagged her shoulders.

Cracking a smile at her dramatics, “I know what ‘hangry’ is, but 'hornery?'”

“Horny and ornery.”

With a shake of his head, Ethan caressed her swollen belly. “So, what I hear you saying is you’re irritable because you're either hungry or horny…”

“Right now, it’s both,” she interjected, her fingers seductively dancing up his chest.

“And the cure for this condition is to either feed you … or fuck you?”

“Look, I’m not saying food and sex would solve all my problems, but it would sure help me calm the hell down,” she admitted with a coquettish grin.

“Well, as much as I’d like to help you satisfy your hunger pains, all I can offer right now is this.”

Ethan reached for the bowl of Halloween candy on the conference table.

“Boo,” she scowled playfully. Sawyer stood and sifted through the options, “I’ll take the candy corn off your hands and leave the chocolates for you. I know they’re your favorite.”

“Actually, I like candy corn,” he said, ripping a small package open with his teeth and pouring them all into his mouth.

“Seriously?” she asked, surprised.

“My dad loves them. We always had a bowl out during the season. I used to push them up on my canines when I was a kid and pretend I was Dracula.”

“Aw, cute. Well, if that’s true, then I’ll take some of these too,” she reached back into the bowl and stuffed her pockets. “Supposedly, chocolate is a good substitute for sex. Feed two birds with one scone.”

🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸

A couple hours later, Sawyer was down at the lab demanding the results for one of her patients.

“What do you mean it’s going to be another four to six hours? I ordered these tests yesterday!”

Her raised voice began to draw the attention of others, including her indirect supervisor. Ethan was just finishing a consultation with the hospital’s lead hematologist, when he heard the uproar.

The lab assistant snapped back. “Look, lady, we’re doing the best we can. The tech will run the test as soon as he’s back from lunch.”

“Lady?! Do you see this badge? That’s Dr. Brooks to you.”

Sawyer spewed red hot anger as she spun on her heels. From several feet away, Ethan could practically feel the heat radiating from her. Her neck and cheeks were crimsoned and her fists clenched at her sides.

“That’s enough,” he admonished, taking Sawyer by the wrist and swiftly pulling her into a familiar and dark supply closet.

Ethan loomed over her as he backed her into a corner.

“I know… I’m sorry,” she apologized. Sad cat-like eyes pleading for forgiveness.

“This kind of stress isn’t good for you or the baby,” he advised. “This is serious, Sawyer. You leave me no choice but to help you calm down.” The corner of his mouth began to turn up in a sly grin, as he ran his hand over her hair.

“Oh, thank god,” she sighed, crashing into his lips.

“We’ll…have to be…quick…and quiet,” he murmured between desperate kisses.

As Sawyer slipped out of her shoes, Ethan lent a hand, sliding her pants and underwear to the ground. As she stepped out of them, Ethan unzipped his pants and pushed them down to expose his rising need. Their white lab coats provided a curtain of privacy in the event that anyone walked in on them.

Lifting her up around his waist, Sawyer tried to wrap her legs around him. With several extra inches around her midsection, she had a hard time locking her swollen ankles behind him and finding a comfortable position.

“Ethan, my belly. This isn’t working,” she squirmed under his hold.

Determined to make this work despite the cramped space, Sawyer slid down. She shrugged off her lab coat, turned her back to him, and placed her hands on the wall.

Ethan took the hint immediately. His hands began to roam under her shirt, starting at her sore back. His thumbs applied light pressure as he worked his way down the length of her spine, earning a few grateful groans. He also spent a few seconds massaging her ass, finishing with a gentle squeeze.

Closing the small gap between them, Ethan reached around and tenderly appreciated her baby bump. Then slithering his fingers into the cups of her bra, he ghosted around her sensitive nipples.

Sawyer felt his breath next to her ear and turned her head to meet him in a passionate kiss, his erection poking and teasing her backside.

Navigating in the dark, Ethan leaned back to align himself with her entrance. “God, Sawyer,” he gasped, easily gliding between her slick folds. “You are so ready for me.”

She looked over her shoulder with a smile and jokingly reminded him of her libidinous mood swings. “What’d I tell you? Me so horny.”

With an amused shake of his head, he pulled back gently, then began to pump his hips. Slow and soft at first.

“Mmmmm, that feels so good, babe,” Sawyer mewled.

Ethan picked up the pace. He pushed harder and deeper, but careful not to get too rough with his pregnant wife or her precious cargo.

“Ohhhh,” she let slip a little too loud.

“Shhhh, baby,” he breathed heavily, working up a sweat.

As her legs began to tremble, Sawyer kept her hands firmly braced against the wall for support.

“I’m close…cover…my mouth,” she panted.

With a hand on her hip to hold her close and steady, Ethan reached around with his other and gently covered her mouth. He leaned in and pressed his chest against her back, resting his chin in the crook of her neck. “Let go, beautiful,” he mumbled against the feel of her rapid pulse.

After a couple deep pumps, Sawyer’s whole body shuddered. She moaned her satisfaction into Ethan’s hand. The vibrations pulsing through her body, and the warm breath against his palm, provoked his own release. Clamping his mouth onto her neck, he muted himself.

The euphoria made her forget all her aches and pain. So, when Sawyer tightened her muscles around Ethan’s still bursting length, it hardly registered when he bit down hard on her throat.

To avoid getting caught, they didn't spend much time basking in the afterglow. Ethan gave his wife a loving kiss, and when he was certain she could stand unsupported, he pulled up his pants and helped Sawyer step into hers.

With a quick peek into the hallway, Sawyer checked to see if the coast was clear. “Hold on…it’s Wen,” she whispered, holding up a hand to halt him.

When Dr. Wen disappeared around a corner, they exited the supply closet.

“Do you think she heard us?”

“If she did, I’m sure she assumed it was only one of the ghosts that she believes haunts these halls,” Ethan chuckled. “The more important question is, are you feeling better?”

“Much better, thank you.”

“Well, let’s make doubly sure and head up to the cafeteria for some lunch.”

🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸

Later that night, at home and in the shower, Ethan pushed wet hair away from Sawyer's neck and discovered the frightful bruising.

“Oh, Soe, I’m sorry,” he expressed, carefully skimming his fingers over the bite mark. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

Sawyer touched the tender spot and moved around him to see her reflection in his shaving mirror.

“Oh my gosh!” she laughed as she traced her fingers over the imprints of his teeth. “I married a freakin’ vampire!”

“I’m sorry. But, hey,” he innocently smiled back in the mirror, “...only a vampire can love you forever.”

He wrapped his arms around her and buried his face into her neck. “Mwahahaha,” he snarled at her ear, before placing a delicate, healing kiss to the love bite.

🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸

The next day, the newlyweds arrived at work hand in hand and walked toward the attendings’ locker room. Pausing just outside the door, Sawyer turned to face her husband.

“Hey, just a reminder I volunteered to help in the clinic this morning. Carrick said he would do rounds for me.”

“I remembered,” Ethan said, bending down to give Sawyer a quick but loving kiss on the lips. “I love you.”

“I love you, too. I’ll see you later,” she returned, reluctantly letting go of his hand.

Stepping into the locker room, she spotted a familiar face. Well, sort of.

“Whoa, that looks soooo good, Elijah. Gross, but so realistic,” Sawyer awed.

“Thanks! Those of us in the research department agreed to dress up like lab experiments gone wrong.”

“Well, mission accomplished. And, Happy Halloween, by the way. I know it’s your favorite day of the year.”

As Elijah excitedly talked about his zombie character - which of course was inspired by a new John Carpenter video game - Sawyer tugged on her white coat and checked her reflection in the mirror.

The bruising on her neck was much more prominent the day after and under the harsh fluorescent lighting of the hospital. She tried to adjust her hair and fix the collar of her jacket, but it was no use. She dug through her bag searching for her makeup case, quickly realizing she left it at home.

“Shit,” she thought to herself.

“Aren’t you dressing up this year?”

Elijah’s question brought her back to the conversation, and an idea popped into her head.

“About that…do you have any more fake blood?”

“Yeah, there’s a tube in my locker. Help yourself,” he offered on his way out.

🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸

Down in the free clinic, Sawyer examined a very inquisitive eight-year old who noticed the bite mark and the two drips of dried blood on her neck.

“Say ‘ahhhh!’” she instructed, using a tongue depressor to check the back of his throat. “Good, no swelling back there.”

“Doctor! Did you get bit by a vampire?”

“I’m afraid I did,” she admitted, putting on a bit of an act.

“Was it Dracula?”

“That’s still up for debate,” she laughed to herself, picturing little boy Ethan with candy corn fangs.

“Did it hurt?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Did he suck your blood?”

“Justin, for goodness sake,” his mother chided and rolled her eyes.

“It’s fine,” Sawyer waved her off.

“Did he make you into a vampire too?”

“No,” turning her back to the young patient and facing his mother, she muttered, “...he just got me pregnant.” The patient’s mother cackled out loud.

🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸🩸

That afternoon, Sawyer was on the fifth floor to check on a patient, when she spotted Ethan stepping into the hallway with Esme and her intern. When they were safely out of the patient’s earshot, he wheeled around on the intern and launched into a stern, and familiar, lecture.

“...It doesn’t matter that you’re still learning…Whether this man lives or dies is on you…There is no room for mistakes…”

When he was done with his tirade, Ethan marched over to the nurses’ station and began tapping away on an iPad.

“Don’t sweat him. He’s all bark and no bite. Isn’t that right, Dr. Brooks?” Esme asked as Sawyer approached the scene.

Mrs. Ramsey shook her head vehemently. “Oh, no,” she spoke loud enough for Ethan to hear, “he bites alright.” When he looked up with a raised eyebrow, she winked and kept walking.

A couple minutes later, Ethan’s phone pinged with a text notification.

Tag List: @choicesficwriterscreations @openheartfanfics @potionsprefect @jamespotterthefirst @annfg8 @peonierose @socalwriterbee @tessa-liam @jerzwriter @quixoticdreamer16 @mysticalgalaxysstuff @inlocusmads @txemrn @trappedinfanfiction @mvalentine @takemyopenheart @openheartforeverinmyheart @coffeeheartaddict2 @genevievemd @starrystarrytrouble @hopelessromantic1352 @kyra75 @lsvdw-blog @rookiemartin @headoverheelsforramsey @zealouscanonindeer @lilyoffandoms

#open heart #open heart choices #open heart fanfic #ethan ramsey #ethan ramsey x mc #ethan x mc #ethan x sawyer #choices stories you play #choices open heart #playchoices #choices fic writers creations #cfwc fics of the week #choicesOCtober #choicespromtps #flufftober2023

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onestepbackwards · 11 months

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I'm cracking up at the idea of where contests come from in the case of the Streamer AU. It reminds me a lot of the Song of Storms Paradox in the Zelda Ocarina of Time where in that game Windmill Man teaches adult Link the song because of his fury at the damage young Link brought by playing it. After traveling back in time, young Link uses that knowledge to cause the damage that led to the Windmill Man's fury. But in that case where did the Song of Storms come from to begin with? It's basically that, but with Pokémon Contests. For a bit of fun fact both 'Where did the song of storms come from' and 'Where did Pokémon contests come from' would probably be considered a Bootstrap Paradox since they both involve time travel and made it so there is no way discernible point of origin for contests/the song. I can see that becoming a running joke in the Pokémon world, and in the chat. The Contest Paradox becomes a thing now in the Pokémon world, and is a subject of debate online.

Gets even funnier to me if pictures of the Streamer existed in history books long before they got sent to Hisui because it makes it seem like at least part of the reason Arceus flung them into the past was just to make sure that Pokémon Contests would exist.

LITERALLY THOUGH

Ocarina of Time is literally what I had been thinking of when I wrote that! How funny it would be if it was one of those paradox things!

No one knows what really came first. Could one exist without the other? The thought has historians and scientists in a tizzy from the whole situation.

It becomes a hot debate topic in the future and in your chat. You even have people arguing in your donos, just so people can argue in text to speech. It ends up becoming a meme discussion in your chat.

Anytime you wanna change the subject, all you or your mods have to do is simply say: “Hey chat, which came first? Contests here in Hisui, or contests in the future? Would contests exist without me coming here and having hisui’s first contest?”

It never fails to make your chat speed up and debate each other.

#streamer au #pla #pokemon legends arceus #zed.talks #ask #anon #long post

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ot3 · 3 months

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i know all social media is fundamentally lacking in content moderation policies that Actually protect anyone, especially black and trans people, but also. this seems worse than most systems???

That means that under Bluesky’s new content moderation policy, a user who was suspended for hate speech or making violent threats would still be able to engage with other servers running on AT Protocol. Bluesky has always been transparent about becoming a decentralized social network, but the swift action it previously took against users who threatened others convinced many Bluesky early adopters that the platform would continue to shut down violent or hateful rhetoric. “While this may not be your vision necessarily, I think a lot of people are less concerned with moving to a new instance of Bluesky, than making sure bigots are not able to have *any* instance on here,” Ben Perry, a Bluesky user also known as tedcruznipples, replied to Graber’s thread. “They shouldn’t be given the opportunity to have federation and proliferate their message.” Bluesky rolled out custom algorithms the day after Graber announced the new moderation policy. The feature allows users to choose from Bluesky’s “marketplace of algorithms” instead of just seeing content from the “master algorithm” that most social media sites employ. Like Twitter lists, users will be able to toggle between the “What’s hot” tab, a tab of people they follow and tabs for custom feeds they’ve pinned. The “Cat Pics” feed shows, predictably, cat pics, while other feeds lean more toward memes and NSFW content. But many Bluesky users — particularly Black Bluesky users — questioned the timing of the roll out. Rudy Fraser, who created a custom algorithm for Black users called Blacksky, said it was unfortunate that Bluesky tried to offer custom algorithms as a “solution” to the moderation debate. “As if a new feature would resolve the underlying issue and as if they couldn’t just ban the offending user,” Fraser said. [source]

this article is from summer last year but bluesky's own currently provided information about their moderation system doesnt give me particularly any more confidence

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laundryandtaxes · 6 months

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It's been so funny and so bizarre to watch the debate around working from home, especially how it's gotten caught up in the In This House we believe in science/walkable cities as meme/free speech is a dogwhistle liberal ethos of this time, because the whole time I've had a job where I actually make things and do things that could not be done from home. In fact, the whole thing deeply disinterests me, although of course I understand why someone would find it absurd to be forced to send emails all day from a specific office instead of from any other place.

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lovelylotusf1 · 2 months

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What each driver would be like playing “TTT” 🔫🕵‍♂️

For everyone who doesn't know the game: TTT is a multiplayer shooter game where the players get sorted into two teams: “Innocent” and “Traitor”. Only Traitors know who is in their team, the Innocent have to guess (leading to a few mind games along the way). There is also a Detective who gets special items to help the Innocents combat the Traitors.

The goal is to eliminate the other team.

You know Among Us? It's basically Among Us but Counterstrike.

Max Verstappen

That one tryhard in the group, you know the one. Takes everything extremely seriously, no fun allowed, he's here to win. Often seen hanging around Charles, who balances out his serious playstyle. Can be convinced to have some fun but only by Charles.

Checo Perez

Doesn't know why he's here. The last video game he played was Tetris. Is frequently left alive solely because he has no clue what's going on and is therefore not seen as dangerous.

Charles Leclerc

The menace. WILL shove you off high buildings and cliffs just because he thinks it’s funny. Teams mean nothing to him, will kill anyone on sight if it has the potential to make him laugh. No one ever suspects him being a Traitor because he also does all this when he's Innocent.

Carlos Sainz

Is a surprisingly good Detective. However, he WILL sing Smooth Operator when he wins. Sometimes gets killed just to prevent this.

Lando Norris

Running around the map at speeds unparalleled. Manic energy personified. Consistently has the most fun, mostly achieved by trolling everyone.

Oscar Piastri

Resident ghost. Goes quiet as soon as the round starts. Everyone thinks he's dead until he snipes them from the shadows. Has won rounds where he was the only one left standing in his team. Was banned from using a Sniper Rifle for a long time.

Lewis Hamilton

Refuses to play.

George Russell

Writes essays on the fly on who is most likely to be a Traitor based on their behavior and pattern of speech. Tries to calm everyone down and speak in an orderly fashion. Makes for a great Detective but often gets killed when he's Innocent because he yaps too much.

Alex Albon

Blames everything on George. Killed a man? George did it (he was on the other side of the map). Saw someone jump off a building? George shoved them (it was probably Charles). Gets away with it most of the time.

Logan Sargeant

Likes to throw explosive barrels at people to his soundboard of Bald Eagle screeches. He embraces the meme. And is often the first one to be killed as a result.

Daniel Ricciardo

Is very bad at the game. Still laughs the most out of everyone. You probably don't want him as your teammate but he is too fun to be mad at him.

Yuki Tsunoda

You'd think he is sweet because he is so smol. Oh no. The rage has nowhere to go in his body. He is the first to scream obscenities into the mic, the likes of which you probably heard coming from a 12 year old on XBox voice chat (they are vicious).

Pierre Gasly

Targets Esteban and Esteban specifically. Even if they're on the same team. Other than that, can be seen trailing Charles and shoving people off buildings with him.

Esteban Ocon

Most often seen in a heated debate with Pierre, spoken in French. Sometimes Charles is live-translating everything they say to everyone’s amusement.

Fernando Alonso

Gets all the trick shots. Dances on your dead body. You hear him laughing maniacally before he kills everyone. Seems to be a Traitor almost every time.

Lance Stroll

A bit unsure of what he's supposed to do but in a lovable kind of way. Tries to latch onto Fernando, who takes him under his wings like a mother hen.

Nico Hülkenberg

People forgot to invite him.

Kevin Magnussen

Doesn't play. Always uses the excuse of having to look after his daughter (even if she isn't there).

Valtteri Bottas

The one who's always messing around with the props on the map. Likes finding the bike, picking it up and pretending to ride it. Isn't interested in anything else.

Zhou Guanyu

Refuses to use any weapon other than the cat gun. Despite that, he is surprisingly good at the game if his cat isn't trying to lie on his keyboard.

#f1blr #f1 headcanons #formula 1 memes #f1 grid #you can pry Charles being a menace in video games out of my cold dead hands #lotus rambles

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slayygirl122 · 8 months

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The pillow room these days is so funny because you've got the group therapy corner, the hate speech corner, the meme corner and the religious debate corner.

#animal jam #ajpc #animal jam classic #aj classic #ajc #jamblr #animaljam

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zukkaoru · 3 months

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For the ask meme: yuuji + nanami, "you would've been a great teacher, though"

“You would’ve been a great teacher, though.” Yuuji doesn’t really mean to say that aloud—it just slips out of his mouth as things often do. Nanami freezes. Briefly, Yuuji debates about taking it back, but— No. He meant it. And Nanami deserves to know that Yuuji appreciates him. “Perhaps,” he agrees, voice distant. “In another life.” There is a sadness to the words that Yuuji doesn’t like; a grief he has heard laced through Megumi and Ieiri’s speech as well. An ever-present mourning unique to sorcerers. Yuuji swallows. “Well, for what it’s worth, I think you make a pretty good teacher in this life, too. Even if you’re not technically employed as one.” He laughs nervously, scratching the back of his neck. “I mean, maybe you’re not teaching me algebra or whatever, but…it’s not like polynomials are going to help me much now. I understand cursed energy more now than I did before I met you, and…I dunno. You taught me that it’s okay that I’m still a kid. So…thanks.” “…Of course,” Nanami replies stiffly. But as he turns away, Yuuji catches sight of a faint smile.

send me a ship + a sentence and i’ll write the next five(ish) sentences

#yuuji pov remains unreasonably difficult for me to write #also this takes place vaguely post-junpei / pre-shibuya arc #nanami kento #yuuji itadori #jjk #ty for the ask!!#anon asks #ask game #grace's writing tag

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im-a-king-baby · 6 months

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Hiii!

I loved ELYN so much! And one scene I would love you to comment on is in chapter 14 when they're out by the lake, and they talk about their futures and their public personas, and I guess they both help each other get to thinking about their options in new ways:

“The first thing you ever said to me was that you weren’t allowed to talk about politics.” Simon bends down to pick a rock up from the grass, turning it over between his fingers. “I guess I’m just saying if this debate is live and there’s no script then this is your chance to tell people your story. To show them what kind of king you’re going to be.” He tosses the stone once in his palm, then throws it into the lake."

I really loved how this got Wilhelm thinking about what he wanted, and how he could go about to get it.

Thanks a lot 💜

No, thank YOU a lot <3 <3.

(This meme is bonus content for ELYN/Everybody Loves You Now which you can read on AO3 here. This post below the cut will contain spoilers.)

So the VERY FIRST line of YR fanfiction I ever wrote was: ‘The first thing Wilhelm ever said to Simon was, "I’m not allowed to talk about politics." It was a wake-up call, a reminder, that Wilhelm will always belong to Sweden first.’ It was originally for a different fic, then I stole it for a Simon POV ELYN-scene which I might post someday (snippet below), but that sense of responsibility is definitely one of the core parts of this kind of contemporary royalty story that is interesting to me. So the beginning of that quote is definitely something that was in my mind from the very beginning.

And it’s interesting to talk about this scene (and chapters 13/14 in general) and that progression to Wilhelm’s decision because it was hardly in draft 1, which jumped from Candace to the debate with very little in between. And then I kept expanding it, and rewriting it a million times (and then my beta was like ‘this isn’t working’ about some parts and I rewrote them several more times.) and these chapters more than a lot of the others I had to step back and really be like ‘what am I trying to achieve here, what are my character arcs, how do I balance that?’

The most important part of ELYN (to me) was that losing the vote had to be a Choice that Wilhelm made. I’ve seen some debates about whether people want an ending where Wilhelm abdicates or where the monarchy is abolished and I always think it misses the nuance that if monarchy is abolished it should be because Wilhelm abolishes it. To me, that’s what makes it an empowered narrative, rather than a story about society rejecting a queer king. And in ELYN, the other key plotline is this reconnection between Wilhelm and Simon and how that pushes them both to break out of these boxes they’re stuck in. On Simon’s side, Wilhelm is a reminder of his past and a wake-up call to how not-okay Simon is now. Pre the writing of 13/14 Wilhelm did had some influence from Simon, breaking the rules and pushing back on his mother and Minou, but I wanted there to be a clear character beat that tied Simon's return to Wilhelm’s making the decision to call for a 'no' vote.

Then it was a case of reflecting on the parallels of their lives, which was mostly this theme of being voiceless. Simon not being able to sing his own songs, vs. Wilhelm being handed speeches to read out and having to stick to the Official Story. And this is where Simon is kind of ahead of Wilhelm, in that he’s already had his ‘fuck it, they can’t stop me’ moment singing at the concert, so he gets to take the advice-giving role, which is nice to balance out their interactions a bit more so it’s not Wilhelm helping Simon all the time.

(In case you’re interested, this is one of the notes I sent my beta with the final rewrite (which kind of shows how I was approaching this transition from a character development perspective): ‘I’ve tried to make the split more clear so that in 13 his action is avoiding the debate (passive) and in 14 he switches to actively using the debate to change the vote.’)

Bonus snippet, here is the line from paragraph one in the Simon hotel scene:

The wind is bitingly cold. “Thanks, tack, love you all,” he calls down. “Have a good night!” He shuts the window, draws the curtains like maybe they’ll leave if they can’t see him. They won’t leave. They were there this morning when he went to an interview, then a doctor about the scratch in his throat, then an outfit fitting for the charity show. The numbers fluctuate but they’re never gone. He wonders how Wilhelm got past them. There must be another entrance, one that someone has decided Simme isn’t allowed to use, because they want to reward the loyalty of the fans freezing their fucking toes off to get a glimpse of him. Wilhelm wouldn’t risk being seen by them. Wilhelm knows how important is is to maintain his image. The first thing Wilhelm ever said to Simon was, ‘I’m not supposed to talk about politics.’ A wake up call. A reminder. That Wilhelm will always belong to Sweden first. And now Simon knows a little of how that feels, to have the expectations of thousands of strangers resting on his shoulders. Fortunately Simme’s image is much easier to maintain. A bit of smoky eye, a smile that promises sex, a never ending stream of photoshoots where the clothes are more or less optional. It all comes naturally: start at the neck of the bottle and work down.

#ELYN fic #commentary meme #trying to get these finished before nano consumes my life #can't believe it's been nearly a year since I started writing this fic #WHAT IS TIME #ELYN spoilers #I should write another YR fic

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