#the end of the road | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

xoabrielle · 4 months

Text

STORMS [TEOTR 0]

it seems like arabella's luck never runs out - until it does.

masterlist - next chapter - song link

cw: mentioned alcohol use, drug use,

Philadelphia - 1985

Arabella knew her luck had run out.

Realistically, it probably should have ran out long ago. But stumbling home to the townhouse her and her mother shared after getting dragged home in the back of a cop car? Yeah, her luck was definitely out.

Juliet Concord stood at the steps of the townhouse as her daughter swayed in the handcuffs that currently held her. Arms crossed and house robe on, the rollers in her hair that Arabella swore made her look like Grandma Concord. Juliet narrowed her eyes at her daughter who stood still locked in handcuffs. “Thank you, officer. Again, I’m so sorry.”

Juliet assured the officer, who promptly unbuckled the handcuffs as Arabella laughed, winking at the officer. “Take me out to dinner first, wouldja?” A sharp look from her mother was received, Arabella rolling her eyes. “Oh relax, m’fine.”

The slurring of Arabella’s words and the glossy look in her brown eyes assuredly said different. Juliet promptly grabbed her daughter’s before she fell up the seven steep steps that led into the townhouse. The hardwood floor that lined the house scuffed against Arabella’s black boots, the black sheer tights that adorned her body ripped in places they weren’t when she left - not that Juliet knew that. Arabella slumped against the couch as her mother scurried away, fetching a water bottle before returning. “I cannot believe you, Arabella! Galavanting with..with those people, sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night with no remorse!”

Arabella truly was too far gone to have this conversation, not sure if it was the drugs or the vodka, but all she could do was muster a smile and a thumbs up. “Yada, yada, yada. M’fine! See?”

The minute she stands she’s back on the couch with a slur of giggles. “M’kay, so maybe NOT fine but-”

Juliet scoffs as she paces back and forth, the plush carpet that lined the living room becoming disheveled. Her house robe was wrapped tightly as she crossed her arms. She looked back at Arabella’s wide eyes, her voice demanding as she grabbed her chin. “Tongue. Now.”

Arabella scrunched her nose and tried to turn away but it was no use. Her mother was a certified nursing assistant, she knew the signs. She reluctantly opened her mouth, sticking out her tongue. A small, square sat on the tongue, some sort of rainbow depicted on it. Juliet wanted to scream, to cry, to shake her daughter to her senses. She grabbed the nearest trash can, “Spit it out, Arabella. Before I call the police and have them take you away. For good.”

Another eye roll as Arabella lazily spit out the new tab. The party had been busted and sadly Arabella was in the small circle in the back of the random house, and running wasn’t in the cards for her. “I can’t even look at you right now.”

Arabella, still in her own little world, snorted. “Then don’t.” She laughed at her own comment, bracing herself on the coffee table before she fell over. Juliet let something out that was a mix of a pained sigh and shocked noise. “M’tired, can I go to bed?”

Juliet shrugs her shoulders. “Well by all means, if you so desire it!” She watched her daughter fall up the steps as tears pierced her eyes. How did it come to this point - and what the hell was Juliet going to do about it? She sat down on the couch, unsure if there was anything that could be done. She had tried an all girls school, week long rehab program, she had even tried signing her up for one of those inspirational talks. But it all seemed in one ear and out the other.

The happy family photos stared back at her as she thought. The smiling little girl with two pigtails and the red ribbons had been replaced by an eighteen year old with no remorse for the world. Juliet’s eyes scan until she lands on the photo of her brother with a baby Arabella in his arms. An idea sparked, Juliet reaching for the phone and dialing a familiar number.

“Hey Jimmy, it’s me. Question for you,” Her nails tap against the coffee table before she sighs, “How do you feel about Bella coming to visit?”

#billy hargrove x oc #billy hargrove #fanfic #billy hargrove fic #billy hargrove smut #TEOTR #the end of the road

4 notes · View notes

supernovaa-remnant · 5 months

Text

..so the fic has reached 40k words

#not quite done but almost!!! almost!!#I can see the light at the end of the tunnel #the end of the road #stella rambles #stella fic updates #I genuinely originally thought this would be 20k at the longest #yet here we are #will probably make it a two-short or even a three-shot instead of a one-shot lol #but it's not really meant to be a super big multichaptered fic y'know?#that's just not how it's formatted

4 notes · View notes

johnschneiderblog · 1 year

Photo

Pure perversity

Coming back inside after taking the family dog for its morning constitutional, Grandson Colin declared, “It’s nasty out there.”

The boy wasn’t kidding. Leaving Indiana for the final push of our 2,600-mile, 6-week trip was “pure Michigan,” indeed:

Temperatures on the freezing bubble; horizontal flurries riding a wind that rocked our Impala; gas prices at $3.59, compared to the $3.09 we paid down south; snow in our yard; a landscape as dormant as a rock; not a hint of spring in woods outside our windows ...

So, why does it feel so damn good to be home ... ?

#John Schneider #back in Michigan #the end of the road #nasty weather

9 notes · View notes

thischarmingpirate · 2 years

Photo

OFMD as Smiths lyrics

"It was dark as I drove the point home" (That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore)

#ofmd #our flag means death #the smiths #that joke isn't funny anymore #the art of f**ckery #izzy hands #we've arrived bonnet #the end of the road

4 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 5 months

Text

“If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”

20 years ago, I got in a (friendly) public spat with Chris Anderson, who was then the editor in chief of Wired. I'd publicly noted my disappointment with glowing Wired reviews of DRM-encumbered digital devices, prompting Anderson to call me unrealistic for expecting the magazine to condemn gadgets for their DRM:

https://longtail.typepad.com/the_long_tail/2004/12/is_drm_evil.html

I replied in public, telling him that he'd misunderstood. This wasn't an issue of ideological purity – it was about good reviewing practice. Wired was telling readers to buy a product because it had features x, y and z, but at any time in the future, without warning, without recourse, the vendor could switch off any of those features:

https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/29/cory-responds-to-wired-editor-on-drm/

I proposed that all Wired endorsements for DRM-encumbered products should come with this disclaimer:

WARNING: THIS DEVICE’S FEATURES ARE SUBJECT TO REVOCATION WITHOUT NOTICE, ACCORDING TO TERMS SET OUT IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS. YOUR INVESTMENT IS CONTINGENT ON THE GOODWILL OF THE WORLD’S MOST PARANOID, TECHNOPHOBIC ENTERTAINMENT EXECS. THIS DEVICE AND DEVICES LIKE IT ARE TYPICALLY USED TO CHARGE YOU FOR THINGS YOU USED TO GET FOR FREE — BE SURE TO FACTOR IN THE PRICE OF BUYING ALL YOUR MEDIA OVER AND OVER AGAIN. AT NO TIME IN HISTORY HAS ANY ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY GOTTEN A SWEET DEAL LIKE THIS FROM THE ELECTRONICS PEOPLE, BUT THIS TIME THEY’RE GETTING A TOTAL WALK. HERE, PUT THIS IN YOUR MOUTH, IT’LL MUFFLE YOUR WHIMPERS.

Wired didn't take me up on this suggestion.

But I was right. The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations. Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in. A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony. Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.

This is the root of all the right to repair shenanigans. Sure, companies withhold access to diagnostic codes and parts, but codes can be extracted and parts can be cloned. The real teeth in blocking repair comes from the law, not the tech. The company that makes McDonald's wildly unreliable McFlurry machines makes a fortune charging franchisees to fix these eternally broken appliances. When a third party threatened this racket by reverse-engineering the DRM that blocked independent repair, they got buried in legal threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/20/euthanize-rentier-enablers/#cold-war

Everybody loves this racket. In Poland, a team of security researchers at the OhMyHack conference just presented their teardown of the anti-repair features in NEWAG Impuls locomotives. NEWAG boobytrapped their trains to try and detect if they've been independently serviced, and to respond to any unauthorized repairs by bricking themselves:

https://mamot.fr/@[email protected]/111528162905209453

Poland is part of the EU, meaning that they are required to uphold the provisions of the 2001 EU Copyright Directive, including Article 6, which bans this kind of reverse-engineering. The researchers are planning to present their work again at the Chaos Communications Congress in Hamburg this month – Germany is also a party to the EUCD. The threat to researchers from presenting this work is real – but so is the threat to conferences that host them:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/researchers-face-legal-threats-over-sdmi-hack/

20 years ago, Chris Anderson told me that it was unrealistic to expect tech companies to refuse demands for DRM from the entertainment companies whose media they hoped to play. My argument – then and now – was that any tech company that sells you a gadget that can have its features revoked is defrauding you. You're paying for x, y and z – and if they are contractually required to remove x and y on demand, they are selling you something that you can't rely on, without making that clear to you.

But it's worse than that. When a tech company designs a device for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades, they invite both external and internal parties to demand those downgrades. Like Pavel Chekov says, a phaser on the bridge in Act I is going to go off by Act III. Selling a product that can be remotely, irreversibly, nonconsensually downgraded inevitably results in the worst person at the product-planning meeting proposing to do so. The fact that there are no penalties for doing so makes it impossible for the better people in that meeting to win the ensuing argument, leading to the moral injury of seeing a product you care about reduced to a pile of shit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

But even if everyone at that table is a swell egg who wouldn't dream of enshittifying the product, the existence of a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature makes the product vulnerable to external actors who will demand that it be used. Back in 2022, Adobe informed its customers that it had lost its deal to include Pantone colors in Photoshop, Illustrator and other "software as a service" packages. As a result, users would now have to start paying a monthly fee to see their own, completed images. Fail to pay the fee and all the Pantone-coded pixels in your artwork would just show up as black:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process

Adobe blamed this on Pantone, and there was lots of speculation about what had happened. Had Pantone jacked up its price to Adobe, so Adobe passed the price on to its users in the hopes of embarrassing Pantone? Who knows? Who can know? That's the point: you invested in Photoshop, you spent money and time creating images with it, but you have no way to know whether or how you'll be able to access those images in the future. Those terms can change at any time, and if you don't like it, you can go fuck yourself.

These companies are all run by CEOs who got their MBAs at Darth Vader University, where the first lesson is "I have altered the deal, pray I don't alter it further." Adobe chose to design its software so it would be vulnerable to this kind of demand, and then its customers paid for that choice. Sure, Pantone are dicks, but this is Adobe's fault. They stuck a KICK ME sign to your back, and Pantone obliged.

This keeps happening and it's gonna keep happening. Last week, Playstation owners who'd bought (or "bought") Warner TV shows got messages telling them that Warner had walked away from its deal to sell videos through the Playstation store, and so all the videos they'd paid for were going to be deleted forever. They wouldn't even get refunds (to be clear, refunds would also be bullshit – when I was a bookseller, I didn't get to break into your house and steal the books I'd sold you, not even if I left some cash on your kitchen table).

Sure, Warner is an unbelievably shitty company run by the single most guillotineable executive in all of Southern California, the loathsome David Zaslav, who oversaw the merger of Warner with Discovery. Zaslav is the creep who figured out that he could make more money cancelling completed movies and TV shows and taking a tax writeoff than he stood to make by releasing them:

https://aftermath.site/there-is-no-piracy-without-ownership

Imagine putting years of your life into making a program – showing up on set at 5AM and leaving your kids to get their own breakfast, performing stunts that could maim or kill you, working 16-hour days during the acute phase of the covid pandemic and driving home in the night, only to have this absolute turd of a man delete the program before anyone could see it, forever, to get a minor tax advantage. Talk about moral injury!

But without Sony's complicity in designing a remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrade feature into the Playstation, Zaslav's war on art and creative workers would be limited to material that hadn't been released yet. Thanks to Sony's awful choices, David Zaslav can break into your house, steal your movies – and he doesn't even have to leave a twenty on your kitchen table.

The point here – the point I made 20 years ago to Chris Anderson – is that this is the foreseeable, inevitable result of designing devices for remote, irreversible, nonconsensual downgrades. Anyone who was paying attention should have figured that out in the GW Bush administration. Anyone who does this today? Absolute flaming garbage.

Sure, Zaslav deserves to be staked out over an anthill and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But save the next anthill for the Sony exec who shipped a product that would let Zaslav come into your home and rob you. That piece of shit knew what they were doing and they did it anyway. Fuck them. Sideways. With a brick.

Meanwhile, the studios keep making the case for stealing movies rather than paying for them. As Tyler James Hill wrote: "If buying isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing":

https://bsky.app/profile/tylerjameshill.bsky.social/post/3kflw2lvam42n

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/#tyler-james-hill

Image: Alan Levine (modified) https://pxhere.com/en/photo/218986

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

#pluralistic #playstation #sony #copyright #copyfight #drm #monopoly #enshittification #batgirl #road runner #financiazation #the end of ownership #ip

23K notes · View notes

lemondropsonice · 5 months

Text

Carry On Anniversary 2024 N°14 After the barn there was a bridge - SN: The end of the road

#spnedit #j2edit #supernatural #jared padalecki #jensen ackles #final anniversary day #imt #imt10 #the end of the road #j2 #they can't understand your magic wonderland

231 notes · View notes

therevereddead · 20 days

Text

#notable deaths #obituaries #deaths (obituaries)#in memoriam #obituary #literature #the sot weed factor #books #the end of the road #the floating opera

0 notes

whateverthewiz · 1 month

Text

#Nicholas Delort #The End of the Road #art #screenprint #black and white art

1 note · View note

ettawritesnstudies · 11 months

Text

WIP Intro

[Image ID: A digital painting of a crossroads with various road signs indicating route 1 south and milemarker 0, exit 0. It's night and there are dandelion puffs growing on the grass around the signs, with pine trees in the background. A ghost girl sits on top of the exit sign and blows a wish on one of the dandelion puffs. End Image ID]

The End of the Road

Category/Genre: New Adult Coming of Age / Paranormal, slow-burn friendship-> romance

Themes: road trips, leaving behind your hometown, the friends you know are transitory but you can't help but get attached to anyhow and the friends you make out of necessity that you can't help but feel you've outgrown, hauntings, ghosts and ghost towns, liminal spaces, the echos of grief, mental illness

Warnings: Death, mention of suicide, alcohol/drunk driving, smoking

POV: Dual 3rd person past tense

Status: Outlining, drafting through summer - autumn 2023

Synopsis:

Winnifred Armstrong barely eked out her degree from the community college while working retail at the local Walmart with the annoying people from her high school. Armed with a diploma and four summers worth of savings, she's determined to get away from her crazy family and this dead end town where everyone knows her name and everyone's asking what she's making of her life. She doesn't know the answer yet but she'll figure it out somewhere that's not here.

Henry Priceton recently graduated from a well known private school. He's trying to live up to all the expectations of his family and his community who see him as "the smart one who made it" but he's saddled with way too much student debt for a degree he kind of hates. Hey, it makes good money in a boring 9-5. He can figure out what he's doing with his life off the work clock once he gets out from under the thumb of his micromanaging parents.

When these old high school classmates both find jobs in a faraway city, their meddling parents decide it would be a great idea for them to share the cost of a moving van and drive their things out together. They get along, but they're not friends, and both hope to take turns driving and spend their breaks sleeping and listening to music through headphones. But as both the conversation and the road roll on underneath them, Winnie and Henry realize they both have ghosts they're trying to outrun. Will they be able to ditch what's haunting them before they reach the end of the road?

Ask if you want to be added to a taglist! Thank you @siarven for helping me develop this <3

#wip intro #the end of the road #etta's art #writeblr #if you see me projecting no you don't #ghosts #road trip wip #road trip #highway #traveling #coming of age

42 notes · View notes