#Volume Converter

[a2zconverter01]

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[dancingpieces]

So I'm doing a Skip Beat reread, and I'm entertaining myself my trying to make a timeline of how long it's been in the manga/around what date it is. I'm on volume 17 and I finally have the first solid dates since volume one where the had said the LME auditions were on Feb 17th!! I'm on the last chapter of volume 17 (ch 102) and we actually know it's 12/12! So it's taken 17 manga to make it 10 or 10 and a half months (I think the manga started early February based on the number of days mentioned in Vol 1).

I know from here it's gonna take way way more volumes to move far in the timeline, lol, but I'm really happy to be getting to where there are a lot more actual dates to work with, my numbering for figuring out the day it was on was getting real complicated, lol.

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Ollie Latch - The Young Convert - Education & Publications - 1976

[fluffydice]

Shoutout my lab partner who asked me how to convert grams to microliters then didn’t believe me when I said that you can’t. Babe tell me your weight in gallons

[shinybulbasaur]

gonna be a bitch for a second but "ohhh they're FINALLY teaching usamerican kids metric" 1. they've been teaching metric units in usamerican schools for decades because 2. they are the established common units of science that ALL equations are built around because 3. they're technically not metric units, they're SI (système international) which is the modern standardized form of metric and many units were redefined around standardizations that would allow for their use in these equations (for example, redefining a meter around the distance traveled by light in a set amount of time, or using kelvin rather than celsius). like yeah yeah it's funny to laugh at the usamericans using their weird measurements but if you're gonna act all high and mighty at least know your history

[clearly-ambiguous]

I have a sneaking suspicion that my coworkers do not realize that volumetric and weight measurements are not necessarily equitable, but it is far too late in this project to ask now

[onedatasoftwaresolutions]

How Data Analytics Enhances IoT Development for Smarter Business Solutions

[expanding-our-channel-lineup]

Why RVR School of Photography is Your Gateway to a Thriving Photography Career

Introduction: Photography as a Career There is a huge market gap and in this gap the art of photography career has come up from being just a hobby to a fully fledged profession. Apart from media and advertisements, photography career  now have a significant opportunity in fashion and social media also. At the RVR school of photography, we focus on the development of such skills and taking enthusiastic photographers as our students, we convert them into professionals. Our students have already worked with TCS, Wipro, Times amongst others. This speaks volumes of our training and the changing perception of the employers towards our students.

1. The Growing Demand for Professional Photographers

It became quite apparent that there is an increased need for photographers not only for social functions or individual projects but rather for the e-commerce, media and fashion industries. As marketing experts seek to impress customers with great product photography, storytelling, and other visual elements, skilled photographers are in high demand. Demand for photographers has exploded virtually with the advent of the digital age. At the RVR school of photography, we take the students through the necessary training, which will encourage  them to built their photography career with all the needs to succeed as photographers in the current market situation.

2. Why Choose RVR School of Photography?

At RVR, we don’t only teach photography; we build photography career. This is what makes us unique:

Comprehensive Curriculum: In our courses, we start with the basics of photography and proceed to advanced editing, lighting, and image processing.

Industry Trained Faculty: Our teachers have more than just teaching as they have been active photographers themselves and know what it means to be in the profession.

Practice: Theory is not enough for us. The program has lots of practical sessions for the learners to further their skills and techniques.

Career Counselling and Job Placement: RVR pays particular attention to all students. Many of our students have received jobs in the companies that qualified them.

3. Courses Offered at RVR School of Photography

Our programs target all  photographers to buit there photography career  at all levels. That’s new photographers who want to acquire basic skills and professional ones who wish to perfect their skills.

 Beginner Photography Course: Photography course for beginners covers the fundamentals how to hold and use a camera, basic light, composition, and how to take pictures. This is an appropriate course for everyone who has never taken a photograph; hence, this course provides a good base.

Advanced Photography Course: In our Advanced Course, some students are equipped with more advanced skills in low-light techniques, portrait photography, and image retouching so that they will be able to manage more difficult work and high quality tools.

Specialized Photography Courses: We have organized specialized courses, such as Fashion Photography, Landscape Photography, and Wedding Photography that let the students develop much interest in the specific field of their choice.

Editing and Post-Production: Our courses on editing and post-production concentrate on industry-recognized tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom, and other similar programs. In this digital age, editing techniques are indispensable in content creation, and our students are well trained in those techniques.

RVR School: Paving the Way to Photography Excellence and Shaping the Future of Creative TalentBy Simran

4. Photography Career: Gain Real-World Experience and Build a Stunning Portfolio

In the same mindset, it is quite safe to say that a photographer’s portfolio is their visual CV, one of the most vital components needed to utilize their expertise and up to clients and or employers. At RVR School of Photography, we believe having an impressive portfolio is of utmost importance especially when starting a career as a photographer. 

Students of RVR have opportunities to participate in real product photoshoots, fashion editorials, etc, which are supervised by the instructors. These projects not only sharpen their practical skills but also prepare students to work in the real world where they have to please people, and complete the tasks given to them on time.

Such projects are led by instructors who are experienced practitioners in the industry and have mentored the students themselves through projects. They help the students with their feedback and how to use techniques that will help the students create an artistic identity that is uniquely theirs.

Also we encourage active learning through portfolios and conduct regular practice in fine al placement where students are given constructive feedback on their work. Feedback always highlights where the student is strong and where the student has room for growth so that the end product is always balance and professional.

5. RVR School of Photography Alumni Success Stories

Our students have to achieve great milestones by getting jobs in well-known companies such as TCS, WIPRO, TIMES, et cetera. These milestones achieved by some of our students bring glory to our school and prove that the training we provide has immense value in the field.

Some of our alumni who have been successful are:

Ravi Sharma: Worked with times as a corporate photographer and covered events of the high management.

Sneha Kapoor: Worked in the TCS marketing team and was involved in the creation of visuals for the campaigns.

Arjun Mehta: Worked as a fashion photographer in Wipro showcasing their apparel lines in the most appealing way.

These stories inspire our students and demonstrate the quality of training they receive at RVR.

6. Photography Career Skills You’ll Master at RVR School of Photography

The skills our students achieve go beyond the basics:

Mastering Composition: Composing a frame that tells a story with a thousand visual elements.

Lighting Techniques: Using natural and artificial lighting for accentuation and photography.

Editing Mastery: Students’ skills with tools such as Adobe Photoshop, Light room, and others.

Client Management: How to handle clients and their expectations and how to put them to fruition.

7. photography Career Paths After Completing a Photography Course

A degree from RVR School of Photography helps in getting various types of jobs:

Corporate Photographer: Photograph brand images, teams, events.

Fashion Photographer: Work with Brands, models, and designers.

Freelance Photographer: Own Photography business.

Media Photographer: Creative visual images for stories for newspapers, magazines.

With our guidance, students can tailor their skills to the path that suits them best.

8. How RVR School of Photography Supports Your photography Career

We don’t stop with the coursework only, it doesn’t end there. We help them to bulit their photography career:

Placements: With a reach over leading employers like TCS, Wipro and Times. We place students at the best jobs available. TCS, Wipro and Times

Networking Events: We provide events to the students where they meet potential employers and industry leaders (Photography).

Career Counseling: Counseling for photography career selection, for portfolio development, for interview skills etc.

9. Why Photography is a Lucrative Career Choice

Modern-day photography has reached unbelievable heights and most people have accepted it as an industry that encompasses numerous photography career opportunities. Photography career is self-employment, creativity and self actualization all in one package.

Consistently Develops:There is no industry today that does not have specialization in photography career. Companies reach out to professional photographers in other sectors such as marketing, advertising, content creation and social media. The same expertise is requested for events such as weddings, business meetings or product launches. It creates a continuous search for new talented professionals in detail work and creative design.

Different photography Career Opportunities:Several professional paths are available even when one has selected the field of phototgraphy. People of all skills and preferences: travel, fashion, wildlife, food, event and much more can all find their field in photography. Freelancers have freedom to select jobs, individuals focusing on photography career in occupations have a fixed salary and constant work.

Financial Stability and Growth:Would you consider photography career as an art or a business? For any professional photographer, it’s both. On the one hand, established photographers can offer a large range of services as well as find themselves to have long-term relationships with their clients. For instance, wedding photographers have good returns in each event during the busy season. On the other hand, commercial photographers working for top companies can receive good commissions on their projects as well.

Freelance Freedom:If you are one of those people that does not like having a boss, freelancing enables you to live a different lifestyle. A photographer who works on a one-off basis gets to select what project to work on, when to work, and how to sell themselves. This path of employment also means you can work with brands from a different country which means other markets always exist.

10. How to Apply to RVR School of Photography

Do you want to begin your photography career? The application to RVR is straightforward and needs no additional stress:

Look at our Site:  RVR SCHOOL OF PHOTOGRAPHY

Select the Desired Course: Review the courses we offer and select the course you want.

Utilize the Application to Apply: Complete the provided form with the required information.

Meet Our Team For An Interview: Here we evaluate your interest in pursuing photography career and your vision.

Our admissions team is here to help you through each step.

Conclusion: Start Your Photography Career with RVR School of Photography

Photography is not simply a play of light and chemistry, but rather a story, an imagination, and a moment that strikes the heart of many. A photography career is endless since it can either be an exploration of artistic vision or a stable and rewarding profession. RVR School of Photography offers world-class training that combines sound theoretical knowledge with practical experience to make sure our students are industry-ready from day one.

Our professional mentorship builds students’ technical abilities and the assurance that they can succeed in a competitive marketplace. We help them create a solid portfolio, which is the foundation of every successful Registrant photographer, and we prepare them for different photography career paths from freelancing to working with renowned companies.

Whether you aspire to be a fashion photographer, specialize in stunning landscapes, or focus on corporate and media photography, RVR School of Photography is the best starting point. Our graduates speak volumes about the quality of education we offer, as many have attained outstanding milestones in their photography career.

Keep your passion for photography as a hobby, or let it change your life. RVR School of Photography provides tailored mentoring, world-class infrastructure, and an energetic learning environment to help you make creative dreams a successful photography career.

So what are you waiting for? Take action today, and allow us to guide you in unlocking your potential and creating an enjoyable career in photography. Become a student at RVR School of Photography, and see your passion become a successful professio

[phantom-z0ne]

Kingdom Come: 145 words written

The revenge has begun and promises are fulfilled :)

Last sentence(s) written:

The spirits joined the procession once they were finished, beelining for their main target, though they didn't hesitate to quickly yet violently pick off any who worked for him with their bare hands.

[sexhaver]

definitely my favorite part of buying toilet paper and paper towels is the Myst-like puzzle game where every package's total amount of Usable Paper Product is expressed not in terms of volume or surface area but instead as a relative expression of how many times more paper is contained in this product than some other product, which itself defines its capacity in relation to others, and so on down the line into infinity. feels like a Blue Prince scenario where i need to press a series of hidden buttons to reveal a breakable wall with a hint behind it that serves as a cipher allowing me to finally convert the capacity of Bounty Double Plus Rolls into square meters, which, when expressed to enough significant digits and interpreted as longitude and latitude, conveys the exact location where i will eventually die

[yandere-daydreams]

Title: The Freeze Incentive.

Pairing: Yandere!BatFam x Reader (DC).

Word Count: 6.8k.

TW: Non/Con, Fem!Reader, Kidnapping + Prolonged Imprisonment, Mentions of Past Suicide Attempts, Lasting Suicidal Ideation, Age Gap (Reader is Mid-Twenties, Bruce is Late Forties), Obsessive Behavior, Masturbation, and Gratuitous Pseudo-Incest. DEAD DOVE: DO NOT EAT.

[Part One] [Part Two] [Part Three]

You were released from the hospital after forty-eight hours exactly. Bruce never ate, never slept, never left your side. You didn’t speak to him, but he didn’t force you to.

His hell spawn kept their distance. Once, the first time you fell asleep, you thought you might’ve seen Cassandra in the doorway as you drifted off, but it couldn’t have been her. Even she wasn’t slippery enough to come and go under the vigilant radar of your new, raging paranoia.

By hour forty-nine, you were being shepherded into an apartment on the opposite side of Gotham. “The walls and windows are bullet-proof,” Bruce explained, as you shuffled through a long, narrow entryway. There were two doors – both made out of a brilliantly silver, blindingly reflective metal and requiring some combination of facial recognition, fingerprint scan, and physical keys to unlock. That apocalyptic level of security might’ve made you feel a little more safe if you hadn’t already known that the people you were afraid most of would be able to come and go as they pleased.

“The ventilation system is on its own rig, and there are cameras in every room – dormant. Just raise your voice above a normal speaking volume if you want to activate them.”

You coughed out a laugh. “Why? Trying to get baby’s first assault on film?”

Bruce didn’t answer. Your tour ended abruptly, and he held you in a vice-grip against his chest as he made up for two days’ worth of sleep.

The penthouse was, for lack of a better point of comparison, not all that you’d imagined it would be. Floor to ceiling windows encircled the living room, providing an unending bird’s eye view of the city. The second guest bedroom had been converted into a makeshift art studio, stocked with materials for every hobby you’d ever had and most that you hadn’t. All the bedsheets were in your favorite color and all the mounted art was to your tastes and there was a poster of your favorite local band in the kitchen – an design they’d only sold once at a concert that’d happened years before you discovered them. But, all the walls were painted an unfeeling shade of off-white, and the balcony door had been sealed shut, and the band poster had been framed – locked behind glass and hung with a perfectionist’s precision.

You would’ve used glue-dots.

You had the poor thing pinned to a countertop, butterknife in-hand as you tried to pry it out of its entrapments, when you noticed Tim.

Dark and lanky, looming in the corner of your vision. He was dressed in his civilian clothes – all over-sized pullovers and ill-fitting jeans. He smiled when you glanced over your shoulder, but his expression fell as you whipped around, holding out your butterknife like it was ex-fucking-calibur.

“Bruce!” You called into the penthouse, keeping your back pressed against the edge of the counter.

“There was a fire in the warehouse district. We traded posts early.”

Of course. You weren’t sure why you’d expected him to say goodbye. “Touch me and I’ll slit my own throat.”

“With that?” He laughed, the noise airy. “We had the edges of the cutlery dulled. Anything sharp enough to break skin is—” Tim cut himself off, shrugging. “You’ll have to ask, if there’s anything you want to use. Standing flight-risk and all.”

God. If you’d known trying to kill yourself would cause this many problems, you would’ve made sure to get it right the first time.

Tim took half a step closer. You squared your shoulders.

“I’ll hang myself with the bedsheets.”

“Tear-away. They can’t hold anything heavier than fifty pounds.”

“I’ll drink boiling water.”

“The stove is bioencrypted. And the microwave. And the kettle.” Tim smiled apologetically. “I’m not going to do anything, I promise. The others, they’re a little—” Another abrupt pause, this one followed by a dry swallow. You wondered if Bruce had briefed him on what to say to you, or if his siblings had been the one to put a script together. Your little stunt probably didn’t help with that, either. Proving you could get hurt put the idea of protecting you into their minds. It gave them an excuse to treat you like something fragile, something that didn’t know any better. The narrative could be rewritten, their fixations tailored to better fit the new angle. You wondered if the Oedipus complex of it all would crack and give way under the added pressure, but ultimately decided not to hope for silver linings in rock-bottom scenarios.

“—overzealous,” Tim finished, finally. “I get it, though. You need your space. I’m just here to keep an eye on you.”

You scowled, wearily. “That doesn’t sound like giving me space.”

“Give me a chance.” His grin brightened. “You won’t even know I’m here.”

You were always going to try and pretend he wasn’t, obviously. That didn’t necessarily mean he’d make it easy.

You kept the butterknife with you, even if it was too blunt to puncture and too small to inflict substantial trauma. Never more than thirty feet away, Tim followed after you as you wandered through the apartment, trying to pass the time without letting your guard down. You flipped through the clothes overflowing from your new, Bruce-tailored closet. Tim watched. You sat in front of a window, trying to make out the world miles below. Tim watched. You tried your hand at embroidery. Tim cringed every time you pressed the needle into fabric, and he watched.

You were pretending to read a book (a low stakes romance, more fluff than substance, something Bruce would’ve picked out with distraction in mind) when Tim broke the tense silence.

“You’re supposed to take a shower, now.”

You eyed him wearily. “You know I'm almost a decade older than you, right?”

He grinned, his face going a telling shade of pink. Okay, that was on you, but still – gross.

“Whatever.” The master bath seemed the most private, the most tucked-away, so you fled in that direction. You were a few inches away from slamming the door shut when Tim’s hand caught the edge, pushing it open despite your best attempts to stop him.

“Bruce’s orders,” he explained, shrugging. Like that made up for the red now steadily creeping towards his ears, the way his breathing seemed to hitch as he stepped inside and closed the door behind him. Like he’d ever listened to Bruce a day in his life. “You have to understand why he’d be touchy about bathrooms.”

The anger was hot, thick, and immediate. You didn’t have to understand anything. It’d been your body folded up and lifeless on the tile floor. All he’d done was call the ambulance.

“Either you leave or we spend the night here.” You crossed your arms over your chest. “Get out.”

Tim chuckled. “You’re being so stubborn.”

“Out.”

“Take your time.” He propped his back against the door. “I’m not going anywhere. We have all day, literally.”

Butterknife be damned. You were going to kill him with your bare hands.

You took a long moment, evaluating your options. Tim had always ranked on the lower side of your danger scale – creepy and perverted, but too buttoned-up and close to Bruce to ever do anything more direct than stealing your panties or planting mics in your bedroom. Their new arrangement would change things, sure, but Bruce’s ongoing denial that kids were here to do anything but protect you seemed to have a dampening effect, keeping the scales from tilting quite as dramatically as they might’ve, otherwise.

You were also, undeniably, scared. Scared of testing the waters so quickly, scared of finding out how Bruce would handle disobedience, scared of who might be taking over after Tim. You pictured Cas, undressing you with care, then Jason, smile cutting into your throat as he forced you under freezing cold water. Tim wasn’t good, but he was preferable. The lesser of many, many evils.

“Face the wall. With a towel over your head.” Tim’s smile quirked, but he complied. You waited until he was fully turned towards the door, pitch-black fabric blocking his peripheral, to go on. “Bruce has every room bugged. If I scream, he’ll be here in minutes.”

A lie, but a fair one. Tim nodded slowly, as if processing new information. Bruce must’ve been keeping a few of the penthouse’s security measures to himself. Even he didn’t trust his kids when left to their own devices.

Getting undressed was the worst part. You were caught between the logical awareness that ripping off the Band-Aid would ultimately prove less painless and the gnawing instinct to cling to what might keep you safe for just a little longer. Forcing your conscious mind to a distance, you kept things military – water, soap, rinse, repeat – and let yourself think only of how thankful you were to finally wash off the hospital grime. You were only a minute or so away from being done when you heard something over the water’s rhythmic pattering. A clicking sound, except it was a little too wet, a little too off-beat. For a second, you were delusional enough to consider that one of the pipes in Bruce’s ten-trillion-dollar apartment might’ve sprung a leak.

Then, dread cold and hollow in your chest, you looked to Tim.

He wasn’t facing you. Thank God, he wasn’t facing you. What you could see of him like this, though the fogged glass of the shower stall, was bad enough. He was hunched over, his forehead pressed against the wood of the door. His left hand was planted at the same height while the right worked between his legs, moving in time with that awful, repetitive noise. The towel had fallen to his shoulders, but you could see that his eyes were clenched shut, like he was still trying not to violate your one boundary. In his mind, you were sure this didn’t count as an overstep.

Vaguely, you remembered Stephanie saying something about Tim being the voyeur type. You wondered if the fact that he wasn’t technically looking made this any better.

Your original goal was immediately forgotten. You stayed where you were until the water went cold, until you could hear Tim’s strained breathing and see white dripping from his hand. You waited for him to clean himself up before moving on to the salvage – towel, clothes, etc. You kept your eyes low, your lips pursed, but Tim wasn’t as stand-offish. He orbited around you as you shrugged open the bathroom door and stepped out, his voice chipper. Giddy. “Feeling better?”

“When’s Bruce coming back?”

“Can’t be sure. His schedule’s the hardest to pin down.” He rested a hand on your shoulder by way of apology. Your skin crawled. “Barbara has the next shift.”

You mumbled something affirmative. Still fully dressed, you crawled into bed and pulled the sheets over your head.

Tim watched.

~

You were right. Bruce’s insistence on the pretense of deniability put the others on-guard, all reluctant to be the one to condemn their father’s favorite lamb to death.

Some were worse than others. Barbara let you watch a season’s worth of some perfectly generic, perfectly mindless reality T.V. dating show in one sitting, only occasionally looking up from her laptop and paperwork to yell at the screen on your behalf. Cas pawed at your tits through your shirt while cuddling until you were too sore to lay on your chest. Damian took advantage of the art studio to paint a terribly forlorn, but relatively flattering portrait of you while you struggled with a crochet hook. Stephanie had you try on three shopping bag’s worth of lingerie, snapping pictures all the while. Kate told you every piece of gossip she’d picked up during Gotham’s social season. Jason stayed away, which was the worst thing he could’ve done. Even serial killers had the decency not to leave their victim’s corpses to the scavengers.

And Dick…

Dick let you out.

Never to go very far, never for very long, and always to somewhere mind-numbingly civilian - a café, or a boutique, or the nicer stretch of docks tourists tended to flock to in the summer. Like the rest, he’d established his own set of boundaries, as defined as they were irrational. He never talked about Bruce, to Tim, or any of the others. He kept his distance when you two were alone and held your hand when you weren’t. If you had to say anything, he said it for you. It was weird, but nothing you couldn’t live with. No – your fears were more abstract than that, more likely to take the form of ticking clocks than groping hands. Things were bad, now. You could live with that. You understood that.

You were just having trouble keeping yourself sane while you sat around, wasted time, and waited for things to get worse.

“Don’t like the view?”

Ah. You must’ve been lost in thought again. You glanced towards Dick, your head resting gingerly on his shoulder, then outward, to the grassy plains of the local park. It was a good day (or Gotham, at least) so you weren’t entirely alone. Couples jogged. Families picnicked. Children played. It might’ve been nice if Dick hadn’t decided that you’d spend the day rooted to a bench on the outskirts, a half-eaten cup of ice cream melting to your side, his arms slung over the backrest and some part of you always making contact with some part of him. So he could be sure you didn’t run, he’d claimed. As if any amount of distance would be enough to get you away from him.

“Just wondering why you’re doing this.”

He chuckled. “What do you mean?”

“Taking me outside. Making me look at happy, smiling people.” Delaying the inevitable. Giving you false hope. “It’s a little mean, considering I’m just going to be rotting again in a couple hours.”

“Better than leaving you locked up all day, right?”

You scuffed your heel into the dirt. Dainty kitten heels – nothing you’d ever been able to run in. “I guess the fresh air is nice. And the lack of security cameras.”

At that, Dick cringed. You were still testing for sore spots, trying to find holes in the fabric that held your captors together, less as part of some future plan and more to keep yourself busy. Bruce’s near-constant invasions of your privacy was, rather transparently, one of Dick’s. “Tell me he’s not recording you.”

“He’s not supposed to be,” you sighed. “I think Stephanie might’ve gotten into the system, though. She’s been on an amateur photography kick.”

It was his turn to sigh, to groan, to let his head collapse onto your shoulder. His arm found its way around you, hauling you that much closer to his chest. “…I don’t like it,” he admitted, his reluctance layered on so thickly, it was hard to believe he didn’t choke. “You know I don’t like it, right?”

“How the others treat me?”

“That they know you exist.” Another groan. You kept your eyes trained straight ahead. “B told you I was the first, right. I… I think I’m always the first. He knows I can handle the deep-end.” And then, more sentimentally, “He knew I’d fall in love with you at first sight.”

Hands curled into fists. Eyes forced open. You couldn’t look at him. You couldn’t blink. “Please don’t say things like that.”

“But it’s true. I used to let myself into your apartment at night – you always left the door unlocked. And remember the last time you went out with your coworkers?” You did. One minute, you’d been at the dive-bar closest to your office, happily accepting another round of shots bought on the company card, and the next, you’d been waking up in your own bed, undressed and hung over. You’d figured you’d managed to get yourself home despite blacking out, but the way Dick was grinning against your throat suggested otherwise. “It should’ve been like that all the time. Just you and me – taking care of each other.”

You couldn’t blink. You couldn’t blink. You’d fall apart the second your eyes closed, and you couldn’t keep letting them break you like that.

“B’s mind works on a switch,” Dick explained. “He can turn it off whenever he wants to, but I’m not like that. I can’t decide when not to love you.” He paused, smirked. “Even if you could be a little nicer to me, some—”

“Help me escape.”

The sound of your own voice caught you off-guard. Dick jolted against you, raising his head, equally surprised. Your face suddenly felt warm, and your heart was beating too quickly. It was by someone else’s – someone stronger, someone dumber - volition that you went on, digging your grave that much deeper. “If you hate the way I’m treated, if you think you love me, then help me leave. I’ll go wherever you want to, I just—” The air hitched in your throat. “You know I can’t stay here, any longer.”

For a second, Dick didn’t respond. For a second, he stayed there, pressed against you, all-but unmoving.

Then, he straightened and laughed, taking your hand in his. He squeezed gently, like he was trying to show you that he cared. Like he loved you.

“Bruce’s shift is coming up. We should get you home, right?”

You let your eyes fall to the ground. Not blinking hadn’t helped – you could feel tears forming in the corner of your eyes, regardless.

“Right.”

~

It rained on your walk back, despite the clear sky. Neither of you had brought an umbrella, and the downpour was too sudden to seek cover, so you were soaked by the time you reached the apartment. The artificial chill clung to you like a second skin, turning your body to shell hostile to its contents. In hindsight, you probably should’ve taken it as an omen of things to come. Or, maybe you just should’ve expected calamity in general – predicted or otherwise.

You were late, too. Bruce was already there by the time you finally made it through that suffocating entryway – sitting on the foot of your bed, a suit jacket hung over his knee and the first few buttons of his collar undone. With a nod by way of acknowledgement, you moved to scurry past him and find something dryer to wear, but he caught your wrist on the way by. “Can you stay for a second, honey?”

Absolutely not. No way in hell. You’d rather die. “…I guess so.”

There was a gentle squeeze by way of gratitude, then he turned to Dick. “Be honest with me. Have any of you touched her?”

Dread formed a bottomless, pitch-black well in your chest. Even Dick seemed reluctant to answer – setting his jaw and squaring his shoulders. Making himself into one of Bruce’s soldiers, rather than his son. “No. Not like that.” He swallowed. “Not since Jason.”

“Good. I was hoping we could talk, first.” With his free hand, he waved Dick closer. Silent and unquestioning, Dick obeyed.

The blocking of your little scene was awkward. You were too close to Bruce and Dick was too close to you while the distance between them was left deliberately more vast. Dick didn’t touch you. He never would, not with Bruce watching, and Bruce seemed to know that. “It’s alright,” he said, with the same stoicism he might’ve showed to a wild, rampaging animal. “Go on. I want to see how you handle it – if you can handle it.”

Dick glowered. “This isn’t something you can train out of me, old man.”

“I’m not trying to.” You made a half-hearted effort to pull your hand out of Bruce’s hold. His grip only tightened, in response. “Show me that you know how to put your hands on something without breaking it.”

There was a second’s worth of hesitation, but not much longer. One of Dick’s hands wrapped around your forearm, replacing Bruce’s, while the other caught your chin. He kissed you – messy, sudden, hard – and you wondered if you really did die on the bathroom floor that night, and this was your own special brand of hell.

When Dick came up for air, there was no pretense of consent, no pause taken to assess you for the mutuality Bruce always seemed so desperate for. His lips pressed into the corner of your mouth, then your jaw, then the corner of your throat – lingering there while his hands dropped to your waist, pawing at the fabric of your sundress. On instinct, you thrashed, shoved at his chest, dug your claws into his chest. Dick only laughed, pulling you that much closer against him. “C’mon, sweetheart, we’re just making up for lost time,” he mumbled into your ear, his breath warm and tacky against your skin. “You remember what I said last time, right? It’s just you and me – you don’t have to think about anybody else.”

“I don’t even want to think about you, little prick complex-having fucking bast---” Your hissed insults were cut off by Dick’s hands on your hips, by your feet suddenly being torn from the ground as he half-lifted, half-threw you onto the bed. The collision was rough, sudden, knocking the air out of your lungs and giving Dick time to get on top of you. Two fists found the collar of your dress and tore, cold air rushing over your chest, your navel, your legs. You tried not to think about the technicalities of it – how planned it seemed, how little hesitation there was, how his grin stretched wider with each inch of mutilated fabric. Your mind was more focused on broader concepts – the all-encompassing hateyou felt for both of them, the acid sitting heavy and thick on your tongue. The fact that you’d already showed Bruce what you do if your life ever turned from unpleasant to unbearable, and the haunting awareness that he was sitting there and watching it happen again, this time from the comfort of his own bedroom.

Dick wasn’t helping. You hadn’t expected him to, but there was still a fresh sort of sting to the feeling of his mouth on your neck, to the sound of his voice in your ear. “So pretty,” he muttered, cupping your cunt through your panties. You lashed out at random, scratching at his chest, but Dick only chuckled, leaned into your assault as if he could pretend it was the sweetest, most saccharine form of affection. “So perfect, and all mine. Could’ve been doing this months ago, in a better world. Would’ve, if I had it my way.”

His thumb pressed harsh circles into your clit, made coarser by satin fabric. You let out a miserable whine, and Bruce clicked his tongue. “Too rough. She’ll bruise.” He moved closer to the side of the bed. “Use your mouth. She prefers it.”

Dick nipped at curve of your throat – another pitchy, humiliating sound. “I don’t hear any complaints.”

“Have I ever told you that, when I first brought you home, Alfred suggested having you neutered? Less hormones that way. A smoother rebellious phase, when you hit teens.” He drummed his fingers against his knee. “I wonder if it’s too late to reconsider the offer.”

Dick grumbled, but the message was clear enough. With one more lingering kiss, he was on his stomach between your legs, head buried between your thighs and tongue drawing shapes into the seat of your panties. You tried to keep your eyes shut, to imagine you were anywhere else, and when that failed to blur the images of claustrophobic car interiors or stop Dick from pulling the now-soaked fabric to the side, you went rigid and tried to sit up. Emphasis on tried. Bruce was already there, of course, holding your shoulders, easing you back down. He always seemed to be at your beck and call when you didn’t want his help.

He wasn’t smiling. You could still feel Dick’s as he ground the bridge of his nose into your clit, but Bruce wasn’t smiling. His gaze bore into your expression appraisingly, occasionally flitting to Dick to make sure his grip was still loose, his teeth kept behind lips. It took seconds for him to break, and even then, the extent of his falter was a sigh, a new set of crow’s feet on the corners of his eyes as he leaned down, pressing his lips into your forehead. “You’ll be the death of me,” he muttered, pulling away. As if you cared. As if he hadn’t already been yours. “Keep that pace. She’s getting closer.”

You weren’t. You really, really weren’t. But, you’d gotten so used to Bruce touching you every minute of every day, and you hadn’t even touched yourself in weeks, and Dick was moaning unabashedly as he fucked his tongue into your cunt – the reverberation steady and pulsing. You didn’t let yourself cum. You wouldn’t let yourself cum, but your thighs kept trying to shut around Dick’s head, and your skin felt like it was on the verge of melting away, and Bruce wouldn’t stop looking at you with the same slight, softened expression he put on whenever you tripped over your own feet or cried after a spanking. Dick’s fingertips bit into the plush of your thighs, and Bruce’s hand came up to cup your cheek. You tried to push him away, but even lifting your arms off of the mattress felt like a waste of energy. You wondered if playing dead would be more effective, would make them stop. You knew it wouldn’t. It hadn’t the first time.

“So beautiful,” he mumbled, leaning down to kiss you. His lips were chapped, and his teeth scraped against your bottom lip too roughly, too clumsily. “And so generous, too. I always hoped you and the kids would get along but—” He paused, chuckled. “It might’ve gotten a little out of hand.”

You tried to open your mouth, to tell him he and his hoard of orphaned sex fiends could go to hell, but all that made it past your lips was a cracked, trembling sob. Bruce hushed you with a low coo, calloused fingers carding through your hair. “Daddy’s right here, honey. Just lie back and bear with me for a little longer, alright?”

As if you were having a tooth pulled. As if his oldest son didn’t have his head buried between your thighs, as if he wasn’t tracing his own name into your cunt over and over and over again. The flat of his tongue ran over your pussy, your clit, and with a stifled gasp, you were pushed over the edge, sent plummeting into an abyss of heat and tension and bright, white lights. Dick nursed you through your orgasm lovingly, but hastily, and Bruce turned his attention away from you to ruffle Dick’s hair. You tried not to linger on the gesture longer than you absolutely had to.

Eventually, Bruce moved aside, and Dick was on top of you again, his chest pressing into yours as he rushed to pull his shirt over his head, to undress in a way you hadn’t been given the choice to. You thought about calling out for Bruce, reaching for him, begging him to make it stop, but you were really too old to be entertaining fantasies. He’d already told you what you needed to do: lie there, shut up, and take it.

Dick wasn’t so pragmatic. He pushed a long, open-mouthed kiss into the side of your neck, sucking and biting until you could be sure that you’d wear the bruise for weeks. You felt something hot and blunt slot against your entrance, but did your best to pretend it was only your imagination.

The contact was too much, too hot, too stifling. Dick’s tongue ran over your cheek, then he dipped lower – hiding his face in the crook of your neck. “I love you.” And then, again, like there was a quantity of desperation that would make you believe him, “I love you.”

He might’ve believed it. You almost did, but then hips were grating against yours, his cock thrusting into you, and suddenly, you weren’t in a state to believe in love at all.

~

It was dark by the time you were allowed to leave the bedroom. Bruce insisted on a long, well-monitored bath and Dick held you against his chest like he was afraid you might be taken away from him, but eventually, Bruce took a call from Barbara and Dick fell into a deep enough sleep to make slipping away something more than a delusional, escapist fantasy.

Once free, you made your way to the kitchen, tore the framed band poster off the wall, and smashed it against the tile floor until the glass shattered. Dick found you less than a minute later, trying to pick up a few of the larger pieces with your bare hands.

He was still grinning. The expression seemed more off-kilter jagged than it should’ve been in the dim light, more patronizing as he lifted you onto the counter, checking your hands over for hairline cuts or other micro-injuries before squeezing them in his. “Stay right here. I’ll get something to clean up with, and—” His eyes moved from your hands to your face, and his voice cut out abruptly. “You’re so perfect,” he sighed, leaning down to press his lips into the apex of your wrist. “Let’s do it.”

Something sharp and hot stabbed into the back of your throat. More out of self-preservation than curiosity, you asked, “…do what?”

“Leave. Run. Get out of here.” Another kiss, this one to the base of your ring finger. It wasn’t hard to picture what kind of life he was imagining for you. “I’ll get a new place in Bludhaven. You’ll lie low for a little while. We’ll be together.”

You grit your teeth. Bruce and his ilk weren’t the type to play mind games with you, but only the most idiotic man you’d ever met, so deeply entrenched in his own delusions that there was no hope of ever dragging him back to the surface again, would’ve believed you had any love in your heart for him after you’d called him so many awful names. After you’d spent hours practically catatonic in his arms. After tonight.

Thankfully, the most idiotic, delusional man you’d ever met was standing in front of you right now. Little miracles, you guessed.

“You make me so happy, Dick.” You ran your fingers through his hair, and he melted into your palm. “It’s just – there’s one thing I’d like to do, first.”

“Anything. Whatever you want, I’ll do it.”

“I think I should talk to Jason.”

Immediately, Dick’s expression fell. “Why Jason?” 

“Just to tie off loose ends. Make sure I’m not leaving anything behind.” You forced yourself to smile, letting your head tilt to the side. “And then I’ll have the rest of my life to spend with you, right?”

You could practically see his eyes glazing over, the same way they had when he found you reading to Damian or chiding Duke for getting himself hurt. Your current reality immediately substituted for a glossier, more appealing replica – or, more appealing to Dick, at least.

“Right.” And then, with one last kiss pressed into your knuckles, “I love you.”

For once, the words didn’t taste so bitter on your tongue.

Dick was a lot of things, but he wasn’t a liar. Bruce clung to you for the next few days – monitoring your diet, watching you sleep, fucking you with more care and more fervor than he ever had before. When he was forced to leave, he held you up until the point he absolutely had to go, then spent another few precious seconds promising Tim would take his place in twenty minutes. That didn’t matter, though. Jason was there in five.

“I love you.”

~

You found him in the living room. He’d come through the balcony, left the door ajar and everything. A handgun was strapped to his thigh, and his helmet sat on his knee. He’d never worn it around you, not so far as you could remember.

Ever the coward, he left it up to you to break the silence. That was fair, in a way. You were the one who wanted to talk.

“Hi.”

“Hey.”

“You look like shit.”

He rubbed one of the dark, sunken circles under his eyes with the back of his hand. “B can’t keep us all trapped inside and sedated. Some of us have to be outdoor dogs.”

“Guess so.” You let a measured beat pass, then asked, “Wanna get out of here?”

There was a twitch at the corner of his lips, a spark of something familiar. By the time Tim was due to arrive, you were on the back of a black and red motorcycle, miles away from the nearest sky-scrapper.

Jason’s apartment was just how you remembered it – albeit, slightly less intimidating in daylight. Bloody clothes and dented body armor laid over couches and cluttered and tables. Drawers filled with bullet casing and pocketknives sat open, on display, while anything comforting or sentimental remained hidden in safes or behind closed doors. His corkboard had gained a few more pictures, and in the corner, there were new sketches of Dick and Bruce. They looked recent.

Steering clear of the makeshift bedroom, you collapsed onto a worn leather couch, sinking into the beaten cushions and savoring the feeling of a well-loved piece of furniture. Jason skirted around you, never lingering, never edging too close. You followed his erratic pacing in the corner of your eyes while you spoke.

“You haven’t visited me.”

One step forward, two back. Both hands shoved into pockets. “I know. I’m sorry.”

“You should be. I’ve been bored to tears.” A pause, a breath of a laugh. “I didn’t realize how much I relied on you, back at the manor. The only people I can talk to now are either in on it or completely oblivious. I’m pretty sure Damian thinks I’ve driven his father insane.”

“He was like that before he met you.” A lap around the couch, then to the nearest window. “They all were. Dick can’t stand being along and Tim would jerk off to a cardboard box if it looked at him the right way.”

“It’s the girls now, too. I think Steph’s just having fun, but Cas…” You trailed off, shaking your head. “I feel a little bad for her. I mean – she’s so young, and she’s already been through so much. It’s hard to blame her for taking after a marathon of bad examples.”

That was enough to have Jason turning on his heel, making a beeline for the front door. You caught his wrist as he passed by. “Slow down. You’re acting like the building’s on fire.”

“Sorry, I just—”

You squeezed, and he sucked in a harsh breath, shutting his eyes. You did your best to keep your voice light, gentle. “When was the last time you got any sleep, Jason?”

“It’s been—” He opened his eyes, his gaze landing on you before quickly moving away. The answer was obvious enough. “—a while.”

“C’mon, Jay. You can’t live like this.” You tugged on his hand. “Why don’t you lay down for a few minutes? I don’t want to watch you fall apart on me.”

He swallowed, his shoulders squaring. There was a moment of reluctance, of hesitation before he asked, “Can I…?”

It wasn’t hard to guess what he wanted, not with his eyes trained so intensely on your lap. Smiling, you nodded, and in an instant, he was on his knees, limp and clutching at your ankles as he laid his head over your thighs. The position was awkward – he was too stiff, too tall – but you tried to make the best of it, running your fingers through his hair. At least he’d asked, this time.

“I’m sorry.” And then, again, his voice raw enough to break, “I’m sorry. I thought they’d back off, or we’d run away together, or—”

“You didn’t want to run away with me.” With your free hand, you patted down your jacket pocket. “And that’s alright. You’re a part of a family. I was never going to ask you to leave them.”

You could practically feel him try to deny, try to say that if you ever asked, he would’ve in a heartbeat. In the end, though, it was all he could do to sigh, sinking further into you. “I love you.”

How many times had you heard that, lately? You tried to remember if Bruce had ever parroted the same phrase. “I love you too, Jason.”

Tucked inside, your fingertips brushed against something hard and jagged. You curled your hand around it. “Every day, I had to watch them pretend they felt the same way about you, watch you pretend to tolerate it. It was like having to rip my own heart out of my chest.”

A sharpened edge sliced into your palm, breaking the skin. You ignored it. “That must’ve been hell.”

“I shouldn’t complain. You had it worse. Obviously, you have it worse.” His nails bit into your calves. “I’ll kill them. If they’ve so much as looked at you, I’ll kill them.”

You hated it when they lied to you.

You couldn’t wait any longer – didn’t have a reason to. In one motion, you tore the long, ragged piece of glass out of your pocket and stabbed it into Jason’s shoulder.

You’d managed to hide it before Dick found you huddled over the broken frame, stowed it away on your person as soon as you realized Bruce was going to take his eyes off of you. Reflexively, Jason jerked back, clamoring for the gun on his waist, but he was staggered, caught off-guard, and you weren’t. Your fist was already curled around the grip, already dragging the weapon out of its holster and forcing the muzzle against his stomach. Your index finger rested on the trigger, the safety disabled, but you didn’t shoot.

“Please,” you whispered, instead, as Jason froze against you. “Don’t say anything, don’t stand – just back up. I don’t want to hurt you.”

Slowly, reluctantly, he did as he was told. Staying on his knees, he edged back, giving you enough space to push yourself to your feet. You kept the gun trained on his chest, never once turning away. His distraught expression had twisted into something more raw, something more angry. Not hateful, but hurt, betrayed. You knew the look well.

“Drop it, (Y/n). You don’t know what you’re doing.”

You tilted the barrel down, shut your eyes, and fired. There was a crash of deafening noise, the pure force of recoil, and then Jason’s muffled cursing. By the time you could bring yourself to look, he was  clutching his ankle, fresh blood seeping through his fingers. “I spent a lot of time with Alfred. I mean, a lot. Basically whenever I wasn’t on the verge of getting molested by you and your gang of traumatized fetishists.” You took a step backward, then another, inching your way to the door. Eventually, your back pressed into wood. “I know you keep cash on-hand – for when Bruce finally cuts you off. Slide it to me.”

“Or what? You’ll kill me?” His laugh was awful, barking, pained. “Go ahead, baby. I’ll finish the job myself if you leave me.”

He wouldn’t. Jason wasn’t that directly self-destructive, none of them were.

Thankfully, you’d always had a little more motivation.

The muzzle was hot against your skin where you pressed it into the underside of your jaw. Jason’s expression didn’t drop, but it changed, stilled, every thought save for those of preservation erased in a fraction of a second.

You didn’t have to make your demands twice. He rummaged one of the holsters on his belt, and then, a stack of hundred-dollar bills was lying at your feet, secured by a single band pulled taut. You let the gun drift from your jaw to your temple as you bent to pick it up, watching Jason all the while.

Finally, you grappled for the knob behind you, sliding deadbolts out of place and turning locks until you stood in an empty doorway. You were free to leave, free to go, but you lingered, keeping your eyes on Jason.

“If you ever really loved me,” you said, fighting to keep your voice even, your hand steady. “You won’t try to find me.”

He might’ve said something. He looked like he was going to, but you were already over the threshold. The door was shut before he could try to convince you to stay.

Once safe on the other side, you lowered the gun to your side, took a deep breath, and started to run.

[moasli786]

pdf zusammenfügen [ ABELSSOFT ]

pdf zusammenfügen [ ABELSSOFT ]

[teaboot]

Things about the metric system that confuse me

Why are there 16 parts to an inch. Like yeah it's divisible by 4 but decimals and percentages on a system based on 100 are so much easier to calculate than fractions.

What are those little sixteenths called

Why don't you have millimeters. What happens if you need to measure something smaller than 1/16th of an inch. Why is your smallest area measurement the length of my fucking thumb

BECAUSE of your dumb inches and sixteenth and fractions, nothing else makes any fucking sense to remember. What's an inch? 16 little notches. What's a foot? 12 inches. What's a mile? 5,280. How the FUCK does anyone remember that. You know what's easy to remember? 10 millimeters are 1 centimeter. Do you know what centimeter means? 1/100th of a meter. You know how many of them are in a meter? 100. Easy shit

Okay this one is at Imperial but whose tablespoon is a tablespoon based off. Why are tablespoons and teaspoons both distinct measurements, they're fucking spoons. They're almost the fucking same. Like if you had "inches" and "binches" and binches were for no reason at all 1/42nd smaller and you only used them for measuring sawdust. Fuck completely off

Okay actually still looking at Imperial and speaking of Teaspoons and Tablespoons, the names don't indicate anything. How would ANYONE simply deduce by name which is bigger or smaller. Why would a spoon for food be bigger than a spoon for a drink. They both gotta fit in your fucking mouth don't they

Did we all standardize our fucking spoon volumes before we standardized our math? And CUPS? Who in the cholera factory was using scientific standard measurements to quality control your cutlery for any of this to be at all reliable for anyone following recipes

Alright back to you Metric WHAT DOES OUNCE MEAN AND WHY IS IT ABBREVIATED AS OZ

WHY IS POUND ABBREVIATED AS LB FOR LIBRA LIKE SCALES LIKE A CRYPTIC ASS ILLUMINATI SECRET MESSAGE WHEN "P" IS PERFECTLY AVAILABLE. YALL AINT PAYING MONEY IN POUNDS AND PENCE SO WHATS THE CONFUSION

Okay also why the hell would the British using Pounds to mean money run away to make America and start using Pounds to mean weight instead. Do I weigh a hundred dollars? Does Chadley at the gym bench press a thousand cents? I hate you

What is a gallon for. What does it mean. You know what's easy to convert to milliliters? Liters. What the hell is an ounce to a gallon

On top of that, what's your measurement transference? We have grams for weight, liters for liquid, meters for distance, and they're all like 1:100:1000 and shit. What do you DO to like. Show how many square inches of mass a gallon has or whatever

Oh shit I ain't even got into Fahrenheit yet

Actually fuck all of us, the end

[miupow]

한지성 ─── 𝗦𝗔𝗡𝗧𝗔 , 𝗕𝗔𝗕𝗬 !

you have a little christmas surprise for your boyfriend...

★ 𝗽𝗮𝗶𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴。。。han jisung x fem!reader 𝗴。⧼ 🔖 ⧽ ⸝⸝ smut, pwp

𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 。。。lingerie kink・est. relationship・lap dance・bondage・sensory deprivation・blindfolds・dirty talk・sub!jisung・begging・dry humping・cumming in pants・degredation kink・praise kink ⸝⸝ ‎ 𝘄𝗰。1. 2 k | 𝘁𝗼 𝗹𝗶𝗯𝗿𝗮𝗿𝘆。

♬ santa, baby 一 laufey

notes from lia。happy early skzhop hiptape release!!! so excited for it's drop at midnight teehee <33 to celebrate here's a lul xmas drabble with jisung!! this was based off of an idea given to me by @sheerfreesia007 ... thank u so much for infecting my mind with this i love u so much

“come on babe, take this stupid blindfold off! I wanna see you!”

“Shh, be patient, Ji!” you giggle, adjusting your grip on the bathrobe as you bend over to turn up the volume on your speaker. “I told you it’s a surprise— be a good boy now, okay?”

Jisung whines at your words, squirming restlessly; truthfully you’ve given him no opportunity to be anything other than patient, with his wrists and ankles tied to the arms and legs of one of your dining room chairs with sparkly holiday ribbon. They were thin and flimsy, and jisung could most likely break out of them with ease, but you were certain your boyfriend loves to be played with far too much to even consider the possibility.

Soft music fills the room as you turn to face him, a sultry rendition of santa, baby that made jisung sit up a little straighter in his chair. Slowly, you make your way over to him, intent to put on a show even if he couldn’t see it quite yet— your hips swing from side to side to the rhythm of the music, sliding a teasing hand up and down jisung’s sweater-clad chest as you circle around his chair. His breath hitches beautifully, his head lolling back to let you ghost your fingers over the curve of his adam’s apple.

…I’ve been an awful good girl, santa, baby, so hurry down the chimney tonight…

With a flourish you kick your leg over jisung’s lap, seating yourself perfectly against the swiftly growing bulge in his pants. You can’t help but grind your clit against his fly, the sensation far too much and not enough all at once— jisung whimpers pathetically in your ear, clued in on the fact you were wearing only flimsy panties underneath that robe of yours. Achingly slowly, you untie your robe and let it fall off your shoulders down to the floor. It pools in a heap at jisung’s bound feet, leaving you bare except for the “surprise” you had prepared for his Christmas gift.

“let me see you…” jisung begs quietly, tugging weakly at his restraints. the pout on his plump lips is just too cute, you can’t help but coo.

…Santa, baby, a ’54 convertible too, light blue… I’ll wait up for you dear

You can’t keep denying him any longer, for both his sake and yours— you peel the red silk blindfold from jisung’s eyes, tossing it haphazardly to the floor along with your robe. He blinks a few time to adjust to the light, his heady gaze falling onto you when his eyes finally open.

“oh fuck…” jisung sighs, his brown puppy eyes widening as they trail down your body, soaking in your outfit… or what could barely be considered one.

…Next year I’ll be just as good, if you’ll check off my Christmas list…

You were dressed in a skimpy santa costume, barely enough fabric covering you to be anything more than lingerie. Your little fuzzy skirt did nothing to cover your sparkly red thong, your ass out and your weeping cunt perfectly visible through the sheer material.  Jisung gulps heavily, his adam’s apple bobbing, shifting and squirming and fighting his restraints in a desperate attempt to touch you. he cants his hips up off the chair, the bulge of his hardening cock grinding against your swollen clit. The barely-there pleasure makes you moan lowly, your gloved hands sliding up your bare torso to squeeze at your bikini clad tits— exactly what you know jisung wants to do himself, his pretty lips falling open as he watches your movements in erotic rapture.

…santa, cutie, and fill my stocking with a duplex, and checks… sign your x on the line…

“you look so sexy, baby, fuck!” jisung warbles, his hips continuing to move on their own, building a delicious rhythm that makes you both pant and whimper. “wanna touch you so bad, holy shit, please let me touch you—”

“nuh uh~!” you chide, wagging your finger in front of his face with an evil giggle. “I said be a good boy, remember? If you stay perfectly still for me maybe I’ll untie you…”

You plant your heeled feet on the floor for better leverage, bouncing and grinding in his lap as your hands move from your tits down to his belt buckle. Your own patience is running thin, your cunt throbbing with need and wetting jisung’s lap, but teasing him is just too much fun; you make no real movements to unbuckle his belt, only sliding your fingertips across the leather to dip beneath his waistband. Jisung’s hips buck wildly when you begin to caress the warm bare skin of his hipbones, nearly toppling you over onto the floor. Your santa hat begins to slide off your head, so you grab it and tug in onto jisung’s head instead. He looks so cute like that, peeking up at you so sinfully from underneath that goofy floppy hat.

…come and trim my Christmas tree, with some decorations bought at tiffany’s…

Finally, you pull his belt free from his belt loops, letting it fall aside with a metallic clink. his cock strains obscenely in his boxers when you pop the button open and tug the zipper down, a wet spot clearly visible where his head was trapped in the fabric. Jisung whimpers lowly when you retract your hands back to his shoulders, leaving him untouched and desperate.

“come on…” jisung whines through grit teeth, his chest heaving and his covered cock throbbing. “fuck me, baby, please…”

Santa, baby, I forgot to mention one little thing, a ring, I don’t mean on the phone…

“can’t hear you over this music, sungie. You’re gonna have to beg better than that!”

You grind against him harder, faster, making jisung choke and splutter—his thighs shake underneath your weight, a telling sign that he’s close to coming. It surprises you a little, him getting so close to the edge from hardly anything at all, your pussy pulsing with need and excitement. You need to see him cum in his pants. If this is his gift for the holiday season, that would be yours.

"baby-- fuck, fuck, I--" jisung can hardly string together a sentence, his eyes unfocused and hazy. "p-please! please, baby, please, please, please--"

“oh my god, ji, are you gonna cum?” you jeer, a wicked smile spreading across your ruby red lips. “I’m barely even touching you! you’re so cute, sungie, cumming in your pants like a teenager just from some grinding…”

“i—I--!” jisung stutters, his eyes rolling back in his head and his mouth stuck open in a permanent moan. He shakes his head rigorously, like he’s begging you to reconsider, but you’ve already made up your mind.

“go ahead and cum, ji! If you cum I’ll untie you, okay? And then I’ll fuck you, since you’ve been such a good boy for me—!”

Jisung is just too easy, you know him and his body far too well for him to fight back— he cums with a broken cry, sticky hot cum staining his boxers and mixing with the copious amounts of slick that gushed from your needy pussy. You help him ride through his climax with your hand tangled in his dark messy hair, knocking the santa hat aside as you tug at the strands. his moans turn high-pitched and shameless, his body shaking and twitching underneath you as his cock spurts out his last few ropes of cum.

“nasty boy,” you coo to him, staining his jawline and neck with red lipstick marks, “ready for more? This is just part of your present~”

Hurry, hurry, my santa, baby!

[royalarchivist]

How to Archive VODs and Clips

Whether you want to download VODs and/or clips for your own records or because you’d like to share them online, knowing how to archive things is handy, especially when so many streams become lost media once they’re deleted off Twitch and/or YouTube.

Here are a few programs that I use for Royal Archivist!

—

Of all the programs on this list, my personal favorites / the ones I most strongly recommend are Cobalt and Twitch Downloader! (When all else fails, OBS is also a good backup).

Cobalt

Cobalt has gained a lot of popularity the past few months, and for good reason! It's a very reliable, extremely user-friendly website that lets you save videos in MP4 formats, convert them into MP3 formats, or video-only without sound.

Cobalt is currently compatible with: BlueSky, Dailymotion, Facebook, Instagram, Loom, OK, Pinterest, Reddit, RuTube, SnapChat, SoundCloud, Streamable, TikTok, Tumblr, Twitch, Twitter, Vimeo, VK, Xiohongshu, and YouTube.

Twitch’s built-in download feature

If you’re downloading your own clip, this is the easiest method to use

First, navigate to your clips page.

To do this, click on your Twitch icon and go to “Creator Dashboard.” There will be a row of icons on your left - click the fifth button from the top (the one above the settings icon) and click on the link that says “Clips.”

At the top of the page, click on “Clips I’ve Created” and you should see a list of every clip you’ve ever made (regardless of whether or not you’ve published them, the clips are there!)

If you're having trouble, you can also type: https://dashboard.twitch.tv/u/ YOUR USERNAME HERE /clips/created

Click on the share button, and the list shown in the photo below will pop up.

After you click on the “Download” button (for landscape or portrait), a new tab will open up with the clip (which will autoplay, so heads up if you have your volume turned up high!)

Right click on the video and click “Save Video As”

That’s all there is to it! Please keep in mind that Twitch’s download function only works for clips you’ve made! You cannot use it to download VODs, or other people’s clips.

Twitch Downloader

Twitch Downloader is by far the BEST Twitch download program I have ever used. I’ve used several different ones, some which have broken because of Twitch’s updates, others which have fallen into disrepair because their creator no longer updates the program, but this one has been working consistently for me for a little over a year now. I’ve kept it very close to my chest because I’m terrified it’ll stop working one day, but it’s better to share resources than horde them out of fear.

Pros:

HD quality for all downloads! Whatever quality the stream was, that’s the quality the download will be (unless you adjust anything in the settings).

The best feature of this program is you can adjust how much you want to clip! Only want a 30 second clip from a 6 hour VOD? You can specify the section you want to download so long as you know the timestamps where you want the clip to start and where you want it to end.

You can download entire VODs.

When saving the file, it will automatically enter the original name of the stream and the stream date. (You can change this, but it’s very handy when you’re downloading an entire VOD and not a section of one).

It will automatically prompt you to update it when a new version has been released. (You do have the option to opt out of this, if you want).

There are a lot of other features available, however, I’ve never tried any of them so I can’t say how well they work. The Github page has a lot of examples and a Q&A section though, so check that out if you’re curious!

On the rare occasion that the program encounters issues, it's easy to use a past version, and the creators are quick to release new updates that resolve any problems. As of today (February 21, 2025) the latest version is currently 1.55.2, which updated last week.

Cons:

Sometimes when you click “Get Info” it won’t immediately load the VOD. This is pretty easy to solve by just restarting the program, so it’s not a huge issue imo.

You can’t preview clips before you download them, so you need to know the exact timestamps you want.

You can’t download VODs that are privated or no longer on Twitch.

How to use:

Download Twitch Downloader from Github and install the version that works for your computer. (In this case, I would download the GUI Windows-x64.zip version. Make sure you’re downloading the GUI version if you want a user-friendly version of this program).

Enter the URL of the VOD you’d like to download.

You can adjust the quality of the video and the length. If nothing is specified in the “Crop Video” section, it will download the entire VOD.

Once you’re ready, click the “Download” button and you’re good to go!

Open Video Downloader

If you’ve ever wanted to download any kind of video, I’m sure you’ve heard of Youtube-dl. There are different versions of this program, but some of them are a bit finicky and if things stop working, it can be difficult and frustrating trying to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it — which is why I recommend this program.

Open Video Downloader, aka youtube-dl-gui, is one of the best video downloaders I’ve ever used. It’s basically Youtube-dl with a Graphical User Interface (GUI) that makes the program very easy for anyone to use.

Pros:

No coding knowledge required! VERY user-friendly.

The creator fixes user issues very quickly! Whenever the program experiences a problem, a new update is released within 24 hours.

It can download videos from pretty much all major social media platforms, including Youtube, Twitter, Tumblr, Twitch clips, Instagram, and more.

Cons:

You can’t adjust the length of what you want to download. If you want to download a 2 minute section from a 5 hour Youtube VOD, you’ll have to download the entire video.

On rare occasions, I’ve had issues where it cannot download an unlisted Youtube video. There are sometimes ways to get around this, but it’s a pain and usually not worth the effort.

How to use it:

Download the latest version of the program from GitHub. Scroll all the way down to “Assets” and select the version that’s right for your computer. (For example, I use Windows, so I would download the .exe file).

Once you’ve installed it, you can start downloading things! For this example, let’s say I want to download Quackity’s “Welcome to the QSMP” video. All I need to do is copy the link and paste it into the white box at the top of the program.

Once that’s done, you should see the video pop up in your download queue. You can queue multiple videos to download at once (you can also download entire playlists too). When you’re ready, click the green download button on the bottom right (as shown in the picture below) or if you only want to download one specific video from your queue, click the download button (circled in red) next to the video.

You can adjust the quality of the video you want to download, and in theory you can choose whether to download just the audio or just the video of a video, but personally that’s never worked for me. That might just be a me issue though.

If you’d like to change where your videos are saved to, click the Folder button (circled in yellow) and choose a download destination. If nothing is chosen, it will default to your Downloads folder.

There are ways you can customize this program, but like I said earlier, this program is very very easy to use and does not require any tinkering whatsoever. You open it, download what you want, then close it. Nice and simple!

Other Recommendations

OBS is a good backup when all else fails! I have to use OBS pretty frequently for YouTube VODs, since there aren't a lot of tools that let you clip parts of a YouTube video (and I'd rather not download an entire 7 hour long VOD for a 30 second clip). There are already a lot of good tutorials out there explaining how to use OBS, so I recommend poking around and seeing what works best for you. If you're new to video downloading / archiving things, I'd still recommend starting with some of the tools I mentioned above first.

I’d recommend making a folder on your computer for clips. I find it very helpful to name all my files with this method: [Stream date] Streamer name - Something that helps me remember what this clip is about / something that will help me find it later, or a quote.

Example: [2-6-24] Mike - I hate capitalism

If you’ve got a significant amount of clips on your computer, I’d recommend backing them up and/or saving them to an external harddrive!

That’s about it! I apologize if I’ve missed any steps, but hopefully everything is more or less easy enough for folks to understand! I’m someone who does not like downloading random programs onto my computer and I’m very paranoid about cyber security, but I’ve used these programs for over a year now, and they’re very reliable and trustworthy. 10/10, I recommend both of them.

Lastly: if anyone has a recommendation for good Youtube clip downloaders, please let me know! I haven’t found any good programs that let me specify how much of a Youtube video I’d like to download, and I am suffering. Help your friendly neighborhood Archivist so I can share more clips from the early days of QSMP.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Mark Zuckerberg announces mind-control ray (again)

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE with BUNNIE HUANG. More tour dates (London, Manchester) here.

Mark Zuckerberg has told investors how he plans to make back the tens of billions he's spending on AI: he's going to use it to make advertisements that can bypass our critical faculties and convince anyone to buy anything. In other words, Meta will make an AI mind-control ray and rent it out to grateful advertisers.

Here, Zuck is fulfilling the fundamental duty of every CEO of every high-growth tech company: explaining how his company will continue to grow. These growth stories are key, because growth stocks trade at a huge premium relative to the stocks of "mature" companies. Every dollar Meta brings in boosts their share price to a much greater degree than the dollars earned by companies with similar rates of profit, but slower rates of growth. This premium represents a bet by investors that Meta will continue to grow, which means that the instant Meta stops growing, the value of its shares will plummet, to reflect the fact that it is a "mature" company, not a "growth" company.

So Zuck needs to do everything he can to keep investors believing that Meta will continue to grow. After all, Zuck's key employees and top managers all take much (or even most!) of their compensation in Meta stock, which means that the instant the company stops growing, those workers' pay will plummet and they will seek employment elsewhere, depriving Meta of the workers it needs to successfully create or conquer a new market and once again become a growth stock.

This is why Zuck keeps telling stories. The most important story Zuck tells is about himself, the boy genius who converted a tool for nonconsensually rating the fuckability of Harvard undergrads into a social media monopoly with four billion users. Zuck's cult of personality isn't the product of mere narcissism – it's a tool for creating the material conditions for ongoing investor confidence:

https://www.businessinsider.com/mark-zuckerberg-shirt-latin-what-does-it-say-explained-words-2024-9

If Zuck is a boy genius, then Zuck's pronouncements take on the character of prophesy. When Zuck announced the "pivot to video," investors poured tens of billions into Facebook stock and into video-first online news production, despite the fact that Zuck was obviously lying:

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

The "boy genius" story is an example of Silicon Valley's storied "reality distortion field," pioneered by Steve Jobs. Like Jobs, Zuck is a Texas marksman, who fires a shotgun into the side of a barn and then draws a target around the holes. Jobs is remembered for his successes, and forgiven his (many, many) flops, and so is Zuck. The fact that pivot to video was well understood to have been a catastrophic scam didn't stop people from believing Zuck when he announced "metaverse."

Zuck lost more than $70b on metaverse, but, being a boy genius Texas marksman, he is still able to inspire confidence from credulous investors. Zuck's AI initiatives generated huge interest in Meta's stock, with investors betting that Zuck would find ways to keep Meta's growth going, despite the fact that AI has the worst unit economics of any tech venture in living memory. AI is a business that gets more expensive as time goes on, and where the market's willingness to pay goes down over time. This makes the old dotcom economics of "losing money on every sale, but making it up in volume" look positively rosy:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/

Now, Zuck has finally described how he's going to turn AI's terrible economics around: he's going to ask AI to design his advertisers' campaigns, and these will be so devastatingly effective that advertisers will pay a huge premium to advertise on Meta:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-ai-revolution-is-an-advertising-revolution-morning-brief-100001467.html

This narrative is especially galling because it's literally the same story Zuck has been telling for decades: "Facebook has built a mind-control out of Big Data, and we can sell anything to anyone":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/30/dont-believe-the-criti-hype/#ordinary-mediocrities

This is a facially absurd proposition. After all, everyone who's ever claimed to have perfected mind-control – Rasputin, Mesmer, MK-ULTRA, neurolinguistic programming grifters and pathetic "pick up artists" – was a liar. Either they were lying to themselves, or to everyone else. Or both.

But many of tech's critics helped sell this narrative (and thus helped Meta sell ads). Many critics have fallen prey to the sin of "criti-hype," Lee Vinsel's term for critiquing the claims of your adversary without bothering to ask whether they are true:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/02/euthanize-rentiers/#dont-believe-the-hype

The project of convincing investors that tech's "dopamine hackers" had perfected mind-control with warmed over, non-replicable Skinnerian behavior-mod techniques and mass surveillance sold a hell of a lot of ads. After all, if there's one kind of person the advertising sector has always been able to sell to, it's advertising executives, who are the easiest of marks for a story about how easy it is to trick the public into buying whatever you're selling:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/10/05/florida-man/#wannamakers-ghost

Every ad-tech sales-bro who takes a meeting with an advertising executive finds himself pushing on an open door. Advertisers desperately wants to believe in mind-control rays. Think of the department store magnate John Wannamaker, who said, "half my advertising spending is wasted – I just don't know which half." Imagine: some advertising exec convinced John Wannamaker that he was only wasting half of his advertising spending!

I've long maintained that the threat from AI to workers isn't that AI can do your job – it's that an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete

The corollary here is that it doesn't matter if AI can design ads that work, not so long as an AI ad salesman can sell this proposition to an advertisers, and not so long as a tech CEO can sell it to investors.

AI keeps passing the worst kinds of Turing tests – for example, it's great at helping people who are prone to life-destroying hallucinations that they are talking to God:

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-spiritual-delusions-destroying-human-relationships-1235330175/

Zuck kept up his growth story with this mind control narrative for more than a decade, got caught committing a string of spectacular frauds, and then lured investors back into his stock offerings by telling the same story. This isn't just an indictment of Zuck, it's a stinging rebuke to the whole idea that markets are a kind of infallible computer for assessing and operationalizing information. The market's "thought process" demonstrably lacks the object permanence that most babies acquire by the time they are a year old. You can tell when your child has acquired object permanence by the fact that they cease to enjoy "peek-a-boo" (object permanence means they understand where you have gone when your face is hidden).

In claiming that AI will give him an infinite growth mind-control ray, Mark Zuckerberg is challenging the market to a game of peek-a-boo – and he's winning.

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/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

Image:

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

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