#Commercial Model

[lusciousmess]

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW (Mar 13) in SAN FRANCISCO with ROBIN SLOAN, then Toronto, NYC, Anaheim, and more!

Another characteristically brilliant Kashmir Hill story for The New York Times reveals another characteristically terrible fact about modern life: your car secretly records fine-grained telemetry about your driving and sells it to data-brokers, who sell it to insurers, who use it as a pretext to gouge you on premiums:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html

Almost every car manufacturer does this: Hyundai, Nissan, Ford, Chrysler, etc etc:

https://www.repairerdrivennews.com/2020/09/09/ford-state-farm-ford-metromile-honda-verisk-among-insurer-oem-telematics-connections/

This is true whether you own or lease the car, and it's separate from the "black box" your insurer might have offered to you in exchange for a discount on your premiums. In other words, even if you say no to the insurer's carrot – a surveillance-based discount – they've got a stick in reserve: buying your nonconsensually harvested data on the open market.

I've always hated that saying, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product," the reason being that it posits decent treatment as a customer reward program, like the little ramekin warm nuts first class passengers get before takeoff. Companies don't treat you well when you pay them. Companies treat you well when they fear the consequences of treating you badly.

Take Apple. The company offers Ios users a one-tap opt-out from commercial surveillance, and more than 96% of users opted out. Presumably, the other 4% were either confused or on Facebook's payroll. Apple – and its army of cultists – insist that this proves that our world's woes can be traced to cheapskate "consumers" who expected to get something for nothing by using advertising-supported products.

But here's the kicker: right after Apple blocked all its rivals from spying on its customers, it began secretly spying on those customers! Apple has a rival surveillance ad network, and even if you opt out of commercial surveillance on your Iphone, Apple still secretly spies on you and uses the data to target you for ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product – provided the company can get away with treating you as the product. Apple can absolutely get away with treating you as the product, because it lacks the historical constraints that prevented Apple – and other companies – from treating you as the product.

As I described in my McLuhan lecture on enshittification, tech firms can be constrained by four forces:

I. Competition

II. Regulation

III. Self-help

IV. Labor

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

When companies have real competitors – when a sector is composed of dozens or hundreds of roughly evenly matched firms – they have to worry that a maltreated customer might move to a rival. 40 years of antitrust neglect means that corporations were able to buy their way to dominance with predatory mergers and pricing, producing today's inbred, Habsburg capitalism. Apple and Google are a mobile duopoly, Google is a search monopoly, etc. It's not just tech! Every sector looks like this:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Eliminating competition doesn't just deprive customers of alternatives, it also empowers corporations. Liberated from "wasteful competition," companies in concentrated industries can extract massive profits. Think of how both Apple and Google have "competitively" arrived at the same 30% app tax on app sales and transactions, a rate that's more than 1,000% higher than the transaction fees extracted by the (bloated, price-gouging) credit-card sector:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/07/curatorial-vig/#app-tax

But cartels' power goes beyond the size of their warchest. The real source of a cartel's power is the ease with which a small number of companies can arrive at – and stick to – a common lobbying position. That's where "regulatory capture" comes in: the mobile duopoly has an easier time of capturing its regulators because two companies have an easy time agreeing on how to spend their app-tax billions:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Apple – and Google, and Facebook, and your car company – can violate your privacy because they aren't constrained regulation, just as Uber can violate its drivers' labor rights and Amazon can violate your consumer rights. The tech cartels have captured their regulators and convinced them that the law doesn't apply if it's being broken via an app:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/18/cursed-are-the-sausagemakers/#how-the-parties-get-to-yes

In other words, Apple can spy on you because it's allowed to spy on you. America's last consumer privacy law was passed in 1988, and it bans video-store clerks from leaking your VHS rental history. Congress has taken no action on consumer privacy since the Reagan years:

https://www.eff.org/tags/video-privacy-protection-act

But tech has some special enshittification-resistant characteristics. The most important of these is interoperability: the fact that computers are universal digital machines that can run any program. HP can design a printer that rejects third-party ink and charge $10,000/gallon for its own colored water, but someone else can write a program that lets you jailbreak your printer so that it accepts any ink cartridge:

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

Tech companies that contemplated enshittifying their products always had to watch over their shoulders for a rival that might offer a disenshittification tool and use that as a wedge between the company and its customers. If you make your website's ads 20% more obnoxious in anticipation of a 2% increase in gross margins, you have to consider the possibility that 40% of your users will google "how do I block ads?" Because the revenue from a user who blocks ads doesn't stay at 100% of the current levels – it drops to zero, forever (no user ever googles "how do I stop blocking ads?").

The majority of web users are running an ad-blocker:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

Web operators made them an offer ("free website in exchange for unlimited surveillance and unfettered intrusions") and they made a counteroffer ("how about 'nah'?"):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Here's the thing: reverse-engineering an app – or any other IP-encumbered technology – is a legal minefield. Just decompiling an app exposes you to felony prosecution: a five year sentence and a $500k fine for violating Section 1201 of the DMCA. But it's not just the DMCA – modern products are surrounded with high-tech tripwires that allow companies to invoke IP law to prevent competitors from augmenting, recongifuring or adapting their products. When a business says it has "IP," it means that it has arranged its legal affairs to allow it to invoke the power of the state to control its customers, critics and competitors:

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

An "app" is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to add an ad-blocker to it. This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model" and it's everywhere. When companies don't have to worry about users deploying self-help measures to disenshittify their products, they are freed from the constraint that prevents them indulging the impulse to shift value from their customers to themselves.

Apple owes its existence to interoperability – its ability to clone Microsoft Office's file formats for Pages, Numbers and Keynote, which saved the company in the early 2000s – and ever since, it has devoted its existence to making sure no one ever does to Apple what Apple did to Microsoft:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

Regulatory capture cuts both ways: it's not just about powerful corporations being free to flout the law, it's also about their ability to enlist the law to punish competitors that might constrain their plans for exploiting their workers, customers, suppliers or other stakeholders.

The final historical constraint on tech companies was their own workers. Tech has very low union-density, but that's in part because individual tech workers enjoyed so much bargaining power due to their scarcity. This is why their bosses pampered them with whimsical campuses filled with gourmet cafeterias, fancy gyms and free massages: it allowed tech companies to convince tech workers to work like government mules by flattering them that they were partners on a mission to bring the world to its digital future:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

For tech bosses, this gambit worked well, but failed badly. On the one hand, they were able to get otherwise powerful workers to consent to being "extremely hardcore" by invoking Fobazi Ettarh's spirit of "vocational awe":

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

On the other hand, when you motivate your workers by appealing to their sense of mission, the downside is that they feel a sense of mission. That means that when you demand that a tech worker enshittifies something they missed their mother's funeral to deliver, they will experience a profound sense of moral injury and refuse, and that worker's bargaining power means that they can make it stick.

Or at least, it did. In this era of mass tech layoffs, when Google can fire 12,000 workers after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, tech workers are learning that the answer to "I won't do this and you can't make me" is "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out" (AKA "sharpen your blades boys"):

https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/29/elon-musk-texts-discovery-twitter/

With competition, regulation, self-help and labor cleared away, tech firms – and firms that have wrapped their products around the pluripotently malleable core of digital tech, including automotive makers – are no longer constrained from enshittifying their products.

And that's why your car manufacturer has chosen to spy on you and sell your private information to data-brokers and anyone else who wants it. Not because you didn't pay for the product, so you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.

Cars are enshittified. The dozens of chips that auto makers have shoveled into their car design are only incidentally related to delivering a better product. The primary use for those chips is autoenshittification – access to legal strictures ("IP") that allows them to block modifications and repairs that would interfere with the unfettered abuse of their own customers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

The fact that it's a felony to reverse-engineer and modify a car's software opens the floodgates to all kinds of shitty scams. Remember when Bay Staters were voting on a ballot measure to impose right-to-repair obligations on automakers in Massachusetts? The only reason they needed to have the law intervene to make right-to-repair viable is that Big Car has figured out that if it encrypts its diagnostic messages, it can felonize third-party diagnosis of a car, because decrypting the messages violates the DMCA:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/drm-cars-will-drive-consumers-crazy

Big Car figured out that VIN locking – DRM for engine components and subassemblies – can felonize the production and the installation of third-party spare parts:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

The fact that you can't legally modify your car means that automakers can go back to their pre-2008 ways, when they transformed themselves into unregulated banks that incidentally manufactured the cars they sold subprime loans for. Subprime auto loans – over $1t worth! – absolutely relies on the fact that borrowers' cars can be remotely controlled by lenders. Miss a payment and your car's stereo turns itself on and blares threatening messages at top volume, which you can't turn off. Break the lease agreement that says you won't drive your car over the county line and it will immobilize itself. Try to change any of this software and you'll commit a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Tesla, naturally, has the most advanced anti-features. Long before BMW tried to rent you your seat-heater and Mercedes tried to sell you a monthly subscription to your accelerator pedal, Teslas were demon-haunted nightmare cars. Miss a Tesla payment and the car will immobilize itself and lock you out until the repo man arrives, then it will blare its horn and back itself out of its parking spot. If you "buy" the right to fully charge your car's battery or use the features it came with, you don't own them – they're repossessed when your car changes hands, meaning you get less money on the used market because your car's next owner has to buy these features all over again:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

And all this DRM allows your car maker to install spyware that you're not allowed to remove. They really tipped their hand on this when the R2R ballot measure was steaming towards an 80% victory, with wall-to-wall scare ads that revealed that your car collects so much information about you that allowing third parties to access it could lead to your murder (no, really!):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

That's why your car spies on you. Because it can. Because the company that made it lacks constraint, be it market-based, legal, technological or its own workforce's ethics.

One common critique of my enshittification hypothesis is that this is "kind of sensible and normal" because "there’s something off in the consumer mindset that we’ve come to believe that the internet should provide us with amazing products, which bring us joy and happiness and we spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return":

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-have-great-conversations/

What this criticism misses is that this isn't the companies bargaining to shift some value from us to them. Enshittification happens when a company can seize all that value, without having to bargain, exploiting law and technology and market power over buyers and sellers to unilaterally alter the way the products and services we rely on work.

A company that doesn't have to fear competitors, regulators, jailbreaking or workers' refusal to enshittify its products doesn't have to bargain, it can take. It's the first lesson they teach you in the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Your car spying on you isn't down to your belief that your carmaker "should provide you with amazing products, which brings your joy and happiness you spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return." It's not because you didn't pay for the product, so now you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.

The consequences of this spying go much further than mere insurance premium hikes, too. Car telemetry sits at the top of the funnel that the unbelievably sleazy data broker industry uses to collect and sell our data. These are the same companies that sell the fact that you visited an abortion clinic to marketers, bounty hunters, advertisers, or vengeful family members pretending to be one of those:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/07/safegraph-spies-and-lies/#theres-no-i-in-uterus

Decades of pro-monopoly policy led to widespread regulatory capture. Corporate cartels use the monopoly profits they extract from us to pay for regulatory inaction, allowing them to extract more profits.

But when it comes to privacy, that period of unchecked corporate power might be coming to an end. The lack of privacy regulation is at the root of so many problems that a pro-privacy movement has an unstoppable constituency working in its favor.

At EFF, we call this "privacy first." Whether you're worried about grifters targeting vulnerable people with conspiracy theories, or teens being targeted with media that harms their mental health, or Americans being spied on by foreign governments, or cops using commercial surveillance data to round up protesters, or your car selling your data to insurance companies, passing that long-overdue privacy legislation would turn off the taps for the data powering all these harms:

https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms

Traditional economics fails because it thinks about markets without thinking about power. Monopolies lead to more than market power: they produce regulatory capture, power over workers, and state capture, which felonizes competition through IP law. The story that our problems stem from the fact that we just don't spend enough money, or buy the wrong products, only makes sense if you willfully ignore the power that corporations exert over our lives. It's nice to think that you can shop your way out of a monopoly, because that's a lot easier than voting your way out of a monopoly, but no matter how many times you vote with your wallet, the cartels that control the market will always win:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars

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

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

[snackugaki]

one orrrr

two?

[birb-catto]

To summarize Alberu's Korean arc experience thru an Isekai title:

“In another world to save my crazy dongsaeng who got kidnapped by a god and wow this bastard is a transmigrator along with his swordmaster who's secretly a grandpa which I never really expected and oh I also became a tiger monster because of some god and I am now a part-time shampoo commercial model!”

(With how much the Korean arc emphasized the Dark Tiger's lustrous and majestic mane every time he shakes it, you'd think Alberu became a shampoo commercial model in another world 🤣)

[misterlemonzmen]

03-29-24 | Mr. Clean was introduced by Proctor & Gamble in 1958 with TV commercials that were not intentionally erotic. It was a different time. via pothos-god-of-desire. MisterLemonzMen.tumblr.com/archive

[motherdanger]

dr. leon denlon

[sergle]

this might just be the pessimism talking but there are times when I feel the body positive movement is straight up Over. even stuff from now that’s meant to be body positive, or is packaged in that way, is of a lower caliber. like it feels like it’s gotten worse.

[petitpiedgalbe]

Flower Heels!

When was the last time you received flowers from someone or bought them for yourself? (Broccoli counts too, since it's a flowering head of asparagus cabbage) :P

[spitblaze]

If you guys could talk about the existence of generative software and nerual nets without suggesting artists nuke their portfolios off of the Internet for their own safety (the datasets have Already Been Scraped btw so that won't even help) that would be very nice. Thanks

[baaaaph]

Promotional GIFs for the Pipi Plush Kickstarter

[linktoo]

I just watched a whole Hyundai commercial for more spider-verse animation but I'm so obsessed with the fact that they got Gwen and Miles' voice actors to stiffly promote an electric car

[charleslee-valentine]

Freebies

For the Texas Chainsaw Massacre Dosability Pride Month Event: Day 4- Gonna Be a Fun Trip

Word Count: ~2,000

Warnings: Internalized ableism, referenced period typical ableism.

_____________

Lord help him. Pray to anyone above that this damn ramp is gonna hold up.

The Sawyers fixed it up out of scrap for him, three railroad ties as the base, curved steel brackets from a car's frame screwed to two plywood slats to reinforce ‘em and wood glue so thick it might as well be a shell around the structure. And prayers. Lots of prayers

“Try it! T-Try it Franklin!” Nubbins goads from the safety of the porch, waving his arms wildly like the worst impression of a traffic cop Franklin ever seen.

Franklin eyes the contraption they built warily, “I don’ know.. We sure it’s safe?”

“Yeh!!” Nubbins answers without even lookin’ or considerin’ it, just waving around urgently for Franklin to come forward.

See the ramp is new, ‘cause his chair is new too. Finally caved in and replaced that old 1950s piece of junk for somethin’ better. Motorized. A chair that can wheel itself and don’t need him pullin’ muscles in his shoulders or Nubbins trippin’ over bent tire frames to push forward.

That’s why the last straw come, was them both takin’ a tumble ass over end down the back steps and into the yard ‘cause Nubbins’ three sizes too big for him pants got snagged on the tire spokes. Franklin got the chair and Nubbins directly on top of him which busted his wrist up pretty good, needed a home-fixed cast a while to keep from tweakin’ it funny. But that meant no manually movin’ the chair, and Nubbins sure wasn’t allowed after he supposedly caused the accident.

Now, he won’t complain about gettin’ wheeled around by Bubba, who happens to be mindful of bumps and cracks when he can be, but Bubba ain’t so patient these days. Certainly ain’t the timid kid he was when Franklin met him a little over decade ago. At almost thirty somethin’ entering his rebellious romantic phase and more interested in some angel-voiced debutante on the radio than dealin’ with Franklin’s business. Fair enough.

The obvious next step is a motorized chair, somethin’ he’d been dreamin’ of for a long, long time. Put it on every Christmas list as a kid, breathed it into the air with the smoke of a birthday wish. And every year he stayed right cooped up in that old beater he had with no illusion of independence with.

Back then he took it for folks not understanding his desire to just wander. To not exhaust himself from propelling forward and the pains shootin’ down his arms into his chest. There’s a fine difference between a self-propelling chair and a pusher chair that Franklin knew well from tearin’ his muscles over and over.

Shane he realized the world works a lot crueler than just not understanding, a coverup for the pain he felt from all of them.

Took until he’s moved out, zero contact with Mom and Pop, in with the Sawyers through some probably wicked chain of events he’d forgotten a while back, to become able to move on his own.

And here in the chair, transferred easy after practicin’ it a dozen or so times the second it was here in the yard, his hand sits on the lever but not pushing forward. He’s nervous. Overwhelmed by flittering anxieties that loom over his head like gnats around a flush.

“Most people, they go for fittings and buy these things special just for them. Don’t just stumble upon..” It’s halfway into that sentence that Franklin realizes, Nubbins never did finish tellin’ him where he got the chair past that it was available and decently clean after a supervised wipe down of all its parts. “Hold on, how did you find this thing again?”

“I-It was on the corner, with a money sign, b-but we took it. L-Like it was for- for freebies since no-nobody was usin’ it.” Nubbins fiddles with his hands ‘cause he knows Franklin ain’t gonna be th’ happiest with that answer.

Not that Nubbins is expecting anxiety and fear and guilt, which is all Franklin is currently dealin’ with. Nubbins expects anger, a smack across his face for breaking rules. While Franklin is too busy spiraling in his own head to immediately comfort him, wondering a bleak topic, “Well how do we know that? What if they needed the money from the old one to buy a better chair and now they got none?”

“Frankie, w-we don’t got no money either. Th-That wouldnt’a h-happened no how.” Nubbins reminds him meekly by raisin’ his hand and seemingly swattin’ away the worries.

“Maybe someone else shoulda got it.” Franklin just keeps worrying. As much as he was sick of his old chair, a guilty conscience gets in the way of his happiness once again. Even far away from the cruelty of certain family members, he’s so programmed to feel bad he makes himself feel that today instead of lettin’ someone else.

Thing is, Nubbins prob’ly never felt guilty once in his entire life, so good at just stickin’ with cold reality and not the wandering anxious thoughts. Impressive for someone Franklin knows got a worse than typical kind of thoughts floating in his little head.

“But y-you needs it.” He points out fairly.

Giving a big sigh, knowing it’s the end of understanding one another in this particular conversation, Franklin starts to drop it but still get some weight off.

“Lots of people need things.. I dunno.. Guess I just feel like I’m stealin’ or somethin’..”

Silence. Nubbins wasn’t listening at all. He’s busy eyeing the necklace he made for Franklin, with a tie rope so it’ll never ever shatter or break its clasp or crumble to bits like them chain necklaces do sometimes. Reaching out, he cautiously takes ahold of the charm, made from clay and bone and wood. More scrap of course.

Out of nowhere he yanks it, snatching the charm so the knot in the back of the necklace undoes itself and the whole thing slips right off.

Franklin’s too late to catch it or to grab Nubbins, just clutching his chest where the heavy charm would usually sit against his skin. Feels bare without it for some reason, if only ‘cause Nubbins was the one who made the damn jewelry in the first place.

Which he now holds way up over his head and dares Franklin to, “C-Come ‘n get me!!”

Eyeing the shifty ramp, Franklin doesn’t budge an inch. Anxiety blooms in the pit of his stomach and soothed only by watching Nubbins himself get wild and bounce around all over the creaky old porch. Might fall through himself. He calls after the movement, “Nubbins, getcha wily little ass back here!”

Scratching his scruffy chin in over-exaggerated consideration, Nubbins decides to sit on the porch bannister and think, “N-Nah. I’s comfy.”

It’s cute. Watching Nubbins mime regular sense of humor and teasing and human interaction in general always makes his heart flutter some. Franklin gives in, “Awright. Awright. Jus’- You jus wait a minute now. I don’t know how to use this thing and I might not-“

“Frankie, c’mon!” Nubbins interrupts the stammering, bouncing all over. He’s so excited to see this new contraption in action. Impatient for it even though it’s about to happen.

The jumping is gonna crack the boards of the porch, and seeing as the ramps shows a complete lack of knowin’ to work with wood, Franklin decides to just do it. Wheel right towards Nubbins and go to him when he calls.

All it takes is a push of that little lever. Franklin squeezes his eyes shut as the wheelchair mechanisms whirr to life, noisily drawing him forward. The feeling is a lot like floating on water. No pressure in his body, no pain just from movin’, just a smooth glide.

Well, smooth as it can be over dry grass and then the dreaded ramp. His wheels stay firmly grounded, however many there are under the structure of this thing, and he’s safe, but it’s still scary to get used to, rockin’ around like that.

He clears the top of the ramp and maneuvers messily in reverse, some kinda eighteen point turn, to face Nubbins instead of the wall, “Christ that was-“

“Y-You did it! You did it! Frankie done it!!” Nubbins congratulates him, grabbing his hands and squeezing excitedly.

It ain’t the heat from the effort of movin’ around that he can blame anymore for the way he knows his face flushes bright red, equal parts bashful and flattered, “It ain’t that excitin’ now! Jus’ pushed a button..”

“But i-it’s good.” Nubbins argues, wide smile firmly in place.

“I s’pose..”

“A-A-And you’re good!”

His eagerness is a little overwhelming. Franklin worms a hand free to fidget, scratching at the back of his curly hair, “I don’ know ‘bout all that..”

Then Nubbins leans into him all serious, thick eyebrows frown tight together and bony finger stab in’ into his chest, “H-Hush it. You gets all sh-shy.”

“I’m ‘llowed to be shy.” He defends, but it crackles a little. With the confrontation between his old broken shell of a heart and his new found longing.

“Yeh. You allowed t-to be not shy s-sometimes too.” Nubbins reminds him, easing up some by straightening out, not entirely breathing on Franklin’s face anymore.

Now he has the confidence to tease back, “Like you, huh?”

“Ezactly!” A bright stream of giggles comes from Nubbins suddenly, impressed by Franklin’s clever. He likes it a lot when he argues against him, stands up for himself.

Decides to reward his bravery against the monsters in his head with some affection. At first, Nubbins tries to wrap his arms around Franklin, wheelchair back and all, but it’s too big and clunky for all that. Instead, he decides to pass along some kisses.

On his forehead because it’s easy to reach, Nubbins plants wet kiss after wet kiss to Franklin’s forehead.

“That’s enough now.” Franklin says, but he’s laughing too now, no longer so stuck up. That’s why Nubbins likes havin’ him round so much, gives him some kinda purpose cheerin’ him up and lovin’ him good all the time likes that.

But Nubbins isn’t taking ‘no more’ for an answer, since this is a game of cat and mouse afterall. He’s a smart mouse that knows, the cat ain’t gonna put up with him if he skitters ‘round too quick and stupid. Holding up his hand, he asks for permission to give another kiss, “One m-more for the road?”

“Sure, but I ain’t goin’ nowhere. You know that.” Franklin hums while tilting his head back some so Nubbins can reach. This time he kisses his cheek, close to his mouth, a little smear of blood from a scab he ripped off wiping on Franklin's skin.

He wants to kiss that one away too to make it better, “A-And o-one to grow on?”

“Nubbins, I mean it. Just cause I can get ‘round a little better don’t mean I’d ever leave ya. Wouldn’t even dream it.” Franklin takes it all seriously.

And it doesn’t make Nubbins upset. This wheelchair business is always serious, always hard. Jokin’, and playin’ and bein mean, he can do that any old place that don’t got a Franklin, but what would be the point? He’s maybe just a little in love.

“I-I’s holdin’ you to that. Ain’t gonna f-forget it.”

“I know.” Franklin smiles, wiping the blood off his face by himself.

“Ain’t s-stupid.” Nubbins testified agin on his first point.

“Hey, now. I know that.” His Franklin interrupts, switching the subjects about to,“Thank you Nubbins. For the chair. And the help.”

Nubbins nods and starts to rock on his heels. Accepting thanks is still as new to him as a fancy alien wheelchair is to Franklin. That, “And th-the lovin’?

He’s in love with Franklin. The Mom and Pop kind. The get hitched by the garden out back in pretty clothes and never let Franklin leave again type.

And Franklin, receiver of affection and gifts and acceptance, now that’s he’s finally feelin’ capable for the first time, agrees, “Especially that.”

[maximura]

Altered States: Song Mingi x Kim Hongjoong | Creative Director/Photography by Jack Bridgland. Styling by Lisa Jarvis (2023)

[forthepleasureofmylife]

Turin Italy

Photo: Dieter Krehbiel

[spineless-lobster]

Hey guys can we like please love “ugly” trans women? Can we please love fat trans women? I just really think we should love all trans women thanks