#app like grubhub

[jackethen12]

Grubhub clone app solution built to manage the food delivery business more effectively and efficiently. It seamlessly manages the eaters, delivery partners, and restaurant owners.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This is your brain on fraud apologetics

In 1998, two Stanford students published a paper in Computer Networks entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

https://research.google/pubs/pub334/

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The co-authors were Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin, and the “large-scale hypertextual web search-engine” they were describing was their new project, which they called “Google.” They were 100% correct — prescient, even!

On Wednesday night, a friend came over to watch some TV with us. We ordered out. We got scammed. We searched for a great local Thai place we like called Kiin and clicked a sponsored link for a Wix site called “Kiinthaila.com.” We should have clicked the third link down (kiinthaiburbank.com).

We got scammed. The Wix site was a lookalike for Kiin Thai, which marked up their prices by 15% and relayed the order to our local, mom-and-pop, one-branch restaurant. The restaurant knew it, too — they called us and told us they were canceling the order, and said we could still come get our food, but we’d have to call Amex to reverse the charge.

As it turned out, the scammers double-billed us for our order. I called Amex, who advised us to call back in a couple days when the charge posted to cancel it — in other words, they were treating it as a regular customer dispute, and not a systemic, widespread fraud (there’s no way this scammer is just doing this for one restaurant).

In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor hassle, but boy, it’s haunting to watch the quarter-century old prophecy of Brin and Page coming true. Search Google for carpenters, plumbers, gas-stations, locksmiths, concert tickets, entry visas, jobs at the US Post Office or (not making this up) tech support for Google products, and the top result will be a paid ad for a scam. Sometimes it’s several of the top ads.

This kind of “intermediation” business is actually revered in business-schools. As Douglas Rushkoff has written, the modern business wisdom reveres “going meta” — not doing anything useful, but rather, creating a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who want to pay for those things, and squatting there, collecting rent:

https://rushkoff.medium.com/going-meta-d42c6a09225e

It’s the ultimate passive income/rise and grind side-hustle: It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to discover a whole festering nest of creeps on Tiktok talking about how they pay Mechanical Turks to produce these lookalike sites at scale.

This mindset is so pervasive that people running companies with billions in revenue and massive hoards of venture capital run exactly the same scam. During lockdown, companies like Doordash, Grubhub and Uber Eats stood up predatory lookalike websites for local restaurants, without their consent, and played monster-in-the-middle, tricking diners into ordering through them:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/19/we-are-beautiful/#man-in-the-middle

These delivery app companies were playing a classic enshittification game: first they directed surpluses to customers to lock them in (heavily discounting food), then they directed surplus to restaurants (preferential search results, free delivery, low commissions) — then, having locked in both consumers and producers, they harvested the surplus for themselves.

Today, delivery apps charge massive premiums to both eaters and restaurants, load up every order with junk fees, and clone the most successful restaurants out of ghost kitchens — shipping containers in parking lots crammed with low-waged workers cranking out orders for 15 different fake “virtual restaurants”:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/01/autophagic-buckeyes/#subsidized-autophagia

Delivery apps speedran the enshittification cycle, but Google took a slower path to get there. The company has locked in billions of users (e.g. by paying billions to be the default search on Safari and Firefox and using legal bullying to block third party Android device-makers from pre-installing browsers other than Chrome). For years, it’s been leveraging our lock-in to prey on small businesses, getting them to set up Google Business Profiles.

These profiles are supposed to help Google distinguish between real sellers and scammers. But Kiin Thai has a Google Business Profile, and searching for “kiin thai burbank” brings up a “Knowledge Panel” with the correct website address — on a page that is headed with a link to a scam website for the same business. Google, in other words, has everything it needs to flag lookalike sites and confirm them with their registered owners. It would cost Google money to do this — engineer-time to build and maintain the system, content moderator time to manually check flagged listings, and lost ad-revenue from scammers — but letting the scams flourish makes Google money, at the expense of Google users and Google business customers.

Now, Google has an answer for this: they tell merchants who are being impersonated by ad-buying scammers that all they need to do is outbid them for the top ad-spot. This is a common approach — Amazon has a $31b/year “ad business” that’s mostly its own platform sellers bidding against each other to show you fake results for your query. The first five screens of Amazon search results are 50% ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is “going meta,” so naturally, Meta is doing it too: Facebook and Instagram have announced a $12/month “verification” badge that will let you report impersonation and tweak the algorithm to make it more likely that the posts you make are shown to the people who explicitly asked to see them:

https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/2/21/23609375/meta-verified-twitter-blue-checkmark-badge-instagram-facebook

The corollary of this, of course, is that if you don’t pay, they won’t police your impersonators, and they won’t show your posts to the people who asked to see them. This is pure enshittification — the surplus from users and business customers is harvested for the benefit of the platform owners:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

The idea that merchants should master the platforms as a means of keeping us safe from their impersonators is a hollow joke. For one thing, the rules change all the time, as the platforms endlessly twiddle the knobs that determine what gets shown to whom:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

And they refuse to tell anyone what the rules are, because if they told you what the rules were, you’d be able to bypass them. Content moderation is the only infosec domain where “security through obscurity” doesn’t get laughed out of the room:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

Worse: the one thing the platforms do hunt down and exterminate with extreme prejudice is anything that users or business-customers use to twiddle back — add-ons and plugins and jailbreaks that override their poor choices with better ones:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store

As I was submitting complaints about the fake Kiin scam-site (and Amex’s handling of my fraud call) to the FTC, the California Attorney General, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and Wix, I wrote a little Twitter thread about what a gross scam this is:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1628948906657878016

The thread got more than two million reads and got picked up by Hacker News and other sites. While most of the responses evinced solidarity and frustration and recounted similar incidents in other domains, a significant plurality of the replies were scam apologetics — messages from people who wanted to explain why this wasn’t a problem after all.

The most common of these was victim-blaming: “you should have used an adblocker” or “never click the sponsored link.” Of course, I do use an ad-blocker — but this order was placed with a mobile browser, after an absentminded query into the Google search-box permanently placed on the home screen, which opens results in Chrome (where I don’t have an ad-blocker, so I can see material behind an ad-blocker-blocker), not Firefox (which does have an ad-blocker).

Now, I also have a PiHole on my home LAN, which blocks most ads even in a default browser — but earlier this day, I’d been on a public wifi network that was erroneously blocking a website (the always excellent superpunch.net) so I’d turned my wifi off, which meant the connection came over my phone’s 5G connection, bypassing the PiHole:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/28/shut-yer-pi-hole/

“Don’t click a sponsored link” — well, the irony here is that if you habitually use a browser with an ad-blocker, and you backstop it with a PiHole, you never see sponsored links, so it’s easy to miss the tiny “Sponsored” notification beside the search result. That goes double if you’re relaxing with a dinner guest on the sofa and ordering dinner while chatting.

There’s a name for this kind of security failure: the Swiss Cheese Model. We all have multiple defenses (in my case: foreknowledge of Google’s ad-scam problem, an ad-blocker in my browser, LAN-wide ad sinkholing). We also have multiple vulnerabilities (in my case: forgetting I was on 5G, being distracted by conversation, using a mobile device with a permanent insecure search bar on the homescreen, and being so accustomed to ad-blocked results that I got out of the habit of checking whether a result was an ad).

If you think you aren’t vulnerable to scams, you’re wrong — and your confidence in your invulnerability actually increases your risk. This isn’t the first time I’ve been scammed, and it won’t be the last — and every time, it’s been a Swiss Cheese failure, where all the holes in all my defenses lined up for a brief instant and left me vulnerable:

https://locusmag.com/2010/05/cory-doctorow-persistence-pays-parasites/

Other apologetics: “just call the restaurant rather than using its website.” Look, I know the people who say this don’t think I have a time-machine I can use to travel back to the 1980s and retrieve a Yellow Pages, but it’s hard not to snark at them, just the same. Scammers don’t just set up fake websites for your local businesses — they staff them with fake call-centers, too. The same search that takes you to a fake website will also take you to a fake phone number.

Finally, there’s “What do you expect Google to do? They can’t possibly detect this kind of scam.” But they can. Indeed, they are better situated to discover these scams than anyone else, because they have their business profiles, with verified contact information for the merchants being impersonated. When they get an ad that seems to be for the same business but to a different website, they could interrupt the ad process to confirm it with their verified contact info.

Instead, they choose to avoid the expense, and pocket the ad revenue. If a company promises to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” I think we have the right to demand these kinds of basic countermeasures:

https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/

The same goes for Amex: when a merchant is scamming customers, they shouldn’t treat complaints as “chargebacks” — they should treat them as reports of a crime in progress. Amex has the bird’s eye view of their transaction flow and when a customer reports a scam, they can backtrack it to see if the same scammer is doing this with other merchants — but the credit card companies make money by not chasing down fraud:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosalindadams/mastercard-visa-fraud

Wix also has platform-scale analytics that they could use to detect and interdict this kind of fraud — when a scammer creates a hundred lookalike websites for restaurants and uses Wix’s merchant services to process payments for them, that could trigger human review — but it didn’t.

Where do all of these apologetics come from? Why are people so eager to leap to the defense of scammers and their adtech and fintech enablers? Why is there such an impulse to victim-blame?

I think it’s fear: in their hearts, people — especially techies — know that they, too, are vulnerable to these ripoffs, but they don’t want to admit it. They want to convince themselves that the person who got scammed made an easily avoidable mistake, and that they themselves will never make a similar mistake.

This is doubly true for readerships on tech-heavy forums like Twitter or (especially) Hacker News. These readers know just how many vulnerabilities there are — how many holes are in their Swiss cheese — and they are also overexposed to rise-and-grind/passive income rhetoric.

This produces a powerful cognitive dissonance: “If all the ‘entrepreneurs’ I worship are just laying traps for the unwary, and if I am sometimes unwary, then I’m cheering on the authors of my future enduring misery.” The only way to resolve this dissonance — short of re-evaluating your view of platform capitalism or questioning your own immunity to scams — is to blame the victim.

The median Hacker News reader has to somehow resolve the tension between “just install an adblocker” and “Chrome’s extension sandbox is a dumpster fire and it’s basically impossible to know whether any add-on you install can steal every keystroke and all your other data”:

https://mattfrisbie.substack.com/p/spy-chrome-extension

In my Twitter thread, I called this “the worst of all possible timelines.” Everything we do is mediated by gigantic, surveillant monopolists that spy on us comprehensively from asshole to appetite — but none of them, not a 20th century payment giant nor a 21st century search giant — can bestir itself to use that data to keep us safe from scams.

Next Thu (Mar 2) I'll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who's-who of European and US trustbusters. It's livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free:

https://www.brusselsconference.com/registration

On Fri (Mar 3), I'll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival:

https://elevate.at/diskurs/programm/event/e23doctorow/

[Image ID: A modified version of Hieronymus Bosch's painting 'The Conjurer,' which depicts a scam artist playing a shell-game for a group of gawking rubes. The image has been modified so that the scam artist's table has a Google logo and the pea he is triumphantly holding aloft bears the 'Sponsored' wordmark that appears alongside Google search results.]

[james-is-here]

Babes, Okay, Cheat fic idea and guess what....I use my ex's actual name cause he was honestly a jerk on the brink of being a dick.

The plot twist is that this cheat fic is more like a revenge fic in a way cause- Well, just read it, it's better than explaining it 😅 the member I used is also a mystery and I gave Mn arm tats cause it's a weakness of mine.

Specifically for @succubus-hansol because filth. This smut is filthy and messy.

Blogs: @belladonna6-6-6 @heartbinn @leezanetheofficial @yongbokkk @michelle4eve @dontwannaexsist (Imk if I forgot you or you want to be added.

You were none the wiser about what your boyfriend was doing. You loved Shawn and he loved you, you trusted him and never saw him badly, he was the sweetest.

You didn't suspect the new cologne on him, the new hoodie, bruises, new necklaces, hiding his phone, elated attitude when he visited you, giving you vague answers when you ask where he's going....

Wait...

You didn't give him those things and his recent hiding from you is suspicious. How have you not looked into it sooner? Especially when he use to shrug when you took his phone, now he makes up excuses as to getting it out of your hand.

"Hey, where you going?" "Um...my mom needs my to help in her garden. I'll be back later." Okay, that's suspicious. "Isn't your car with your brother?" "Oh, I'm taking an uber." "Oh, okay. Love you!" You yell but he's already out the door. That's what tipped you off, first he was wearing an unbuttoned dress shirt and loose fitting slacks and boots. Second, he hates getting dirty, he doesn't do anything that gets him or his hands dirty.

When he came home hours later, he was tipsy, swaying everywhere and tripping over his feet before collapsing onto the couch and you watched from the dining table.

His phone ends up on the floor and you take the chance to check it. You two shouldn't hide things from each other but he does and you can't help but to listen to the devil on your shoulder, while your angel is trying to get you to trust Shawn but all you do is block it out.

You pick up his phone and unlock it, surprisingly it's the same passcode as always and yet he keeps it from you. Opening his app history, you see his messages and see that he's texting someone with the cliche contact name of "Doordash". Did he really think that you'd think the app itself was texting him?

Doordash: You just left and I already miss you 🥺

Doordash: When can we meet up again?

Doordash: I'm free tomorrow, wanna meet up at the convenience store next to my place?

Is he...seeing someone behind your back? Clearly this person doesn't know about you like you didn't know about him.

Scrolling through other messages, your chest tightens when you check a chat and realize that's it's yours and he fucking named you "Grubhub".

There's other contacts and fake names that haven't had any interactions in years, you and "Doordash" are the only ones minus his family members.

You pull out your phone and open your uber that you shared with him. Last ride on your account was surprisingly thirty minutes away. Closing out of the app and opening your contacts, you make a new one and save the "Doordash" number before going back to the other persons number.

After forever of texting Shawn, you know how to play the part.

You: Of course ❤️ I'm free as well, what time?

Doordash: Five okay with you? Wanna take you out before taking you to my bed. 😏

Damn, whoever this was is one smooth motherfucker.

You: Oh I can't wait 😩 See you then 😘

You delete the messages on your end then put the phone back with Shawn and leave yourself a reminder of what you just committed to.

What's shocking is you don't really feel hurt that he's been lying to you. Maybe a little but honestly you think you'll survive without Shawn.

When your reminder went off, Shawn was passed out in bed still. He woke up on the couch, hungover and in pain, so he was sleeping the previous night off.

"Mn, where you going?" He mumbled when he heard you digging through your closet. "Boss called me in for a little bit for a staff meeting and I need to pick up my paycheck. Won't be gone long." "Mmm okay." He hums as he stretches before settling and promptly passing out.

Leaving the bedroom with jeans and a grey t-shirt hoodie with the sleeves rolled up, showing the black ink chinese dragon wrapped around your right forearm and ivy vines wrapped around your left.

You grab a white cap and your keys, slipping on your shoes then heading out the door. The drive is short and you have to park across the street but looking around, you don't see anyone possibly looking for someone else until ten minutes after the set time.

A guy wearing all black walked to the door of the convenience store and leaned against the wall next to it, checking his phone and then turning his head back and forth, this has to be him.

Turning off your car, you get out quickly then cross the street, leaning on the other side of the door. You wait a couple minutes, glancing at him a couple times before the bell of the store rings. "Excuse me, you both are loitering. Either come in and get something or leave." The store owner scolds and you went to speak but the other spoke first. "Sorry, Ma'am, I'm just waiting for my boyfriend-" You quickly jump in, knowing she won't take that as an excuse. "No problem, Ma'am, we'll get out of your hair."

You give the other a tight lipped smile and walk over to him. "Sorry, come on." He surprisingly follows you to the side of the shop and you both find a bench. "Um, so why'd you do that? I was actually waiting for someone." "Sorry, again. Who were you waiting for?" "My boyfriend. His name is Shawn. I really should at least go back, at least nearby so he can find me."

He goes to stand but you stop him. "So you're Doordash?" "I- Excuse me?" Sighing, you rub your eyes and lean back. "Uh, okay...Shawn wasn't the one that messaged you to meet him here. It was me. He's also my boyfriend..." "What? No, Shawn wouldn't do that to me." "I thought the same thing. He told me last night he was going to help his mom in the garden." He sat up and looked at you almost in realization. "When he left my place he said he needed to get home to take care of his mom cause she was sick." "He came home tipsy last night." "We...We drank last night, how the fuck didn't I make that connection?" He berates himself and slouches back against the bench.

You both stare at the road ahead of you before you speak up. "Well...I'm Mn. What's your actually name Mister Doordash?" "Doordash?" You snicker at his confused face, thinking about it he is really cute. "Shawn named you Doordash in his phone. I was Grubhub." "That's so dumb." "That's what I said!" You laughed and a small smile graces his face. "I'm Chris or Chan. Guess it's...nice to meet you? I don't know." "I don't know either."

You both stare at the road again but you turn to look at Chan. He really did look cute, you guess Shawn can choose good men. He has a good looking face, fluffy hair peaking out of the beanie he wore, and you couldn't help but take in every detail, including how soft his lips looked, then you realized they were moving.

"Your ink looks cool." "Huh?" You blink, spaced out for a moment. "Your tats, they look really cool." "Oh, thanks." "So...Since we're both currently ghosting Shawn, wanna go get something to eat? It's better than sitting here and honestly I don't want to go home yet." You notice he's looking down at his fidgeting hands and glancing at your arms.

"Yeah, beats failing to try and get back at him and not coming up with anything." Honestly, since looking through his phone, the devil on your shoulder has taken the reins and you honestly wouldn't mind getting back at Shawn by using Chan.

"Can I be straight with you?" "Um, I think that'd still make you gay." You shake your head with a smirk as you laugh, throwing your head back. "Oh, you got jokes, huh?" He lets out a laugh and it's clear that the awkwardness is gone.

"I meant, smartass, can I be honest with you?" He giggles and nods. "Yeah." "We go get food, I pay, and then we get back at Shawn." "We?" You hum and stand up. "Food first, honestly I'm really hungry. I'll tell you then, yeah?" He sits up, looking up at you and then sighing and standing. "Yeah, okay. You will pay, right? Shawn makes me pay." "I always pay." "Okay then."

He actually takes you to Changbin's restaurant, his best friend. A homey bistro Chan helped him make a reality. "Who's this?" Changbin asked when Chan brought you to the bar in front of the open kitchen. "Funny story, actually. Mn, this is Changbin. Changbin, this is Mn, Shawn's boyfriend." Changbin choked on the water he was sipping and almost dropped his cup.

"You're joking." Chan sighs and sits down, you sitting next to him. "Nope. Apparently we were secrets, even in his phone." "Ooh, what were your names?" Changbin has heard of fast food contact names but has never heard it in person so he was eager to hear as he leaned on the bar in front of him. "Doordash." Chan answered and you followed with, "Grubhub."

Changbin grimaces and whistles lowly. "That's sucks. Anyways, whatcha want to eat?" Chan orders his and you get the same thing, not really sure what to get since his friend's menu looked really good.

When he delivered your food, Chan immediately started eating but you messed with your fries. "Hey, daydreamer, you okay?" Changbin teases when he returned from another customer. "Oh, yeah." "Thought you were super stunned by your food but you haven't even eaten anything." "Sorry, just never been cheated on and I feel like I should be upset. I mean I am but I also don't care." "People react differently. Honestly, if I was you I'd get revenge sex." Chan choked on his soda, couching and gasping and you reach over and pat his back.

"Ch-Changbin!" "What? That's just me." He holds his hands up in surrender. "I like you...funnily enough, I've actually been thinking the same thing." "Seriously?" Chan cleans up the soda he spilled and Changbin lowers his hands. "Yeah."

Chan didn't know how to answer, he just looked away and this time it was him staring at his fries. "Well, sleeping with other people wouldn't really be revenge but I guess-" "Dude, of course it's not revenge. I meant you and Mn. I-I mean if you want, y'know." Then he glances at you. "He's not bad looking, if you don't take him I will." You chuckle shyly while finally eating your fries. "Plus, you do have a thing for tat-" "Changbin! Please...I love you, mate, but shut up." "Dude, don't yell at me, you literally look like you brought him on a date."

He suddenly looks around, an older couple in a booth, a younger couple a couple seats down from you at the bar, and a teen on a laptop with headphones on at a table near the window. Looking at you, he smiles sheepishly. "Sorry." "It's okay. Also wouldn't mind getting revenge with you." "Really?" "Yeah." You smile, looking down at the counter, glancing at Chan's friend then back to Chan. "Shawn is good a picking the cute ones."

He sighs, a shy grin on his face as he rests his elbows on the counter and covers his face. "He flusters easily, doesn't he?" "He's usually confident and flirty, this is a first." "Oh really?" Changbin snickers when you lean over to Chan and he doesn't notice. "Chan?" He uncovers his face to look at Changbin but jumps when he sees your smirking face, dropping his hands onto the counter with a small slap as he leans away, hiding his smile in his shoulder as he completely blocks the two of you out.

"You both are jerks." You lean back to your seat with a soft chuckle and watch Chan straighten back up. "Are you serious though?" "I'm not usually one to sleep with people I just met but yeah, I am." Suddenly Changbin is harshly setting down his towel on the counter and leaving from behind the bar and coming over to Chan, pushing him out of his chair then pushing you out of yours.

"For two people who just met, there's a lot of tension so go take care of it, lunch is on me, go, go, go." "Wait, I said I'd pay though." "Don't fight with Changbin, if he says it's on him, it's on him, I've tried." Chan answers you as his friend shoves you out.

"Go, forget Shawn, have fun, I don't know." He pushes you out the door and then shrugs at the end of his sentence. "I swear, why am I friends with him?" "I heard that!" He yelled from the other side of the door.

Standing there awkwardly, you put your hands in your pockets and look down at the sidewalk. "Um, we don't have to at this moment...we could just watch a movie if that's okay." Maybe a movie could relax your nerves a little. "Yeah, that's okay." He smiles and steps away with you following, taking you to his place which is surprisingly a block away.

His apartment was cozy, not too many decorations but enough to show his personality and what he likes. "It not much but it's mine." is what he said when the both of you entered. "It's nice." You replied.

Now you sat on his couch, he sat cross legged on one side and you were stretched out on the other, arms crossed lazily on your stomach. It was a bit awkward, just sitting there in silence but it was okay.

Chan suddenly moved to sit closer to you and you glance at him from your peripheral. "How long had you been with Shawn?" "Mmm a year?" "Damn..." "What?" "He was with you before me. Six months." You shake your head, honestly astonished with this information.

Bringing up his knees, you saw his hand reach out to your leg before it stopped and his arm wrapped around his legs. Bringing a knee up, your thigh moved closer to him and you readjust, an arm going over the back of the couch, and he moved slowly to mess with the threads of your ripped jeans, turning his head only slightly but mostly hiding his face in his knees.

He slowly moves from the threads to the edge of the rip and then his fingers slip into the rips, fingers soft on the small exposure of your thigh.

Hesitantly, you take his hand into yours, just holding it but he tightens the hold slightly and pulls it towards him while crossing his legs and holding it in his lap, not even realizing he's practically encased himself with your arms in front of him and behind him.

His fingers are light while tracing over the head of your tattooed dragon, tracing its body and turning your arm to trace the lightning around its body. You stare at the side of his head, watching his eyes take in the details of the ink.

For a moment, you get lost in his beautiful features. You suddenly act on impulse, his hands moving from your arm when you raise your hand to his chin and turned him towards you. "You trapped yourself." You said softly and his eyes move around rapidly and suddenly realize where he is. "O-Oh, sorry." "You really do like people with ink, don't you?" "Yeah. I-I don't know why...just looks cool."

Tilting your head, you move forward and kiss his cheek, then his jaw, and when he doesn't pull away you move under his jaw, your kisses were soft and were barely there.

He inhaled sharply when you pressed your lips under his jaw, specifically under his ear, and you graze your teeth over the spot to get his reaction, a barely audible whine, before biting and sucking. Biting his lip, he lets out a soft moan and automatically tilts his head to give you more room and you move your hand from holding his chin to under the other side of his jaw and hold him where he was.

Attacking more of his neck, his noises were soft and held back as he kept his mouth shut, his hand moving to your knee, nails digging into your knees and causing a dull pain but your jeans lessen it.

Your hand moves to his thigh as you move back on the couch, getting closer and pulling his thigh towards you which makes the male move, uncrossing his legs and moving just as close.

Without thinking, your left hand still on the back of the couch moves to the back of his head, tangling your fingers into his hair then pull him back. That finally got a noise out of him, his lips parting and letting out a soft moan as he turns his head slightly towards you, lips still parted as his chest heaves out the soft pants he's panting out. His eyes wide and glancing at your lips, shining with spit from your recent attack.

You lean forward slowly, tilting your head and your lips barely touch before one of your phones is ringing. Pulling away, you look towards the sound and find your phone on the coffee table, Shawn's contact on the screen.

Looking back to Chan, he nods his head and you let go of his hair, leaning forward and picking your phone up before answering it bringing it to your ear at the same time Chan sits up, pushing you against the back of the couch and you watch as he throws his leg over your spread legs and sits on your lap.

"Oh-" "Mn? You okay, you've been gone for ages." You put the phone on speaker and hold it away from yourself as Chan places his left hand on your neck and his right on your bicep then leans into your neck, returning the marks that you gave him. "Ah~ Yeah, I'm okay, did you need something?" "No, just miss you. Thought it was just a staff meeting and getting your check?" "I-It was, boss kept me longer. He promoted me." "That's amazing!" That promotion was two weeks ago. "So you'll be home soon?" "Yeah, I should be. M-Mom asked me to stop and pick up dog food for Brexit." "Okay...Well, hurt back, yeah?" "I will." "Okay. See you soon, Mn." "You too, bye Shawn."

You hang up, tossing your phone onto the floor softly before placing your hands on Chan's thighs and turning to the left, laying him down and hovering above him between his legs. "You are braver than you look." "Thank you?" He asks with a laugh which made you smile.

"Now, can I continue what I was doing before I was interrupted?" "Yes. Please." Smiling, you lean down, barely touching his lips before you change your mind and lean up slightly, lifting your hand and thumbing his bottom lip, parting his lips further apart, his eyes locked on yours that are on his lips. "So obedient even though you just met me." His eyes flutter as he whines. You gently push his bottom lip back up so he closes mouth around your thumb and it's like automatic as he start sucking it. "How did Shawn get a hold of you? He hates being dominate."

He moans around your thumb when you push into his tongue then slip your thumb from his lips. "I-I'm m-more of a switch...but I haven't really, um, switched...guess I could only find subs so I never was one." "Well, now you can be."

Finally, you lean down and connect your lips, firm and absolutely certain that this is what you want cause when your lips connected with his full, soft ones and they parted easily for you, you didn't want to stop as you slipped your tongue in and swipe it along his, pulling a proper moan out of him and he sounds so good you can't help but groan in return.

His arms drape around your neck and pull you closer. In return, you act on impulse and lower yourself onto him and he moans again when your pelvis meets his, grinding your clothed growing hard-on into his.

Breaking apart for air, you move to his neck again and his back arches closer to you. "H-Hyung- Fuck, sorry." His hand flys to his mouth as you pick your head up. "So you have a thing for tatted older men?" "Am I wrong? I'm sorry." "I'm two years older than Shawn." "Same age as him..." Smiling, you kiss the corner of his mouth. "Then no, you're not wrong."

You lean back down, pressing your lips firmly to his before a ring tone goes off again. "Are you fucking serious?" You groan as you look up and grab Chan's phone, he takes it and answers but his hips still jolt up to meet yours. "Hey." "Chan! I'm bored~ Can we hang out?" "Um, one sec, can you call me back in a few minutes, I'm busy at the current moment." "Oh, yeah, sure." Chan hangs up, putting his phone on the table and pushing you off him to switch spots with him straddling your lap.

He pushes your shirt out of the way and drags his nails down your toned stomach before he comes to your belt, fingers fiddling with your buckle in fake struggle, fingers nudging into your bulge below the accessory as he pulls it apart, the buckle clinking against itself while he unbuttons your pants then slowly dragging down the zipper.

"Chan...Baby, go faster." You pant out before throwing your head back against the cushion when his hand palms you and opens your pants wider to fully hold you. Hissing at the sensation before huff out a moan and look back down at Chan's movements. "Fuck." "Baby make Hyung feel good?" He asked, his eyes wide and wanting as he bit his lip, humping into his own hand. "Yeah, baby. Shit, making hyung feel so good." His hand squeezes your bulge slightly before he lets go and pulls down your boxers.

Hissing at the cold air, you grip his thighs, attempting to pull him closer. "Hyung so...big...and heavy..." He purposefully lets some of his spit drip onto your tip as he begins to stroke you. "Baby, remember, Shawn's calling you back soon." "I know. You answer when he does and switch it to video call." "You crazy?" "For you? I am now. You think I'd let a guy and dick like you go?"

You chuckle as he scoots back on the couch, pulling your jeans further down to your knees and only pulls your boxers down to mid-thigh. "Gonna suck me off, Baby?"

His answer is taking your tip between his lips, tongue lapping at your pre-cum and swirling around your tip. "Fuck, so good." He takes more of you into his mouth, tongue moving rapidly on the underside of your cock, he moans as he pulls off of you with a 'pop' and exhales heavily as he strokes you, licking the underside of your cock. His actions all messy and sticky with saliva and pre.

His phone goes off again and you look over, grabbing it then looking back down to Chan who nods with a dazed smile and blown pupils. Answering it, you change it to video chat and point it at the ceiling before switching the camera to face the floor. "Chan? Why are you showing your floor, silly?"

He taps your thigh as he takes your cock down his throat and you groan as your head falls back, temporarily distracted as his warm, wet mouth takes you all the way in. "Ooh, you jerking off babe? Why didn't you call me sooner?"

You sigh out a moan, lifting your head then facing the phone towards Chan. "Wha- What the fuck, Chan?! You're cheating on me?!" You groan as he pulls up, his tongue sticking out as he reaches your tip and lets it rest on the pink muscle, his eyes blown wide and crossed slightly as he looks up at you. Your hand brushing through his hair, tangling in the strands and scratching his scalp, his eyes close as he moans. "Wait, Mn?! I recognize that tattoo, what the actual fuck?!"

"You cheated on us first..." Chan closes his mouth and starts bobbing his head, slurping and sucking, completely focused on your cock that he's become drunk on. "So don't go yelling at us." "This isn't fair." "What i-isn't fair is y-you cheating on me s-six months after we got together...a-and ch-cheating on Chan with me after that..." You get out through stuttery breaths as Chan's mouth felt so fucking good.

"W-We also know you were hiding us from each other. Doordash and G-Grubhub, really?" Chan gags on your length and gasps as he pulls back, jerking you off quickly as he rests your tip on his tongue again. "Fuck, Baby, go faster...gonna cum, baby, I'm so close." With your words, a moan, and a quick "Oh fuck!" You cum on his tongue as he keeps stroking you, humming at your release shooting into his mouth and when you finish, panting heavily, he licks your tip with the tip of his tongue before pulling back and shows his tongue mainly to you but Shawn was still yelling at the both of you.

He closes his mouth, swallowing your cum then sticking his tongue out to show you it's gone. You push yourself up, flipping the camera around before kissing Chan messily, tongues tangling together and you taste yourself on his tongue.

"We're done Shawn." You lean away from Chan and look at the phone, the younger male moving to leave marks on your neck as well. "Fuck both of you. This isn't fair." He hangs up and you laugh, tossing the phone away gently.

"Isn't fair, is he for real?" You think aloud before Chan is turning your head and kissing you again, moaning into your mouth as he moves back onto your lap and your hands hold his hips. "Hyung, please fuck me, I need you so bad." "Here or your room?" "Fuck me right here, please." "You can beg better, can't you?" "Hyung, please stuff me full. I-I need your cock, need it so bad, please Hyung, please." His his rut into yours, grinding his clothed erection onto yours, moaning freely.

"Baby so needy for his cunt to be full, huh? Only needy for me, right? You'll be mine from now on, right? Always want my cock stuffing you, keeping you full?" "Fuck, Hyung, please~" His moan morphs into a whine as his hips move faster.

You lay him down, sliding off your pants and boxers before pulling of Chan's sweats, finding him wearing only the sweats as his cock slips from the sweats and lays on his stomach, hard and leaking. "Commando, huh?" "I-I always was when I met up with him...now only for you." "Shit, you're so fucking cute." You toss his sweats next to your jeans before taking off your shirt.

"So hot..." His hands find your body as you hover over him and lick into his mouth. Your hand slips under his hoodie, hands smoothing over his skin and pushing up his hoodie. "W-Wait, I want to k-keep this on." "Okay." Your hand squeezes his peck before you move your fingers to pinch his nipple. "Ah~ Shi- S-Sensitive." He moans, arching his back and throwing his head back.

"I'm not removing it, just lifting it up." You say as you push the hoodie out of the way before leaning down and biting his tit. His hands, now covered by the sleeves of the hoodie, find your hair, gripping it when you move to bite and suck his nipple. His moans were music to your ears as you let go of his nipple and kiss up to his neck, biting and sucking under his ear.

"Hyung, please." He takes your cock into his hand, stroking you lazily. "I need to prep you though." "No, please." "Have you bottomed before?" He nods. "Please, I-I want...I need it, Please. I want the stretch...please, Hyung." He begs and you kiss him, your cock still covered in spit as you prop yourself up next to his hip, his legs folding next to your waist and spreading wider.

"Fuck." He wanted to watch but you are way bigger than he anticipated as you pushed yourself in, moving your hand to the side of his other hip. "Hngh~ Ah fuck~" His voice became higher, whinier as he lets out choked moans. "S'good, S'big. Hyungie s'big, ah~" He whines softly as he brings his hands up, clad with sweater paws as he hides his face.

"Yeah? Baby feel good? I haven't started fucking you and you're cock drunk. Has it been that long since you've been fucked?" "Y-Yes." "Then I will give you all I have." "Please, Hyung." "Don't worry, baby, I will."

You push yourself up, sitting back with your hands on his knees, holding him open. "Fuuuck Channie Baby...." Your left hand slides down his thighs and splayed itself on his toned stomach. "You look so fucking good. Such a good looking body, how did I not find you sooner?" Leaning back more only slightly, you gather quite a bit of saliva and let it fall off your tongue, landing on his hole and your length before you push in more.

Your right hand joins your left before holding his waist tightly and pushing forward at the same time you pull him towards you until you're finally all the way inside him. "Fuck~ S-S'full...S'big, fu-hgnh~" He squirms, body restless as he adjusts and his chest heaving heavily as it felt like the air was punched out of his lungs, his hands wanting to push him up to see but they let him go and his back arches.

You move your hands next to his head, mouth attaching to his and you swallow his moans, licking along his tongue, his teeth, the roof of his mouth. You claimed his mouth feverishly as you pull your hips back, leaning on your arm without pulling away to bring his leg up to his chest and hook it over your shoulder, leaning onto the other arm and bringing his other leg up and pushing it out.

"Hyung! Fuck, Fuck, right th-there!" "Already?" "Y-Yes, Yes, please move. Please fuck me, fuck...fuck me a-as if w-we d-didn't just meet each other, please." "Shit, you're gonna be the death of me now."

You push back in hard and he yelps, back arching the furthest so far as the moan he lets out is practically pornagrahic, you immediately thrust into him quick and hard, hitting his prostate dead on and drawing a moan with every harsh thrust into him.

"Fuck, you're so tight, Baby. So warm, so good. Such a good boy, practically letting a stranger fuck you." As he looks at you, his mouth is wide open, moans falling past his lips, and his eyes are blown wide and glassy with want, need, and lust. "M-Mn, F-Fu-uck, Hyung-" He gasps at the harsh thrust, your tip punching into his prostate. "I-I..." He whines, closing his eyes and looking away, covering his face with his right hand.

"You what, baby?" "I-I...I-I can't s-say it...just met you..." "We're w-well past that, Baby, just say it." "Fuck, I'm sorry...I-I l-love you, Hyung...I'm sorry." Leaning down, you give him a kiss, biting his bottom lip before letting it go and returning to hover over him. "It's okay, Baby. It's okay. I love you, too. Gonna take you out after this, screw Shawn, your mine n-now. G-Gonna treat you s-so well, g-gonna spoil my baby."

"Hyung, Fuck!" He arches into your chest, head thrown back. "Shit, don't stop, don't stop, faster, faster, AH FUCK!" Your hand wraps around his length, helping him closer to his high before he's cumming hard, shooting up to where his hoodie is bunched up on his chest and he squeezes hard around your length.

He whines in overstimulation as you keep thrusting into him. "Just a little longer, s'close, gonna fill you up, fuck it deep into your cunt." He clenches around you, making you moan softly at the feeling. "You like that? Wanna be bred? Want my cum deep inside you, have my babies?" He moans as his dick twitches slightly. "Fuck, gonna cum, fill you full, Shit~" You cum with a moan, groaning a moment later as you thrust into him deeply, barely moving your hips as he moans at the feeling of your warm seed fills him up.

"Don't...Don't pull out..." You chuckle tiredly, collapsing onto him with your face in his neck. "U-Unless you c-can carry me t-to m-my room, we're laying here." You gently let his legs go, moving your own legs in order to sit up and take him with you. He yelps in shock as your dick shifts but still stays inside him.

"Think you can lean back and grab your pants?" "No, I sleep naked." "Okay then." You grab his thighs and stand up, he wraps his arms around your neck, burying his face in the side of your neck and leaving small kisses before he nuzzles his nose into your neck, cuddling into your arms.

"Do you have a plug?" "I'm hugging it." He mutters and you physically have to stop and laugh. "That's not...Really?" He giggles as you enter his room, closing the door behind you then moving to sit on his bed. "No, hold on." He detaches himself from you and leans to his right slightly to the drawer of his nightstand and pulls out a plug.

"Want me to put it in?" "Obviously." You take the object from him and he places his hand on your shoulder as yours move to his ass, squeezing the soft skin and spread him before lifting him up, you slip out of him with a slight squelch noise then replace yourself with the toy. "Fuck..." "You okay?" He whines, shifting on your lap as your hands stay on his ass. "S'empty..." You chuckle, kissing his temple. "I'll get you a bigger toy so you'll always be full."

He pulls back, meeting your eyes. "Really? Y-You don't h-have to, I-I was just saying that stuff to...get off." "Were you really? I was serious, going to take you out tomorrow and spoil the hell out of you. Sounded like you were serious too, remember? Can't let a good guy and dick like me go." "I-I did...Shit..."

"Do you want to be something with me?" "I do. You're so much better than everyone else." "Then from now on you're my baby, my sweet baby boy, okay?" He nods shyly, leaning forward to hide his blushing face in your neck. "I'm your baby boy, Hyung. I..." He hesitates and you kiss his shoulder. "I love you, baby." He whines, tightening his hold around your neck. "Mmm...I love you too, Hyung."

Taking him with you, you lay down under his covers before covering you both up, he snuggles under his blankets and closer to you, wrapping his arms around your middle as he tucks himself under your chin, nose nuzzling at your neck and taking in your scent as your arms wrap around his shoulders and hug him close.

"Good night, Channie Baby."

"Good night, Mn-Hyung."

[booksooks]

𝑳𝒆𝒄𝒕𝒖𝒓𝒆 𝑯𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝑳𝒂𝒖𝒈𝒉𝒕𝒆𝒓: 𝑫𝒂𝒚 3.1

Author's Note: I'm so tired I'll edit this when I wake up. There will be a day 3 part 2. For now, please enjoy 💙

Contents: Nothing that needs a warning <3

Word Count: 2153

Summary: Entering your second year at college, only a few months after being broken up with, you weren't expecting anything special. Especially not in the romance department. But then a quiet, but friendly-enough boy on your floor catches your attention faster than you would like to admit. And oh, boy, are you in deep.

Thursday was more boring than you’d like to admit. You woke up early, despite your first class being only at 2pm, and you spent those hours mindlessly scrolling on your phone. And then you realized you didn’t know where your class was, so you scrambled to get your school’s brightspace open to find it. 

You breathed a sigh of relief when you were able to find it; it was one of the rooms on the upper floor of the library. The rest of your free time was spent getting ready for said class, choosing an outfit and doing any other cosmetic needs, skincare and stuff. Music blared loudly from your phone as you got ready, hyping you up for the day as you danced around your small room. Hanami had left for her classes for the day, so you had the tiny space to yourself as Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry made you bounce on your feet and sing into your microphone (aka your lint roller). It was only mildly embarrassing behavior, and your door was locked, so you weren’t extremely concerned with anyone seeing you. 

After a few more minutes, however, you sighed and decided you couldn’t get away with putting off leaving any more. You slipped your shoes on and snatched up your backpack to head out the door, your music now playing through your earbuds. You had left earlier than you needed, because you wanted to grab a drink from the commons cafe before attending two classes, and you wouldn’t have enough time to get something between two said classes. So leaving early was the only solution. 

You didn’t want to brag, you thought to yourself as you made your way to class, but you looked pretty damn good today. Jean shorts with star patches sewn over the ass (which, while cute, were inconvenient because it meant no pockets), and a baggy green shirt, and black converse made up your outfit. Your hair was hairing to the max, and you just felt good in the way you looked, which didn’t happen often, so if you had a little more swagger in your step, sue you. Today would be good. 

You carried the sentiment with you all the way to the commons cafe, where the school had implemented an entirely unnecessary and complicated new system to ordering the food through GrubHub, for whatever reason. You sighed and ordered your drink, and the app notified you that it would be ready in… 13 minutes. “Jesus Christ,” you mumbled to yourself as you leaned against a wall. Next time you would just order before leaving your dorm. It wasn’t like there were even that many people in line ahead of you, only three according to the GrubHub app. You rolled your eyes and checked the time, anxious to be on time with the added thirteen minutes to your schedule. You would be, thankfully, and spent the rest of your time waiting just scrolling through your phone. 

How much time did you spend on your phone anyway? Probably too much, you decided, going back to the messages between yourself and Shigaraki and Toga in the group chat last night. You hadn’t even used it for its intended purpose of scheduling a study session, but you figured you could blame it on Toga - wait, no, you couldn’t. You had asked when a good time to study was in her private messages. Oh well, it gave you a chance to text Shigaraki without Toga’s prying eyes. You had seen the way she looked at your hand on his elbow yesterday, a flicker of mischief and something a little more devious sparking in her eyes. You had your suspicions that she had left you two behind on purpose, but she had only just met you, so what reason would she have to try and get the two of you alone? 

Then again, she did seem like the obsessive type, with her little comment about stabbing people. And it wasn’t like you minded, per se. Shigaraki was an attractive man, the more you thought about him. Or more accurately, he was your type. He was tall, and his arm had felt so solid and warm beneath your hand yesterday, muscles taut underneath your fingers. You swallowed down the saliva pooling in your mouth, because yeah that was enough of that train of thought. 

Your mind didn’t stray very far, however, because you remembered his eyes and how damn pretty they were. Deep-set and a bright, ruby red, they sparkled with a less-than-hidden ferocity in the shadows of his pale blue hair. It was more than a little intimidating, the intensity in his gaze and how he seemed to be able to take in any information and store it away for later, to be pored over when it’s convenient for him. All in a few seconds of eye contact. 

You nearly jumped out of your skin when your phone buzzed in your hand, indicating that your order was ready and oh shit did you think about Shigaraki Tomura for a whole 13 minutes straight? That certainly wasn’t concerning, nor was it something you would let yourself think about for any longer as you grabbed your drink and made your way to class. Macroeconomics, ugh. Microeconomics had been hell last semester, but unfortunately it was a requirement for business majors, and there you were, a business major, which… Sucked to suck. 

You sighed quietly and shook off any and all thoughts about sucking and Shigaraki, and sweet Mary molasses you should not have thought about those two words together in the same sentence. What was wrong with you today? You decided it could be a problem for later, as you pushed open the door and greeted the professor, a sweet looking middle-aged woman before you sat down. This would be a long class. 

You were right, the class had been incredibly long, and incredibly boring, and you had taken to counting ceiling tiles to even stay awake. But the class was over now, thankfully, and you hopped to your feet to go to your next and last class, which was a calculus course. Fuck calculus. You pulled up your phone to double check the classroom number, knowing that the building it was in was right across from the library. 

The classroom was empty when you got there, save for-

“Shigaraki, hey!” 

The man looked up from his computer as you said his name, bright red eyes glancing at your mostly bare legs before meeting your gaze. “Hi.” 

“Are you in this calculus class too? That’d be so cool if we had two classes together.” You exclaimed, sitting at a desk next to him. He nodded and typed something out on his computer before shutting it, giving you his full attention, which you appreciated. 

“Yeah.” 

You nodded thoughtfully, wanting to keep the conversation going but unsure where to pick it back up. “It’s kinda early though, I mean, I’m 15 minutes early and you were here before me. What class did you have before this one?” 

Shigaraki said something about a computer science class, bringing one of his hands up to scratch at the base of his neck, an area of skin that was normally hidden underneath his sweater. Your eyes zeroed in on that little patch of skin, now scratched red and raw, and you had to physically blink to realize that not only had Shigaraki answered your question, he had asked you one of his own. 

“Uh, sorry I zoned out,” you admitted sheepishly. “What was that?”

“I asked what class you had.” 

Oh, right. That made sense. “Macroeconomics,” you mumbled. “It’s so boring I almost fell asleep.” 

Shigaraki’s lips curved into a sly, quiet snicker. His expression was marked by a subtle twitch at one corner, pulling your attention to the small scar that lay over the edge of his lip. A mole rested just beneath the other corner, adding a touch of asymmetry to his face that was prettier than it should have been. As he smiled , and God help you it was adorable, the wrinkles around his eyes deepened. “Falling asleep on the second day?” he mused, with a hint of mockery. “That’s no good.” 

Get a hold of yourself! You sang in your head. Where did his sudden, teasing confidence come from? 

You managed to smile sheepishly and avoided his gaze, shrugging. “Not my fault it’s a boring class.” 

Shigaraki had stopped pawing at his neck, instead tapping his fingers against his mouth and drawing your attention to it. His lips were cracked and dry, and looked to be honestly rather painful. “Can’t be that boring if you’re there.”

“W-What?” You chuckled softly, trying to figure out whether or not… was he flirting with you?

“You heard me,” he said, turning to face away from you and stare at the door. You blinked at him rapidly, and then shook your head. There was no way he was flirting. 

To distract yourself, you pulled out your phone and checked the time. 3:35pm. “Hm.”

“Hm?” Shigaraki parroted. 

“Hm, it’s five past and no one’s here yet,” you explained, pulling up the syllabus to double check you were in the right room, the right building. Yep. Room 221, Greens Hall. “Are we in the wrong room, do you think, or…?” 

Shigaraki frowned. “Could be.” 

You blinked at your phone, double and then triple checking your phone, just in case. But your eyes were not deceiving you. “Maybe everyone else is just late?” You asked hopefully. You knew it wasn’t true, there was no way no one else hadn’t trickled into class by now. 

“Let’s just,” you paused, “wait a few more minutes.” 

“Okay.” 

And so you did. Then a ‘few more minutes’ turned into ten, which turned into 15, and then 20. Not once had Shigaraki opened his computer back up. He had chosen to, instead, pull out his phone and fiddle around on it, and although you couldn’t see the screen you had to assume it was some sort of game by the way he held the device, thumbs poised over the edges of the screen. 

After 30 minutes of sitting in silence, you spoke up. “We’re definitely in the wrong room.” 

Shigaraki glanced up, briefly, and then looked back down at his phone. “How? We’re in the room that’s named on the syllabus.” 

“Iunno,” you mumbled, shrugging as you stood up and hoisting your backpack over your shoulders. “I’m gonna go back to my dorm and email the teacher from there. Wanna come with?” 

He nodded after a moment’s hesitation, sliding his stuff together and haphazardly shoving it all in his backpack. You watched, a little disturbed at the lack of organization, but didn’t comment because his backpack was already over his shoulder, and so was yours, and he was at the door quickly, holding it open for you. 

“Thanks,” you chirped, scooting past him and into the empty hallway. 

Shigaraki “mhm’d” in that soft, raspy voice of his, and soon enough his long legs were matching your stride. You both made your way out of the building in silence, trading off who opened doors for who automatically. You inhaled deeply when you got outside, the air cooler now that it was in the late afternoon, loving the feeling and the smell. 

The walk back to your dorm building was just as quiet, the both of you enjoying the sounds of other people walking or catching up with friends. Soon enough, however, you were on the little deer path that connected the academic part of campus to the living part of campus, where it was less chattery and was more welcoming to the cries of birds or squirrels barking. 

You broke that silence. “So uh, are you doing anything later?”

Shigaraki didn’t say anything for a moment. “No, don’t think so, why?” 

“Uh, well,” you started, hoping you didn’t sound as awkward as you felt. “I heard that they’re playing a movie on the front lawn of Briggs, and I wanted to go but I don’t wanna go alone.” 

You saw Shigaraki nod minutely in understanding. “What movie are they playing?” 

“I’m not sure,” you muttered. “An action movie, I’m pretty sure. I didn’t see though, on the flier. It starts at eight, though. If you want to come, no pressure.” 

You were rambling, God did you ever shut up? It was like you were determined to stick your foot in your mouth or make him uncomfortable. 

“Sure, I’ll be there.” 

“Oh, okay cool!” You said, your tone brighter than you had intended. 

The rest of the walk was quiet, and you said your ‘see you later’s in the hallway just in front of the staircase. It wasn’t until you were back in your room that you realized that, not only had you asked Shigaraki to go watch a movie with you, he had agreed. Oh joy.

End Notes: Thank you for reading <3!

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AO3 Link

ABSOLUTELY NO ONE HAS MY PERMISSION TO REPOST MY WORK TO ANY SITE.

[winterspiderpurrs]

Uber eats/grubhub worker Peter Parker gets worried when his regular never deters doesn't use the app as normal. The guy is a regular for the last 2 years. Even if he has never met the guy before.

So yeah he gets worried and calls the number he has. This weird British guy answered " This is Jarvis, you have called a private line, how did you get this number and why are you calling"

" Hi! I mean... Hello. So like... umm I'm Parker i mean Peter Parker. Umm I normally do deliveries for uhh Anthony. And umm he never doesn't order? I mean if he didn't that's fine but...uhhh... I just want to make sure he is okay? Like... it's cool if there isn't an order but... normally he does... and I wanted to make sure ya know... everything is okay..."

" One Moment Please "

And thats how Peter ends up being directed to Stark Tower, up elevators he has never been in before. Given entry to what appears to be a lab/workshop.

The Tony Stark laying in a chair and being told to help move the arc reactor in his chest before he passes out.

[chubbybunnytgirl]

we need a way for people to be able to anonymously send you food without having your address...like a combination of grubhub and a throne wishlist, ya know? there's an untapped market for a safe and discrete food delivery app.

[klapollo]

i want apps like doordash/ubereats/grubhub to go out of fashion and die so bad im not even joking. they made food delivery worse in basically every way. tons of fucking fees that make your meal twice as expensive for no reason, delivery workers getting paid peanuts in a gig economy setup, dominating delivery and then making it so restaurants can barely recoup on what can make up a significant portion of their business.

like i know it's not ideal but i feel like i would much rather use an online yellowpages type directory that would just tell me restaurants within delivery distance of me, direct me to THEIR website/phone where i can order directly from them and they have delivery drivers that they employ and pay hourly wages to (remember those). like i made a post about this already but while being a delivery boy sucked before all of this, the dominance of doordash and co is something ive seen happen very rapidly within the last decade and has made ordering takeout so much more fucking miserable for literally EVERYONE involved but the app company itself. i hate it

[oops-prow-did-it-again]

Why You Should Rethink DoorDash, and Other Courier Apps: From a Driver Based in the USA

So this is part rant and part psa. I have been doing delivery work as a gig driver for DoorDash for years bc of various personal circumstances. I'm hoping to get a CDL in the near future so I can move on to a better job, but that's besides the point for right now. Further disclaimer: I only know the intricacies of DD. I do not know how precisely GrubHub, Uber Eats, etc, work, but I presume they work much the same, since I see the same complaints come from those services too.

This is in no particular order but please, if you have the time, please read it through. I'll preface this by saying I am not going to be rude or bitchy about customers or merchants here, this isn't just me whining, I'm just trying to give a level recount of my experiences with DD, and often, they are just... Not great experiences, unfortunately.

I don't know how many people realize this, but drivers get offered a base pay of $2.00-$2.50 per delivery, depending on the area. This is all DoorDash HAS to pay a driver. Every time you submit an order via DD, it gets spit out onto drivers' apps with that base pay + tip displayed. Meaning if you do not tip, every driver sees only $2-$2.50 to deliver your order. Sometimes, if enough drivers decline an order enough times, the DD algorithm will start to slowly raise the base offered pay... by about $0.25-$1 per round depending on the mileage it takes to deliver that order. This means if you do not tip, your order will most likely be extremely delayed, or bundled with another order, which will make it late, and your food cold.

**Emphasizing this: although I find low tips frustrating, I am NOT personally faulting anyone for not tipping.** DD should just pay their drivers, and it shouldn't be up to you, especially bc ordering delivery is so damn expensive. But I'm telling you this bc they certainly don't advertise it, and many people in my experience are shocked by now little it pays. Many drivers will not accept an offer that's less than $1-$1.50/mi. This means if your restaurant is 8mi away from you, and DD pays the minimum $2, you need to be tipping at least $6-$10 for most drivers to even consider it, or else it will be sitting for a long time or get bundled with a double delivery (more chances for mistakes + takes longer for the food to get to you).

Furthermore, in certain localities, DD offers an hourly rate for its drivers. This sounds good on paper, but keep in mind that this does not include gas money, and only accounts for the time from a delivery being accepted to the time it is dropped off. If you are delivering in suburbs or, god forbid, rural areas, you will spend a lot of time not making money but still burning gas returning from a home to where restaurants are so you can get your next delivery. While the app may say something impressive like $14-$17.25/hr, in reality, it's usually half that or less when you factor in downtime.

DD orders are also exorbitantly more expensive than if you buy directly from the merchant because DD charges the merchant 15-30% of the menu price to use their platform, and the merchants pass this on, usually plus a little extra, to you. This is before you even consider "delivery fees," which are not paid to drivers and are pretty much exclusively pocketed by DD. Also, DD will often choose a store farther away from you (so, say, a McDonald's that's 5mi away from you as opposed to the one that's 1mi away) specifically so they can charge more on fees. *Sometimes* this is just bc the closer store isn't enrolled in DD, but oftentimes, it isn't.

ADDENDUM ON THIS, HOWEVER: If you are ordering directly from a merchant that you know does not have actual in-house drivers, but is offering delivery anyway, like Wendy's or McDonald's, understand that these merchants are going to send these deliveries through to DD or Uber Eats. These orders have cryptic names for items on the Dasher's end and often we cannot contact you if there's an issue with your order, because the phone numbers provided to the Dasher's app never work. If you know for certain the merchant has its own delivery team (most pizza places, Chick-fil-A, Panera, etc), please order delivery directly through them, but if you know they do not (Wendy's, McDonald's), DO NOT ORDER delivery through their apps. It displays poorly on the drivers end and is often more expensive and a less ideal experience for you.

DD does offer DashPass, a subscription service that, for $9.99/mo, says it slashes delivery fees and other costs. Not really; the amount you pay in DashPass, especially the longer you have it, often exceeds the fees you would pay if you simply bought orders without DashPass. Also, it will advertise at you constantly via notifications and emails which will make you more likely to spend more on delivery that you wouldn't have in the first place, further eroding whatever savings you'd gain from DashPass.

DoorDash also can do a thing where they enroll stores in their platform without that store's permission. These orders require Dashers to use a red card, a notoriously buggy debit card that is supposed to get loaded with the amount of money it takes to cover the order by DD. The restaurants do not get any extra profits from these, and many store managers would love to prevent this from happening, but it requires legal action that is infeasible for most stores to do on their own. This causes friction and conflicts between store managers and drivers, delays for the customers, and solely profits DD.

DD ***does not*** reimburse for any amount of gas or car repair costs. Instead, they offer a company debit card which has tons of hidden fees for their drivers, and gives a small % cashback on gas. It is an overwhelmingly bad deal, but they use it as a shield against accusations that they don't support drivers against the cost of gas. They do...but only if you let them be your bank. Otherwise, you get your pay the Tuesday after the week you worked, or you can cash out immediately via the FastPay feature - for a $1.99 fee out of the money you earned.

DD support teams (and I know this is not unique by any measure to DD but it feels worth mentioning) are based in Taiwan, I believe, as well. I have absolutely nothing against the support teams, for they are doing the best with what they have, but DD absolutely weaponizes language barriers and the difficulty in communication to try to silence customers and dashers alike when there is a problem. DD seems to hope that if you get frustrated enough trying to talk to support (once again, not the workers' faults, the call center is absolutely being exploited too, I just don't have firsthand enough experience with that work to talk about the specifics of how), you will simply give up and not bother trying to seek a refund or half pay.

On that note, if a delivery has to be canceled for whatever reason, your driver will not get paid regardless of the time they spent on it. Very very rarely they will give "half pay," which is half of the promised payout, but only if you were on the delivery for an excessive length of time (i.e., 1+ hours).

Furthermore, if a delivery is marked as undelivered, DD will issue a contract violation against the driver. It is then up to the driver to submit proof that they completed the delivery, via pictures or video evidence, even though DD tracks our phones the entire time we are delivering and should be able to see if we were there or not. **New drivers are not properly warned about this,** so oftentimes when you have a "hand it to the customer" delivery, drivers don't think to take pictures or videos, and dashcams are expensive, not everyone has one. It is extremely hard to argue your way out of a contract violation if you do not have proof.

If you get 3 or more contract violations, you will be immediately suspended from the platform, and 2 puts you at risk of it. If you complete 100 deliveries without incident since the one that gave you the violation, it *will* just go away... But this is a subtle tactic used to scare drivers into taking more (usually very badly paying) orders, because they fear deactivation.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't try to get a refund, if you legitimately did not receive your order. But please, try contacting your driver directly before you contact support, and if you must contact support, really consider whether someone losing a job, even if it a side gig, is worth the amount of money you spent. You can often just lie and tell DD the order is completely wrong and they'll refund it without punishing the driver, as that's seen as a merchant error.

Also, I don't think many customers realize this: we CANNOT see delivery instructions before we accept a delivery, and they are difficult to see until after the delivery is picked up (as they are only available on a floating widget badge). If you ask for extra sauces or other things in the delivery instructions, 9 times out of 10 we will not see it until we are already on the road and headed to you. Please don't hate drivers for this; most of the drivers I've seen are more than happy to do whatever you want! But msg us via the app, DO NOT use the delivery instructions. Delivery instructions is for instructions on how to find your house or apartment if the numbers aren't very visible, or telling us to call you instead of come to your door when we arrive, that sort of thing. In fact, please be as descriptive as possible for the delivery instructions on this front- if you're ordering from a business, tell us the business name. If you're ordering from an apt, tell us the apartment complex name. If you're ordering from a house, tell us the color of your house or the cars in the driveway. It's all very helpful!

One last thing before I wrap this up: safety. Delivering is an extremely dangerous job. Pizza delivery, for example, is one of the most dangerous professions, and DD's safety features are even worse than those places. DD has implemented a feature for you to contact 911 via the Dasher app in emergencies, but often, this would still be too late. DD does NOT vet the areas for safety that they release the platform into, and there is no real recourse for violent customers aside from talking to support, which takes time and often won't communicate the issue effectively. Sometimes this works, and customers will rarely get banned from Doordash if they threaten, harass, or injure a driver. But the vast majority of these cases go unreported.

Loose dogs and carjacking are also major problems. Customers failing to notify other people in their households that they ordered delivery has led to me being threatened before. I've had people answer the door in their underwear. I had someone try to invite me into his house while wearing nothing but briefs. I had someone step out of their pickup truck carrying two rifles directly in front of me right before I delivered to their house once. I've had dogs nearly bite me - thankfully none have, I'm luckier than many others, but it's still a significant risk. A lot of people seem to trust their dogs when they really should not.

All of this, for $2.25 in base pay + a few dollars in tips.

I really do love delivering, and I do appreciate the freedom DD gives me in choosing my work schedule right now. However, the compensation is woefully bad, the company scams merchants, customers, and drivers alike, and the working conditions are very unsafe.

Idk how many people here really use DD, or what in particular can even be done about most of these issues, but I hope this enlightened some folks.

[davidaugust]

NASA is seeking future innovative methods that could help retrieve rock samples collected by the Perseverance rover on Mars. Gig work apps, like Uber and Grubhub, offered to pick up the rocks, but NASA’s no wage-theft policy killed that plan.

[ask-st-ccchoir]

Hello Satan Caucasian Cramer Chor! This is all of you ur new names according to what you're entered as in my photos app

Ocean - Sea McConnelly-Violetice

Noel - NO! Grub hub (it replaced taco bell somehow)

(2008-2015) Ocean - Autism, speaks

Ricky - autism, does NOT speak

Alternate Ricky - not rich, but hard. (My friend made that one. I'm scared)

Mischa - Mitski, Bach, cheeky

Alternate Mischa - Miss ya mom boskinski.

Jane - Janice Buck

Penny - Quarter Sheep

Constance - constancely in a porta potty

Astrid - Asteroids are hitting the earth, specifically the ocean.

Hank - Hans (but he finishes sentences)

Trishna- bUGTERFFLL.

karnak- Car krash.

Virgil - Virgin

Father Marcus - Heart attack🩷

I hope all of these are personal attacks

🌹grubhub. Oh my god thats worse.

🌊autism Speaks,,

🌌At least yours is speaks, mines is not speaks.. Hard?? Oh....

💵guh.. You did NOT need to bring up mama🔥🔥😭‼️‼️

🔥HA NO PERSONAL ATTACKS FOR ME HAHAH🗣️🗣️

🐑janice buck.... Huhh.....

🍬oUCH😭😭

🏹hits the ocean... Hmmm....

💘i mean... I'll take it...

🐞i dknt think mine is.. That bad...

🔮kar krash.??????

🐭kar krash? More like coaster crash, also.. VIRGIN????

[kbthebearcat]

An old comic from 2022, but I still like how this came out! It’s Troy and Alice just chilling in his room, but they’re getting hungry! So why not order out? 

I think they’re supposed to be on htrae, and then maybe Martha and Adam went on a mission or something, and Troy doesn’t feel like cooking this time… so the two of them decide to order some food! And of course… tacos are certainly going to be one of the things they order! 

I tried to make up something similar to Grubhub for the app, but I realized that I didn’t exactly think everything through as far as like… it being in english. Technically it should be in htraein, because it would make a lot more sense for Troy to be ordering from a htraein food delivery service in this setting, buuuuut…. Maybe he just translated it to english for Alice to read. Yeah we’ll go with that! >w>  

And on another note, I forgot how much I love drawing my characters in this line-less/painted style… 

It’s just that it takes more time, and my patience with the process still needs work. ;w; 

I haven’t minded doing more lined artwork though, that has been a lot of fun to do again too. There’s something about inking that can just feel really nice for me, and you can still do a lot with lined artwork and mess around with all sorts of shading techniques, which it what I’ve been exploring recently.  

I actually started this drawing back in 2020 I think?

But then I finally got the motivation to finish it, and I’m happy I did!

One of the things I think that made me stall was because the original idea I had for this had Troy playing a Candy Crush type game called “Taco Munch” but I ended up bailing on that idea for now, and instead went with this one. 

I would still like to explore this “Taco Munch” game though, lol… maybe do some concept art for it just for fun. 

Anyways, I think I rambled long enough here… 

[gothicprep]

i swear, the hot takes people have about food delivery apps is a knock-on effect of the covid lockdown. like, people absolutely got dependent on this if they were stuck at home and didn’t know how to cook. can’t tell me otherwise. it costs twice as much as takeout.

Sorry to the disabled millionaires out there who, for some reason, think grubhub should be an extension of the ADA or something. I do not and will never care about you.

[yusuke-of-valla]

I'm this close from fucking strangling whoever at GrubHub decided their app should send their drivers 16 minutes early!

Because guess what! They take up space in the entryway waiting! And they get annoyed at me when the order won't be out for awhile! Why are you like this! Who'se ass do I need to kick? To get you fuckers to stop sending drivers before They're ready?

"Why is this taking longer than usual" WELL MOTHERFUCKER I'M TRYING TO A TUALLY GIVE THE KITCHEN TIME TO MAKE THE FOOD

[queerlilchinchin]

Quick tip: if you're going to use an app like grubhub or door dash, make sure that you're paying attention to the address of the place you're ordering from.

It just took me almost 2 hours to receive 2 smoothies I'd bought for $37. It shouldn't have taken that long, but even so, the distance between my apartment and the place I ordered from was further than I'd intended.

[edwinspaynes]

If the TLH Squad Had the Internet: A Companion to Social Media Headcanons

I am sorry, my Matthew and Thomastair biases are emerging again, please accept me

The first thing Matthew does when he connects to ye olde world wide web is turn to the rest of the group. "this is cool," he says. "i'm going to use it to download stageplays illegally, find sexually explicit materials, and watch videos of cute animals playing."

Alastair looks at him with SUPREME judgment. "This device contains the entirety of human knowledge, no one is ever going to use it for that. Don't be stupid."

Matthew shrugs and goes back to his illegal stageplay downloads. "I think that's exactly what people will use it for."

Alastair is interested in the internet because it is a New Thing. He begins to research it a bit. He's reading essays on the internet, how it was formed, how it works, how to navigate it. He especially learns how to protect his privacy online.

Matthew accepts ALL cookies. He thinks he will get literal cookies. Alastair, who has learned about cookies, just lets it happen.

Thomas and James decide to pull a prank on Matthew and Alastair. They painstakingly figure out how to order GrubHub and get Insomnia Cookies delivered. Matthew takes this as an enormous win because he was right, he got cookies. Alastair can suck it.

Thomas and James both find food delivery fascinating. They learn that they can eat whatever they want if they press a few buttons. They do not really understand that they're paying for it. They order like 20 pounds of Pad Thai.

Thomas also is extremely interested in podcasts. He can hear people speaking other languages and learn new things with the touch of a button. He likes Lexicon Valley, and he just starts listening to it. He listens to it for hours while everything goes on around him. It's cool.

Eventually, Thomas shows Alastair Spotify. Alastair thinks Spotify is the coolest thing because he can listen to classical music and ghazals whenever he wants to. He winds up making several playlists.

He hates modern music and has decided that it is The Enemy. Matthew discovers Shake It Off and loves it. He plays it loudly and it's only 50% to annoy Alastair.

Matthew becomes a huge Swiftie.

Alastair's playlists are extremely organized in a way that fascinates both James and Matthew, who have just ❤ed random shit they like in the most disorganized way.

James and Matthew also figure out that they can make joint playlists, which is pretty cool.

James downloads the Kindle app on his phone and has realized that he can read books on his device. He thinks it's really cool because he can take the books anywhere, but he ultimately decides he doesn't like it because it doesn't smell or feel like a book.

Matthew, who is a World Traveler, likes the app so much that he orders an actual Kindle. Now he doesn't need to lug books about as he travels the world, and he can always have the Complete Works of Oscar Wilde with him. It works.

Cordelia is mostly confused with how the keyboard works because she ran her hand across it once and it automatically made words. She realized that she doesn't need to type the words manually and wants to emulate that. She can't figure out that she needs to run her fingers over the letters in the configurations of the words she wants to make.

Eventually, she does get there and gasps. She shows James. This has rocked his world. Both of them now refuse to type like normal people and Alastair casts solid judgment on them. He thinks that the dragging-your-fingers method is not only lazy, but ineffective because of their many typos. (He is correct).

Cordelia also uses this opportunity to learn more about Cortana as it exists in the crown jewels. She's baffled to learn the facts of this Cortana as it is so different from her own sword. She finds it moderately uncomfortable that there's a second Cortana in the Tower of London.

Like Alastair, she likes reading essays on JStor. Matthew thinks this is a weird way to use the internet.

Matthew has downloaded so much illegal music at this point it's insane.

Lmk if you want a Part 2 :)

[nickgerlich]

Dining Virtually

The way we purchase food from restaurants has changed considerably in recent years. The standard dine-in or takeaway, and sometimes a pizza delivered to your doorstep, have been rattled by the arrival of third-party delivery services like Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, and more. DoorDash leads the roster with 66% market share.

But it is not just delivery that has changed the landscape, all fueled by mobile apps and digital marketing. Restaurants have added their own twist to the saga with virtual brands. These show up on apps as nearby restaurants, but you would be hard-pressed to find them in real life, because there are no signs announcing their presence.

No, they exist only online and in a kitchen known by a different name.

Many of the big chains are doing it, like Chili’s (Brinker), Hooters, Outback (Bloomin’ Brands), Applebee’s, and Wingstop. Even children’s party palace Chuck E. Cheese does it, with their Pasqually’s Pizza.Imagine learning the next day that the pizza you had delivered last night actually came from Chuck E. Cheese. Yuck.

Denny’s has also ventured into these waters with Banda Burrito, The Melt Down, and The Burger Den. And now it has inked a deal with third-party facilitator The Franklin Group to expand these concepts across 250 franchisees in the Denny’s system.

To be fair, there has been a small shakeout in the virtual brands sector of late, with Red Robin terminating its concepts and sticking solely to its main brand. But that is not unusual in any industry for weaker concepts to be shed, and new ones to replace them.

Virtual brands allow a restaurant chain to make better use of under-utilized facilities, especially during parts of the day in which customer traffic may sag. Having complementary products can help fill out those peaks and valleys.

They also allow restaurants to test new menu items or concepts, as well as serve different markets. But in many cases, the product is pretty much the same as if you went to Hooters or Chili’s. It’s just in a different package.

Some might consider it disingenuous, even misleading, for a restaurant to employ virtual brands. Essentially, it could be considered as smoke and mirrors, and perhaps problematic if different pricing strategies are used for identical products. Imagine if CPG (consumer packaged goods) companies did that. There would be riots.

The range of food items falling into the virtual brands category is somewhat narrow, typically limited to pizzas, burgers, and wings. These travel well with readily available packaging. While the courier services will attempt to deliver just about anything—including menu items that might seep, spill, or swish around en route—it just makes matters easier if there is some standardization.

Virtual brands are not to be confused with ghost kitchens, although there could be an overlap in some instances. Essentially, a ghost kitchen is a commercial-grade kitchen at which multiple brands are prepared on shared facilities. There are variations on this as well, such as the one in Atlanta owned by Inspire Brands, and featuring the brands under its corporate umbrella, including Arby’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, Jimmy John’s, and Sonic Drive-In. DoorDash also owns ghost kitchens, which it typically leases to local mom-and-pop operators, and with whom it has exclusive delivery rights.

And if you are wondering, a food hall is kind of the same concept as a ghost kitchen, with shared food prep facilities among numerous small food service operators. It’s just that it is all visible to consumers.

Meanwhile, virtual brands continue to proliferate, much like craft breweries. They satisfy our urgings for something different. In the case of Denny’s and its burrito, burger, and patty melt brands, the food may be much the same as what you would order off the standard menu, but at least it sounds different.

You just didn’t know it. Until now.

Dr “Virtually Right” Gerlich

Audio Blog