#app-slider

[calkale]

slimav headcannons? 💞🧸

Anon babe this has been cooking all morning i hope you’re prepared

I feel like i should add like a timeline to this cause its kinda everywhere and im ignoring some of the canon stuff mav did between 86 and tgm, in my head he became a test pilot in like 2006? and thats basically the only thing he does so he can be with slider more and thats around the time ice stopped flying so also when slider became an airline pilot. idk when slider retired or if he even did yet but after mav flew the tgm mission he retired but he does still fly his p51 in airshows and if the navy needs him hes still a civilian test pilot

-They workout together and have a joint playlist (they share headphones idk how it works), mav wears little shorts and big shirts or tank tops and slider wears sweats and tank tops usually. They did matching outfits once and every time they looked at each other they started giggling so they never did it again (on purpose that is)

-mav loves being so small compared to slider, when they hug it makes him feel protected

-after goose died mav didnt really have anyone to talk to (this is before him and slider got together), he couldnt go to carole, he did go to ice a few times but slider became his person, mav grew a lot closer to both of them and they helped him a lot the first few weeks after he lost goose, they were friends for a year or more after this happened and eventually they got together

-mav buys slider flowers, tulips are his favourite

-Slider has a lifted truck (1979 ford f150, red with a white stripe on the side) and he has no running boards/step to fuck with mav (https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMYAhdg7R/)

-slider has ever single bruce springsteen cd in his truck, he keeps them all in a cd book because some of them are signed and he doesnt wanna keep the signed ones in the truck (there's also not enough room to keep ALL the cds in there in their individual cases)

-slider wanted to be an a10 pilot. He was best friends with ice growing up and decided to give up his dream of joining the air force so he could be with ice in the navy, he never told ice this, ice knew slider would've preferred the air force and wanted to be a pilot but he didn't know it was his dream. Mav is one of the few people slider shared this with

-slider leaves the navy once ice stops flying and he becomes an airline pilot, he doesnt work a whole lot so he can spend more time with mav but he loves being an airline pilot

-they got married on a beach in hawaii, at first they didnt know if they wanted to get married (and before 2011 they couldnt), slider had the ring for a year before finally deciding to propose to mav in early 2013 and they got married on valentines day in 2014. it was a small wedding and they both wore all white suits. this is the vibe of the reception: (https://www.instagram.com/p/CoVjzuUg9y-/?igshid=MDM4ZDc5MmU=)

-slider grows a mini mullet after leaving the navy, mav loves to play with his hair, its super soft and curly and he loves running his hands through it

-slider is the little spoon almost always, mav cuddles up to his back like a koala

-slider made fun of goose for wearing hawaiian shirts all the time but after leaving the navy he starts wearing them too (theyre not super vibrant and over the top, he wears a lot of muted or just pastel colours) and mav makes fun of him for it (he thinks its cute)

-slider calls mav babygirl and it makes mav blush SO HARD

-they have a HUGE bed, it was one thing they both agreed on when picking furniture for their house, they needed a big bed because sliders huge and mav sleeps like a starfish half the time

-theyre both morning people but mav is more of a morning person, slider likes to sleep in a little while mav makes him breakfast, after they eat they’ll sit on the deck in the backyard and drink their coffee

-slider took a bartending class and he makes fruity cocktails for mav, every time they go out mav gets a beer or a jack n coke because hes shy, he does love both of those but he also likes “girly drinks” on occasion. Sliders favourite drink is a margarita

-they love going on a hikes together, slider brings a bunch of snacks for mav because mav doesnt like carrying a bag

-idk where their house is but its in a medium sized town/small city? close to mavs hangar, its a medium sized house with a big yard and an in ground pool (that was the one thing slider wanted when they decided to buy a house together), the vibe of their house is similar to their wedding, a lot of colours and they have a lot of plants and flowers. its a two bedroom two bathroom house, the second floor is where the guest bedroom and bathroom are as well as a storage room, their bedroom and bathroom, kitchen and living room are all on the first floor. they have pictures everywhere and looking around their house you can tell exactly what kind of people they are and what they like, it feels like a home.

-slider comes to the hangar a lot and he’ll just hang out on the couch while mav does his thing, sometimes he helps out or works on his truck but he prefers to just watch mav

-slider picks mav up SO MUCH, he’ll throw him over his shoulder, carry him bridal style, give him a piggyback ride

-they build model planes together, they’re both loser plane nerds (so am i, im allowed to say that). Mav gets slider an a10 model for his birthday every year and watches him put it together. they keep their model planes all over the house, some of them are hanging from the ceiling too (slider hung them because mav almost fell off the ladder)

-they have so many little jokes with each other, when they’re out in public they’ll see something that relates to one of them and point it out to each other and they’ll both start laughing and get weird looks from everyone around them

-when slider becomes an airline pilot mav bakes him cookies to take with him, slider would hand them out to the crew on the plane and thats how he want from “big scary navy guy” to an absolute sweetheart, everyone loves him and compliment mavs baking

(im riled up about this rn so im adding my headcanons for their body types too)

when slider was in the navy he was bigger than most of the people there, he had a lot of muscle and not a lot of fat, when he left he did keep up his workout routine and he started eating better because he had more access to food, hes still mostly muscle now but he has a healthy layer of fat on him too.

When mav was younger his mom was a great cook, he loved to help her in the kitchen but after his dad died she just stopped, she barley ate, she did make stuff for mav but never let him help and she didnt make it with love like she would before, she wasnt happy. After she died and when mav was going from foster home to foster home he never had something stable, he had a weird relationship with food, it wasnt bad necessarily, he didnt not like eating, a lot of the time he had to make food for himself but it just wasnt as good as it could be. While in the navy he was average i guess? he had muscle but it wasnt super defined and he wasnt the biggest fan of cardio when he first joined so he did have a little fat. (while being a test pilot you have to be like better than in perfect shape but im ignoring that) he has more muscle than he did before but now that hes not flying in action as much he has more time to get back into cooking and he loves it, it feels like when he was cooking with his mom again and it has a lot to do with slider, slider loves him and he loves the food he makes, mav definitely has a little tummy now and slider loves how soft he is, theyre both still in great shape now, they love working out and being active (in many ways 👀)

also adding nsfw stuff under the cut

-Nsfw-

-mav usually bottoms but they do switch, mav loves watching slider get all worked up because of him, sliders so big and scary to most people and mav loves to take him apart and see slider begging for more underneath him (or on top👀)

-they both LOVE the size difference, it doesnt matter how long theyve been together the way slider towers over mav always gets them both so horny

-mav loves being praised, they both love soft, loving sex and just being sweet with each other, slider will take his time to kiss mavs entire body and mavs adores it

-BUT they love rough and fast sex just as much, mav can be such a brat and slider knows exactly how to put him in his place, he’ll pull his dog tags or his hair

-slider calls mav so many pet names, baby, babygirl, princess, sweetheart, and so on

-sliders dick is definitely long and distinguished (and thick), mavs is a little smaller than average but hes not insecure about it

-they’ve had threesomes with ice many times, ice and slider used to “help each other out” while they were at sea and when slider told mav that he asked if he could watch them sometime. The first time ice fucked slider while mav watched, the next time ice fucked mav and slider fucked mav after. One time for mavs birthday they both fucked him at the same time

-slider loves to feed mav, he gets him chocolate covered strawberries (mavs favourite) and he’ll feed them to mav while he rides him slowly. At their wedding they decided mav would feed slider cake because mav didnt know if he could be normal with slider feeding him cake, they did save a piece for later tho ;)

-mav loves wearing lingerie, he likes being feminized and this took it to a whole other level, slider loves it just as much if not more. The first time mav wore a set he was so shy and cute it made slider lose his mind

-They fucked on a beach during their honeymoon many times, the first time they only had a towel and they got sand everywhere, the next time they brought a blanket

-mav loves sliders hands, he loves when slider grabs his waist because his hands wrap all the way around him

[sugar-and-spite]

hey @ discord i finally updated your stupid app. why does the contrast slider not apply to the actual message box, which is the main interface of discord, and the thing i need the contrast slider for, because you idiots decided to change your color scheme for no fucking reason?

[wanderlingworld]

Hey there! These Animal Crossing valentines are in my shop right now! All cards come with cute pink envelopes. Deluxe sets are discounted bundles with washi tape and stickers to decorate with, include as small gifts, or keep for yourself. 😉 If you’ve been wanting stickers and washi tape, this is a good chance to get both! And if you’re into that squiddy game, Splatoon, I have some valentine sets for that as well! Those are selling quick, so check them out! 👀 wanderlingworld.etsy.com

Also, aren’t these little blossoms cute?! I brought them in on a rainy day when they only had one blossom open each. Within a few hours in my warm kitchen they all popped open! 🌸

[sunnysidemage]

Sorry, I don’t know who this Johnny Silverhand fellow is, I only listen to real music *plays K.K. Rock and Metal on repeat*

[bitchfitch]

I'm drawing Lordakai.... I need everyone to pool their strength.... and just. focus it. on making me put pants on this beast.

[rimouskis]

I would give anything to have my crappy busted iPod Touch from high school back. like man I want to DIG IN to the music I had on there

[rsthemewp]

7+ Best Art Portfolio Website WordPress Premium Theme

Art Portfolio Website WordPress Premium Theme

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[forvendetta]

𝗠𝗔𝗖𝗞 𝟭𝟬 - 𝗛𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗬𝗼 𝗘𝘆𝗲𝘀

it’s me you wanna be, indeed and i could still see the hate in your eyes / ’cause i’m living like a G, you intrigued and i could still see the hate in your eyes

[deepwoundsandfadedscars]

Options that the default clock/alarm app on my phone needs: the ability to set the volume for individual scheduled alarms

This medication knocks me the fuck out so I need my morning alarms at the loudest setting to rouse me from my slumber, but the evening alarm reminding me to take said meds does NOT need to make me jump out of my skin and set my heart racing every night at 9 PM. Let me have loud mornings and quiet evenings, for fucks sake

[monarch-boo]

So there's a new Gacha Life coming out??? I haven't been keeping track of these games in a while, I had no clue they were even working on another.

I saw some gameplay from people who got early access and there's actually so much cool looking new shit in the way of customization and now I'm really excited for it to come out officially.

[jacesreferences]

Screenlane

Mobile UI design references

[yellowharrington]

wildflower and barley -- joel miller x reader

pairing + fandom: joel miller x reader, the last of us (hbo)

word count: 5k+ oops

warnings/notes: smut smut smut!!! minors DNI, 18+!!! no outbreak!au. age gap (it's implied reader is in her 20s while joel is 45) and mentions of joel being kinda perverted and liking it lol. drinking (both reader and joel, not excessive), use of a dating app like tinder but not specified, unprotected PIV w creampie and oral (m+f receiving), do not fuck your tinder hookups without protection i'm just horny and gross. excessive use of darlin' as a nickname. implied that reader likes men. she/her pronouns used, afab!reader (with mentions of body parts), no use of y/n. if i missed anything lmk!

a/n: heavily inspired by this post by @yesttoheaven about joel's tinder profile!! it has been rotting my brain since i saw it which literally inspired me to write my first fic in the tlou fandom ever so please be gentle with me. i imagined show!joel because i've never played the game so do with that what you will. please reblog and leave comments if u enjoy it <3333

divider by @cafekitsune

summary: after deciding to change your age range on a dating app in hope of a change of scenery, you stumble across joel miller.

No one likes using dating apps.

Swiping left, left, left mindlessly at troves of men holding fish, showing off their trucks, or with deer heads mounted to the walls behind their selfies holding guns.

This was Texas, after all.

Having just moved here, it was a little shocking, to say the least. But you were getting used to the “eligible” bachelors that were your age generally looking and acting the same. When you did end up finding someone of interest, you were usually turned off pretty quickly by whatever shitty pick-up line they had chosen. Or, your personal favourite, “wanna fuck?”

No thanks.

It was an idyllic summer evening, the hot stuffy air of Austin flowing in through your windows. You laid in bed, propped up on the pillows against your headboard and sorting through the faces that adorned your screen. No one particularly interesting, as usual, and every profile was starting to melt together to look the same.

You sighed, looking into your settings, adjusting and increasing different metrics to hopefully change the pool just enough for there to be someone new or interesting. 

Age range: 25-30

Your eyebrow cocked as you looked onto the screen, pulling the slider more to the right experimentally. No one was here to see you, and even though it was slightly embarassing to be interested in older men, you’d be lying if you said it didn’t pique your interest to imagine it. Even just to try, and see, if they ever really did grow up. You imagined it was wishful thinking, but increased the range anyways.

Age range: 35-45

Feeling the need to throw your phone across the room after doing that, you placed it face down under your pillow and slid out of bed. No use in swiping through them now, and you were getting tired of looking. A pint of Ben and Jerry’s and a new episode of your favourite show was waiting for you downstairs.

‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃 ࣪ ִֶָ☾

Joel Miller does not use dating apps.

He barely knows how to send a text on his phone, let alone navigate the world of online women. Not to say he didn’t explore the options, so to speak, but they usually were not ones that were single, his age, and in his area. Unless the ads on those sites were real, that is.

“It’s starting to get sad,” Sarah had remarked at breakfast, when they got on the topic, and Joel feigned hurt. Hand over his heart, he dropped his fork onto the plate. “It’s not sad, Jesus. I’m just busy, is all.”

“Busy not gettin’ busy,” Sarah remarked, and Joel’s eyes widened. “Hey now! None of that.”

A blush spread up his cheeks and ears as they continued to eat breakfast in slightly awkward silence, before Joel took his plate to the sink. “Okay, off to school, you. And no more conversations about my dating life. Ever.”

Sarah laughed as she finished off the last of the juice in her glass. “I’m just saying, dad. You can if you want to. Might be nice for you.”

Joel planted a soft kiss to her head before she bounded out the door, rolling his eyes and calling out a ‘love you’ before she closed the door swiftly behind her. Joel stared at his cell phone on the table. Maybe it would be nice.

‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃 ࣪ ִֶָ☾

The following evening, you were a little too excited to see the dating app specimens you had acquired. Not sure what to expect, really, and you went in with no expectations. It’s not like they’d magically all be tall, dark, and handsome, but some variety never killed anybody.

Paul, 41

Daddy, but not yours. No libs allowed. 6’ because that matters.

You sighed deeply. Some things never change. 

After swiping through much of what you were used to, a profile managed to catch your eye among the sea of disappointment.

Joel, 45

Just a Southern gentleman trying this out for the first time. Contractor of over 10 years. I love my daughter, BBQ, strong coffee, and sleeping in. 

Now that was the most interesting thing you’d seen in a while.

He didn’t look a day over 40. His eyes creased at the corners when he smiled wide in his photos. He looked tan, a product of the Texas heat and his job, you thought. His features were accompanied by salt-and-pepper facial hair and messy curls that looked soft and pliable. His photos showed off his physique incredibly, tight wash-worn t-shirts pulling over his arms and shoulders, looking big, broad. He was no doubt the most handsome man you’d seen on an app, maybe ever.

When you swiped right before you could think too hard, you were surprised to see the green “Match!” Flash across your screen.

Your fingers ghosted over the keyboard on your phone, thinking of a witty thing to say, probably for too long.

Your phone buzzed as you saw a notification pop up.

Joel has sent you a message.

Hey, darlin’. How are ya?

You felt your face warm at the sweet message, when was the last time someone had called you darlin’? Ever?

Hey cowboy. I’m great, how are you?

He was certainly an eager responder, taking only a few seconds to reply. You found yourself smiling down at your phone screen.

Cowboy… I like that. I’m better now that I’m talking to you.

Oh, Joel, who told you to say that? 😂

No good?

Not bad. 6/10. 

Only 6/10? I’ll work on it. I like to think I’m better in person. 

I would love to find out. 

You found yourself emboldened by how easy the conversation was flowing. Joel was certainly easy to talk to, easier than the other matches you had going for you, and infinitely more handsome.

Oh, would you? Alright. I’d love to take you to dinner sometime. If you don’t mind being seen with an old man such as myself in public. Or meeting a stranger from the internet.

He’s a very handsome stranger. I would love to go to dinner with you. Know any good spots? I’m new around here.

There’s a great barbecue spot in downtown Austin. If you’d prefer something fancier, let me know.

I love bbq. Just tell me where and when, cowboy.

Tomorrow, 7pm ok?

You sent him your phone number in the message. Fuck it.

Sounds great. Text me the address, I’ll be there. :)

Joel’s reply didn’t come. Instead, a text appeared at the top of your screen with an unknown number. 

It’s Joel. This the right number?

Yup. You found me.

Great. Talk tomorrow sweetheart. Looking forward to it. :)

He texted you the address of the restaurant, right before you opened the contact card, saving his name as “cowboy ♡”.

‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃 ࣪ ִֶָ☾

Cowboy. Cowboy. Cowboy. It was playing over in his head like a broken fuckin’ record. 

Joel was positively freaking out about this date.

Sarah had managed to secure a sleepover at her friend’s place, so the house would be empty for the night. He had been busying himself with cleaning the entirety of the house, even taking the time to mow the grass before work and vacuum the family room. He can’t remember the last time he vacuumed anywhere.

Would she even make it back here? How does this work? Will she want to sleep over or hang out on the couch or should he be making a dessert for after?

His mind was brought out of it’s craze by Sarah jumping down the stairs. She plopped her bag down on the freshly wiped countertop.

“Careful,” he warned, putting a hand up. “I just cleaned that off.”

“I can tell. It smells like the cleaning aisle threw up in here.”

He smirked before patting her head with his hand, as she aggressively smoothed out her hair. “Dad! Don’t!”

“When do you wanna go to Ellie’s?” He asked, more gaging how long he has left to get ready than actually asking.

“Probably soon. Why? Tryna get rid of me?” she poked her dad in the side, but when she flinched away instead, a large smile spread across her face. He was tense.

“What’s your deal?” Joel hated the way she knew him so well sometimes.

“Nothing.“

“Are you going on a date?”

Silence fell over the kitchen between the two of them, as Joel’s shoulders slumped in defeat. “How did you know?”

“Oh my god, you actually took my advice,” Sarah laughed, watching her dad’s face burn red with embarrassment. “Just don’t do anything weird on communal surfaces, please.”

Joel shook his head at her suggestion, already becoming annoyed with the whole prospect. He was so nervous, about what to wear, how to act, what the expectation was… let alone, what would happen if they made it back to his place at all. 

Although, when he was able to shake his nerves for a second, he was just really fucking excited.

“Wear those dark jeans, and that green shirt you wore to Tommy’s last week. Looks good on you.” Sarah smiled as she put her arms around Joel’s middle, while his worries melted away with her touch. “She’ll love you, I promise.”

‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃 ࣪ ִֶָ☾

It had been such a long time since you’d been on a proper date, you were starting to lose your mind at the simple process of deciding what to wear.

Clothes were strewn across every surface of your apartment, shoes matching with jeans that matched with cardigans, tops that matched with belts and jackets.

It’s 87 degrees at 5 o’clock, idiot. You’re not wearing a jacket. Relax.

Exhausted of picking out outfits and making decisions, you collapsed on your couch and took a look at your options. You landed on an easy sundress, putting the rest of your clothes back in their respective drawers, and pulling out all of the products you were expecting to use to get ready.

You scrolled through your phone aimlessly as a notification bubble popped up on the screen.

We still on for tonight darlin’? Or did you change your mind?

No worries if you did. I respect that.

You let out a cackle at the message, thinking about how he must look right now. Was he nervous? Scared? Was he just looking for a controversially young fuck?

You weren’t… completely against that.

Didn’t change my mind, wouldn’t in a million years :)

Meet you there. Can’t wait to see you.

His eagerness to meet up would’ve been a red flag if it were any other run of the mill guy, but something about Joel felt special. There didn’t seem to be any funny business with him; too sincere to try anything other than just a good old fashioned date.

You too, cowboy.

‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃 ࣪ ִֶָ☾

When Joel showed up at the restaurant, he clenched a small bouquet of pink peonies in his right hand and checked his watch obsessively. The minutes ticked away, as he kept a high alert for anyone who could be his potential date. He knew what you looked like, of course, but this being his first time doing anything of this sort is making him hyperaware of anything going awry.

When he does lay eyes on you, his whole gaze softens. A pink sundress, hair pristinely styled and a bounce in your step that reminded him of summer. You looked like an angel, the sunset behind you painting the sky tangerine, which reflected off of the shine against your supple skin. So young, beautiful, it was taking his breath away.

“Joel?”

Your voice matched your sweet demeanour, and he was taken out of his waking daydream.

“Hi,” is all he can say, letting his breath out as he relaxed. “Yes, hi, sorry. I’m Joel.”

“Hi,” you laugh back, eyes darting to the flowers in his hand. They matched your dress.

“These are for you,” he gets the hint, extending his arm out, and you can see the veins bulging in his forearm. He looked so much stronger in person, it was making your knees go weak.

“Thank you, wow,” you held them up to your nose to smell the sweet aroma. “I love peonies.”

“Me too,” he smiled, showing off a string of pearly white teeth, that contrasted with the pink of his lips and the even tan of his skin.

“Shall we?” He extended his arm to you for you to grab onto, and you got to feel the warmth of his skin for yourself. Your hand wrapped around his forearm as he opened the door of the restaurant for you, leading you inside and catching a glimpse of the backs of your thighs as you walked in front of him.

‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃 ࣪ ִֶָ☾

When you were finally sitting, the conversation flowed easily. He was truly a Southern gentleman, like he had said. It wasn’t normal for you to open up so quickly, but Joel was so easy going and smart, he asked the right questions and knew when to listen. He knew how to listen, a warm gaze and a nod along, asking follow up questions to your answers and easily getting to know you.

You asked about his daughter, his family, his work. He was happy to tell you. 

“So, what’s a man like you doing being single in this city?” You take a sip of the wine in the glass in front of you, burgundy staining your bottom lip. 

He takes a bite of the food in front of him, a napkin pressing to his lips quickly after. “Been busy,” he started to say, honey brown eyes meeting yours for a second. His gaze sent an electrifying pulse down your spine.

“And, well, when Sarah’s mom left there was a ton to do,” he says it nonchalantly, as if that should be something normal to happen. “House, work, school, she keeps my hands full. Hasn’t been a lot of time.” His syrupy drawl is pulling you in, you’re enticed by the way he speaks to you. So easy, warm, soft. You wonder what his hands feel like on your body, lips pressed to your neck, torso pressed against yours.

“Sorry, that’s a lot of information for a first date,” he laughs to cover the awkwardness, and quietly curses himself for going into so much detail about his precarious family situation and basically admitting to you that he hasn’t fucked anything other than his hand in the last 5 or so years.

“No, it’s okay,” you slide your hand across the table, palm up, urging him to slot his hand into it. He takes it, easily, enveloping yours. His fingers find the pulse point on your wrist. You let your eyes drift up to his, drinking in the way his chest fills out the shirt he chose.

“What’s your story?” He asks earnestly, giving your hand a squeeze. “Can’t imagine there isn’t a long line of people outside waiting to take my place, darlin’.”

You blush furiously at the nickname, and let your eyes meet his once again. “You have no idea the… mess that is out there,” the wine is calling your name to take another sip at the mere thought, but you refrain. “Certainly not too many I am interested in.”

“So, is that why you’re on a date with an old man on a beautiful summer night in Austin?”

You could tell Joel, in a twisted way, liked that you were younger than him. It made him feel younger by admission, that you’d want to spend time with him. 

“You’re not that much older,” you laugh, not even believing it yourself as the words left your lips. “And I like to try new things. Don’t you like trying new things, sometimes?”

It was his turn to let his face go red at your insinuation. If only you knew how ‘new’ this really was for him, how much he was pushed out of his comfort zone right now.

You didn’t notice. 

A little more polite small talk and exchanging of stories was all you could take before the tension was becoming too much. After another glass of wine and a shared plate of sky-high chocolate cake for dessert, you were enjoying his company and could tell he was enjoying yours all the same. When you met his gaze again, hands still intertwined, you could tell there was a question on the tip of his tongue.

“Would you want to…“ - a nervous pause, with a halo of lust - “come back to mine for a nightcap? I’ve got an empty house this evening.”

You couldn’t help but smirk, knowing in your heart that Joel must’ve made arrangements for his family not to be home in anticipation. He had to have planned for you, known in his heart you’d say yes.

“I’d love that.”

‧₊˚ ☁️⋅♡𓂃 ࣪ ִֶָ☾

Joel’s home is unmistakably him. It smells like a pine candle that sits near the front door and a faint aroma of laundry detergent. There’s photos everywhere, him and his daughter, his brother’s family. Big windows were letting in the twinkling lights of the city outside, the inky sky making them look brighter against its canvas.

“You have a beautiful home,” you say, although it seems a little formal for the situation. What else do you say to a grown-up in their house?

“Thank you,” he takes a bottle of whiskey from the bar cart and pours two rock glasses, handing you one. He flicks on a lamp, ambient light filling the room and painting his skin amber orange, as he joins your side by his kitchen table.

“I did a lot of the construction myself, the decorations are my daughter.” He points lazily to the trinkets on the shelves and photos on the wall. “I don’t really have a good eye for that type of stuff.” 

You take a sip from the drink and it coats your throat, burning down as you suppress a cough at the taste. You nod along as he explains the design choices he made in the home, and you play along, knowing it’s likely out of anxiety.

“What about upstairs?”

Your eyes are innocent as they meet his, although you understand the implication you’re making whole-heartedly. He puts his glass down on the kitchen table and you follow his lead, his strong hand around your wrist as he leads you up the stairs wordlessly.

“It’s not anything,” - he clears his throat - “special,” he shows you around the second floor, finishing at the door of his bedroom that has been left slightly ajar. 

You step in quietly, leading him inside as you take in the bedroom. Neatly folded clothes, a made bed that looks well loved. Blue sheets and fluffy pillows, big bay windows that let the moonlight in.

“I think it’s nice,” you say simply, letting yourself turn around to meet his broad frame. He looks down at you slightly, eyes meeting yours as your hand drops from his grasp and snakes around his neck. His hands come up the sides of your dress, pulling it up slightly, but landing on your waist.

“Is this okay?” He asks tentatively in the dark of the room, his lips so close to yours already you can practically taste the whiskey on his lips for yourself. You answer him by pressing your tentative lips to his, slotting them together easily.

Joel’s grip on your waist tightens momentarily as he takes you in, pulling you as close as he possibly can. He can smell the perfume on your neck and the wine on your lips from earlier, and it’s making his need for you increase tenfold. 

You pull him into you as you stumble back to let your knees hit his mattress, sitting down and letting your hands come to his belt buckle. Your hands came to undo it as he pulled his t-shirt off to throw onto the floor beside him, bending down to help you pull the dress over your shoulders to meet his t-shirt.

You made quick work of his jeans, pushing them to the ground and looking up at him with a keen glance. You could see the breath making his belly rise and fall, anticipating your touch on him any second.

When your hand wrapped around the base of his cock, his breath hitched and his head rolled back. He was already half-hard only from kissing you, so a few pumps made him easily ready for your mouth.

“You’re so big,” is all you can think to say, head spinning from the sheer size of him right in front of your face. Your mouth watered at the way his hand palmed through your hair, pulling you in closer to him for some relief.

It was intoxicating to him, the way your mouth fit around his cock. Such a beautiful sight to see, your head licking and sucking at his tip, gathering spit there to lubricate him. His knees were going weak as he watched intently, no thought able to cross his mind, other than maybe how long it had been since he’d had anyone to do this with. He was going to have to pace himself if it was all like this.

Your mouth constrained around the length of him, taking him deeper and deeper with every bob of your head. Filthy sounds were filling the room now, of your eager mouth pulling him in as best you could. His hand stayed steady at the back of your head, not pushing, just softly pressed there for support. His other hand found your shoulder, pushing down your bra strap.

“God, darlin’,” was all he could choke out, using his hand to pull you off of him. Your hand lazily stroked him as you looked up at him, spit collecting at the corners of your mouth. “I’m not gonna last long if you keep doin’ that,” his laugh eased some of the tension in the room, as you took your other hand and wiped the spit away.

He leaned down, pressing a fervent kiss to your lips before using his own hands to unclasp your bra and let your breasts free. His lips traveled to the side of your neck, before he was kneeled down between your legs, sucking your nipple into his mouth. He lapped at you, all consuming, as his hand came up to grasp the other breast that wasn’t being serviced. He moaned at the noises you were making, lewd whines into the night air that only encouraged him. 

His lips made their way down your body to your clothed centre, your back against his soft sheets. You looked down at him intently, watching as he pulled your panties down your legs and immediately delved into your pussy with broad strokes of his tongue.

Your body jerked upwards at the contact, hand fisting the sheet beside you as he lapped at you, like a man starved. His expert tongue found your clit easily, sucking and licking at you for what felt like hours. You thought about his heavy cock between his legs, begging to be touched, hard as ever as he licked at you desperately.

“Joel,” you whined out, feeling your hand reach down to grab at his curls and push him deeper into you. That only made him moan, one hand lazily fisting his cock as the other came up to dip a finger into you, allowing you to see stars when you screwed your eyes shut.

His fingers were so large, pressed into your core as you fucked yourself on them and his tongue in tandem. He was groaning and grunting, and you hoped his neighbours couldn’t see into the window at the desperate filth that was going on in his bedroom.

“Fuck, Joel, please,” you begged, but he had no mercy, and your orgasm was creeping up on you. He was ready to watch you come undone, pushing a second finger into you and furiously sucking on your clit. His other hand left his own pleasure and wrapped around your breast, pressing and playing with the hard nub there, pinching to provide a little bit of sting to it. It was sending you into another dimension.

“Come for me, sweetheart,” and his voice is gravely and debauched, enough to send you into your first orgasm, chanting his name and pulling on his hair. He was happily licking at you, fingers still pressing in and out as to not mess up the rhythm, as you rode out your orgasm against his face. 

When you started to come down, he finally detached himself from you before standing up between your legs and pressing his broad palms to your thighs. He stayed there for a moment, cock still hard and heavy between his legs as you gazed up at him, out of breath from his work.

“You’re really good at that,” was all you could think to say, head clouded with arousal. You moved up on the bed a little, opening your legs and pressing your knees apart to show your pussy to him again.

“Please fuck me, Joel,” you breathe out, letting your hand find your own clit to rub it teasingly for him. It was still so sensitive, but the way he was looking down at you, eyes dark and stormy with need, you could almost come again just from that.

He put a knee down on the bed and crawled on top of you, his lips finding yours once again as your hands found his face. You held him there, savouring the kiss as his tongue crashed against yours, all warmth and spit and the taste of you. His hand found your breast and continued to play with your nipples, softly, coaxing more moans into his mouth from yours.

He leaned back and slipped his cock inside of you, filling you up immediately and making you gasp. He groaned into the side of your neck, tonguing the side of your ear and kissing you feverishly as he pumped in and out of you.

Your legs wrapped around his waist, pulling him impossibly close, your moans filling the room as he rocked in and out of you. He kissed your jaw and chest, before reaching down between your bodies and pressing his thick finger to your clit again, using the wetness there to draw circles around your sensitive nub.

“So pretty,” he smiles into your neck, your hand on the back of his, playing with the now-sweaty strands of hair on the nape. “So pretty for me, taking my cock,” the dirty talking is welcome as he continues to bring you closer to a second orgasm, your breath hitching once again.

“Come inside of me,” you say it like a whisper, a secret in the stillness of the room, and Joel is unsure he even heard you correctly.

“Are you sure?” He says it not accusingly, but in a way that conveys he feels like he just won the lottery.

“Yes, please, fill me up.”

You can see the way his eyes darken more, shifting so he’s on his knees and using your body to fuck himself on his thick cock. His hand continued to play with your clit, bringing you so close to your orgasm that tears pricked at the corners of your eyes. His cheeks were getting hot as he thrusted in and out furiously, and you could almost see the stress melt off of his face as he came close to his own undoing.

The white-hot feeling washes over you once again, eyes shutting before you’re back on your elbows and watching intently. Your whole body feels like it’s on fire as his thrusts become sloppy, your name pouring out of his lips like a prayer. You’re clenching around him and letting him ride out his high alongside you, slowing after his hot cum coats your walls and leaves you full of him.

He collapses on top of you, cock softening inside as you both catch your breath together. Your chests are sticky with sweat as you breathe, taking in the smell of him, and the feel of his warmth on your body.

He pulls himself from you and flops beside you, still taking a moment to admire you. You look over at him, a lazy smile on your face as your hand reaches out to caress the skin of his chest. He takes the time to run his fingertips up your arms and back as you lay there in silence together, just soaking in the moment in a post-sex glow.

“I guess I should get going,” you say after a few beats, sitting up to grab your dress off the floor. You cringe at the thought of throwing your underwear on and leaving, this being just another random hookup for you that never lead to anything. Joel was sweet.

A confused look spreads across his features and his brows knit together, before sitting up next to you at the edge of the bed.

“I mean, I don’t know how these things usually go,” he laughs, as his hand finds your lower back. “But you don’t gotta run outta here like a scared animal or somethin’.”

You look up at him again, unsure of what to do next. In your, albeit limited, experience with dating app hookups, you were expected to leave pretty much right after.

“Oh, um,” you look around the room at the soft worn-in sheets and the TV across from Joel’s bed. You take a look at him again, your eyes meeting his to match his gaze, where you can tell he’s mentally begging that you’ll stay the night.

“I mean, if you don’t mind, I’d be happy to stay.” Joel smiled lopsidedly and let his hand rub soothing circles at your lower back. 

“I’ll make it worth your while,” he laughs, stepping over to go into the bathroom and warm up a cloth for the mess spilling out from between your legs. “I wouldn’t mind wakin’ up and doing all that again tomorrow.”

You laugh and lay back onto his bed as he presses the warm cloth to your pussy, his lips once again finding yours to pull you in for a sweet kiss. 

You nod, sliding between the comfortable sheets as Joel runs downstairs to grab your abandoned drinks as well as a couple of bottles of ice cold water. He slips into the sheets next to you, not bothering to throw on any pajamas (not that you were complaining), and settling in beside you. After a few gulps of water, you nestled into his chest and let your hand find his tummy, resting on it as you listened to the even pattern of his breath.

“We should do this again. Like, after tomorrow morning.” you say quietly as you’re drifting in and out of sleep. His fingertips continues to slide across your arm and give you goosebumps as you snuggled closer into him, hearing a laugh exhale out of his nose and feeling a kiss press to the top of your head. 

In his sleepy, deep southern drawl, he replies. “Don’t have to ask me twice, darlin’.”

[dduane]

From the Ditching Adobe ASAP dep't, a recommendation: Crazybump

People who've listened often enough to my rantings about digital art tools will know that I've been a Corel user for a couple of decades now —maybe even a few?—and that I've routinely only used Adobe PS (in one manifestation or another) when it's unavoidable—meaning, when it has a tool the effects of which I can't duplicate in some other way without spending a ton of time trying.

I've always loathed PS's bloat and (seemingly unnecessary) complications. Now, though, with the most recent distasteful corporate shenanigans and the unwelcome encroachment of AI, I've been moving to find ways to get rid of it entirely. This has required taking a good hard look at what I actually use it for, and actively seeking out ways to do those things using other tools.

Here's one I like which I've now worked with often enough to safely recommend it to other people.

One of the main things I was using PS for was the creation of bump maps and normal maps to overlay digital objects I was going to be rendering. Adobe has now mostly moved that function, along with most of its 3D tools, into other apps (for which they naturally expect you to spend even more money...). So I can no longer do this job in PS—possibly something to do with my video card (which PS insists is not set correctly, though it always was before...), possibly not.

So, my hand having been forced on this issue before Adobe started to get really loathesome, I went looking for a different tool that would do this job: and after some digging around, I found it. Let me introduce you to Crazybump.

This standalone program runs happily under Windows 10 and Windows 11, and there's a public beta for the Mac. It has the same kind of straightforward ease of use that you get from, say, EZGif, and what it does, it does really well. Better, I'm pretty sure, than Adobe PS does/did.

It is seriously configurable in terms of the quality of normal maps that it turns out. (Look at the top screenshot: the sliders will indicate what I mean.) It will cheerfully create all the major map types—normals, displacement, occlusion, specularity, and diffuse—with one click; and the created maps come out clearly and logically labeled in the filenames. You can also do extremely useful things like combine already existing normal maps—and if you've ever tried to square that particular circle by hand, you'll welcome this feature like a long-lost friend.

Anyway, if you do work that calls for these filetypes, I highly recommend Crazybump. I'm running on an evaluation version right now, but intend to license it as soon as I've got a little cash to spare.

More than this, deponent saith not. :)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Gig apps trap reverse centaurs in Skinner boxes

Enshittification is the process by which digital platforms devour themselves: first they dangle goodies in front of end users. Once users are locked in, the goodies are taken away and dangled before business customers who supply goods to the users. Once those business customers are stuck on the platform, the goodies are clawed away and showered on the platform’s shareholders:

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

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/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Enshittification isn’t just another way of saying “fraud” or “price gouging” or “wage theft.” Enshittification is intrinsically digital, because moving all those goodies around requires the flexibility that only comes with a digital businesses. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can’t rapidly change the price of eggs at Whole Foods without an army of kids with pricing guns on roller-skates. Jeff Bezos, grocer, can change the price of eggs on Amazon Fresh just by twiddling a knob on the service’s back-end.

Twiddling is the key to enshittification: rapidly adjusting prices, conditions and offers. As with any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Tech monopolists aren’t smarter than the Gilded Age sociopaths who monopolized rail or coal — they use the same tricks as those monsters of history, but they do them faster and with computers:

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

If Rockefeller wanted to crush a freight company, he couldn’t just click a mouse and lay down a pipeline that ran on the same route, and then click another mouse to make it go away when he was done. When Bezos wants to bankrupt Diapers.com — a company that refused to sell itself to Amazon — he just moved a slider so that diapers on Amazon were being sold below cost. Amazon lost $100m over three months, diapers.com went bankrupt, and every investor learned that competing with Amazon was a losing bet:

https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-bezos-went-thermonuclear-on-diapers-com.html

That’s the power of twiddling — but twiddling cuts both ways. The same flexibility that digital businesses enjoy is hypothetically available to workers and users. The airlines pioneered twiddling ticket prices, and that naturally gave rise to countertwiddling, in the form of comparison shopping sites that scraped the airlines’ sites to predict when tickets would be cheapest:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin

The airlines — like all abusive businesses — refused to tolerate this. They were allowed to touch their knobs as much as they wanted — indeed, they couldn’t stop touching those knobs — but when we tried to twiddle back, that was “felony contempt of business model,” and the airlines sued:

https://www.cnbc.com/2014/12/30/airline-sues-man-for-founding-a-cheap-flights-website.html

And sued:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/business/southwest-airlines-lawsuit-prices.html

Platforms don’t just hate it when end-users twiddle back — if anything they are even more aggressive when their business-users dare to twiddle. Take Para, an app that Doordash drivers used to get a peek at the wages offered for jobs before they accepted them — something that Doordash hid from its workers. Doordash ruthlessly attacked Para, saying that by letting drivers know how much they’d earn before they did the work, Para was violating the law:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/tech-rights-are-workers-rights-doordash-edition

Which law? Well, take your pick. The modern meaning of “IP” is “any law that lets me use the law to control my competitors, competition or customers.” Platforms use a mix of anticircumvention law, patent, copyright, contract, cybersecurity and other legal systems to weave together a thicket of rules that allow them to shut down rivals for their Felony Contempt of Business Model:

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

Enshittification relies on unlimited twiddling (by platforms), and a general prohibition on countertwiddling (by platform users). Enshittification is a form of fishing, in which bait is dangled before different groups of users and then nimbly withdrawn when they lunge for it. Twiddling puts the suppleness into the enshittifier’s fishing-rod, and a ban on countertwiddling weighs down platform users so they’re always a bit too slow to catch the bait.

Nowhere do we see twiddling’s impact more than in the “gig economy,” where workers are misclassified as independent contractors and put to work for an app that scripts their every move to the finest degree. When an app is your boss, you work for an employer who docks your pay for violating rules that you aren’t allowed to know — and where your attempts to learn those rules are constantly frustrated by the endless back-end twiddling that changes the rules faster than you can learn them.

As with every question of technology, the issue isn’t twiddling per se — it’s who does the twiddling and who gets twiddled. A worker armed with digital tools can play gig work employers off each other and force them to bid up the price of their labor; they can form co-ops with other workers that auto-refuse jobs that don’t pay enough, and use digital tools to organize to shift power from bosses to workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/02/not-what-it-does/#who-it-does-it-to

Take “reverse centaurs.” In AI research, a “centaur” is a human assisted by a machine that does more than either could do on their own. For example, a chess master and a chess program can play a better game together than either could play separately. A reverse centaur is a machine assisted by a human, where the machine is in charge and the human is a meat-puppet.

Think of Amazon warehouse workers wearing haptic location-aware wristbands that buzz at them continuously dictating where their hands must be; or Amazon drivers whose eye-movements are continuously tracked in order to penalize drivers who look in the “wrong” direction:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur

The difference between a centaur and a reverse centaur is the difference between a machine that makes your life better and a machine that makes your life worse so that your boss gets richer. Reverse centaurism is the 21st Century’s answer to Taylorism, the pseudoscience that saw white-coated “experts” subject workers to humiliating choreography down to the smallest movement of your fingertip:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

While reverse centaurism was born in warehouses and other company-owned facilities, gig work let it make the leap into workers’ homes and cars. The 21st century has seen a return to the cottage industry — a form of production that once saw workers labor far from their bosses and thus beyond their control — but shriven of the autonomy and dignity that working from home once afforded:

https://doctorow.medium.com/gig-work-is-the-opposite-of-steampunk-463e2730ef0d

The rise and rise of bossware — which allows for remote surveillance of workers in their homes and cars — has turned “work from home” into “live at work.” Reverse centaurs can now be chickenized — a term from labor economics that describes how poultry farmers, who sell their birds to one of three vast poultry processors who have divided up the country like the Pope dividing up the “New World,” are uniquely exploited:

https://onezero.medium.com/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs-b2e8d5cda826

A chickenized reverse centaur has it rough: they must pay for the machines they use to make money for their bosses, they must obey the orders of the app that controls their work, and they are denied any of the protections that a traditional worker might enjoy, even as they are prohibited from deploying digital self-help measures that let them twiddle back to bargain for a better wage.

All of this sets the stage for a phenomenon called algorithmic wage discrimination, in which two workers doing the same job under the same conditions will see radically different payouts for that work. These payouts are continuously tweaked in the background by an algorithm that tries to predict the minimum sum a worker will accept to remain available without payment, to ensure sufficient workers to pick up jobs as they arise.

This phenomenon — and proposed policy and labor solutions to it — is expertly analyzed in “On Algorithmic Wage Discrimination,” a superb paper by UC Law San Franciscos Veena Dubal:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

Dubal uses empirical data and enthnographic accounts from Uber drivers and other gig workers to explain how endless, self-directed twiddling allows gig companies pay workers less and pay themselves more. As @brianmerchant@mastodon.social explains in his LA Times article on Dubal’s research, the goal of the payment algorithm is to guess how often a given driver needs to receive fair compensation in order to keep them driving when the payments are unfair:

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2023-04-11/algorithmic-wage-discrimination

The algorithm combines nonconsensual dossiers compiled on individual drivers with population-scale data to seek an equilibrium between keeping drivers waiting, unpaid, for a job; and how much a driver needs to be paid for an individual job, in order to keep that driver from clocking out and doing something else. @ Here’s how that works. Sergio Avedian, a writer for The Rideshare Guy, ran an experiment with two brothers who both drove for Uber; one drove a Tesla and drove intermittently, the other brother rented a hybrid sedan and drove frequently. Sitting side-by-side with the brothers, Avedian showed how the brother with the Tesla was offered more for every trip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UADTiL3S67I

Uber wants to lure intermittent drivers into becoming frequent drivers. Uber doesn’t pay for an oversupply of drivers, because it only pays drivers when they have a passenger in the car. Having drivers on call — but idle — is a way for Uber to shift the cost of maintaining a capacity cushion to its workers.

What’s more, what Uber charges customers is not based on how much it pays its workers. As Uber’s head of product explained: Uber uses “machine-learning techniques to estimate how much groups of customers are willing to shell out for a ride. Uber calculates riders’ propensity for paying a higher price for a particular route at a certain time of day. For instance, someone traveling from a wealthy neighborhood to another tony spot might be asked to pay more than another person heading to a poorer part of town, even if demand, traffic and distance are the same.”

https://qz.com/990131/uber-is-practicing-price-discrimination-economists-say-that-might-not-be-a-bad-thing/

Uber has historically described its business a pure supply-and-demand matching system, where a rush of demand for rides triggers surge pricing, which lures out drivers, which takes care of the demand. That’s not how it works today, and it’s unclear if it ever worked that way. Today, a driver who consults the rider version of the Uber app before accepting a job — to compare how much the rider is paying to how much they stand to earn — is booted off the app and denied further journeys.

Surging, instead, has become just another way to twiddle drivers. One of Dubal’s subjects, Derrick, describes how Uber uses fake surges to lure drivers to airports: “You go to the airport, once the lot get kind of full, then the surge go away.” Other drivers describe how they use groupchats to call out fake surges: “I’m in the Marina. It’s dead. Fake surge.”

That’s pure twiddling. Twiddling turns gamification into gamblification, where your labor buys you a spin on a roulette wheel in a rigged casino. As a driver called Melissa, who had doubled down on her availability to earn a $100 bonus awarded for clocking a certain number of rides, told Dubal, “When you get close to the bonus, the rides start trickling in more slowly…. And it makes sense. It’s really the type of shit that they can do when it’s okay to have a surplus labor force that is just sitting there that they don’t have to pay for.”

Wherever you find reverse-centaurs, you get this kind of gamblification, where the rules are twiddled continuously to make sure that the house always wins. As a contract driver Amazon reverse centaur told Lauren Gurley for Motherboard, “Amazon uses these cameras allegedly to make sure they have a safer driving workforce, but they’re actually using them not to pay delivery companies”:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/88npjv/amazons-ai-cameras-are-punishing-drivers-for-mistakes-they-didnt-make

Algorithmic wage discrimination is the robot overlord of our nightmares: its job is to relentlessly quest for vulnerabilities and exploit them. Drivers divide themselves into “ants” (drivers who take every job) and “pickers” (drivers who cherry-pick high-paying jobs). The algorithm’s job is ensuring that pickers get the plum assignments, not the ants, in the hopes of converting those pickers to app-dependent ants.

In my work on enshittification, I call this the “giant teddy bear” gambit. At every county fair, you’ll always spot some poor jerk carrying around a giant teddy-bear they “won” on the midway. But they didn’t win it — not by getting three balls in the peach-basket. Rather, the carny running the rigged game either chose not to operate the “scissor” that kicks balls out of the basket. Or, if the game is “honest” (that is, merely impossible to win, rather than gimmicked), the operator will make a too-good-to-refuse offer: “Get one ball in and I’ll give you this keychain. Win two keychains and I’ll let you trade them for this giant teddy bear.”

Carnies aren’t in the business of giving away giant teddy bears — rather, the gambit is an investment. Giving a mark a giant teddy bear to carry around the midway all day acts as a convincer, luring other marks to try to land three balls in the basket and win their own teddy bear.

In the same way, platforms like Uber distribute giant teddy bears to pickers, as a way of keeping the ants scurrying from job to job, and as a way of convincing the pickers to give up whatever work allows them to discriminate among Uber’s offers and hold out for the plum deals, whereupon then can be transmogrified into ants themselves.

Dubal describes the experience of Adil, a Syrian refugee who drives for Uber in the Bay Area. His colleagues are pickers, and showed him screenshots of how much they earned. Determined to get a share of that money, Adil became a model ant, driving two hours to San Francisco, driving three days straight, napping in his car, spending only one day per week with his family. The algorithm noticed that Adil needed the work, so it paid him less.

Adil responded the way the system predicted he would, by driving even more: “My friends they make it, so I keep going, maybe I can figure it out. It’s unsecure, and I don’t know how people they do it. I don’t know how I am doing it, but I have to. I mean, I don’t find another option. In a minute, if I find something else, oh man, I will be out immediately. I am a very patient person, that’s why I can continue.”

Another driver, Diego, told Dubal about how the winners of the giant teddy bears fell into the trap of thinking that they were “good at the app”: “Any time there’s some big shot getting high pay outs, they always shame everyone else and say you don’t know how to use the app. I think there’s secret PR campaigns going on that gives targeted payouts to select workers, and they just think it’s all them.”

That’s the power of twiddling: by hoarding all the flexibility offered by digital tools, the management at platforms can become centaurs, able to string along thousands of workers, while the workers are reverse-centaurs, puppeteered by the apps.

As the example of Adil shows, the algorithm doesn’t need to be very sophisticated in order to figure out which workers it can underpay. The system automates the kind of racial and gender discrimination that is formally illegal, but which is masked by the smokescreen of digitization. An employer who systematically paid women less than men, or Black people less than white people, would be liable to criminal and civil sanctions. But if an algorithm simply notices that people who have fewer job prospects drive more and will thus accept lower wages, that’s just “optimization,” not racism or sexism.

This is the key to understanding the AI hype bubble: when ghouls from multinational banks predict 13 trillion dollar markets for “AI,” what they mean is that digital tools will speed up the twiddling and other wage-suppression techniques to transfer $13T in value from workers and consumers to shareholders.

The American business lobby is relentlessly focused on the goal of reducing wages. That’s the force behind “free trade,” “right to work,” and other codewords for “paying workers less,” including “gig work.” Tech workers long saw themselves as above this fray, immune to labor exploitation because they worked for a noble profession that took care of its own.

But the epidemic of mass tech-worker layoffs, following on the heels of massive stock buybacks, has demonstrated that tech bosses are just like any other boss: willing to pay as little as they can get away with, and no more. Tech bosses are so comfortable with their market dominance and the lock-in of their customers that they are happy to turn out hundreds of thousands of skilled workers, convinced that the twiddling systems they’ve built are the kinds of self-licking ice-cream cones that are so simple even a manager can use them — no morlocks required.

The tech worker layoffs are best understood as an all-out war on tech worker morale, because that morale is the source of tech workers’ confidence and thus their demands for a larger share of the value generated by their labor. The current tech layoff template is very different from previous tech layoffs: today’s layoffs are taking place over a period of months, long after they are announced, and laid off tech worker is likely to be offered a months of paid post-layoff work, rather than severance. This means that tech workplaces are now haunted by the walking dead, workers who have been laid off but need to come into the office for months, even as the threat of layoffs looms over the heads of the workers who remain. As an old friend, recently laid off from Microsoft after decades of service, wrote to me, this is “a new arrow in the quiver of bringing tech workers to heel and ensuring that we’re properly thankful for the jobs we have (had?).”

Dubal is interested in more than analysis, she’s interested in action. She looks at the tactics already deployed by gig workers, who have not taken all this abuse lying down. Workers in the UK and EU organized through Worker Info Exchange and the App Drivers and Couriers Union have used the GDPR (the EU’s privacy law) to demand “algorithmic transparency,” as well as access to their data. In California, drivers hope to use similar provisions in the CCPA (a state privacy law) to do the same.

These efforts have borne fruit. When Cornell economists, led by Louis Hyman, published research (paid for by Uber) claiming that Uber drivers earned an average of $23/hour, it was data from these efforts that revealed the true average Uber driver’s wage was $9.74. Subsequent research in California found that Uber drivers’ wage fell to $6.22/hour after the passage of Prop 22, a worker misclassification law that gig companies spent $225m to pass, only to have the law struck down because of a careless drafting error:

https://www.latimes.com/california/newsletter/2021-08-23/proposition-22-lyft-uber-decision-essential-california

But Dubal is skeptical that data-coops and transparency will achieve transformative change and build real worker power. Knowing how the algorithm works is useful, but it doesn’t mean you can do anything about it, not least because the platform owners can keep touching their knobs, twiddling the payout schedule on their rigged slot-machines.

Data co-ops start from the proposition that “data extraction is an inevitable form of labor for which workers should be remunerated.” It makes on-the-job surveillance acceptable, provided that workers are compensated for the spying. But co-ops aren’t unions, and they don’t have the power to bargain for a fair price for that data, and coops themselves lack the vast resources — “to store, clean, and understand” — data.

Co-ops are also badly situated to understand the true value of the data that is extracted from their members: “Workers cannot know whether the data collected will, at the population level, violate the civil rights of others or amplifies their own social oppression.”

Instead, Dubal wants an outright, nonwaivable prohibition on algorithmic wage discrimination. Just make it illegal. If firms cannot use gambling mechanisms to control worker behavior through variable pay systems, they will have to find ways to maintain flexible workforces while paying their workforce predictable wages under an employment model. If a firm cannot manage wages through digitally-determined variable pay systems, then the firm is less likely to employ algorithmic management.”

In other words, rather than using market mechanisms too constrain platform twiddling, Dubal just wants to make certain kinds of twiddling illegal. This is a growing trend in legal scholarship. For example, the economist Ramsi Woodcock has proposed a ban on surge pricing as a per se violation of Section 1 of the Sherman Act:

https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-105-issue-4/the-efficient-queue-and-the-case-against-dynamic-pricing

Similarly, Dubal proposes that algorithmic wage discrimination violates another antitrust law: the Robinson-Patman Act, which “bans sellers from charging competing buyers different prices for the same commodity. Robinson-Patman enforcement was effectively halted under Reagan, kicking off a host of pathologies, like the rise of Walmart:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes

I really liked Dubal’s legal reasoning and argument, and to it I would add a call to reinvigorate countertwiddling: reforming laws that get in the way of workers who want to reverse-engineer, spoof, and control the apps that currently control them. Adversarial interoperability (AKA competitive compatibility or comcom) is key tool for building worker power in an era of digital Taylorism:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

To see how that works, look to other jursidictions where workers have leapfrogged their European and American cousins, such as Indonesia, where gig workers and toolsmiths collaborate to make a whole suite of “tuyul apps,” which let them override the apps that gig companies expect them to use.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/08/tuyul-apps/#gojek

For example, ride-hailing companies won’t assign a train-station pickup to a driver unless they’re circling the station — which is incredibly dangerous during the congested moments after a train arrives. A tuyul app lets a driver park nearby and then spoof their phone’s GPS fix to the ridehailing company so that they appear to be right out front of the station.

In an ideal world, those workers would have a union, and be able to dictate the app’s functionality to their bosses. But workers shouldn’t have to wait for an ideal world: they don’t just need jam tomorrow — they need jam today. Tuyul apps, and apps like Para, which allow workers to extract more money under better working conditions, are a prelude to unionization and employer regulation, not a substitute for it.

Employers will not give workers one iota more power than they have to. Just look at the asymmetry between the regulation of union employees versus union busters. Under US law, employees of a union need to account for every single hour they work, every mile they drive, every location they visit, in public filings. Meanwhile, the union-busting industry — far larger and richer than unions — operate under a cloak of total secrecy, Workers aren’t even told which union busters their employers have hired — let alone get an accounting of how those union busters spend money, or how many of them are working undercover, pretending to be workers in order to sabotage the union.

Twiddling will only get an employer so far. Twiddling — like all “AI” — is based on analyzing the past to predict the future. The heuristics an algorithm creates to lure workers into their cars can’t account for rapid changes in the wider world, which is why companies who relied on “AI” scheduling apps (for example, to prevent their employees from logging enough hours to be entitled to benefits) were caught flatfooted by the Great Resignation.

Workers suddenly found themselves with bargaining power thanks to the departure of millions of workers — a mix of early retirees and workers who were killed or permanently disabled by covid — and they used that shortage to demand a larger share of the fruits of their labor. The outraged howls of the capital class at this development were telling: these companies are operated by the kinds of “capitalists” that MLK once identified, who want “socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor.”

https://twitter.com/KaseyKlimes/status/821836823022354432/

There's only 5 days left in the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon's Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they're DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Image: Stephen Drake (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Analog_Test_Array_modular_synth_by_sduck409.jpg

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

 — 

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

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

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Louis (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chestnut_horse_head,_all_excited.jpg

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en

[Image ID: A complex mandala of knobs from a modular synth. In the foreground, limned in a blue electric halo, is a man in a hi-viz vest with the head of a horse. The horse's eyes have been replaced with the sinister red eyes of HAL9000 from Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.'"]

[parkertfs]

CockCo’s New App

Ted had seen the ads for the new app going viral. It was advertised as a photo enhancement app, one that was supposed to be better than photoshop.

As soon as Ted opened the app, it prompted him to take a photo.

“What would you like to enhance?”

The app was almost comical in its simplicity.

“Snap a pic and we’ll do all the work!”

Ted laughed. This app was totally fake. He pointed the camera down at his lap where his shorts were hiding a measly 4 inches and grape sized nuts.

“Awesome! Now choose the enhancement percentage!” Ted was next prompted with a slider from 100% to 500%. He found it strange that there wasn’t any option for less than 100%, but he shrugged and laughed, jokingly opting for 500%.

“Awesome! Now choose payment method!” Ted wasn’t expecting this. The app was free and the app store didn’t say there would be in-app purchases.

The options were “Brains!”, “Height!”, “Muscle!”, “Hair!”, “Smell!”, “Endurance!”, and “Confidence!”. And in very small text at the bottom of the screen there was a sentence that read, “All enhancements are positive and permanent and are subject to CockCo’s terms of service.”

Ted was really confused now, so far nothing had changed about his photo, and if all of these ‘payments’ were positive then why was it payment?

Ted selected all of the payment methods, the check boxes lighting up with different colors as he went. He laughed again at the silliness of the app and pressed “continue”.

“Awesome! Now sit back, relax, and watch!”

The app then showed his original photo, his lap in full view. The app showed a little swirling ball next to the words, “Enhancing”.

Ted’s eyes widened as he saw the image of his pants begin to change. His zipper seemed to bulge out farther, along with the shorts digging further into his thighs and waist.

What Ted saw next made him drool. His cock, starting at 4 inches hard, began to snake along his waist. His grape sized nuts inflating too, pushing out against the fabric of his shorts. He watched as it slowly reached his hip, pushing through the pocket and inverting the fabric. As his balls continued to inflate he suddenly noticed he was in a lot of pain. He looked down and saw that his shorts — or rather his body — now matched what he saw in the photo… constricting around his balls, confining his enormous cock, and hugging his muscular ass and thighs.

Ted let a deep moan as his shorts tore in half, releasing his growing manhood. His new stench was now wafting up at him, his mind getting foggy from the smell… or was it from something else? He couldn’t tell, his brain was in his balls now, full of potent cum ready to blow.

God he looked so good. His orange sized balls filling up, his beer can thick footlong cock, his ass bouncing as he stood up, his new pecs jiggling too. Inches were adding to his height, making his body look more like a greek god’s than a burly lumberjack’s. His mind was filling with his new body’s hormones and thoughts. Thoughts of fucking, getting fucked, sucking and cumming.

He took a deep breath in, inhaling his now pungent stench, slowing his mind more and making him leak precum like a faucet.

He reached one of his enormous hands down and grabbed his dick, his other hand reaching between his juicy cheeks and rubbing his super sensitive hole.

It was too much. Within seconds he was cumming. And wow did he cum. He launched huge globs of creamy, smelly, jizz all over himself. But as the last of his cum slowly dripped out of his massive apple sized cock head, he felt his balls swell bigger, his body was already getting prepared for round two.

Ted loved the new app.

[a2zillustration]

I loved that every piece of dialogue for this interaction was either "This is brand new information!" or "I'm going to kill you." Larian said no middle sliders.

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