#gotta get back to blogging my way *into* more charity with other people instead of out of it.

[aeide-thea]

as a result of having been a jerk* recently i'm thinking about this:

Exercising restraint is hard. Protecting other people from the full brunt of our frustration—which is almost always driven by underlying fear, insecurities, and anxiety—takes work. We want to give in to the urge to wallow, to do damage, to invite company into our misery. We also can feel closer to others when we expose them to our raw emotion, and if there’s one reliable truth about human psychology, it’s that we desire connection so much that we’ll take it in negative forms when we can’t get positive ones. But venting often doesn’t work to enhance intimacy; it can even isolate us further, whether we’re talking about getting a bad rep among our colleagues for being a negative Nancy, undermining our partner’s sense of trust and safety, or having people in our social circles associate us with stress. Venting isn’t good for us in other ways, too. When our thoughts center on how we’ve been hurt and victimized, we feel less empowered and more out of control. Fred Luskin, a forgiveness researcher at Stanford University, calls this a “grievance narrative.” In a 2006 study, Luskin and his colleagues discovered that replaying a grievance narrative both internally and externally causes our bodies to remain in a state of threat. Those who participated in a forgiveness training program felt less fired up and on edge (55th percentile for anger, compared with normal adults) than a control group (72nd percentile). Another study, which included 60 female participants, found that ruminating about ill will can significantly increase blood pressure. Scratch that bite now, and it only gets itchier later. None of this means you should repress your emotions, never grouse to your loved ones, or otherwise lean into what Whitney Goodman writes about in the book Toxic Positivity. In fact, studies on “social sharing” show that the productiveness of this type of venting depends on how it’s done. According to a 2019 paper, “When Chatting About Negative Experiences Helps—and When It Hurts,” recounting a negative experience takes you right back there emotionally and physiologically, just like the grievance narrative research shows. That leads to an increase in negativity. Friends who respond by comforting you provide a balm in the moment, according to a 2009 paper by Bernard Rimé of the Université catholique de Louvain, but that kind of support doesn’t help process the gripe or trauma. That’s why we’ll often find ourselves hanging up with one friend and calling another. As he put it, “No consistent empirical support was found for the common view that putting an emotional experience into words can resolve it.” We “equate emotional relief with emotional recovery,” but they’re not the same, he said, making that temporary blood pressure dip make a whole lot more sense. That said, the 2019 paper reported that chatting with friends can bring closure when they help you reconstrue an event, rather than just recount it. What does that look like? Asking why you think the other person acted that way, prodding to see whether there’s anything to be learned from it all, and just generally broadening your perspective to “the grand scheme of things.”

[isa-ghost]

hey it's the anon who asked what dr*m did,

I decided to do my own research (mainly cause I was curious) but... I can't find much? let me rephrase it - I did find the allegations from 6ish months ago, that he's going to court with one(?) of them, but that's... all? I didn't find the court's verdict, confirmations, or him admitting either... and any post or video I find has both the OP and the comments mostly on his side and believing that it's either not true or true but not grooming, even people who say they're not his fans or don't even like him.

so Im not sure if the confirmation didn't reach youtube or if I'm searching wrong or something?

but honestly while researching I realized that I cant stand him lmao, gotta agree with some comments I read - he made a mistake by showing more of his personality online, looks like any time he can handle a situation wrong/respond wrong he does it

so dunno, guess I didnt find the confirmation but at least now I don't find his old minecraft videos interesting anymore so theres that

Yeah he can't act properly to save his fucking life

Also I think most of the threads on Twitter and stuff that have all the proof he's guilty/etc is probably long buried, unfortunately. You could probably try to ask around saying you're trying to get the whole picture but tbh it's not a huge deal if you can't. You can try searching my blog but Tumblr sucks with that shit. The fact that this and his other controversies have been buried and lost to the void of the internet is typical white boy with a monstrously big platform shit so I'm not surprised. I never heard any details about court (prob for legal reasons) or a conviction either. All I know is there was screenshot proof from the victim that they talked, and Dr*m confirmed the screenshots were real but didn't say anything about other details. But those details literally can't be false if the screenshots & the shit said in them are true.

Anyway, as far as his other bullshit goes:

People found old kkk meme edits on his yt account through the wayback machine. More than once if I'm not mistaken

He has a history of defending himself using the r slur

He cheated "on accident" in a speedrun (the least important thing ever but everyone always brings it up)

He claimed he was going to donate all proceeds during pride month to lgbt+ charities & he'd do charity streams all month but never did

He defended himself about replying to haters, which would send thousands of his toxic stans after the person getting them doxxed/death threats/etc and he refused to address that it was irresponsible of him bc he was too entitled to immaturely clap back at the antis. Even other ccs, like B/itzel called him out about shit related to how he uses his platform irresponsibly & he unfollowed & shaded them like a bitch baby

The whole "accidental" copycat shit with QSMP/USMP and basically softcore stalking Q/uackity online.

His "apologies" for all of the above fucking sucked in multiple ways. And that's just 2021-Now shit I can remember off the top of my head, I lost my Twitter in May last year so now I get my info from people's posts about it on here or links to tweets.

Everyone largely suspects he spontaneously reignited d/smp lore & started the finale to cover up the groomer thing bc he has a history of doing smth "new and cool" every time he causes drama to divert attention and avoid accountability.

He's also suspected of suddenly rewriting the d/smp finale to paint his Irredeemable Abuser Villain Up Until The Last Stream as a sympathetic poor baby out of nowhere and wrote that his victim, c!Tommy apologized to him, which sends a HORRIBLE message about abusive relationships. T/ommy and T/ubbo have both subtly mentioned not liking the finale and that Dr*m had AWFUL communication during the last like 6+ months of the smp.

He also suddenly showed up in T/ubbo's chat lurking while T/ubbo happened to be mentioning he'd do his own research on the grooming situation instead of blindly siding with Dr*m and it was some shit out of a horror movie is2g, he suddenly dmed T/ubbo out of nowhere during it on discord saying they'd talk about it after T/ubbo wasn't streaming. Basically sounds like he was gonna bias T/ubbo about his innocence. Like he hadn't been in chat all stream long but SUDDENLY he was there the second the topic came up. But the d/smp ccs also can't say anything about the situation since it's a legal matter, so a handful of ccs have just stated/implied they don't support him other ways

He only quit MCC bc he threw a tantrum about how he couldn't practice for it but now that MCC island exists, people were getting better than him. He's habitually a sore loser about that kinda shit

He's got that whole weird "is he, isn't he" bullshit going on about him being lgbt. I personally think he's just catering to his stupid d/n/f shippers bc they like to truth their relationship & sexuality all the time and he's never explicitly said he's bi or smth. He's just vaguely been like "yeeeaahhhh I mostly like girls like 99% but maaaayyybeee I like guys idkkkk. 🤪" But he's also done that multiple times so who tf knows. I'm not gonna fully dismiss him & I understand no one including me is entitled to his specific sexuality, but he has garbage credibility on like everything so I'm neutral on the matter and find it hard to believe him

Not directly him related, but his stans went on a long and horrifying witch hunt on Twitter during the kkk ordeal doxxing, death threatening & harassing ENTIRE mcyt subtwts who spoke out against him and called him out on his racism, performative activism, shitty apology, etc. For example, I was part of S/neeg's subtwt and all my mutuals and me had to go private to avoid getting doxxed. It felt like being raided in some dystopian ass horror film. Entire subtwts were going private, panicking, paranoid they'd get outed & stalked & harassed by people just for condemning racism, raising Black voices, etc. It was borderline traumatic to some people, I know people who lost sleep over it bc they were so afraid.

That's all I can think of off the top of my head but the end of 2021 to early 2022 was a fucking nightmare between him being an immature entitled piece of shit and his stans blindly defending him and going out of their way to endanger people who rightfully opposed him.

[solesurvivorpaigeargot]

Heya, friends, followers, and fans!

Did you hear?

I'm having a Party!

And I'd like to invite all of you lovely people!

That's right, on July 11th, this blog is celebrating it's 1 year anniversary, as well as 500 followers. It's amazing how much can happen in a year! We're gonna get into all the details down below; but first we gotta throw in a read-more so folks don't gotta scroll pass this forever. Cool?

Cool.

What are we celebrating?

As said above, this stream is happening both to commemorate the 1 year anniversary AND 500 followers. I cannot gush enough about how fast this blog has grown. I know I worked hard but DAMN it feels good when folks embrace you in kind. In that way, I'm also celebrating some amazing people I've met along the way. People who've helped with the event, made me laugh, made me think, made me cry... people who've talked shop with me, given me tips, or asked for mine! People who made @falloutsketchysecretsanta possible, and all the people who came to participate in it.

Y'all didn't just come outta nowhere. We had a journey together, and that is most certainly worth celebrating.

More than celebrating, however, we are also starting something new.

Friends, followers, and fans, July 11th marks the launch of @artistsoftheapocalypse . I've mentioned a few times that Sketchy Saturday is growing, and I want to facilitate that growth. In the future, Sketchy Saturday will continue as it has, but over on this blog where it can be managed by a small team of volunteers, including myself. This also means that when we have guest weeks, the event won't move! Guest artists can instead be added to the blog members as well as our Discord, have my entire collected reference folder, have the askbox and score sheet managed by mods who are familiar with the system, and the support of other artists who've done this rodeo before.

More than Sketchy Saturday, however, some new things are coming that we'll be talking about during the stream, so make sure you tune in :3

So, let's get into the next important question...

HOW are we celebrating?

All-Day Art Livestream on July 11th, 9 AM to 5 PM, US Pacific time! On TWITCH

That's right folks, Loor is going live and they aren't doing it alone. We've got special guests along for the ride, some who will be on voice with me, [ @fallout-lou-begas , @theartofblossoming , @nukaworld-nora , @squirttheradspooder ] and some who will be riding along via the chat because they prefer not to be on voice [ @tarberrymentats , @beware-the-red-menace ] and yet others who are helping us run things on the back end, and may pop in if they so desire, but shall remain unnamed... for now :3

More than that, we're gonna be raffling off prizes! Stickers, hand-painted bottlecaps, and a FREE COMMISSION from yours truly [ 1 full body figure in a fully realized environment, with full color, shading, and finishing effects, digital copy only but you are welcome to have it printed for personal display purposes. ] in the prize pot! There will be both FREE ENTRIES everyone will be able to earn on the day of the stream, as well as EXTRA ENTRIES for donations!

And let's talk about those donations.

Originally, my intent for any donations made during the stream were for a local charity, The South Kitsap Helpline. I still want to donate to them, because they do good work, but I'm only going to earmark the first 50$ for that. After that, I'm going to split stream donations between my volunteers. What they choose to do with it is up to them, no matter what the amount turns out to be. They took time out of their lives to help me make this happen and support the project moving forward, they deserve it.

PLEASE reblog this post! :D WE HOPE TO SEE YOU THERE!

[quicksilversquared]

The Cat’s Girlfriend

Apparently not satisfied with the attention that her stories and previous Ladyblog interviews are getting her, Lila decided to claim that she was dating Chat Noir, which Chat Noir's civilian self has some problems with that. He can't really dispute the claim as Adrien, but- well, sometimes opportunities pop up when they're least expected.

links in the reblog

Lila had loved telling her superhero stories for months. She had become Ladybug's best friend only days after arriving in Paris, of course. Her grandparents had been superheroes in Italy. She and Ladybug hung out all the time, eating snacks that Lila had baked herself- she had been taught by a master baker, after all, and Ladybug set fire to anything she tried to bake, so it only made sense- and talking battle strategy. Ladybug took Lila to her and Chat Noir's hangout spots all the time- Lila showed off pictures that had clearly been taken from the top observation deck at night as proof. She helped Ladybug match powers and Miraculous, and wasn't it a pity that her hard work helping had been destroyed with Queen Wasp's appearance?

But her claim that she was actually dating Chat Noir? That was new.

Their classmates oohed and ahhed, exchanging excited looks while Lila ducked her head bashfully, not-so-subtly basking in the attention and fielding questions with a shy look on her face.

"Apparently her last story had stopped getting her enough attention," Plagg snickered from inside of Adrien's jacket. "Whatcha going to do about this story? Just let people believe that Chat Noir is dating Lila?"

"What else can I do?" Adrien hissed back. He didn't like it, but Adrien wasn't supposed to know what was going on in Chat Noir's private life. If he tried to claim anything else, then people would be suspicious and it would just draw unwanted attention. If he had an opportunity to correct the story as Chat Noir, then he would, but the chances of him getting that opportunity? Really low.

(After all, if he brought it up out of the blue, then that would suggest that he was close enough to hear Lila, unless Alya posted about it on her blog. And even if she did... well, it might be seen as mean-spirited to just bring up and bash that one specific claim when he hadn't been asked about it, even if it would totally be well within his right to do so.)

The bell cut off the questions, and everyone broke away from huddle around Lila. Almost against his will, Adrien's attention slid backwards as Alya and Marinette returned to their seats. No doubt Marinette would point out the very obvious holes in Lila's claims- after all, everyone with eyes could see that Chat Noir was interested in Ladybug, not a random lying civilian- and then Alya would just dig her heels in, ignoring all of the holes in the story in favor of complaining that Marinette wasn't giving Lila a chance.

It happened every time, after all. Adrien could understand why- it was really annoying to see their friends suckered, over and over again, and Marinette was all about justice and fairness- but they just weren't getting anywhere.

(He had tried jumping in on Marinette's side the week before, because Lila had been trying to get a class outing rescheduled because she was "going to be gone" and "would hate to miss it- she would feel so left out!" and rescheduling would have fallen on Marinette, but Alya had just dug in even deeper, meeting his resistance with her own. So that- well, it hadn't worked.)

(Thankfully Marinette had flat-out refused to change the date, informing the entire class that if they wanted to come up with a second outing on a date that worked for Lila, that was up to them but she was too busy to change everything.)

"She's so lucky that she's Chat Noir's girlfriend," Alya was gushing behind Adrien. "Ladybug as her best friend, Chat Noir as her boyfriend- I bet Ladybug introduced the two of them! And it's no wonder that he's interested, because she's a sort of civilian superhero on her own, isn't she? With all of her charity work and everything."

Adrien cringed. Here it came, another argument between two besties-

"You know, I bet that Chat Noir would love to tell you how they got together! He seems the romantic type- y'know, the kind to absolutely gush about their girlfriend?"

Adrien's mind flatlined.

...what.

"I bet that would make a really great video for the Ladyblog," Marinette continued, and Adrien turned to- well, not to stare, because that would be rude, but to try to figure out what was going on. Had Marinette been akumatized? Or, more likely, had Lila been akumatized and now was controlling Marinette like a puppet? "I know you said that videos have been slow lately, because too many of the fights have been too dangerous for you to get close, so maybe a superhero's personal life interest piece would help with that?"

"Ooh, yeah!" Alya agreed, hand shooting out to snag her notebook and pencil, and Adrien blinked in confusion. Had both of them been taken over by weird body-snatchers or something? Their Lila-centric conversations never went like this. "I can interview both of them! Lila said that I could ask her about their relationship after class today, so I can get her side of the story then, but yeah, my viewers would love to hear it from Chat Noir, too. I'll ask him for the story after the next akuma fight! Well, the next one I can get to," she corrected, looking a bit sheepish. "My parents said that if I run off again and leave my sisters in the apartment when I'm meant to be babysitting, I'll be grounded for a month. And I can't get out of school. But the next chance I get! Now I gotta think up questions before that happens- I can't get caught unprepared!"

Alya started scribbling furiously in her notebook, Adrien's eyes slid over to Marinette. She caught his gaze and her lips twitched up in a smirk before she winked, and it all fell into place. Once again, Marinette was proving just how smart she was and how well she could put that into practice when she wasn't letting her frustration blind her.

Clever, Marinette. Instead of doing the same thing she always did and arguing with Alya about Lila, she had outwardly gone along with it and in doing so, had managed to steer Alya into doing exactly what she wanted to. Now Alya would go to Chat Noir, not to fact check but just to get more information for her scoop, and end up find out exactly how truthless Lila's stories were.

...well, he might just get his perfect opportunity to debunk Lila's lies after all.

  It really was no real surprise when Ladybug and Chat Noir spotted Alya biking after them during the next akuma attack. She kept on their tails, cell phone apparently mounted on the front end of her bike to minimize the likelihood that she would lose control of the bike while steering one-handed, and was the first reporter on-site after the akuma had been defeated and it was safe to approach.

Considering that she wanted her story first, that was no real surprise. She had to get to them first, since Lila's "side of the story" had been filmed and posted the previous day. Adrien had been surprised by that, but after texting Marinette, it had all become clear. Alya had never been known for her patience, and, well, two posts and two videos were better than one! So she had posted the interview with Lila, promising a "part two" soon. That meant that people would be interested, and they would no doubt come back regularly until the part two was posted.

(And they would, Adrien knew that. Apparently Lila had heavily implied that she knew who Chat Noir's civilian self was, though she hadn't said it outright, and that had people clamoring for more interviews to try to get any clues they could.)

...he had to feel a little bad for Alya, honestly. There would be no easy way for her to hide the fact that she hadn't fact-checked any of her articles featuring Lila and her friendship with Ladybug, and that wouldn't reflect well on her. Still, she couldn't say that Marinette hadn't warned her.

Maybe this would just be a much-needed wake-up call to Alya that she couldn't just dig her heels in and not check her facts just because she thought that she was right.

"Ladybug! Chat Noir!" Alya called eagerly, biking over eagerly and yanking her phone from the holder as she practically tossed her bike aside. "Do you have a few minutes for a quick interview?"

"It depends on how quick," Ladybug quipped. "I have three minutes, I think, and Chat Noir, you have-?"

"Four." He considered Alya. "But I'll have to go in two or three to be safe."

"Great!" Alya practically shoved her phone in his face, and it was only his model training that kept Chat Noir from yanking his head back and giving himself several chins in the process. "So, I recently learned about your relationship with the one and only fantastic Lila Rossi, and Paris and I would love to hear your side of the story of how you got together!" The camera swung to Ladybug briefly. "And how you helped set them up!"

Hook, line, and sinker. He had Alya right where he wanted her. Thank you, Marinette.

"You must be mistaken, I'm not dating anyone," Chat Noir told her, pasting on his best puzzled look. "All of Paris knows that I only have eyes for Ladybug, after all. I don't know why anyone would think otherwise." He shrugged. "Someone must just be spreading rumors."

Alya paused, clearly taken aback. The phone inched backwards a hair. "But- but Lila told me herself! All about how Ladybug introduced the two of you, and how you got closer, and- and-"

Next to him, Ladybug let out an exasperated sigh. "I thought I told Lila to quit making up stories about knowing me months ago. It was annoying then, it's still annoying now, and I'm certainly not thrilled that she's dragging Chat Noir into it now, too. I'm sure that if she's been making up stories about other famous people, that they're not thrilled about it either."

Alya took a slow step back, looking a bit paler than usual. Admirably, though, she kept on filming, even though she had to know that her integrity as a reporter was getting torn apart live. "I- oh."

"The first time either of us met Lila Rossi was at or right before her akumatization into Volpina for the first time," Chat Noir chimed in. "And the only time either of us has come into contact with her is during akuma battles, either when she was akumatized herself or when she was purposefully getting in our way by claiming that she was badly injured and needed attention. If she's claiming otherwise- well, then it's her own fault if Hawkmoth decides to target her thinking that we're friends. I suspect that she's just making up all sorts of tall tales to get people to like her so that she can manipulate them into doing what she wants."

"Oh."

"I had hoped that such a public call-out wouldn't be necessary and that Lila would realize that lying about having connections with famous people such as superheroes was wrong, but clearly talking to her relatively privately hasn't done a thing." Ladybug glanced around at all of the assembled reporters. They had caught up now and were eagerly recording. "So I might as well make it clear: We are not connected to Lila Rossi in any way. I am not friends with her, Chat Noir is not dating her, and any claims to the contrary are not at all based in fact. She is lying about having connections for her own gain, and I would take any stories she tells with a huge grain of salt." She waved, winding up to throw her yo-yo. "Bug out!"

...well, clearly Ladybug wasn't going to give Lila any wriggle room. Harsh, but admittedly deserved at this point.

"She said it all, folks," Chat Noir told the cameras with a winning smile. "Any stories from Lila Rossi should probably not be trusted, at least not without a very in-depth check first. If something sounds too good to be true, well..." He shrugged, determined not to lose his cheer. "It just might be."

With that, Chat Noir took off into the sky, heading back home and feeling lighter than he had for a while, a load off of his shoulders now that the rest of the world- well, Paris at least- knew not to trust Lila Rossi. Maybe it was a bit of a dramatic approach to the problem, as highly publicized as the call-out had been, but if he had learned nothing else during the months of dealing with Lila that they had gone through, it was that she was slippery and would just come up with more excuses. Maybe there would be fallout- fallout that he had, admittedly, initially been hoping to avoid, with Lila no doubt pouncing on yet another akuma to try to get revenge- but in the end, everything would hopefully be better.

It was weird to say, really, but maybe Lila lying about dating Chat Noir had been the best thing that could have happened, since it had provided the perfect opening for the superheroes to correct the lies that she had been spreading without looking like they were picking her out unfairly. If they were super lucky, maybe the added publicity from all of the major news stations would get the attention of Lila's mom, and some of her other lies would start unraveling with a vengeance.

Even if that didn't happen, Alya and the rest of their classmates would be aware of Lila's lying now. They weren't going to trust her, which meant that Lila would be left powerless. She couldn't do anything when everyone around her was aware of her manipulations.

The rest of the school year was truly looking up.

[softest-cinnamon-roll]

79.) or 84.) for the smut prompts? 💓💓

79. “You don’t need to cover up the hickeys.” & 84. “There’s people here.”

(not really smut, but cute none the less!)

* * * * *

As much as it was beginning to get to him, there was something…thrilling about being Richie Tozier’s dirty little secret. There was something about knowing he was the one Richie was fucking at night after his shows, and not some of the blonde bimbos that try and sell stories of their rendezvous to the press. Even though Eddie was in way too deep, his feelings going from ‘this is just sex’ to ‘oh my god I love you’ in just over three months since they started seeing each other.

Not that he would ever tell Richie that. He couldn’t risk ruining the thing they had going by opening his big mouth and spilling his feelings out all over the bedroom floor. What a way to ruin the mood that would be, and Richie would probably kick him out faster than he could pick his dignity up off the marble floor.

It had always been their thing. After Richie finished his set, he would text Eddie to meet him somewhere and he would. No-one knew of their secret meetups and there was no plan on the horizon for them to go public as they weren’t exclusive. That is until a few weeks ago, when Richie had asked Eddie to accompany him to a charity event in Los Angeles.

He had gotten all dressed up and Richie had collected him from his apartment in a limo that drove them to the event. The whole night Richie was pressed up against Eddie’s side, introducing him to some of his friends and colleagues. As it was a closed event, there were no press, which meant Eddie didn’t end up on the front cover of every tabloid as Richie’s new ‘boy toy.’

Eddie was sure it was only meant to be a one-time thing, but Richie started to take him out in public more often. Whether it be to the movies, or to his shows, they were together. It was confusing Eddie just a little bit, but he was too scared to ask Richie if things had changed, after all, they still had regular sex.

At that present moment, they were in Richie’s changing room, about ten minutes away from Showtime. He was pressed up against the wall, Richie’s lips moving down his neck to suck what would become a dark purple hickey onto the skin, and Eddie had to hold back a moan. He was loud okay, and if he was loud then people would hear, and Eddie didn’t want an audience.

“Don’t cover your mouth baby,” Richie breathed against the skin, running his tongue over the forming bruise. “I like it when you moan, it lets me know that what I’m doing is making you feel good.” Once he’d finished talking, Richie moved a hand down to Eddie’s pants, palming him over the fabric.

Eddie jolted a little and pushed Richie away, a dark flush taking over his cheeks, “Richie…there’s people here. A lot of them. I don’t want someone walking in and catching us…like that.” He tucked a strand of his blonde hair behind his ear and walked over to the vanity cabinet, looking at his neck in the mirror. “Shit…Richie it’s huge. Do you have any concealer?”

Instead of answering, Richie just stared at him from the wall he had just moved away from, a strange look on his face. “Eds…you don’t need to cover up the hickey’s.” He moved over to Eddie, placing his hands on his hips. “I think they look nice on you.”

Turning around, Eddie frowned, the confusion niggling in the back of his brain. “People are going to know though…that you put them there if they see me?” Richie’s eyes widened a little and his mouth moved into an ‘oh’ shape. However before he could say anything, the door was opening and Richie’s manager was stepping inside.

“Richie, it’s time. Let’s get you on stage. Eddie, head into the audience, we’ve saved you a seat.” The manager winked at him and Richie sighed, stepping back as he followed her out of the room.

Eddie slowly made his way to his seat, third row from the front with an excellent view. A few minutes after he had sat down, the lights dimmed and Richie stepped out onto the stage, microphone in hand and grinning like an idiot.

“Hey guys, welcome. As always I can’t believe how many of you showed up tonight, a full house I believe?” In response, the audience screamed and Richie laughed, covering over his ears. “Damn, great crowd tonight.” He paused, scratching his neck. “Listen, I just wanted to address something to you all first before I go into my set. It’s a little serious…actually it’s a lot serious and it’s something I should have brought up a long time ago.”

The audience all fell silence and Eddie frowned. What the hell was he doing?

“About three months ago, this amazing guy came into my life. He’s funny, sweet and doesn’t take any of my crap, and believe me I have a lot of crap. At first, I wasn’t too sure that I wanted to even be in a relationship with anyone, so we decided that it would be strictly sex and it was…for about a month. Then good old feelings got in the way, at least for me they did. So I started taking him to functions and out on dates that weren’t totally independent on us having sex at the end of the night. Sometimes it did, sometimes it didn’t. I thought that maybe, because he came with me to all these events, that he had migrated from being my fuck buddy to being my boyfriend.”

Eddie’s eyes were wide at this point, his heart hammering against his chest as his leg bounced. He was glad that the lights on stage were so bright that Richie couldn’t see him, because Eddie was sure if they made eye contact at that point he might burst into tears.

Richie continued.

“I found out tonight though that that might not be the case. You see, we were making out and I left this huge hickey on his neck and he tried to cover it up. I told him that he didn’t need to do that because well, I thought we were exclusive. Yeah, of course I want to keep my private life…private, which is why we haven’t been in all the magazines, but apparently that just made my…my guy feel as though he was still my dirty little secret. Which he isn’t, by the way. Far from it.” Richie laughed, running a hand through his hair. “The truth is…I’m head over heels in love with him and if he’ll have me. I’d like to make a real go of things.”

At this point, Eddie was crying, tears streaming down his cheeks. He lifted his hand to wipe at his eyes and Richie flashed a grin to the audience.

“Alright, now onto the show!”

The second the show came to a close, Eddie was out of his seat and running backstage, stopping as Richie exited the stage and spotted him. They paused, staring at each other for a few moments before Eddie took a step closer, a smile on his lips. “So…we’re really bad at this communication thing, aren’t we?” He asked.

“Definitely,” Richie chuckled, closing the distance and wrapping his arms around Eddie’s waist to pull him into his arms. “I love you, Eddie. I am completely head over heels for you.”

Eddie flushed, his heart hammering in his chest as he pushed up on his toes to press a kiss to Richie’s lips. “I’m in love with you too…and I’d love to make a go of things with you. Always.”

Richie let out a breath, his face dropping in relief. “So…dinner and a movie?”

Grinning, Eddie settled back down on his heels, lacing his fingers together with Richie’s. “Yeah. Dinner and a movie.”

* * * * *

@richietoaster @tozier-boy @eds-trashmouth @bitchbrak @sloppybitchreddie @its-stranger-than-you-think @maximusfraker @jem-carstairs-is-perfection @thejadeazalea @halfway-happy353 @tinyarmedtrex @inthebreadbinwrites @kat-ships-everything @takeourpure @lo-v-ers @that-weird-girls-blog @studpuffin @s-s-georgie @reddie-for-anything @trashmouthtozierr @richietoizer @girasol-eddie @bi-bi-richie @honeybeehanlon @mars-14 @reddiesetandgo @marsisaplanetyall @xandertheundead @sedanleystanley @hawkinsbabe @beepbeeprichiellc @stellarbisexual @oldguybones @stanleuyris @eduardoandale  @purplepoisonedgem @reddie-to-cryy @pink-psychic @violetreddie @toziesque @queen-sock @appojoos @moonlightrichie @rreddies @disneyfan567 @annxmatron @lifesucksheres20bucks @anellope @roobarrtrashmouth @are-you-reddie-for-it @callmechee @nancynwheeler @reddieforlove @twoidiotsinl0ve @madi-artist @tozierking @s-onora @atownofeggs  @wilding-throught-thehallways @no-she-wasnt-reddie @dadbodrichie @thorn-harvester-ven @eddiekasbpark @sparklingrainbowdragon @ransonelovebot @gloire-celeste @derrylosers @3tothe1 @virgo-luthie @sashadrowned @spirited-marvel @losers-gotta-stick-together @rebecca-the-queen @ultrapaninibred

[secretgamergirl]

Hate Mobs Gotta Go

Last night, I did something I have never expected to do, and just full on gave up on a fun RPG writing assignment. Which I had to do because I hit a point where it was so overdue and unfinished that I was falling asleep sitting up and stress vomiting and other such things. There’s a whole lot of factors behind that. Other health issues, the toll of being on total pandemic lockdown for months, with neighbors just straight up open mouth coughing at my door, emergencies with friends and family, multiple fires and hardware failures, but the main thing was, and still is, the constant harassment from a militant hate mob, completely out of touch with reality.

Years ago, I remember there was this thing the internet at large was fond of doing with foaming at the mouth far right religious extremists- Mercilessly ridiculing them in public to expose how disconnected everything they said or did was from reality. Remember seeing this one float around and laughing your head off?

And if I mention the Westboro Baptist Church, you immediately picture a single family of raving bigots picketing funerals and such with their big homophobic signs, with a bigger crowd mocking them, right?

For some reason, the modern version of that particular flavor of fringe weirdo doesn’t get that sort of ridicule. Presumably because they’re focusing almost exclusively on trans people, and most people have this weird thing where like if you stick up for trans people you get cooties or something and never dig into the real juicy ridicule fodder. But for real, this stuff is OUT THERE. Just look at a few examples here.

Come for the weird ravings about harvesting baby organs. Stay for the... adult woman who apparently believes breasts get their shape from actually being sacks filled with milk under women’s skin? Now, how about this colorful comparison?

For anyone who wasn’t aware, pronouns are words like “I” “you” “he” “she” “it” and “this,” while rohypnol is colloquially known as “the date rape drug,” so this is utter gibberish. The full context of course is that this person is trying to make the argument that forcing this bigot to refer to women she’s prejudiced against as “she” instead of arbitrarily tossing around “he” or “it” is... raping her brain, I guess?

So... this is pretty clearly some creep’s weird little fantasy. The obvious giveaway is pretending that trans women “aren’t in the correct bathroom” when going to... the correct bathroom, and that the non-existent law about this is somehow enforced by... random bigots opting to deputize themselves. What DOES happen for real though is bigots like this being arrested for barging into public restroom stalls with camcorders aimed at the crotches of women on toilets and trying to defend themselves by insisting they have some duty to check what their genitals look like. On which note...

That’s just disgusting. It’s also as close as I feel comfortable to posting all the graphic fantasies I see from these people about the barbaric genital mutilation they imagine trans women subject ourselves to which really has no basis at all in reality. Well maybe I can post this one.

I’m not going to go through and itemize all the baldfaced lies in that, because I really kinda hope I don’t have to, and also because the person who slapped this together was kind enough to break it up in such a way that I legitimately can say “every single line of this is a completely baseless lie.” Also the art in the corner is stolen from a child-friendly comic whose author is trans, so, that’s extra slimy. Also wow that “bone scans” bit is actually one I’ve never seen. Where the hell do they even get these ideas?

Also this one needs some setup. If you have time, this right here is a freaking journey, if not, I’ll try to summarize.

So a while ago, this one particular unhinged bigot decided the most productive way to spend all her time was to get in touch with a bulk sticker printing business and order thousands if not millions of these weird gross poorly framed slabs with a really crude drawing of a penis and bunch of gibberish she really wishes were the names of popular twitter hashtags that nobody else but her ever uses. And then after receiving these, just... wandering around the city she lives in all day every day plastering them on phone booths and power poles and the mirrors of bathrooms in like.. elementary schools and park benches, just everywhere. And then makes multiple passes a day apparently to make sure nobody has tried to remove any of them, as detailed in this amazing thread I’ll link again.

So the latest break in that particular saga is that same zealot going around plastering stickers like this around too, to make it seem like “both sides do it.”

It should be obvious that that’s a “blacks rule!” sort of fake between the baffling text and using the extra inclusive, particular emphasis on supporting people of color, general purpose LGBT+ flag, but also, like their fellows on 4chan, they plan this sort of “false flag” crap in broad daylight:

I should really properly credit the whistle-blowing on that particular oddity, and I should also note that aside from the breast milk sacks, this is all just stuff I saw TODAY catching up on my twitter feed, but my main point with all this is to illustrate that we really are dealing with Jack Chick/Westboro Baptist-level unhinged zealotry... but again, nobody’s out there pointing and laughing. And it turns out, when you don’t have people pointing and laughing at this sort of thing, you get people taking it seriously. So... when I went to quickly search for a news story to link with the bit about creeps barging in on women with cameras, the results I got were... this.

That... sure is a lot of stories about totally innocent people in a demographic I belong to being murdered by total strangers goaded into blind murderous hatred by the sort of people I’m pointing and laughing at! Ha ha! There’s a very real chance of that happening to me every time I step outside, for any reason! Tee hee! I live in a state of constant fear! Whoopsie!

And it’s not just stuff like that. The people posting these rambling tirades about “breast milk sack implants” and putting crude penis stickers everywhere, never being called out as the unhinged weirdos they are, either have the world turning a blind eye to all this crap, or have everything they do downplayed in the media to the point where outright sexual harassment, doxing, and slurs I don’t want to repeat get headlines like “so-and-so made comments that some fringe trans activists on the internet deem ‘possibly transphobic’” and that’s AT BEST. More often you get stuff like the one incident I managed to bring a lot of public attention to way back when, where some bigot just literally walked up to someone on the street, grabbed them, savagely beat the hell out of them until pulled apart, had friends film the whole thing, and bragged after the fact about it, and every story that appeared as a result claimed the assailant was the victim, because they were all written by her friends.

Face obscuring provided by me here, by the way.

And that isn’t a one-off incident. Because, see, most of these unhinged weirdos spewing out all this transphobic gibberish are not, as you would think, a bunch of barely educated Trump hat wearing members of some fringe religious congregation. They’re editors and producers in major British news outlets. This isn’t me shouting conspiracy nonsense either, this is well-documented. Like, The Guardian gets public internal protests over this crap. So does the BBC. Yes, other respected news sites cover this. Media watchdog groups do their best to reign this in with hearings and such, but, don’t actually have any power to enforce anything really. So when there’s “reporting” on this crap, it’s coming directly from the “breast milk sack implant” people. Oh and here’s some screenshots of the headlines of those stories you’re too lazy to click through and actually read:

And of course, sometimes when they want to really come across as respectful, they try to find “scientists” and “doctors” who back up their ravings but all they have to fall back on are disgraced quacks who spend most of their time on activism work to normalize pedophilia.

I’m not bringing that point about Cantor up to discredit his writings about trans people by the way. He doesn’t really HAVE any writings about trans people. He just pasted the names of a bunch of random studies from the 70s about whether playing with barbies makes you gay into his blog a few years back and this crowd was so desperate for validation they declared him an “expert in the field” and started passing out links to his.... pro-pedophila blog. Which is part of this whole pattern, but I’ve written about that before. Oh and the governments of multiple countries manage to treat all these people as “experts” and make policy decisions based on their ravings. That’s fun.

Anyway, aside from encouraging random people to, you know, just randomly murder anyone they see who looks like maybe a trans woman, every so often this weird little cult pulls in an actual celebrity who then has a public meltdown as they post all this gibberish to a wider audience. Currently this is going on with Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling (who’s actively promoting the pedophile guy up there on Twitter), and I think also William Shatner, but I haven’t really looked into it. The last big one though was Graham Linehan. Who you might remember from co-writing some sitcoms that were popular decades ago in Britain, or from being the weird cartoon villain who tried to kill the funding of a children’s charity, prompting this strange pledge drive marathon of Donkey Kong Country.

You might also know him as one of... I think honestly just two people who have ever managed to be such out of control stalking hate mongers that they were actually given a permanent no possible appeal ban from Twitter. Personally though I know him more as, you know, that one absolute creep who’s been obsessively stalking me for like 5 years and never shutting up about his weird personal obsession with me.

I WOULD link the recent freaking filmed interview he did where he spent forever rambling about me, but I’d have to actually watch it to confirm I had the right link, and also the only place I could quickly find a link to it would be on his twitter feed, which as stated, no longer exists. Oh and random side note there, despite being personally, by name, the person he was explicitly targeting all his hateful ramblings at, he wasn’t banned from that site for any of the disgusting stuff he said to me. He just slipped up and mentioned a cis woman with a professorship while shouting about this crap recently and that caused people to actually take action. I do so love being invisible.

Anyway, point is, prior to Rowling grabbing the baton from him as his social media presence went up in flames, this guy was name-dropping me a LOT. Presumably he still is, just in places fewer people see it. And when you have as big an audience as he did, and that audience is as full of hatemongers as his was, that has a pretty noticeable effect. I’ve been deluged with so much hateful garbage for so long it’s impossible for me to put any numbers on it. The closest I can do to quantify it is note that hate dump was big enough that I was also flooded with more weird messages intended as support from total strangers than I could deal with, totally losing access to social media feeds and my e-mail from the volume for a good bit, and THAT flood was big enough that I got this whole second wave of creepy stalkers who’d built up this whole weird fanon where this stalker here is like, someone I used to date or be business partners with and not just some creepy dude like twice my age stalking me over the internet, from a completely different hemisphere.

And I mean... in the broadest of strokes, I can kinda laugh all this off. Because... these people are completely ridiculous, out of touch with reality, and mostly live in other countries. But... all the threats and shouting are very real and very constant and like.. picture someone outside on the street shouting at your windows about how they’re going to break in and kill you. You really can’t ignore that. Even if they’re unarmed, and all they’re really capable of doing is shouting and pounding on your door, you can’t really just ignore that shouting and pounding and just watch a movie or play a game or write this article you promised would be done 3 months ago. You can certainly try, but a pretty big part of your brain is going to be occupied with thoughts about how maybe you should call someone to see if they’ll escort this violent person away, or maybe you should barricade your door in case all that pounding does something.

And I mean this isn’t a bad metaphor for how all the constant threats and stalking I’m dealing with thanks to celebrity bigots personally obsessed with me impacts my life, but it also does a pretty good job of describing how my night went pretty recently when I ACTUALLY DID HAVE SOMEONE POUNDING ON MY ACTUAL REAL PHYSICAL DOOR SHOUTING ABOUT STABBING ME TO DEATH, and no, there was no resolution to that beyond the sound of sirens causing that person to back off.

I also had an experience not too long ago where I was supposed to take a cab to a routine appointment, a car showed up with the cab company’s name on it, somewhat early, and proceeded to drive me... out to the middle of the freaking woods like an hour from where I live, and when my phone rang with my actual cab asking where I was the driver freaked out, had me get out of the car, and took off leaving me just... stuck in the middle of nowhere freezing to death and trying to find a landmark an actual cab could pick me up from. Still don’t know what the hell that whole thing was about and whether a cab driver just REALLY didn’t know what he was doing and panicked or what, but I do know that talking about it publicly in the vaguest of terms lead to a bunch of unhinged shouting from... apparently some unconnected ride share driver with a habit of dumping trans women between stops when they try to get medications or something, convinced I was calling him out for that.

So.... yeah. Things aren’t exactly going great in my neck of the woods. I’d really appreciate it if people would properly treat these unhinged violent weirdos like unhinged violent weirdos and not respectable members of society so they quit getting so bold and public with the violent stuff, and people who listen to them get properly shouted down for doing so.

[vandergeld]

                  hey  everyone welcome BACK to my blog  ,  hi  , how  are  ya ?   i’m   RUZZY   (  or  ru  ,  rudy  idk  if thats too  much  lmAO  )  &  i  have  not  been  apart  of  a  group  in  84  years ............  that  graphic  is  so  extra  but  i  was  bored  &  first  impressions  are  everything  ,  ANYWHO  this  is  my  mans WARNER  played  by  my  mans  GRAYSON DOLAN  ,  who  lacks  f’n  resources  so  i  gotta  work  some  magic  w/  all  these  gifs  on  tumblr  lmao  so  any  gif  icons  are  noT  mine  for  the  most  part  they’ll  be  taken  from  gifs  alr  created  (  s/o  2  the  fly  hunnies  that  made  ‘em  )  anyway  ya’ll  don’t  really  care  abt  me  lmao  soooooo here’s warner ! PLS  feel  free  to  hmu ANYTIME  for  the  plots  &  things  of  that  nature  u  could  lit  never  bother  me  idc ,  my  discord  is  𝐫𝐮𝐳𝐳𝐲𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐝𝐚𝐮𝐳𝐢#1643 if  u  everrr need  to  get  ahold  of  me  when  im  not  on  tumblr  !

         𝐆𝐑𝐀𝐘𝐒𝐎𝐍 𝐃𝐎𝐋𝐀𝐍, cismale, he/his. → look out, there’s 𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐍𝐄𝐑 𝐕𝐀𝐍𝐃𝐑𝐆𝐄𝐋𝐃. you know, the 𝐓𝐖𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐘  year old 𝐁𝐑𝐎𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑 of 𝐁𝐄𝐓𝐀 𝐋𝐀𝐌𝐁𝐀𝐃𝐀 𝐌𝐔. you know, i overheard someone say that they were 𝐒𝐄𝐂𝐑𝐄𝐓𝐈𝐕𝐄, 𝐑𝐄𝐁𝐄𝐋𝐋𝐈𝐎𝐔𝐒 , 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐌𝐈𝐍𝐆  and 𝐃𝐄𝐕𝐎𝐓𝐄𝐃. but that’s just rumours. fresh new pairs of air jordan 1's, the roar of a crowd in a stadium, and lost weekends come to mind when i think of them. what about you? [ ruzzy, he/him, 18, est ]

TW : CANCER MENTION  ,  SMOKING  MENTION  .

//   »    GENERAL      :

FULL NAME   :   warner     evangelino   alexander       vandergeld       (   inspired by the antagonists of white chicks lmaooo   )     .

HOMETOWN  : new  york  city  ,  new york  .

NICKNAMES   :   dumbass   .

AGE   :   twenty  .

BIRTHDAY   :   october twenty-first   .

ZODIAC   :   libra   .

GENDER   :   male   .

PRONOUNS   :   he      &      him   .

NATIONALITY   :   american   .

ETHNICITY   :   german  ,   italian  ,  irish   .

LABEL(S)   :   the   golden boy   ,   the   lothario   ,   the   jock   .

TROPE(S)  :  chick magnet  ,  hormone-addled teenager  ,  unwitting pawn  , upper class twit  ,

OCCUPATION   :  college student  &  collegiate football player  & full time frat bro  .

FRAT : beta lambada mu  .

MAJOR   :   environmental science  .

POS  : charming  ,  charismatic  ,  brave  ,  athetic ,  dedicated  ,   eco-friendly  ,  high-moral compass  ,  book smart  ,  kind  ,  energetic  ,  optimistic  , loyal (  most of the time  ) ,  respectful  ,   well-rounded  ,  level-headed  , ambitious  ,  debonair  ,  life of the paty  .

NEG   :  compulsive  ,  easily-influenced  ,  dimwitted  , hypersexualized  ,  problematic  ,  addictive  , rebellious  ,  bemused  ,  defensive  ,  clingy  ,  hopeless-romatic  ,  overly-competitive  ,  envious .

INSP  : nate archibald  (  gossip girl  )  

//   »    PAST      :

          warner   was  born  &  raised  in  the  city  that  never sleeps  and    is  the  product  of  evangeline   moretti-vandergeld  , an   intelligent   american-italian  socialite  turned   environmental   politician  ,   and  captain  william   vandergeld  ,  a  former   navy   captain  ,   and  now   a   shareholder   in   some   boring   fortune   500   company   that   allowed   his   wife   and   son   to   live   an   affluent  ,   and   privileged   life  . his   mother  however  ,   was   the   real deal  ,   often   using   their   sum   of   wealth   to   donate   to   multiple   charities  ,  organizations  , etc, she was  dedicated  to  keeping  new  york  city  (  and  all  who  lived there  )  clean  and  safe   , and  she instilled  those  same  values  onto  her  son.

          some people are born lucky  ,  and others  ,  lucky  to  be  born  .   warner  was  the  first  option  .  his childhood  was  nothing  short  of  happiness  ,  and  happiest  days  were  with  his  mother  ,  for  as  long  as he  could  remember  ,  any happy  moment  in  his childhood  was  faded  right  into  her.

          things  took  a  drastic  change  his freshman  year  of  (  private  obvy lmao  )  high-school   .   warner’s  mother  was  diagnosed  with  breast  cancer  ,  and  little  to  his  knowledge  ,  it wasn’t  looking  pretty  from  the  start  .  she was  frequently  in  and  out  of the hospital  for  a  few  months  at  a  time  and  it  was  not  looking  good  on  any  fronts  .  one  day  when  she  went  to  the  hospital  it seemed  like  she  never  left  ,  maybe  she  didn’t  ,  those  days  were  a blur  for  warner  to  be  honest  .  watching  his  mother  lose  life  , every  single  day  was  not  a task  he  was  up  for  .

          by  then  it  was  just  warner  and  his  father  ,  they  were  all  they  had  in  the big  city  . (  when  he  wasn’t  always  away  on business  )  warner  grew  up  in   that  big  luxy  town  house  all  by  himself  ,  with  the  company  of  loyal  maids  ,  chefs  ,   and  nannies  of course  .  but  in  high  school  , the  more  he  really submerged  himself  into  it  ,  it  was  a  crazy  world  &  he  loved  it  .  whilst  getting  demands  from  his  father  in  tokyo  to  attend  those  boring  sailing  classes  ,  warner  instead  headed  out  to  their  beach  house  in  the  hamptons  for  an  early  20  rager  .

       warner  undoubtedly knew  the  power  he  possessed  ,   big  man  on  campus  type  &  it felt  good  , until  about towards  the  end  of his  junior  year  he  was  honestly  all   partied   out  ,  but  of  course reputation  is   everything  ,  in  order  to  keep  up  thats  when  he  picked  up  the   real  ugly  habits  ,  that  were  of  course  fun  .  smoking  numerous  amounts  of  marijuana  ,  various  girls  in  -  and  -  out  every other  day  was  a  feeling  like  no  other  ,   he  knew  it  was  wrong  ,  he  knew  his  mom  would  be  ashamed  ,  him  doing  all these  things  and  not carrying  on  her  legacy  in  some  way .  but  he  couldn’t  help  himself  in a  all  honesty   ,   and   no  doubt  some  of  that  transitioned  over  in  college .

//   »    AES   :

          lost weekends partying  ,  chicken  wings  &  french  fries  ,  air  jordan  1′s  ,  gucci  guilty  cologne  ,  friday  night  lights  ,  clouds  of  smoke  &  red  eyes  ,  diamond  encrusted  jewelry  glistening  under  bright  lights  in  a  dark  room  ,  nike  sweatsuits  ,  game  winning  moves  ,  new  york  city  at  night  ,  hamptons  in  the  summer  ,  spring  break  in  miami  ,  impulsive decisions  .

//   »    TL;DR   :

(  and  some  stuff  i  probably  missed  oops  )  warner  is  a  conflicted  mama’s   boy  who  knows  half  the  shit  he does  is  wrong  but  can’t  stop  .  after  his  mothers passing  he had  an absent father  who seemed  to  always  be  away  on  business  ,  only  in  town  for  a  month  or  two  ,  missing  his sons’ multiple  feats   to  keep  himself  distracted  from  the  fact  that  his  wife  was  no  longer  with  them. created  immense daddy  issues  for  warner  ,  especially  since  he  was  a  standout  football  star  &  2x   stage  champ in  high  school  ,  and is  currently  playing  collegiality  for  the  irish ,  with  dreams  of  making  it  in  the  nfl  cause  screw  his  dad  he  don’t  wanna  go   2  the  navy   ,   or  work  for  dat  company # not  gonna  happen .  warner  took  great  advantage  of  wealth  &  his  fathers  absence  ,  but  he’s  lowkey  partied  out  in  college  ,  or  so  he likes  to  say  but  he fakes  it ‘till  he  makes  it bc  he  doesn’t  his  brothers  to think  he’s  lame . HE’S  LIVING  FOR  EVERYBODY  BUT  HIM  BASICALLY .

//   »    HEADCANONS    :

warner  is  on  a  football  scholarship  majoring  in  environmental  science  bc  although  he  most  likely  won’t  do  shit  w/  da  degree its  for  mommy  .

he can EASILY  be  manipulated  or  taken  advantage  of  ,  he’s  book  smart  but lowkey  dumber  than  a  fucking  box  of  rocks 

immastonerbyyoungthug.mp3  .  occasionally ,  but  ,  more  so  than  that  ?  he  always  manages  to  flush  out  his  system  in  time  if  needed  be  ,  but  he  loves  2  roll  up  #  stress relief 

a  BEAST  on  that  field  (  student  athlete  meme  here  )

has  all  the  canon  gray  tattoos  bc  fuck  what  dad  thinks  .  he  wears  a solid  16 inch gold  chain  ,  and  another  of  the same  length with  his  moms’  name  on  it  , never  fucking  takes  it  off  ,  showers  with  it  cause  he  can  .

ok  ........  he  rich  ,  but  like  not  i  can  do  whatever  i  want  rich  ???  he  may  not  ever  have  to  work  a  day  in  his   life  ,  but  he  don’t  got  the pull  u  think  he  does  w/  his  dumb  ass  u  probably  couldn’t  even  tell  he’s  got  money  with  his  minimalist  fashion  sense  .

he  has  a  higher  moral  compass  than  most  of  his  frat  bros  ,  but  the  stupid  shit  he does  ,  u most  likely  won’t  even  be  able  to tell  ,  he’s  definitely  a  serial  romeo  and  a  heartbreaker  ,  one  compliment  ?  he’s  ready  to  drop  his  pants  &  fall  in  love  w/   u  .

HE DUMB  ,  but  like  he  can  talk  his  way  into  &  out  of  anything  ,  most  of  the  time  ,  batting  those  big  brown  eyes  &  a  million  dollar  smile  has  saved  his  ass  on  multiple  occasions  .

//   »    WANTED CONNECTIONS   :

EX-GIRLFRIEND :  i’m  thinking  his  first  &  only  “  serious  “  relationship  while  in  college  .  were  going  pretty  steady  until  he  cheated  on  her  (  hmm wc  on  who  he  cheated  on  her w/ ??  ) ,  she  never  found  out  but  that  guilt  ate warner TF UP  so  he  cut  things  off  with  her  via  text  message  and blocked  her  number  ,  ignores  her  any  chance  he  gets  ‘till  this  day  ,  cause  he  doesn’t  have  any  balls  and  cannot  face  his  fears  .

FRAT BROS  : lowkey  what  i’m  MOST  excited  for  asdfgh  like  whoever  is  in  beta  lambada mu  hit  me  the  fuck UP so  we  can  discuss  dynamics  ,  roomates  ,  allat  .

FOOTBALL TEAM  : same  for  above  ,  he’s  lowkey  cocky  &  got  sly  comments  when  he’s  on  the  field  ,  he constantly  humbles  himself  but  can’t  helps  it  ,  he is  hot  shit  and  he  knows  it  , how does  his  team  feel  ab  that  ??  w/  his  defensive  ass  !

GOOD-LUCK CHARM  :  prolly  a  girl  (  bonus  points  if  a  cheerleader  ???  im  not  picky  tho  i promise  if  ur  muse  don’t  shake  poms  idc  )  it  happened  out  the  blue  ,  they  screamed  his  name  while  the  team  was  walking  out  for  a  game  ,  and  she  called  that  he’d  get  3  td’s  and  thats  exactly  what  he  did  now  they  joke  ab  it  and  shit  (  maybe  a  goodluck  kiss b4  games  bc  its  warner lolol  ) idk  i  came  up  wit  it  on the  spot but  i love  it.

//   »    MISC   :

i’m a dumbass  &  this  got  way  longer  than  i  expected  but  if  u  made  it   all  the  way  thru  ily . 

[reveriequill-rai]

Blood Candy: Chapter 2

(finally lmao. still debating on how frequently to post these chapters)

I walked down the ancient-looking stairwell to the basement. What appeared to be dark, dried red paint smeared the walls, as if someone had made some semblance of an attempt to renovate the old stairwell but somehow fainted or otherwise was forced to cut their work short. Then again, with the odd scent that filled the air, I would faint, too.

Finally, I got downstairs to the much cleaner looking, obviously renovated bottom floors. I walked down the hallway, observing the white painted walls lined with all kinds of fliers encouraging habits for better health. Some blotches of red paint stained some parts of the walls and floor, I noticed. Finally, I arrived at room 0134, where I was supposed to meet Dr. Kermit. I sat down, waiting, wondering why a doctor didn’t guide me there themselves. 

The room was small and rather messy. Files were stuffed in overflowing drawers and shelves, pretty easy for the taking. The floor was lined with long scuff marks leading to the door, and there were very little pieces of doctors’ equipment in sight, save for a blood pressure monitor, a vital signs monitor (what?), and a syringe kit.

Must’ve forgot to move that vital signs monitor someplace, I thought. 

“Sorry I’m late,” a male voice suddenly spoke. I jumped slightly as I looked up, startled from the abrupt entrance. 

A young man who appeared to be only a few years older than me was suddenly in the doorway. He had black hair that covered one of his maroon-colored eyes. Aside from the distinctly maroon eyes, not many other features stood out to me. He wore the standard white coat and a black shirt and jeans. 

“Oh! Hey,” I said. “You must be Jasper Kermit.”

“The one and only.” The young doctor smiled. “And no, before you ask, I cannot do a Kermit impression.”

“I’m guessing a lot of people ask you that?” 

An exasperated look crossed Jasper’s face as he sighed.

“It’s a family curse,” he said. “Literally can’t go a day without someone making a Kermit joke. That’s why I say my last name is Kody. Was gonna do that here, too, but my little troll of a brother ratted me out.” 

I chuckled. 

“That’s rough, buddy,” I said. 

“Yep,” Jasper sighed. “So, what grade you in…Dakota, was it? You don’t look that much younger than me.”

“Yep,” I said. “Nearly wrapping up junior year,” I said. 

“Sweet. That was my toughest year…how’s it going?”

“Got an essay due in 2 days, but my parents practically begged me to get my blood drawn first. They want to know if I’m still allergic to eggs so my aunt Natalie won’t have to waste her time preparing her famous end-of-junior-year cake.”

“You’re telling me junior year is so rough that you guys need a full blown party to commemorate the end to this hellish year?” Jasper laughed. “Dang. If only I were that lucky.”

“Sorta. Normally it’s at the end of every year, but they stopped that tradition when they realized I was mildly allergic to eggs.”

“Wish my parents threw me a party with cake when I graduated from medical school,” he said. “But nope! They were so eager to kick me out of the house. What school do you go to?” 

“North Clueham High.”  

Jasper paused and nodded. 

“I see.” He seemed shocked by my answer, but I figured it was nothing.

I smiled.

“Glad I got a doctor that actually treats me like a human being instead of a child or a freakin’ lab rat,” I said. 

“‘Bout time, huh?” Jasper said, grabbing an empty syringe from the cabinet. “I try not to patronize too much. Believe me, I know that feeling all too well. Besides,” he continued, looking back at me with a slightly unnerving look, “I gotta make sure my patients are all nice and cozy before I suck the blood right out of ‘em.” 

I gave a nervous laugh. Maybe Seb was onto something, I thought amusingly to myself.

“Funny you mention that,” I said. “My friend Sebastian runs a conspiracy blog with my friend Akira. It’s called AkiSeb, and right now he’s all over this theory that people who do bloodwork and blood drives are secretly vampires who use humans to gain enough blood to fuel their evil agenda.” 

“Your friends seem smart.” Jasper grinned. 

“More like crazy,” I retorted. “Too many horror movies.” 

“Probably.” 

“Well, when you and your little legion of vampire doctors and nurses finally get enough blood to awaken Dracula or whatever and you guys finally enslave the human race,” I joked, “at least spare my life and everyone else who’s given you blood. You oughta thank us for helping you out, even if unwillingly.”

Jasper laughed.

“Will do,” he said, sitting down in a chair across from me. “But humans suck, no pun intended. You oughta thank us for getting you hooligans under control. Alright, let’s get started.” 

We went through the usual procedure, with me clenching my fists so he gets a good idea of where my veins are and where best to extract blood from. Finally, he chose my arm. 

“Normally I would’ve gone for the neck,” he joked, “but you know how it goes.”

“Can’t give it away?” I laughed. “Smart.”

Jasper grinned as the needle pierced through my skin and into my vein, leaving a sharp, stinging feeling that lingered for what felt like ages. Normally blood drawings only took a few seconds, but it felt like I had been in that chair for almost a minute. 

“Jasper,” a female voice called while I was still getting blood drawn. A nurse who looked about his age with brown, curly hair appeared in the doorway. “You better shut up with all this vampire nonsense. You’re gonna scare your little brother.” 

“Serves him right for revealing my real surname to the whole freakin’ office,” he retorted. “Shouldn’t you be babysitting the little twerp, anyhow?”

The nurse glared daggers at him and disappeared back into the doorway. 

“It’s not babysitting, by the way, he’s 15!” she called. 

“Still a baby!” Jasper yelled back before turning back to me. “That’s Harriet, my co-worker. Major buzzkill. She babysits my little brother since our parents are at work, like, all the time, and I can’t expose the little twerp to stuff like syringes. Dude might stab my eyes out for teasin’ him so much.” 

“My older sister was annoying,” I said, “so I can’t blame you. Good thing she’s married now so she can go bother her husband instead of me.” 

Finally, the blood drawing was finished. 

“There we go,” Jasper said, applying the wad of cotton and the bandages over it. “You good?” 

“Yeah…” I said, still slightly nervous. “That felt pretty long, though. How much did you take?”

“Enough. It may have felt long, but I assure you it was only a few seconds.”

“Really? I’m positive I was there for almost a minute.” I checked my watch. “Yep. Definitely a minute, give or take.”

“Strange.” Jasper secured the syringe with my blood in it. “Maybe I’m just so used to this that it feels much shorter to me.”

I stood up, but Jasper gestured for me to sit back down.

“I’m gonna go put this in the lab so I can get the results,” he said. “Can I trust you to wait here ‘till I get back?”

I nodded. 

Jasper gave me a smile as he left the room with the blood-filled syringe in hand. I went on my phone while I waited, calling Seb and telling him to get ready to pick me up.

“Oh hey! You’re alive!” Seb teased over the phone. He then said in a monotone voice, like an automated phone call, “Thank you for donating to the Clueham Charity for Vampires in Need. Your contribution to the future enslavement of the human race is very much appreciated, ya filthy mortal.” 

“Oh, shut it,” I laughed. “Turns out the doctor has a sense of humor after all. He was on that whole vampire junk, too. Told him about you while he was at it.” 

“Really? What’d he say?” 

“He said you were smart,” I answered, “and I said you were a buffoon who watches too many horror movies.” 

“I like him,” Seb said. “What’s his name?”

“Uhh…” I contemplated which of Jasper’s last names to use. “Jasper Kody.” 

“Sweet. I’ll be sure to get an appointment with him next time I need one,” he said. “Hopefully he doesn’t have a stake through his heart by that point.” 

I rolled my eyes. We proceeded to talk about whatever was on our minds for about the next ten minutes while I waited for Jasper to get back. 

“This dude’s taking forever,” I groaned, interrupting our mini-debate/scenario on whether or not we would survive a slasher movie. “He better have my results back--and I swear if you mention anything about how he’s secretly a vampire, I will personally bash that big head of yours in and drive home myself.”

“You can’t even drive, ya killjoy,” Seb taunted. “But you know me so well. I’m almost flattered. Emphasis on ‘almost.’”

I checked the battery on my phone. Only 5%?! I swear I remember charging this thing, I thought.

“Shoot, I gotta hang up,” I said. “Remember to actually pick me up this time?”

“Fine, if I must,” Seb laughed. “We don’t want a repeat of the mall incident; Akira might actually murder me if I leave you again. See ya.” 

As if on cue, Jasper finally came back. The blood-filled syringe was swapped out for a red ball in plastic wrapping that he held in his hand.

“Now, I know this seems childish,” he admitted bashfully, “but believe me, I do this to all my patients. Besides, it’s good to keep your energy up after a blood drawing.”

It was a piece of candy. A small, translucent red, probably strawberry or cherry flavored ball of hard candy. It almost looked like a cat’s eye marble. 

“O-oh, thanks…!” I said. “…but I really don’t do sweets.”

Jasper raised an eyebrow, a bit of a disapproving look on his face. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that...I thought, silently cursing myself for being so rude. He didn’t have to give me the candy...so I might as well take it, right? 

“B-but I can give it to my friend Seb!” I said suddenly. “Y’know, conspiracy blog guy? Yeah, he’s got a crazy sweet tooth. One time I gave him most of my Halloween candy when we went trick-or-treating...and he downed the entire thing in, like, half a day.”

The smile returned to Jasper’s face as I took the candy. 

“Nice,” he said. “Have a good day!” 

“You too!” I said, still slightly embarrassed that I hurt the young doctor’s feelings.

After quickly walking back upstairs, I looked around for a nearby seat while I waited for Seb. The only one nearby was taken by a kid in a dark green jacket with messy brown hair. I decided to stand. The kid, who looked rather nervous, looked at me almost pleadingly.

“You alright?” I asked the kid. He nodded. He only looked a few years younger than me. 

“You got Jasper, right?” he asked me. I nodded. 

“Why’d you ask?” I said. 

“That’s my brother. I’m Oliver, but you can call me Oli.” 

“Ah. Nice to meet you. I’m—“

“Dakota? Yeah. I overheard that whole conversation while he was stealing your blood.”

I sighed. If I hear anything related to vampires one more time—

“Your brother got you on this whole vampire mess, too?” I said. “Geez, what is it with everyone and vampires, today? First my friend, now my doctor, now his kid brother…” 

“He likes to chase me around the house with syringes he brings home,” Oli admitted bitterly. 

“Oof…that’s gotta be scarring.” I leaned against the wall next to the seat Oli was in. “Did he ever…?”

“Stick me with one? No,” Oli answered, then quickly added. “Only because I knocked it away from him in time.” 

I froze. Now, I used to lie to my mom all the time whenever my sister and I were play-fighting, insisting that she always hurt me more than she was supposed to. So, Oli could easily be getting revenge on Jasper “stereotypical annoying older brother” Kermit by making me believe he was much more cruel than he seemed.

Or he wasn’t. 

“Oh…” was all I managed to say before I got a text from Seb.

“I’m outside.”

“Shoot, I gotta go,” I told Oliver. “See ya around!” I walked off, quickening my pace so as not to deal with more of this vampire nonsense from anyone else.

“No you won���t,” the boy said bluntly. I stopped in my tracks and turned around.

“If you know what’s good for you,” Oliver said, looking me dead in the eyes, “you won’t come back here again.”

[pbpress]

Blood Candy: Chapter 2

By Ruqayyah Pickel

This is the second chapter of a longer piece of writing.  Chapters will be posted here as they are finished.  Stay tuned for the continuation of the story.

I walked down the ancient-looking stairwell to the basement. What appeared to be dark, dried red paint smeared the walls, as if someone had made some semblance of an attempt to renovate the old stairwell but somehow fainted or otherwise was forced to cut their work short. Then again, with the odd scent that filled the air, I would faint, too.

Finally, I got downstairs to the much cleaner looking, obviously renovated bottom floors. I walked down the hallway, observing the white painted walls lined with all kinds of fliers encouraging habits for better health. Some blotches of red paint stained some parts of the walls and floor, I noticed. Finally, I arrived at room 0134, where I was supposed to meet Dr. Kermit. I sat down, waiting, wondering why a doctor didn’t guide me there themselves. 

The room was small and rather messy. Files were stuffed in overflowing drawers and shelves, pretty easy for the taking. The floor was lined with long scuff marks leading to the door, and there were very little pieces of doctors’ equipment in sight, save for a blood pressure monitor, a vital signs monitor (what?), and a syringe kit.

Must’ve forgot to move that vital signs monitor someplace, I thought. 

“Sorry I’m late,” a male voice suddenly spoke. I jumped slightly as I looked up, startled from the abrupt entrance. 

A young man who appeared to be only a few years older than me was suddenly in the doorway. He had black hair that covered one of his maroon-colored eyes. Aside from the distinctly maroon eyes, not many other features stood out to me. He wore the standard white coat and a black shirt and jeans. 

“Oh! Hey,” I said. “You must be Jasper Kermit.”

“The one and only.” The young doctor smiled. “And no, before you ask, I cannot do a Kermit impression.”

“I’m guessing a lot of people ask you that?” 

An exasperated look crossed Jasper’s face as he sighed.

“It’s a family curse,” he said. “Literally can’t go a day without someone making a Kermit joke. That’s why I say my last name is Kody. Was gonna do that here, too, but my little troll of a brother ratted me out.” 

I chuckled. 

“That’s rough, buddy,” I said. 

“Yep,” Jasper sighed. “So, what grade you in…Dakota, was it? You don’t look that much younger than me.”

“Yep,” I said. “Nearly wrapping up junior year,” I said. 

“Sweet. That was my toughest year…how’s it going?”

“Got an essay due in 2 days, but my parents practically begged me to get my blood drawn first. They want to know if I’m still allergic to eggs so my aunt Natalie won’t have to waste her time preparing her famous end-of-junior-year cake.”

“You’re telling me junior year is so rough that you guys need a full blown party to commemorate the end to this hellish year?” Jasper laughed. “Dang. If only I were that lucky.”

“Sorta. Normally it’s at the end of every year, but they stopped that tradition when they realized I was mildly allergic to eggs.”

“Wish my parents threw me a party with cake when I graduated from medical school,” he said. “But nope! They were so eager to kick me out of the house. What school do you go to?” 

“North Clueham High.”  

Jasper paused, and nodded. 

“I see.” He seemed shocked by my answer, but I figured it was nothing.

I smiled.

“Glad I got a doctor that actually treats me like a human being instead of a child or a freakin’ lab rat,” I said. 

“‘Bout time, huh?” Jasper said, grabbing an empty syringe from the cabinet. “I try not to patronize too much. Believe me, I know that feeling all too well. Besides,” he continued, looking back at me with a slightly unnerving look, “I gotta make sure my patients are all nice and cozy before I suck the blood right out of ‘em.” 

I gave a nervous laugh. Maybe Seb was onto something, I thought amusingly to myself.

“Funny you mention that,” I said. “My friend Sebastian runs a conspiracy blog with my friend Akira. It’s called AkiSeb, and right now he’s all over this theory that people who do bloodwork and blood drives are secretly vampires who use humans to gain enough blood to fuel their evil agenda.” 

“Your friends seem smart.” Jasper grinned. 

“More like crazy,” I retorted. “Too many horror movies.” 

“Probably.” 

“Well, when you and your little legion of vampire doctors and nurses finally get enough blood to awaken Dracula or whatever and you guys finally enslave the human race,” I joked, “at least spare my life and everyone else who’s given you blood. You oughta thank us for helping you out, even if unwillingly.”

Jasper laughed.

“Will do,” he said, sitting down in a chair across from me. “But humans suck, no pun intended. You oughta thank us for getting you hooligans under control. Alright, let’s get started.” 

We went through the usual procedure, with me clenching my fists so he gets a good idea of where my veins are and where best to extract blood from. Finally, he chose my arm. 

“Normally I would’ve gone for the neck,” he joked, “but you know how it goes.”

 “Can’t give it away?” I laughed. “Smart.”

Jasper grinned as the needle pierced through my skin and into my vein, leaving a sharp, stinging feeling that lingered for what felt like ages. Normally blood drawings only took a few seconds, but it felt like I had been in that chair for almost a minute. 

“Jasper,” a female voice called while I was still getting blood drawn. A nurse who looked about his age with brown, curly hair appeared in the doorway. “You better shut up with all this vampire nonsense. You’re gonna scare your little brother.” 

“Serves him right for revealing my real surname to the whole freakin’ office,” he retorted. “Shouldn’t you be babysitting the little twerp, anyhow?”

The nurse glared daggers at him and disappeared back into the doorway. 

“It’s not babysitting, by the way, he’s 15!” she called. 

“Still a baby!” Jasper yelled back before turning back to me. “That’s Harriet, my co-worker. Major buzzkill. She babysits my little brother since our parents are at work, like, all the time, and I can’t expose the little twerp to stuff like syringes. Dude might stab my eyes out for teasin’ him so much.” 

“My older sister was annoying,” I said, “so I can’t blame you. Good thing she’s married now so she can go bother her husband instead of me.” 

Finally, the blood drawing was finished. 

“There we go,” Jasper said, applying the wad of cotton and the bandages over it. “You good?” 

“Yeah…” I said, still slightly nervous. “That felt pretty long, though. How much did you take?”

“Enough. It may have felt long, but I assure you it was only a few seconds.”

“Really? I’m positive I was there for almost a minute.” I checked my watch. “Yep. Definitely a minute, give or take.”

“Strange.” Jasper secured the syringe with my blood in it. “Maybe I’m just so used to this that it feels much shorter to me.”

I stood up, but Jasper gestured for me to sit back down.

“I’m gonna go put this in the lab so I can get the results,” he said. “Can I trust you to wait here ‘till I get back?”

I nodded. 

Jasper gave me a smile as he left the room with the blood-filled syringe in hand. I went on my phone while I waited, calling Seb and telling him to get ready to pick me up.

“Oh hey! You’re alive!” Seb teased over the phone. He then said in a monotone voice, like an automated phone call, “Thank you for donating to the Clueham Charity for Vampires in Need. Your contribution to the future enslavement of the human race is very much appreciated, ya filthy mortal.” 

“Oh, shut it,” I laughed. “Turns out the doctor has a sense of humor after all. He was on that whole vampire junk, too. Told him about you while he was at it.” 

“Really? What’d he say?” 

“He said you were smart,” I answered, “and I said you were a buffoon who watches too many horror movies.” 

“I like him,” Seb said. “What’s his name?”

“Uhh…” I contemplated which of Jasper’s last names to use. “Jasper Kody.” 

“Sweet. I’ll be sure to get an appointment with him next time I need one,” he said. “Hopefully he doesn’t have a stake through his heart by that point.” 

I rolled my eyes. We proceeded to talk about whatever was on our minds for about the next ten minutes while I waited for Jasper to get back. 

“This dude’s taking forever,” I groaned, interrupting our mini-debate/scenario on whether or not we would survive a slasher movie. “He better have my results back--and I swear if you mention anything about how he’s secretly a vampire, I will personally bash that big head of yours in and drive home myself.”

“You can’t even drive, ya killjoy,” Seb taunted. “But you know me so well. I’m almost flattered. Emphasis on ‘almost.’”

I checked the battery on my phone. Only 5%?! I swear I remember charging this thing, I thought.

“Shoot, I gotta hang up,” I said. “Remember to actually pick me up this time?”

“Fine, if I must,” Seb laughed. “We don’t want a repeat of the mall incident; Akira might actually murder me if I leave you again. See ya.” 

As if on cue, Jasper finally came back. The blood-filled syringe was swapped out for a red ball in plastic wrapping that he held in his hand.

“Now, I know this seems childish,” he admitted bashfully, “but believe me, I do this to all my patients. Besides, it’s good to keep your energy up after a blood drawing.”

It was a piece of candy. A small, translucent red, probably strawberry or cherry flavored ball of hard candy. It almost looked like a cat’s eye marble. 

“O-oh, thanks…!” I said. “…but I really don’t do sweets.”

Jasper raised an eyebrow, a bit of a disapproving look on his face. Maybe I shouldn’t have done that...I thought, silently cursing myself for being so rude. He didn’t have to give me the candy...so I might as well take it, right? 

“B-but I can give it to my friend Seb!” I said suddenly. “Y’know, conspiracy blog guy? Yeah, he’s got a crazy sweet tooth. One time I gave him most of my Halloween candy when we went trick-or-treating...and he downed the entire thing in, like, half a day.”

The smile returned to Jasper’s face as I took the candy. 

“Nice,” he said. “Have a good day!” 

“You too!” I said, still slightly embarrassed that I hurt the young doctor’s feelings.

After quickly walking back upstairs, I looked around for a nearby seat while I waited for Seb. The only one nearby was taken by a kid in a dark green jacket with messy brown hair. I decided to stand. The kid, who looked rather nervous, looked at me almost pleadingly.

“You alright?” I asked the kid. He nodded. He only looked a few years younger than me. 

“You got Jasper, right?” he asked me. I nodded. 

“Why’d you ask?” I said. 

“That’s my brother. I’m Oliver, but you can call me Oli.” 

“Ah. Nice to meet you. I’m—“

“Dakota? Yeah. I overheard that whole conversation while he was stealing your blood.”

I sighed. If I hear anything related to vampires one more time—

“Your brother got you on this whole vampire mess, too?” I said. “Geez, what is it with everyone and vampires, today? First my friend, now my doctor, now his kid brother…” 

“He likes to chase me around the house with syringes he brings home,” Oli admitted bitterly. 

“Oof…that’s gotta be scarring.” I leaned against the wall next to the seat Oli was in. “Did he ever…?”

“Stick me with one? No,” Oli answered, then quickly added. “Only because I knocked it away from him in time.” 

I froze. Now, I used to lie to my mom all the time whenever my sister and I were play-fighting, insisting that she always hurt me more than she was supposed to. So, Oli could easily be getting revenge on Jasper “stereotypical annoying older brother” Kermit by making me believe he was much more cruel than he seemed.

Or he wasn’t. 

“Oh…” was all I managed to say before I got a text from Seb.

“I’m outside.”

“Shoot, I gotta go,” I told Oliver. “See ya around!” I walked off, quickening my pace so as not to deal with more of this vampire nonsense from anyone else.

“No you won’t,” the boy said bluntly. I stopped in my tracks and turned around.

“If you know what’s good for you,” Oliver said, looking me dead in the eyes, “you won’t come back here again.”

[our-smooty]

Take Me to Church Chapter 18: Redemption

Fandom: Gorillaz

Rating: Explicit

Relationships: 2doc

Tags: Car Accidents Angst Hurt/Comfort Drugs/Alcohol Implied/Referenced Suicide SuicideHealing Everything Hurts

Summary: The band is back together, but things are… weird to say the least. But when a crisis arises, can they pull it all together and be a family again?

Link to other Chapters on my Blog!

Stuart woke up groggy, disoriented, and with a pressing need for a piss. He was well versed in the art of hangover bathroom trips and he managed to get to the toilet without much problem. Wrapping things up quickly he leant over the sink to wash up, gazing idly into the mirror. The bags under his eyes looked worse than normal and he looked a little pale, even for him.

Bits and pieces of last night came back to him as he stared. He’d taken a lot of pills, and most of the night was a blurry mess. He remembered that Murdoc hadn’t come home, and Russel was out looking for him but after that, it was all a fuzzy. The easiest way to know if the problem had resolved itself was to check Murdoc’s room. The singer shuddered.

OK, he could do this. Murdoc probably wasn’t even awake, he could just crack the door open, peek inside, then go back to hiding in his room. It was only once he left his room and was standing with his hand on the doorknob to the bassist's room that he realized he was shirtless and dressed only in his sleeping pants. Oh well, Murdoc had seen him in worse.

The door creaked open quietly as 2D looked inside. Luckily the bedside lamp was on, and 2D could see the shape of the bassist sleeping tangled in the sheets. Relief swept through the singer like a wave. Murdoc was home and safe. 2D hadn’t realized how worried he actually was until he saw the other man there. The urge to walk in and crawl into bed beside the man was strong, but then he remembered their argument the day before and closed the door, walking back to his bedroom.

He’d meant what he said yesterday. Whatever was going on between them was a mistake. He knew that he’d been sending out mixed signals lately--he was confused himself--but when Murdoc had brought up their relationship he knew he had to put a stop to things. 2D wished he’d been able to do it at a better time but now that he knew the bassist was home, he figured that everything turned out alright.

But… why did he feel like he’d lost something? There was an aching in his chest that he could only attribute to his argument with Murdoc. He should be happy that Noodle was awake and talking, that she was going to be ok! But instead he was acting like a love-sick teenager who’d had his first breakup--and they hadn’t even been dating!

“Get it together, Stu,” he whispered to himself, sitting idly at his keyboard. There were papers full of notes and music all over the bench and floor, some in his writing, others in Murdoc’s. They’d been going over some of 2D’s song ideas for the past week, making notes and goofing off. He reached down and grabbed a random one, setting it on the holder and beginning to play.

It was one of the songs he’d written in his journal, currently untitled and only half formed. The only lyrics he had so far was for a chorus and he sang those quietly to the audience of his empty bedroom.

“I will always think about you. That's why I'm calling you back on my way through.

He paused to scribble a few notes for his future self on the paper before shuffling it back into a random pile. Music writing didn’t hold the same spark it did when Murdoc was around to listen.

He checked the time and realized it was well into the afternoon. Russel would be awake for sure, and 2D knew he should go apologize for his behaviour the night before. There was no good reason for him to get so high and leave Russel to sort everything out himself.

With a groan, he stood from the bench and left his room, though not before reaching into his pill stash and popping a couple painkillers. Not as many as the night before, but enough to fill him with a comfortable warmth once they kicked in. Stuart ambled down the hall to the drummer's room and knocked. Immediately he heard a “come in”.

“Hey Russ,” he said, standing sheepishly in the doorway. “I wanted t’say sorry for last night…”

Russel was seated in his reading chair, a book open on his lap. He looked up at 2D and the singer felt guilty at the large, dark circles under his friend's eyes. “Thanks, D.  I’m not gonna say it’s fine, but thanks for apologizing.”

2D took a seat on the bed. “How’d everythin’ go las’ night?” Russel shrugged.

“He came home himself eventually, completely wasted.” Russel closed the book and set it aside. “Said he’d been doin’ more than just drinkin’ so I spent most of the night checkin’ up on him.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah. He was really upset about your fight yesterday.” Overwhelming guilt crept through 2D’s system. He didn’t want to make the bassist upset, but he also didn’t know how to fix things.

“You think I should go make it up to him?” he asked. Russel was usually the level headed one of the bunch and Stu was hoping he could tell him what to do.

“To be honest D,” Russel began, “whatever’s between you and Murdoc is your business, and you gotta deal with that yourself. I don’t think I can tell you want to do.”

2D scuffed his socks against the floor. “But, say you were me. What would you do?”

Russel looked at him, raising a brow. “D I’ve punched Murdoc in the face multiple times. Do you think I’d even get to this point?”

“Good point, nevermind,” 2D answered, scratching the back of his head in embarrassment. “Sorry I’m putting all this shit on you, Russ.”

Russel shook his head. “It’s alright D, I get it.”

Changing the subject, 2D perked up. “What are you up to today then?”

“Not a lot, reading. Might go out later.” 2D’s interest peaked.

“Where had you been goin’ so often Russ, you got a sweetheart?”

Russel flushed a little, looking away. “I mostly go on walks around town to avoid hearin’ you and Murdoc screwin’ each other's brains out."

He should have seen that one coming. Russel was quiet, but he knew how to throw down with the best of them. “Fair enough, sorry again.”

“It’s fine D. Maybe try to keep it down past 10?”

2D smirked. “No promises.” He stood up. “Guess I shouldn’t put this off anymore. Thanks again.”

“Good luck D,” Russel said, waving.

The hallway had never looked for long. The space between Russel’s room and Murdoc’s couldn’t have been more than 20 feet, but to 2D it looked like a monumental hike. He really, really didn’t want to deal with Murdoc right now, and he was sure Murdoc didn’t want to deal with him. Was he really going to walk into the Satanists room, wake him up, and demand answers?

The bedroom door was right in front of him, and 2D didn’t allow himself the luxury of hesitating. The bassist was still sleeping, fully clothed. Russel’s charity must have run out after getting him to bed. The singer wasn’t really sure where to go from here; as usual, he didn’t have a plan. He knew that if he woke Murdoc up, he better have a good reason. But he really, really didn’t think this through, so instead, he tiptoed to the bed and slid into the warm comfort of the bassist's bed. It was easy to pretend that yesterday hadn’t happened when he was wrapped up in the warm blankets. Curling onto his side, facing Murdoc, Stuart could feel the other’s stale breath against his cheek. With extreme care, he lifted an arm and placed it around Murdoc’s waist. He was surprised when Murdoc didn’t wake up but instead snuggled in closer to the embrace. 2D felt his cheeks heat at the sight.

He could have this, every morning, if he wanted. He was pretty sure that Murdoc wanted that too, but the memories of how Murdoc used to treat him not that long ago were holding him back. It was almost like they were two different people, the Murdoc he knew now, who was trying to be better, and the Murdoc he used to know, who hit him and kept him on that rotten island. 2D still had nightmares tinted bubblegum pink and echoing with whale noises.

Murdoc twitched in his sleep, his arm reaching out and grabbing onto Stu’s pant leg. Sleeping like this it was hard to imagine him as he’d been on Plastic Beach. 2D wasn’t sure how much of the beach Murdoc even remembered, he’d been awfully drunk and awfully mad. Any time someone brought it up around the bassist he either laughed it off or got in a mood and walked out. 2D wasn’t sure how to talk to him about it without causing a blowout, but it was becoming increasingly clear that he’d have to, and soon.

But for the time being, Murdoc was asleep, and Stuart was warm. The important stuff could wait a little while.

Murdoc woke up warm, but incredibly uncomfortable. His jeans--why was he wearing his jeans in bed?-- were digging into his hips and he still had his shoes on for some reason. He thought back but everything after he’d found some teenager selling drugs in an ally off the high street was a complete blank. Obviously, he’d made it home, and he’d either dragged himself up to bed and passed out, or one of his bandmates had done it for him. Judging by the fact he was still fully dressed in his day clothes and boots, it’d been Russel.

As he began to toss and turn, trying to find a comfortable position, he realized he wasn’t alone in the bed. Had he brought home a bird? Maybe it was that lanky bloke he remembered talking to outside the second pub. Either way, he really didn’t want to deal with a clingy one-night-stand and he was about to tell them to get the fuck out when he spied a shock of blue hair peeking out from the comforter.

Murdoc was afraid to breathe. What the hell was 2D doing in his bed? He remembered them having a fight yesterday, or more accurately, he remembered trying to be honest with the singer for once and 2D shooting him down. He remembered feeling the world fall out from underneath him in that break room and then spending the rest of the night trying to forget that feeling. Thought things were fuzzy he didn’t think they made up last night, so what was he doing in Murdoc’s bed?

Normally, this would be a good sign. A pretty face in his bed after a night of binging was usually a good thing, especially now that he’d admitted to feeling something for the singer. But it was soured by the fact that as far as he knew 2D had rejected him completely and utterly. Did the singer still want to be friends with benefits? Murdoc wasn’t sure if he could handle that, now that he’d had a little taste of so much more. Finally able to move he peeled back the covers to reveal 2D’s sleeping face and hands curled under his chin. He looked like an angel.

So badly, Murdoc wanted to curl into the singer, wake him up and ask 2D to hold him as they both drifted back to sleep. Instead, he settled for shimmying close enough to feel the warmth from the other man, reaching out a hand to thread his fingers through the others. Was this going to be the last time he had the chance to do this, would he ever get the chance to be this close to Stuart again? A nagging, sinking feeling told him there was a good chance of that happening.

2D murmured in his sleep and Murdoc hushed him. “Shh, love. Get some rest,” he whispered, kissing his forehead ever so gently. The singer settled down with a slight smile on his face and Murdoc allowed himself to smile back, just a little. He wanted to commit every inch of this moment to memory so that when the other did wake up and leave him for good and Gorillaz was over, he’d have something to think back on.

He stayed like that for a long while, letting the singer drool all over his pillow in a fit of uncharacteristic kindness. Occasionally 2D would move around, or mumble in his sleep and each time Murdoc felt his adrenaline kick in. By the time the other man did rejoin the world of the conscious, Murdoc was an anxious mess.

“Mmm what time is it?” 2D asked sleepily, rubbing his eyes. Murdoc shrugged; he hadn’t checked the time when he woke up, too shocked to find the singer in his bed.

“Wait, what am I doin’ here?” Ah, there it was. Maybe the singer had been smashed as well, and wandered into Murdoc’s room by mistake? Wouldn’t be the first time.

“How the hell should I know, faceache?” Stuart flinched at Murdoc’s tone. He sat up and Murdoc tried not to let his eyes wander over his bare chest.

“I-I’m sorry Muds. I didn’t mean to fall asleep,” 2D stuttered, looking away. Murdoc continued to frown as he sat up as well, coming face to face with the singer. His nervous posture made Murdoc wanted to reassure him, but the pain of yesterday’s rejection was still too fresh.

“Well, get out then,” he snapped, fists clenched in the sheets. Anger, resentment, those were things he could understand, things he could use.

“B-but I…”

Murdoc bristled. “You what, Stuart? Did you wanted another go at me, another chance to tell me to fuck off?”

2D shook his head quickly. “N-no, Muds I--” but Murdoc interrupted, angry now.

“Then what do you want! Y-you know how I feel, so why are you makin’ this harder?” the bassist shouted. He was getting emotional now. “Why won’t you just go?”

2D was quiet, so Murdoc continued. “You can’t have it both ways, Stu.”

“I know,” he answered, head bowed. “I jus’ wanted to talk.”

“Then talk.”

Murdoc waited, his temper simmering under the surface. 2D didn’t look like he knew what to say, opening and closing his mouth a few times.

“I-I like you, Murdoc, you’re my best mate,” he began, “and I think we made a right mess of things, sleepin’ together.”

“You think?” Murdoc interrupted again and 2D frowned.

“B-but I also think that maybe you’re right,” the singer looked up, “there’s something between us. It's been there from the beginin’ and we’ve been ignorin’ it.”

Murdoc stayed silent, waiting for the other to continue. “It’s so fucked up though, because y-you used to hit me, and y-you kept me on that fuckin’ island. You hurt me, Murdoc, so many times.”

Murdoc’s chest ached. He had hurt the singer, he knew that, just like he knew he didn’t deserve the other man’s attention. “I know, Stu. A-and I’m sorry.”

“I know you’re tryin’ to be better, but it’s a little messed up, me lovin’ someone who hurt me so bad.” Murdoc’s eyes widened as 2D blushed at his slip-up.

“D I--” 2D held up his hand, telling Murdoc he wasn’t finished.

“I-I don’t know what to do, Murdoc. Last night I was so worried about you, but I was so angry too. Sometimes I don’t know if I love you, or hate you.” Tears were forming in the corners of the younger man’s eyes. Murdoc took the risk and reach out, weaving his fingers between the singers. He had to do something right now to fix this. If he didn't, he'd regret it for the rest of his life.

“I’ve been thinkin’,” Murdoc began quietly, “y-you said somethin’ about findin’ a doctor to talk to, one of those psych tossers.” He looked up at the singer, catching his eye. He wanted to let 2D know he was serious. “I’ll go with you, o-or on my own. If you want.”

“You will?” Stu asked, surprised. Murdoc nodded.

“You know I’m not good at talkin’ about things,” the bassist paused, “but I think… I think there’s something good between us. And, there’s something in me that’s all twisted up and bad but I-I’d be willing to try, if you are.”

2D looked thoughtful, his brow furrowed and the tip of his tongue peeking out between his teeth. It was criminally cute and made Murdoc want to scoot closer, but he wasn’t sure if that would be appreciated. Instead, he tightened his grip on the singer's hand and waited.

“Muds…” the singer sighed, staring down at their hands. “Do you really mean that?”

Murdoc nodded, bringing their hands up to his chest, practically hugging them. “D, I promise. I don’t want to fuck up again. I-I can’t lose you or the band.”

2D continued to stare at their hands. Murdoc hoped he believed him, though a small part of him still insisted he didn’t deserve it. But he was so close. So close to breaking through all the self-hatred and shit and starting to heal.

Finally, 2D looked up. The tears from before had dried, and he had an almost comical stoic expression on his face. “OK.”

“OK?” He’d been hoping, but he hadn’t expected the singer to actually agree.

“Yeah, OK. If you’re serious--”

“I am!” Murdoc interrupted, desperate to make thing singer understand that this time, against all the odds, he was telling the truth.

2D smiled a little, but quickly sobered. “But it can’t be like it was before. You can’t beat on me, or call me nasty things.” Murdoc shook his head. He didn’t want to hurt 2D ever again and he knew, looking at the other man in that moment, that if he did it’d be the end of everything.

“I’m goin’ to be better this time D.” He didn’t know how exactly, but he was going to try. 2D nodded and looked again to their joined hands. He was leaning in a little, the stoop of his shoulders making him look older and more tired than he should have. Murdoc leaned in as well, angling himself so their hands and his chest was pressed right up against the other’s side as close as possible. Even though 2D had said OK, he wasn’t sure if it was alright to move forward. Luckily, Stu took charge and closed the gap, tipping the bassists head back and kissing him. To Murdoc, it felt like a new start, a chance at redemption that he couldn’t afford to waste.

[thewalkingdeadimaginings]

This Is Forever

HI umm I was wondering if you could do a one shot where the reader has been a part of Alexandria for a while and she and Daryl have started to fall for eachother without the other one knowing and she goes to The sanctuary and offers herself in return for daryls safe return to Alexandria? And then negan calls Daryl into his room and makes a scene causd he's jealous about how the reader is in love with Daryl and Daryl finds out that way and somehow Daryl and the reader end up "getting cozy ;)" HI I just sent a request for a Daryl X reader one shot where the reader gives herself to negan in exchange for daryls safe return to Alexandria, sorry it's me again lol! I forgot to ask if you could also make it like negan brings the reader to Alexandria in horrible condition all tied up and Daryl sees it and it drives him crazy before they some how end up "getting cozy ;)" lol I'm so sorry this is so much to ask! I love your writing by the way!!<33

Somehow, I’m kinda sorta catching up but also not really because I have a million more requests left to write I am such trash omg how did I earn 1,000 followers? Hahaha I didn’t have a chance to write at all last weekend. I was at a charity event my dad runs every year. All the proceeds go to an amazing local charity for autism. From merchandise and raffle tickets alone, we made 5,000 dollars. That’s not counting things like ticket sales and getting in the door. That hasn’t been counted yet. If you wanna hear more about it, let me know because this charity is close to my heart because my brother is autistic. If you wanna know more about it, I’m gonna post it on another blog on wordpress so let me know!! Also, just a reminder that I do have a Wattpad account. My username is PerfectInsanity17 but I haven’t posted in a while for one because I’ve been working on this and secondly, not a lot of people were reading my work so I paused for a bit. But I’ve got three stories to read on there. If you’d like me to keep going on those stories, let me know!

How did you end up here?

A few days ago, things were wonderful. Things couldn’t get any better. Maggie and Glenn would be having a baby, Alexandria was thriving, you were rebuilding the wall. The only complaint you had was that your friendship with Daryl had become more and more complicated. The more time you spent with him, the stronger your feelings got. But he constantly kept you at arm’s length and there was no possible way to get more than friendship from him. But if that was your only complaint, then you really had nothing to worry about.

How could so much go wrong in just a few days?

In just a few days, Alexandria’s only doctor was killed, Daryl ran off to get vengeance on her killer, Glenn, Michonne, and Rosita went after him, something went wrong with Maggie’s baby, and mere hours later, Glenn and Abraham would be dead, murdered mercilessly right in front of you and the entire group. And you would watch Daryl, bloody, pale, and weak being dragged away as a prisoner. All because of one man. All because of Negan.

You’d caught Negan’s attention briefly but it was nothing more than a smile and a nod from him. You wanted to cry out in protest when he had Daryl thrown into a van and driven away but Rick told you not to. The crushed skulls of your friends didn’t hurt in convincing you to stay quiet either.

How did you get here?

It was only a few days later when Carl got the crazy idea in his head to sneak into a savior’s truck and head for the sanctuary. You weren’t sure which was crazier, Carl’s plan to kill Negan, or your plan to switch places with Daryl. How much good would switching with Daryl do? Probably wouldn’t help all that much. But Daryl would be home where he belonged. You had no idea what they were doing to him and that made your heart ache even more. He was already an abused man with a bruised soul. He might not recover from even more damage. If you could get him away from all this, then you would. You’d walk through fire for that man.

The things one does for love.

Seeing Carl with such bloodthirst was unsettling. He managed to take out two of Negan’s men before someone stopped him. And through it all, Negan was nothing but amused by the situation.

“And you,” Negan said when you emerged. He pointed at you with his bat, its barbed wire fresh and clean, as if it didn’t have flesh hanging off it and blood dripping from it like a leaky faucet just a few days ago. The memory of Abraham and Glenn’s flesh dangling from the barbed wire made you nauseous.

“What’re you doin’ here?” Negan asked.

“I wanna make a deal with you,” you stated. Laughter erupted from the men surrounding the truck but Negan was quiet. Once the laughter died down, he let out a chuckle and rested the bat on his shoulder.

“Shit, could’ve just driven here yourself,” he said, “Don’t gotta be a stowaway. Come on in, let’s talk about this deal.”

You’d caught a glimpse of Daryl before Negan took you and Carl outside. He was rounding up walkers for some reason you couldn’t quite understand. He was filthy, his thin hair soaked in sweat, his face marked with cuts and bruises that made your blood boil with rage. At least he’d recovered from being shot. He was alive, that was the most important thing. That’s how you had to rationalize it to keep from losing your mind. Otherwise, you weren’t sure what you would’ve done.

“So, what’s your name?” Negan asked once the two of you were alone, “Didn’t have a chance to ask when we met.”

“Between murdering two people and kidnapping another, how could you have found the time?” you shot back, “Name’s Y/N.”

“Shit!” Negan exclaimed, slamming his hands down on his legs, “You’re just full of piss and vinegar, aren’t ya?”

“Look, I came here to make a deal with you, Negan,” you said, “You gonna hear me out or not?”

“By all means,” Negan said, “Don’t be shy, Y/N. I’m shakin’ in my boots.”

“I was hoping you’d let Daryl go.”

“Not a chance.”

“Let me finish,” you snapped, “Let him go and take me in his place.”

“You gotta forgive me, Y/N,” Negan chuckled, “I’m kinda confused. Why would you give a damn if you were here instead of him?”

“Because he doesn’t deserve whatever you’ve put him through.”

“Funny you should say that,” Negan said, “Because Daryl seems to think differently.”

“That doesn’t surprise me,” you said, “But that doesn’t change the fact that he doesn’t deserve this.”

“And again I say, why do you care?” Negan inquired.

“Because I love him,” you blurted out, “And I need him to be safe.”

Negan’s smile fell and he leaned back in his chair. He was no longer amused by the situation. You couldn’t imagine Negan being jealous considering this was the only time you’d ever spoken. Then again, he was quick to murder two people he’d never met before. So, maybe he was quick to…lust.

“You stay right there,” Negan said, hopping up onto his feet. The sly grin was back on his face as he headed for the door, “I will be right back. Just give me two minutes.”

You leaned back in your chair, allowing yourself to get just a little comfortable as Negan left the room. It probably wasn’t the greatest idea to get the slightest bit comfortable. If Dwight or any of Negan’s other meathead henchman came in, you’d be screwed. Negan could easily trap you in this comfort you’d sunk into.

After a few minutes, Negan returned with Dwight following close behind, dragging Daryl by the collar of his sweatshirt. You gasped but Negan held out his hand before you could get up.

“Don’t move,” Negan said, turning his attention to Daryl, “Well, Y/N made an interesting offer. Would ya like to hear it?”

“What did you do to her?” Daryl snapped.

“Nothin’ at all,” Negan retorted, “Now pay attention. Y/N seems to think you don’t deserve any of this. And she wants to make a trade. I let you go and take her instead.”

“Why would you tell him this?” you snapped.

“And do you wanna know why?” Negan continued.

“Negan!” you exclaimed, “Don’t!”

He threw his head back, erupting in laughter, “Because she loves you! Now ain’t that just fantastic, Daryl? The things people do for love am I right?”

Daryl stood there staring at you, stunned by the revelation. He fought to keep a straight face. He didn’t want Negan to read him and figure everything out. If he was alone with you, he would’ve…well, he wasn’t entirely sure what he would’ve done. From the time you’d met, he was certain that you’d never seen him as anything more than a friend. And wasn’t this the worst time to find out he was wrong? When he couldn’t say a word in response to you.

“I gotta say, Y/N, you’ve made an interesting offer,” Negan continued, “You can stay if you want to but there ain’t a chance in hell of me letting him go free.”

“No!” Daryl blurted out, earning a rough yank from Dwight, “Just let her go.”

Negan sat back down across from you, nodding to the door, “Dwight, I think Daryl needs a time out. Put him in his cage.”

“Y/N, don’t do this,” Daryl continued as Dwight dragged him out of the room, “Get out of here!”

Dwight slammed the door behind them and it was just you and Negan alone, trapped in the uncomfortable silence. You folded your hands together on your lap, shaking your head, “I’m not staying unless you let Daryl go. Otherwise, I’m leaving with Carl.”

“We’ll talk about this later,” Negan said, “You just hang out here for a while. I’ve got some things to tend to.”

You didn’t move from your spot for hours. Negan had left to take Carl him and you considered sneaking away after a while but you wouldn’t leave without Daryl. And you had no idea where he was and you couldn’t exactly search for him without being caught. You really had no way of escaping so you just continued to wait.

After several hours, Negan burst into the room, fuming and swinging his bat around. He was enraged, pointing his bat at you, “What the fuck did you do?”

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t fucking pretend you don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about.”

“I haven’t moved from this spot!” you shouted, “I’m clueless!”

“Well, looks like you got your deal after all,” Negan said, “Daryl’s gone, and you’re mine now.”

Another few days passed and Daryl had gone from hilltop to the kingdom but ultimately ended up back in Alexandria with the others, prepared to fight Negan with everything they had. Dwight offered his assistance but knew nothing about you or your condition. He hadn’t seen you since the day you arrived, which sent chills down Daryl’s spine. It must’ve meant that Negan had dealt with you personally. Had he killed you? Or…worse? Things he didn’t want to think about.

“We’re gonna win,” Rick declared.

“What about Y/N?” Daryl asked.

“Once we finish this, we’ll be able to go over there and get her,” Rick explained, “I’m sure Y/N is fine, Daryl. Negan won’t kill her. She could be a potential bargaining tool for him. Don’t you think?”

Daryl grunted, “Sure. Better make the fucker pay for the shit he’s done.”

“Believe me, we will,” Rick said, “No doubt about that. Let’s just get ready. Try not to worry, Daryl. Y/N can take care of herself. She was bold enough to leave and try to get you out of there, she’ll be just fine.”

Just as Daryl had been afraid of, Negan had been the one to handle you personally. Negan was convinced you had something to do with Daryl’s escape and it was incredibly bad timing but you had no idea Daryl had even gotten out. Negan of course didn’t believe you for a second and his solution to this problem was to simply have you beaten until you admitted to it. But you knew that if you did, he’d most likely have you killed. On the other hand, you were so delirious that you weren’t sure which would be worse, death or being beaten.

You were just barely conscious when Negan threw you into a coffin. After a few minutes, you heard some familiar voices that made you perk up and felt the coffin being lifted but there wasn’t much you could do as you could barely move and were too weak to push open the coffin.

“I’ve got somethin’ you might be interested in,” Negan said. The coffin creaked and groaned as he pulled it open. You turned away from the blinding afternoon sunlight but were quickly dragged out by your upper arm, feeling Negan’s leather jacket against your skin.

“Y/N!” Daryl exclaimed from behind the gate. Rick stood at the very top of the gate, staring at you in shock. He knew that Negan wouldn’t have killed you but he still wasn’t expecting you to be so bruised and bloody.

“She made the deal,” Negan continued, “She stayed, he left. But I’m gonna take Daryl back now. If you all cooperate, Y/N will live. But, it’s a limited time offer so I’d make this decision quick.”

After that statement, everything became a blur. Bullets were flying, everyone was running around in a panic, ducking down and hiding. You could’ve sworn you heard Daryl shouting so you followed the sound of his voice despite how disoriented you felt. Negan was too distracted to notice your absence or try to prevent you from running off. You were avoiding all the gunfire better than you expected since you weren’t even trying. All you knew was you had to find Daryl. It felt like years since you’d seen him. And the last time you had seen him wasn’t exactly pleasant for either of you.

After being unable to find any familiar face, you realized it was pointless to be in the middle of all this gunfire when you could barely focus. You sat under a tree off in the corner where the gunshots were faint and you were free to take a deep breath. Your bones ached, your head throbbed, the blood and sweat that had accumulated on your body over the last few days left a layer of grime you couldn’t stand. Your eyes were so swollen, it was easier to just lay your head back and close your eyes.

The chaos ceased for a moment but you weren’t allowing yourself to feel relieved yet. Sure, Rick and the rest of the group could’ve won but they also could’ve lost and it would become a slaughter soon. Soon, people were shouting and firing their guns again and this time, roaring followed. Roaring? Why would you be hearing roaring? Who would have an animal like that?

You kept your eyes shut the entire time. If you didn’t see it, it couldn’t be happening, right? You thought of the simpler times when you and Daryl went on runs together, when you’d be spending days at a time alone together. He was always so quiet but his blue eyes spoke louder than his mouth ever could. He always hugged his legs to his chest, like he was shielding himself, very rarely ever made eye contact. And when he did, he seemed so unsure and would only peek at you from behind his wispy hairs hanging over his face. You’d wake up early in the morning while he was still sleeping and you’d push those hairs away from his face just to sneak a peek at his peaceful expression, his chest moving steadily up and down. You never wanted those runs to end. You had been convinced every time that you would tell him how you truly felt about him but in the end, you could never go through with it. And now, it could easily be too late. Daryl could be dead or dying. With all that gunfire, the possibility of him being alive was slim.

The second round of insanity ended much faster and then silence followed for several hours. You refused to move from your spot though, still so tired and so sore. This was the first time you’d been able to relax in days without fear of getting hurt again.

Footsteps approached you but you still didn’t move or open your eyes. The person’s clothes rustled and you heard them set something down in the grass beside them. It was when the person spoke that you finally opened your eyes and a pair of blue ones were staring back at you.

“Y/N,” Daryl said, “I’ve been lookin’ everywhere for you. Thought you were dead.”

“I thought you were,” you whimpered. Despite how injured you were, you threw your arms around him, nearly tackling him, “I’m so glad you made it out okay. Who got you out?”

“Not sure,” he replied, “What did that asshole do to you?”

“He was convinced that I was the one to get you out,” you explained, “The timing was pretty coincidental I’ll admit but he wouldn’t listen to me. I don’t wanna talk about that now. I’m just glad it’s over. Is Negan dead?”

Daryl shook his head, “Everyone from hilltop and the kingdom came at the last second and chased Negan and his guys outta here. But they’ll be back. Come on, let’s get you looked at. Can ya stand?”

“I think so,” you grunted as you got up on your feet. Being in one position for the last few hours made your muscles scream out in agony when you finally straightened out. Daryl grabbed your hand as the two of you walked to the infirmary. With all the commotion, you didn’t feel it was the right time to bring up what Negan had said a few days ago. Daryl would just get uncomfortable and shut down like he always did when someone brought up heavy conversation. Expressing emotion was not on Daryl’s list of skills. Especially now with his mind on other things, talking about that just wasn’t as important.

You gave it about a week. Your injuries had mostly healed by then. But other than that, you and Daryl were back with your group and things felt almost normal again. But you still felt uneasy around him. And he seemed more quick tempered than usual, getting frustrated with you easier than before.

Daryl had taken you back to the infirmary after you’d reopened a wound while you were trying to regain your strength and practicing your shooting. He sighed a few times as he was cleaning up the wound on your arm.

“What’re you thinking, Y/N?” he grumbled.

“Can’t just sit around forever,” you replied, “I have to get back to how I was.”

“If you hadn’t gone there in the first place,” Daryl muttered, “You should’ve stayed here where it was safe.”

“I had to go,” you argued, “You weren’t safe.”

“I don’t care about me,” Daryl shot back, “You shouldn’t worry about me so much, Y/N.”

“Didn’t you hear what Negan said?” you snapped, “What he told you? I care so much about you, I love you so much. I couldn’t stand the thought of you being hurt or ending up dead.”

“Well, how do you think I felt?!” Daryl shouted, tossing the bloody rag into the trashcan, “I hated every minute of you being there. I knew what Negan was doing and there was nothing I could do.”

You were startled by his outburst. He so rarely offered much in response but he was off now, “I don’t wanna lose you, Y/N. Not again. Can’t go without you again.”

“I didn’t know you felt that way,” you said.

“Yeah, well, didn’t wanna give Negan any more leverage than he already had,” Daryl said, “I didn’t actually believe him when he said it. It’s true though, what he said. Isn’t it?”

You kicked your feet, grinning as you grabbed his hands and pulled him closer to you so he stood between your legs, “It’s very true, Daryl. I love you so much. There was just…never a good time to say it.”

Daryl nodded, his own way of saying he loved you too. You were content with his not actually saying it because you knew he felt it. You felt it in his touch when he ran his fingertips up your arms. You felt it in the kiss he placed on your lips, careful and hesitant in all of these gestures but they spoke to you.

You wrapped your arms around Daryl’s torso, your hands slipping underneath his shirt and roaming his back. He tensed a little at your touch but soon he was rolling with it, kissing along your jaw and down your neck, his teeth grazing your shoulder. You inhaled deeply, taking in his scent as his trembling fingers tugged on your shirt. Pulling away briefly, you threw your shirt over your head and tossed it to the floor, quickly bringing Daryl back in. He groaned against your skin, running his nails down your back. You unbuttoned his shirt, pushing it off his shoulders.

“You really wanna do this?” you mumbled, wrapping your legs around his hips.

Daryl nodded and ran for the door to lock it as quickly as he could to make it back to you. You laid back in bed as he climbed over you, burying his face in your neck. You wrapped your legs around his hips once more and he responded with an experimental thrust of his hips, grinding against you. A squeak escaped your lips as you gripped him tighter in your arms.

“Shit, Y/N,” he grunted, “Never wanted anything so bad.”

A fire was burning deep within you and he’d barely touched you. Neither of you could bear it anymore, you couldn’t hold back any longer. You lifted your hips so Daryl could pull your pants down with ease. You sat up a bit and smashed your lips against his while you tugged his pants down past his hips. You felt his fingers slip underneath the waistband of your underwear, his thick fingers cold against your warm flesh. As his fingers reached your core, you bit his lip in surprise. You retaliated by allowing your hands to explore, sliding into his boxers and gripping him firmly in your hand.

“Daryl,” you whispered, slowly stroking him. Daryl groaned, whipping your body around and pulling your underwear down your legs. You gripped the headboard, your heart racing as you panted and whined. You wiggled your hips impatiently, looking back at him over your shoulder, “What’re you waiting for?”

“Stay still,” Daryl said, slapping his hands down on your hips. You jumped but smiled at the fiery feeling growing in the pit of your stomach. Biting your lip, you lowered your head. Without warning, he plunged into you and you both groaned in unison as he stayed there for a moment, allowing the two of you to adjust to the senstation.

“Goddamn, Daryl,” you said. Daryl slowly started moving his hips back and forth, his hands moving up and down your back. He held back any noises, only allowing a few grunts. You couldn’t hold back your pleasure as you moaned and whimpered, curling your toes and bunching the sheets up in your fists. The ache grew stronger with every thrust and you knew this wouldn’t last long for either of you. But this closeness would be worth it no matter how long it was.

Suddenly, Daryl lifted you up so the two of you were on your knees, your back against his chest as he thrust harder against you, beads of sweat running down the side of his head and dripping off his jaw, landing on your shoulder. With one hand on your hip, he moved his free hand down your stomach until he reached your sweet spot, his fingers moving in quick, deep circles. You writhed and rolled your hips against his fingers, flashes of white in your vision as you finally came. Your legs were weak and once Daryl let go of you, you fell forward, his continued thrusting sending you into aftershocks and your walls squeezed him so tightly, he couldn’t hold back anymore. He leaned his head back as he released inside of you.

“I can’t…we just…fuck,” Daryl said, more out of breath than you’d ever seen before, “You alright?”

“More than alright,” you replied, rolling onto your back. He flopped down beside you, “That was amazing. I can’t believe we did that though. Ever think we’d end up here?”

“Nah, but then again, you’ve always been unpredictable,” Daryl replied, kissing your sweaty temple. He never thought he’d ever have the courage to tell you how he felt about you. This had been the last thing he ever expected to happen but he wouldn’t change it for anything. He never wanted to let you go. This was forever.

OKAY THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR PATIENCE I KNOW I’M ABSOLUTE TRASH I APOLOGIZE FOR TAKING SO GODDAMN LONG. Writing smut is just harder to get done for some reason.

[camsthisky]

Hi! Bat Fam fic rec? Love your blog! Have a pleasant day!

Of course! I did just make another fic rec post, which you can find here, but all of the ones listed here are specifically Batfam. I didn’t include any that I’ve already recommended in my other post, but I thought this would be a good idea to include the ones that didn’t make the cut last time (mostly because I was dead tired and posting at two in the morning).

You can also look at my fic recs tag!

Again, just a fair warning, a lot of these are going to be Dick Grayson centric.

Keep Losing Sleep by incogneat_ohWords: 2,893Summary: “When’d you last sleep?” Jay asks, curious.“Eleven years ago,” Tim says, at the same time as Dick says, “Tuesday.”My Comments: The batboys trying to help Tim with his insomnia? Heck yes.

Come One, Come All by incogneat_ohWords: 2,047Summary: He sits on the end of the bed, watching the slow expansion of Dick’s chest, frowning slightly. Tapping his fingers on the knees of his jeans absently.Or, the fic where Dick is injured and the family are sticking close by.My Comments: I’m a sucker for Dick getting hurt and his family doing their best to take care of him. This is one of THE best I’ve read. I seriously read it all of the time.

Kill your darlings by ShariArunaWords: 2,476Summary: Fic Prompt!: Brainwashed evil Dick with Batbros to the rescue!My Comments: Man, this fic hits hard. The boys have to fight their brother after he’s dosed with fear toxin and I just feel for them so much.

Manus by ShariArunaWords: 2,002Summary: He knows his family, he knows which people are important to them. And Dick’s been at war with Bruce for the first place in every Robins’ heart for a long time now. Winning, for the most part.My Comments: Okay, so the thing I love about this fic is that it shows that Jason cares for his family without ever really stating the fact. Dick’s injured and Jason feels like it’s all his fault. My heart breaks just reading this fic! Also, check out @unavenged-robin​ for more because they’re amazing!

The Name Game by RascalJoy (DarkQuill)Words: 1,610Summary: Duke Thomas doesn’t have a hero name yet. The Robins (read as: Jason) decide to fix that.(“If you say ‘Robin,’ I will cut you,” Damian growled.“He will,” Tim agreed. “He’s crazy.”)My Comments: This is kind of crack-ish, but I think it’s pretty funny, and it’s such an accurate representation of how done Duke is with the batkids.

Mistlefoe by strikeyourcolorsWords: 10,158Summary: With forced house arrest, a poisoning, a charity holiday lights display, last minute shopping, accidental lipstick drugging, and mistletoe based violence, chaos reigns supreme in the days leading up to Christmas. But the Batfamily? They thrive in chaos. In other words, pointless holiday humor and fluff with some feelings mixed in.My Comments: Okay, so I can hear you asking, “Why are you recommending a Christmas fic?” and my answer is because this fic messed me up. Badly. I thought I was in for a funny, light-hearted fic, but it gets kind of angsty towards the end (like a good kind of angsty that hits you right in the feels).

April 27th by mitch23kWords: 2,694Summary: Just five days before the fifth anniversary of Jason Todd’s death, Dick Grayson gives a risky answer to an interviewer question about his brother. Jason thinks it’s funny, and suddenly, the family finds themselves in a competition to see who can be more dramatic about their brother on TV.My Comments: I love reading how Jason slowly comes to realize that he’s a part of the family and this fic does it really well! It’s a good read!

The League of Extraordinary Bowling Bats by chibi_nightowlWords: 5,065Summary: “What did Dickiebird do? Steal all your other shirts?”The shirt is bright green with wide yellow stripes pretending to be a pin stripe running vertically across it. On the back, in bright red letters, “Timmy” is spelled out.“You’re next,” he spits out, shooting Jason the worst glare he could muster. “He’s got one for you too.”My Comments: A fluffy fic of the family doing ridiculous things like renting out an entire bowling alley. Amazing.

Bruce texts instead of talking, and Dick learns to deal with his home situation by narfiffiftic (maladictive)Words: 1,100Summary: Dr. Hurt shot Dick, and now he has to deal with the aftermath: Make sure you check the stitches before you go to sleep, I saw you for ten minutes today, you realize what nearly happened? Just do as I say, B, they’re on the back of my head, you come check on them. Use a mirror, Dick. Be careful,My Comments: Set between Batman and Robin #16 and #17, where DIck has brain surgery. It really makes you think of how Bruce really hasn’t changed a bit. I feel for poor Dick here, but he’s always got his brothers!

Meet the Family by autumnangelwritesWords: 1,610Summary:It was rare that Bruce got called to handle ‘dad issues’ and, well, Clark honestly couldn’t resist.My Comments: Bruce is so done with the Justice League in this and it’s pretty funny. It is angsty, though, and it makes you think that maybe Bruce actually does know how to parent.

Talon’s Grasp by lowflyingfruitWords: 78,187 (23/23)Summary: Dick Grayson was kidnapped by the Court of Owls. Talon escaped. With no known way to undo what has been done, and the Court trying to reclaim their assassin, is there still a place for Nightwing in Gotham? Is there still a place for Dick in the family?My Comments: I don’t usually read Talon!AUs, but this is a really cool fic and I got sucked into it. It shows how the whole family would react to Dick getting captured and they try to scramble to turn him back, and it’s honestly really good.

So those are all on ao3, but here are a few on ff.net:

Altruism by paganpunk2Words: 4,800 (2/2)Summary: Dick’s day volunteering at a BPD fundraising car wash takes a turn for the delightful when Alfred stops by. T for language.My Comments: A fluffy one-shot where Alfred just wants to support Dick, even if Bruce won’t. This is one of my favs, but of course, all of paganpunk’s stuff (especially the Spark in the Dark series) is absolutely amazing!

Bumper Stickers by FinalArcWords: 3,080Summary: Bruce is back from the “dead”, and not especially tolerant of some of the changes made in his absence. Dick couldn’t care less.My Comments: Someone on ff.net was asking me for a prompt and they rec’ed this to me. And honestly? It’s really good. Bruce has to come to terms that life basically moved on without him, and it’s kind of hard to swallow for him. A really good read.

A Robin’s Gotta Eat by RomanianDollarWords: 3,631Summary:When Jason gets injured in a gang fight he heads to the one person who will receive him: Tim Drake. While there he finds his kid brother doesn’t have the best diet habits, and decides to take matters in his own hands.My Comments: Jason cooks and the family eats together! It’s pretty fluffy, and Tim’s reactions in this are pure gold.

Hope you enjoy reading!

[tonethegay]

1-154

1:Full name.- Toni Rivera2:Zodiac sign.- The best sign of them all... Aries !3:3 fears.- the dark, losing my bff, and um failing4:3 things I love.my bff.. duh, video games and being a streamer/creator5:4 turn on’s.- big butt, nice smile, great humor/personality, nice boobs 6:4 turn off’s.- negativity, liars, hypocrites, and i don't know7:My best friend?- @queenfvckit8:Sexual orientation?- Gayyyyy9:My best first date?- haven't had one 10:How tall am I?- 5'6"11:What do I miss?- not a what but who.. my dad, uncle and cousin12:What time was I born?-9 something am13:Favorite color?- Green 14:Do I have a crush?- what even is that !? 15:Favorite quote?- When you've reached a certain point of your life, there are people out there waiting to see you fall,but rather than let gravity take you down, sometimes you have to take matters into your own hands and fly!16:Favorite place?- My Tigers Den aka my recording and streaming area aka my bedroom 17:Favorite food?- Pizza 🍕 😋18:Do I use sarcasm?- lmfao never 19:What am I listening to right now?- The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air20:First thing I notice in new person?- Smile or eyes 21:Shoe size?- 7 in men and 8 in woman but i wear men's shoes always 22:Eye color?- Light brown23:Hair color? - brown 24: Favorite style of clothing?- comfy, stylish, men's clothes 25:Ever done a prank call?- yes 😂26:What color of underwear I’m wearing now?- black boxer briefs 27:Meaning behind my URL?- some people call me Tone and I'm gay so i combined the two28:Favorite movie?- umm this is a hard one but um either Captain America Civil War or the Fast and Furious series. 29:Favorite song?- Ooh 😲 this ones super tough. i'll say Mark My Words by Justin Bieber 30:Favorite band?- don't have one31:How I feel right now?- in pain cuz the right side of my ribs hurt when i laugh or breathe too heavy. 32:Someone I love.- My bff33:My current relationship status.- Single 34:My relationship with my parents.- Dads dead and don't talk to my mom much35:Favorite holiday.- Easter36:Tattoos and piercing I have.- 3 tats all on my left arm (3 roses on my inner forearm, tigers eyes on the outer forearm close to the wrist and a matching sister tattoo on my inner bicep), and just my ears pierced. 37:Tattoos and piercing I want.- lots more tattoos i want to have a full sleeve at some point and maybe my tongue and maybe big maybe my nose 38:The reason I joined Tumblr.- cuz i wanted to be gayer 39:Do I and my last ex hate each other?- well she hates me (lmao that's what she says cuz she's a pain in the ass) but i still love her, we're best friends 40:Do I ever get “good morning” or “good night” texts?- well yeah41:Have I ever kissed the last person I texted?- nope42:When did I last hold hands?- um i held my nephews hand today, does that count ? 43:How long does it take me to get ready in the morning?- maybe 30 minutes 44:Have I shaved my legs in the past three days? - nope 👎🏼 but you can't really tell either, it's def been like 3 weeks45: Where am I right now?- in my not so comfy bed 46:If I were drunk & can’t stand, who’s taking care of me?- it better be my bff 47:Do I like my music loud or at a reasonable level?- loud af48:Do I live with my Mom and Dad?- no i do not49:Am I excited for anything?- to be financially stable with some extra spending money but something a little sooner than that going back to school for a degree in graphic design50:Do I have someone of the opposite sex I can tell everything to?- nah (don't have many friends)51:How often do I wear a fake smile?- not very often but it does happen occasionally 52:When was the last time I hugged someone?- i hugged my nephew a few hours ago53:What if the last person I kissed was kissing someone else right in front of me?- well if we've both moved on then just gotta except it 54:Is there anyone I trust even though I should not?- um not sure55:What is something I disliked about today?- i streamed too late56:If I could meet anyone on this earth, who would it be?- Selena Gomez 😍😝57:What do I think about most?- making it as a streamer/ gamer and meeting my bff 58:What’s my strangest talent?- i'm untalented so nothing 59:Do I have any strange phobias?- not that i know of 60:Do I prefer to be behind the camera or in front of it?- in front now but it hasn't always been that way61:What was the last lie I told?- hell i don't know. i do my best to be as honest as possible 62:Do I prefer talking on the phone or video chatting online?- since i've met my bff... both !63:Do I believe in ghosts? How about aliens?- Yes and Yes64:Do I believe in magic?- Hell yes65:Do I believe in luck?- to an extent66:What’s the weather like right now?- a bit cool67:What was the last book I’ve read?- The making of Optic Gaming 68:Do I like the smell of gasoline?- yes69:Do I have any nicknames?- Tone, Baloney70:What was the worst injury I’ve ever had?- nothing horrible but i messed up my rotator cup in my left shoulder 71:Do I spend money or save it?- both, i save money so i can spend it 72:Can I touch my nose with a tongue? - wth of course i can touch my nose with a tongue but touching my nose with MY tongue no i can't 73: Is there anything pink in 10 feet from me?- i have pink writing on my t shirt 74:Favorite animal?- Tiger75:What was I doing last night at 12 AM?- talking on the phone and working on my laptop76:What do I think Satan’s last name is?- James 😂 jk i don't fucking know77:What’s a song that always makes me happy when I hear it?- anything edm or Bieber78:How can you win my heart? - be yourself, be positive and a good sense of humor79: What would I want to be written on my tombstone?- Here lies the best fucking person ever Tone Balone aka Toni Rivera80:What is my favorite word?- um i'm not even sure 81:My top 5 blogs on tumblr?- @queenfvckit- @1beyond-it- @wevegothighhopes- @bieber-news- @selenagomez-updates 😍82:If the whole world were listening to me right now, what would I say?- please subscribe to me on youtube and connect with me on all my social medias to stay up to date on what i'm doing and when i'll be uploading or streaming (insert list of social media accounts) 83:Do I have any relatives in jail?- yes unfortunately #FreeJonathan84:I accidentally eat some radioactive vegetables. They were good, and what’s even cooler is that they endow me with the super-power of my choice! What is that power?- Read people's mind85:What would be a question I’d be afraid to tell the truth on?- no idea, never really thought about it86:What is my current desktop picture?- Captain America87:Had sex?- yes88:Bought condoms?- no89:Gotten pregnant?- noooooo90:Failed a class?- yes 91:Kissed a boy?- unfortunately 92:Kissed a girl?- only in my dreams but hopefully irl really really soon93:Have I ever kissed somebody in the rain?- no but that's hella cute and goals af94:Had job?- yep 👍🏼 95:Left the house without my wallet?- fuck yes and it pisses me off every time96:Bullied someone on the Internet?- never 97:Had sex in public?- no98:Played on a sports team?- hell yeah 99:Smoked weed?- not yet100:Did drugs?- nah101:Smoked cigarettes?- second hand but that's it102:Drank alcohol?- once but it was gross 103:Am I a vegetarian/vegan?- fuck no104:Been overweight?- well yeah 105:Been underweight?- nope106:Been to a wedding?- yes 107:Been on the computer for 5 hours straight?- fuck yes all the damn time really, it's my unpaid job (for now)108:Watched TV for 5 hours straight?- used to109:Been outside my home country?- nope110:Gotten my heart broken?- yes111:Been to a professional sports game?- yes112:Broken a bone?- never 113:Cut myself?- on purpose no by accident a whole fucking lot114:Been to prom?- nope115:Been in airplane? - yes but i was a baby 116: Fly by helicopter?- nope but i was supposed to but couldn't because of weather conditions 117:What concerts have I been to?- R. Kelly, N'SYNC and um that's it i think118:Had a crush on someone of the same sex?- well duh that's how being gay works 119:Learned another language?- eh120:Wore make up?- like twice121:Lost my virginity before I was 18?- no122:Had oral sex?- no123:Dyed my hair?- no124:Voted in a presidential election?- yes.. twice125:Rode in an ambulance?- nope but i've been inside one to learn about what's in it126:Had a surgery?- nopers127:Met someone famous?- i wish128:Stalked someone on a social network?- lmao who hasn't !? 129:Peed outside?- not that i can think of130:Been fishing?- sure have 131:Helped with charity?- yes Relay For Life and many others132:Been rejected by a crush?- um probably 133:Broken a mirror?- no134:What do I want for birthday?- a gaming pc and gaming chair135:How many kids do I want and what will be their names?- maybe two, for a boy Christian or Vince maybe even Anthony or Christian Anthony yep that's the one and for a girl hmm 🤔 Katie 136:Was I named after anyone?- yes, my dad. they thought i was gonna be a boy so i would've been a jr but then i ended up being a girl so they just named me Toni instead of Anthony obvi 137:Do I like my handwriting?- fuck no 138:What was my favorite toy as a child?- Legos 139:Favorite TV Show?- Ugh so many but Pretty Little Liars140:Where do I want to live when older?- well i'm 23 but i'd love to live in Cali or Canada 141:Play any musical instrument?- yes drums and a little guitar. been a while since i've played either one tho142:One of my scars, how did I get it?- On my cheek and neck, i was attacked by a dog when i was younger and it scratched me pretty deep, had to get stitches.143:Favorite pizza topping?- cheese but if it's Pizza Hut pepperoni is delicious144:Am I afraid of the dark?- yes 145:Am I afraid of heights?- no way146:Have I ever got caught sneaking out or doing anything bad?- yeah of course147:Have I ever tried my hardest and then gotten disappointed in the end?- um i don't remember 148:What I’m really bad at.- expressing myself 149:What my greatest achievements are.- sleeping 150:The meanest thing somebody has ever said to me.- shut the fuck up fat ass 151:What I’d do if I won in a lottery.- well depends on how much it is, but buy a car, house, have the ultimate gaming setup/ room, visit my bff, give money to some people in my immediate family and the bff152:What do I like about myself?- my smile and eyes 153:My closest Tumblr friend.- @queenfvckit154:Something I fantasies about.- sex with a girl155:Any question you’d like- why am i so amazing ? welp you can thank my parents for that but that's a question you have to ask my creator cuz i couldn't tell ya 😂🙌🏼😍

[shontaviajesq]

Beyoncé Put on a Clinic for Content Creators Today: 3 Lessons from #BeyonceHomecoming and #Beychella

As many of us were minding our own business in the wee hours of Wednesday morning on April 17, Mrs. Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter was preparing to come for all of our necks, edges, and lives with the release both a 137-minute documentary and concert film, titled Homecoming, AND a live album featuring songs from the concert, aptly titled Homecoming: The Live Album. And whew, Lord, I wasn’t ready. I. WASN’T. READY.

Both the film and album feature various components of Beyoncé’s 2018 headlining set at Coachella, a twenty-year old music and arts festival held in California. She was the first African-American woman to headline the festival. Her performance is masterful for many, many, reasons—it was so good that DJ Khaled famously proclaimed that "Coachella gotta rename Coachella to Beychella."

View this post on Instagram

Check this out ! After @beyonce perform after she dune the dance 💃 ! @coachella got rename @coachella to B CHELLA !!! NEW NAME ALERT 🚨!! B CHELLA AKA BEYCHELLA !!!!! #TOPOFF 🔝🚀🐝 🔥 #TOPOFF AVAILABLE EVERYWHERE

A post shared by DJ KHALED (@djkhaled) on Apr 15, 2018 at 12:21pm PDT

The original performance from 2018 caused a frenzy of excitement, as I presume you already know. If you aren’t familiar with all of this….what are you even doing here?!?

Kidding, of course. Here’s the #BeyoncéHomecoming trailer if you haven’t seen any of this yet:

Beyoncé and her Homecoming were trending across social media for most of the day for all kinds of reasons. Think pieces will be written about Homecoming for days and weeks I’m sure. As I was watching all of this transpire today (because OF COURSE I was...), it made me think a lot about content creation and how dynamically Beyoncé was using and re-using hers.

Content creators like myself and many of you can take notes.

If you aren’t familiar with the term “content creators,” here’s a quote from Feldman+Weber:

On the face of it, a content creator is exactly what it sounds like; someone that creates content for [a] business. You can have various content creators, one for infographics, one for blog posts, one for videos, etc.

Their whole aim is to take your ideas and turn them into content that’s valuable for your business.

I want to share the top three things content creators can take away from #BeyoncéHomecoming and #Beychella:

#1 Create Original Content

First and foremost, before we even get to #BeyonceHomecoming OR #Beychella, we have to start with Beyoncé’s original work. According to Wikipedia, “Beyoncé has released six studio albums, four live albums, three compilation albums, five EPs, one soundtrack album, one mixtape, two karaoke albums, and 62 singles (including 12 as a featured artist, nine promotional singles and five charity singles).” She had a HUGE pool of content to pick and choose from for her Coachella performance, which did not feature any brand new content.

Content creators, we have to do the same thing. It can be SO HARD to post blog posts regularly, or record podcasts each week, or shoot that next YouTube video. But, consistency is important. This will give you a breadth of material to use later. Stay encouraged. Use automated systems or content calendars if that helps.

The point is, create enough stuff so that you can use it later. You worked hard to create that stuff the first time —put it back to work for you regularly.

#2 Chop and Screw (Remix and Repurpose) Your Original Content

Ya’ll know Beyoncé is from Houston, the home of chopping and screwing, in which a song is remixed in a way that slows down and changes/distorts the original. With #Beychella, Beyoncé took her original songs—and songs of other artists—and remixed them in really interesting ways.

You could tell any given song was the original but different. She performed many of the songs with HBCU marching band arrangements behind them. One of my favorites is the Diva/Everybody Mad part of the show. Check it out (at least until YouTube makes whoever posted this take it down):

Similarly, the rest of us content creators have to do the same thing. Yes, it sucks to create brand new content all the time. One way to break up the monotony if this is to re-use your old stuff. Cut up your 10 minute videos into 60 blocks for Instagram. Create a treasure trove of #TBT and #FBF posts. Repost old blog posts with new or updated lessons. Much of what we do goes around and comes around and we can leverage our past creative content in all kinds of ways.

As a part 2b—the strategy of releasing both the Netflix special AND the album of songs was a really smart move. I actually had a long commute this morning along may back roads with terrible cell phone service. I couldn’t watch the Netflix special, but I listened to the entire 40 SONG album on the 2.5 hour drive. This kind of release strategy allowed Beyoncé, Netflix, and the various streaming services to capture all kinds of old and new eyeballs and ears and drive all of us back and forth between multiple platforms.

For your own content, are there places where you can do the same thing? Certainly worth considering.

#3 Don’t Leave Your Culture and Personality at the Door

FINALLY, perhaps the most important lesson- be you all the time. Whether you watched the original #Beychella performance in 2018 or #Homecoming, one of the things that is evident is that Beyoncé did not want to come to Coachella, which has a distinctly white, bohemian vibe, and leave her blackness behind.

“I felt like people wanted me to stay in my little box. I could have worn my flower crown, but it was more important to bring our culture to Coachella.” Full stop. Beyoncé's #HOMECOMING serves as an eternal source of #WednesdayWisdom: https://t.co/hdUNBJqMKk pic.twitter.com/75YkcMWi9B

— ALL ARTS (@AllArtsTV) April 17, 2019

Instead of coming with her “flower crown,” Beyoncé brought the culture of historically black colleges and universities, black greek letter organizations, black scholars and feminists, and black entertainment norms with her. They even swag surfed.

In the film, Beyoncé talks about how she wanted black culture to be shared, embraced and celebrated through her performance.

For many content creators, it can be a daily struggle to figure out how transparent and vulnerable to be with our voice and in our work. I used to struggle with this a lot more than I do now. Though I have some fancy titles and awards, I still get just as excited as everyone else in #BlackTwitter when Beyoncé drops a new project on our necks. A few years ago I might have been hesitant to say so publicly.

So….there you have it. Some great lessons from Professor Knowles-Carter about how to create and leverage your own content. Use it accordingly, students. Class dismissed.

via GIPHY

[endenogatai]

The facts about Facebook

This is a critical reading of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s article in the WSJ on Thursday, also entitled The Facts About Facebook. 

Yes Mark, you’re right; Facebook turns 15 next month. What a long time you’ve been in the social media business! We’re curious as to whether you’ve also been keeping count of how many times you’ve been forced to apologize for breaching people’s trust or, well, otherwise royally messing up over the years.

It’s also true you weren’t setting out to build “a global company”. The predecessor to Facebook was a ‘hot or not’ game called ‘FaceMash’ that you hacked together while drinking beer in your Harvard dormroom. Your late night brainwave was to get fellow students to rate each others’ attractiveness — and you weren’t at all put off by not being in possession of the necessary photo data to do this. You just took it; hacking into the college’s online facebooks and grabbing people’s selfies without permission.

Blogging about what you were doing as you did it, you wrote: “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.” Just in case there was any doubt as to the ugly nature of your intention. 

The seeds of Facebook’s global business were thus sewn in a crude and consentless game of clickbait whose idea titillated you so much you thought nothing of breaching security, privacy, copyright and decency norms just to grab a few eyeballs.

So while you may not have instantly understood how potent this ‘outrageous and divisive’ eyeball-grabbing content tactic would turn out to be — oh hai future global scale! — the core DNA of Facebook’s business sits in that frat boy discovery where your eureka Internet moment was finding you could win the attention jackpot by pitting people against each other.

Pretty quickly you also realized you could exploit and commercialize human one-upmanship — gotta catch em all friend lists! popularity poke wars! — and stick a badge on the resulting activity, dubbing it ‘social’.

FaceMash was antisocial, though. And the unpleasant flipside that can clearly flow from ‘social’ platforms is something you continue not being nearly honest nor open enough about. Whether it’s political disinformation, hate speech or bullying, the individual and societal impacts of maliciously minded content shared and amplified using massively mainstream tools you control is now impossible to ignore.

Yet you prefer to play down these human impacts; as a “crazy idea”, or by implying that ‘a little’ amplified human nastiness is the necessary cost of being in the big multinational business of connecting everyone and ‘socializing’ everything.

But did you ask the father of 14-year-old Molly Russell, a British schoolgirl who took her own life in 2017, whether he’s okay with your growth vs controls trade-off? “I have no doubt that Instagram helped kill my daughter,” said Russell in an interview with the BBC this week.

After her death, Molly’s parents found she had been following accounts on Instagram that were sharing graphic material related to self-harming and suicide, including some accounts that actively encourage people to cut themselves. “We didn’t know that anything like that could possibly exist on a platform like Instagram,” said Russell.

Without a human editor in the mix, your algorithmic recommendations are blind to risk and suffering. Built for global scale, they get on with the expansionist goal of maximizing clicks and views by serving more of the same sticky stuff. And more extreme versions of things users show an interest in to keep the eyeballs engaged.

So when you write about making services that “billions” of “people around the world love and use” forgive us for thinking that sounds horribly glib. The scales of suffering don’t sum like that. If your entertainment product has whipped up genocide anywhere in the world — as the UN said Facebook did in Myanmar — it’s failing regardless of the proportion of users who are having their time pleasantly wasted on and by Facebook.

And if your algorithms can’t incorporate basic checks and safeguards so they don’t accidentally encourage vulnerable teens to commit suicide you really don’t deserve to be in any consumer-facing business at all.

Yet your article shows no sign you’ve been reflecting on the kinds of human tragedies that don’t just play out on your platform but can be an emergent property of your targeting algorithms.

You focus instead on what you call “clear benefits to this business model”.

The benefits to Facebook’s business are certainly clear. You have the billions in quarterly revenue to stand that up. But what about the costs to the rest of us? Human costs are harder to quantify but you don’t even sound like you’re trying.

You do write that you’ve heard “many questions” about Facebook’s business model. Which is most certainly true but once again you’re playing down the level of political and societal concern about how your platform operates (and how you operate your platform) — deflecting and reframing what Facebook is to cast your ad business a form of quasi philanthropy; a comfortable discussion topic and self-serving idea you’d much prefer we were all sold on.

It’s also hard to shake the feeling that your phrasing at this point is intended as a bit of an in-joke for Facebook staffers — to smirk at the ‘dumb politicians’ who don’t even know how Facebook makes money.

Y’know, like you smirked…

Then you write that you want to explain how Facebook operates. But, thing is, you don’t explain — you distract, deflect, equivocate and mislead, which has been your business’ strategy through many months of scandal (that and worst tactics — such as paying a PR firm that used oppo research tactics to discredit Facebook critics with smears).

Dodging is another special power; such as how you dodged repeat requests from international parliamentarians to be held accountable for major data misuse and security breaches.

The Zuckerberg ‘open letter’ mansplain, which typically runs to thousands of blame-shifting words, is another standard issue production from the Facebook reputation crisis management toolbox.

And here you are again, ironically enough, mansplaining in a newspaper; an industry that your platform has worked keenly to gut and usurp, hungry to supplant editorially guided journalism with the moral vacuum of algorithmically geared space-filler which, left unchecked, has been shown, time and again, lifting divisive and damaging content into public view.

The latest Zuckerberg screed has nothing new to say. It’s pure spin. We’ve read scores of self-serving Facebook apologias over the years and can confirm Facebook’s founder has made a very tedious art of selling abject failure as some kind of heroic lack of perfection.

But the spin has been going on for far, far too long. Fifteen years, as you remind us. Yet given that hefty record it’s little wonder you’re moved to pen again — imagining that another word blast is all it’ll take for the silly politicians to fall in line.

Thing is, no one is asking Facebook for perfection, Mark. We’re looking for signs that you and your company have a moral compass. Because the opposite appears to be true. (Or as one UK parliamentarian put it to your CTO last year: “I remain to be convinced that your company has integrity”.)

Facebook has scaled to such an unprecedented, global size exactly because it has no editorial values. And you say again now you want to be all things to all men. Put another way that means there’s a moral vacuum sucking away at your platform’s core; a supermassive ethical blackhole that scales ad dollars by the billions because you won’t tie the kind of process knots necessary to treat humans like people, not pairs of eyeballs.

You don’t design against negative consequences or to pro-actively avoid terrible impacts — you let stuff happen and then send in the ‘trust & safety’ team once the damage has been done.

You might call designing against negative consequences a ‘growth bottleneck’; others would say it’s having a conscience.

Everything standing in the way of scaling Facebook’s usage is, under the Zuckerberg regime, collateral damage — hence the old mantra of ‘move fast and break things’ — whether it’s social cohesion, civic values or vulnerable individuals.

This is why it takes a celebrity defamation lawsuit to force your company to dribble a little more resource into doing something about scores of professional scammers paying you to pop their fraudulent schemes in a Facebook “ads” wrapper. (Albeit, you’re only taking some action in the UK in this particular case.)

Funnily enough — though it’s not at all funny and it doesn’t surprise us — Facebook is far slower and patchier when it comes to fixing things it broke.

Of course there will always be people who thrive with a digital megaphone like Facebook thrust in their hand. Scammers being a pertinent example. But the measure of a civilized society is how it protects those who can’t defend themselves from targeted attacks or scams because they lack the protective wrap of privilege. Which means people who aren’t famous. Not public figures like Martin Lewis, the consumer champion who has his own platform and enough financial resources to file a lawsuit to try to make Facebook do something about how its platform supercharges scammers.

Zuckerberg’s slippery call to ‘fight bad content with more content’ — or to fight Facebook-fuelled societal division by shifting even more of the apparatus of civic society onto Facebook — fails entirely to recognize this asymmetry.

And even in the Lewis case, Facebook remains a winner; Lewis dropped his suit and Facebook got to make a big show of signing over £500k worth of ad credit coupons to a consumer charity that will end up giving them right back to Facebook.

The company’s response to problems its platform creates is to look the other way until a trigger point of enough bad publicity gets reached. At which critical point it flips the usual crisis PR switch and sends in a few token clean up teams — who scrub a tiny proportion of terrible content; or take down a tiny number of fake accounts; or indeed make a few token and heavily publicized gestures — before leaning heavily on civil society (and on users) to take the real strain.

You might think Facebook reaching out to respected external institutions is a positive step. A sign of a maturing mindset and a shift towards taking greater responsibility for platform impacts. (And in the case of scam ads in the UK it’s donating £3M in cash and ad credits to a bona fide consumer advice charity.)

But this is still Facebook dumping problems of its making on an already under-resourced and over-worked civic sector at the same time as its platform supersizes their workload.

In recent years the company has also made a big show of getting involved with third party fact checking organizations across various markets — using these independents to stencil in a PR strategy for ‘fighting fake news’ that also entails Facebook offloading the lion’s share of the work. (It’s not paying fact checkers anything, given the clear conflict that would represent it obviously can’t).

So again external organizations are being looped into Facebook’s mess — in this case to try to drain the swamp of fakes being fenced and amplified on its platform — even as the scale of the task remains hopeless, and all sorts of junk continues to flood into and pollute the public sphere.

What’s clear is that none of these organizations has the scale or the resources to fix problems Facebook’s platform creates. Yet it serves Facebook’s purposes to be able to point to them trying.

And all the while Zuckerberg is hard at work fighting to fend off regulation that could force his company to take far more care and spend far more of its own resources (and profits) monitoring the content it monetizes by putting it in front of eyeballs.

The Facebook founder is fighting because he knows his platform is a targeted attack; On individual attention, via privacy-hostile behaviorally targeted ads (his euphemism for this is “relevant ads”); on social cohesion, via divisive algorithms that drive outrage in order to maximize platform engagement; and on democratic institutions and norms, by systematically eroding consensus and the potential for compromise between the different groups that every society is comprised of.

In his WSJ post Zuckerberg can only claim Facebook doesn’t “leave harmful or divisive content up”. He has no defence against Facebook having put it up and enabled it to spread in the first place.

Sociopaths relish having a soapbox so unsurprisingly these people find a wonderful home on Facebook. But where does empathy fit into the antisocial media equation?

As for Facebook being a ‘free’ service — a point Zuckerberg is most keen to impress in his WSJ post — it’s of course a cliché to point out that ‘if it’s free you’re the product’. (Or as the even older saying goes: ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’).

But for the avoidance of doubt, “free” access does not mean cost-free access. And in Facebook’s case the cost is both individual (to your attention and your privacy); and collective (to the public’s attention and to social cohesion).

The much bigger question is who actually benefits if “everyone” is on Facebook, as Zuckerberg would prefer. Facebook isn’t the Internet. Facebook doesn’t offer the sole means of communication, digital or otherwise. People can, and do, ‘connect’ (if you want to use such a transactional word for human relations) just fine without Facebook.

So beware the hard and self-serving sell in which Facebook’s 15-year founder seeks yet again to recast privacy as an unaffordable luxury.

Actually, Mark, it’s a fundamental human right.

The best argument Zuckerberg can muster for his goal of universal Facebook usage being good for anything other than his own business’ bottom line is to suggest small businesses could use that kind of absolute reach to drive extra growth of their own.

Though he only provides a few general data-points to support the claim; saying there are “more than 90M small businesses on Facebook” which “make up a large part of our business” (how large?) — and claiming “most” (51%?) couldn’t afford TV ads or billboards (might they be able to afford other online or newspaper ads though?); he also cites a “global survey” (how many businesses surveyed?), presumably run by Facebook itself, which he says found “half the businesses on Facebook say they’ve hired more people since they joined” (but how did you ask the question, Mark?; we’re concerned it might have been rather leading), and from there he leaps to the implied conclusion that “millions” of jobs have essentially been created by Facebook.

But did you control for common causes Mark? Or are you just trying to take credit for others’ hard work because, well, it’s politically advantageous for you to do so?

Whether Facebook’s claims about being great for small business stand up to scrutiny or not, if people’s fundamental rights are being wholesale flipped for SMEs to make a few extra bucks that’s an unacceptable trade off.

“Millions” of jobs suggestively linked to Facebook sure sounds great — but you can’t and shouldn’t overlook disproportionate individual and societal costs, as Zuckerberg is urging policymakers to here.

Let’s also not forget that some of the small business ‘jobs’ that Facebook’s platform can take definitive and major credit for creating include the Macedonia teens who became hyper-adept at seeding Facebook with fake U.S. political news, around the 2016 presidential election. But presumably those aren’t the kind of jobs Zuckerberg is advocating for.

He also repeats the spurious claim that Facebook gives users “complete control” over what it does with personal information collected for advertising.

We’ve heard this time and time again from Zuckerberg and yet it remains pure BS.

WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 10: Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg concludes his testimony before a combined Senate Judiciary and Commerce committee hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill April 10, 2018 in Washington, DC. Zuckerberg, 33, was called to testify after it was reported that 87 million Facebook users had their personal information harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Yo Mark! First up we’re still waiting for your much trumpeted ‘Clear History’ tool. You know, the one you claimed you thought of under questioning in Congress last year (and later used to fend off follow up questions in the European Parliament).

Reportedly the tool is due this Spring. But even when it does finally drop it represents another classic piece of gaslighting by Facebook, given how it seeks to normalize (and so enable) the platform’s pervasive abuse of its users’ data.

Truth is, there is no master ‘off’ switch for Facebook’s ongoing surveillance. Such a switch — were it to exist — would represent a genuine control for users. But Zuckerberg isn’t offering it.

Instead his company continues to groom users into accepting being creeped on by offering pantomime settings that boil down to little more than privacy theatre — if they even realize they’re there.

‘Hit the button! Reset cookies! Delete browsing history! Keep playing Facebook!’

An interstitial reset is clearly also a dilute decoy. It’s not the same as being able to erase all extracted insights Facebook’s infrastructure continuously mines from users, using these derivatives to target people with behavioral ads; tracking and profiling on an ongoing basis by creeping on browsing activity (on and off Facebook), and also by buying third party data on its users from brokers.

Multiple signals and inferences are used to flesh out individual ad profiles on an ongoing basis, meaning the files are never static. And there’s simply no way to tell Facebook to burn your digital ad mannequin. Not even if you delete your Facebook account.

Nor, indeed, is there a way to get a complete read out from Facebook on all the data it’s attached to your identity. Even in Europe, where companies are subject to strict privacy laws that place a legal requirement on data controllers to disclose all personal data they hold on a person on request, as well as who they’re sharing it with, for what purposes, under what legal grounds.

Last year Paul-Olivier Dehaye, the founder of PersonalData.IO, a startup that aims to help people control how their personal data is accessed by companies, recounted in the UK parliament how he’d spent years trying to obtain all his personal information from Facebook — with the company resorting to legal arguments to block his subject access request.

Dehaye said he had succeeded in extracting a bit more of his data from Facebook than it initially handed over. But it was still just a “snapshot”, not an exhaustive list, of all the advertisers who Facebook had shared his data with. This glimpsed tip implies a staggeringly massive personal data iceberg lurking beneath the surface of each and every one of the 2.2BN+ Facebook users. (Though the figure is likely even more massive because it tracks non-users too.)

Zuckerberg’s “complete control” wording is therefore at best self-serving and at worst an outright lie. Facebook’s business has complete control of users by offering only a superficial layer of confusing and fiddly, ever-shifting controls that demand continued presence on the platform to use them, and ongoing effort to keep on top of settings changes (which are always, to a fault, privacy hostile), making managing your personal data a life-long chore.

Facebook’s power dynamic puts the onus squarely on the user to keep finding and hitting reset button.

But this too is a distraction. Resetting anything on its platform is largely futile, given Facebook retains whatever behavioral insights it already stripped off of your data (and fed to its profiling machinery). And its omnipresent background snooping carries on unchecked, amassing fresh insights you also can’t clear.

Nor does Clear History offer any control for the non-users Facebook tracks via the pixels and social plug-ins it’s larded around the mainstream web. Zuckerberg was asked about so-called shadow profiles in Congress last year — which led to this awkward exchange where he claimed not to know what the phrase refers to.

EU MEPs also seized on the issue, pushing him to respond. He did so by attempting to conflate surveillance and security — by claiming it’s necessary for Facebook to hold this data to keep “bad content out”. Which seems a bit of an ill-advised argument to make given how badly that mission is generally going for Facebook.

Still, Zuckerberg repeats the claim in the WSJ post, saying information collected for ads is “generally important for security and operating our services” — using this to address what he couches as “the important question of whether the advertising model encourages companies like ours to use and store more information than we otherwise would”.

So, essentially, Facebook’s founder is saying that the price for Facebook’s existence is pervasive surveillance of everyone, everywhere, with or without your permission.

Though he doesn’t express that ‘fact’ as a cost of his “free” platform. RIP privacy indeed.

Another pertinent example of Zuckerberg simply not telling the truth when he wrongly claims Facebook users can control their information vis-a-vis his ad business — an example which also happens to underline how pernicious his attempts to use “security” to justify eroding privacy really are — bubbled into view last fall, when Facebook finally confessed that mobile phone numbers users had provided for the specific purpose of enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) to increase the security of their accounts were also used by Facebook for ad targeting.

A company spokesperson told us that if a user wanted to opt out of the ad-based repurposing of their mobile phone data they could use non-phone number based 2FA — though Facebook only added the ability to use an app for 2FA in May last year.

What Facebook is doing on the security front is especially disingenuous BS in that it risks undermining security practice by bundling a respected tool (2FA) with ads that creep on people.

And there’s plenty more of this kind of disingenuous nonsense in Zuckerberg’s WSJ post — where he repeats a claim we first heard him utter last May, at a conference in Paris, when he suggested that following changes made to Facebook’s consent flow, ahead of updated privacy rules coming into force in Europe, the fact European users had (mostly) swallowed the new terms, rather than deleting their accounts en masse, was a sign people were majority approving of “more relevant” (i.e more creepy) Facebook ads.

Au contraire, it shows nothing of the sort. It simply underlines the fact Facebook still does not offer users a free and fair choice when it comes to consenting to their personal data being processed for behaviorally targeted ads — despite free choice being a requirement under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

If Facebook users are forced to ‘choose’ between being creeped on or deleting their account on the dominant social service where all their friends are it’s hardly a free choice. (And GDPR complaints have been filed over this exact issue of ‘forced consent‘.)

Add to that, as we said at the time, Facebook’s GDPR tweaks were lousy with manipulative, dark pattern design. So again the company is leaning on users to get the outcomes it wants.

It’s not a fair fight, any which way you look at it. But here we have Zuckerberg, the BS salesman, trying to claim his platform’s ongoing manipulation of people already enmeshed in the network is evidence for people wanting creepy ads.

The truth is that most Facebook users remain unaware of how extensively the company creeps on them (per this recent Pew research). And fiddly controls are of course even harder to get a handle on if you’re sitting in the dark.

Zuckerberg appears to concede a little ground on the transparency and control point when he writes that: “Ultimately, I believe the most important principles around data are transparency, choice and control.” But all the privacy-hostile choices he’s made; and the faux controls he’s offered; and the data mountain he simply won’t ‘fess up to sitting on shows, beyond reasonable doubt, the company cannot and will not self-regulate.

If Facebook is allowed to continue setting its own parameters and choosing its own definitions (for “transparency, choice and control”) users won’t have even one of the three principles, let alone the full house, as well they should. Facebook will just keep moving the goalposts and marking its own homework.

You can see this in the way Zuckerberg fuzzes and elides what his company really does with people’s data; and how he muddies and muddles uses for the data — such as by saying he doesn’t know what shadow profiles are; or claiming users can download ‘all their data’; or that ad profiles are somehow essential for security; or by repurposing 2FA digits to personalize ads too.

How do you try to prevent the purpose limitation principle being applied to regulate your surveillance-reliant big data ad business? Why by mixing the data streams of course! And then trying to sew confusion among regulators and policymakers by forcing them to unpick your mess.

Much like Facebook is forcing civic society to clean up its messy antisocial impacts.

Europe’s GDPR is focusing the conversation, though, and targeted complaints filed under the bloc’s new privacy regime have shown they can have teeth and so bite back against rights incursions.

But before we put another self-serving Zuckerberg screed to rest, let’s take a final look at his description of how Facebook’s ad business works. Because this is also seriously misleading. And cuts to the very heart of the “transparency, choice and control” issue he’s quite right is central to the personal data debate. (He just wants to get to define what each of those words means.)

In the article, Zuckerberg claims “people consistently tell us that if they’re going to see ads, they want them to be relevant”. But who are these “people” of which he speaks? If he’s referring to the aforementioned European Facebook users, who accepted updated terms with the same horribly creepy ads because he didn’t offer them any alternative, we would suggest that’s not a very affirmative signal.

Now if it were true that a generic group of ‘Internet people’ were consistently saying anything about online ads the loudest message would most likely be that they don’t like them. Click through rates are fantastically small. And hence also lots of people using ad blocking tools. (Growth in usage of ad blockers has also occurred in parallel with the increasing incursions of the adtech industrial surveillance complex.)

So Zuckerberg’s logical leap to claim users of free services want to be shown only the most creepy ads is really a very odd one.

Let’s now turn to Zuckerberg’s use of the word “relevant”. As we noted above, this is a euphemism. It conflates many concepts but principally it’s used by Facebook as a cloak to shield and obscure the reality of what it’s actually doing (i.e. privacy-hostile people profiling to power intrusive, behaviourally microtargeted ads) in order to avoid scrutiny of exactly those creepy and intrusive Facebook practices.

Yet the real sleight of hand is how Zuckerberg glosses over the fact that ads can be relevant without being creepy. Because ads can be contextual. They don’t have to be behaviorally targeted.

Ads can be based on — for example — a real-time search/action plus a user’s general location. Without needing to operate a vast, all-pervasive privacy-busting tracking infrastructure to feed open-ended surveillance dossiers on what everyone does online, as Facebook chooses to.

And here Zuckerberg gets really disingenuous because he uses a benign-sounding example of a contextual ad (the example he chooses contains an interest and a general location) to gloss over a detail-light explanation of how Facebook’s people tracking and profiling apparatus works.

“Based on what pages people like, what they click on, and other signals, we create categories — for example, people who like pages about gardening and live in Spain — and then charge advertisers to show ads to that category,” he writes, with that slipped in reference to “other signals” doing some careful shielding work there.

Other categories that Facebook’s algorithms have been found ready and willing to accept payment to run ads against in recent years include “jew-hater”, “How to burn Jews” and “Hitler did nothing wrong”.

Funnily enough Zuckerberg doesn’t mention those actual Facebook microtargeting categories in his glossy explainer of how its “relevant” ads business works. But they offer a far truer glimpse of the kinds of labels Facebook’s business sticks on people.

As we wrote last week, the case against behavioral ads is stacking up. Zuckerberg’s attempt to spin the same self-serving lines should really fool no one at this point.

Nor should regulators be derailed by the lie that Facebook’s creepy business model is the only version of adtech possible. It’s not even the only version of profitable adtech currently available. (Contextual ads have made Google alternative search engine DuckDuckGo profitable since 2014, for example.)

Simply put, adtech doesn’t have to be creepy to work. And ads that don’t creep on people would give publishers greater ammunition to sell ad block using readers on whitelisting their websites. A new generation of people-sensitive startups are also busy working on new forms of ad targeting that bake in privacy by design.

And with legal and regulatory risk rising, intrusive and creepy adtech that demands the equivalent of ongoing strip searches of every Internet user on the planet really look to be on borrowed time.

Facebook’s problem is it scrambled for big data and, finding it easy to suck up tonnes of the personal stuff on the unregulated Internet, built an antisocial surveillance business that needs to capture both sides of its market — eyeballs and advertisers — and keep them buying to an exploitative and even abusive relationship for its business to keep minting money.

Pivoting that tanker would certainly be tough, and in any case who’d trust a Zuckerberg who suddenly proclaimed himself the privacy messiah?

But it sure is a long way from ‘move fast and break things’ to trying to claim there’s only one business model to rule them all.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8204425 https://tcrn.ch/2S42YXt via IFTTT

[sheminecrafts]

The facts about Facebook

This is a critical reading of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s article in the WSJ on Thursday, also entitled The Facts About Facebook. 

Yes Mark, you’re right; Facebook turns 15 next month. What a long time you’ve been in the social media business! We’re curious as to whether you’ve also been keeping count of how many times you’ve been forced to apologize for breaching people’s trust or, well, otherwise royally messing up over the years.

It’s also true you weren’t setting out to build “a global company”. The predecessor to Facebook was a ‘hot or not’ game called ‘FaceMash’ that you hacked together while drinking beer in your Harvard dormroom. Your late night brainwave was to get fellow students to rate each others’ attractiveness — and you weren’t at all put off by not being in possession of the necessary photo data to do this. You just took it; hacking into the college’s online facebooks and grabbing people’s selfies without permission.

Blogging about what you were doing as you did it, you wrote: “I almost want to put some of these faces next to pictures of some farm animals and have people vote on which is more attractive.” Just in case there was any doubt as to the ugly nature of your intention. 

The seeds of Facebook’s global business were thus sewn in a crude and consentless game of clickbait whose idea titillated you so much you thought nothing of breaching security, privacy, copyright and decency norms just to grab a few eyeballs.

So while you may not have instantly understood how potent this ‘outrageous and divisive’ eyeball-grabbing content tactic would turn out to be — oh hai future global scale! — the core DNA of Facebook’s business sits in that frat boy discovery where your eureka Internet moment was finding you could win the attention jackpot by pitting people against each other.

Pretty quickly you also realized you could exploit and commercialize human one-upmanship — gotta catch em all friend lists! popularity poke wars! — and stick a badge on the resulting activity, dubbing it ‘social’.

FaceMash was antisocial, though. And the unpleasant flipside that can clearly flow from ‘social’ platforms is something you continue not being nearly honest nor open enough about. Whether it’s political disinformation, hate speech or bullying, the individual and societal impacts of maliciously minded content shared and amplified using massively mainstream tools you control is now impossible to ignore.

Yet you prefer to play down these human impacts; as a “crazy idea”, or by implying that ‘a little’ amplified human nastiness is the necessary cost of being in the big multinational business of connecting everyone and ‘socializing’ everything.

But did you ask the father of 14-year-old Molly Russell, a British schoolgirl who took her own life in 2017, whether he’s okay with your growth vs controls trade-off? “I have no doubt that Instagram helped kill my daughter,” said Russell in an interview with the BBC this week.

After her death, Molly’s parents found she had been following accounts on Instagram that were sharing graphic material related to self-harming and suicide, including some accounts that actively encourage people to cut themselves. “We didn’t know that anything like that could possibly exist on a platform like Instagram,” said Russell.

Without a human editor in the mix, your algorithmic recommendations are blind to risk and suffering. Built for global scale, they get on with the expansionist goal of maximizing clicks and views by serving more of the same sticky stuff. And more extreme versions of things users show an interest in to keep the eyeballs engaged.

So when you write about making services that “billions” of “people around the world love and use” forgive us for thinking that sounds horribly glib. The scales of suffering don’t sum like that. If your entertainment product has whipped up genocide anywhere in the world — as the UN said Facebook did in Myanmar — it’s failing regardless of the proportion of users who are having their time pleasantly wasted on and by Facebook.

And if your algorithms can’t incorporate basic checks and safeguards so they don’t accidentally encourage vulnerable teens to commit suicide you really don’t deserve to be in any consumer-facing business at all.

Yet your article shows no sign you’ve been reflecting on the kinds of human tragedies that don’t just play out on your platform but can be an emergent property of your targeting algorithms.

You focus instead on what you call “clear benefits to this business model”.

The benefits to Facebook’s business are certainly clear. You have the billions in quarterly revenue to stand that up. But what about the costs to the rest of us? Human costs are harder to quantify but you don’t even sound like you’re trying.

You do write that you’ve heard “many questions” about Facebook’s business model. Which is most certainly true but once again you’re playing down the level of political and societal concern about how your platform operates (and how you operate your platform) — deflecting and reframing what Facebook is to cast your ad business a form of quasi philanthropy; a comfortable discussion topic and self-serving idea you’d much prefer we were all sold on.

It’s also hard to shake the feeling that your phrasing at this point is intended as a bit of an in-joke for Facebook staffers — to smirk at the ‘dumb politicians’ who don’t even know how Facebook makes money.

Y’know, like you smirked…

Then you write that you want to explain how Facebook operates. But, thing is, you don’t explain — you distract, deflect, equivocate and mislead, which has been your business’ strategy through many months of scandal (that and worst tactics — such as paying a PR firm that used oppo research tactics to discredit Facebook critics with smears).

Dodging is another special power; such as how you dodged repeat requests from international parliamentarians to be held accountable for major data misuse and security breaches.

The Zuckerberg ‘open letter’ mansplain, which typically runs to thousands of blame-shifting words, is another standard issue production from the Facebook reputation crisis management toolbox.

And here you are again, ironically enough, mansplaining in a newspaper; an industry that your platform has worked keenly to gut and usurp, hungry to supplant editorially guided journalism with the moral vacuum of algorithmically geared space-filler which, left unchecked, has been shown, time and again, lifting divisive and damaging content into public view.

The latest Zuckerberg screed has nothing new to say. It’s pure spin. We’ve read scores of self-serving Facebook apologias over the years and can confirm Facebook’s founder has made a very tedious art of selling abject failure as some kind of heroic lack of perfection.

But the spin has been going on for far, far too long. Fifteen years, as you remind us. Yet given that hefty record it’s little wonder you’re moved to pen again — imagining that another word blast is all it’ll take for the silly politicians to fall in line.

Thing is, no one is asking Facebook for perfection, Mark. We’re looking for signs that you and your company have a moral compass. Because the opposite appears to be true. (Or as one UK parliamentarian put it to your CTO last year: “I remain to be convinced that your company has integrity”.)

Facebook has scaled to such an unprecedented, global size exactly because it has no editorial values. And you say again now you want to be all things to all men. Put another way that means there’s a moral vacuum sucking away at your platform’s core; a supermassive ethical blackhole that scales ad dollars by the billions because you won’t tie the kind of process knots necessary to treat humans like people, not pairs of eyeballs.

You don’t design against negative consequences or to pro-actively avoid terrible impacts — you let stuff happen and then send in the ‘trust & safety’ team once the damage has been done.

You might call designing against negative consequences a ‘growth bottleneck’; others would say it’s having a conscience.

Everything standing in the way of scaling Facebook’s usage is, under the Zuckerberg regime, collateral damage — hence the old mantra of ‘move fast and break things’ — whether it’s social cohesion, civic values or vulnerable individuals.

This is why it takes a celebrity defamation lawsuit to force your company to dribble a little more resource into doing something about scores of professional scammers paying you to pop their fraudulent schemes in a Facebook “ads” wrapper. (Albeit, you’re only taking some action in the UK in this particular case.)

Funnily enough — though it’s not at all funny and it doesn’t surprise us — Facebook is far slower and patchier when it comes to fixing things it broke.

Of course there will always be people who thrive with a digital megaphone like Facebook thrust in their hand. Scammers being a pertinent example. But the measure of a civilized society is how it protects those who can’t defend themselves from targeted attacks or scams because they lack the protective wrap of privilege. Which means people who aren’t famous. Not public figures like Martin Lewis, the consumer champion who has his own platform and enough financial resources to file a lawsuit to try to make Facebook do something about how its platform supercharges scammers.

Zuckerberg’s slippery call to ‘fight bad content with more content’ — or to fight Facebook-fuelled societal division by shifting even more of the apparatus of civic society onto Facebook — fails entirely to recognize this asymmetry.

And even in the Lewis case, Facebook remains a winner; Lewis dropped his suit and Facebook got to make a big show of signing over £500k worth of ad credit coupons to a consumer charity that will end up giving them right back to Facebook.

The company’s response to problems its platform creates is to look the other way until a trigger point of enough bad publicity gets reached. At which critical point it flips the usual crisis PR switch and sends in a few token clean up teams — who scrub a tiny proportion of terrible content; or take down a tiny number of fake accounts; or indeed make a few token and heavily publicized gestures — before leaning heavily on civil society (and on users) to take the real strain.

You might think Facebook reaching out to respected external institutions is a positive step. A sign of a maturing mindset and a shift towards taking greater responsibility for platform impacts. (And in the case of scam ads in the UK it’s donating £3M in cash and ad credits to a bona fide consumer advice charity.)

But this is still Facebook dumping problems of its making on an already under-resourced and over-worked civic sector at the same time as its platform supersizes their workload.

In recent years the company has also made a big show of getting involved with third party fact checking organizations across various markets — using these independents to stencil in a PR strategy for ‘fighting fake news’ that also entails Facebook offloading the lion’s share of the work. (It’s not paying fact checkers anything, given the clear conflict that would represent it obviously can’t).

So again external organizations are being looped into Facebook’s mess — in this case to try to drain the swamp of fakes being fenced and amplified on its platform — even as the scale of the task remains hopeless, and all sorts of junk continues to flood into and pollute the public sphere.

What’s clear is that none of these organizations has the scale or the resources to fix problems Facebook’s platform creates. Yet it serves Facebook’s purposes to be able to point to them trying.

And all the while Zuckerberg is hard at work fighting to fend off regulation that could force his company to take far more care and spend far more of its own resources (and profits) monitoring the content it monetizes by putting it in front of eyeballs.

The Facebook founder is fighting because he knows his platform is a targeted attack; On individual attention, via privacy-hostile behaviorally targeted ads (his euphemism for this is “relevant ads”); on social cohesion, via divisive algorithms that drive outrage in order to maximize platform engagement; and on democratic institutions and norms, by systematically eroding consensus and the potential for compromise between the different groups that every society is comprised of.

In his WSJ post Zuckerberg can only claim Facebook doesn’t “leave harmful or divisive content up”. He has no defence against Facebook having put it up and enabled it to spread in the first place.

Sociopaths relish having a soapbox so unsurprisingly these people find a wonderful home on Facebook. But where does empathy fit into the antisocial media equation?

As for Facebook being a ‘free’ service — a point Zuckerberg is most keen to impress in his WSJ post — it’s of course a cliché to point out that ‘if it’s free you’re the product’. (Or as the even older saying goes: ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch’).

But for the avoidance of doubt, “free” access does not mean cost-free access. And in Facebook’s case the cost is both individual (to your attention and your privacy); and collective (to the public’s attention and to social cohesion).

The much bigger question is who actually benefits if “everyone” is on Facebook, as Zuckerberg would prefer. Facebook isn’t the Internet. Facebook doesn’t offer the sole means of communication, digital or otherwise. People can, and do, ‘connect’ (if you want to use such a transactional word for human relations) just fine without Facebook.

So beware the hard and self-serving sell in which Facebook’s 15-year founder seeks yet again to recast privacy as an unaffordable luxury.

Actually, Mark, it’s a fundamental human right.

The best argument Zuckerberg can muster for his goal of universal Facebook usage being good for anything other than his own business’ bottom line is to suggest small businesses could use that kind of absolute reach to drive extra growth of their own.

Though he only provides a few general data-points to support the claim; saying there are “more than 90M small businesses on Facebook” which “make up a large part of our business” (how large?) — and claiming “most” (51%?) couldn’t afford TV ads or billboards (might they be able to afford other online or newspaper ads though?); he also cites a “global survey” (how many businesses surveyed?), presumably run by Facebook itself, which he says found “half the businesses on Facebook say they’ve hired more people since they joined” (but how did you ask the question, Mark?; we’re concerned it might have been rather leading), and from there he leaps to the implied conclusion that “millions” of jobs have essentially been created by Facebook.

But did you control for common causes Mark? Or are you just trying to take credit for others’ hard work because, well, it’s politically advantageous for you to do so?

Whether Facebook’s claims about being great for small business stand up to scrutiny or not, if people’s fundamental rights are being wholesale flipped for SMEs to make a few extra bucks that’s an unacceptable trade off.

“Millions” of jobs suggestively linked to Facebook sure sounds great — but you can’t and shouldn’t overlook disproportionate individual and societal costs, as Zuckerberg is urging policymakers to here.

Let’s also not forget that some of the small business ‘jobs’ that Facebook’s platform can take definitive and major credit for creating include the Macedonia teens who became hyper-adept at seeding Facebook with fake U.S. political news, around the 2016 presidential election. But presumably those aren’t the kind of jobs Zuckerberg is advocating for.

He also repeats the spurious claim that Facebook gives users “complete control” over what it does with personal information collected for advertising.

We’ve heard this time and time again from Zuckerberg and yet it remains pure BS.

WASHINGTON, DC – APRIL 10: Facebook co-founder, Chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg concludes his testimony before a combined Senate Judiciary and Commerce committee hearing in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill April 10, 2018 in Washington, DC. Zuckerberg, 33, was called to testify after it was reported that 87 million Facebook users had their personal information harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a British political consulting firm linked to the Trump campaign. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Yo Mark! First up we’re still waiting for your much trumpeted ‘Clear History’ tool. You know, the one you claimed you thought of under questioning in Congress last year (and later used to fend off follow up questions in the European Parliament).

Reportedly the tool is due this Spring. But even when it does finally drop it represents another classic piece of gaslighting by Facebook, given how it seeks to normalize (and so enable) the platform’s pervasive abuse of its users’ data.

Truth is, there is no master ‘off’ switch for Facebook’s ongoing surveillance. Such a switch — were it to exist — would represent a genuine control for users. But Zuckerberg isn’t offering it.

Instead his company continues to groom users into accepting being creeped on by offering pantomime settings that boil down to little more than privacy theatre — if they even realize they’re there.

‘Hit the button! Reset cookies! Delete browsing history! Keep playing Facebook!’

An interstitial reset is clearly also a dilute decoy. It’s not the same as being able to erase all extracted insights Facebook’s infrastructure continuously mines from users, using these derivatives to target people with behavioral ads; tracking and profiling on an ongoing basis by creeping on browsing activity (on and off Facebook), and also by buying third party data on its users from brokers.

Multiple signals and inferences are used to flesh out individual ad profiles on an ongoing basis, meaning the files are never static. And there’s simply no way to tell Facebook to burn your digital ad mannequin. Not even if you delete your Facebook account.

Nor, indeed, is there a way to get a complete read out from Facebook on all the data it’s attached to your identity. Even in Europe, where companies are subject to strict privacy laws that place a legal requirement on data controllers to disclose all personal data they hold on a person on request, as well as who they’re sharing it with, for what purposes, under what legal grounds.

Last year Paul-Olivier Dehaye, the founder of PersonalData.IO, a startup that aims to help people control how their personal data is accessed by companies, recounted in the UK parliament how he’d spent years trying to obtain all his personal information from Facebook — with the company resorting to legal arguments to block his subject access request.

Dehaye said he had succeeded in extracting a bit more of his data from Facebook than it initially handed over. But it was still just a “snapshot”, not an exhaustive list, of all the advertisers who Facebook had shared his data with. This glimpsed tip implies a staggeringly massive personal data iceberg lurking beneath the surface of each and every one of the 2.2BN+ Facebook users. (Though the figure is likely even more massive because it tracks non-users too.)

Zuckerberg’s “complete control” wording is therefore at best self-serving and at worst an outright lie. Facebook’s business has complete control of users by offering only a superficial layer of confusing and fiddly, ever-shifting controls that demand continued presence on the platform to use them, and ongoing effort to keep on top of settings changes (which are always, to a fault, privacy hostile), making managing your personal data a life-long chore.

Facebook’s power dynamic puts the onus squarely on the user to keep finding and hitting reset button.

But this too is a distraction. Resetting anything on its platform is largely futile, given Facebook retains whatever behavioral insights it already stripped off of your data (and fed to its profiling machinery). And its omnipresent background snooping carries on unchecked, amassing fresh insights you also can’t clear.

Nor does Clear History offer any control for the non-users Facebook tracks via the pixels and social plug-ins it’s larded around the mainstream web. Zuckerberg was asked about so-called shadow profiles in Congress last year — which led to this awkward exchange where he claimed not to know what the phrase refers to.

EU MEPs also seized on the issue, pushing him to respond. He did so by attempting to conflate surveillance and security — by claiming it’s necessary for Facebook to hold this data to keep “bad content out”. Which seems a bit of an ill-advised argument to make given how badly that mission is generally going for Facebook.

Still, Zuckerberg repeats the claim in the WSJ post, saying information collected for ads is “generally important for security and operating our services” — using this to address what he couches as “the important question of whether the advertising model encourages companies like ours to use and store more information than we otherwise would”.

So, essentially, Facebook’s founder is saying that the price for Facebook’s existence is pervasive surveillance of everyone, everywhere, with or without your permission.

Though he doesn’t express that ‘fact’ as a cost of his “free” platform. RIP privacy indeed.

Another pertinent example of Zuckerberg simply not telling the truth when he wrongly claims Facebook users can control their information vis-a-vis his ad business — an example which also happens to underline how pernicious his attempts to use “security” to justify eroding privacy really are — bubbled into view last fall, when Facebook finally confessed that mobile phone numbers users had provided for the specific purpose of enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) to increase the security of their accounts were also used by Facebook for ad targeting.

A company spokesperson told us that if a user wanted to opt out of the ad-based repurposing of their mobile phone data they could use non-phone number based 2FA — though Facebook only added the ability to use an app for 2FA in May last year.

What Facebook is doing on the security front is especially disingenuous BS in that it risks undermining security practice by bundling a respected tool (2FA) with ads that creep on people.

And there’s plenty more of this kind of disingenuous nonsense in Zuckerberg’s WSJ post — where he repeats a claim we first heard him utter last May, at a conference in Paris, when he suggested that following changes made to Facebook’s consent flow, ahead of updated privacy rules coming into force in Europe, the fact European users had (mostly) swallowed the new terms, rather than deleting their accounts en masse, was a sign people were majority approving of “more relevant” (i.e more creepy) Facebook ads.

Au contraire, it shows nothing of the sort. It simply underlines the fact Facebook still does not offer users a free and fair choice when it comes to consenting to their personal data being processed for behaviorally targeted ads — despite free choice being a requirement under Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

If Facebook users are forced to ‘choose’ between being creeped on or deleting their account on the dominant social service where all their friends are it’s hardly a free choice. (And GDPR complaints have been filed over this exact issue of ‘forced consent‘.)

Add to that, as we said at the time, Facebook’s GDPR tweaks were lousy with manipulative, dark pattern design. So again the company is leaning on users to get the outcomes it wants.

It’s not a fair fight, any which way you look at it. But here we have Zuckerberg, the BS salesman, trying to claim his platform’s ongoing manipulation of people already enmeshed in the network is evidence for people wanting creepy ads.

The truth is that most Facebook users remain unaware of how extensively the company creeps on them (per this recent Pew research). And fiddly controls are of course even harder to get a handle on if you’re sitting in the dark.

Zuckerberg appears to concede a little ground on the transparency and control point when he writes that: “Ultimately, I believe the most important principles around data are transparency, choice and control.” But all the privacy-hostile choices he’s made; and the faux controls he’s offered; and the data mountain he simply won’t ‘fess up to sitting on shows, beyond reasonable doubt, the company cannot and will not self-regulate.

If Facebook is allowed to continue setting its own parameters and choosing its own definitions (for “transparency, choice and control”) users won’t have even one of the three principles, let alone the full house, as well they should. Facebook will just keep moving the goalposts and marking its own homework.

You can see this in the way Zuckerberg fuzzes and elides what his company really does with people’s data; and how he muddies and muddles uses for the data — such as by saying he doesn’t know what shadow profiles are; or claiming users can download ‘all their data’; or that ad profiles are somehow essential for security; or by repurposing 2FA digits to personalize ads too.

How do you try to prevent the purpose limitation principle being applied to regulate your surveillance-reliant big data ad business? Why by mixing the data streams of course! And then trying to sew confusion among regulators and policymakers by forcing them to unpick your mess.

Much like Facebook is forcing civic society to clean up its messy antisocial impacts.

Europe’s GDPR is focusing the conversation, though, and targeted complaints filed under the bloc’s new privacy regime have shown they can have teeth and so bite back against rights incursions.

But before we put another self-serving Zuckerberg screed to rest, let’s take a final look at his description of how Facebook’s ad business works. Because this is also seriously misleading. And cuts to the very heart of the “transparency, choice and control” issue he’s quite right is central to the personal data debate. (He just wants to get to define what each of those words means.)

In the article, Zuckerberg claims “people consistently tell us that if they’re going to see ads, they want them to be relevant”. But who are these “people” of which he speaks? If he’s referring to the aforementioned European Facebook users, who accepted updated terms with the same horribly creepy ads because he didn’t offer them any alternative, we would suggest that’s not a very affirmative signal.

Now if it were true that a generic group of ‘Internet people’ were consistently saying anything about online ads the loudest message would most likely be that they don’t like them. Click through rates are fantastically small. And hence also lots of people using ad blocking tools. (Growth in usage of ad blockers has also occurred in parallel with the increasing incursions of the adtech industrial surveillance complex.)

So Zuckerberg’s logical leap to claim users of free services want to be shown only the most creepy ads is really a very odd one.

Let’s now turn to Zuckerberg’s use of the word “relevant”. As we noted above, this is a euphemism. It conflates many concepts but principally it’s used by Facebook as a cloak to shield and obscure the reality of what it’s actually doing (i.e. privacy-hostile people profiling to power intrusive, behaviourally microtargeted ads) in order to avoid scrutiny of exactly those creepy and intrusive Facebook practices.

Yet the real sleight of hand is how Zuckerberg glosses over the fact that ads can be relevant without being creepy. Because ads can be contextual. They don’t have to be behaviorally targeted.

Ads can be based on — for example — a real-time search/action plus a user’s general location. Without needing to operate a vast, all-pervasive privacy-busting tracking infrastructure to feed open-ended surveillance dossiers on what everyone does online, as Facebook chooses to.

And here Zuckerberg gets really disingenuous because he uses a benign-sounding example of a contextual ad (the example he chooses contains an interest and a general location) to gloss over a detail-light explanation of how Facebook’s people tracking and profiling apparatus works.

“Based on what pages people like, what they click on, and other signals, we create categories — for example, people who like pages about gardening and live in Spain — and then charge advertisers to show ads to that category,” he writes, with that slipped in reference to “other signals” doing some careful shielding work there.

Other categories that Facebook’s algorithms have been found ready and willing to accept payment to run ads against in recent years include “jew-hater”, “How to burn Jews” and “Hitler did nothing wrong”.

Funnily enough Zuckerberg doesn’t mention those actual Facebook microtargeting categories in his glossy explainer of how its “relevant” ads business works. But they offer a far truer glimpse of the kinds of labels Facebook’s business sticks on people.

As we wrote last week, the case against behavioral ads is stacking up. Zuckerberg’s attempt to spin the same self-serving lines should really fool no one at this point.

Nor should regulators be derailed by the lie that Facebook’s creepy business model is the only version of adtech possible. It’s not even the only version of profitable adtech currently available. (Contextual ads have made Google alternative search engine DuckDuckGo profitable since 2014, for example.)

Simply put, adtech doesn’t have to be creepy to work. And ads that don’t creep on people would give publishers greater ammunition to sell ad block using readers on whitelisting their websites. A new generation of people-sensitive startups are also busy working on new forms of ad targeting that bake in privacy by design.

And with legal and regulatory risk rising, intrusive and creepy adtech that demands the equivalent of ongoing strip searches of every Internet user on the planet really look to be on borrowed time.

Facebook’s problem is it scrambled for big data and, finding it easy to suck up tonnes of the personal stuff on the unregulated Internet, built an antisocial surveillance business that needs to capture both sides of its market — eyeballs and advertisers — and keep them buying to an exploitative and even abusive relationship for its business to keep minting money.

Pivoting that tanker would certainly be tough, and in any case who’d trust a Zuckerberg who suddenly proclaimed himself the privacy messiah?

But it sure is a long way from ‘move fast and break things’ to trying to claim there’s only one business model to rule them all.

from iraidajzsmmwtv https://tcrn.ch/2S42YXt via IFTTT