#still searching for another way for mobile

[briefinquiries]

Tyler Owens x Reader: Say Don't Go

Request: Anonymous asked: “​​I think your writing is one of the best on here for Tyler <3 i’d love to read your take on the reader sticking out a big tornado with Tyler, i guess similar to the rodeo scene in the movie with Kate but i’d like to read your own take on him just comforting the reader and making sure they get through it <3”

Word count: 3.7k 

Warnings: Blood & injury mention, tornado, hurt / comfort

A/N: thank you so so much for the kind words :((( absolutely loving these requests & all of the comments / replies to my recent tyler fics. please keep them coming!!

 “You could’ve stayed home if you didn’t want to come,” you said to Tyler frustratedly. 

“It’s not that I didn’t want to come,” he replied, trailing behind you as you ventured into another store. “I just didn’t realize that picking up a birthday gift was going to entail being at the mall ‘til sun down.”

“I told you I didn’t have anything picked out and that I’d probably have to look around–” you reminded him, stopping in your tracks so that you could turn to face him. 

Tyler put his hands up in surrender. “I know, I know. I’m sorry, I’ll shut up.”

As soon as he backed down, your gaze immediately softened. “Well I don’t want you to be miserable,” you said as you crossed your arms. 

The corner of Tyler’s lip tugged upward in a cheeky grin. “Now how could I ever be miserable when I’m spendin’ time with you?” 

You rolled your eyes, but you couldn’t help the smile that crept across your face. “Yeah, whatever,” you said with a smirk. “Why don’t you head to the food court? Once I finish up, I’ll come find you.”

He tilted his head to the side, like a puppy looking for permission. “You sure?” 

You nodded, adjusting the bag slung over your shoulder. “Yeah, of course. Just, don’t get ice cream without me,” you warned.

Tyler took a step forward so that you were now only inches apart. You felt his hand rest on the small of your back before he pulled you closer and leaned forward. The second that you felt his lips press against yours in a soft, gentle kiss, all of the annoyance and frustration you’d previously felt melted away in the blink of an eye. Even though you and Tyler had been together for nearly two years now, he still had that kind of effect on you. 

When he stepped away, a smile lingered on his lips. 

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he assured you. 

You kept your eyes trained on the back of his head as he made his way from the store, because the truth was– even when he pissed you off, you loved him more than you’d ever loved anything. 

Only when he was out of sight did you finally turn and resume your search. As much as you loved spending time with Tyler, you had to admit it was easier to shop around without him constantly moaning and groaning the entire time. 

You settled into the silence, taking your time as you made your way through the store. After inspecting all of the assorted knick knacks and smelling nearly every candle in the place, you finally settled on a necklace for your mom’s upcoming birthday. 

Once you’d paid, you tucked the jewelry box inside your bag and began making your way out of the store, planning to head straight for the food court to find Tyler. 

Except the second you stepped out of the store, you nearly jumped out of your skin at the loud sound of cracking thunder above. It was close– enough so the building trembled. You watched as other shoppers stopped in their tracks too. 

And then, to your absolute dismay, you heard the emergency alert systems on everyone’s phones start going off in unison. 

You pulled yours out of your pocket and read the message flashing across your screen. 

National Weather Service: TORNADO WARNING in this area until 8:30 PM CDT. Take shelter now in a basement or an interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building. If you are outdoors, in a mobile home, or in a vehicle, move to the closest substantial shelter and protect yourself from flying debris. Check media for more information. 

You swallowed thickly before glancing up from your phone. Gradually, others began doing the same. Then, as soon as everyone had read the warning and realized what was going on, panic ensued. 

People began running in all directions– pushing others aside and rushing towards exits. You tried your best to remain calm, but you couldn’t ignore the fear spreading through you. 

Instantly, your eyes began scanning the crowd as you instinctively began looking for Tyler.  

He’ll come for you, you thought. Tyler will come. 

But that didn’t mean you couldn’t meet him halfway. You tried to keep close to the wall to prevent being crushed in the crowd– unfortunately for you though, other people had the same idea. As hard as you tried to keep to the side, soon, you were sucked right into the mass of people. The only thing you could do was move with them and try desperately to stay on your feet as everyone pushed and shoved their way around you. 

Eventually, you dared to careen your neck up and scan for him. At first, all you saw was chaos– but people all seemed to be moving in the same direction now. You watched as parents picked up their children and spouses grabbed each other’s hands. Employees ran out of stores and customers dropped bags. 

It took a few minutes, but eventually, you spotted a familiar tuft of sandy brown hair– the only person in eyesight moving against the crowd.

“Tyler!” you screamed. 

He reacted to your voice, his head turning in the direction he thought it was coming from. 

“Tyler!” you yelled again. 

This time, his eyes landed right on yours. 

But before you could even sigh the breath of relief that was sitting in your chest, you felt something, or rather someone jab into your side. The force was enough to make you stumble on your feet and fall to the ground with a thud. People continued rushing by– feet stepping on you, knees colliding into your back. At one point, you tried to place your hand on the floor to give yourself enough leverage to stand up, but as soon as you did, a white converse stomped right on your fingers, causing you to hiss out in pain. 

Panic began creeping up your throat– making it harder to breathe, let alone think of a plan. A dark cloud began clouding your vision, numbing your senses to what was happening around you. Until suddenly, you heard your name being called. The sound broke through the haze. Before you could react, you felt two hands sliding underneath your armpits from behind. And suddenly, you were being hoisted up from the ground. 

“I got you,” Tyler’s voice said in your ear. You didn’t even get a chance to turn and look at him before he was pushing you forward. “We gotta move.” 

Thankfully, his grip under your arms never faltered, otherwise you were sure you wouldn’t have been able to keep up. But eventually, Tyler pushed you towards the outer edge of the busy mall hallway. Once you were no longer in danger of being flattened by the crowd, he spun you around– hands clutching your shoulders tightly while he blocked the remaining traffic from reaching you. 

“Are you hurt?”

You shook your head. At least you didn’t think you were… But when you glanced down at yourself, you quickly realized why Tyler even asked. Your button down shirt was ripped– presumably from being grabbed, and the tank top beneath it had a few spots of blood splattered across the fabric. You weren’t even sure where it came from. 

“We gotta go,” Tyler said urgently.  

“The shelter–” you began, but Tyler shook his head. 

“Everyone’s heading that way, it’ll be full by now. Plus, we don’t have time– I looked outside and… it’s close.”

“What do we do?” you asked, voice trembling with fear. 

Tyler let his arms fall from your shoulders and instead grabbed onto one of your hands. He gave it a reassuring squeeze before nodding in the opposite direction of where everyone else was running. 

“The stairwell,” he said. 

You nodded shakily. “Okay.”

With that, Tyler was off– weaving his way in and out of the crowd. Luckily, it had thinned out dramatically– most people heading towards the parking lot or the storm shelter on the other side of the mall. Once you broke away from the thickest part of the crowd, Tyler’s grip loosened slightly on your hand. 

“C’mon,” he urged, leading you around the corner. At the very end of the hallway was the door that led to the stairwell. 

But you only made it a few feet down the hallway before you felt the floor shake beneath your feet. Only moments after, there was a loud bang just as a chunk of the roof was being ripped off the building. 

“Tyler–” you yelled. 

“Keep going,” he pleaded. 

With part of the roof separated, you could hear the winds whipping outside more clearly. The sound was deafening, like a freight train barrelling right for you. 

But even above the raging winds– you heard the cries of someone nearby. You looked to your left to see a mother and her child huddled underneath a display booth. 

“Tyler,” you said again, tugging on his arm. 

He slowed down, turning towards where your eyes were fixated. He hesitated, clearly conflicted on what to do. 

“We have to help them,” you said. 

His eyes scanned yours desperately before he nodded. “Wait here,” he said, releasing your hand. 

You watched as Tyler crossed the hall– trying to avoid the debris now falling from the roof. He called something out to the woman, but you couldn’t hear above the sound of the wind. It was enough to catch her attention though, because soon she was passing her son to Tyler. The poor boy couldn’t have been older than five or six. Tyler pulled him to his side with ease before reaching his other arm out and helping the mother up from underneath the table. 

Once she was on her feet, Tyler passed her back her son and pointed towards where you stood against the wall. She tucked her son’s head against her chest and began hurrying forward– Tyler at her heels as they fought against the increasing winds. 

“Take my hand,” you yelled. With the arm she wasn’t using to support her son, she reached for you. 

You grasped onto her and helped pull her against the wall. 

“Go to the stairwell,” you explained. “Get underneath them, as low as you can.”

She nodded, unshed tears glistening in her eyes before she began heading down the hall. 

Just then, you heard a deafening crack. You turned to see another piece of the roof being pulled off– causing large chunks of debris to begin falling. 

“Get down!” you heard Tyler holler. Using your arm, you shielded your head the best you could and shrank to the floor as the largest piece fell. A cloud of dust enveloped you as soon as it landed and you felt small pieces of debris bouncing against your skin– After a brief moment, you dared to look up. 

But Tyler was no longer standing in front of you. 

“Tyler!” you screamed. Without thinking, you moved forward, trying your best to stay low. But despite your best efforts, you were still caught off guard by the piece of metal that blew past your head, slicing open your skin– “Fuck!” you yelled, grabbing at your temple. When you pulled your hand away, your fingers were coated in a thick, crimson liquid. 

“Tyler!” you yelled again, voice growing increasingly frantic. 

“I’m here–” you heard him yell back, causing your shoulders to deflate slightly. As you crawled around the largest pile of debris, you saw him on the ground, moving a chunk of roofing off his foot. His eyes met yours, a flash of concern crossing his face when he saw your head. “You gotta get to the stairs–”

“No, no, no. Not without you,” you shook your head, continuing to move towards him as you felt the blood trickle down the side of your face. 

“The storm’s here– you gotta go. You gotta take cover,” he pleaded. 

“I’m not leaving you–” you cried, unable to control the tears burning behind your eyes. As they fell down your cheek, they mixed with the blood from your temple. Once you were crouched beside him, you used what little strength you had left to Tyler’s hand and pull him from the small pile of rubble. 

When you looked at the short distance between yourselves and the staircase door– you were surprised to see the woman, propping it open with her body and waving towards the two of you to hurry up. 

“Move–” Tyler encouraged, pushing you against the wind. “Go, go, go–”

You army-crawled forward, wincing as more debris nicked your skin. But finally– you reached the door. Tyler moved his hand to your waist and guided you towards the staircase. 

The woman reached for her son, who was crouched low in the corner. Meanwhile, Tyler moved you towards one of the railings. 

“Hold on to this–” he instructed. You wound your arms around the fixture.

"Don't go–" you begged.

But immediately after, you felt the warmth from his body wrap around you. You looked up and saw Tyler shielding your body with his own– his hands gripping the part of the railing just above yours.

“I got you,” he promised. “We’re gonna be okay, I got you,” he repeated. But soon his voice was swept away by the sound of the storm. 

The winds grew even louder as the tornado moved closer– the noise of various chunks of debris slamming into the ground around you made you shake. You squeezed your eyes shut– hoping and praying to whatever God might be out there that Tyler was right and you’d both be okay…

You weren’t sure how long the storm raged on. It felt like hours, although you knew that couldn't be right. Eventually though, the winds died down. In their absence, you could hear the sound of the woman comforting her son, along with Tyler’s labored breathing above you. 

With a shaky hand, you reached behind you– like you didn’t quite trust that he was still there. You felt the fabric of his jeans beneath your palm and sighed out the choppy breath that had been lodged in your throat. 

“Tyler,” you heaved pathetically, voice cracking. 

“I’m here,” he gasped, voice equally shaky as he gasped for air. “I got you.”

Nodding, you brushed your hair from your sweaty face and felt Tyler shift. Following his lead, you turned towards him. As soon as your eyes landed on him– hunched over and breathing like he’d just run five miles, you let out a choked sob. 

“Are you okay?” he panted.

“Tyler–” was all you could manage to blurt out. 

A calloused hand cupped your face– thumb trailing along your hairline. You winced when his thumb passed over a sensitive spot on your head from where you’d been hit earlier. “You’re okay,” he soothed. “We’ll get it checked out.”

You nodded, leaning into his touch as you desperately craved comfort from him. Seemingly picking up on your need, he wrapped his arm around your shoulders and tugged you into his chest. “We’re okay,” he repeated, hand moving to cup the back of your neck. You let your eyes fall shut– inhaling the scent of his T-shirt. Even though he was coated in sweat and dust, he still smelled so comforting and familiar. 

He planted a kiss on top of your head before panting, “We gotta get out of here.”

You nodded, and forced yourself to pull away from him. Tyler helped you to your feet, eyes studying to make sure you were steady before he turned towards the woman. 

“You guys okay?” he asked. 

She nodded, clutching tightly to her son, who was still in her arms. 

“Alright, c’mon– be careful where you step,” he said, helping them out from the staircase. Tyler led them past you and into the hall before coming back for you. 

You desperately tried to steady your shaking legs. You were wobbly on your feet, but with Tyler’s help, you managed to maneuver your way out from underneath the staircase. 

As soon as you were back in the hall, your breath caught in your throat at the sight. The entire mall was destroyed– the roof had caved in, creating mounds of rubble everywhere you looked. There was dust all over– and no one else in sight. 

“Tyler–” you croaked again. His name seemed to be the only words you were able to form in your shock. 

“C’mon,” he urged gently, pulling you along. 

You let him lead the way, eyes scanning the debris hopelessly. You stopped in your tracks the moment you saw the first body– it was a woman, probably in her late twenties, just like you. She had a mound of tile stacked on top of her and a trail of blood soaking through her yellow sweater. Her eyes were still open– like they were frozen in fear. 

“Don’t look,” Tyler’s voice cut through the fog. 

He put his body between you and her and placed his hands on both sides of your face, forcing your gaze to meet his. 

“Sh– she’s dead,” you trembled. 

Tyler nodded solemnly. “I know,” he nodded. “Don’t look, okay? Just keep your eyes on me.”

Tyler wound his arm around your shoulders and tugged you into his side. With his fingers digging into the fleshy part of your hip, he led you forward, bearing the majority of your weight. Eventually, he managed to lead you all out of the rubble of the mall. 

“You sure you’re okay?” Tyler turned and asked the woman again. She nodded before thanking him and heading off in the direction of an ambulance. 

Tyler seemed to have something similar in mind. 

“I want to go home,” you insisted. 

But Tyler shook his head. “You need to get your head checked out first.”

“Tyler, please–” you whimpered. 

He glanced down at you– seemingly noticing the way your voice cracked. His face softened the moment he saw the tears sliding down your cheeks. 

“Hey–” he said gently. “Baby, you’re okay. Everything’s going to be okay.”

“I just want to go home,” you repeated. 

“I know, baby. I know,” he soothed. “But your head– I really want them to take a look. Then we can go home.” 

You sunk your teeth into your lower lip. After a moment, you nodded defeatedly and let Tyler lead you the rest of the way to one of the many ambulances parked near what was left of the mall. 

The paramedic who got to you first was a middle aged man with a kind smile. He told you how brave you were as he shined a flashlight in your eyes, checking your pupils. 

When he moved to the wound on your temple, now coating your entire hairline in gooey blood, you grimaced. 

“This is gonna need a few stitches,” he said after inspecting it. 

Tyler sat beside you and let you squeeze his hand as tightly as you needed while the paramedic stitched you up. He applied a local anesthetic but you felt every second of the needle threading through your skin. 

You held onto Tyler like your life depended on it, trying to allow his words of affirmation and comfort to consume you. 

“Almost done,” the paramedic said before clipping the remainder of the thread. He placed a clean bandage on the side of your head and offered you a soft smile. “You did great,” he told you. 

Although you were feeling detached from just about everything right now, you nodded in response before letting Tyler pull you to your feet. 

“Think you can walk?” he asked. 

You nodded again, although you didn’t entirely hear him. 

“The parking garage collapsed– but Boone’s on his way. He’s gonna give us a ride home.”

“Okay,” you mumbled softly, letting yourself melt into Tyler’s side again. 

The road where you met Boone was a short walk, and you were thankfully starting to get feeling back in your legs. But even still, you let Tyler support the majority of your weight as he guided you towards Boone’s familiar, beat up truck. Tyler held open the door and helped you climb inside.

“Christ–” Boone said, turning in the driver’s seat to get a good look at you. 

“She’s okay,” Tyler answered, sliding into the backseat beside you. Although he sounded like he was trying to convince himself more than Boone. 

“How the hell did you guys make it through that?” Boone asked as he surveyed the destruction around you. You forced yourself not to look. Instead, you rested your head against Tyler’s shoulder. “The blockade guy told me the entire storm shelter collapsed. I guess too many people crammed inside, so they couldn’t shut the door good.”

You swallowed thickly. If you hadn’t found Tyler, the storm shelter was going to be your plan B– 

“We hid under the staircase,” he said as Boone began down the road. “Had Dexter been tracking anythin’ out this way?” 

The two proceeded to talk about the sudden impact of the storm and whatever else tornado chasers cared about. Meanwhile, Tyler’s thumb trailed up and down your bare arm soothingly, allowing you to tune it all out. 

When Boone pulled down your dirt driveway and put his car in park fifteen minutes later, he turned to face you. “I’m real glad you’re okay.”

You offered him a weak smile. “Me too.”

After thanking his friend, Tyler helped you out of the car and towards the house, his hand never leaving your waist until you were inside. 

“Couch or bed?” he asked, shutting the front door behind him. 

“Couch,” you murmured. The bed meant stairs, which you weren’t sure you were ready for quite yet. 

“You got it,” he said. 

Gently, Tyler helped lower you to the couch, where you curled up against the corduroy fabric and sighed. 

But your eyes snapped open quickly as soon as you realized that Tyler wasn’t laying down with you. 

“Where are you going?” you asked, trying (and failing) to mask the panic in your voice. You shifted and sat up, a sudden wave of pain hit your head, causing you to squeeze your eyes shut. You tried your best to mask it and force your eyes back open. It felt pathetic, but you didn’t really want Tyler out of your sight right now. 

He turned around instantly. “I was just gonna get you some water and an ice pack, baby. I’ll be right back.”

“Okay,” you said uneasily. Your eyes remained trained on him the entire time he maneuvered around the kitchen. You could tell he noticed, too. His eyes kept flickering up to check on you. 

He was back in less than a minute– but still you sighed a breath of relief. He set the glass of water down on the side table before taking a seat on the other end of the couch. 

He handed you the ice pack and watched sadly as you placed it on your temple with a wince. 

“Can I get you anything else?”

“Will you– will you lay down with me?” you asked him. 

Tyler nodded. “Of course, baby.” He opened his arms, making a spot for you to lay between his legs. With your back resting against his chest, Tyler wound one arm around your middle and used the other to hold the ice pack against your head for you. 

Using what little strength you had, you gripped his forearm. “Just... please don’t go,” you begged. 

Tyler pressed his lips on the top of your head. “I won’t– I’m right here,” he assured you. “Not goin’ anywhere.”

You exhaled a sigh of relief and laid your head back against his chest, finally feeling content.  

After a while, you were finally able to drift off in his embrace. Your body ached and your head throbbed, but everything felt more bearable when you were in Tyler’s arms.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I. Competition

II. Regulation

III. Self-help

IV. Labor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[sylusjinwoon]

{ 163 }

anomaly.

jinwoo sung x isekai’d!fem.reader

{ you think your days are uneventful | and no one ever thinks about you… }

you had no rhyme or reason, not even a mere explanation, as to how this was possible.

you found yourself in the fictional world of solo leveling; a world that you adored with all your heart.

back in the real world...

you recall spending hours of your days binge reading the chapters of the manwha on your phone, falling in love with the amazing art style and the action sequences. it was embarrassing for you to admit, but in the midst of you reading the comic, you ended up developing quite the crush on the main protagonist, sung jinwoo.

of course, you were well aware of how he already had a canon love interest, but a part of you truly didn't care. when your emotions became too much for you to handle, that was when you would constantly search for any inserts pertaining to him, drowning yourself in such wonderful daydreams while saving each and every story you came across within the safety of your phone.

and when solo leveling's mobile game was announced-

you were the first to sign up for it immediately. once the game had launched globally for you to enjoy, you quickly dove into the game while doing your best to care for jinwoo. sure, there were some hiccups along the way, and you accidentally made him 'die' on some occasions, but still, you allowed your love for jinwoo to push you forward.

you spent some of your money on purchasing better items and weapons for jinwoo, slowly leveling up jinwoo in a more safe and efficient manner. and while you were simply enjoying the game, the last you you remember was working on grinding up jinwoo's level before falling asleep within the comfort of your bed-

only to find yourself in an unknown bedroom within an unfamiliar apartment. a gasp escapes from your lips when you look down at your hands, realizing that they looked... more colorful and bright-

almost as if you had been drawn and colored in.

a sudden knock heard on your door breaks you out of your thoughts, trailing your eyes to see your mother opening the door for you, "morning sweetheart, it's time to get up and go to classes!"

you were shocked to see that it was actually your mother who greets you with a sweet smile on her face. she was dressed in soft clothes consisting of a sweater and jeans with her arms crossed over her chest, waiting for you to get up.

"mom, i- where are we right now?"

she frowns upon hearing your question, "what do you mean? we're in seoul, your father got promoted as a hunter and was transferred to the korean hunter's association branch, remember?"

your mind was spinning. there was no way in hell this was real! your parents were both regular office workers. you had never once seen your dad with any combative abilities-

were you dreaming?

had your daydreams pertaining to solo leveling's world made you hallucinate this much?

as if sensing your confusion and discomfort, your mother goes inside your room and settles herself on your bed, reaching out a hand to you as she brushed back your hair. "honey, are you alright?"

you swallow thickly and tried to even out your breathing. "i-i'm fine! but uhm... just to double check... do you and i have any... abilities?"

your mother shakes her head and continues to gently brush back your hair. "no, we are normal civilians, but don't worry! your father will protect us..." she meets your gaze and asks in a warm and concerned manner, "did you wish to skip classes for the day? i'm sure your professors won't mind as much, since you are a university student."

you shake your head at the offer, actually feeling quite eager to explore the world of your beloved webcomic. "no mom, it's okay! i just had a strange dream... and was a little confused, that's all."

she gives you another bright smile before leaning in to press a kiss against your hair. "alright then, i'll make some breakfast for you, and you can head out to your classes afterwards."

she finally leaves you alone then, heading back out into the kitchen as you bolted out of bed to look at your reflection in the mirror. your features remained the same, yet now that you were 'drawn' into the art style of solo leveling, you knew that you were much prettier than usual.

gone were the acne scars and blemishes, and despite your figure remaining the same, you felt quite confident in it. as you touch at your face, admiring the bright quality of your eyes, you couldn't help but sigh to yourself.

"i may look better, but i still don't think i'm a match for cha hae-in."

despite how you could feel your heart pounding with excitement and anticipation at the thought of meeting sung jinwoo someday, you knew better than to get your hopes up. after all, he must have had his second awakening already and was simply doing raids and attending meetings and conferences throughout the world (as per the plot). you knew that his romance with cha hae-in would start to blossom soon, and you didn't wish to acknowledge or even be a witness to it.

in this world, even though i love it so much and would LOVE to be a badass hunter or a healer, i'm still just a civilian.

you continue admiring yourself in the mirror with an almost wistful expression. "maybe it's a blessing that i am a civilian and jinwoo is a hunter..."

that way, i don't have to meet him; i can save myself the heartache and forever remain out of his personal orbit.

you hear your mom calling out to you to come get ready and come to eat breakfast, breaking you out of your reveries as you walked out of your bedroom with a newfound eagerness.

{ ... }

[ ANOMALY DETECTED. ]

jinwoo was simply settled within his office, looking over some reports when the system showed him a new notification. he frowns at the translucent screen, hands reaching up to tap at it.

[ ANOMALY DETECTED. WOULD YOU LIKE TO VIEW IT?

YES / NO ? ]

he could feel his eyes flash purple in response, filled to the brim with concern at the thought of a brand new threat that appeared in his world.

"yes." was his simple answer, eyes becoming glued to the screen as he waited for what the system would show him-

only to feel a bit dumbfounded upon seeing a young woman walking out of her apartment. she was dressed casually with a bag slung over her shoulder, clearly a student as she made her way to the station.

"system, what makes this woman an anomaly?" he asks it casually, waiting for yet another reply. within seconds, a new screen was seen.

[ DIFFERENT UNIVERSE. ]

this message made jinwoo's eyes go wide, his anger quickly being replaced by curiosity. "and how are you certain she's from a different universe?"

[ SHE IS AWARE THAT SHE COMES FROM A DIFFERENT UNIVERSE. SHE IS THE ONLY ONE WHO IS AWARE. SHE IS AN ANOMALY. ]

jinwoo was intrigued now, hands remaining folded against his desk as his glowing, purple eyes continue to watch the woman go on with her day.

interesting... very interesting indeed.

{ ... }

even though you were simply making your way to class, you were honestly having so much fun. even though you technically haven't been out exploring seoul before, it was like you were running on autopilot, with your legs having no issue taking you to the university you attended.

there was a strange sense of familiarity that washes over you, and it almost felt like you were a character that was meant to be within solo leveling's world-

almost.

upon arriving at your university, you greet the two girls that you assumed were meant to be your friends, joining them before and after classes as you managed to enjoy lunch with them. during your classes, you were pleasantly surprised to find that you could understand the textbooks and the professor's written notes as you copied them diligently within your own notebook.

with your classes completed later that afternoon, you decided to spend some time exploring the city, basking in the beauty of the late afternoon while enjoying the sunset. as you stopped in the middle of the sidewalk while admiring the warmth of the setting sun, your phone began to ring with an incoming call from your mother.

picking it up on the second ring, you answer, "hello? hey mom, what's up?"

"you're finished for the day, right? do you mind coming home so that you can help me prepare dinner?"

"of course. i'll see you soon. i love you, mom!"

you hear her laughter on the other end. "i love you, too. stay safe, and come home soon!"

after hanging up the call, you walk with your head held high and a bounce in your step.

even knowing the dangers that were to come-

(the monarch's invasion settled within the heart of this city)-

you held no anxiety or fear because jinwoo would ultimately take care of the war, protecting everyone and everything that lived on this earth while taking on the burden all on his own.

{ ... }

jinwoo had been watching the young woman for quite a few weeks now, and he was fascinated by her carefree and happy nature.

had those who came from a different universe always remained this happy?

even when she was simply doing mundane things like...

attending classes,

helping her mother cook,

eating dinner with her parents the moment her father came home,

and simply studying-

jinwoo couldn't look away.

it was like her finding joy with the simple things in life was like a beacon of light to him. she had an inner beauty that called out to jinwoo, and he found himself desperate to know more about her.

i should meet her soon... and place a shadow soldier on her.

he swipes away at the system's screen the moment he sees her get into bed. knowing that she had class the next day, jinwoo decides to make some time to meet her once and for all.

{ ... }

"oh my god, is that who i think it is?!" one of your friends was heard crying out to you, hanging on to your arm in a tight manner as she stops you from crossing the gate.

"hm? what are you talking about?" you ask with a yawn.

"it's him! the latest s-rank hunter, sung jinwoo!" your other friend was practically freaking out, too, eyes going wide as a dreamy expression crosses her features.

of course, how could you forget? in this world, powerful hunters were viewed and treated like celebrities. as you strained to look toward the gates, you saw that it was indeed jinwoo settled near the gates. he was dressed in his usual coat and suit with what looked like a bouquet of flowers in his hand.

strange, does cha hae-in attend this university, too?

you thought to yourself, even though you were 100% certain that she only worked as a hunter-

but why else would jinwoo be here with a bouquet of flowers?

"you guys go ahead and meet him." you slowly back away from your friends, adjusting your bag as you looked toward the other gate of your university, "i just know that he is going to have a whole group of fans flocking to him, and i don't want to be late. i made plans with my parents." you lie through your teeth before making a dash away from the gate, not even bothering to reply to your friend's protests.

you were determined to never meet with jinwoo-

after all, you didn't want to even fall any more in love with him than you already were-

especially when knowing that he had always belonged to someone else.

however, in the midst of you running away, you were unaware of a pair of glowing, purple eyes that followed your every movement.

{ ... }

she's avoiding me...

jinwoo finds himself back home, barely touching the dinner his mother had prepared for him. his chopsticks kept picking at the rice, eating it a single grain at a time while deep in thought.

"oppa, if you keep going at that pace, you'll be stuck here forever." jinah teases him between bites of her own food, "seriously, what's up with you?"

not even jinah's teasing could break him out of his intrusive thoughts, earning a concerned look from his mother. "jinah, could you give me a moment to talk to your brother?"

she rolls her eyes playfully, but ultimately listens to her, standing from her seat with her bowl of rice and side dishes in hand, giving them some privacy. unable to find his appetite, jinwoo puts down his bowl and pushes it away from him. feeling her touch as she reaches across the table toward him, his chin was suddenly being held by his mother, her own dark eyes filled with concern for him.

"what's wrong, my love?"

he swallows thickly, trying to hide how he was feeling. "nothing is wrong..."

because she was his mother, he should have known better than to lie. "you're heartbroken."

jinwoo stiffens completely when he hears her words. "n-not exactly when she... ah... she doesn't know that i exist. or rather... she doesn't even wish to acknowledge me."

his mother remains silent for a few beats before letting out a soft laughter. "well, perhaps the young lady is a bit intimidated by you, jinwoo."

he could feel his eyes going wide upon hearing her words, feeling shy when she kept on laughing, "in fact, you remind me of your father. when i first met him, i was filled with such joy and love at the mere sight of him. yet... because i had never felt such a powerful sense of love before, i tended to shy away from him a bit."

his mother continues to speak with her eyes closed, "but despite my distance, your father was persistent. he never once gave up on me, always sending me sweet gifts and taking me out on fun little dates. it was through his kindness alone that he had captured my heart completely, getting rid of my doubts since i knew that he was the one for me."

jinwoo smiled at his mother, allowing her to bask in her memories with a hint of sadness felt within his heart.

"so, what are you suggesting that i do then?"

his mother finally opens her eyes before giving him a wide grin, "if she means that much to you, then you need to capture her heart... turn whatever anxieties she has for you into something softer and warmer... like love. you are your father's son, and i know that you not only inherited his appearance, but his tenacity as well..."

he could feel his heart grow lighter in response to her words, now being filled with a newfound courage. letting out a light chuckle when he stands from his seat, coming towards his mother so that he could press a kiss against her hair.

"thanks mom... for the advice. i know exactly what i need to do now."

{ ... }

ever since you first caught sight of jinwoo lingering outside of your university, you had been extra cautious of your surroundings. sure, you were well aware that he had the power to keep track of you through inserting his soldiers within your shadow-

but if you were nowhere near his periphery, then he could not insert them into your shadow, therefore, making it unable for him to watch you fully.

so in your head, there was no way jinwoo could possibly keep track of you.

about a month had passed since you and your friends saw jinwoo, and ever since then, you didn't see him (thank the rulers above). since you were much more relaxed right now, completely convinced that jinwoo being close to your campus was a mere coincidence. and who knows? maybe that was the chosen meeting place he and hae-in had agreed on.

wishing to enjoy your saturday, you finish eating breakfast with your parents before telling them about your plans of enjoying the city. of course, they let you do as you pleased while making you promise them to be home by 9pm at the latest. sealing your promise with them, you grab your bag that held your phone and wallet before leaving your apartment.

the weather was so nice, and you could feel the gentle wind coursing through your hair, making you let out a happy sigh. you stop walking and take a moment to enjoy the weather. "i knew it was a good idea to come out of the house."

"about time."

you freeze upon hearing a deep chuckle settled a few feet away from you, making your eyes go wide as you saw what appeared to be shadowy wisps forming before you.

you were left gaping when jinwoo reveals himself from the shadows, giving you a smug expression.

"did you think you could hide from me forever?" amusement was seen shining within his grey eyes, appearing as bright as silver with the way the sun was seen against them. you were caught off guard, whispering to him in a shocked manner, "you wasted your shadow exchange for this?"

jinwoo's eyes were tilted upwards in question, "oh, so you know a lot about me then?"

he ignores your flustered expression, coming closer to you as he held your chin tightly with one of his hands. he forces you to look at him, a look of annoyance with a hint of anger shimmering within his now glowing, purple eyes.

"why have you been avoiding me?"

his question comes out as strained, and you had no clear answer to give him without spilling your own secrets.

because i'm not from this world?

because i'm half in love with you due to the fact that you're my comfort character?

because i don't want to see you falling for cha hae-in and feel hurt and envious at the same time?

yet none of those words fall from your parted lips, and you couldn't stop yourself from meeting his gaze with a pout. seeing your expression, he sighs and immediately lets go of your chin. running a hand through his hair, he appears disappointed in himself when he meets your gaze again.

"i'm sorry, i was supposed to treat you gently..." jinwoo apologizes to you before taking a hold of your hand. "come on, let me take you out on a proper date."

by now, your mind was spinning, sputtering out weak protests as you could feel the heat against your cheeks. were you dreaming again? was this actually happening?

did your fantasies just come to life?

still caught in a daze, you and jinwoo had been walking for quite some time when he finally stopped at what looked like an amusement park. you look behind you to double check yourself, taking note that the skies were still perfect and sunny-

not at all swallowed up by a looming, purple gate.

a knowing smile crosses your features when jinwoo purchases tickets for you and him to go into the park, making you bask in the sweet scents of cakes, candies, with a hint of buttery popcorn. of course, thanks to his status as an s-rank hunter, he was allowed entry with you within mere minutes.

as you both walk into the amusement park, the crowd of people that once lingered quickly parted ways, their excited whispers could be heard while jinwoo kept your hand held tightly within his.

"no way, it's hunter sung jinwoo!"

"who's that with him?"

"i don't believe she's a hunter..."

"hunter sung with a regular civilian? wow, that's unheard of."

you felt your anxieties beginning to mount when jinwoo suddenly gave your hand a squeeze.

"just ignore them and don't even worry about it." jinwoo's smile manages to captivate you, and you had to look away from him (unless you wished for your heart to burst from the confines of your chest!)

why didn't you go with hae-in instead, like you were supposed to?

you didn't allow your jealousy to ruin this seemingly perfect moment with him, deciding to ask instead, "why did you want to go here with me?"

jinwoo shrugs while looking straight ahead. "i've always wanted to try and go here once... while taking a chance to get to know you better."

you blink up at him, detecting what he was hinting in his voice.

had he been watching you after all?

did he know that you weren't meant to be here-

is that why he held an interest in you?

because you weren't normal-

because you were an anomaly?

"do you want to get on that ride first?" jinwoo breaks through your thoughts, making you look up to see one of the rollercoasters. with a smile, you knew that you would enjoy each and every ride more so than cha hae-in ever could since you were still a mere civilian. such cheap thrills were still very much entertaining to you.

"yes! if it's at all possible, i'd like to ride everything at least once!" you tell him with a wide smile, squeezing his hand in response when he smiles down at you.

"sure, let's go on every ride, then."

so you spent the next several hours getting on each and every ride. while jinwoo maintained a blank expression, you raised your arms up and continued to yell with joy and happiness. each ride filled you with an exhilaration you hadn't felt in a long time. 

and with jinwoo follwing you every step of the way, you only felt your happiness increase.

after tiring yourself out with all the rides, jinwoo buys you lunch consisting of a cheeseburger meal. you look over at him, seeing him sipping at his soda while not even eating. between bites of your burger, you asked him why he didn't get anything to eat.

in response to your question, jinwoo simply rests his cheek against the palm of his hand. "i'm not hungry... because seeing your happiness and smile is enough to fill me."

your eyes go wide, not expecting jinwoo to say such a thing to you. as your heart began to race in response, you saw jinwoo looking away from you with a blush and a grin. he remains quiet, allowing you to finish your meal when he suddenly asks, "i know you're probably tired from all those rides, but... do you think you can handle one last ride with me?"

your breathing becomes labored then, heart already beginning to skip beats when you realized what was going to happen next...

{ ... }

your screams could be heard as you practically cling to jinwoo while riding on kaisel's back. as the shadow monarch kept laughing at your terrified screams, you were doing all that you could to keep from puking up your lunch!

the wyvern's wings seemed to cut through the skies, picking up speed at jinwoo's commands as you held on to him in an even tighter manner. after what felt like an eternity, kaisel began to slow down its flight, landing in the midst of a forested area while jinwoo carried you down its back.

jinwoo lands against the plush grass with you still in his embrace, still giving you an innocent smile while admiring your scowling face.

he calls out your name in between his laughter, "are you alright?"

you shake your head and fought back the dizziness coupled along with the contents of your food felt swirling in your stomach. "n-no... that was practically maniacal of you, sung jinwoo."

jinwoo's laughter becomes louder now, still keeping you in his arms when he tells you with a hint of arrogance. "consider this as payback for purposely ignoring me for so long."

his words only makes the nausea get worse, filling you with anxiety when he continues to walk even deeper into the forest, not stopping until he reached a clearing that you were all too familiar with.

your heart clenched with pain at the memory of hae-in with jinwoo at this exact location, watching as a shooting star was seen decorating the night sky.

yet, with you still in his embrace, the scene was a little different.

jinwoo settles himself against the grass, placing you on his lap with his arms wrapped around you. he presses your back against his chest with a hum, never once looking away from the skies while keeping you close to him.

your heart was still racing painfully, but you struggled to find the right words to even say to him. and as you were stewing in your thoughts, you knew you had to tell him the truth.

"do you realize that i am not originally part of your universe?"

jinwoo doesn't look away from the skies, only letting out another hum as his grin seemed to widen in response to your question. "of course i know... but don't worry. it doesn't matter to me where you're from... as long as you agree to be mine from now on."

your mouth turns dry at his answer, making you turn around to face him, "w-what? how can it not matter to you? i...i tried so hard not to get in the way of your life, b-because you deserved to be happy with cha hae-in..."

he meets your gaze then, eyes glowing purple once more, "you thought that was best for me?"

your throat clenches painfully and you look away from him, only managing a nod in response.

"...is that why you were so dead set on avoiding me?"

you shut your eyes and let out a shaky "yes, i didn't want to fall even more in love with you... knowing that you belonged to her originally."

"don't be ridiculous... i am my own person and can very much choose who i wish to be with." jinwoo reassures you in between bouts of his laughter, tightening his hold on you before continuing, "i've said it before, and i'll say it again, it doesn't matter to me where you came from."

he shifts the way he held you just then, turning you around so that you were now fully facing him, with your hands against his shoulders. your face was getting hotter by the minute, and from the way jinwoo was holding you in place, you couldn't even look away from him.

"when the system alerted me to your presence, i thought that you were a threat... but the more i observed you, i came to admire you..."

shutting his eyes, you felt jinwoo gently delving his fingers into your hair before continuing, "i was honestly so mesmerized by your presence... and i kept thinking to myself... 'how are you able to be so happy all the time? how are you so filled with love for your family and friends? why did you exude so much light...?'"

jinwoo opens his eyes once more, now framing at your face with his two hands, "you being in my universe was the best thing that ever happened to me... and you being here makes me happy, do you understand?"

"jinwoo..."

your whisper of his name was all you could manage when he suddenly tightens his arms around you, bringing your head down closer to his when he perfectly slots his lips with yours, kissing you with a passion you had never once felt before as you basked in this moment with him...

a.n. - ahhhh i'm so happy at how this came out! i've wanted to do a story like this for a while, and i hope that you readers have enjoyed it as well 🥹

edit: i'm trying to make this appear in the tags, so i'm sorry if this is a double post to you! 😭

all stories are written by rei; reposts, translations, and plagiarism are not allowed.

[sayruq]

Abdulrahman was one of the first to die.A carpenter in the village of Qarawat Bani Hassan, he had been on his way back home from work in Ramallah in February last year when he was arrested at a mobile checkpoint. He was taken into administrative detention - under which Israel can hold people indefinitely without charge - in Megiddo prison. His brother Ibrahim said the charges against him were minor, such as taking part in protests and possessing a firearm, but said he was also accused of belonging to Hamas although there were no specific charges about any activities within the group. Ibrahim is still trying to piece together how exactly his brother died. He has to rely on testimony from Abdulrahman's former cellmates, as well as reports from court hearings. One former cellmate, who spoke to the BBC on condition of anonymity, said: "After 7 October, it was total torture. They beat us for no reason, they searched us for no reason. Even if you look at someone the wrong way." He described having seen Abdulrahman heavily beaten in front of him and others. "At 9am, they came into our cell, and began to beat us. One of the guards began to insult Abdulrahman's parents, which he didn't stand for, and he began to fight back. "They beat him badly, and took him away to another cell upstairs for a week. During that time you could hear him crying out in pain." He said he had only found out about Abdulrahman's death after he left prison a week later.

[disabled-womans-woman]

Did you know?

Searching for Cane Decorating (as in the mobility aid) gets you pages of results for Christmas craft videos. Even specifiying by adding the term "disability" or "mobility" still leaves you with a bunch of DIY home decor with cane webbing, for some reason.

So! Here's some videos to get you started on making your mobility aid reflect your personality:

First is this video featuring a lot of general discussion around mobility aids and being disabled, but does feature large sections for making your aids work for you in a fashionable way--including how to wear heels while using a cane!

Next, we have this short and sweet (under 5 mins.) aesthetically pleasing video on decorating a cane, that's not just using stickers or bedazzling. It's quite a unique end-product that I haven't seen with other mobility aid customizations.

EDIT NOTE: while the above creator is femme presenting, the result is pretty gender neutral and looks like a high fantasy elf's cane!

This is another video for decorating that isn't just stickers and bedazzling, but it's much longer than the previous vids with a lot of the YouTuber (Voice Actress Cari Favole) talking about their life and disability in the first 14 minutes before starting the customization.

Last off, is this video review about just buying a walking stick that is already fashionable and customized for you.

Do you know any other videos about making your mobility aid work with your fashion & personality that you love? Feel free to add them below!

[yandereunsolved]

Yandere Daryl Dixon taking care of traumatized reader—why can't everyone just go away? except you, you can stay. (cw(s): Daryl's trauma, talks of anxiety, ptsd, non-descriptive self-harm)

Yandere Daryl didn't think much of you at first. You're just another weaklin' that'll be gone in a few dawns. He shouldn't waste his time lookin' after people like that anyway.

You barely talked since he met ya. You refuse to make eye contact with anyone else in the group. You contribute, but it isn't much. Unlike him, you appear to be a sweet lil snack for the walkers: defenseless and skittish, a rabbit.

Still, like a leaf holdin' onto a sickly oak in a tornado, you stayed alive. From the quarry to the prison, you ambled along, not opening up to anyone. Well, maybe you opened up to him just a lil.

Yandere Daryl ends up being your safe place. He's someone who listens. He may not be good with feelings n' shit but he listens well. He lets you curl up next to him and tell him about anything. Sometimes it's nothing, and he appreciates that.

You both can sit in silence, and it's never awkward. It's like two kin souls meeting each other and simmering together.

Yandere Daryl grows closer to you. He doesn't want to think about it. He's always thinkin' about ya. There's always at least one eye on your figure.

He refuses to let you go on trips alone or without him. So naturally he gets somewhat aggressive when others talk down to ya. If someone raises their voice atcha, then he's ready to punch their teeth inward. He's proud of the sick and twisted thoughts that roll through his head of the things he wants to do to anything that threatens to hurt you.

He doesn't want to show you that side of him.

He's heard about your past and how the fall of the world affected you. He promised himself that he wouldn't ever be the reason you shut down or have a pstd flashback. He's workin' on being better than his mom and pop's relationship. Even the notion of possibly raising a hand against you makes his stomach churn, his head spin.

Yandere Daryl is always there to comfort you when something goes awry. He's still shitty at it, but he provides himself and hopes to whatever is out there, that's it's good enough. He tends to wrap one or both arms around you when you shut down/regress. He enjoys placing his chin over the top of your head and humming a sweet tune that he heard from the uppity church ladies that used to frequent his shitty neighborhood. 

He tries to say those nice things.

"Is alright."

"I'll protect ya."

"You're safe. The bad people can't hurt ya no more."

It helps heal his inner child as well. He gets to protect you, and it feels like he's protecting little Daryl Dixon as well. There's no screamin', hittin', broken booze bottles, or half-tapped-out cigarettes. There's only you and him. 

He'd murder anyone that got in the way of that, even Carol, even Rick.

He'll never admit it, but he likes it when you play with his hair, especially when you're stressed or overwhelmed. If you trace his scars, then he's in heaven.

Yandere Daryl always makes sure you have whatever health stuff you need. It could be meds, certain foods, prosthetics, or anything else. He'll do anything. He puts himself in the toughest situations just to make sure you are happy n' alive.

Have a medical condition? Meds are yours. He'll find substitutes if he can or learn medicinal remedies.

Allergies or food restrictions? No worries. He may be a shitty cook, but it's the end of the world. He's got plenty of time to practice so you can have a fully tummy and plenty of energy.

Hard of hearing or deaf? He learns sign language. He may be bad at it, but he'll learn! He doesn't mind repeating himself or repeating what others said for you. He'll do his best to find hearing aids or batteries if you used those before the world went to hell.

Partially or fully blind? He'll find you a cane or wittle you a walking stick. He'll be your guide.

Have a missing body part or limited mobility? He'll search high and low for a prosthetic. He'll carry you if he needs to. He'll help you in any way. He can't really find how practical wheelchairs are in the apocalypse, but he'll figure somethin' out.

Some other restriction or something rare he's never heard of? He'll go hell n' back to make sure you have whatever you need.

You just need space? Fine. He's still going to watch you from afar.

There are times when walker bites seem to pale in comparison to that innocently bright expression in your eyes. It's the look that he's always wanted to see from somebody. You look at him like he's some sort of protector, some hero. The first time he saw it, his initial reaction was to brush it off and call you stupid. He regretted that as soon as he saw you deflate and curl back within yourself. He mumbled a 'sorry' and made sure to never do it again.

Yandere Daryl almost breaks down the first time he notices your self-harming tendencies. It could be fresh cuts or starving yourself. It isn't good. He tries not to be harsh with you.

He tries.

It's just so hard because he's crying. He's trying to be quiet but he can't. He loves you so much that the thought of you not loving yourself makes him want to worship you until you do.

Why can't you see it? Why can't you see how special you are?

He wants to think you're selfish, but he knows you're not. It's your body. Is he being selfish? No. Yes? No.

He doesn't know.

All he knows is that he ends up on his knees with tears streaming down his face. He's begging. The words aren't intelligible, but he is.

This is what you do to him. This lil lamb just had to lay in his pasture.

Just stay alive. He'll do the rest for you.

Yandere Daryl just protects you. He hates groups but he knows they're important. You've made bonds, and so has he, unfortunately. He'll just keep you close. Maybe one day he'll be able to confess his undying reverence for you. Hopefully you won't figure out how many people he has killed for you. The things he has done... oh, they'd make the devil cry. As long as you sleep well at night knowing your Daryl Dixon is protectin' you. Well, he doesn't care about the so-called 'collateral damage' because of it.

[leog4u]

Adult Gaming Survey Results!

Hey, hey! Here's the results of that survey on adult games I set up a while back. I was blown away by the amount of responses, totaling at 1,159! After reading every write-in, I've made a little write up with some analyses that adult game devs could chew on. I think it's also interesting from an audience stand point, so give it a read! The link above goes to the survey results, so you can see the percentages and write-ins for yourself. Oh also here's a link to the top 12 favorite adult games of the responses, so you don't have to count the 591 answers yourself.

As a reminder, this is a survey for adult games. Search any game in the response list at your own risk. Minors go do something else.

And with that out of the way...!

How often do you play adult games?

Something I noticed was quite a few replies mention very large gaps between adult game sessions. I'd like to drill down on this, because paired with respondents mentioning not know how to acquire adult games, this lack of awareness might lead to less opportunities for playing adult games.

The flip side to many responses in “Other” mention binge bursts, followed by long periods of no adult game activity, it might just be a case of adult life lacking free time. 

How long do you expect an adult game to be?

A relief to game devs, there’s no major expectation for an adult game to be pulling JRPG playtime numbers. A majority would rather play a game that does what it sets out to do at its own pace, rather than hitting a target goal of X hours and be subject to poor flow and padding. 

How long is an adult gaming session?

A majority spend over an hour, with time set aside to do said adult gaming. While “till i finish” could be less than an hour, it’s still a designated time set aside to play an adult game.

What’s interesting is the responses in the “Other” category that go into detail, if the goal is to just get off, it’ll be quick. But if a game has plot and gameplay, like some kind of video game, then it’s likely they’ll take more time as they’re now being entertained in the way a video game does.

When it comes to art, what level of quality do you expect?

Again, something that should come as a relief to adult game devs. There’s not a big expectation of painted, master quality art that would be hung in a museum. People want something that gets the idea across and something fresh. 

The style should match the actual content of the game. Too many times I've played a game with the most facebook friendly mobile game style, and it just feels like it's distracting from what the game is trying to actually do.

It also would help if when a potential customer scrolls down the itch.io adult game page, their eyes don't glaze over at art that looks like every other game on the market.

Do you buy your adult games?

A problem that is highlighted here is the lack of ability or knowledge on how to buy adult games. Storefronts hide the settings needed to see adult game options, which actively lead to a lack of knowledge on how to purchase. 

A majority of the “Other” category mentions it being a combination of spending money and playing free games.

Another point to note is that some mentioned that they will pirate with the intention of spending money later. A free demo, like some mention seeking out first, can help devs avoid piracy, since some people use pirated games as a demo when none is available to see if the game’s worth it.

Another note, which unfortunately won’t help the devs affected, but when non-english games aren’t available in english or on english storefronts, some respondents feel that the only way to play is by pirating. It’s difficult to get the numbers, but I’d be interested in seeing how well japanese adult games on steam that have been localized for english speaking audiences are doing, since that previously wasn’t an option for japanese adult devs until very recently.

How important is writing in adult games for you?

This was actually a surprising result to me. Adult games primarily advertise their art. How much of it there is, how well drawn it is, if it’s animated or not. So seeing 77% of respondents cite good writing as one of the most important parts to an adult gaming experience really changes what the priorities should be for an adult game dev. 

While some would skip writing, either to get to “the good stuff” or just to skip over bad prose, some have an actively worse experience with being shown bad writing.

How important is animation in the porn scenes?

A recurring sentiment in the “Other” category is that if the animation is bad, don’t bother. 

Combined with the majority of 67.1% saying that animation is optional, I think adult game devs are safe to not prioritize it unless their game is the kind that needs it to function, like a side-scroller. It drains a lot of money and resources, especially for a first time project.

Even the live2D tweening has little payoff with these numbers considered.

How important is voice acting in the porn scenes?

Similar to animation, voice acting is a nice feature to have, if it’s done well. Otherwise it can feel tacked on, or worse, detrimental to enjoying the game.

With 50% not caring or actively muting, I think it’s safe to say that it’s a “nice to have” and resources should be focused on other things like writing and gameplay.

How important is sex sound effects in the porn scenes? (moaning, wet slapping, squelching, etc)

What’s really fascinating is that the sound effects and audio design are more appreciated than the voice acting. If I had to pinpoint a difference, it’s that bad delivery can ruin a scene, but a sound effect is far less intrusive.

What genres of porn games do you like the most?

The genres chosen were a combination of which were the most populated as well as recent trends. A large amount of write-ins were expressing that simulation games were a favorite. 

Now comes the question, is the number one favorite genre RPGs because that’s the best genre for an adult game, because it’s a genre people enjoy playing for gaming’s sake, or because a massive amount of adult games are made in RPG Maker? I think it’s a little bit of columns A, B, and C.

When it comes to adult games, what matters more?

People are here for porn, but that doesn't mean they're here for just porn. They want a good delivery vehicle for the porn. Both parts of this sentiment mean that there's one thing you should avoid more than anything and it's annoying padding and grinds. They bought your game, there's no need hide a nipple behind five hours of gameplay. Likewise, it's not very good game design to give the player everything at once, as I've mentioned before.

There are several draws to adult games. It's intimacy in a safe, virtual environment. It's making bonds with characters the player falls in love with that end with a climax, or two. It's exploring kinks. And it's blowing off some steam by getting your rocks off. These should be considered when designing a porn game.

Does a kink you enjoy influence if you buy an adult game?

In the future, I would rephrase this question as asking how much your kink factors into buying a game, rather than what was presented. As it stands, “I buy things if they’re good” isn’t that interesting or valuable of an insight.

Respect to the small slice that don't buy shit unless it has their kink in it.

Does a kink you dislike influence if you buy an adult game?

Making more extreme or polarizing kinks optional enables the developer to explore said kinks while allowing the player to avoid uncomfortable situations. As long as it’s clear what’s optional and what isn’t on the product description, this seems to be the preferred method. 

What’s your stance on AI art?

A landslide stance. This can be attributed to politics: there is a hardcore stance against any and all AI. That aside however, when it comes to selling a product to a consumer, why would they want a product they know was made with no care or effort? Where else were corners cut? AI in porn games are usually used to generate the art and writing, the most important parts (according to the survey) to the porn game. It's where you want the most care and attention, not the opposite.

What aspect of an adult game do you care about the most?

Players care about the porn in their porn games. This isn’t a surprise. Audio being ranked so low also isn’t a surprise considering the previous results. But, what is interesting is how gameplay is ranked highest in the “important” category, past art and writing. I interpret it as “come for the art and writing, stay for the gameplay.” 

Talking Points From the Free Form Responses

Replayability and customization are gameplay features people value, which can be reflected in the amount of responses citing games such as Corruption of Champions and Degrees of Lewdity as their favorites.

Porn games are really unique because you need to list out its content. We're used to spoilers being a bad thing in marketing materials, but for porn its mandatory. A customer needs to know: what's the degree of sexual content, is it cheese cake, is it gay, is there dub-con, is there inflation, the list goes on. Nobody will be mad to know that something they don't like is in something. Well, some people will be, but it's a lot worse when it's a surprise. Also consider, it stops comments asking if there's content like pregnancy in your game or not.

I can not understate how important customization is to a number of people, wanting the body and pronouns they have to be reflected in the player character. This gives text based games a bit of an edge, since it's significantly less resource intensive to accommodate for all these different identities in text vs having to make art assets for every configuration and body type.

There’s a general lack of knowledge on where to actually get adult games. This is due to social media sites making it difficult for adult content to be shared, as well as limited market places for adult content. Epic Game Store has a ban on it, despite allowing for full on con-artist projects like NFT and Crypto games, while Steam requires some settings to be changed that aren't advertised. However, Steam's new feature to hide games definitely helps gamers feel more comfortable acquiring adult games since their friends won't have to know when they're jerking off.

Woman focused content that doesn’t involve non-con is lacking. Meanwhile, a lot of adult games that feature a woman protagonist that does consent either have her be bimbofied or a literal succubus, rather than an actual character that wants sex like their male counterparts. These male counterparts could be extracted from their porn game and placed in any other fantasy story and get along fine, so why not women?

Don’t forget to add a gallery to your game.

[androgynealienfemme]

"Yes, it's true: I was the type of young femme who managed the girls basketball team in high school, just to be able to take in the sight of all those butches parading their muscles up and down the court. I found Girl Scout camp to be femme heaven and reveled in being able to explore my athletic self and still maintain my femmeness. And, to my horror, I have to admit pushing Tina away from my breasts in the back seat of a Buick while attending Mount Saint Mary Seminary. And then there was feminism... Although I came out as a "gay" woman before reading The Feminine Mystique, the seventies brand of white feminism had me trimming my nails and cutting off my hair. Soon I was outfitted in farmer jeans and high tops. And still I was told by my "sisters" that I didn't "look like a dyke" (read: I didn't look butch). I began to lead two lives- one as an outrageous, skirted, lipsticked femme while I worked in and traveled with carnivals, and another as an imitation butch back home in the women's community. Eventually, I pulled the pieces of my being back together and proclaimed boldly, "I am a working-class lesbian femme." So I had maybe six years reveling in unleashing my seductive femme self when, as lives go, mine changed: slowly at first and then more dramatically. Recurring back pain and limited range of mobility were finally diagnosed. Soon after came decreased mobility. No more mountain climbing. No long mall walks in search of the perfect piece of sleaze. No more standing against kitchen walls being gloriously fucked by some handsome butch. I stopped using alcohol and drugs, became ill with what is now known as CFIDS (Chronic Fatigue Immune Dysfunction Syndrome), and began to use a three-wheeled power chair. The more disabled I became, the more I mourned the ways my sexual femme self had manifested through the nondisabled me: cruising at the local lezzie bar, picking up a dyke whose eyes refuse to stray from mine, dancing seductively, moving all of me for all of her. Cooking: love and suggestion neatly tucked into the folds of a broccoli quiche. Serving my date in varying, sleazy clothing, removing layers as the meal and our passion progressed. And making love... feeling only pleasure as my hips rose and fell under the weight of her. Accomplishment and pride smirked across my face as her wrists finally submitted to the pressure of strong persistent hands. There are the ways I knew to be femme, to be the essence of me.

It's been five years now since I began using my wheelchair. I am just awakening to a new reclamation of femme. Yes. I still grieve the way I was, am still often unsure how this femme with disabilities will act out her seduction scenes. I still marvel when women find passion amidst the chrome and rubber that is now a part of me.

There have been numerous dates, lovers, relationships, sexual partners, and fliterations along the way. Cindy, Jenny, Ellie, Emma, Diane, Dorothy, Gail, June, Clove, Lenny, Cherry, Diana, Sarah I, and Sarah II. You have all reminded me in your own subtle or overt, quit or wild ways that I am desirable, passionate, exciting, wanted.

Yes I am an incredibly sexual being. An outrageous, loud mouthed femme who's learning to dress, dance, cook, and seduce on wheels; finding new ways to be gloriously fucked by handsome butches and aggressive femmes. I hang out with more sexual outlaws now- you know, the motorcycle lesbians who see wheels and chrome between your legs as something exciting, the leather women whose vision of passion and sexuality doesn't exclude fat, disabled me.

Ableism tells us that lesbians with disability are asexual. (When was the last time you dated a dyke who uses a wheelchair?) Fat oppression insists that thin is in and round is repulsive. At times, these voices become very loud, and my femme, she hid quietly amidts the lists.

Now my femme is rising again. The time of doubt, fear, and retreat has passed. I have found my way out of the lies and oppression and have moved into a space of loving and honoring the new femme who has emerged. This lesbian femme with disabilities is wise, wild, wet, and wanting. Watch out.

-"Reclaiming femme... Yet again" Mary Francis Platt, The Persistent Desire (Edited by Joan Nestle) (1992)

[doctorbitchcrxft]

Phantom Traveler | Supernatural Series Rewrite | Dean Winchester x Reader

Pairing: Dean Winchester x Reader (Eventual)

Warnings: canon violence, canon gore, namecalling, typical Dean and reader

Word Count: 8289

Mobile Supernatural Series Rewrite Masterlist

Supernatural Series Rewrite Masterlist

Supernatural Series Rewrite Playlist

You were sound asleep, curled up into yourself when a knock on the door brought you out of your slumber. 

“(Y/N)?”

‘Sam.’

“I got coffee, thought you could use some,” he called through the door.

You pushed yourself up out of the bed as you yawned, and walked over to the door of your motel room to open it for Sam. 

“Dude, you realize it’s six in the morning, right?” You scratched your head as you let Sam into the room.

“You sound like my brother.”

You playfully glared at him. “Don’t compare me to him.”

“Here.” He handed you a coffee and a bag of what you assumed was a pastry.

“Thanks,” you replied, sitting on your bed with your stuff in hand. 

Sam sat on the chair across from you. “Still haven’t warmed up to Dean, huh?” 

“Well, he hasn’t exactly warmed up to me,” you reminded him, thinking of the fight you got into yesterday over his reckless driving.

“Guess that’s true,” he conceded. “It’s weird, though, you guys are so much more alike than you let on.”

“Tell that to him. He started it.” You took a big bite of your pastry.

“Seriously?” Sam laughed, “ ‘He started it’?”

You shrugged, smirking. 

He seemed to remember his original intention behind disturbing your slumber. “Hey, he found a case, though.” 

“Oh, yeah? What’s up?” You licked the pastry cream off your thumb.

“We don’t know. The guy on the phone didn’t say.” Sam raised his coffee cup to his lips.

“Guy on the phone?” You took a sip of your coffee as you let Sam answer.

“Yeah. Some guy my dad and Dean worked a case for a while back’s got another one for us. He called Dean.”

“Ah—” you nodded, “—gotcha. So, where’s he live?”

“Pennsylvania,” Sam responded. 

“Okay, not too far,” you noted. “I’ll be ready in fifteen.”

***

“Thanks for making the trip so quick,” a short older man named Jerry told you and the boys. “I ought to be doing you guys a favor, not the other way around. Dean and your dad really helped me out.”

You were walking beside Sam as you followed behind the man who was having you do this job. You were being led through a warehouse past planes as well as their parts and people hard at work.

“Yeah, he told me. It was a poltergeist?” Sam asked the older man.

Someone walking in front of your group was eavesdropping on you. “Poltergeist? Man, I loved that movie.”

“Hey, nobody's talking to you. Keep walking,” Jerry stated authoritatively to the man. He turned his attention back to the conversation. “Damn right it was a poltergeist, practically tore our house apart.” He addressed Dean. “Tell you something, if it wasn't for you and your dad, I probably wouldn't be alive. Your dad said you were off at college. Is that right?” He’d turned to Sam.

“Yeah, I was. I'm— taking some time off,” Sam explained.

“Well, he was real proud of you. I could tell. He talked about you all the time.”

“He did?” Knowing what you knew about Sam’s relationship with his dad, you found this surprising, too.

“Yeah, you bet he did,” Jerry nodded. “Oh, hey, you know I tried to get a hold of him, but I couldn't. How's he doing, anyway?”

“He's, um, wrapped up in a job right now,” Dean lied. 

“Well, we're missing the old man, but we get Sam and— what’s your name again?” he asked you.

“(Y/N).”

“(Y/N). Even trade, huh?”

“Eh, I wouldn’t say that,” you laughed.

“Say, (Y/N), how’d you get wrapped up with these two?” Jerry asked.

“Oh, uh—” you began, searching for an abridged version of the truth, “—I met them on a hunt in California. They decided to drag me along with them.”

“Well, I’m glad you’re here. The guys are gonna need backup with this one,�� Jerry said. 

“Why?” 

He did not give a direct answer to your question. “I got something I want you guys to hear.”

He led you to his office where you and Sam took the two chairs and Dean stood behind his brother.

”I listened to this. And, well, it sounded like it was up your alley,” Jerry stated, putting a CD into a drive. “Normally I wouldn't have access to this. It's the cockpit voice recorder for United Britannia flight 2485. It was one of ours.”

A frantic voice immediately rang out from the speaker as soon as the recording started. “Mayday! Mayday! Repeat! This is United Britannia 2485—” the recording cut out with a static sound, “—immediate instruction help! United Britannia 2485, I copy your message—” and cut out again, “—May be experiencing some mechanical failure—” and then cut out one last time. The man’s voice was completely drowned out by static, whooshing, and growling sounds.

“Took off from here, crashed about two hundred miles south,” Jerry continued. “Now, they're saying mechanical failure. Cabin depressurized somehow. Nobody knows why. Over a hundred people on board. Only seven got out alive. Pilot was one. His name is Chuck Lambert. He's a good friend of mine. Chuck is, uh… well, he's pretty broken up about it. Like it was his fault.”

“You don't think it was?” Sam questioned him.

“No, I don't.”

“Jerry, we're gonna need passenger manifests, um, a list of survivors,” Sam listed.

“Alright,” the man replied.

“And, uh, any way we can take a look at the wreckage?” Dean inquired.

“The other stuff is no problem. But the wreckage… guys— and gal— the NTSB has it locked down in an evidence warehouse. No way I've got that kind of clearance.” Jerry shook his head.

You frowned.

“No problem,” Dean declared.

You gave him a questioning look to which he shrugged off.

***

“How fucking long does it take to make a fake ID?” you groaned, falling back across the backseat of the Impala. You and Sam had found a way to isolate the EVP on Sam’s computer, having gotten a copy of the tape from Jerry.

“I don’t know,” Sam responded. “But I’m gonna lose it if it’s much longer.”

“Same here.” At that moment, Dean walked out of the Copy Jack the Impala was sitting in front of as a pretty woman walked into the store. They greeted each other before Dean walked over to you and his brother.

“Dude,” you started, “You’ve been in there forever.”

“Wah-wah,” he whined, mocking you. “You can’t rush perfection.” He held up three IDs.

“Homeland Security?” Sam questioned as he took one of the IDs. “That's pretty illegal, even for us.”

“Yeah, well, it's something new. You know? People haven't seen it a thousand times,” Dean pointed out as he got into the car.

“Alright, so, what do you got?” Dean asked his brother as he flicked your ID back at you. It hit you square in the side of the head. 

“Dude, really?” you hissed, aggravation clear in your tone.

“Shh,” the older Winchester hushed you as he waited for Sam to answer.

“Well, there's definitely EVP on the cockpit voice recorder,” Sam explained.

“Yeah?”

“Listen.”

The isolated voice of what you were dealing with came through the recording scratchy and backed by demonic growling sounds. “No survivors!”

“ ’No survivors’?” Dean asked. “What's that supposed to mean? There were seven survivors.”

You shrugged.

Dean let out a sigh. “So, what are we thinking? A haunted flight?” 

“There's a long history of spirits and death omens on planes and ships, like phantom travelers,” Sam began.

Dean hummed in affirmation. “Or remember flight 401?”

“Right. The one that crashed, the airline salvaged some of its parts, put it in other planes, then the spirit of the pilot and copilot haunted those flights.”

“I don’t know, guys,” you stated skeptically. “Ghost just doesn’t feel right.”

“Well, thanks for your optimism, sunshine,” Dean quipped.

“It’s not about optimism, you asshole, it’s about being right and dealing with whatever we’re up against properly,” you pushed back.

“Know-it-all,” the older Winchester replied. 

“Fuck off, Winchester.”

He let out a breath and turned his attention back to the case.“Alright, so, survivors, which one do you want to talk to first?”

"Third on the list: Max Jaffey,” you said.

“I wasn’t talking to you, but why him?”

You glared at Dean. “Because if anybody saw something weird, he did. I talked to his mom while you were spending forever in the store. She said some pretty weird shit and told me where to find him. He was so screwed up, he checked himself into the hospital.”

***

You and the Winchesters walked beside Max Jaffey, who hobbled on a cane, through the Riverfront Psychiatric Hospital’s garden. 

“I don't understand. I already spoke with Homeland Security,” Max told your trio.

“Right. Some new information has come up,” Dean lied. “So if you could just answer a couple questions...”

“Just before the plane went down, did you notice anything… unusual?” Sam questioned.

Max looked confused. “Like what?”

“Strange lights, weird noises, maybe. Voices,” Dean offered. 

“No, nothing.”

Seeing as no one was getting anywhere with this investigation, you tried your hand at it. “Mr. Jaffey, you checked yourself in here, right?”

He nodded at you.

“Why?”

“Uh, I was a little stressed,” he said sarcastically. “I survived a plane crash.”

“Uh-huh,” you nodded. “And that’s what scared you? That’s what screwed you up so badly?”

You could tell you were close to the answers you were after as he swallowed uncomfortably. “I— I don't want to talk about this anymore.”

“I know, but I also know you saw something up there,” you continued. “We need to know what.”

“No.” Max shook his head. “No, I was… delusional. Seeing things.”

“He was seeing things,” Dean half-mocked him.

You shot a warning glance at Dean, hoping to get him to shut up. 

“It's okay,” you coaxed. “Just tell us what you thought you saw, please.”

“There was… this—man. And, uh, he had these… eyes—these, uh, black eyes. And I saw him—or I thought I saw him...” he trailed off, stopping as he recounted the events.

“What?” Dean asked.

“He opened the emergency exit,” Max explained. “But that's— that's impossible, right? I mean, I looked it up. There's something like two tons of pressure on that door.”

“Yeah,” Dean confirmed, clearly confused. 

“This man, uh, did he seem to appear and disappear rapidly? It would look something like a mirage?” Sam asked.

Max quirked his head at the younger Winchester. “What are you, nuts? He was a passenger. He was sitting right in front of me.”

***

“I think we can rule out phantom traveler,” you noted as you got out of the car in front of the Phelps’s house. You were going to visit the wife of George Phelps, the man who opened the emergency exit. 

“Why?” Dean asked.

“You heard Jaffey. He said the dude had black eyes. Opened a fucking emergency exit on his own. ‘Black eyes’ points me to demon.”

Dean’s eyes widened. “Demons?”

“I mean, it makes sense,” Sam shrugged. “He could be a demon. He might be some kind of a creature, too, in human form.”

“Does that look like a creature's lair to you?” Dean questioned as he gestured toward the house that was representative of the essence of suburban houses. From its beautiful garden to the cobblestone steps to the beige paint coating the outside of the two-story building.

Sam shrugged and began leading your trio up the steps of the house. 

Once inside, you three sat across from Mrs. Phelps on the couch while she sat in an armchair. 

Sam picked a picture of Mrs. Phelps and an older man up off of the side table. “This is your late husband?” he asked.

“Yes, that was my George.”

“And you said he was a dentist?” Dean questioned. 

She hummed in affirmation. “He was headed to a convention in Denver. Do you know that he was petrified to fly? For him to go like that...”

Sam asked another question. “How long were you married?”

“Thirteen years.”

You could tell Sam was contemplating how to ask his next question. “In all that time, did you ever notice anything… strange about him; anything out of the ordinary?”

She paused for a moment. “Well, uh, he had acid reflux, if that's what you mean.”

You nodded, clicking your tongue. “I think that’s all we have for you, Mrs. Phelps. Thank you for your time.”

She showed all of you out, and you piped up as you walked down the stairs outside of the house. 

“Demon’s sounding more and more correct all the time,” you smiled, trying to joke around.

“Jesus, you’re annoying,” Dean groaned.

“And you’re a misogynistic dick that can’t handle women with brains,” you responded. 

“What, are we gonna duke this out now?” Dean stopped by the door of the car, facing you. 

You stood by the backseat’s door. “You started it,” you taunted childishly, crossing your arms over your chest as you stared back at him. 

“Really?” he leered. “You’re gonna pull that card? Mature.”

“You act like you’re any better.”

“Guys—” Sam tried to cut in, but Dean continued to fight with you. 

“You’re such a bitch.”

“Wow, haven’t heard that one before,” you drawled.

“Guys! You can fight later. Wrong place, wrong time to sort this out,” Sam chastised you and Dean like you were children.

You got in the car and slammed the door behind you.

“Don’t hurt my baby ‘cause you’re pissed,” Dean scolded you as he started to pull the car away. 

“Just drive, asshole,” you grumbled in frustration as you slumped down in your seat. The rest of the car ride to the local outlet mall was silent.

***

You had never felt more confident. Despite the fact that you could have worn the one dress you already had to pose as homeland security, you decided to treat yourself to a new outfit to distract from your aggravation with Dean. 

The boys had gone to a suit shop called “Mort’s for Style,” and you went into a dress shop called “Betsy’s.” It was a cute little shop with a lot of great dress and pantsuit options.

You had picked out a navy blue pantsuit. You wore a white button-up underneath the blazer with the top two buttons undone to accentuate your breasts. The blazer was unbuttoned, and the high-waisted, straight-legged pants you wore matched the black color of your blazer. With the white button-up tucked into your pants and the small amount of makeup you threw on to draw attention to your eyes and lips, you felt good. 

Once you had paid for your clothing, you walked out of the shop and back to the Impala. Surprisingly, the boys were not there waiting for you. 

You leaned your back against the car, picking out the grit from under your nails.

You looked up when you heard Dean’s voice. “Man, I look like one of the Blues Brothers.” 

Both of the boys were dressed in sharp, black suits. You almost lost your breath at the sight of Dean, but fought yourself to keep your composure. You would not give him the satisfaction of knowing you found him attractive. 

“No, you don't,” Sam told him. “You look more like a seventh-grader at his first dance.”

You laughed at the younger brother’s jeer. “What took you girls so long?” you asked once you got in the Impala. “I thought you two would’ve beat me out the store by a long shot.”

“Dean wouldn’t leave the dressing room,” Sam said dryly.

“Seriously?” you droned.

You and Sam both looked to Dean, who did not answer immediately. When he finally spoke, he complained, “I hate this thing.”

“Hey,” Sam stared. “You want into that warehouse or not?”

Dean rolled his eyes as he continued to drive along.

You steeled your nerves as your black, pointed-toe pumps clicked across the warehouse floor. Your trio was headed to the security guard that would allow you in to see the wreckage.

You held the clipboard you had stowed in your bag close to your chest, acting as some sort of a recorder for the boys. The three of you flashed your badges at the security guard, who nodded and allowed you into the hangar where the wreckage was being kept.

There was a large map of what the plane should look like painted onto the floor, and the parts that corresponded to the different portions of the map were laid in their proper spots. There were wires hung on fences and broken interior parts of the plane laid on tables. The most heartbreaking things for you to look at were the torn passengers’ seats because most of the people who had been in them were now dead.

You looked over at Dean, who had earbuds in and was moving a small box over the tops of the wreckage.

“What’s that?” you asked him.

“It's an EMF meter. Reads electromagnetic frequencies.”

You got closer to him, noticing what the object appeared to be. “I know what an EMF meter is; I’m not stupid. But why does that one look like a busted-up walkman?”

“ 'Cause that's what I made it out of. It's homemade,” he grinned.

“Yeah, I can see that,” you quipped. 

His grin disappeared. “Bitch.”

“Dick.”

You once again fought the pain in your chest when he called you a bitch. In all honesty, you thought his homemade EMF meter was cute. However, you were too far gone in your war with him to surrender now.

Dean ran the Walkman over a piece of the wreckage with black spores and yellow dust on it. You could hear the faint sound of a spike on the meter through Dean’s headphones.

“Check out the emergency door handle,” Dean called to Sam. 

Sam came over to where you and Dean stood as the older brother scratched at the dust to get some on his hand.

“What is this stuff?” Dean asked.

One way to find out.” You saw the younger of the two brothers start scraping some of the dust into a small bag.

“We need to go,” you told the boys. You weren’t sure what told you that, but you just suddenly felt unsettled. The hairs on the back of your neck stood at attention, and every muscle in your body tensed. You started off toward the exit in the back of the warehouse. 

“Wait, (Y/N), what if we’re missin’ something?” Dean questioned, clearly aggravated you were ready to ditch already.

“Too bad, we gotta go.” You kept walking toward the exit, making it out of the door and around the backside of the building. 

At that moment, an alarm started blaring through the area surrounding the warehouse.

You turned around to look at the boys as you gloated, “I’m not gonna say, ‘I told you so’!“ Not bothering to rip your shoes off of your feet, you took off running to the gated exit. 

Sam and Dean were quick to follow you and soon passed you up. The older brother took off his suit jacket and threw it over the barbed wire at the top of the fence. You did the same with your blazer. After quickly taking off your pumps to avoid hurting yourself when you jumped from the top of the gate, you threw yourself over the fence. The other two did the same.

Sam grabbed your blazer that you were too small to reach from the top of the fence as Dean found it within himself to remark, “Well, these monkey suits do come in handy.”

You ran after the two boys, heels and blazer in hand as the jagged rocks in the cement cut into your feet. As soon as you shut the door to the car, Dean slammed on the gas pedal.

He tore out of the warehouse’s parking lot, speeding down the road to head toward Jerry’s workplace. 

"(Y/N),” Sam started, turning in his seat to face you with a curious expression on his face, “how did you know that?”

“Honestly, I don’t know. My intuition’s just always been pretty sharp.” You were being honest; there had been a few times on hunts previously when you’d known it was time to get the hell out of dodge.

“Hm.” You could tell Dean still didn’t trust you.

“Dude, I don’t know what else to tell you. That’s the truth,” you countered. “I’ve been helping you guys with your dad for almost two months now, and you still don’t trust me. I don’t know what more to do for you.”

“Maybe because I don’t know you,” he responded, never taking his eyes off the road. 

“Maybe if you tried to know me, you’d find it a little easier to trust me,” you answered.

“Not interested,” came Dean’s grumbled response.

You tried your best to ignore the pang that went through your chest once more. “Of course not.”

***

You refused to speak to or even look at Dean; your frustration with the fact that he had no desire to know you and his general existence boiling to the surface. You could feel his stare burning into the side of your head as you focused on Jerry, who sat in front of you. He was looking through a microscope on his desk at the yellow dust Sam had collected.

“Huh,” Jerry remarked. “This stuff is covered in sulfur.”

“You're sure?” Sam asked.

“Take a look for yourself,” Jerry offered, getting up from behind the desk so Sam could take his place. 

Banging sounds along with a string of curse words caught your ear as Jerry sighed. 

“If you guys will excuse me, I have an idiot to fire,” he dryly stated, walking out of the office.

You got up from the chair you were sitting in next to Dean. “See?” you started excitedly, gesturing toward the sulfur, “Demons.”

“That would explain how one guy had the strength to open up the emergency exit,” Sam added.

“This goes way beyond floating over a bed or barfing pea soup. I mean it's one thing to possess a person, but to use them to take down an entire airplane?” Dean put his hands on his hips as he stood. “You ever heard of something like this before?” 

Sam looked over at his brother, who responded, “Never.”

“Well, I have,” you said simply.

They both looked to you to continue.

“In NYC a couple years back. Some cabbies had gotten possessed and were takin’ girls left and right.”

“Those were demons?” Sam asked, standing up from behind Jerry’s desk. “That was a huge deal on the news while I was at Stanford. Police thought it was a serial killer. You took ‘em on all by yourself?”

“I’m a big girl, Sam,” you chuckled. “I can handle a few demons. But, yeah, that was me. That was probably the toughest case I’ve ever been on. Finding where those demons had taken those girls after they drugged them in the cabs... where they were raped and murdered...” You shook your head, your cheery expression gone. 

“I’m sorry you had to see that,” Sam told you gently. 

Your eyes were glued to the floor, hands on your hips with not a bit of life in your voice as you muttered, “All in a day’s work.”

Sam had asked you to tell him and Dean everything you knew about demons once you got back to the Winchesters’ motel room. Sam sat at the table close to the window while Dean sat on the bed closest to his brother. You stood in front of the two as you spoke.

“Demons exist in every religion in every world culture. With the ones that I was dealing with up in New York, they were most similar to Incubi from early Christian religion. Incubi raped sleeping girls. These demons drugged the girls to put them to sleep, then they raped them, and then they murdered them. What I’m thinking for these demons is that they’re most similar to certain Japanese demons. I had to look into these when I was trying to figure out how to kill the NYC demons. The Japanese believe demons cause certain disasters, whether it be natural or man-made. Some cause earthquakes, others cause disease—”

“And this one causes plane crashes?” Dean deadpanned, cutting you off.

You ignored him. “Demons are having to find new ways to ratchet up the body count. Like with me in New York, Incubi can’t go about their old methods anymore. This demon probably evolved with the times like the Incubi did, and so it figured plane crashes were the best way to get its job done.”

Dean snorted, getting up from. the bed and turning away from you and his brother.

“What?” Sam asked.

He turned around, scratching the back of his neck. “I don't know, man. This isn't our normal gig. I mean, demons, they don't want anything, just death, and destruction for its own sake. This is big. And I wish Dad was here.”

“Yeah. Me too,” the younger Winchester admitted.

Dean’s phone rang, and he answered it. “Hello?... Oh, hey, Jerry… Wha— Jerry, I'm sorry. What happened?... Where'd this happen?... I'll try to ignore the irony in that… Nothing. Jerry, hang in there, all right? We'll catch up with you soon.”

He hung up the phone. 

“Another crash?” Sam questioned, already knowing the answer.

“Yeah. Let's go.”

“Where?”

“Nazareth.” 

‘Ah, there’s the irony.’

***

After leaving the horrendous scene of Chuck’s plane crash, you and the boys went back to Jerry’s office. Once again, Jerry confirmed that the dust you had taken from the steering wheel of Chuck’s plane was, in fact, sulfur. 

“Well, that's great,” Dean sassed. “Alright, that's two plane crashes involving Chuck Lambert. This demon sounds like it was after him.”

“If that's the case, that would be the good news,” you chimed in. You looked up to the sky, addressing the pilot. “No offense, Chuck.”

“What's the bad news?” Jerry asked you.

“Chuck's plane went down exactly forty minutes into the flight, just like 2485,” you informed the older man.

“Forty minutes?” Chuck inquired. “What does that mean?”

“It's biblical numerology. You know Noah's ark, it rained for forty days. The number means death,” Dean said.

“I went back, and there have been six plane crashes over the last decade that all went down exactly forty minutes in,” Sam explained.

"Any survivors?” the older Winchester questioned his brother.

“No. Or not until now, at least, not until flight 2485, for some reason.” Sam turned to you after thinking for a moment. “On the cockpit voice recorder, remember what the EVP said?”

“ ‘No survivors,’ “ you realized. “It's going after all the survivors. It's trying to finish the job.”

Dean drove the Impala down an empty highway. 

Sam was on the phone with one of the survivors from the plane crash, the conversation almost over. “Really? Well, thank you for taking our survey, And if you do plan to fly, please don't forget your friends at United Britannia Airlines. Thanks.” He hung up the phone. “All right. That takes care of Blaine Sanderson and Dennis Holloway. They're not flying anytime soon.”

“That leaves the flight attendant, Amanda Walker,” you commented.

“Right. Her sister Karen said her flight leaves Indianapolis at eight P.M. It's her first night back on the job,” Sam told you and his brother. 

“That sounds like just our luck,” Dean grumbled.

“Dean, this is a five-hour drive, man, even with you behind the wheel,” Sam said worriedly.

“Call Amanda's cellphone again, see if we can't head her off at the pass,” Dean tried.

“I already left her three voice messages. She must have turned her cellphone off.”

“God, we're never gonna make it,” you shook your head, leaning back in the seat as you scrubbed a hand through your hair.

“We'll make it,” the older brother countered, slamming his foot on the gas. 

Somehow, someway, Dean had managed to get to the airport at ten minutes to seven. 

You jumped up out of the car, taking your gun out of your pants and stashing it under the backseat.

“What are you doing?” 

You still did not feel like talking to Dean but answered him shortly nonetheless. “We’re going into an airport.”

Dean finally caught onto what you meant and took all of his weapons off of him, too. “I feel naked.”

You fought the smile threatening to creep up your face.

You rushed into the airport just behind the boys, squeezing your way through the crowd of people to get to the departure board.

“Right there,” Sam pointed out. “They're boarding in thirty minutes.”

“Okay. We still have some cards to play,” Dean paused, thinking for a moment.  “We need to find a phone.” 

He found a courtesy phonw on the wall, picking it up. “Hi. Gate thirteen… I'm trying to contact an Amanda Walker. She's a flight attendant on flight, um… flight 4-2-4.”

He waited impatiently for Amanda to pick up the phone. When she finally did, he began speaking again.

“Miss Walker. Hi, this is Dr. James Hetfield from St. Francis Memorial Hospital. We have a Karen Walker here… Nothing serious, just a minor car accident, but she was injured, so—” His face fell, his eyes widening a touch. “You what?... Uh, well… there must be some mistake—”

Sam went around his brother to try to get a closer listen. 

After a longer pause, Dean let out a sigh of relief and smiled. “...Guilty as charged… He's really sorry… Yeah, but… he really needs to see you tonight, so—... Don't be like that. Come on. The guy's a mess. Really. It's pathetic… Oh, yeah… No, no. Wait, Amanda. Amanda!” Dean slammed the phone back onto the receiver. “Damn it! So close.”

"Alright, time for plan B. We're getting on that plane,” you stated firmly.

“Whoa, whoa, now just hold on a second.” For the first time since you met him, Dean looked scared.

“Dean, that plane is leaving with over a hundred passengers on board, and if we're right, that plane is gonna crash,” Sam argued.

“I know.” He looked conflicted.

“Okay. So we're getting on the plane, we need to find that demon and exorcise it. I'll get the tickets. You and (Y/N) get whatever you can out of the trunk. Whatever that will make it through security. Meet me back here in five minutes.”

Dean looked at Sam blankly, evidently a little anxious.

“Are you okay?” the younger Winchester asked.

Dean hesitated. “No, not really.”

“What? What's wrong?”

“Well, I kind of have this problem with, uh...”

“Flying?” you cut in.

“It's never really been an issue until now,” he told you.

“You're joking, right?” Sam huffed.

“Do I look like I'm joking? Why do you think I drive everywhere, Sam?” he spat.

For the first time since you met him, you didn’t feel like mocking him about his fear of planes.

“Okay, then (Y/N) and I’ll go,” Sam proposed.

Dean shook his head. “What?”

“We’ll handle this one.”

“What are you, nuts? You said it yourself, the plane's gonna crash.”

“Dean, we can do it together, or I can do this one with (Y/N). I'm not seeing a third option, here.”

Dean scratched his head. “Come on! Really? Man...”

Dean walked much faster than you did toward the car to get supplies, clearly trying to leave you in his dust.

“Would you slow down a bit, please?” you asked.

“Why should I?”

“Because even if you get to the car before me, you’re not gonna have a fucking clue what to use to deal with a demon,” you reminded him, your words a bit more venomous than need-be.

He stopped, turning to face you. “Are you calling me stupid?”

“No,” you told him. You truly weren’t.

“Definitely sounds like you are.”

You walked past him to the trunk of the Impala. “I wasn’t, I’m simply pointing out the fact that I’m the one who knows how to deal with demons, and you don’t.”

“There you go again. Acting like you know so much better than I do.” His attitude was truly exhausting.

Your voice rose as you defended yourself. “Because I do! In this case, at least!”

“But it’s not just this one time that you acted like you’re better than me,” he argued. “Do you realize how frustrating it is to deal with your smart ass?”

“Do you realize how frustrating it is to deal with yours?” you threw back. You sighed, putting aside your anger for now. “Look, we don’t have time to talk about this.” You shoved holy water, a rosary, and the EMF Walkman into Dean’s hands. “Now, let’s go.” 

You shoved past Dean and headed back to the airport.

***

You sat between Sam and Dean, completely at ease. Dean, however, was losing his mind.

"Just try to relax,” Sam whispered from the window seat 

Dean’s voice came back harder and slightly louder. “Just try to shut up.”

“Oh, don’t be a baby,” you scolded playfully.

“Don’t be a bitch,” Dean clapped back using the same tone with you that he had with Sam. He took in a sharp breath when the plane began moving a second later.

You gathered your courage and grabbed his hand. He jerked away from you and looked at you in surprise. When the plane took off, though, his hand rejoined yours, squeezing tightly. You giggled to yourself.

“I’m so glad this is funny to you,” Dean hissed.

“It’s not,” you answered simply.

“Then why are you laughing?” His grip tightened once again.

“It’s just,” you considered your next words carefully. “It’s kind of cute, that’s all.”

Dean was caught off-guard by your response. He eyed you quizzically, unsure of what to say. You just shrugged, settling the back of your head against your seat with your hand still in Dean’s. It was much larger than yours, and you fought the urge to run your fingers along the calloused ridges. 

Moments passed in a bit of an uncomfortable silence before Dean spoke again, not a trace of bite in his tone. “Why are you doing this?”

You rolled your head toward him. “Everybody’s scared of something,” you quietly replied. “It helps me to know I’m helping you. Even if you do hate my guts.”

“I don’t hate your guts.” He spoke so softly you almost couldn’t hear him.

“Pfft, could’ve fooled me,” you answered. 

“You just…” he started, “...get on my nerves. ‘S all.”

You giggled. 

A few minutes later when the plane had fully gotten up in the air, you heard the familiar sound of a song you had heard many times before in the Impala coming from the man next to you. 

“You're humming Metallica?” Sam asked Dean monotonously.

“Calms me down,” the older brother replied. 

“ ‘Some Kind of Monster’? Really?“ You raised a brow at him.

Dean did not respond to you.

“Look, man, I get you're nervous, all right? But you got to stay focused,” the younger Winchester reminded his brother.

“Yup,” you chimed in. “We only have thirty-two minutes to track the bitch down and full-on exorcise it.” 

“Yeah, on a crowded plane,” Dean commented. “That's gonna be easy.”

“Just take it one step at a time, alright?” Sam said calmly. “Now, who is it possessing?” 

“It's usually gonna be somebody with some sort of weakness, you know, a chink in the armor that the demon can worm through. Somebody with an addiction or some sort of emotional distress,” Dean stated.

“Well, this is Amanda's first flight after the crash. If I were her, I'd be pretty messed up,” Sam told Dean, who hummed in response.

Dean sat up stiffly, his body still tense as he turned to the blonde flight attendant walking past.

“Excuse me. Are you Amanda?” he asked her.

“No, I'm not,” she answered with a smile.

"Oh, my mistake.”

The flight attendant hummed in agreement.

He peered into the back of the plane, finding the other blonde flight attendant. “All right, well, that's got to be Amanda back there, so I'll go talk to her, and, uh, I'll get a read on her mental state.”

“What if she's already possessed, genius?” Sam asked.

“There's ways to test that,” Dean responded, pulling the holy water out of his jacket. “I brought holy water.”

“Correction, I brought holy water—” you leaned forward, gently taking the bottle, “—And that’s for when we try to exorcise the demon. She’ll flinch at the name of god if she’s possessed.”

“Yeah, I know that,” Dean replied, getting up from his chair. You could tell he had not. You already missed the feeling of his hand in yours.

He turned to go, but you stopped him.

“Dean!” you whispered.

“What?” The annoyance in Dean’s voice was back. 

“Say it in Latin.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Then what is it?” you smirked, quirking a brow.

“ ‘Christo!’ I’m not an idiot!” he hissed back. Dean turned away from you and headed to the back of the plane. 

You slumped down in your seat, closing your eyes as the copilot began speaking. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your first officer speaking...” you tuned out the rest of his message.

A few minutes went by before the older brother returned.

“Alright, well, she's got to be the most well-adjusted person on the planet,” he sighed as he flopped back into his seat.

“You said ‘Christo’?” Sam asked.

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“There's no demon in her. There's no demon getting in her.” 

“So, if it's on the plane, it can be anyone. Anywhere,” Sam explained.

The plane shook, causing Dean to tense up. He grabbed your hand once more. “Come on!” he whined. “That can't be normal!”

“Hey, hey, it's just turbulence,” you coaxed.

“Sweetheart, this plane is going to crash, okay? So quit treating me like I'm fucking four.” He went to drop your hand, but you tightened your grip.

“Okay,” you started, changing tactics. Your tone became harsh. “You need to calm down.”

“Well, I'm sorry, I can't,” Dean sassed.

“You didn’t want to be treated like you’re four, so stop acting like it,” you commanded. “Be a man, Winchester. If you’re a basketcase, you’re wide open to possession. Get your shit together. Right now.”

Dean took a deep breath.

You smiled. “Great. Onto the Rituale Romanum.”

“The what?” Sam and Dean asked in unison.

“The exorcism ritual,” you elaborated. “It's two parts. The first part expels the demon from the victim's body. It makes it manifest, which actually makes it more powerful.”

“More powerful?” Dean questioned, his voice strained and eyes wide.

“Yup.”

“How?” He was starting to get panicky again.

“It’d just be able to wreak havoc on its own without a vessel,” you informed.

“Oh. And why is that a good thing?”

“ 'Cause the second part of that sends the bitch back to hell once and for all.”

“First things first, we got to find it.”

“There ya go,” you chuckled.

“Shut up,” Dean grumbled, getting up from his chair with the EMF Walkman.

You and Sam let him walk down the aisle by himself for a few minutes before the two of you got up to go talk to him.

You tapped his shoulder.

“Ah!” Dean jumped back, wheeling around to face you. “Don’t do that!”

“Anything?” Sam asked.

The older brother shook his head. “No, nothing. How much time we got?” 

“Fifteen minutes,” Sam told you and his brother. “Maybe we missed somebody.” 

“Maybe the thing's just not on the plane,” Dean shrugged.

“No way. Dean, it’s gonna be here,” you protested. Just as you spoke, the EMF meter spiked. 

You looked up to see the copilot coming out of the bathroom.

“What?” Sam asked. “What is it?”

You stared at the copilot. “Christo.”

The man’s head slowly turned toward you and the boys, his eyes black.

You wheeled around to face Sam. “We gotta talk to Amanda.”

“She's not gonna believe this,” Sam contested.

“You’re probably right, but we only got twelve minutes,” you reminded the younger brother. You walked ahead of the boys into the concessions area where Amanda busied herself.

“Oh, hi. Flight's not too bumpy for you, I hope,” she smiled politely, clearly caught off-guard by your presence.

“Actually—” Dean began, “—that's kind of what we need to talk to you about.”

Sam closed the curtains behind you as Amanda answered Dean. “Um, okay. What can I do for you?”

“Alright, this is gonna sound nuts, but we just don't have time for the whole ‘the truth is out there’ speech right now,” Dean rushed out.

She looked confused but kept her smile painted on her face.

“Alright, look, we know you were on flight 2485,” Sam continued for Dean.

Her grin disappeared. “Who are you guys?”

Sam ignored her question. “Now, we've spoken to some of the other survivors. We know something brought down that plane and it wasn't a mechanical failure.”

“We need your help because we need to stop it from happening again. Here. Now,” the older brother told her.

“I'm sorry—” she started, attempting to move past you, “I— I'm very busy. I have to go back—”

“Chuck Lambert’s dead, Amanda,” you cut in, effectively stopping her from leaving. “The pilot from 2485.”

“Wait. What?” She turned to face you, her eyebrows furrowed. “Chuck is dead?”

“Yeah,” you said quietly. “He died in a plane crash. That’s the second plane crash in two months. Doesn’t that strike you as weird?”

She shook her head in complete disbelief.

“Look, there was something wrong with 2485,” Sam added. “Now maybe you sensed it, maybe you didn't. But there's something wrong with this flight, too.”

Dean made a last attempt to drive the point home. “Amanda, you have to believe us.”

The blonde looked to the ground. “On… on 2485, there was this man. He… had these eyes.”

“Black eyes?” you asked.

She nodded.

“That’s exactly what we’re talking about,” Sam clarified.

“I don't understand, what are you asking me to do?”

Dean answered before you got the chance to. “Okay. The copilot, we need you to bring him back here.”

Amanda looked between the three of you, confused. “Why? What does he have to do with anything?”

“Don't have time to explain. We just need to talk to him. Okay?”

“How am I supposed to go in the cockpit and get the copilot—” You could practically see her mind running a mile a minute. 

Even Sam was getting impatient. “Do whatever it takes. Tell him there's something broken back here, whatever will get him out of that cockpit.”

“Do you know that I could lose my job if you—”

“Babe, you're gonna lose a lot more if you don't go get him right now,” you remarked.

She looked at you and nodded, turning to leave for the cockpit.

As soon as Amanda made it out of the curtains, you fished the holy water out of your hoodie’s pocket, moving to press your back against the wall next to the closed blue curtains.

A few moments later, you heard the copilot say to Amanda, “Yeah, what's the problem?” Just outside the curtains. As soon as the demon ducked into the small room, Dean punched him in the face. He then shoved the demon to the ground and slapped duct tape over his mouth. 

“Wait,” Amanda protested as you got down on the ground beside Dean, “What are you doing? You said you were just gonna talk to him.”

“We are gonna talk to him,” Dean replied simply as you splashed the copilot with holy water.

The demon groaned under the duct tape, his skin sizzling and burning holes through his shirt.

“Oh, my god. What's wrong with him?” Amanda cried.

“Look,” Sam started calmly, “We need you calm. We need you outside the curtain.”

Amanda’s breath quickened. “Well, I don't underst— I don't know—”

“Don't let anybody in, okay? Can you do that? Can you do that? Amanda?”

She gave herself a pep talk before heading outside of the curtains.

“Hurry up, Sam,” Dean groaned. “I don't know how much longer I can hold him.”

The demon went to kick the older Winchester in the back, but you dove to grab his legs.

Sam began reciting the Latin ritual written in his father’s journal. “Regna terrae, cantate Deo, psallite Domino—”

The demon kneed you in the forehead, causing you to fall back and got a few good swings at the boys in as well. You clambered on top of the copilot, sitting on his stomach with his arms pinned by his sides under your legs.

Sam continued with the ritual before the demon threw you off of him. He ripped the tape off of his mouth and turned to Sam. “I know what happened to your girlfriend! She must have died screaming! Even now, she's burning!”

You attempted to recover from getting slammed into the wall while Dean focused on attacking the demon.

Sam sat there in shock, so you grabbed the journal and tried to finish the ritual.

The demon hit Dean again, effectively getting the young man off of him and knocking Dean into you. The book fell from your hand, and the demon kicked it out into the passenger’s cabin.

A cloud of black smoke flew out from the copilot’s body and into a vent while Sam went out into the aisle to find the journal. 

Suddenly, the plane shook violently and took a nosedive. The lights in the plane flickered and you and Dean were thrown to the back wall of the concession’s area. 

You and Dean screamed as the plane went down. Dean held onto the emergency exit door for dear life as you pressed yourself into the corner opposite from the older Winchester.

Your yelps were cut off when the plane leveled out following a surge of electricity coursing through the aircraft. You assumed Sam was able to finish the ritual and the pilot was able to regain control of the plane. 

You shakily stood up from the ground and dusted yourself off, tugging on the sleeves of your large hoodie.

You stepped out into the passenger’s cabin, heading to Sam as people began asking their neighbors if they were okay.

You wrapped Sam in a short, tight hug as you thanked him for keeping his head level enough to finish the ritual and trying to comfort him after what the demon had said. When you had made your way back to your seats, a slight rumble went through the aircraft. Dean grabbed your hand once again, and kept it there for the rest of the flight. A small smile tugged at your lips. 

After landing back at your original airport, you stood beside Sam and Dean as you watched the swarms of EMTs, FBI agents, and FAA agents go from person to person. They questioned or looked over each one, and your focus bounced between them.

You found Amanda in the crowd talking to an FBI agent, and she turned to the side to mouth “thank you” to you and the Winchesters.

“Let's get out of here,” Dean said firmly.

You began to head to the exit when Dean asked Sam, “You okay?”

You turned back to Sam, who reminded you and his brother, “Dean, it knew about Jessica.”

“Sam, these things, they, they read minds. They lie. Alright? That's all it was.” The older brother attempted to brush Sam’s concerns off.

“Yeah.” The brunet didn’t sound convinced.

“Come on.”

***

The next day, you and the Winchesters visited Jerry at his workplace to give him the final mission report. Jerry showed you and the boys out and escorted you to the Impala parked outside of the warehouse. 

“Nobody knows what you guys did, but I do. A lot of people could have been killed,” he acknowledged. He shook your hand before turning to the boys. “Your dad's gonna be real proud.”

Sam gave him an awkward, tight-lipped smile. “We'll see you around, Jerry.”

You turned to the car, as did Dean before he turned back to the older man. 

“You know, Jerry—" he began.

“Yeah.”

“I meant to ask you, how did you get my cellphone number, anyway?” the young man continued. “I've only had it for like six months.”

“Your dad gave it to me,” Jerry explained simply.

“What?” Sam exclaimed in shock.

“When did you talk to him?” Dean questioned.

“I mean, I didn't exactly talk to him, but I called his number. His voice message said to give you a call.” He took a pause. “Thanks again, guys— and gal,” he grinned.

“Bye, Jerry!” you called after him as he headed off.

“This doesn't make any sense, man. I've called Dad's number like fifty times. It's been out of service,” Sam told his brother.

Dean dials what you assumed was his father’s number. However, instead of the out-of-service message Sam had described, a voicemail began to play.

The two boys leaned into the phone so they could hear it better.

You leaned over Sam’s shoulder, the voice hard to hear, but you were still able to make out the words. “This is John Winchester. I can't be reached. If this is an emergency, call my son, Dean. 785-555-0179. He can help.”

Sam fumed, shaking his head in frustration as he got in the car. He slammed the door behind him. You looked over to Dean, who did not meet your gaze. He got in the car following his brother. You took one last look at the setting sun as a plane flew over your head. 

“I fuckin’ hate flying,” you muttered.

Series Rewrite Taglist: @polireader @brightlilith @atcamillanorrman @jrizzelle @insomnia-bookworm @procrastination20 @mrs-liebgott @djs8891 @tiggytaylor @staple-your-mouth @iloveshawn @jesstherebel

[ms-demeanor]

since twitter has become actively hostile to its users, so they came to tumblr, and reddit has become actively hostile to its users, so they came to tumblr, what do we do now that tumblr is becoming (more) actively hostile to its users? i’ve been here for over a decade so i know tumblr users are the type to cling on despite everything and revel in undoing every change, but i’m so tired of the way this website breaks the way it fundamentally works in order to appeal to new users. the twitterfication of the site seems so much worse than when people jumped ship after the porn ban, and even then, only small communities (and twitter) cropped up as solutions. you might not be the person to ask for a definitive answer, but i figured a tech blog might be interested in considering - what do we do when there’s nowhere left to go?

Okay so, I mean this very seriously: how has tumblr meaningfully become like twitter?

I don't personally find the sidebar view obnoxious and it seems to me like just another layout change that's pretty typical to tumblr. New users are getting signed up with a bit more emphasis on algorithmic feeds, but that is still very easy to change (MUCH easier than on any other social platform) and the algorithm has been there for everyone for quite a while, we just typically don't notice it because a lot of long-term tumblr users don't go into the "for you" feed.

I don't think that tumblr *has* fundamentally broken the way that it works to appeal to new users. My dash now is still very much like my dash in 2019, and still very much like my dash in 2018 (though much less pornographic). Reblogs are still reblogs, likes are still likes. Replies, for all that they seem like they've been around forever, are new and good and I think they work well. I'm irritated that the notes menu doesn't have a "view all" option but I think that's a worthwhile tradeoff for an easy way to see tags.

I *do not* understand why tumblr has broken linking back to previous reblogs but I don't think that's out of an effort to act like twitter; it is a bizarre choice that I dislike and don't understand but I also don't think that it has fundamentally changed the way the site works and i mean you've been around long enough that I'm sure you've had the same experience I have of going into the notes of a post and randomly clicking until you found a version that you wanted to reblog without a bunch of bullshit at the bottom. Tumblr has always kind of sucked, this change DOES suck but it doesn't suck in a way that is particularly novel or insurmountable. (For instance, I think this change sucks MUCH LESS than when they made posts with links invisible to the search, that is something that is genuinely bad that has been long lasting but doesn't get brought up much in lists of the ways that tumblr has gone wrong)

Tumblr *is* changing, but I think it is changing more incrementally and less terribly than other parts of the internet. I also hate the floating clown, the login walls, the dash-only view for blogs (you can't archive it and I HATE that), and - to an extent - the new lightbox on mobile. And I dislike that less than I thought I would but I don't think it's a fundamental change that necessarily impacts my interactions with the site - it *adds* a feature that I don't care for but it doesn't *break* anything that I require to have a good time on tumblr - in that way I think of it very much like Live. People hate Live so much and I find that perplexing because it is so easy to simply ignore it.

But that's not really your question; that's just some stuff I want people to think about because as much as tumblr has changed in the last two years it is nowhere near as fucked up as the recent things that twitter and reddit have pulled.

So, as to your question: where do we go?

Well. Not to be an extremely old person on the internet, but damned if I don't miss email lists. And forums. God I miss forums. Neither of those things has all the bonuses of platforms like twitter or reddit or tumblr or facebook, but they were great ways to hang out with people you liked on the internet.

The internet is changing. I can feel it, you can feel it, I'm pretty sure we're all like cattle in a field lifting our noses and hearing some distant rumbling and becoming slowly aware that it's almost time to run. There's a coming stampede and it isn't here yet but you know it's on its way. You're not imagining that, that's how things feel right now and there are a shitload of things contributing to it.

Things like SESTA/FOSTA and KOSA (which has not passed yet but is a big red flag waving on the horizon) have been eroding away the way that users on various platforms can function. Some platforms have consolidated in ways that harm users; some new platforms have popped up and shaken up the map of the internet; some platforms are being torn apart brick by brick by owners who don't care about the users. It kind of seems like people are actually looking up and realizing that advertising is A) bad and B) doesn't actually work and I think we're running straight toward another advertising-based crash like we saw in 2017. It feels like all the desperate things that tumblr is doing is just rearranging deck chairs on the titanic as the internet as a whole starts to sink into the ocean.

Honestly, I don't think it's that bad. I think it *feels* bad, but I think we're looking at a slow whimpering death of the platforms, not a bang. I think tumblr is going to hang on at least for a few years and I think it's going to end up like livejournal and myspace, which both still exist as websites that are recognizable as updated versions of the sites they were in 2004-2010. The thing that I think would really, honestly hurt tumblr in a fundamental way is if it moved to a more algorithmic and data-sales based model of advertising, and I think that's still pretty distant. I think Automattic is aware that killing the chronological feed would be the one unforgivable sin that would cause a mass exodus and a final crash, and I think when we see that, when we can't just scroll through the feed and see what our friends did that day in order of when they did it, that's when the party is over here.

But that's still not answering your question.

So, where do we go? What do we do? Well, for now, I'd say it's a good time to get contact info for your friends across various platforms. Get email addresses, get phone numbers.

Now is also the time for you to set up a personal website. NeoCities is currently the best place to do this, though it takes a lot more effort than just starting a blog on tumblr. I think that various oldschool blogging sites like Wordpress and Blogger/Blogspot/whatever the hell the google one is are a better place to have your emergency backup than a more platform-y platform if you aren't up to doing something with NeoCities.

If you've got the ability to do so and a group of people who are interested in the same core subject, set up a forum. There's a decent amount of off-the-shelf forum software out there and a text-and-small-images forum isn't prohibitively expensive, but it's never going to be huge and you're never going to have the kind of spread and virality and random connections that you would on a platform with millions or billions of users.

If you can't set up a forum, setting up or joining a discord server for your friends is a decent enough option at the moment, and may be a very good option for people who are looking to keep their interactions more private.

But yeah i think right now is a great time for people to start setting up their own personal websites, to start visiting actual webpages again, to start bookmarking their friends' websites, and to start collecting contact info that isn't tied to platforms.

[theshitpostcalligrapher]

Pinned FAQ

How do I request a card?

You can request up to 3 cards for free during openaskbox events! During those, the /ask inbox opens up for a few hours, during which I try to write as many as I can live on twitch and post them on tumblr.

After the event is over and I close that inbox, there are still a BUNCH of leftover requests. This is how I fill the daily content queue, I use those up til it's empty again and then run another openaskbox.

On Sundays at 3pm EST I write all 28 cards due to go up for the week from that pool of leftover asks live on twitch and then queue them to go up after stream

What if I don't wanna wait?

If you'd like to throw a bit of cash around instead of waiting, you can buy via the etsy listing or you can tune in to those^ Saturday livestreams, there's a variety of ways to donate to get cards written for you on the spot

How do I buy the card I've requested?

The etsy listing is available here! Please remember to include in the notes of the purchase which card(s) you want to buy. If you'd like me to bundle together all the cards you've requested over a period of a few years, dm me here on the blog and I can quote you on a cheaper bundle price

Why did you answer all those asks, it messed up my dash?

Sorry about that! So to keep all of that ^ organized, at the end of the month, I answer about 112-140 leftover asks in order to record them to a proper "to-write document"

It helps me keep organized, it allows me to easily search for spelling issues, and it gets a few eyeballs on the request in case someone tries to slip an obscure slur into their request that I'm not cool with writing (it has happened)

Lots of the regulars are used to this dash nonsense, but there are folks who want to avoid it entirely. If you're on mobile I'd just recommend unfollowing for a while, but if you're on desktop, you can blacklist the tag "added to notepad" and go to xkit to tick the "fully hide blocked tags" option so it clears up your dash

Wait I thought requests were closed, why can I still send things?

That's because requests use /ask, but /submit is always open because it's for YOUR calligraphy, pet photos, fanart of man... etc. Requests are NOT open when it's not openaskbox day but feel free to send me cool shit YOU made anytime

Wait you have a twitch, do you do anything other than calligraphy?

I try! my schedule at work (restaurant) varies week to week so I try my best to stream whenever I've got free time to, nothing's really planned out though

What are your regular writing tools and paper?

I mainly just use speedball nibs, specifically the c-series (c-0 through c-4) because they're angled flat nibs that let me do most blackletter hands I write. I have a supply of leonardt thin tips for detailing and illustrating

As for paper, the cards you see on the daily are on plain index cue cards I buy from staples. When commissioned/doing larger pieces, I work with a variety of paper, including a 32 lb xerox paper that has juuuust a perfect amount of lamination that avoids ink feathering, black paper that I bought a hundred sheets of in 2019 and I no longer remember the label, and a BOATLOAD of southworth's ivory parchment paper at both 32 and 64 lb weights.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (May 3) in CALGARY, then TOMORROW (May 4) in VANCOUVER, then onto Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Even Google admits – grudgingly – that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

It's nice that Google has finally stopped gaslighting the rest of us with claims that its search was still the same bedrock utility that so many of us relied upon as a key piece of internet infrastructure. This not only feels wildly wrong, it is empirically, provably false:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

Not only that, but we know why Google search sucks. Memos released as part of the DOJ's antitrust case against Google reveal that the company deliberately chose to worsen search quality to increase the number of queries you'd have to make (and the number of ads you'd have to see) to find a decent result:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Google's antitrust case turns on the idea that the company bought its way to dominance, spending the some of the billions it extracted from advertisers and publishers to buy the default position on every platform, so that no one ever tried another search engine, which meant that no one would invest in another search engine, either.

Google's tacit defense is that its monopoly billions only incidentally fund these kind of anticompetitive deals. Mostly, Google says, it uses its billions to build the greatest search engine, ad platform, mobile OS, etc that the public could dream of. Only a company as big as Google (says Google) can afford to fund the R&D and security to keep its platform useful for the rest of us.

That's the "monopolistic bargain" – let the monopolist become a dictator, and they will be a benevolent dictator. Shriven of "wasteful competition," the monopolist can split their profits with the public by funding public goods and the public interest.

Google has clearly reneged on that bargain. A company experiencing the dramatic security failures and declining quality should be pouring everything it has to righting the ship. Instead, Google repeatedly blew tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks while doing mass layoffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Those layoffs have now reached the company's "core" teams, even as its core services continue to decay:

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

(Google's antitrust trial was shrouded in secrecy, thanks to the judge's deference to the company's insistence on confidentiality. The case is moving along though, and warrants your continued attention:)

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-2-trillion-secret-trial-against

Google wormed its way into so many corners of our lives that its enshittification keeps erupting in odd places, like ordering takeout food:

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

Back in February, Housefresh – a rigorous review site for home air purifiers – published a viral, damning account of how Google had allowed itself to be overrun by spammers who purport to provide reviews of air purifiers, but who do little to no testing and often employ AI chatbots to write automated garbage:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

In the months since, Housefresh's Gisele Navarro has continued to fight for the survival of her high-quality air purifier review site, and has received many tips from insiders at the spam-farms and Google, all of which she recounts in a followup essay:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

One of the worst offenders in spam wars is Dotdash Meredith, a content-farm that "publishes" multiple websites that recycle parts of each others' content in order to climb to the top search slots for lucrative product review spots, which can be monetized via affiliate links.

A Dotdash Meredith insider told Navarro that the company uses a tactic called "keyword swarming" to push high-quality independent sites off the top of Google and replace them with its own garbage reviews. When Dotdash Meredith finds an independent site that occupies the top results for a lucrative Google result, they "swarm a smaller site’s foothold on one or two articles by essentially publishing 10 articles [on the topic] and beefing up [Dotdash Meredith sites’] authority."

Dotdash Meredith has keyword swarmed a large number of topics. from air purifiers to slow cookers to posture correctors for back-pain:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/keyword-swarming-dotdash.jpg

The company isn't shy about this. Its own shareholder communications boast about it. What's more, it has competition.

Take Forbes, an actual news-site, which has a whole shadow-empire of web-pages reviewing products for puppies, dogs, kittens and cats, all of which link to high affiliate-fee-generating pet insurance products. These reviews are not good, but they are treasured by Google's algorithm, which views them as a part of Forbes's legitimate news-publishing operation and lets them draft on Forbes's authority.

This side-hustle for Forbes comes at a cost for the rest of us, though. The reviewers who actually put in the hard work to figure out which pet products are worth your money (and which ones are bad, defective or dangerous) are crowded off the front page of Google and eventually disappear, leaving behind nothing but semi-automated SEO garbage from Forbes:

https://twitter.com/ichbinGisele/status/1642481590524583936

There's a name for this: "site reputation abuse." That's when a site perverts its current – or past – practice of publishing high-quality materials to trick Google into giving the site a high ranking. Think of how Deadspin's private equity grifter owners turned it into a site full of casino affiliate spam:

https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publishing/

The same thing happened to the venerable Money magazine:

https://moneygroup.pr/

Money is one of the many sites whose air purifier reviews Google gives preference to, despite the fact that they do no testing. According to Google, Money is also a reliable source of information on reprogramming your garage-door opener, buying a paint-sprayer, etc:

https://money.com/best-paint-sprayer/

All of this is made ten million times worse by AI, which can spray out superficially plausible botshit in superhuman quantities, letting spammers produce thousands of variations on their shitty reviews, flooding the zone with bullshit in classic Steve Bannon style:

https://escapecollective.com/commerce-content-is-breaking-product-reviews/

As Gizmodo, Sports Illustrated and USA Today have learned the hard way, AI can't write factual news pieces. But it can pump out bullshit written for the express purpose of drafting on the good work human journalists have done and tricking Google – the search engine 90% of us rely on – into upranking bullshit at the expense of high-quality information.

A variety of AI service bureaux have popped up to provide AI botshit as a service to news brands. While Navarro doesn't say so, I'm willing to bet that for news bosses, outsourcing your botshit scams to a third party is considered an excellent way of avoiding your journalists' wrath. The biggest botshit-as-a-service company is ASR Group (which also uses the alias Advon Commerce).

Advon claims that its botshit is, in fact, written by humans. But Advon's employees' Linkedin profiles tell a different story, boasting of their mastery of AI tools in the industrial-scale production of botshit:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg

Now, none of this is particularly sophisticated. It doesn't take much discernment to spot when a site is engaged in "site reputation abuse." Presumably, the 12,000 googlers the company fired last year could have been employed to check the top review keyword results manually every couple of days and permaban any site caught cheating this way.

Instead, Google is has announced a change in policy: starting May 5, the company will downrank any site caught engaged in site reputation abuse. However, the company takes a very narrow view of site reputation abuse, limiting punishments to sites that employ third parties to generate or uprank their botshit. Companies that produce their botshit in-house are seemingly not covered by this policy.

As Navarro writes, some sites – like Forbes – have prepared for May 5 by blocking their botshit sections from Google's crawler. This can't be their permanent strategy, though – either they'll have to kill the section or bring it in-house to comply with Google's rules. Bringing things in house isn't that hard: US News and World Report is advertising for an SEO editor who will publish 70-80 posts per month, doubtless each one a masterpiece of high-quality, carefully researched material of great value to Google's users:

https://twitter.com/dannyashton/status/1777408051357585425

As Navarro points out, Google is palpably reluctant to target the largest, best-funded spammers. Its March 2024 update kicked many garbage AI sites out of the index – but only small bottom-feeders, not large, once-respected publications that have been colonized by private equity spam-farmers.

All of this comes at a price, and it's only incidentally paid by legitimate sites like Housefresh. The real price is borne by all of us, who are funneled by the 90%-market-share search engine into "review" sites that push low quality, high-price products. Housefresh's top budget air purifier costs $79. That's hundreds of dollars cheaper than the "budget" pick at other sites, who largely perform no original research.

Google search has a problem. AI botshit is dominating Google's search results, and it's not just in product reviews. Searches for infrastructure code samples are dominated by botshit code generated by Pulumi AI, whose chatbot hallucinates nonexistence AWS features:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/pulumi_ai_pollution_of_search/

This is hugely consequential: when these "hallucinations" slip through into production code, they create huge vulnerabilities for widespread malicious exploitation:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

We've put all our eggs in Google's basket, and Google's dropped the basket – but it doesn't matter because they can spend $20b/year bribing Apple to make sure no one ever tries a rival search engine on Ios or Safari:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-payments-apple-reached-20-220947331.html

Google's response – laying off core developers, outsourcing to low-waged territories with weak labor protections and spending billions on stock buybacks – presents a picture of a company that is too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Google promised us a quid-pro-quo: let them be the single, authoritative portal ("organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"), and they will earn that spot by being the best search there is:

https://www.ft.com/content/b9eb3180-2a6e-41eb-91fe-2ab5942d4150

But – like the spammers at the top of its search result pages – Google didn't earn its spot at the center of our digital lives.

It cheated.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

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[blindbeta]

Why Writers Should Consider Giving Blind Characters Canes, Guide Animals, or Other Mobility Aids + How To Choose One

(Note: This post is admittedly long and full of information. Make use of the headings to read the parts you are interested in. I have provided many links, which you can read as you go or save for later. I suggest saving this post and taking your time with it. I am also willing to answer any questions for people who have difficulty reading long posts. While I considered breaking this post into parts, I decided to keep all the information in one place for ease of sharing and reference, especially because multiple sections of the post refer to other sections contained within it.)

When I read for blind characters, my most common suggestion for writers is to give their character a cane, guide animal, or utilize another mobility aid. Most stories I beta read feature totally blind characters or people with very little vision, such as only seeing colors. Despite this, it is extremely common for me to suggest giving them a cane or guide animal because they are rarely portrayed using mobility devices. Because this is such a common suggestion, I wanted to create a post about it.

Most of this will be about mobility aids for people who aren’t familiar with them or are still deciding what tools are best for their character. It will also be mostly for modern, realistic, or semi-realistic stories. I will create a separate post for fantasy and science fiction mobility aids, use of magic or magical items, and writing stories set in or inspired by times before formal mobility tools existed. However, I believe this post can benefit anyone who is writing a blind character or anyone who wants to learn more about blindness. Mobility tools are a big part of blind culture, blind communities, diversity of blind experiences, and accessibility.

Learn About Mobility Aids

Here is a comprehensive post by visually impaired fiction writer and blogger @mimzy-writing-online which contains information about canes, O&M, guide animals, etc. If you are not familiar with canes, start there. It contains helpful information for body language, use of canes, and resources for descriptions that any writer will find valuable. The post also has a section on guide animals and sighted guide.

Here is a post I made about crafting fictional guide animals, although I have no experience as a guide animal handler myself. I made sure to research and include links, so it should still be a good starting point. It also has information about differences between service animals and emotional support animals.

Sighted Guide / Human Guide

First, terminology discussion. Sighted guide is a more common term and more examples come up when I search this term. Sighted guide refers to when a person with vision helps guide a blind person. The guide can be abled or also blind themselves. I have guided my friends before and they have guided me. I have often said that, in a way, sighted guide is a misnomer because someone who has less vision or no vision can also guide someone with more vision just as well.

The term human guide makes up for this misnomer by being more accurate. A TikTok by AskABlindPerson or @askablindperson on tumblr, explains this well. Here is a link to the video. The video states the following:

“I’m blind and I definitely prefer to say human guide rather than sighted guide because you don’t inherently need vision to guide and a blind person can do it too. And it doesn’t have to be that the blind person who’s guiding has more vision than the other person either. It can just be that they know the area better than the person they’re guiding, or it could be that they just have better cane skills or independent travel skills than the other person. Because not everybody has equal access to the same exact opportunities for training. So a blind person can also guide, which is why I like to say human guide because it’s more inclusive.”

Not everyone minds which term is used, however. Some people also only use one term because it was taught to them first, rather than because of any particular meaning.

Below are some examples of sighted / human guide and when it is often used.

Here is an article titled How to be a Sighted Guide

Here is another helpful page with information on certain situations such as narrow spaces.

Here is a video by London Vision.

While human guide can be someone’s main mobility aid, it is often used according to the situation.

Situations in which your character might want to use sighted guide include:

-crowds, where a cane might be difficult to use or someone has a companion they would like to avoid being separated from

-while in lines, mostly to provide descriptions of what happens around them or to let them know when to move forward in the line

-ground that is uneven or steep may cause someone to want to use sighted guide rather than a cane, although this will depend on the person. Using a guide and a cane is also possible. A guide animal may go around the obstacle

-when going inside an unfamiliar house or indoor location, usually for locating a specific room

-navigating unfamiliar areas

-public transport

-guide animal handlers may choose to either do traditional sighted / human guide while using the guide animal or give the command for their animal to follow the person without holding onto them

Guides allow the blind person to gain additional information about their surroundings through conversation with the guide. Human guides can also aid in navigation by providing helpful directions or landmarks. Human guides can be used with a white cane or guide animal. They can also be used without any other mobility aid.

People from cultures who place high value on interdependence, especially on family, may wish to use more human guides. People who have anxiety or disorientation may prefer to use human guides or simply travel with someone else for security. Other people who might tend to use more human guides include: people who have moved to an unfamiliar area, people who are losing vision, people who have recently become blind, people with other disabilities or health concerns, or people who prefer the company of others.

In stories, human guides can portray character relationships, establishing trust and respect. Perhaps a character already knows how to guide, showing familiarity with blindness. This mobility tool can display the helpfulness of a stranger or be the start of a meet-cute. Additionally, showing how good or bad a character is at guiding can show compatibility between characters. I also believe that writing guides into a story can allow for detailed visual descriptions or conversation between your characters.

Imagine character A slowly learning to trust character B, culminating in letting that character be a human guide.

Sonar Devices

I wanted to include a section for these because they aren’t often discussed.

Sonar devices are intended as a supplement for use of a cane or guide animal. Unless the sonar and cane are paired together, such as with the WeWalk cane. While they could be used by themselves, this should probably only be with the addition of a guide and in non-crowded, familiar area.

Here is a video review of the Sunu Band by TheBlindLife.

Here is another review comparing two devices: the Sunu Band and the Buzz Clip.

Note how the devices are used, especially with a cane. The cane is used to detect objects from the waist below, whereas the sonar device is used to detect objects above the waist. This includes objects like tree branches.

Sonar devices work by detecting objects in front of the user and giving a tactile alert, such as a vibration. Vibrations increase the closer one gets to the object, giving a continuous vibration when right in front of it. Moving away from the object, such as stepping to the side, will stop the vibration.

This device could allow blind characters to be more active an create interesting opportunities for descriptions.

Why Does My Character Need a Cane, Guide Animal, or Human Guide?

A few reasons include:

1. It will be more relatable for blind audiences if characters move through the world like they do

2. It is more realistic for stories set in our world or worlds meant to be realistic save for a few elements

3. It allows audiences who aren’t blind to understand how blind people move through the world. In the case of sighted guide, it also offers depictions of politely and efficiently offering help to a blind person, which may include not offering help at all.

4. Canes and guide animals give your blind character some visibility, as the cane, and to some extent the guide animal and harness, signify to others that a character is blind or otherwise disabled in some way. As for sighted / human guide, it offers an extra voice for advocacy purposes or the added visibility that someone is being helped.

5. Mobility tools allow blind people to participate more in a world that is rarely accessible for them at a basic level. I almost always find this is true in books as well unless the writer makes a point to include universal design.

6. Mobility aids improve navigation, increase safety, and increase interaction with the world.

Why Would Anyone Need To Know My Character is Blind?

Safety is a big factor.

In this video titled Using A White Cane While Legally Blind by Cayla With a C, Cayla discusses some of the benefits of using a white cane. One of these is that the cane works as an identifier, letting people know the person using it can’t see so other people need to watch out for them. She mentions it is also important for cars and bikers to know cane users can’t see them well or at all, meaning they don’t expect a cane user to move out of the way.

Both Cayla and Molly Burke share in their videos that people are more likely to offer help when they use a cane.

How Do Mobility Aids Help Blind People Navigate?

It depends on what mobility aid is used.

Canes offer more tactile information and direct contact with the environment. Canes allow someone to feel changes in the ground, such as going from carpet to tile. They make it easier to feel steps or broken sidewalk. They allow blind people to be aware of obstacles, such as a chair, rather than simply going around them they way they might with a guide dog. They help blind people locate landmarks they need in order to be oriented in their environment and navigate their way to different places. For example, they may search for a bench, knowing a drinking fountain is across from it.

As for guide animals, because I am not a guide animal handler myself, I wanted to include quotes from a few sources.

The Guide Dog Foundation says the following in a very useful Q&A:

“In short, guide dogs are taught how to find and follow a clear path, maneuver around obstacles, and stop at curbs. They follow their teammate's directions, and they know that they can disobey only in the face of danger.”

And according to International Guide Dog Federation:

“A guide dog is trained to guide its owner in a straight line unless ordered otherwise. The dog will avoid any obstacles en route, above or around you. It will stop at stairs, doors and kerbs. The dog will not decide where to go; it is up to the vision impaired person to instruct the dog on the direction for the dog to go and the dog will safely guide the person as instructed. The vision impaired person will already be familiar with regularly travelled routes and the dog will quickly become familiar with these too.”

And International Association of Assistance Dog Partnership has a page that explains the categories of tasks performed by guide dogs, as well as other types of assistance dogs.

Sighted / human guide can be used with a family member, friend, or helpful stranger. It can be a primary mode of O&M or used when needed, meaning it be used even if someone already has a cane or a guide animal.

Usually, human guide involves contact with the guide. It can also include the guide orienting the person they are leading by describing surroundings such as “there is a bench to the right” or “we’re near the door” or it can involve telling someone where steps are.

How Do I Know What My Character Should Use?

What your character chooses will depend on their lifestyle, level of vision, age, where they live, culture, religion, and their needs as a blind person.

In the post on guide animals, I went over a few reasons someone might choose a guide dog or a guide horse.

Here are some articles about canes vs guide animals. Although the ones I found focus on dogs, I believe many points made about guide animals can be applied to miniature horses as well.

Guide Dogs vs White Canes: The Comprehensive Comparison

The link above includes the following:

“One of the biggest and most obvious differences between a guide dog and white cane is that a guide dog is trained to avoid obstacles along their pathway. A white cane helps locate impediments so that the blind person can decide how best to maneuver around them.”

Another article that may help:

White Cane vs Guide Dog: Why or Why Not?

White Canes and Guide Dogs - What’s Actually the Difference?

Here are some videos:

Guide Dog vs Canes - Pros and Cons by Molly Burke

White Canes vs Guide Dogs by Challenge Solutions

White Canes vs Guide Dogs - Which is Better? 21 Pros and Cons by Unsightly Opinions

Guide Dog vs Cane, Which is better? by Ashley’s Advice

I also wanted to discuss a few more points.

1. Multiple disabilities

People with multiple disabilities may prefer different methods. For example, those who use a stabilizing cane may have different reasons for choosing their mobility aid. I went into that more in this post here.

It would be difficult to cover all other disabilities here, but I will attempt to include some things to consider.

Consider any pain, weakness, or other difficulties your character may have around their hands, wrists, arms. Canes require repetitive use of these areas.

Consider any sensory issues your character has. Sensory issues may come into play with cane vibration and the tactile information given by canes, especially as it differs between surfaces. The video by Challenge Solutions listed above discusses pain caused by vibration and repetitive movement, for someone who already deals with this. It goes into more detail, mentioning that a dog may lessen this difficulty compared to cane use.

Consider phobias or traumas that may make service animals, especially dogs, a bad choice for the character, their loved ones, or community. In contrast, consider how a service animal may help provide comfort to characters with traumas unrelated to animals

I hope that provides a starting point for thinking about how other disabilities may impact someone’s choice when deciding what mobility aid is right for them. I hope this is helpful is choosing a mobility aid for your character.

2. Financial Considerations

Consider financial difficulties. While guide dog schools often provide highly trained dogs, weeks of training, a harness, and some essentials for free, it depends on the school. Some schools may cover the dog’s veterinary care, while others may not. Some may provide one bag of food. Some may cover costs of transportation to the training school, but may not cover the cost of missed work. Challenge Solutions lists several costly areas that go with having a dog, such as grooming or toys.

The amount the training schools cover is so varied that one cannot assume anything about how the blind person keeps up with care of their dog. They may have trained with a school that covers the most costly things, leaving them to buy the occasional treats and toys, while other schools may not cover much after the dogs and handler leave the school, causing financial difficulties that may or may not have been fully anticipated. Financial situations of blind people with guide animals cannot be reliably assumed.

Canes, on the other hand, are a one-time payment per cane, if they aren’t already free. While canes do require replacement tips and while people do go through canes quickly, the cost is not comparable to that of caring for a guide animal.

For writers, it may make sense to have your fictional world contain schools that continue to cover costs over the guide animal’s life. Or perhaps veterinary care is free in that world. Either way, this may be something to consider. The character’s financial situation can show a lot about them and the world in which they live.

3. Additional thoughts about safety and discrimination

Safety has many different connotations in blind communities. Some people consider safety to mean social safety, as alerting others to blindness may explain any behavior that would be considered strange or rude.

Some consider safety to mean physical safety from tripping, falling, running into objects or people, or having them run into you. This is especially important with vehicles.

Still others consider safety to mean being able to navigate and orient oneself, such as when traveling alone.

Some people consider safety to mean interpersonal safety and the fear of being harmed due to being perceived as vulnerable.

Molly Burke mentions this particular subject at around 19:22 to 20:47 in her video here. To paraphrase, she says that having a big dog with her makes her feel safer as a blind person. Molly states that the white cane may increase her vulnerability as it identifies her as a potential target due to her blindness.

I mentioned that it is helpful for people to be identified as blind, such as with a cane and, to a lesser extent, a guide dog. That is still true. This may provide protection by alerting others that they may need to look out for a blind person instead of expecting that person to avoid them or their vehicle.

On the other side, a cane may alert others to vulnerability in a way that is harmful to the blind person. Due to this factor, blind people may feel safer with a guide dog because the presence of a dog may make others hesitate before doing them harm. I am not sure if the same can be said for those with horses, but it is possible horses may still act as a deterrent. In the video by Challenge Solutions, Caitlyn says that while guide dogs are not trained to be guard dogs and should not be aggressive by nature, it can feel safer to travel with a guide dog. Caitlyn says the following: “They are dogs and I would like to think that they would have a protective instinct if a situation arose where that was needed.” She adds, “I think there is more of a protective aspect to guide dog usage than white cane usage. At least I always felt a lot safer with my dog than I do with my cane.”

I also wanted to include thoughts about discrimination.

Some blind people may worry they will experience more discrimination using one mobility aid over another. This may influence their decision. To give brief examples, people with service animals may be turned away from places they are allowed to go. They may need to advocate for themselves more because of this. Another example might be feeling like people judge them or stare at them more when they use a white cane. They may be grabbed or shouted at more often when using a white cane, as described by Challenge Solutions, or they may be ignored or go unnoticed in other cases. In fact, some blind people are only spoken to in public because of guide dogs acting as a conversation starter.

However, feeling invisible in society seems to be a common issue for many disabled people. Some people also talk about being invisible in some areas and uncomfortably visible in other areas. While a blind person’s choice of mobility aid may influence this, the common disabled experience of both invisibility and hyper-visibility might still follow them.

Additionally, myths about blindness, which I wrote about in this post here, may also cause people to accuse cane users of faking if they have residual vision, which can lead to them feeling unsafe or like they cannot use their residual vision without receiving negative attention. This may cause some people to want a service animal, as in the case of a guide dog, some people may assume they are simply walking their dog or training a guide dog. This may be a way some blind people try to avoid being accused of faking blindness. However, blind people with guide animals may also be accused of having a fake service animal or be accused of not really needing their service animal. Additional barriers may include general public ignorance about laws around service animals or differing laws around access per country.

All of the above can put a lot of strain on people who are just trying to get from point A to point B.

Sighted guide may come with some issues as well. Finding someone who is willing to guide and a helpful guide may be challenging unless a blind person is already using a trusted friend or family member. In social situations, other people may misunderstand use of human guide, believing that they should address the guide rather than the blind person. Use of this mobility aid may also come with judgment from others about the blind person being incapable, lazy, or a burden on others. None of these are true, but they can be judgments people make.

Sighted / human guide may be a preferred form of O&M for people who have recently gone blind or are in unfamiliar areas. Additionally, blind people who come from cultures where interdependence is valued may prefer to use a human guide with or without another mobility aid. It is also important to note that the nature of the blind community also celebrates both interdependence and dependence, and these may not always mean the same thing as they do to people who aren’t blind. This is also true when it comes to using mobility tools and techniques.

What Should My Low Vision Character Use?

The majority of blind people have some residual vision, including low vision. Which is part of why most of the blind community doesn’t use canes, along with lack of training. Unfortunately, many people with residual vision are, however subtly, turned away from using canes or other mobility aids. Based on stories from friends, suggestions in this post by @mimzy-writing-online, my own experience, and information online, I will suggest a few reasons this might be the case.

A big reason has to do with believing they have too much vision to require a mobility aid. The idea of not being disabled enough is both an internal an external issue for people with residual vision. This is because people often claim that if a person can see some, they must not require mobility aid. Mobility aids are seen as a last resort, rather than a way to make life easier. This can lead to self-doubt, confusion, or guilt for a blind person. They might feel as if they are ungrateful because they believe other people have it worse. Conversely, some people may have been taught that relying on a mobility tool is shameful, giving up, or reveals a lack of independence. And sadly, some blind people with residual vision may be afraid of rejection or standing out from others.

This leads me into another reason, which is: believing they will experience more discrimination or social exclusion when using a cane. Unfortunately, this can be true. However, it is also true to that not using a cane can cause others to judge someone for things they do or don’t do as a blind person.

Disclosure is an option that works for many. However, blind people cannot always disclose to everyone they interact with, such as to strangers spotting them outside. Disclosure of blindness can also be fraught with accusations of not really being blind, not looking blind, or not being blind enough to count as blind. These accusations sometimes happen when using canes as well. Denial of help, denial of accommodations, and accusations of faking are common.

In some circumstances, the opposite can happen. Instead of being accused of faking, the choice to use a mobility aid might bring about helpfulness from strangers or concern from loved ones. There may be concern that the vision loss has progressed or that something is wrong. After all, suddenly using a mobility tool can inspire alarm in people who aren’t used to them, because the prevailing thought is that mobility tools are only for totally blind people. And the incorrect message behind this is that being totally blind is negative.

Characters choosing to start using a mobility tool could ease themselves and loved ones into it by being open about their plans. They could experiment with cane use, marginally increasing use over time. Or they could simply use a cane as often as they need to, addressing concerns as they are brought up. Portrayal of communication about mobility aids between a blind character and their family could be a lovely addition to a story.

Lastly, blind people are expected to rely on residual vision for as long as possible, in as many situations as possible. Even if it causes pain, disorientation, or anxiety. Even if seeing is exhausting or frustrating. Even if it isn’t safe. However, the other side of this is that many blind people with residual vision enjoy seeing colors or shapes. They may enjoy being able to describe things to friends with less vision.

But their sight may not always be enough to forgo using a mobility tool safely.

It is my opinion that anyone on the blind spectrum or with declining vision can benefit from use of accessibility tools, whether it be learning Braille or training with a cane.

People with low vision can use canes when they feel it is necessary. Examples may include times where they may need extra visibility or extra contact with the ground as they walk. They may choose to use a cane when crossing the street for added safety. Same applies to using stairs. They may bring their cane only to unfamiliar environments or out with them at night. They might feel like using it one day or in one place and not the next. They may have a condition that is not stable from day to day. Overcast weather or dim lighting could make it necessary to pull out a cane. They could simply want to use their cane or decide to leave it at home because they felt like it.

A blind person does not need to a full-time cane-user to be allowed to use one. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. If they need it, they need it. It is that simple. It will be the same with your low vision character.

Characters may also switch up mobility tools depending on what is best for where they’re going and what is accessible to them. For example, someone may use a human guide for extra safety while in a new city.

Why I Want More Mobility Aids in Media

This is just my opinion, but I would like to see more characters using mobility aids blind people use in real life. This helps to normalize use of these tools for people who are not familiar with blindness. This allows blind people representation that is more true to life. It also adds more detail to stories that wouldn’t otherwise be there.

There is also something off about blind characters who don’t use anything, specifically because most portrayals of blindness involve characters who are totally blind. Why are these characters walking around absolutely everywhere with no familiar way to navigate? Why are tools used by the blind community rejected when it comes to stories about blind characters?

I suspect it is because of a few factors:

1. Not knowing how mobility aids work. Another deterrent could be the difficulties of research and, in live-action media, wanting to avoid training usually sighted actors in use of these mobility tools.

2. Not wanting the blind character to seem too hindered

3. Wanting the mobility aid to be cooler or more interesting if it does exist. This varies by genre and the period in which the piece of media is set.

I find it strange that most stories about blind people do not feature blind characters using tools or techniques blind people use in real life. It sometimes feels as if blindness is a decoration writers add to their story without thinking about how it would impact their character.

My suggestion is to consider the amount of vision your character has, along with their lifestyle, and choose a mobility tool that works for them. I know that some of you are writing characters who can technically move through life without using a mobility aid full time. In these cases, it would be fun to see characters who are transient mobility aid users.

Closing - Not Everything About Blindness is Difficult

I hope this post was informative. I know that some of it may feel contradictory in nature, but that seems to be part of diversity of experience people have with mobility aids. Not everything has to be true for your character or will be true to their experience. Additionally, don’t feel pressure to portray the difficult aspects of mobility aids or being blind in public spaces; it is good to have stories where blind characters are treated well by everyone. There are days when blind people have nothing but lovely interactions with others and when safety is not a concern.

While I mentioned some negative aspects of being blind in this post, there are many positives as well. This can include opportunities to meet new people and have conversations. This can mean getting the chance to use cool gadgets other people don’t get to use. It can also mean being able to experience the world in unique and fun ways, such as noticing little details about the world. It can mean appreciating colors, lights, smells, sounds, or sensations. It can also mean cool navigation tools and techniques.

I will post a part 2 soon. It will include information for writers of science fiction, fantasy, and stories set in historical times. As always, if anyone has anything feel free to share. I will add any responses here as edits to this post.

If you found this post helpful, my pinned post has many more links. I accept asks or messages with questions. I also offer beta reading for blind characters.

-BlindBeta

[copperbadge]

Amateur Translation Programs

So I had a lot of imaginative and informative responses to my post about looking for an amateur translation program -- something where I could load in a foreign language and it would insert a box where I could add a translation every-other-line. The idea was that this way I could practice translation with more advanced texts, and texts I chose, and thus move away from Duolingo, which at this point is good for drilling and daily practice but not for more advanced learning.

I didn't find precisely what was needed but I did get some inspiration for further explanation, and I also learned that adding the term "glossing" (thank you @thewalrus-said) into my searches helped a great deal in terms of weeding out programs that were either "Let this AI translate for you" or just endless promotional links for Babbel and Duolingo and such. I thought I'd collect up the suggestions and post them here; at the end I'm including my best swing at designing what I wanted, and why it doesn't work yet.

Suggestion one, from many people, was various ways to generate a page that is simply fixed Italian text with space underneath each line to add in a translation. This is pretty simple as a process and there are sites that will do it for you, such as this one that @ame-kage suggested. However, most of these don't allow for movement in the Italian text, and many produce a PDF which you would need to print out in order to write on unless you're willing to open it in Acrobat (and deal with Acrobat). A good solution for some but not what I'm looking for purely because I'm trying to make this super frictionless so that (knowing myself as I do) I will actually do it.

I did find this version interesting, suggested by @drivemetogeek: Have one word doc saved as your "template" doc and set the line spacing as 2.0 or higher. Select your text from source and paste it into the template doc as text-only. Ctrl a, ctrl c to select all and copy, then open a new document and "paste special" as picture. Right click and set the "wrap text" as behind text. Now you have a document where you can, basically, type over the existing text because it's the background of the page. This seems like the most frictionless version, because you could set up a bunch of them ahead of time. If you wanted to move between desktop and mobile, however, you'd need to ensure that the pasted image was fairly narrow so that you don't have to sideways-scroll.

Relatedly, people suggested generating a document that is simply the Italian text with empty space beneath it for typing in of the translation. This can be done either semi-automated, using a macro or a language like Python, or find-and-replace on, say, the stops at the ends of sentences. It basically outputs the same as above but with a more digitally accessible format, without any more effort than above. If you were to do this in Google Sheets you could also fix the column width so that it didn't do anything weird when you opened it on your phone. But it is still very friction-y, and does not allow for easy shifting of the Italian as needed. There's high probability of the translation breaking weirdly across the page. Still a top option in terms of simplicity and access.

@smokeandholograms suggested another variation illustrated here where essentially you're converting the text to a series of tables, with each paragraph a row, and an empty cell next to it for the translation. I might play around more with this one eventually, since I think I could possibly make it a three-column and put the Italian in one, the translation in the next, and the auto-translate to let me know where I might be slipping in the third. (Not that I trust auto-translate but comparing a hand translation to an auto translation can be useful in terms of working out when I've messed up the way a tense or mood is read. I tend to read indirect verbs as automatically imperative because I'm a weirdo.)

@wynjara linked to an add-in for Word specifically designed for translators, known as TransTools; this appears to employ a macro to do the same thing, though it does have a format where you can place the translation next to each sentence directly rather than in a separate cell. The full suite of tools is only $45 which is reasonable for my budget, but for what I need I think I could also just create the macro.

Using LaTeX as a tool specially designed for glossing was an option on offer, but I don't know enough about LaTeX to figure out the pros of this one, which is in itself the major con -- there's a learning curve that I think varies widely by person but for me is unfortunately a wall. It came out of a discussion on Reddit about trying to find something like what I want; also in that discussion is a link to a code generator that allows you to…do something…to the initial language, but it's not entirely clear to me (I'm sure it's clear to people who understand coding) what you would then do with it that would allow it to be output in the way I'm hoping for. Like, I could turn a paragraph of text into HTML, I understand that far, but any Italian I find is already on a website.

Moving more into apps that might work, Redditors on the LaTeX discussion suggested SIL Fieldworks, which is a professional language tech tool. Fieldworks isn't a program I'd previously encountered but much as with the ones I had, it looks like the learning curve is fairly steep and it is definitely overkill generally for what I need, though it might also harbor within it the thing I want. It is free, so I may download and play around with it.

@brightwanderer suggested using note-taking or "whiteboard" apps such as Freeform or Nebo; these are generally a kind of "infinite canvas" in which you can drop objects, text boxes, or handwriting. I don't know that Freeform would be measurably different to just using Word and a macro, since I'd still have to input/format all the text and then be stuck with the same "fixed text" setup -- and it's also iOS only -- but for some folks it might be more helpful. Nebo is a similar infinite-canvas with unfortunately the same issues, though on the plus it's available for Android, which is where most of my mobile property resides.

@bloodbright suggested that I was looking for a CAT tool, a professional translation tool mainly used by translators working in the field. This was a concept I'd encountered, but I hadn't found a good starting place. They suggested Smartcat and OmegaT. Smartcat bills itself as an AI translation platform and is HARD pushing the "don't translate it yourself, hire a translator or let AI do it" angle, so it's difficult to tell what it offers in terms of actual tools for translators, and it's also cagey about pricing, so I can't really evaluate it. OmegaT is free and gives off big "some weirdo homebrewed this in their basement" vibe (which I am here for) but I also recognized it from screengrabs that were the reason I veered away from professional-grade software: it looked too complex. Realistically, the major downside of OmegaT is that I don't think I can put it on my phone. One thing I did find interesting is that once you translate a portion of the text, the original language goes away, though I assume you can turn that off if needed. I do kind of like that because it means my distractable brain is looking at Less Stuff.

So where did I end up?

Well, it looked like I was going to have to try a homebrew myself. I had the idea of trying some of the initial suggestions but in reverse -- designing a document where every other line was a single-cell table fixed to the page. You could paste in the Italian, which would wrap around the cells, and then enter the English in the cells.

You can fix a table in place in Google Docs -- you click on the table, then under Table > Style select Wrap Text, Both Sides, and Fix On Page. Getting the whole page set up is a little labor intensive but once you did that, you could just save it as a template and make a duplicate of it each time. And this actually works….on desktop.

Unfortunately, if you open it in the mobile Docs app, the app can't handle the fixed tables and automatically moves them all to after the text that's been pasted in. I tried redesigning it so that it's a table within a table -- one for the Italian, then within that a series of them for the English -- but when you nest a table in Google Docs, it doesn't let you fix the second table in place. And you are also still dealing with the wrap issue, although you can resize the page and add a large right-hand margin as a kludge of a fix for that.

You can build this same kind of document in Word, so I tried building one in Word and then uploading it to Drive, but when you open the Word file in Docs (or in Microsoft Word for Android), it still strips the fixed positioning -- there's just some functionality missing from both apps that doesn't allow them to handle fixed-position tables.

So, the design is sound, just not the final execution. If I could program an app, I could probably remedy the issues with it -- it's simply a series of text boxes nested inside one another with different formatting. I would imagine that's relatively basic to set up, although given that neither Docs nor Word can handle fixed tables in mobile, perhaps I've stumbled on a much bigger problem that everyone is ignoring because nobody actually needs or wants fixed tables in mobile. :D

Experimentation is ongoing, anyway. I might simply have to resign myself to the fact that my translation study is going to have to be in front of a computer, which might be for the best anyway when I inevitably want to compare my translation to an auto-translate to see where I might have read something wrong.

[gigglesandfreckles-hp]

a euphemia potter sighting! and...a fateful dm ;-)

“It has to be a double vowel.” James looks up from his phone, mid Google search. “What?” “Wordle,” Sirius mutters, eyes glued to his own mobile. He’s tapping away with that obnoxious stylus he insists on using, its tiny tip scratching at the screen in a way that makes James’s jaw tighten. James glances back at his own phone, his fingers scrolling through the search results. His frustration mounts as another fruitless batch of results pop up under ‘Evans female London.’ The more he searches, the more elusive she seems. “Are you still Googling her?”

continue reading chapter 4 on ao3

[petermorwood]

Sound FX oopsie or not?

I was watching a couple of episodes of "The Crown" last week, and picked up yet again on something I'd noticed - heard - before. Unless there's something going on that I don't know about, the sound the show used for phones is incorrect.

They (w)ring wrong. In fact they ring American.

UK / Irish bell-ringer phones, the ones I grew up with - and which you'd expect to hear in Buckingham Palace, Balmoral etc. - had a short double ring, like so: Brringg-Brringg ... Brringg-Brringg ... Brringg-Brringg.

US bell-ringer telephones had a single long-ish ring, like so: Brrriiinnng ... Brrriiinnng ... Brrriiinnng.

It probably sounds unimportant for those too young to have heard these phones unless they've installed a "old phone ring" in their mobile.

However for people who grew up with a particular ring (not that long ago, the phones in those pics brring'd on in homes and offices on both sides of the Pond well into the 1990s) the incorrect sound can be as odd as, for instance, seeing US or Irish / UK cars driving on the wrong side.

It takes a couple of seconds, and then "Oh, that's not right..." (or not left, as appropriate).

Despite more on-line searching than I should have wasted time on, I haven't found either "goof" or "reason why" to explain how those phones in "The Crown" rang the way they did, and it's an itch I'd love to scratch.

*****

Another sound error is depicting modern British emergency vehicles as having two-tone (dee-dah-dee-dah) horns. Not any more - even though an EV going somewhere in a hurry with lights and sounds on is AFAIK still "running blues and twos".

Nowadays "twos" have been replaced by wailer, yelper and oth-er kinds of electronic siren - none of which, IMO, are as efficient as the two-tone either for cutting through ambient noise or indicating which direction the sound and vehicle is coming from.

I've also got a memory of a documentary sometime in the past year about the Battle of Britain and the Blitz (i.e. 1940-41) where whoever dubbed in the sound-effects clearly assumed that a dee-dah tone has always been the British police-fire-ambulance warning.

Ahhh... No.

British emergency vehicles in the 1940s didn't use sirens, horns or klaxons; they were fitted with hand-operated or electric bells. At that period, the two-tone warning called a Martin-Horn...

...was AFAIK exclusively German...!

All this sounds picky-picky, but while using the wrong plane or ship or vehicle because no example of a real one exists any more is one thing, making a mistake in something as inexpensive and easily-reconstructed as a period sound is another matter.

Of course it's a well-known truism that while the contract for a movie / show's historical consultant says they must be paid, there's no matching contract clause that says they must be heeded, so for the sake of their scholarly reputations those consultants sometimes demand to be removed from the credits.

Looking at you, Ridley...

*****

ETA: Some days later, with that original post still queued, I may perhaps have found an answer. :->

I've just watched "Thirteen Days", that rather good, properly tense movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis, in which Kevin Costner's character had two phones at home. The black one was domestic with a US single ring, the red one was Official...

With a UK-style double ring.

Without bothering to re-watch each relevant episode of "The Crown", I'm now thinking those "incorrect" phone-rings may all have been internal lines and - like the Official phone in "Thirteen Days" - had a different ringing pattern to denote they weren't a "civilian" call.

In addition, the Costner character and his wife both react to the double ring with alarm, indicating they know its significance.

All of the above makes sense when you consider that custom ringtones were half a century in the future, and there's only so much the electrical pulses driving a pair of metal bells can do...