#streaming services are the devil’s doing

[missgreeneyartz]

I’m so annoyed because I got rid of all my streaming services (except Shudder) because I never watched enough to justify paying for them and between Nimona and the new Scott Pilgrim series (and whenever the next season of Arcane comes out), Netflix is really going to get me crawling back like a worm aren’t they 😠 can you even just buy Netflix specific media or is everything that’s a Netflix exclusive only ever available on Netflix? Annoying. ANNOYING.

[lumiereswig]

I'm still seeing a lot of angry takes in the tags about how excessive Watcher's current costs are and how all fans really want, apparently, is "just shane and ryan sitting in a basement" back again. While I do think Watcher is probably spending over budget and that's a real issue, a lot of the takes I'm seeing show a fundamental misunderstanding of how video production works and where costs actually lie. So a few quick things that I just keep seeing that are bothering me:

It was never just Shane and Ryan in a basement. BFU did a great job selling that conceit and making sure you never saw anyone beyond them and maybe TJ, but they absolutely had other crew members with them on ghost hunts and they didn't do all the work on BFU themselves. This Q&A from Season 2 lists 36 people on staff for Buzzfeed Unsolved. It's fair to make arguments that Watcher may or may not need 25 people, but those arguments should not be coming from a place of "before it was just Shane and Ryan and nobody else."

If you don't know how many people are needed to make a professional video from a TV/film standpoint, you will not have a reasonable grasp of why Watcher wants to keep 25 people on staff. Sure, some YouTubers get by with a ring light and a contracted editor. The Watcher team have stated repeatedly that they do not want to work as just YouTubers and see themselves more as a production studio—so why do people keep referencing the YouTube model to understand their business? This is like asking the local shake shop why it doesn't function like the kids' lemonade stand down the block. The item category is similar but they're not trying for the same products or process.

The "gold dusted food" is not the big budget sink you think it is. On most TV shows I've worked on it's normal to partner with businesses that are shown onscreen and work out a deal where the price of the product (in this case the gold food) is reduced or eliminated in exchange for the free publicity. Watcher very likely made a deal with every restaurant it worked with to make the Korea trip affordable for the company. The real budget spends are on things you're probably not seeing but that still matter: camera and lighting equipment is expensive, insurance for that equipment is expensive, business overhead and paying your staff are expensive. So again—it's fine to critique Watcher for the streaming plan and the perceived budgetary issues, but go into this knowing the costs might not be coming from the things you see onscreen.

My source is that I work in TV and film and actually have a clue on how the industry functions. Again, 36 people worked on Unsolved (and those were the people mention in Season 2—who knows how big the team blew up past that in later seasons). Entertainment work is real work, and demands decent equipment, competent staff, and the same types of business and budget problems you'd find in any other business (overhead, staffing, etc.). Feel free to critique Watcher's business model, but first try to understand where that model is coming from and what goals it's attempting to serve.

[gor3-hound]

CRY FOR ABSOLUTION - LEON S. KENNEDY

ft. leon kennedy x fem!reader

a/n: heyyy :3 had to make the priest collar edit on picsart so don't look at it too close... um... title from 'absolution' by ghost. thank you @ottermarbles for beta reading !! been working on this slowly while writing commissions... finally here !! rbs and feedback appreciated as always <3

cw: 18+ content, priest!leon, non-religious!reader, dead dove, non-con to dub-con to non-con, victim turned perpetrator, forced breeding, mentions of forcing marriage, religious themes, p in v, creampie, degradation, name calling, breath play

word count: 1.6k words

Leon can sense your presence in the church before he sees you. The hairs on the back of his neck stand on end, his whole body going rigid. He starts murmuring under his breath, eyes shut as he recites the prayer. He’d tried countless times to pray to the Virgin Mary, to strengthen his faith in God so he may resist your advances. To Saint Mary Magdalene, to guide you away from your life of sin. To God Himself to plead that you would leave him alone.

He was sure you were the Devil. Almost certain that you were some cruel test that God had bestowed on him.

He grips the rosary dangling around his neck as your footsteps get closer, whispering one final prayer to God, a desperate plea to give him strength before he faces you, hands trembling as his eyes open to meet yours. Leon couldn’t quite understand how you always managed to avoid the crowds, to worm your way into the Church between services, narrowly avoiding the other priests. You did not care for them, for your faith. You had your eyes set on Leon, a succubus in the flesh that had targeted him so callously.

”While I appreciate your dedication to the Church, I’m afraid the service has already drawn to a close, and there is a lot of work for me to get through before tonight’s service. Perhaps if you return later with the other parishioners, we can s-“

”Father, I hoped to speak to you before the service.” You say as you stalk closer, your heated gaze trailing him. He almost doesn’t hear you speak, the ringing in his ears dampening the sound around him, making your voice nothing more than a faint echo. He’s looking at you, but he’s not seeing you. His gaze is far away as he tries to think of something, anything else. A lump forms in his throat that he cannot dislodge no matter how hard he tries, swallowing to attempt to clear the passage enough so that he felt he could breathe, but with no success. His vision blurs, and he vaguely registers the tears forming in his eyes as you coo, cupping his cheek to wipe the few that fall.

”Please,” he whispers, voice cracking as he gazes at you fully, your face slowly coming into focus. What did he do to deserve this? He was a good man, wasn’t he? He’d tried his best to help the less fortunate, to be kind to everyone he spoke with. Had he committed some sin without realising it? Some blight against God that meant he deserved this? "Please, I don’t want this. You’re misguided, that's all. I can help you. You don’t have to do this.”

As always, his protests fall on deaf ears. He feels the steady stream of tears running down his face, brows pinching together as you back him up into the confessional. His chest continues to grow tighter and tighter until his lungs constrict painfully with each breath. The air gets caught in his throat and makes him choke, his brain shutting down as he just lets you free him from his vestments and tug down his trousers. He's glad to be rid of the collar, at the very least. It feels less like God was bearing down on his throat to drag him to Hell for letting this happen.

The first sob forces its way from his chest as your lips wrap around his cock. He wishes that he could hate the way it felt. It makes him nauseous - makes his head spin, but it feels good. He's at war with himself as to what this means, if enjoying the wet warmth wrapped around him means he's no better than you. He closes his eyes and clenches his fists as he tries to distance himself from your touch.

You pull yourself off of his cock with a pop, rustling around for something in your pocket. The crinkle of a packet has his eyes snapping open again, his eyes honing in on the foil you're holding up between two fingers. Panic seeps into his very core, his breath coming out in harsh puffs. “Thought we could try something new.” You say with a giggle, like it's the most normal thing in the world.

No. No, this couldn't happen to him. He's a priest - he's meant to stay far, far away from the pleasures of the flesh. He had to do something, anything to stop you. He swallows hard, eyes flickering around the confessional, trying to figure a way out of this before you lead him down a path of sin.

Leon isn't sure what happened. One minute, you were tearing open the condom with your teeth, and the next minute, he pounced. His hand gripped your throat to pin you down in the confessional, squeezing tight. His eyes are wide, almost feral as they meet yours, his free hand yanking your underwear down. His movements are clumsy as he prods as your cunt, trying to push his way in. After a few attempts, he manages to hook the tip on your entrance, and he slides home in one thrust.

“Oh.” He breathes out, eyes squeezing shut again. Maybe God wasn't testing him. Maybe this was his reward for being a good follower - all he had to do was breed this pussy full and wed you, and he'd be able to do this as many times as he pleased.

No. This was a test. He must have passed. He succeeded, and this was his reward. A pretty housewife for him to keep bred and safe in his grasp. A woman to cure his cold, lonely nights. He could finally have the family he always wanted. He was angry at you now, yes, but he would forgive you when you accepted his proposal and his seed.

“Temptress.” He hisses between gritted teeth, the hand on your throat tightening. The pressure against your windpipe is bruising, leaving you desperately trying to gasp in breaths through too tight of a passage. “Indecent whore. This is what you wanted, wasn't it? You didn't care when I told you ‘no’, did you? No? Then take it.”

He scoffs as you plead for him to stop again, his brows narrowing in frustration. He didn't want to do this. Leon was a good man. He was a holy man. He couldn't let you ruin him. What if the word of this got out?

“You wanted to ruin me, didn't you? You thought you couldn't take what you wanted from me without consequences? That… fuck… that God wouldn't punish your sins? I'm going to make you take my seed. You're going to be my pretty little wife, and no one will hear about this.”

He thrusts forward particularly violently after his words, his grip on your throat tightening enough that you start thrashing, cunt clenching around his cock enough that he has to halt his movements to stop himself from cumming too soon.

“If you breathe a word of this to anyone, I will drag you down into the deepest depths of Hell with me. I swear it on the Lord Himself.” He grits out, finally releasing his hold on your throat.

He ignores your protests, a muddy mix of guilt and anger swirling in his chest with each plea that falls from your lips. You had shown him no mercy, and yet you expect him to spare you? You were nothing more than a Godless nymph. He would show you the light.

“Do you know your prayers, hmm?” He coos, gripping your chin. The pads of his fingers dig into your cheeks harshly, drawing a pained moan from you. He starts fucking into you again now that his orgasm has fully subsided, letting out a shaky breath at the drag of his length against your gummy walls. “No, of course. You have no respect for the house of the Lord - you just wish to defile it.”

He lets go of your face to hitch your legs over his waist, breaths coming out in heavy pants as he pistons his hips into you, sweat beading against his skin from exertion, bangs stuck flat against his forehead. “Repeat after me.”

‘Lord God, in your goodness have mercy on me:’

The words fall past your lips in a daze as you repeat them, his hand reaching up to your throat again, but not squeezing. A warning to continue as he speaks the next line.

‘Do not look on my sins, but take away all my guilt.’

He's close now, barely able to hold back as he ruts into you helplessly, reduced to nothing more than a dog in heat as you clench around his cock.

‘Create in me a clean heart and renew within me an upright spirit.’

His hips stutter as you repeat the last words of Contrition back to him, his head dropping to the crook of your shoulder as he gasps out sharp breaths. His cock jumps as he orgasms, stuffing you full of his cum with a noise more akin to a whimper than a moan.

He leans back, eyes taking in your appearance. There was some kind of sick satisfaction seeing you broken like this, knowing God had allowed him to take back the part of him you had aimed to destroy.

You would be his. He would keep you as his wife, his prize. He was given a chance to relinquish the sins you had bestowed upon him.

He would not let the opportunity pass.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Neither the devil you know nor the devil you don’t

TONIGHT (June 21) I'm doing an ONLINE READING for the LOCUS AWARDS at 16hPT. On SATURDAY (June 22) I'll be in OAKLAND, CA for a panel (13hPT) and a keynote (18hPT) at the LOCUS AWARDS.

Spotify's relationship to artists can be kind of confusing. On the one hand, they pay a laughably low per-stream rate, as in homeopathic residues of a penny. On the other hand, the Big Three labels get a fortune from Spotify. And on the other other hand, it makes sense that rate for a stream heard by one person should be less than the rate for a song broadcast to thousands or millions of listeners.

But the whole thing makes sense once you understand the corporate history of Spotify. There's a whole chapter about this in Rebecca Giblin's and my 2022 book, Chokepoint Capitalism; we even made the audio for it a "Spotify exclusive" (it's the only part of the audiobook you can hear on Spotify, natch):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing

Unlike online music predecessors like Napster, Spotify sought licenses from the labels for the music it made available. This gave those labels a lot of power over Spotify, but not all the labels, just three of them. Universal, Warner and Sony, the Big Three, control more than 70% of all music recordings, and more than 60% of all music compositions. These three companies are remarkably inbred. Their execs routine hop from one to the other, and they regularly cross-license samples and other rights to each other.

The Big Three told Spotify that the price of licensing their catalogs would be high. First of all, Spotify had to give significant ownership stakes to all three labels. This put the labels in an unresolvable conflict of interest: as owners of Spotify, it was in their interests for licensing payments for music to be as low as possible. But as labels representing creative workers – musicians – it was in their interests for these payments to be as high as possible.

As it turns out, it wasn't hard to resolve that conflict after all. You see, the money the Big Three got in the form of dividends, stock sales, etc was theirs to spend as they saw fit. They could share some, all, or none of it with musicians. Big the Big Three's contracts with musicians gave those workers a guaranteed share of Spotify's licensing payments.

Accordingly, the Big Three demanded those rock-bottom per-stream rates that Spotify is notorious for. Yeah, it's true that a streaming per-listener payment should be lower than a radio per-play payment (which reaches thousands or millions of listeners), but even accounting for that, the math doesn't add up. Multiply the per-listener stream rate by the number of listeners for, say, a typical satellite radio cast, and Spotify is clearly getting a massive discount relative to other services that didn't make the Big Three into co-owners when they were kicking off.

But there's still something awry: the Big Three take in gigantic fortunes from Spotify in licensing payments. How can the per-stream rate be so low but the licensing payments be so large? And why are artists seeing so little?

Again, it's not hard to understand once you see the structure of Spotify's deal with the Big Three. The Big Three are each guaranteed a monthly minimum payment, irrespective of the number of Spotify streams from their catalog that month. So Sony might be guaranteed, say, $30m a month from Spotify, but the ultra-low per-stream rate Sony insisted on means that all the Sony streams in a typical month add up to $10m. That means that Sony still gets $30m from Spotify, but only $10m is "attributable" to a specific recording artist who can make a claim on it. The rest of the money is Sony's to play with: they can spread it around all their artists, some of their artists, or none of their artists. They can spend it on "artist development" (which might mean sending top execs on luxury junkets to big music festivals). It's theirs. The lower the per-stream rate is, the more of that minimum monthly payment is unattributable, meaning that Sony can line its pockets with it.

But these monthly minimums are just part of the goodies that the Big Three negotiated for themselves when they were designing Spotify. They also get free promo, advertising, and inclusion on Spotify's top playlists. Best (worst!) of all, the Big Three have "most favored nation" status, which means that every other label – the indies that rep the 30% of music not controlled by the Big Three – have to eat shit and take the ultra-low per-stream rate. Only those indies don't get billions in stock, they don't get monthly minimum guarantees, and they have to pay for promo, advertising, and inclusion on hot playlists.

When you understand the business mechanics of Spotify, all the contradictions resolve themselves. It is simultaneously true that Spotify pays a very low per-stream rate, that it pays the Big Three labels gigantic sums every month, and that artists are grotesquely underpaid by this system.

There are many lessons to take from this little scam, but for me, the top takeaway here is that artists are the class enemies of both Big Tech and Big Content. The Napster Wars demanded that artists ally themselves with either the tech sector or the entertainment center, nominating one or the other to be their champion.

But for a creative worker, it doesn't matter who makes a meal out of you, tech or content – all that matters is that you're being devoured.

This brings me to the debate over training AI and copyright. A lot of creative workers are justifiably angry and afraid that the AI companies want to destroy creative jobs. The CTO of Openai literally just said that onstage: "Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place":

https://bgr.com/tech/openai-cto-thinks-ai-will-kill-some-jobs-that-shouldnt-have-existed-in-the-first-place/

Many of these workers are accordingly cheering on the entertainment industry's lawsuits over AI training. In these lawsuits, companies like the New York Times and Getty Images claim that the steps associated with training an AI model infringe copyright. This isn't a great copyright theory based on current copyright precedents, and if the suits succeed, they'll narrow fair use in ways that will impact all kinds of socially beneficial activities, like scraping the web to make the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/13/spooky-action-at-a-close-up/#invisible-hand

But you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, right? For some creative workers, legal uncertainty for computational linguists, search engines, and archiving projects are a small price to pay if it means keeping AI from destroying their livelihoods.

Here's the problem: establishing that AI training requires a copyright license will not stop AI from being used to erode the wages and working conditions of creative workers. The companies suing over AI training are also notorious exploiters of creative workers, union-busters and wage-stealers. They don't want to get rid of generative AI, they just want to get paid for the content used to create it. Their use-case for gen AI is the same as Openai's CTO's use-case: get rid of creative jobs and pay less for creative labor.

This isn't hypothetical. Remember last summer's actor strike? The sticking point was that the studios wanted to pay actors a single fee to scan their bodies and faces, and then use those scans instead of hiring those actors, forever, without ever paying them again. Does it matter to an actor whether the AI that replaces you at Warner, Sony, Universal, Disney or Paramount (yes, three of the Big Five studios are also the Big Three labels!) was made by Openai without paying the studios for the training material, or whether Openai paid a license fee that the studios kept?

This is true across the board. The Big Five publishers categorically refuse to include contractual language -romising not to train an LLM with the books they acquire from writers. The game studios require all their voice actors to start every recording session with an on-tape assignment of the training rights to the session:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

And now, with total predictability, Universal – the largest music company in the world – has announced that it will start training voice-clones with the music in its catalog:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/umg-startsai-voice-clone-partnership-with-soundlabs-1235041808/

This comes hot on the heels of a massive blow-up between Universal and Tiktok, in which Universal professed its outrage that Tiktok was going to train voice-clones with the music Universal licensed to it. In other words: Universal's copyright claims over AI training cash out to this: "If anyone is going to profit from immiserating musicians, it's going to be us, not Tiktok."

I understand why Universal would like this idea. I just don't understand why any musician would root for Universal to defeat Tiktok, or Getty Images to trounce Stable Diffusion. Do you really think that Getty Images likes paying photographers and wants to give them a single penny more than they absolutely have to?

As we learned from George Orwell's avant-garde animated agricultural documentary Animal Farm, the problem isn't who holds the whip, the problem is the whip itself:

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Entertainment execs and tech execs alike are obsessed with AI because they view the future of "content" as fundamentally passive. Here's Ryan Broderick putting it better than I ever could:

At a certain audience size, you just assume those people are locked in and will consume anything you throw at them. Then it just becomes a game of lowering your production costs and increasing your prices to increase your margins. This is why executives love AI and why the average American can’t afford to eat at McDonald’s anymore.

https://www.garbageday.email/p/ceo-passive-content-obsession

Here's a rule of thumb for tech policy prescriptions. Any time you find yourself, as a worker, rooting for the same policy as your boss, you should check and make sure you're on the right side of history. The fact that creative bosses are so obsessed with making copyright cover more kinds of works, restrict more activities, lasting longer and generating higher damages should make creative workers look askance at these proposals.

After 40 years of expanded copyright, we have a creative industry that's larger and more profitable than ever, and yet the share of income going to creative workers has been in steady decline over that entire period. Every year, the share of creative income that creative workers can lay claim to declines, both proportionally and in real terms.

As with the mystery of Spotify's payments, this isn't a mystery at all. You just need to understand that when creators are stuck bargaining with a tiny, powerful cartel of movie, TV, music, publishing, streaming, games or app companies, it doesn't matter how much copyright they have to bargain with. Giving a creative worker more copyright is like giving a bullied schoolkid more lunch-money. There's no amount of money that will satisfy the bullies and leave enough left over for the kid to buy lunch. They just take everything.

Telling creative workers that they can solve their declining wages with more copyright is a denial that creative workers are workers at all. It treats us as entrepreneurial small businesses, LLCs with MFAs negotiating B2B with other companies. That's how we lose.

On the other hand, if we address the problems of AI and labor as workers, and insist on labor rights – like the Writers Guild did when it struck last summer – then we ally ourselves with every other worker whose wages and working conditions are being attacked with AI:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

Our path to better working conditions lies through organizing and striking, not through helping our bosses sue other giant mulitnational corporations for the right to bleed us out.

The US Copyright Office has repeatedly stated that AI-generated works don't qualify for copyrights, meaning everything AI generated can be freely copied and distributed and the companies that make them can't stop them. This is fantastic news, because the only thing our bosses hate more than paying us is not being able to stop other people from copying the things we make for them. We should be shouting this from the rooftops, not demanding more copyright for AI.

Here's a thing: FTC chair Lina Khan recently told an audience that she was thinking of using her Section 5 powers (to regulate "unfair and deceptive" conduct) to go after AI training:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mh8Z5pcJpg

Khan has already used these Section 5 powers to secure labor rights, for example, by banning noncompetes:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/25/capri-v-tapestry/#aiming-at-dollars-not-men

Creative workers should be banding together with other labor advocates to propose ways for the FTC to prevent all AI-based labor exploitation, like the "reverse-centaur" arrangement in which a human serves as an AI's body, working at breakneck pace until they are psychologically and physically ruined:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

As workers standing with other workers, we can demand the things that help us, even (especially) when that means less for our bosses. On the other hand, if we confine ourselves to backing our bosses' plays, we only stand to gain whatever crumbs they choose to drop at their feet for us.

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/2024/06/21/off-the-menu/#universally-loathed

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

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

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

[whateveriwant]

Happy Sunday! Whatever you do, definitely don't imagine Simon stuck in a time loop, forced to relive the worst day of his life over and over again 😀

The worst day of Simon's life? you might wonder. What would that be? Good question!

How about the day that Simon, at the tender age of four, came face-to-face with the boogeyman himself? His mother had warned him of the ghoulish entity, the one who lurked in shadows, inflicting pain on those who would seek to misbehave. What she didn't tell him, and what Simon would discover for himself that night as he awoke to the sounds of screaming, was that the boogeyman was no mere specter. She didn't tell him how he punished indiscriminately, uncaring if you were a woman or child. She didn't tell him how he wielded his fist like a hammer, his breath stinking of booze and cigarettes. And she didn't tell him (because how could a mother begin to explain to her young son?) that the boogeyman would wear the face of his own father.

Or how about the day that Simon realized he made the biggest mistake of his life? When he first joined the army, he had lofty ideas of honor and glory; action and duty; responsibility and yes, if it came to it, even sacrifice. Call him naive, but what else could you expect of a boy who's been fed nothing but a trough of propaganda his whole life? Simon surely didn't realize, not as he signed his soul over for a pair of dog tags. He didn't realize, not as he queued up with other lost boys for his chance to play soldier. He didn't realize even as he was shipped out with less than two months of basic training under his belt. No, Simon didn't realize until it was already too late, until it was staring at him across the blood-soaked trench with glossy, unblinking eyes. It was only then, looking into what remained of the face of a friend, that Simon realized there is decidedly very little that is ‘dolce et decorum’ about dying in war.

Or there's the day Simon discovered hell exists right here on Earth, and it's ruled over by a devil called Roba. Simon had thought that living a life already full of pain and horror would have thickened his skin like the rings of a tree, making an impenetrable armor even a mortar couldn't dent. But all it took was the careful orchestration of one wicked man to prove that even the toughest of trees can be felled. Day in and day out, he endured a steady stream of beatings, tortures, and assaults. Day in and day out, he was forced to the brink of his sanity, tipping over it once or twice. Day in and day out, the once unbreakable soldier entered a new circle of hell, and as he descended, finding each pit worse than the last, he wondered if he would ever make it out alive.

Or there's the any number of days (and there are a dreadful many) that Simon lost the only things in his life that ever truly mattered to him. The day he came home, the taste of betrayal acrid on his tongue, to find four mangled corpses had replaced the people he called family. The day he failed, the target vanishing like smoke from a gun barrel, his hands wet with the blood of the sergeant he had come to consider a brother. The day he never saw coming, the day that smashed what was left of his heart into pieces, the day he lost the best thing to ever happen to his miserable excuse of a life; the day he lost you.

It was years later, long after he'd hung up his masks and tags, that they came for you in the dead of night. Payback, they'd said, for something he'd done when he was still in the service. Though you had no affiliation with that period of his life, they knew that by taking you – by hurting you – it was the perfect eye for an eye. All Simon could do as they bound and beat you was watch from across the room, his own chains rattling desperately. He watched as your fingers bent at odd angles, your clothes adhered to your skin with blood, the bones in your face shattered and swelled until you were unrecognizable. You were strong – stronger than Simon ever wanted you to have to be – but that didn't stop his heart from breaking with every abuse your body received. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, he tried to get through to you, even as the sickening crack of your femur threatened to drown him out.

It was hours (it felt more like decades) that you were both dragged through this misery. Simon watched the whole time, hot tears obscuring his vision, his voice keeping you awake between the syringes of adrenaline pumped into you. But eventually there came a point in which you slumped, a sort of finality to the way your limbs sagged, and Simon couldn't help how his own heart stopped pumping. The room was loud in his ears, louder than it had ever been thus far, and yet, not a single sound was made. He shook his chains to rouse you. Get up, he ordered. Get up, my love. Get up! he begged, screamed until his vocal chords shred. His pleas were met by only silence, a slowing trickle of blood leaking from your mouth, and when the ones that did this to you declared that revenge was now claimed, Simon knew the last thread that wove any sort of meaning into his life had finally been cut.

Any one of these days could be a contender for the worst day of Simon's life, an eternity of torment looped within a 24 hour cycle. And no matter what he does, no matter how hard he tries to change things, it's never enough. He is never enough.

[doomhands-jr]

The Devil's Advocate - Chapter 7

Pairing: Delinquent!Noah Sebastian X Pastor's Daughter!Reader

Summary: Noah is a delinquent with a lot of anger at the church. You're a pastor's daughter plagued by moral perfectionism, charged with overseeing the community service he's been sentenced to complete. You've never encountered true temptation before. How will you fare up against Noah, who not only isn't bound by the same rules of purity as you, but actively scoffs at them?

Rating: 18+ Minors DNI

Warnings: Angst, religious guilt, mentions of religious trauma, mentions of masturbation. Mentions of anti-choice propaganda.

Masterlist

Banner by @flowerynerds

Authors note: Maybe grab a cup of tea for this one.

_________

Noah Davis didn’t like to think of his actions in terms of morality. He understood that right and wrong were subjective. That life didn’t exist in binaries of good vs. evil, and that things like virtue and righteousness weren’t so easily defined. 

That didn’t mean there weren’t some steadfast rules he followed: 

Do his best to act in a way that aligns with his internal moral compass

Reduce harm much as possible

Do what’s best for the collective, while still keeping his best interests in mind

That line of thinking has served him well over the course of his lifetime. He’d freed himself from moral obligations and had done what he truly felt was best, and in doing so, he was able to walk through life with his head held high, standing by his actions. 

The idea that some of his behavior was sinful had not entered his mind since he formally left the church. 

But now, as he laid in bed, recovering from the tsunami of brain chemicals that just flooded his system, he felt like a sinner . 

The sin coursed through his body, sick and bittersweet. It flowed through his veins, infecting his cells and rotting his bones like a poison. Like a drug. 

He scrubbed a hand over his face, clammy palm meeting clammy forehead, cock still twitching with the aftershock. 

He’d expected you to put up more of a fight. He’d banked on you shutting him down, batting him away and telling him to behave himself, but you’d walked so willingly into his snare, so eager and needy, offering up yourself on a platter with almost no hesitation. 

It was a vile thing that you brought out of Noah. An ugly, profane creature that lurked in the shadows of his soul. He’d been aware of its existence in his periphery. It had been a sleeping beast. One he’d hoped he’d never have to contend with. 

But now? It had taken its first shuddering breath, and with it, thrown down its gauntlet. Its demand? You—not as a partner, but as a sacrifice. Sprawled out on an altar for it to consume and defile. To claim for the sake of hubris. 

Noah longed to find a way to cleanse himself—confess his sins and pray the rosary. Baptize himself in holy water. Take communion and walk forth a forgiven man. Would that be enough? 

War had been waged within Noah, and the odds were stacked against him. He was David, standing at the feet of Goliath. Jonah, staring down the gullet of the whale. 

He squeezed his eyes shut and the image of you at the apex of pleasure flashed across his vision. You’d made that offering to him. It was sacred. He’d cherish it for the rest of his life.  

_______

Noah had no holy water available to him to wash his sins away. He did have a hot shower, though, and at least that was a start. 

Turning on the water, he allowed the steam to gather in clouds around his bathroom. His skin had grown sticky with sweat, and his shoulders ached. As soon as he stepped under the spray, the tension began to dissipate. 

He pressed his forehead against the cool tile wall and allowed the stream to trickle down his back. 

He had a duty to himself—and to you. There was no denying his affection for you, but therein lied a glaring problem: you were ready for more. You deserved more. You deserved to push past these boundaries of purity and explore who you were outside of faith, and that made you vulnerable. Because whatever sickness lived inside Noah was itching to exploit that vulnerability. Not for your benefit, but for its own.

“Help me figure this out,” he whispered against the shower wall. It was a prayer in the most ironic sense. He wasn’t sure if he even believed in what he was praying to, but without any other ideas, it felt like the right thing to do. “I don’t want to hurt her, but I’m afraid.” 

He received nothing but silence in response. 

He scoffed at his own actions. What did he expect? Divine understanding? 

He grabbed the soap, lathering it up before scrubbing it over his disgusting, unclean body. Why did he even bother? He learned long ago that nobody was going to save him but himself. If he wanted his demons to die, he’d have to be the one to kill them. 

________

On a snowy Sunday morning, Noah didn’t have a church to attend, but he did have a pair of work boots, a heavy coat, and a trail through the woods that allowed him to commune with nature. 

He also had a pre-roll he stole from Nick, which he cupped against his jacket to light. It took a few tries. The wind wasn’t biting, but it was present, and it flickered the flame in his lighter. He eventually got it lit though, and he took a deep drag, holding the smoke in his lungs and waiting for it to take effect. 

Exhaling slowly through his nose, he closed his eyes to focus on the high setting in. His body began to lift, a warm, cloudy, hollow feeling expanding out from his chest to his limbs, and ten minutes later, the joint was spent and Noah was intricately connected to the forest around him.

He walked on the trail, delighting in the way the frozen leaves crunched under his boots. He forgot his gloves again, so he stuffed his hands in his pockets as he walked. 

You were probably in church right now. Might even be on stage leading the praise and worship music alongside Isaac, where you were safe. 

No, that wasn’t true. You deserved more than the life you’d find within the church. If you stayed put, you’d eventually find yourself on the arm of some 30-something with a trust fund and a perfect attendance record at Sunday school. You’d have to hide who you were from society, pretending to fit in where you didn’t belong. 

Noah dug his nails into the palms of his hands. He wanted you to have more than that, but he wasn’t the right person to give it to you. At least not in his current state. 

Giving up the idea of you was painful, yes. But it also gave him time to figure out how to contend with the ugly parts of himself. If he could let go of his desire for you, then he wouldn’t have to risk that part of him taking over. He could lock it back into the cage he’s kept it in for so many years and continue on in life as if nothing had ever happened. 

He’d never have to know that hunger again. 

He breathed in deep, allowing the frigid air to sting his lungs and throat. It wasn’t painful enough for him. He needed to toil and sweat and suffer to repent for his sins. He picked up his pace, letting his feet fall heavy onto the ground. Within a few minutes, his heart rate sped up, lungs stretching to accommodate his increased need for oxygen. All systems firing to pump fresh blood through his body. 

That helped. Maybe he could sweat the fever out. Force the toxicity to exit through carbon dioxide and leave it as an offering to the forest so it can convert it back to oxygen. 

He broke out into a run, thinking back to the time he caught you running in the rain and wondering if you’d been seeking the same energetic cleanse. 

You’d cried in his arms that night. 

He slowed his pace, down from a run to a jog. 

It was the first time he’d noticed something wrong—the first time he sensed that his control was slipping. 

A stray root caught his foot and he fell hard to the ground, catching himself with his palms and knees. He stayed there for a moment to assess his body and see if any damage had occurred, and when he found none, he rolled onto his back and laid in the snow and mud, stretching his arms and legs to the side and creating a snow angel. 

The snow fell lightly, catching on his eyelashes. He stuck out his tongue, allowing the tiny flakes to melt upon contact and tasting the nothingness of it all. 

He closed his eyes, and he was thirteen again. A nude magazine lay open on his floor. He’d just finished masturbating for the third time that day. Sobbing, he grabbed the leather belt hanging over his desk chair and whipped himself across the back with it. Harder this time than last. Perhaps with enough pain, he would learn his lesson. 

He bunched a shirt up and stuffed it into his mouth, biting down hard to muffle himself as he wept. God surely wouldn’t forgive him again after this. He would be sent to hell for being so unclean. 

For months, he’d tried to break this disgusting habit, but it was to no avail. He was sick and perverted, and lacked the self-control he needed to resist temptation.  

He didn’t want to go to confessional. He didn’t want to have to hear his priest’s disappointed voice telling him to say ten hail-marys. 

He took a deep, shuddering breath in, noticing how the icy air stabbed at his lungs. He didn’t want to dwell too long on that memory. He could already feel his throat constricting. 

It wasn’t until he befriended Ruffilo that he realized he wasn’t uniquely perverted. Ruffilo hadn’t been raised in a church. He talked about porn as if it was something exciting, rather than shameful. He’d been the first one to bring up the subject of masturbation, making casual comments and jokes about how often he got himself off. 

Ruffilo’s world—a world without shame—had been a foreign concept to Noah. After being exposed to it, he realized that faith and freedom were mutually exclusive. There was no way to balance the two, so he chose freedom and never looked back. 

Noah’s fingers found a frozen leaf. He caressed the edges, feeling how smooth they were and remembered brushing bits of leaves off your coat that time you’d jumped in the leaf pile. He remembered how you gasped when his frigid hands ghosted over the nape of your neck. He could have cut the tension with a knife. 

He couldn’t go back to the church. There was too much pain there to revisit. He cut off that part of him a long time ago, back when believing in God meant engaging in his own self-destruction. 

Being with you meant dipping his toes back in the water of religion. You and faith were a package deal. He knew that. You weren’t going to give it up any time soon, and certainly not for him. 

He closed his eyes again and felt the sting of saltwater. He wasn’t going to cry. He’d done enough of that in his adolescence. But the feelings were there, and they weren’t going to let him off the hook without being felt. 

It was you or self-preservation.

He inhaled deeply and forced himself back up, turning to start the long trek back to town. A conversation needed to be had. 

________

There was no priest to whom he could confess his sins, but there was Folio, and late on a Sunday afternoon, he could be found stoned in his room. 

“I fucked up,” he announced, standing in the doorway.

Nick was on his bed, controller in his hands and headset on. From where Noah stood, he couldn’t see the screen, but he guessed his friend was mowing down enemies in Call of Duty. 

“In the middle of something,” he said. “Give me a few.” 

Noah invited himself into the room and sat in Nick’s desk chair, observing the décor. Nick decorated his walls with posters of women in various states of undress. Some of them were holding fish. Others were posed on top of cars. 

His fishing rod and tackle box rested in the corner next to his desk. An electric drum kit lined the far wall. Clothes were strewn about the room, along with drumsticks, food wrappers, and half-empty water bottles. A few cans of beer spilled out of the overfull trash can. On the nightstand sat an ashtray with the spent ends of several blunts stuffed in the center. 

Quite the confessional booth. 

“What’s up?” he said, taking his headset off and turning his attention to Noah. 

“I fucked up,” Noah repeated. 

Nick blinked twice, but made no other movement. “Okay,” he said. “In what way?” 

“You already know.” 

“The pastor’s daughter?” Nick guessed, tilting his head lower to stare at Noah through furrowed brows. “Did you fuck her?” His tone was accusatory, and deservedly so. 

Noah shook his head. “Not exactly.” 

Nick turned on his bed to face Noah head-on. “What did you do?” 

Noah deliberated over exactly how much to tell his friend. What happened between the two of you last night was private and he didn’t want to share your business with someone else unless you said it was okay, but he needed to get some things off his chest. 

“So,” he began, taking a deep breath and shaking his head. “I think I need to stay away from her for a while. I’ve got some stuff to sort out and until I do, I might hurt her.” 

Nick gave himself time to fully process what Noah had just said. He inhaled deeply through his nose, letting his eyes drift away from Noah and relaxing his focus as he mulled it over. 

“You really care about her?” he asked. 

Noah nodded. 

“Want me to stay away from her, too?” It was an honest question, and Noah was suddenly struck with how much his friends cared about him. 

Noah squeezed and relaxed his hands a few times to increase circulation in his fingers. They were still cold from his walk. 

“No, actually. If anything, I think you’d be a really good influence for her. She could use someone like you.” 

Nick’s eyebrows pulled up in the center. He tilted his head to the side. “Why do you say that?” 

“She needs to have more fun,” he said. “She’s been repressed for a really long time and I think she’s ready to break out of that and live life.” 

Nick’s eyes went wide and he  pointed to his chest. “And you want me to be the one to help with that?” 

Noah didn’t want Nick to do that. The last thing he wanted was to see you enjoying yourself without him, but if it was between that and you staying miserable under the church’s influence, he at least wanted you to be happy. 

“I think you’d be good for her,” he said, working hard to make sure he didn’t sound bitter at all. 

“What if I fuck her?” he asked, his momentary sincerity seemingly over. 

Noah’s face dropped. “Don’t fuck her.” 

“But what if I do?” 

Noah clenched his jaw, grinding his molars together as he steadied himself. He knew Nick didn’t mean anything by it. He was just being himself and trying to rile Noah up, but Noah wasn’t about to give in. 

“Then make sure you’re on the same page with her about what it means. Don’t lead her on.” 

Nick chewed on his tongue. “Where is all this coming from?” He asked. “Why do you think you’ll hurt her?” 

“I guess,” Noah said, picking at a bit of dead skin on his lip, “It’s sort of just a gut feeling? I don’t know how to describe it, but there’s something in there that tells me I gotta sort myself out before I get involved with anyone.” 

Nick blinked up at his friend, softening. “I didn’t realize you were so serious about her.” 

“I don’t know what I feel,” said Noah. “I just need some time to figure that out.” 

“You okay?” he asked, hand coming up to scratch an itch at the back of his neck. 

Noah nodded. “I will be,” he said. It was true, he would be okay eventually. He was sure of that. He’d survived worse than this. He just needed to figure out what the best course of action would be. 

Nick’s eyes flicked back to the paused game on the screen. “So you’re saying it’s cool if I fuck her then?” he said. 

Nick could be a real asshole at times. He was abrasive by nature. Many found his personality overwhelming, but the ones who stuck around knew that he was an antagonist, not to be mean, but to challenge people—coax them out of their comfort zones and force them to confront their triggers. He wasn’t always right, and he often stuck his own foot in his mouth, but when he was right, he was so right, it made up for all the other times. 

This time, however, he used his skill to diffuse the tension. 

“Man, fuck you,” said Noah, slapping the ash tray off the end table. It tipped over sideways and spilled its contents onto Nick’s bed, coating his sheets with ash and spent roaches. 

“Bro!” Nick shouted, but Noah was already out of the room, hissing to himself with laughter, and Nick was too couch locked to chase him. 

________

“Noah said to tell you he’s sorry. He got called in for overtime again,” Nick said as he walked into the community center seven minutes late. 

Your heart sank. Not just because you wouldn’t get to see Noah, but because he could have easily texted this information to you himself. 

It was as you’d suspected. Noah was avoiding you.

Over the course of the week, you’d grown more and more stressed. Sunday was fine. You’d woken up feeling well rested, having dreamt of Noah throughout the night. At church, you couldn’t focus on any of the sermon because you were too consumed reliving the previous night. 

Monday came and went with no word from Noah. You thought for sure he would have texted you to say hi or check up on you. Some sort of acknowledgement that the dynamic between the two of you had shifted. But you’d also heard it was customary to wait three days. 

So you waited. 

By Wednesday, your patience had grown thin. You’d given him the benefit of the doubt, wondering if maybe he was nervous and waiting for you to reach out, so you had, sending him a casual hey . 

He never responded. You’d been checking your phone religiously over the course of the week, but it had been radio silence on his end. 

“Okay. Thanks for letting me know.” You kept a straight face and a steady voice while you spoke, but it took effort. “We’re supposed to be shoveling snow today but since there’s only us, I’m going to veto that.” 

Nick sighed in relief. “Thank god . I wasn’t built for the cold.” 

“Get inside,” you nodded towards the doors. “We’ll start with windows.” 

He offered up a salute and bounded through the doors, eager to escape the cold. 

As Nick got to work, you processed this information. 

Noah’s silence was deafening. 

Was this your punishment? Was God unhappy with your behavior and was this his way of letting you know? 

An element to this was fitting. This was the cost, you realized. This was the price you paid for giving into temptation. 

A bitter laugh escaped under your breath. 

Was the church right about everything? Was there a reason you shouldn’t fall into temptation? 

Maybe Hell did exist—and it wasn’t a lake of fire, but the absence of Heaven after you’d already tasted it.  

Even after everything, you probably would still have done it all over again if you had the opportunity. He’d introduced you to a part of yourself that had been dormant for a long time and for that, you were grateful. 

But the price was steep. 

Your biggest regret was that you hadn’t even gotten to touch him before it was all over. You felt so stupid. Why couldn’t you have held out a little longer? Resisted temptation until you had him fully within your grasp? 

But then again, perhaps the loss of him would be even more painful, wouldn’t it? 

You sighed and stretched your arms up, resting your forearms on your head as you observed Nick spraying down the windows with cleaner. 

You could get through this. It would be hard, but it was within your grasp. People have survived much worse. In the grand scheme of things, this heartache was minor. It would hurt for a while, but eventually you’d recover and life would go on. 

It was just a matter of getting to the other side. 

You wanted to remember this pain. Savor the full impact and hopefully this would be the only time you needed to learn this lesson. You’d grow, heal, and move on a better and stronger version of yourself. 

Eventually. 

Right now, you needed to focus on the task at hand: overseeing community service without getting yourself into any more trouble. And that’s what you were going to do.  ________

That did prove to be a tougher job than you anticipated. Nick was charismatic as ever and kept trying to get your attention. 

You’d throw him a bone every once in a while, if only because it genuinely did lift your spirits to be around him. He was a much safer presence. 

“How many weeks do I have left?” 

You were strewn across the back pew, doing your best not to wallow, but failing pretty spectacularly, when Nick’s voice broke you out of your ruminations. 

“I’m not sure,” you said, sitting up and looking at him. He leaned casually against the back of the pew, rag thrown over his shoulder. His fingers tapped a rhythm on the wood. “I have it written down somewhere. I’d have to look.” 

“Can you let me know next week?” he asked, bouncing on his heels. You could see what attracted Ava to him so much. 

“Yeah.” 

“Or actually, maybe this Friday. Isn’t that when your Christmas thing is?” 

You blinked stupidly up at him. You’d forgotten all about the upcoming showcase. 

“Oh, yeah. It is. I didn’t realize you knew about it.” 

“Yeah,” he said, and then shifted on his feet as if he was trying to figure out a way to avoid saying that Noah told him about it. Which would mean that Nick was also aware of the awkwardness between the two of you. 

“Were you thinking of going?” you asked. “You don’t have to.” 

“I thought it might be fun to see you sing,” he said, voice soft and lips smiling.  

You were momentarily taken aback. You didn’t think Nick cared about anything you were doing. The thought that he might be interested in your life outside of community service was one that hadn’t crossed your mind. 

“Really?” you asked. 

He looked side to side and nodded, as if it should have been obvious to you. 

“Nick, that would mean so much. I would love for you to come.” 

“Good,” he said, a self-satisfied smile back on his face. “But try not to suck or I won’t be donating anything.” 

You snorted loudly. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.” 

“Anytime.” 

The conversation died down, and you could feel the elephant in the room rearing its head. 

You could ask how Noah was doing. It wouldn’t be too out-of-character. But you’d give yourself away easily if you did. 

Besides, nothing good would come of it. If Noah wanted to contact you, he would. If he didn’t, then he was just someone you needed to get over. 

Nick lingered, just as hesitant to leave the conversation. 

“You doin’ okay?” he asked. 

You sighed, leaning into the back of the pew. “Yeah,” you said. “I’m fine.” 

“Wanna talk about it?” he asked. 

You rolled your head across the pew to look over at him. His face held a neutral expression, but there was softness in his eyes. 

“Maybe some other time,” you said. “Thank you, though.” 

“No problem,” he said. “I’m here if you need me.” He punctuated it with a squeeze to your shoulder and your hand came up to clasp over his on its own accord. He was warm, and truth be told, you really needed the gesture. 

Perhaps you’d be okay. 

_______

“And there were no signs prior to this?” 

“No,” you said, collapsing on Ava’s bed while she worked on her Contemporary Art project from her desk. It looked like a big lump of Styrofoam. She held a strip of sandpaper, rubbing it back and forth over a corner and causing little pieces to flake off and litter the desk and floor beneath her. 

“And neither of you talked beforehand about what it would mean?” 

“No,” you grumbled, recognizing your first mistake. You absolutely should have talked about what it meant for the both of you before doing anything, and you can’t understand why you’d been so foolish to skip over that. “It just sort of…happened?” 

Ava fixed you with an imploring stare. 

“Babe, I’m really sorry that you got hurt, but. I don’t know,” she began. “Aren’t you always the one preaching about that kind of thing? It seems like you could have used a little bit of your own advice, don’t you think?” 

You turned over and let out a loud groan into Ava’s pillow. 

“Not helping.” 

“I know, I know. That was probably insensitive. I just,” she trailed off, turning back to her project. “Maybe this was a lesson you needed to learn? Not to look down on others for the things they struggle with. And maybe also to recognize that we’re all human. We’re all sinners. Even you?” 

You pouted. “You really think I needed to learn that?” 

“You’ve been known to judge in the past.” 

“I’ve been better about that!” you said, throwing your hands up in the air. 

“I know,” she said. “I know you have.” She pouted back at you. “Maybe I’m not the best person for this kind of talk.” 

You sighed, crossing your arms over your stomach. “No, you’re fine. I think I’m just feeling sorry for myself is all.” 

Ava got up from her desk, brushing as many Styrofoam flakes from her clothes as she could, and crawled into her bed with you, wrapping her arms around your shoulders. You melded into her touch. “You’re allowed to feel hurt. He did send you mixed signals.” 

“What about you and Nick?” you asked. She chewed on her lip for a moment. 

“Nick and I…we talked about it beforehand. We knew it was just for that night going into it.” She rested her chin on your shoulder. 

“You didn’t want to pursue anything more?” 

Ava shrugged beside you. “Neither of us is looking for anything.” 

You leaned your head on her shoulder. It would have been nice had you had the same disposition going into the encounter with Noah. You could have just enjoyed it for what it was and then went your separate ways without any complicated feelings. You admired Ava’s ability to do that. 

“You’re right,” you said. “We should have talked about it beforehand. Made sure we were on the same page.” 

You turned to bury your face in her shoulder, squeezing your eyes shut to keep any tears from escaping. 

“It doesn’t always work out that way,” she said. “Don’t judge yourself for your mistakes.” 

She stroked your back as you failed to prevent your eyes from leaking. “Is it okay if I cry on you?” you asked, voice muffled by her shirt, a stray piece of Styrofoam finding its way into your mouth. 

“Babe, of course. I’m here for you.” 

You nodded into her shoulder, allowing the first of many sobs to fall. She continued to stroke your back, soothing you as you wept. 

It hurt. You’d trusted Noah to care for you. You never would have believed him to be the type to get what he wants and then not call. 

Plus, he still had five weeks of community service (you’d checked), and there wasn’t any way he could get out of that. 

“How am I supposed to face him on Saturday?” you whined. 

“Hmmm,” she said. “Is Folio talking to you?” 

“Yeah,” you sniffed. “He’s actually been really nice.” 

“What if you just talk to him? Use him as a distraction so you don’t have to talk to Noah. Who knows? Maybe having fun with him would help you move on.” 

You pulled away to look at her. 

“You mean like…?” you trailed off. 

She laughed. “I’m not saying have sex with the guy,” she said. “I doubt he’d do that since Noah’s like, his best friend. But he’s a good guy and he’s fun to be around. And you could use that kind of energy in your life.” 

You sniffled again and let your head drop back down to rest on her, spitting out another fleck of Styrofoam. It truly was everywhere. 

You doubted that hanging out with Nick would help you get over Noah. If anything, it would just remind you of him. But you did need more friends in your life, and he was someone you could see yourself getting along with. 

Perhaps focusing on your friendships would help. You squeezed Ava’s middle. 

“I love you,” you said. “Please be my friend forever.” 

She breathed softly, squeezing you back. “If you play your cards right.” 

______

Friday’s showcase had a much larger turnout than expected. People lined the pews and even stood in the back after all the available seats had been filled. You peeked through one of the side doors that entered onto the stage and saw Nick sitting in a middle row. Ava sat a few rows in front of him. She caught your eye and gave you a big thumbs-up for good luck. 

Your eyes scanned over the crowd, searching for a tall, tattooed figure and coming up short. 

He said he was going to come. He was the one who had pressed you for the information in the first place. 

You looked down at your phone screen. 6:53. He still had seven minutes to make it. 

You exhaled a deep breath and shook your hands out, trying to calm your nerves. 

“Want to pray?” came Isaac’s deep voice to your right. You looked over to find him standing quite close to you. His usual v-neck and beanie had been swapped out for a white button-down and black tie, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. His hair was tied neatly in a bun atop his head. 

“Sure,” you breathed, figuring you could use some prayer. 

He grasped your hands in his. His were warm. Steady. They helped to soothe your nerves. 

“God,” he began, “please watch over us and guide us as we work to spread the good news of Jesus’s birth. Let us not falter. Allow our voices to ring true and fall on ears willing to hear. In your name. Amen.” 

“Amen,” you repeated, working hard not to roll your eyes. 

It wasn’t that you didn’t appreciate the prayer. It was just that Isaac talked as if he were living a hundred years ago, trying his best to sound profound, and you weren’t entirely convinced it was solely for God’s listening pleasure. He was a performer, after all. 

He squeezed your hands, smiling. “Almost time. Are you nervous?” he asked. 

“A little bit,” you said, noticing the discomfort in your gut. 

“Don’t be. You’ve got this. It’s just the one solo and then you’re in the choir for the rest of it.” His thumbs rubbed over the backs of your hands, and you were about to pull your hands away from him, but it actually was quite soothing. He seemed like he genuinely cared about you. And he smelled nice. Some sort of expensive-smelling cologne that was the complete opposite of whatever spiced oil Noah wore, but in a really good, clean way. 

“You look great, by the way,” he added, taking a step back and giving you a once-over. “I like the dress.” 

The dress in question was a high-necked A-line in a bright shade of red to match the holiday theme (Christmas theme, your father would correct you, because apparently no other holidays existed to him). 

You wore a dark green cardigan overtop, along with a gold necklace and black heels. Your lips were painted to match the dress. It was the most dressed-up you’d been since last Christmas. When you chose the outfit, you were still under the impression that a certain tattooed someone would see it. 

“Thanks,” you said. 

You could tell by the way Isaac lingered that he wanted to continue the conversation, but you didn’t feel much like talking. Needing an exit, you excused yourself to go get a drink of water. 

Weaving through other soloists and members of the church choir, you made your way down one of the two hallways that flanked either side of the main sanctuary. You rounded the corner, where one of the members of your church’s worship band—Darian—was passing out programs for the event. 

“Hey! You ready for your solo?” he asked when he saw you. 

You smiled, breathing out a nervous laugh. “Yeah,” you said, scanning the stragglers still arriving for any sign of Noah. 

“I’d be nervous if I was on first,” he said. You took your eyes off the latecomers and looked to find him smiling encouragingly at you. 

“Yeah,” you said, shifting your weight awkwardly. “Isaac insisted for some reason that I open.” 

Your stomach sank even more. You couldn’t see Noah anywhere. 

“He mentioned it was because your song would set the tone for the evening,” said Darian, but you were only half-listening. “Do you want one of these?” 

You looked back at him. “What?”

He held out a program for you to take. “In case you wanted to keep it. For posterity, or scrapbooking or whatever.” 

“Yeah, sure,” you said, grabbing it without really thinking. 

Your emotional bandwidth had been all but used up, chest tight and head foggy. You felt bad that you weren’t really engaging in conversation, or even paying attention to it for that matter, but hoped Darian would forgive you. 

Sensing that you weren’t in the headspace to talk, Darian wished you luck and went back to handing out programs. You thanked him and continued walking across the foyer and down the opposite hallway with no real destination in mind. You were to go on in less than a minute. 

You shook your head, trying to get out of it and into your body. You needed to connect with your voice in order to perform, but you couldn’t seem to steady your breathing. 

The sanctuary was laid out in a rectangle, with the foyer lining the back, hallways with classrooms running the length of either side, and then a room behind the main stage, so from where you stood at the end of the hall, you could see through the windows of the doors to the stage that the lights had dimmed. 

Isaac walked out to the center of the stage from the hallway opposite you. A spotlight appeared on him, and with an abundance of charismatic charm, he thanked the audience that had gathered, before leading them in yet another prayer to bless the evening’s performance and to let God’s will be done. 

Throughout the entirety of his introduction, you’d zoned in and out. Your nerves ate at you, consuming your focus and leaving you feeling detached from your surroundings. 

You’d performed this song a dozen times at least, and in front of much of the same audience, too. You performed every week in front of the congregation on Sundays. Perhaps you’d struggled with stage fright at one point in your life, a decade ago when you were still fairly new to performing, but these days you were at-home in front of a microphone. 

And yet. 

Your knees shook. A cold sweat had broken out on the back of your neck, and your stomach clenched and released several times in quick succession. 

“Ladies and Gentlemen, please enjoy O Holy Night, performed by my dear personal friend, and co-leader of our praise and worship team,” Isaac began. 

You heard your name being called, snapping you out of the haze. 

The audience applauded. Isaac gestured to the doorway opposite you, where he assumed you would be entering from. 

Taking a deep breath, you opened the door and walked to the center of the stage. Isaac turned when he heard the doors open, looking caught off-guard for a moment, but he recovered quickly, gesturing to you and clapping to signal to the audience that they should keep their applause going. 

He slowly backed away and gave you a double thumbs-up before exiting the stage. 

Recognizing you were still holding the program Darian had handed you, you clasped your hands behind your back and stepped up to the microphone. 

The soft piano intro played out over the loud speakers. You closed your eyes and inhaled deeply. 

O holy night,  

The stars are brightly shining,  

It is the night of our dear savior’s birth.  

The first note came out shaky. You’d pushed too hard with your diaphragm, allowing more air than was needed to pass through your vocal folds. You closed your eyes and focused on breath control, feeling the spotlight heat your skin. 

Long lay the world 

In sin and error pining  

‘till He appeared and the soul felt its worth.  

Back in the late 1843, a church in the south of France had its organ renovated. After the renovations were complete, the church reached out to a French poet by the name of Placide Cappeau, asking him to write a poem that could be used as a hymn. In response, Cappeau penned the first iteration of O Holy Night.  

Placide Cappeau was a known atheist.  

A thrill of hope. The weary world rejoices  

When the Catholic Church got wind of an atheist creating a Christmas carol, they did their best to bury the song. They claimed it lacked musical flavor. At the time, the idea of all men and women owning souls was highly radical. 

For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.  

O Holy Night has since become one of the most popular Christmas carols known to western society, thanks in part to John Sullivan Dwight translating it to English in 1855. 

You knew this, because you’d written a history of the carol for an end-of-semester project back when you went to high school at Calvary Baptist. 

Fall on your knees. O hear the angel voices,  

At the time, you’d wondered how an atheist—someone who, in your mind, stood against everything you stood for, could write such a beautiful song that touched the hearts of you and so many others. 

O night, divine. O night, when Christ was born.  

How could someone with no connection to God write something that so clearly captures the essence of the Holy Spirit?

You chanced a look out at the crowd, once more searching for the familiar face you so wanted to see. The atheist who understood more about Christ’s love than so many in the church ever would, and found no sign of him. 

You squeezed your eyes shut, preparing for the high note that signaled the climax of the song. 

O night, O holy night. 

Your voice rang out, loud and with a pleasing vibrato you’d finally learned to control three years ago. You paused for effect. The music cut out, and you sang the last line. 

O night divine!  

It was over. You’d done it. The piano melody came back in for the closing notes, and you curtseyed elegantly as the crowd applauded. 

You exited through the same doors you entered, heading straight for the restroom so you could take a moment to yourself before you had to be back on stage in the choir for O Come All Ye Faithful.  

Placing your program on the sink counter, you ran your hands under cool water, intending to splash some on your face when a small blurb on the bottom of the pamphlet caught your eye. 

Collection plates will be passed around. Please help us save countless unborn lives by making a donation. 

Unborn lives. 

Isaac was donating the proceeds to a pro-life organization. 

You’d been unknowingly roped in to an anti-choice fundraiser. 

A wave of anger erupted from deep within you, washing over your entire body and pulsating through it. 

You snatched the program from the counter, storming out the bathroom, across the foyer, and to the adjacent hallway Isaac stood at the end of. 

“What the Hell, Isaac!?” you near-shouted, bounding toward him. 

Isaac’s eyes widened upon your approach. He took several steps back, running into two of the other choir members, but it wasn’t enough. You slammed the program into his sternum. 

“Whoa!” he said, grasping the program you’d thrust at him with one hand and holding the other out to keep you from coming any closer. “Where’s the fire?” 

“What is this?!” you said, stabbing the program on his chest with your finger where the blurb appeared. 

He looked at you bewildered, then down to where your index finger pushed into his chest, and then back to you like you were a mad woman. “We said we wanted to give the proceeds to charity.” 

“Yeah,” you said, ripping the program out of his hand and throwing it down at his feet. “Like a soup kitchen or a toy drive. Not to Life Alliance!” 

Isaac’s eyebrows pulled together in blatant confusion. “What’s better than saving innocent lives?” he said. 

“Oh my God,” you scoffed, not caring whether or not it counted as taking the Lord’s name in vain. 

 Suddenly all the air in the room felt like it had been vacuumed out and you found yourself struggling to breathe. 

Taking a step backwards, it dawned on you that this was your limit. The church had compressed you your entire life, and you’d finally reached your breaking point. “I can’t participate in this.” You said it not to Isaac, but to yourself. “I have to go.” 

“Hey! Hold on,” Isaac said. “You can’t leave. You’re our first soprano. We need you for the high G.” 

You shook your head, turning on your heel. You wouldn’t have been able to hit that note even if you wanted to with how your throat was constricting. 

“We can talk about this. Maybe we can do more than one charity,” he said, but you were already halfway down the hall, tears threatening to spill over. 

The heels you wore made it hard to run down the icy sidewalk, but run you did. Down the sidewalk, down the street. You didn’t stop running until you’d put several blocks between you and the church. 

You’d once thought of it as a sacred place—a home away from home. 

Now, the only time you felt at home in it was on Saturday mornings, sharing the space with two delinquents who didn’t even believe in God. 

Nowhere felt sacred anymore. 

Nowhere except the shed in the backyard of Jolly’s house. But you were cut off from that now, too. 

Where did you belong now?  __________ How are we all feeling after that? Also, if anyone has any artistic skills and would like to help me make a moldboard or a banner or something for this story, I would be forever grateful!

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[70sscifiart]

The Last-Minute Sci-Fi Gift Guide

There's only one thing worse than procrastinating on getting gifts for your loved ones, and that's procrastinating on putting together a guide to help out everyone else with all those gifts. It's Dec 12, so you can decide for yourself which I'm doing.

Art book: Worlds Beyond Time, $32

If you follow this blog, you might have heard of this one. I published Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s this year after five years of work on it, and I think it's really good! 400+ images, 100+ artists, with lots of fun art history and jokes.

Also, it's just $20 right now if you order through my publisher and use the code SKIPTHELINE! Cheapest it's ever been!

Card game: Coup, $14

In this "social deduction" card game, you play as a government official in a future dystopia who needs to backstab their way into power. Everyone starts out with just two cards in this bluffing game, so the tide can turn pretty quick when players start assassinating each other's cards. The fast pace makes it a good gift for someone who loves spies but thinks they don't like card games.

Game to play over Zoom: Bad Spaceships, $3

If a bluffing game stresses you out, try Bad Spaceships: It's a collaborative world-building game in which you roll dice to see what area of your spaceship connects to another, forcing you to spitball exactly why this is the case. As the game puts it, you might fix the hull by playing Tetris, or charge your weapons in the swimming pool. You're basically getting weird prompts to tell a story that can evolve over the course of the game.

It's such an indie game that it comes as PDFs you download from itch.io, but you can play it just as well over Zoom, if you're looking for an excuse to catch up with your old digital nomad college friend.

Movies/TV: Streaming service gift card

Gift cards are all well and good, but you can personalize them by recommending a few of your favorite shows as well. I suggest:

Hulu: Cowboy Bebop

Apple TV+: Severance

Criterion Channel: Ravenous, Paprika, Strange Days

Paramount+: Yellowjackets

Amazon Prime: The Devil's Hour

But to be honest, this entry is just an excuse to talk about the new Max show Scavenger’s Reign. Inspired by the work of French artist Moebius and with a clear debt to famed 70s animated film Fantastic Planet, this stylish sci-fi show features a bunch of humans trying to survive on a beautiful but hostile alien world. Perfect for lovers of fictional nature.

Vintage sci-fi

This Etsy shop has some good stuff, like the 1971 Frank Kelly Freas NASA poster above, a bit of history that I even mentioned on page 167 of my art book.

Penguin science fiction postcards, $28

These postcards have a ton of very cool sci-fi covers I've blogged in the past – great value if you want a lot of art for a low cost.

Meteorite pendant necklace, $34

I think we all know what kind of rock your loved ones need around their neck: A chunk of meteorite straight out of the 1576 Argentinan meteorite fall.

Book recs

For astronauts: Packing for Mars by Mary Roach, The New Guys: The Historic Class of Astronauts That Broke Barriers and Changed the Face of Space Travel by Meredith Bagby

For comedians: Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir, Even Greater Mistakes: Short Stories by Charlie Jane Anders 

For sleuths: Six Wakes by Mur Lafferty, Drunk on All Your Strange New Words by Eddie Robson

For crafters: Knits of Tomorrow: Toys and Accessories for your Retro-Future Needs

For the resistance fighters: The Light Brigade by Kameron Hurley, An Unkindness of Ghosts by Rivers Solomon

For slasher movie fans: Clown in a Cornfield by Adam Cesare

Syd Mead "Biomorph Vehicle" button down shirt, $49

T-shirts aren't classy enough for the world's coolest visual futurist, Syd Mead. I haven't actually bought this incredibly odd shirt, but I really need to.

Art prints (and more) from 70s sci-fi artists

Artist shops can be surprisingly hard to track down on the internet, but here's a short list of ones I've come across. All of these artists are featured in my book (except one), so you can read up on them before you commit to a print.

Michael Whelan 

John Harris

Syd Mead

Don Maitz

David B Mattingly

Peter Andrew Jones - Jones was one of just a few artists who declined to be included in my art book, but he has a distinct, colorful style that I would have loved to have featured!

Finally, here's one extra bonus, just for everyone who made it to the end of this article: The UK-based educational charity Centre for Computing History sells three big officially licensed John Harris posters featuring these three artworks, famous for their use as covers for Sinclair programming manuals.

It's a great deal that I've never seen mentioned anywhere, and Harris' work has a timeless quality that makes it great for an unassuming wall decoration. If you're outside the UK, the shipping costs will be a pain, but there's no better deal for a classic sci-fi poster.

[jikookuntold]

The Untold Truth of "Letter"

Back in 2021, 2022, or even early 2023, if someone had told me about the possibility of JK having vocal credits in Jimin's solo album, I would have called it wishful thinking at best. But it happened, and we got the song "Letter" (AKA Dear Army) as a hidden track in Jimin's first solo album, FACE, with back vocals by JK, and his name written invisibly in the album book.

The perfectly matching vocals of Jikook, with the heartfelt lyrics and soft instruments, undoubtedly made one of the most beautiful songs of the year, which could break many records for Jimin and his album if it was released in the streaming and buying services. The release of Letter as a hidden track in Jimin's solo album raised many questions and debates among Jikookers, and as someone who barely scrolls in the Tumblr app, I know I'm a bit late for the party, but I may or may not have some notes to add to the already made discussions. FYI, these are my analytic views and speculations, I am fully aware that this song has been named "Dear Army", and Jimin called it a "Fan song" on different occasions. So, I do not intend to ignore that and diminish Jimin's expression of love for his fans.

What's a Hidden Track?

Before getting into "Letter", we need to understand what a hidden track is. Well, the definition is pretty clear; When a song is not listed in the official track-list of a music album, but it exists in (some versions of) the physical printed CD, cassette, or LP, it's called a "hidden track". 

Hidden Tracks of BTS

There are several techniques and reasons to "hide" a track in an album, but in the case of BTS discography, the hidden tracks exist for a specific reason, and I'm going to explain it with the only examples we have. The debut album (2013) and Love Yourself: Her (2017), are the only BTS albums including hidden tracks, and if we ignore the skits in each album, "Path" and "Sea" are the only hidden songs BTS ever released. So, these two songs must have something(s) in common and different from the other BTS tracks that caused them to end up as a hidden track. To find that common factor, we need to check their lyrics first:

Path

[Intro: RM] Yeah, wassup? You know, time flows like stars (Check it, check, check, check, check it out) [Verse 1: RM] I started from imitating Eminem, Garion, Epik High To writing my own raps Now I see that I’m already at Hongdae My lyrics back then were all (****) Bossy But we dunno, we dunno When I dreamed without anyone to stop me Reality tied me down and trapped me inside Oh, my youth trapped me My hot heart lost to my cold mind (Damn) As I blindly told myself my decision was right I don’t know whether it’s an angel or a devil, but it says to me "Do you really have any plans to rap properly?" (Yes or no?) I didn’t have more time to hesitate and didn’t want to be stupid So I came here and three years passed by Some say art is long, life is short But for now, art is life Life is sports, just do it, uh [Chorus] If I had chosen a different path, would have I been any different? If I stopped and looked back (Oh hey ya, hey ya) What will I see at the end of this road? Where you should’ve been standing? (Oh hey ya, hey ya) [Verse 2: Suga, Suga & Jungkook] A long time passed and by 2013, I was a trainee for three years I was a high school student who grew overnight (I became a child) White hair grew from my desires and one by one my many friends (Parted ways with me) I spent my time in Seoul alone without a family (That was my third spring) I thought my worries would disappear with my debut ahead of me I closed my eyes to the present that had nothing to change But the reality was different, even as my family and friends tried to stop me I walked into the tunnels that shed no light on my own I thought I would be alone (Why?) As it turns out, there weren’t seven bare feet but we were wearing the shoe named Bangtan We’ll have to go forward, take one more step, become newer And that’s how I spent my fourth spring in Seoul (Whoa) [Chorus] If I had chosen a different path, would have I been any different? (Hey) If I stopped and looked back (Hey) Oh hey ya, hey ya What will I see at the end of this road? Where you should’ve been standing? (Oh hey ya, hey ya) [Verse 3: J-Hope] 2010, the year I walked towards Seoul! I just loved to dance, and now I’m standing on top of the stage Until then, I overcame many pains and scars to prepare myself I survived with my belief to bend, not break, and ran for three years Let the stars inside my heart shine! Now shine on me differently Write “Bangtan” on the paper world I walk my future with more lights on Give a smile to that far future (Ha, ha)

As you can see, the lyrics are simple and self-explanatory, so I guess we don't need any lyrics analysis, and the description section of the Genius translation I used here, says it all:

“길 (Road/Path) follows the member’s decisions to become idols in the Korean music industry. They recall their different upbringings from listening to hip hop in school to the hard years of being trainees under BigHit Entertainment. BTS pose the questions of how their lives would be different if they made a different decision, and they ask themselves what the future entails. A very introspective track about their career for a debut album, BTS display their thought processes as they enter the music scene.”

Sea

[Intro: Jungkook] Oh, ah, yeah [Verse 1: Rap Monster] I just started walking and ended up at the sea I'm looking at the coast from here There's endless sand and the rough wind I'm still looking at a desert I wanted to have the sea so I swallowed you up But I'm even thirstier than before Is what I know really the ocean? Or a blue desert? [Refrain: J-Hope] I don't know, I don't know If I'm feeling the waves right now, yeah I don't know, I don't know If I'm being chased by the sand wind, yeah I don't know, I don't know Is this the sea or the desert? Is this hope or despair? Is this real or fake? Shit [Pre-Chorus: J-Hope] I know, I know, my hardship right now I know, I know, I'll overcome I know, I know, open me up It's the place I can rely on Think positive, I'm swallowing my dry spit Even if I'm nervous, even if I'm in a desert I'm in the beautiful Namib Desert [Chorus: Jimin, Jin] Where there is hope, there is always trial (4) [Hook: V, Jungkook] Where there is hope You know, you know You know, yeah yeah (2) [Verse 2: Suga] I thought this was the ocean but it's a desert A medium-sized, ordinary idol was my second name Countless people get cut from broadcast But someone's empty spot is our dream They say some of these kids can't make it cuz their agency is too small I know, I know, I know too Times when the seven of us had to sleep in one room With foolish hope that tomorrow will be different before we fell asleep We saw the mirage in the desert but we couldn't grasp it Praying that we'll remain in this desert till the end Praying that this isn't truly our reality [Verse 3: Suga] In the end, we reached the mirage and it became our reality The scary desert became the ocean with our blood, sweat and tears But why is there this fear in between the happiness? Because we know too well that this place is really a desert [Refrain 2: Suga] I don't wanna cry I don't wanna rest No, who cares if we rest a little? No no no I don't wanna lose It's always a desert I told you everything Then I'll just be more depressed [Chorus: Jungkook, V] Where there is hope, there is always trial (2) [Hook: Jimin, Jin] Where there is hope You know, you know You know, yeah yeah (2) [Bridge: Rap Monster] Ocean, desert, the world Everything, the same thing Different name I see ocean, l see desert I see the world Everything's, the same thing With a different name It's life again [Hook: V, Jungkook] Where there is hope You know you know you know yeah (2) [Chorus] Where there is hope, there is always trial

Compared to “Path”, we have more innuendos and metaphors in “Sea” because of Namjoon’s lyricism (it was supposed to be in his mixtape at first), but as the description says:

"It discusses the hardships BTS has experienced since debut, particularly struggling to compete with groups from other, larger agencies. In this song, BTS reflects on these hardships, fearing that their global fame and success could leave as suddenly as it arrived."

Common Denominator

These two lyrics have one big thing in common, and it's the topic they are discussing. They talk about the members' struggles, fears, hopes, and dreams career-wise. I was thinking maybe these issues are something they can only share with their longtime fans, not the general public, therefore, they decided to release them as hidden tracks in the physical album for their real fans who buy them, something like the difference between Weverse and Instagram, I guess? Then I realized that’s something Namjoon has mentioned himself to Billboard Magazine, in LYS: Her interview:

And if fans are so lucky to own the physical album, they’ll hear two hidden tracks at the very. Why keep them secretive?

"I think they’re hidden because you have to be a real fan of BTS to understand them. Otherwise, you won’t. Otherwise, you’d like to be, “Why are they feeling so confused about things? They’re good?!? They’re No. 1 somewhere, they have so much stuff, why are they worried?” People always talk about that. But if you are a true fan of BTS and you buy the album and you listen to the hidden track — if you are an Army and we spent time together from 2013, 2014 — they could understand. It’s kind of more special, more closer, to our true hearts"

What about "Letter"?

In conclusion, hidden tracks for BTS, are something between them and their real fans who know about the path they have wended, therefore they can open up to them through lyrics and talk about their fears and struggles and ambitions without being judged or misunderstood. Also, we have to debunk some of the misconceptions going around (especially after the release of FACE) about hidden tracks. For example, some claimed that Letter is made for fans because hidden tracks are always supposed to be “gifts” for fans. This claim obviously can’t be true when you are able to listen to a hidden track legally, only by purchasing the physical album. Gifts are supposed to be free of charge, like Promise, Still with You, Christmas Love, My You, and so on. 

Then what about “Letter”? Why this song is a hidden track in Jimin’s first solo album? Did Jimin want to say something by hiding this track in FACE? To answer this questions, we need to pay attention to the lyrics and how the song was made:

 [Verse 1] What should I say? And how should I convey it? I'm really not getting my words right I know it sounds so clichéd So that it's not taken lightly Let me say it to you properly [Chorus] I say oh-oh, I hope you can be happier You, who stretched your hand out to me whenever I fell I say oh-oh, I'll hold it now (I'll hold it) So when you feel like crying, you won’t fall [Verse 2] After all this time has passed Will we still be the same? Just like we were when we first met, hmm-mmm If we are together, even the desert could turn to a sеa Just like how we were then, oh-hoo-ooh [Chorus] I say oh-oh, I really hope that it’ll last forever You, who felt like a warm spring to me in a cold winter I say oh-oh, I'll always cherish it All those moments between you and I [Refrain] Baby, don't leave Just stay by my side, yeah To you, who see me bigger than what my little self is (to you) So that I can give as much as I’ve received (oh-oh) So that I can keep my word (oh-oh) Don't worry, just stay by my side, yeah (Yeah) We don’t know what the future holds (holds, yeah) And that’s scary and makes us afraid (oh-oh) But don’t forget that we’re always together (don't forget) [Outro] I know it sounds so clichéd So that it's not taken lightly Let me say it to you properly

The Feelings

If you compare these lyrics to "Path" and "Sea" you can clearly see the differences, and except a mention of "sea and desert" there's nothing in common between them. Letter is not a monologue about career issues, it's a romantic song. These lyrics are expressing the feelings and addresses them to an audience and appreciates them. But how was this song made?

According to Jimin, at first, SMF Pt2 was supposed to be the last track of his solo album, but in their YTC promotion and recording era when they announced that they have planned to put their group activities on rest, Jimin decided to express his feelings of the moment through a letter, and turned that letter to song lyrics. Producers liked the song so much and decided to add it in his album and that’s how “Letter” was born. Although Jimin didn’t explain much about those “feelings” and left the conclusion to us like a true artist, we all know that this song is totally different from the other tracks in his album.

All the tracks of FACE are dark and sad. Jimin’s first album is all about himself, and he talks about the painful emotions he had as an artist and a person in the past few year, but with “Letter” there is a different story. Recording Academy admitted this and wrote:

“Though the EP is technically only six songs, the physical version has an additional “hidden” track called “Letter”. The song provides an intimacy that stands out from the other FACE tracks, capturing Jimin in his best form. The lyrics are poignant and vulnerable as Jimin pleads for someone to stay (“Baby, don't leave Just stay by my side, yeah”) The biggest surprise though? Fellow BTS member Jungkook contributes vocals to harmonize with Jimin.”  

A Fan Song?

“Letter” being a “Fan Song” is a stated fact by Park Jimin himself, and there can’t be any arguments about it, but that fact doesn’t mean Jimin made this song with the thought of fans in his head and all about them. In one of my old posts, I said that a faceless crowd can’t be the muse for a romantic song, especially when that song has a "standing-out intimacy".

Another reason for calling "Letter" a fan song, is the fact that it starts at 6:13 of the album, the numbers that remind us of the debut date of BTS. We can't call this a coincidence because we know how thoughtful and punctual Jimin is. But don’t forget that 6.13 is more of BTS time than ARMY time. So, as much as you call this track a song for fans, it can be called a song for his fellow BTS members.

Why JK?

Now, let’s address the elephant in the room. Why JK was a part of this song? Did it mean something for Jimin, or did he have no other options? Jimin said that FACE is an album about himself, and he didn’t feel right about featuring other artists in it, that’s why he decided to record SMF Pt2 all alone and do all the rap parts by himself instead of featuring Yoongi in it. He collaborated with several producers and songwriters (including Namjoon), but there was no featured artist in the whole album.

About the background vocals of the album, he did most parts by himself, and for the other parts, he worked with artists who already had credits in his album, such as BLVSH, Sumin, and James Keys. But JK didn’t have anything to do with Jimin’s album. Jimin was fully capable of doing the background vocals of Letter by himself, as he did for the first parts of the song. Jimin never really explained why he decided to have JK in the song, other than saying their voices match. This known fact doesn’t give us much information, but we can have our speculations. 

Closer Than This?

Another thing that questions the idea of “Letter" being inspired by fans, is the existence of “Closer Than This”. The newest release of Jimin is the exact definition of a fan song, the lyrics are straightforward and directly address the fans and leave no place for speculation. If CTT is the result of Jimin getting inspired by his fans, then “Letter” must be inspired by something different because these two songs are not comparable. 

The difference becomes more obvious when we look at the initial version of the Letter lyrics in Jimin’s drafts. I wonder what the Grammy journalist who called the final lyrics of “Letter” intimate would have said if they read this: 

You hugged me tightly Only you who protected me Hold my hand, hold my hand tightly You who reached out my hand You held out your hand to me

We don’t know what was going on in Jimin’s mind when he wrote these, but we can see that the initial lyrics have been moderated, and the intimate parts, which clearly refer to a person, didn’t end up in the final lyrics. FYI, I’m doing a lyric analysis here, and this is not a complaint or conspiracy theory because Jimin said that he liked the way the final version came out, and it's all that matters.

For Fans, Not About Fans

So far we made it clear that "hidden tracks" are not about fans, they are for fans like any other BTS song, but the hidden tracks are a secret between the artist and the fan, something that only the true and dedicated fan can understand, and this applies to Jimin's "Letter".

Jimin gave up on many records for streaming and buying by releasing this song as a hidden track in his album. So, there must be an important message in this song that he wanted to convey to the true fans. He did his share of being thankful to fans by CTT, and I don't think he needed to do it twice in a year.

Maybe you prefer to think Jimin just made this song for ARMY and hid it in the album as a surprise or because it didn’t match with the whole concept of FACE, and you might not be wrong about any of that. But, don’t forget that he didn’t explain anything about this, and we both are just making assumtions.

Yes, maybe Jimin didn't acknowledge JK being a part of Letter in his promotion era, but JK did everything he could for his share. A few hours before the release of FACE, he started a live and played a part of it with his guitar, and months later, he watched Jimin's live performance for Festa while harmonizing with it and reminding us that he knows the lyrics very well. In Jimin's documentary he was very supportive and even teased for a live performance with him in future.

Why Just Jikook?

Jimin and Jungkook are not the only members of BTS. But I don't know why everytime Jimin or JK do something with romantic undertones, the fans (OT7 ARMYs, to be more specific) immediately try to label it as "About ARMY". I usually don't see this energy with the other five members. I'm perfectly sure they are also very grateful for ARMY, they have released several songs about them, and they would have loved to collaborate in a fan song with Jimin, too.

Then why Jimin only included JK in Letter? Why he wanted to sing for "ARMY" with him? Unless we assume Jimin's gratitude towards ARMY has connections with JK, and I don’t even want to bring up 2019 "I am army" jokes. But "Letter" is the song the most optimistic Jikookers didn't expect to exist. You may try to ignore and normalize it, but you can't deny the fact that Letter proved Jikook's unbreakable connection as two harmonic colleages, long time friends, and inseparable souls.

[viperrot]

⇁slasher season | leon kennedy | intro

re4 remake ghostface!leon s. kennedy x fem!reader NSFW 18+

MINORS DNI: BEWARE OF THE CONTENT YOU CONSUME.

you've always been in love with horror media growing up, especially slasher films. your boyfriend suggests to indulge in your dark fantasies after learning about your liking towards the classic ghostface.

series content warnings: porn with little plot, cnc/dubcon, depictions of chase, stalking, knifeplay, size difference, and possibly more to be added

content contains: GRAPHIC DESCRIPTION OF MURDER (ghostface in the movie doing ghostface things), oral (f!receiving), reader has fem!anatomy and uses fem!pronouns, size difference (leon is supposedly taller and beefier than reader), use of petnames (bunny, bug), no p in v, leon eats pussy like a champ!, praise and degradation

not proofread i am eepy

3719 words

song rec: "porno witch" by devil's witches (PLEASE LISTEN I LOVE THIS SONG UHHUGGHHU)

the introduction to my new self-indulgent collection of ghostface leon! no ghostface!leon here, but in the next one? ohohoho… be prepared, little doves.

enjoy below the cut~

Swaddled up in a soft blanket dyed to look like the Mystery Machine from Scooby-Doo, you patiently waited for your boyfriend to arrive home from work. You sat on the floor below your couch, surrounded by pillows you had taken from your bedroom in effort to get comfortable.

Tonight was movie night, and it was your week to pick the movie. With the summer season in full swing, you had finally decided it was “Slasher Season”—a time of the year you made up when you were in high school as an excuse to watch shitty horror films on your mom’s VHS player. Slasher Season, for you, was from July and all the way into Christmas—the typical settings of many slasher films. From summer camp scenarios, halloween killing sprees, and organs for Christmas presents, you thought it was a proper time period to call the Slasher Season.

As you scrolled through your phone, mindlessly looking through cringe social media, a ping! sound vibrates the small device. Your put your attention on the notification banner at the top of the screen, smiling softly when you see a message from your sweetheart.

Lee💕» Almost there. Make me some hot chocolate?

At the mentioning of the sweet treat, you checked the electric kettle that was resting on the kitchen counter and squinted at it.

« Too farrrr you do it urself!!

You respond, feeling lazy.

Lee💕» You’re goofy. See you soon, bug

Your heart raced knowing Leon was only a few blocks away at this point. He often walks place-to-place to make up for his lack of gym consistency as a result of college taking up most of his time, and his dorm isn’t very far from your apartment. As you waited for Leon, you got up from your comfortable spot on the floor to turn on the kettle before searching for the remote to the TV, finding it wedged between the couch cushions.

Sitting back down in your pillow moat, you quickly search for one of your favourite slashers on a random streaming service—Scream, 1996. The infamous Ghostface mask stared back at you as you clicked around for the “play” button, starting the movie and immediately pausing it to continue when your lover arrives.

The door to your quaint apartment clicks, the sound of a door knob rattling catching your attention. It pushes open to reveal Leon, sporting a black t-shirt and some blue jeans. He crouches down to slip off his beat-up Converse, tucking them against the wall before fully entering the house and closing the door behind him. He pushes his hair back as he looks at you with a boyish grin, a faint blush dusting the bridge of his nose as his pupils widen at the sight of you.

“Hey, bug,” Leon beams. He takes a look at the kitchen and notices the electric kettle boiling on the counter.

“Hi, Lee,” you chuckle softly. “I thought you changed at your dorm?” you motioned towards his jeans from your spot on the floor. His attention turns down to his attire.

“Figured I could shower and then just wear the sweats I keep here. Plus, I didn’t want to walk in pants like that,” Leon shrugs, walking towards the short hallway that led to your bedroom. You hum and go back to your phone while your blondie changes out of his tight jeans. The six-foot tall hunk walked into the living room and nudged you with his sock-clad foot, asking you to scoot forward. You did so, allowing him to squeeze behind you and set you into his lap.

"Was it busy today?" you peer up at him, your eyes unable to focus on his chin and his eyes at the same time. You felt Leon's right arm leave your waist to pick up the remote on the coffee table, pressing the "play" button to begin the movie. He tugs up the Scooby-Doo themed blanket to cover the both of you before answering your question.

"Like always. Luckily, no one pushed me into the pool today," Leon chuckled. He works as a swim instructor during the summer for little kids at the local pool, and the children would often play with him and push him into the body of water. The image of a dozen little ones running around him like vultures made you giggle.

"That's kinda lame," you joke. Leon squeezes your side gently, taking a nibble at the shell of your ear as a silent jab at your comment.

"Do you want hot chocolate, bug?" Leon asks lowly. You shake your head as a no, focusing your attention to the movie.

Drew Barrymore as Casey Becker picked up the white landline phone, responding to the fake voice speaking to her with a cheeky grin on her face. You felt your thighs squeeze at the sound of Ghostface on the other end of the line, silently wishing you were Casey Becker. If Leon noticed, he made no effort to say anything. As the scene plays out, you feel your lover's chest hum softly.

"What is this...?" he questions quietly. Your eyebrows knit together at this.

"You don't know what we're watching...?!" you gape up at him, your head looking over your shoulder. He gives you a look of pure confusion.

"Not really, no. Am I supposed to know?" Leon laughs nervously, a brow quirked up.

"If you're dating me, yes! Yes, you're supposed to know!" You yelp out, distraught by your lover's confession. He flashes a stupid smile, seemingly unbothered by your behaviour, his lightly calloused fingers tickling beneath the baggy jumper you wore that totally wasn't his to tease at the skin of your waist.

"Then why don't you help me out and tell me what in the world we're watching, bunny?" Leon circles his thumb just above your v-line, rubbing softly as he nuzzles his chin onto your shoulder.

"It's only like... one of the best slasher films of all time," you mumble under your breath. "Scream by Wes Craven from 1996."

"Mmm... not ringing a bell, bunny," Leon begins to press kisses into the crook of your neck as his eyes focus on the screen in front of you two, confused as to why the platinum blonde chick is losing her mind while running around with the phone in her hands.

Casey Becker screams at the sight of her meathead boyfriend strapped to a chair in front of her family’s pool, guts hanging out of his stomach from a large slit that ran across it. Leon cringed slightly at the sight, not expecting to watch a horror movie tonight.

"What is this..." he squints, still confused.

"Just keep watching," you sigh, childishly upset that Leon didn't know what this movie was.

The scene continued, Casey Becker running around and out of her house with a knife from her burning kitchen. Eventually, she's found by the wicked killer of the movie. He chases her with his blade, digging it into her neck as she cries to her poor parents over the phone. The blood gurgled in her throat as she cried, crawling in the yard of her lavish and isolated home, leaving a trail of her blood in her wake.

As Ghostface brandished his modified hunting knife, you shivered with a sick excitement, unknowing of the sparkle in your eyes as the scene unfolded.

But Leon knew.

As you squirmed in his lap, he grew curious, his lips no longer kissing against your neck. He knew what the two of you were watching now—he had dressed up as that murderous fool for Halloween in his senior year of high school as a joke with some old friends. Leon hadn’t any idea who Ghostface was. He simply knew him because of his friend group that dressed up as other slasher antagonists.

He remembers the compliments he’s get when trick-or-treating with his friends—the girls that’d flirt with him and ask him for a game of cat and mouse with batted eyelashes. Leon feels warm at the memory of spending time with his old group and denying girls a playful chase, but he quickly brushes them away when he feels you grind into his lap a little harder than the other times.

“What’s got you so twitchy, bunny?” Leon whispers into your ear, thumbing at the waistband of your pajama shorts. You jolt at the sensation, a blush running up to your ears.

“Nothing?” You respond, hoping he wouldn't realize the true reason as to why you're so fidgety tonight. The sight of Billy Loomis and Stu Macher made you want to jump with joy, unconsciously biting your bottom lip as they teased their respective girlfriends. Leon hummed, mimicking the kisses Billy would give Sidney in the scene, his lips grazing the lines of your neck.

"I think you're lying to me, bug," Leon chuckles lowly, his lips curling up into a grin against your neck. "I have a serious question for you."

You perk up at this, your full attention in your lover's hands. You can no longer focus on the slasher film playing on the TV as Leon turns you in his lap to face him, his nose grazing against your own as he tilts his head down to look into your eyes.

"Do you get, uh...?" Leon hesitates, his lip twitching as his eyes dart around in search of what to say.

"Do serial killers turn you on?"

Blink.

Blink, blink.

"HAH- why would you think that, Lee?!" you laugh nervously, your heart drumming against your ribcage. The blonde man smirked at the flustered sight of you, knowing good and well you were lying through your teeth.

"Well, you keep squeezing your thighs together, first of all," he notes. "And then you keep squirming around like a caterpillar getting ready to cocoon," his hands tickle your waist, trailing up and up, closer to your chest.

"That doesn't mean anything, Lee. I-I'm just feeling the affects of a thrilling film!" you try to dodge his speculations, eyes averting from his own. Leon presses a soft kiss on the corner of your lips before you felt his right hand trail away from your torso, cupping the heat between your legs.

"If it doesn't mean anything," he leans in, whispering into you ear.

"Why are you soaking through your shorts?"

You shiver when you feel Leon's breath tickle your ear, unknowingly grinding your clothed slit onto the palm of his hand. He chuckles lowly, pulling away from your heat. Your blush worsens, and you whine softly when the contact is lost.

"Be honest with me, bunny. Do you like the idea of being chased? Maybe even... having a little fun with a knife?" Leon coos, bringing his hand back to your waist. You shyly nod, shoving your face into his neck to avoid his soft gaze. His laugh rumbles low in his chest as he holds you close, caressing your skin gently.

“Don’t be embarrassed—It’s kind of cute, really,” Leon assures you. “But I have another question.”

You press your chest against his, and you feel him hug you a little tighter. You hum softly, urging your lover to continue.

“Do you want to try something more… slasher-like?” He asks curiously, and you grow a little confused.

“What do you mean, Lee? Like… do you mean you want to watch more movies, or in be-“

“In bed. Or maybe even out of bed,” Leon smirks. You pull away from the crook of his neck, interested in the proposition.

“Out of bed? How would that work?” You slightly pucker your lips with confusion. Leon traces your bottom lip with his thumb, tugging at it gently as his blue eyes traced the features of your face.

“However you want, bunny. I can send you creepy messages on a cheap burner phone, make you wonder if I’m stalking you every moment of the day, and maybe even, hmm… Get a Ghostface costume…?” Your eyes widen with surprise at his suggestions, and by the look in his eyes, he’s completely serious. You stifle a nervous laugh, unsure of how to even respond.

“Y-y’know, I thought you were a ‘missionary only’ kinda guy,” you half-joked.

It was mostly true, really. The times you’ve had sex with Leon, he was mostly very sweet—he’s just a big tease. He always wanted to look you in the eyes, whisper sweet praises to you as he rolls his hips into yours. You never bothered to ask him for rougher activities, not wanting to come off as weird to your boyfriend of almost a year, so his suggestion of chasing and stalking you was a shocker.

“M’only a ‘missionary only’ guy because I didn’t think you’d be such a lewd and depraved girl,” Leon confesses, smirking down at you. “But now… I know what you really like,” his hand reaches down to the curve of your ass, pinching the plush flesh teasingly between his fingers.

“I-I’m not lewd,” you stammer out, your arousal dripping from your tongue. Leon takes in the sight of you—flushed and small in his lap, your body betraying your words as you began to grind onto the apparent bulge in his sweatpants.

“Stage one is denial, bug~” gently, he pushes you down to the floor, the movie and Mystery Machine blanket that covered you two long forgotten. You make no protest when he begins to tug off your pajama shorts, revealing the cotton panties beneath. Leon’s breath grazes over the white fabric, tickling your most sensitive areas as he smiles up at you from his spot between your thighs.

“So, what do you say, bunny? Do you want to play a game with me?” Leon chuckles darkly, his teeth pulling at gusset of your panties to pull them off. When they’re halfway down your thighs, he ducks to wedge himself in front of it before lowering himself to the slick between your legs, his plump lips immediately getting to work.

His tongue runs up from the bottom of your pussy and up to your sensitive little clit, teasing at the bundle of nerves with a few flicks of his tongue. Leon skims his giant hands over your thighs before squeezing them closer to his head, burying himself into your wet cunt like a man starved.

You moan out his name as you thread your fingers through his soft blonde hair, throwing your head back into the carpet as you feel his warm tongue bully itself into your wet hole.

“Tastes so good, bunny,” Leon groans, the vibrations of his voice against your cunt making your stomach churn. “All f’me, too—god,” he smiles before fucking his tongue back inside, relishing in the way your thighs hugged his head tight.

“L-Leon—“

“That’s right, bunny… Keep moaning like the depraved little slut you are,” your lover chuckled, the devilish tone dripping from his tongue. Leon began to focus on your clit as one of his hands left your thighs, teasing the entrance of your pussy with soft pokes and prods.

“Who would’ve known such a sweet girl like you could be so dirty~” Leon mumbles as he sucks at your sensitive little nub. “You like it when I call you slut, huh? You’re squeezing my head like I’m trying to kill you or somethin’, bunny.”

“Why don’t you beg for my fingers, hm? Let’s hear it, bunny~” the blue-eyed boy pulls himself away from your twitchy little hole, smirking at the sight of how fucked-out you looked despite him barely doing anything. His head presses against your thigh as he forces them apart, placing soft nibbles onto the plump flesh as he awaits your response.

“P-please, Lee…” you pant out, hands reaching out for him desperately as your hips bucked up. Leon remains in his current position, worrying bruises into your inner thigh as if nothing was happening.

“L-Leon, please… need you—“ your voice is shaky as you continue to beg, and that seems to do the trick as you watch your lover return to his spot buried between your legs.

“Perfect…” He smiles, his lips a breath away from your aching cunt. “My perfect little bunny, hm~? Let’s give you want you want now, slut~”

Without warning, Leon thrusts his thick fingers into your slick little hole, scissoring your entrance open as he sucks harshly on your clit. You cry as you feel his teeth graze against the little bud, eyes rolling back as his fingers pump a hair upwards to graze against that special little spot inside of you.

“L-Lee—!” You moan, breath hitching in your throat as you tugged at his hair. Leon makes no plans to stop, continuing his attack onto the most sensitive spots of your body as you squirm and squeeze beneath him. Every time your thighs clenched around him, he couldn’t help but chuckle with delight, relishing in every sensation you gave him.

“Feels so good, isn’t that right, bunny?” Leon coos, smiling coyly at the sight of your arched back and drool-covered lips. “Y’look so pretty like this, bug… Love eating you out.”

Leon digs his fingers deeper inside of you as he goes back to stimulating your clit, his tongue dragging letters onto your slick pussy with expertise. Your hips rock up onto his mouth, your jumper riding up your stomach as you squirmed. Your lover could feel your cunt squeeze with each thrust of his calloused digits.

“Y’gunna cum for me, bunny?” he hums. “Go on. Cum for me, slut. This might be the last time I let you feel this good,” Leon growls.

At his order, you release, your juices making a mess of your lover’s face as your hips twitch forward. Leon sighs with delight, lapping up every drop you give him as if he was never going to have another meal for the rest of his life. Groaning at the taste of you, he pays no attention to the way you lay boneless beneath him.

“Such a good girl for me, bunny~” he moans onto your pussy, obsessed with the flavour of you as his tongue drags itself in and out of your slick hole. Your shivered, trying to push him away from your overstimulated intimates as your eyes rolled back. He doesn’t budge, continuing to fuck you with his greedy tongue.

“Tastes so fuckin’ good… all f’me… all mine~” Leon mumbles between every lick, pussydrunk and loopy. He finally pulls away, your slick making a mess of his jaw and lips. His blue eyes stare down at you with a slight worry.

“You okay, bug?” He whispers, bringing a hand up to caress your cheek. You nod softly, lost for words as a result of your recent orgasm. Leon chuckles at your current state.

“So cute… Let’s get you a bath, n’then we can keep watching Scream in the bedroom, okay?” Leon helps you up to your feet before carrying you bridal-style immediately after. You make no argument, allowing the man to walk you over to the bathroom down the hall.

Apparently, watching Scream and making you scream are two different things, but Leon didn’t really care.

uh. my first public smut i’ve ever written? hope u enjoyed the intro i guess bc this is one of the few times i’m gunna make leon be nice to u in this little collection :,]

comment if you want to be in the taglist, perhaps?

[scuttlingcrab]

The Great Hunt

In Search of a Hammer

I recently discovered some rare dialogue where Raphael returns the Orphic Hammer to Tav if they “misplaced it.” Hilarious and perfect. Naturally, I had to write about Raphael finding out about Tav’s incompetence and jumping through hoops to return it to them before the last battle.

Summary: Raphael learns from Korrilla that Tav foolishly sold the Orphic Hammer in an attempt to earn some last minute gold. Raphael hunts down the Hammer before his dreams are destroyed forever.

Notes: This will be in 3 parts! Part 2 is now here: An Absolute Waste of Time. Part 3 is coming soon! 🥰

Link to my other work in the Devil's Archive.

(Image via keylana-dragon)

Rat-tat-tat. Rat-tat-tat. 

The gentle rapping on the door of the Devil’s Den was enough to disturb Raphael, to pull him from his current train of thought. He pursed his lips, letting out a stream of hot air from his scrunched nose like a vexed dragon. There was only one who knocked in such an irritating, irregular rhythm; always with a slight air of caution, as if they were already apologising for the sin they’ve yet to commit. Why must these damned creatures insist on such blatant trepidation in his presence? With all the interruptions as of late, he would’ve preferred at least a shred of authority with their actions.

“What is it this time, Korrilla?” Raphael snapped, slowly closing the diary he had been scribbling in. “You are becoming more irksome than a gaggle of babbling children.”

There was a long pause before the door to his suite creaked open, allowing in the sounds of rushed, heavy footsteps. The atmosphere in the room immediately shifted as Korrilla waited behind Raphael, his skin prickling as he sensed the tides turning. 

In all the years of service to Raphael, Korrilla only entered the room in such an undignified manner when there was a problem. The last time she barged into his quarters, disrupting a rendezvous with a client that had been years in the making; she announced that the Crown of Karsus had been stolen from Mephistopheles’ vault. 

Raphael interlaced his fingers atop the rosewood desk, squeezing his hands together as he waited for what felt like aeons for Korrilla to give her explanation. 

“Speak!” He barked, his words violently cutting through the silence. “You of all creatures should know that time is of the essence.” 

Korrilla coughed in surprise at the sudden outburst, nervously clearing her throat as she took a step forward. 

“Right, I uh. Well, see… You’re not going to like this…”

“Do not tell me my dear father has finally decided to pay me a visit?”

“Well… no, it’s not that bad, but…” She hesitated, her voice quivering. 

Raphael straightened his back, twisting like an owl so he could glare at Korrilla. She winced at the action, as if he had struck her.

“I’m afraid that, um… that little mouse, your favourite client? They’ve sold the Orphic Hammer.”

“They did what?!” 

“Needed the coin apparently. I tried to stop them, even went to the s–”

Raphael slowly turned away from Korrilla, loosening his hands. He placed his palms on the desk, digging his nails into the rosewood. The tips of his fingers glowed red as the piece of furniture burst into flames.

––

Mamzell Amira stood behind her counter near the entrance of Sharess’ Caress, leaning against a small bookshelf. She had her arms crossed, squeezing them just enough against her chest to show a healthy amount of cleavage. 

Her prized house of pleasure was bustling, the busiest it had been in years, and all thanks to Lord Gortash’s recent coronation. She could just about hear the sound of gold ringing in the pockets of lustful customers as they crammed into her establishment, wanting a taste of what Sharess’ Caress had to offer. Her accounts would indeed be plentiful after that day alone, helping her relieve a few more debts that had been stacking up as of late. 

Mamzell’s gaze drifted back to the young half-elf in front of her, who could still not meet her eyes without blushing. She had been stuck in a conversation with him for the last hour, trying to coax him out of that shiny shell of his. The boy had a handsome face and dark eyes that told her a different story, one of a raging beast lurking beneath the surface of that sheepish disposition. He had a lot of potential and she knew the perfect pairing for him…

Out of nowhere the entire building shook frantically, as if the walls trembled in fear. The room became silent as everyone waited for the tremors to end, but they only got worse. Another earthquake? And so soon? But no… deep shouts reverberated through the ceiling, getting louder and louder, causing the windows to shatter and the lights to flicker sporadically. She could just about recognise that voice… No matter, whoever that was, they better leave a generous tip. 

“As I was saying, sweetling; my expertly trained courtesans can elicit all sorts of reactions from lucky patrons...” 

—— 

The Devil’s Den was ablaze. The wooden ceiling groaned as it continued to warp from the blistering heat. Thick flames consumed everything as it moved across the suite, making its way towards Korrilla.

Korrilla crawled in the direction of the door, desperately trying to escape the inferno. Raphael stood in the centre of the room, hellfire bursting from his body like an erupting volcano. He shed his mortal skin, sneering viciously at Korrilla. 

“Mamzell Amira isn’t going to like this…” Korrilla shouted over the turbulent flames, concealing her mouth from the smoke with the sleeve of her dress.

“I’ll be damned what that wretched woman thinks, you insipid creature! She is bound to me regardless, so let her clean up this mess after I’m finished with you. In fact, I will burn this entire pathetic city to the ground. The Illithids will have nothing to claim but charred bones and ruins by the time they arrive.”

The ceiling fell behind Raphael, bringing a wine rack down with it. A large blast of embers continued to swirl around the Devil as wine bottles met the flames, exploding like fireworks. 

“Raphael, we need to get o–”

“Where did they sell it? Tell me at once!” 

“B-Beehives' General Goods… in the Lower City.”

Raphael roared, flapping his wings and causing the fire to grow more ferocious, mirroring his temper. Of all the shops Tav could’ve approached, they had stooped so low as to sell it there. To one of the dullest, most idiotic merchants Raphael had encountered in the last century. If that imbecile desperately needed the coin, why didn’t they approach Raphael? Had he not offered them salvation? A way out of their impending fate? He had made it so easy, so effortless for them! All they needed to do was free Orpheus from those damned infernal bindings. He should have made it more of a challenge, maybe then they would’ve stuck to the script. 

The Devil lashed his tail, destroying what was left of the blackened desk and tearing up the remaining floorboards in the process. How could he have allowed himself to be so daft, to leave such an important part of his plan to mere mortals? If he failed now, when he was so close to the Crown, to his destiny, he would be known as the laughing stock of the Hells. The bards would make a mockery of him in song for all eternity. Raphael’s worst nightmare. 

Around him, the Devil’s Den and his dreams crumbled, turning to ash. No. No! He would not let that happen. There was still time to make amends. 

“Gird your loins, Korrilla.” Raphael bellowed.

“Wait, what? You can’t be–”

Raphael snapped his fingers, immediately sending Korrilla away to another plane. Temporarily banished. He didn’t care where he sent her, he just knew that if he had to look at that face for another second, he feared what he might do to her. The dwarf would prove useful in the days ahead and yes, she did meddle in his affairs from time-to-time, but she was a loyal servant. A strong warlock. She could survive anything. 

He’d find her later, for another scolding and a proper debrief, once the Hammer was back in the hands of that trying little mouse.

—— 

Oliver Tefoco prided himself in the Beehive General Goods. Somehow he still managed to keep his little shop afloat, even after the Absolute targeted the city’s main gates, putting the business in jeopardy. Oliver never thought he could run it by himself, not without his beloved wife, Kroyce, at his side. He had sent his wife and children away when the cultists attacked the city. And all for the best, really, who knew if and when they’d strike again. He couldn’t even remember the last time he had been truly alone; without the sounds of his wife’s idle chatter or his children’s laughter as they ran up and down those rickety old stairs. It was all too quiet now. Gods, he sure missed Kroyce, constant nagging and all... 

The merchant stiffened, immediately rising from his chair behind the counter, as if Kroyce might walk in at any moment. Perhaps he should tidy things up, just in case. It was getting a wee bit dusty in there and besides, there had been no other guests since that dishevelled group of adventurers visited him hours ago. Selling him that strange hammer, he had never seen one quite like it in all his years as a merchant.

He might as well keep himself busy. It’s what Kryoce would do.

Oliver ventured into the kitchen, returning a few minutes later with a rag and wooden bucket filled with water.

“Right…” Oliver muttered to himself, dabbing the rag in liquid. “Better get going.”

Oliver started his task by cleaning the shelves behind the counter, removing the contents from each level. Bottles of wine, potions, books and more books; he had practically everything. Perhaps too many things, maybe he should sell some bits and bobs at the next market. 

As he began clearing away the cobwebs, a strong scent of sulphur abruptly filled the room. The air felt heavy against his thin frame, and he found himself struggling to breathe. He paused, dropping the rag in the bucket. Did he leave the stove on? No, can’t be right. He didn’t remember… 

The merchant turned around and was unexpectedly face-to-face with a tall, dark haired man. Oliver let out a high pitched scream, nearly falling over backwards. 

The stranger loomed over Oliver, his eyes a peculiar golden colour, resembling the flickering flames of a candle. As Oliver stared back at the man, he noticed his skin sizzled, hissing like an overflowing kettle. How long had that man been standing there? He would have to check on that blasted door chime, that’s the second time this week it decided to stop working.

Oliver licked his lips, trying to swallow but realised his mouth was uncomfortably dry. His tongue stuck to the top of his hard palate. Sweat cascaded down his forehead, making his beard a soggy, droopy mess.

“H-hello, my good sir! How may I help an esteemed guest such as yo–”

“I am looking for a hammer.” The man’s voice was deep, intoxicating. 

“A h-hammer, you say? Why, I have plenty. Hammers for building, s-smithing –” 

“No, no…” The man slowly raised his finger, shaking it side-to-side. Oliver could’ve sworn he saw a spark fly from those fingertips. “This is no ordinary hammer.” 

“I-I only have ordinary goods, sir. P-please if you are not satisfied, might I also offer you some light nibbles, perhaps? Or maybe some potions to cure any–” Oliver started going through the rest of his usual spiel in an attempt to calm his nerves.

“You will listen to me.” The stranger growled in response, taking a step towards Oliver. “Someone came into your shop today, selling you a hammer, did they not?”

Oliver’s mouth hung open in confusion and he scratched his head, staring at the man in front of him. The stranger's face turned into a terrifying scowl as Oliver continued to gape. There was something familiar in his face, the way he talked, moved, those fancy clothes… Where had he heard that voice before? And those eyes…

“Did they not?” The man said again, his tone rising.

“Uh, yes? Hold on…” 

The stranger perked up slightly, but his eyes remained stern. He edged closer to Oliver.

“A funny dwarf woman came in here earlier,” Oliver continued, “asking the same type of questions. But I will tell you the same thing I told her. I am not giving away any information. No sir. Those are my rules–”

“Where is the hammer?” The man's voice rumbled through his chest. The room was sweltering and Oliver leaned against the wall for support, feeling woozy. He sniffed the air, smelling something new, something burning. Smoke rose from the feet of the stranger. 

“L-listen here, sir.. I mean no trouble, but I don’t do business with thugs. If that woman is going to send her goons after me, well–”

Oliver never considered himself a brave man. He practically avoided conflict his whole life, save for that one time he punched a man in the face, due to a misunderstanding. He often thought about what he’d do if he was ever threatened, he had no idea how to hold a sword and knew just the basic fundamentals of magic. Despite that, he felt pretty confident he could take on that stranger. No matter how weird he smelled, or how the ground caught fire where he stepped. Just an illusion, that’s what Kryoce would say. 

The stranger raised his hand, and Oliver put up his fists, preparing to counter whatever attack came his way. The man pressed his thumb and middle finger together and Oliver gasped. Long black nails protruded from his fingertips, reminding Oliver of... claws.

The man snapped his fingers and Oliver suddenly found the world around him very, very big. 

—— 

It was impossible for Raphael to keep calm as he tore through the Beehive General Goods. He had turned the entire residence upside down as he searched for the Hammer, plundering the top floors and basement like some sort of petty thief. He ripped through the walls and floorboards in the off chance the merchant hid the Hammer there. 

The Devil knew what merchants were capable of. He had dealt with many in his career, and they were always hiding something, withholding important information if it might make them just an extra bit of coin. There was nothing of value in that so-called shop anyways. Rubbish, the lot of it. And still, no Hammer to be found.

Raphael had been reckless, he would never dare show his cambion form outside of the usual safe houses. It was dangerous to do so in Baldur’s Gate, but he had no other choice. Time was running further away from him the more he dawdled, searching for the Hammer. Raphael would be the least of that merchant’s worries, let alone the entirety of Faerûn, if Tav didn’t have the Hammer soon. 

The sound of glass breaking pulled Raphael away from his internal monologue. A large rat darted across the floor, running back and forth in a rapid attempt to find a hole to hide in. Raphael grinned as he knelt down, picking up the creature by its tail. It dangled in his fingers, squirming. 

“My dear, dear merchant. Are you ready to give me an answer? Or do you prefer being a slimy little rat? I would say, this look suits you quite well. Although, it would be bad for business, don’t you think?” 

Raphael squeezed the rat’s tail tighter and it screeched. 

“Good. Now, let’s try this again. Where is the Hammer?”

To be continued…

[lionheartedmusings]

man, i'm never gonna get over just how wildly underestimated q!bad is and how much of that is to some extent by design. i genuinely think that unless you're there for his streams, you can't really grasp the multiple chess boards that are this one demon's interactions and just how much power he holds over every little thing.

as far as most people are concerned q!bad is kind, and generous, and maybe a little out of the loop. he's the resident complainer, a terrible liar who tries to gaslight everyone, the guy who spent months being nothing more than a walking atm and a glorified babysitter -- he's mischievous and a prankster, but otherwise pretty harmless. that's just bad! a silly little guy, maybe annoying at times but just... bad.

the thing is, q!bad didn't start playing this game when the eggs went missing, my man's been curating how he's seen for a good while, because he *wants* to be non-threatening and dismissed to an extent. he wants to be liked desperately, wants to be of service and takes pride and joy in doing so, wants to be kind because he genuinely enjoys bringing people happiness, sure. he's also devious and macabre and sinister. he's terrifying... but you don't get very far with that, so he hides sharp teeth and words of the devil under careful smiles.

it's still working miraculously, even after it's been made pretty fucking clear that he's the one that kidnapped ron and potentially hurt him -- people still don't expect the depths of his machinations. it's absolutely wild to witness.

he moves with such subtlety, works his way around interactions purposefully slipping here and there, lying poorly on purpose, making himself seem at times... well, ineffective. he plays on what's expected of him and it helps him actually get his shit done without being bothered, because people only look skin deep.

all of this to say that q!bad really showcases the power of underestimating your opponent and how doing so gets you caught in a web you truly can't unravel from because you don't see the strings. he keeps saying that "everything is going according to plan" regardless of how many wrenches are thrown in it because he's the man with a backup plan for his backup plans to his backup plans.

he's absolutely fucking horrifying in a way that is hard to put into words until you see the extend of what he's hiding, and in his darkest moments i can't help but imagine the teeth and terror and snarls that hide under his cloak.

he is also a silly lil kind guy who is one inch tall, though. q!bad contains multitudes.

[dollwrites]

𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀 ∣ smut ( minors dni ), fem!reader, heavy noncon, abuse and injuries, threats of violence against reader in detail, graphic depictions of blood, foot fucking, all characters featured are aged 18+

𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗼𝗿𝘁𝗮𝗻𝘁 ∣ please reblog && leave feedback. not proofread so there’s probably mistakes. thanks for reading < 3

𝗸𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘁𝗼𝗯𝗲𝗿 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟯 ∣ day twenty-six [ jan valentine + foot fucking ]

the last dime-shaped burn was still sizzling on your flesh, a faint gray stream curling up from your ankle as your bare feet rub against his lap. your skin was already littered with marks— bruises, cuts, burns. dozens of them. a staggering reminder, most of which would permanently marr your visage, that you were at the vampire’s mercy.

“You know what you are now, don’tcha?” his smirk was wide and toothy, twisting his ragged features into a chilling sight to behold. the gold hoops in his lower lips glint as he speaks, catching what little bit of light still held from the flickering, broken bulb that hung from the ceiling. you were grateful that your surroundings were mostly concealed in darkness, but you could smell the carnage. all the blood and gun smoke. the stench of the death of your friends and coworkers that lingered in the hallways. you were humiliated enough when you couldn’t even fight back, but the fact that Jan Valentine hadn’t even bothered to kill you yet, and instead had played with you, was even worse. treating you like a child’s doll, he left his marks on you, and pretzeled you into whatever position he wanted to torture you in next, and you could do nothing to stop it. unlike your stronger and more courageous comrades, who’d fought to their demise, you were left for the vampires to do with as they pleased. you sniffle, but the tears had mostly dried on your face, and look up at him with big, scared eyes. you’d already learnt better than to beg him for mercy, if your busted lip was an indication. Jan grinned wider, cocked his head to the side, and snickered. “You’re my little fuckslut now.” his razor’s edge fangs were stained red. with whose blood? you didn’t want to know. “A piece of meat, for me to carve up however the fuck I want to.”

you flinch at that, and push your trembling toes against his cock more fervently, allowing the entire sole of your soft foot to massage the rigid veins. he seems harder now that he’s describing cutting you.

“Thinking about making you bleed some more is making me hard, fuck.” Jan hisses, malevolently, as he reaches for you. one, rough grip takes hold of the hair at your scalp, and you cry out, closing your eyes tightly as he jerks you closer. “I think that’s what I’ll do. Make you a real prime cut of fuckmeat. Take away any part of you that wants to tell me no, or fight back, and leave only the places I can stick my dick untouched. What do you say? Want me to cut you?”

you shake your head, whimpering a nearly incoherent babble of no’s and god no’s.

“Then you better make every limb that that you want to keep useful, because only the parts of you that I can fuck interest me.” his threat spurs you, and you whimper, rubbing your soles against his cock with more urgency. you had a feeling he wasn’t bluffing, and that the sick bastard would actually cut your feet off if you didn’t make them useful to him. and that meant servicing him. “Keep going,” Jan grinned like the devil, jutting his hips forward as the toe of his heavy boot taps against the floor. “Wanna see my dick between your feet. Make it feel as good as a pussy, and I’ll letcha keep ‘em once I’ve shot my load on ‘em.”

you physically cringe and recoil at his words— they were so vulgar. but, you do as instructed and clamp your feet together, creating a tight gap for his cock to slide into, and you pump them up and down, your motions awkward and erratic, lacking skill. after all, you’ve never had to do this for anyone before. but you got the feeling this wouldn’t be the last time you were forced to do this for him.

“You’re gettin’ it.” Jan grunted in mild approval, and launched a wad of spit into his own lap. it soaked your feet, and you had no choice but to smear it over his twitching, swollen cock as they stroked it. your eyes flit to the sight of your disgraced, bruised feet and then away, humiliated and ashamed. Jan laughs, a loud and raspy cackle, stomping one foot close to you. “What, you still shy?” he taunts, menacing and cruel. “Stupid bitch, I’m not even close to being done here. You better get used to watching me fuck every part of ya, and show some gratitude for my choice to keep you alive while I do it.”

[lillymakesart]

more episode 5 discussion

tl;dr a continuation of my video dissertation on lilly.makes.tiktoks: (summary) mikio fell in love with mizu, they had their first argument, mama convinced mikio to turn mizu in, mikio did go turn her in. "love poisoned by betrayal" where mikio is the love, mama is the betrayal

i feel like mama's betrayal needs some more reading into in order to truly understand her motivations, because that pipeline going from caretaker to ultimate betrayal is so insane

mikio's petty actions (picking at mizu's insecurities by calling her a monster and taking away the horse he gifted to her) are all in line with a hurt, petty, toxic lover that just wanted to hurt mizu back in the way the she hurt him

what about mama? she has cared for Mizu all these years, had been her mother figure, and even reaped some benefits off of Mizu's arranged marriage. isn't turning her adoptive daughter into the very men she fought all her life to keep her safe from a bit too intense?

to wish such foul ill on someone must have taken years and years of built up resentment and vitriol. maybe if we look at the timeline from mama's perspective the motivation behind her betrayal would reveal itself

Fowler said that mama was Mizu's maid. not sure if this has any significance, but he didn't say nanny or wetnurse. maybe she was simply a maid that worked around the house and only tangentially caring for the baby. life in the estate must have been pretty cushy for her as she was generally sheltered and protected under her lord's care

but then assassins come for the baby, she is caught up in the mess, and she can only stand by and watch as Mizu's life hangs in balance before her. fate decides that Mizu should live, and she is shoved into mama's arms and the man tells her to take the devil child and run, and so she does. she leaves the cushy protected life of being a maid in the estate and becomes a homeless woman on the streets, now burdened with a crying baby and no idea what to do

at some point she turns towards a life of prostitution, which at this I'm guessing is her only option. this life must be terrible compared to her work at her lord's estate. perhaps the stress turns her towards opioids, and she becomes an addict

maybe a messenger keeps in contact with her and makes regular deliveries of money to continue caring for the baby. the money amount could have even been generous, enough to keep them off the streets in a respectable town, but with mama's addiction we all know where the money truly went.

one day the money stops, and mama can't get her opioids anymore. theoretically she could have continued caring for Mizu, but she'd rather work full-time as a prostitute and continue acquiring drugs than care for a child that she never wanted, was never even trained to care for. in fact, this child has brought her life lower than ever before, so of course she'd leave her

the resentment has already built up when Mizu was a child, but it really ramps into full force when she finds Mizu again as an adult

we can see some first signs of jealousy when Mizu tells mama that she "should never do that again, I earn money, more than enough" and mama replies "how honorable you turned out to be." the implication here is that mama thinks Mizu is accusing prostitution of not being honorable. Mizu does not have to suffer woman's work in the way that mama has because Mizu has lived as a man, and was permitted to learn an artisanal trade to earn money with. this is a luxury that mama will never know, and builds on the resentment.

when mama finds Mizu a husband, to the audience it seems like Mizu is the one doing the favor for mama, but for mama, this is the least Mizu could do for her in return for all those years of debased service caring for her. at least with Mikio things could somewhat start looking like mama's old life again, protected in a household, not having to worry about when the next meal would come in, and most importantly, a steady stream of income for drugs

but then Mizu blocks mama's drug money, forcing mama to go out and work for her drugs again (more discussion on this part in the tiktok video tl;dr my theory is that mama never stopped smoking and was secretly going out to work for her drugs and just keeping it a secret). this return to a debasement that mama thought she was finished with really drives home the hatred she has developed for Mizu at this point

from mama's point of view, Mizu is an ungrateful brat that ruined her life, stole her best years from her, forced her into prostitution, and now just when she was starting to get some return for all those years of turmoil, Mizu snubs her again by forcing her back into prostitution

when Mikio comes home that day after the duel, clearly angry with Mizu and looking for ways to hit her back, this must have been a point of weakness for mama where she just couldn't help but divulge the secret of Mizu's bounty. all those years she has held back her resentment and hatred, with no thanks or appreciation for what she has given up for Mizu's wellbeing, must have come crashing down on her as she let the bitterness and resentment win at this exact moment

it's not right, but it does make sense. mama betrayed Mizu in the ultimate way, but she too was once a victim send post

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Demon-haunted computers are back, baby

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

As a science fiction writer, I am professionally irritated by a lot of sf movies. Not only do those writers get paid a lot more than I do, they insist on including things like "self-destruct" buttons on the bridges of their starships.

Look, I get it. When the evil empire is closing in on your flagship with its secret transdimensional technology, it's important that you keep those secrets out of the emperor's hand. An irrevocable self-destruct switch there on the bridge gets the job done! (It has to be irrevocable, otherwise the baddies'll just swarm the bridge and toggle it off).

But c'mon. If there's a facility built into your spaceship that causes it to explode no matter what the people on the bridge do, that is also a pretty big security risk! What if the bad guy figures out how to hijack the measure that – by design – the people who depend on the spaceship as a matter of life and death can't detect or override?

I mean, sure, you can try to simplify that self-destruct system to make it easier to audit and assure yourself that it doesn't have any bugs in it, but remember Schneier's Law: anyone can design a security system that works so well that they themselves can't think of a flaw in it. That doesn't mean you've made a security system that works – only that you've made a security system that works on people stupider than you.

I know it's weird to be worried about realism in movies that pretend we will ever find a practical means to visit other star systems and shuttle back and forth between them (which we are very, very unlikely to do):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

But this kind of foolishness galls me. It galls me even more when it happens in the real world of technology design, which is why I've spent the past quarter-century being very cross about Digital Rights Management in general, and trusted computing in particular.

It all starts in 2002, when a team from Microsoft visited our offices at EFF to tell us about this new thing they'd dreamed up called "trusted computing":

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/05/trusting-trust/#thompsons-devil

The big idea was to stick a second computer inside your computer, a very secure little co-processor, that you couldn't access directly, let alone reprogram or interfere with. As far as this "trusted platform module" was concerned, you were the enemy. The "trust" in trusted computing was about other people being able to trust your computer, even if they didn't trust you.

So that little TPM would do all kinds of cute tricks. It could observe and produce a cryptographically signed manifest of the entire boot-chain of your computer, which was meant to be an unforgeable certificate attesting to which kind of computer you were running and what software you were running on it. That meant that programs on other computers could decide whether to talk to your computer based on whether they agreed with your choices about which code to run.

This process, called "remote attestation," is generally billed as a way to identify and block computers that have been compromised by malware, or to identify gamers who are running cheats and refuse to play with them. But inevitably it turns into a way to refuse service to computers that have privacy blockers turned on, or are running stream-ripping software, or whose owners are blocking ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

After all, a system that treats the device's owner as an adversary is a natural ally for the owner's other, human adversaries. The rubric for treating the owner as an adversary focuses on the way that users can be fooled by bad people with bad programs. If your computer gets taken over by malicious software, that malware might intercept queries from your antivirus program and send it false data that lulls it into thinking your computer is fine, even as your private data is being plundered and your system is being used to launch malware attacks on others.

These separate, non-user-accessible, non-updateable secure systems serve a nubs of certainty, a remote fortress that observes and faithfully reports on the interior workings of your computer. This separate system can't be user-modifiable or field-updateable, because then malicious software could impersonate the user and disable the security chip.

It's true that compromised computers are a real and terrifying problem. Your computer is privy to your most intimate secrets and an attacker who can turn it against you can harm you in untold ways. But the widespread redesign of out computers to treat us as their enemies gives rise to a range of completely predictable and – I would argue – even worse harms. Building computers that treat their owners as untrusted parties is a system that works well, but fails badly.

First of all, there are the ways that trusted computing is designed to hurt you. The most reliable way to enshittify something is to supply it over a computer that runs programs you can't alter, and that rats you out to third parties if you run counter-programs that disenshittify the service you're using. That's how we get inkjet printers that refuse to use perfectly good third-party ink and cars that refuse to accept perfectly good engine repairs if they are performed by third-party mechanics:

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

It's how we get cursed devices and appliances, from the juicer that won't squeeze third-party juice to the insulin pump that won't connect to a third-party continuous glucose monitor:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

But trusted computing doesn't just create an opaque veil between your computer and the programs you use to inspect and control it. Trusted computing creates a no-go zone where programs can change their behavior based on whether they think they're being observed.

The most prominent example of this is Dieselgate, where auto manufacturers murdered hundreds of people by gimmicking their cars to emit illegal amount of NOX. Key to Dieselgate was a program that sought to determine whether it was being observed by regulators (it checked for the telltale signs of the standard test-suite) and changed its behavior to color within the lines.

Software that is seeking to harm the owner of the device that's running it must be able to detect when it is being run inside a simulation, a test-suite, a virtual machine, or any other hallucinatory virtual world. Just as Descartes couldn't know whether anything was real until he assured himself that he could trust his senses, malware is always questing to discover whether it is running in the real universe, or in a simulation created by a wicked god:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/28/descartes-was-an-optimist/#uh-oh

That's why mobile malware uses clever gambits like periodically checking for readings from your device's accelerometer, on the theory that a virtual mobile phone running on a security researcher's test bench won't have the fidelity to generate plausible jiggles to match the real data that comes from a phone in your pocket:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/01/google-play-malware-used-phones-motion-sensors-to-conceal-itself/

Sometimes this backfires in absolutely delightful ways. When the Wannacry ransomware was holding the world hostage, the security researcher Marcus Hutchins noticed that its code made reference to a very weird website: iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com. Hutchins stood up a website at that address and every Wannacry-infection in the world went instantly dormant:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/10/flintstone-delano-roosevelt/#the-matrix

It turns out that Wannacry's authors were using that ferkakte URL the same way that mobile malware authors were using accelerometer readings – to fulfill Descartes' imperative to distinguish the Matrix from reality. The malware authors knew that security researchers often ran malicious code inside sandboxes that answered every network query with fake data in hopes of eliciting responses that could be analyzed for weaknesses. So the Wannacry worm would periodically poll this nonexistent website and, if it got an answer, it would assume that it was being monitored by a security researcher and it would retreat to an encrypted blob, ceasing to operate lest it give intelligence to the enemy. When Hutchins put a webserver up at iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com, every Wannacry instance in the world was instantly convinced that it was running on an enemy's simulator and withdrew into sulky hibernation.

The arms race to distinguish simulation from reality is critical and the stakes only get higher by the day. Malware abounds, even as our devices grow more intimately woven through our lives. We put our bodies into computers – cars, buildings – and computers inside our bodies. We absolutely want our computers to be able to faithfully convey what's going on inside them.

But we keep running as hard as we can in the opposite direction, leaning harder into secure computing models built on subsystems in our computers that treat us as the threat. Take UEFI, the ubiquitous security system that observes your computer's boot process, halting it if it sees something it doesn't approve of. On the one hand, this has made installing GNU/Linux and other alternative OSes vastly harder across a wide variety of devices. This means that when a vendor end-of-lifes a gadget, no one can make an alternative OS for it, so off the landfill it goes.

It doesn't help that UEFI – and other trusted computing modules – are covered by Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which makes it a felony to publish information that can bypass or weaken the system. The threat of a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine means that UEFI and other trusted computing systems are understudied, leaving them festering with longstanding bugs:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/09/free-sample/#que-viva

Here's where it gets really bad. If an attacker can get inside UEFI, they can run malicious software that – by design – no program running on our computers can detect or block. That badware is running in "Ring -1" – a zone of privilege that overrides the operating system itself.

Here's the bad news: UEFI malware has already been detected in the wild:

https://securelist.com/cosmicstrand-uefi-firmware-rootkit/106973/

And here's the worst news: researchers have just identified another exploitable UEFI bug, dubbed Pixiefail:

https://blog.quarkslab.com/pixiefail-nine-vulnerabilities-in-tianocores-edk-ii-ipv6-network-stack.html

Writing in Ars Technica, Dan Goodin breaks down Pixiefail, describing how anyone on the same LAN as a vulnerable computer can infect its firmware:

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/01/new-uefi-vulnerabilities-send-firmware-devs-across-an-entire-ecosystem-scrambling/

That vulnerability extends to computers in a data-center where the attacker has a cloud computing instance. PXE – the system that Pixiefail attacks – isn't widely used in home or office environments, but it's very common in data-centers.

Again, once a computer is exploited with Pixiefail, software running on that computer can't detect or delete the Pixiefail code. When the compromised computer is queried by the operating system, Pixiefail undetectably lies to the OS. "Hey, OS, does this drive have a file called 'pixiefail?'" "Nope." "Hey, OS, are you running a process called 'pixiefail?'" "Nope."

This is a self-destruct switch that's been compromised by the enemy, and which no one on the bridge can de-activate – by design. It's not the first time this has happened, and it won't be the last.

There are models for helping your computer bust out of the Matrix. Back in 2016, Edward Snowden and bunnie Huang prototyped and published source code and schematics for an "introspection engine":

https://assets.pubpub.org/aacpjrja/AgainstTheLaw-CounteringLawfulAbusesofDigitalSurveillance.pdf

This is a single-board computer that lives in an ultraslim shim that you slide between your iPhone's mainboard and its case, leaving a ribbon cable poking out of the SIM slot. This connects to a case that has its own OLED display. The board has leads that physically contact each of the network interfaces on the phone, conveying any data they transit to the screen so that you can observe the data your phone is sending without having to trust your phone.

(I liked this gadget so much that I included it as a major plot point in my 2020 novel Attack Surface, the third book in the Little Brother series):

https://craphound.com/attacksurface/

We don't have to cede control over our devices in order to secure them. Indeed, we can't ever secure them unless we can control them. Self-destruct switches don't belong on the bridge of your spaceship, and trusted computing modules don't belong in your devices.

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

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/2024/01/17/descartes-delenda-est/#self-destruct-sequence-initiated

Image: Mike (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/stillwellmike/15676883261/

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

[indieyuugure]

Hello sorry to bother you with this all of sudden ,and this might be coming out of nowhere, and I’m not trying to force you but I m trying to get more people into this show with great potential. If your not interested it’s fine but Have you heard of or watched moon girl and devil dinosaur? Season 2 comes out February 2. 

The main character i love she gives me autistic vibes I’m autistic. The show has interesting characters, action ,great music, and animation ,good themes and representation, Anime references, it even has an eyecatch season 2 is going to be more story driven if you find that interesting. 

It be good if you watch the first 2 season 2 episode when they air so the ratings will be higher. And watch the other season 2 episodes when they air.

I think Disney might be trying to sabotage the show with them probably dropping 14 episodes on Disney + on February 3. They did similar with season 1 and the ratings where low ,please watch season 2 episodes when they air on. But more importantly also watch it on Disney + on feb 3 and when they air it on YouTube. Unfortunately they are dropping 14 episodes on Disney + so watch them all in one day but also when they air the first time.

I’m not just saying only cable just also. I’m saying please support this show. Despite that it still won 5 Emmys. Also if it’s no trouble could if it alright with you spread the word about this show to others you know like either online or irl. Time is limited!

Yeah, I can spread the word!

I’ve never watched this show before since I don’t have Disney+, but I’m sure many other people on here do!

Looks like a cool show, so I’ll probably check it out and maybe watch an episode or two on the streaming service I use or YouTube, so thank you for the recommendation! ^v^

I wish the show luck, as a ROTTMNT fan, I’m very familiar with shows being cut short for no particular reason.

Good question! :]

[insanescriptist]

Going from sharing brainspace with a demon to sharing an apartment with said demon actually wasn't hard. Not like Jason expected it would be. No matter how tiny the apartment was.

Yeah, he bitched about the couch and stole Jason's bed when Jason was off in a safehouse and pointedly was scheming for better accommodations for himself and the cat. To be honest, Jason was also scheming for better accommodations for himself and the cat. The cat was growing on him.

Jason kept expecting it to be hard to share the space. However his Pit Demon manifested as some sort of Italian mobster and thus had the human knowledge to not be a terrible roommate. Didn't yammer on at all times about nothing, didn't vibrate in place. Didn't play loud obnoxious music at all times or fail to mark down what had been used if he cooked. Xanxus didn't leave hair in the shower, didn't leave a mess behind him in the way that people used to traveling and living out of their travel bags did. Was very exacting in his neatness. No evidence left behind, no stress.

It was the unexpected things that got to Jason, more than the learning curve of "How to survive Gotham's Bullshit," home edition.

Who the fuck expected a Pit Demon to be a Catholic for one?

That first Sunday, not even a full twenty-four hours after possessing Tashira Owens' corpse, the demon went to Mass. Jason had followed, half expecting the service to go terribly. It didn't but it let Jason see how smooth, how rote all the little rituals were.

A devout demon. Only in Gotham.

Jason had no idea how Christianity meshed with you know, being a demon mobster. But clearly Xanxus had found some way to do it that Jason's meager religious knowledge couldn't understand without delving further into it. Jason was more performative religious as a kid; in that if he said the right words, did the right things, they'd feed him. Sure he'd read up more on religion, that good ole' Robin bookwork but academic understanding wasn't actually believing, much less acting in accordance with the faith or truly understanding it. Closest Jason got was the All-Caste and it was less religion and more way of life. One he had mostly left behind.

Other oddities from a demon was his ability to busk. Like actually play music and get paid for it on some street busk. Jason had thought the Devil and his fiddle was just some country song. Not something demons could go and play and be paid for. Especially since the violin didn't exist. Not in Jason's apartment and not in Xanxus' hand, unless he wanted it to. Xanxus called it a memory, but how the hell he made it manifest was probably magic. That was also on Sunday, after Mass and Jason knew only a few of the songs by ear and certainly not by name; his musical tastes always ran to rock. Whatever; it was easy money. Not a lot compared to Jason's illegal income streams, but for a couple hours' work, but considering Jason wasn't even expecting a measly hundred from his fellow Gothamites, it exceeded his expectations.

It did mean that Xanxus didn't have to be given spending money out of Jason's accounts. That his Pit Demon having the means to earn an income meant Jason didn't have to worry about his food budget or general living expenses being ate up by an inconsiderate roommate.

It also meant that Xanxus' had the money to replace all the plates and other crockery he had ruined as he adjusted to Gotham's "Living the Horrors," standards.

Leaving your glasses up in the cupboard and see how much poison they collected from the air's everything, even after filters was always a horror show. Jason was surprised that that experiment wasn't some kid's winning horror at a science fair. Maybe too mundane for Gotham. Not nearly as dramatic as the whole, "will dissolve plates if left to soak repeatedly in the sink."

Jason's first victims to Xanxus' learning that Gotham Water:tm: can and will dissolve the glaze off of plates was at least cheap ceramic dinner plates. Jason's mixing and eating bowls were steel and glass respectively, except for the one ceramic bowl reserved for cereal menaces. So some things could entirely be left fine in the water. Mostly. Others however could not.

So now Xanxus did what he thought was logical and set the water on fire.

Jason was now resigned to occasionally see his sink on fire. With the dishes in it.

Magical fire that somehow purified the water -something he was sure was otherwise impossible with all the pollution in it, didn't even set off his smoke detector somehow- that the dishes were soaking in. The testing period to finding something that worked to purify the water and not destroy his soaking dishes also -surprise, surprise- killed more of his tableware but Xanxus at least replaced it. Well, tossed money at Jason to buy his own replacements.

So arson was generally not an acceptable way to do dishes, but it let Xanxus soak the dishes so he'd actually do the dishes.

All told, basically ideal roommate in a small space. Even with the cat causing extra chores.

Did chores, wasn't messy, loud or inviting people over. Wasn't obnoxious.

Jason wasn't likely to invite people anyway and so far Dickhead hadn't butted in, so he hadn't had to explain why his glass mixing bowl basically lived in the sink now and would light up when water from the tap was poured into it.

Which left the most obnoxious habit to be relatively minor.

Xanxus was vain, but not modest.

Jason wished he had some personal modesty.

Jason didn't know all the details but Owens' corpse was chosen both from luck and for fit. However it was still technically a corpse so needed an energy investment to believe it wasn't. So that it would be alive enough to produce the energy that Xanxus used for magic. However it could only produce so much, over such a period of time.

So sometimes the energy that was used to disguise the corpse as Xanxus was too much a drain and the illusion of Xanxus fell. Which surprise, a half naked man on his couch became a half naked woman wearing men's clothing on his couch.

Yeah, Jason wasn't sure what to think about that beyond a, "he looks more at ease with being a woman than I expected," for someone with such a strong masculine impression left in Jason's head. This also gave him an intellectual thought exercise of the limits of necrophilia and the degrees thereof from his lingering zombieness (mostly alive) to a possessed corpse mimicking life (functionally alive) to a shambling corpse (mostly dead) and a well preserved corpse (very much dead.)

Jason never said he wasn't fucked in the head, but he wasn't fucking around and finding out with this. Jason kinda valued living his life, such as it was. Pit Demon roommate and all.