#those can get easily lost on the Internet

[become-a-robot]

I like this picture I love the mental image of them doing cue cards for their songs

(photo by Kathleen Laraia McLaughlin from 3/5/88)

[ddarker-dreams]

imagine chrollo learns your passcode (easily), and he sees all the messages you've sent..CREEP

privacy?? chrollo has never heard of her. he may be a polyglot but that's the single word across all languages that he's unfamiliar with. blotted from his vocabulary altogether. really though, once he sets his eyes on you, everything is fair game. he may masquerade as a gentleman but his depravity overwhelms the pretense, seeping out like blood through a loosely applied gauze. what can he say? he finds your technological footprint intriguing. it's like a case study. what apps you spend the most time on, your favorite podcasts/music to stream, the strange youtube rabbit holes you go down on a tuesday night; and, most importantly, the aforementioned messages.

consider pleading with a higher power because he will not take flirtations messages from your behalf lightly. it'll be one of the few times he frowns while scrolling through your phone, feeling slighted, as if he's entitled to this knowledge you've kept in the dark. realistically, he's not so lost in the land of delusion to think you were perfectly preserved for him your entire life, as if he'd unthawed you from a cryogenic chamber upon making your acquaintance, but. man. this is rough on the soul. why did you send this girl so many winky faces. you never sent him winky faces. what's so special about her? he gets shal to pull up her bank account, it's in the red, and her credit score is atrocious.

personal hc infusion time — chrollo may be a master of deciphering people's intent face to face, but electronic correspondence is another beast entirely. the man still reads newspapers. he doesn't get internet jargon and the latest memes (especially those that build upon past popular jokes). he misconstrues a lot of the messages you've sent and have received. not wildly so, but he thinks more courting is going on than there ever was. why do you say 'ily' to so many people. and the heart emoticons, they're everywhere, this person just sent you a picture of a frappe, what's with all this excitement and exclamation marks on your behalf? it's perplexing. old man syndrome.

basically, his feelings come out bruised after doing a little too much snooping.

[buckys-wintersoldier]

Unexpected meeting | Sebastian Stan

Pairing -> Sebastian Stan x Female!Reader

Summary -> You’re lost in New York and when you ask someone for help you didn’t realize who it is until you’re standing in front of him. Sebastian Stan, who offers you his help to get home.

Warnings -> (G) none, just fluff

Wordcount -> 1.2k

Request -> Heyyy. I had this idea for a while now and thought maybe you would like to write it! If not it's also okay! 💗 So, here is my idea: Reader is new in New York and moved there a while ago. She was walking around for a while and then gets lost and isn't sure where she is. Then she sees Sebastian from a distance and decides to ask him for help. She shouts something at him but when she gets near she notice who he is. She gets nervous but Sebby is very sweet and kind. He helps her and maybe Sebastian asks her out on a date. Thank you in advance 💗 @lives-in-midgard

A/N -> Thank you so much for the request. I absolutely love it and I hope you like what I made with it. Some cute Sebby is always wonderful, hehe.💕 My requests are open, if you have any asks don’t hesitate to ask.

Masterlist | Sebastian Stan Masterlist

It’s not long since you moved to New York; after finishing at the university, you were finally ready to move away from California.

California, the place you grew up with your family, your friends, and all the memories. But you need some fresh air and some new places to see, and when you got the offer from your chef to get a job in New York, you immediately said yes.

And there you are, little woman, in the middle of the big city. In the middle of buildings that are like giants. You love that place, the people, and the job you got. The only problem? You don’t know someone; it’s quite loud sometimes, and the worst part is that you can get lost really easily.

You moved there just a few days ago, and now you have finally had some time to go out for a walk, enjoying the sun. With your cup of coffee in your hand, you walk along the street, through the park, and along another street. The way you decide to go depends on how many people there are; when it’s quiet, you turn into the street; when it’s loud, you wait until you reach another street with fewer people.

When you reach another park, you look around. The place you're in right now is definitely not similar to the place you were before. So you didn’t walk in a circle, but where are you right now?

Suddenly, you feel like you’re lost. Turning around a few times, you look for someone who could help you find your way back home. That’s the moment when you sigh and regret the quiet places, and even more the fact that you thought it wasn't necessary to have internet when you’re outside of your apartment.

When you moved there, you looked for internet at home, but you thought you could take your time to have internet outside of your home. It’s definitely not like that, and now you’re lost in a park, not knowing the way you walked from your apartment to the place you’re standing right now.

The trees around you are green and bright because of the sun. But there is no one, not even one person, you can ask for the way. Right?

When you turn around again, you can see a man walking from the other side of the park in your direction, but before he reaches you, he takes a turn, and you roll your eyes. With big steps, you follow him, not knowing if you want to shout and let him think you’re a weirdo or just tap his shoulder and let him think you’re a bigger weirdo.

“Excuse me, Sir?” you decide to shout, and you see the brown-haired man looking to the left and right before he stops and turns around.

When he stands there and looks at you, you almost crash into him. You should have stopped running when you shouted, but you were scared he wouldn’t turn around, so you would have reached him in no time otherwise.

“I’m sorry, I got-“ you interrupt yourself when you look up and into two steel blue eyes. You know those eyes; you know them way too well for someone who has never seen them in real life before.

“Hi, can I help you?” he asks you, and when you hear his voice, you need to pay attention to not freak out in front of him or just melt into a puddle.

His one hand is sliding through his short, curly, brown hair while he fixes you with his eyes. A soft smile appears on his lips when he sees the blush on your cheeks.

“I’m so sorry,“ you breathe out, trying to calm yourself down.

You feel so stupid in front of HIM. In front of Sebastian Stan, you just shouted at a celebrity, and you didn’t recognize it earlier.

“I didn’t want to disturb you, and I didn’t want to shout at you,” you mumble and scratch the back of your neck.

Sebastian laughs softly, his nose scrunching slightly, and you can’t stop looking at it. It’s the most adorable nose you have ever seen, and the way his eyes brighten when you look into them, you feel like the sun is kissing the ocean, and it turns out to be the lightest blue you have ever imagined. His lips are slightly parted and turn into a bright smile when he sees you getting nervous in front of him.

“It’s ok; there's no reason to be nervous,” he says, his voice calming you down. “Can I help you with something? I don’t think you wouldn’t shout at me and run after me when I couldn’t do anything for you. Or do you want me to sign your body? Then I would prefer to do it somewhere more private. Just you and me,” he jokes around, and your cheeks heat up.

“I’m lost; I moved here a few days ago, and now I can’t find the way back home,” you mumble, embarrassed.

Against your worries that he could laugh and tell you how stupid you are or just say he has no time, he smiles at you and reaches his hand out to place it on your shoulder.

“That’s oke, I had that a few times when I was on set. There is no reason to be ashamed; can you tell me your address?” Sebastian asks softly, and you nod, telling him the street and number of your apartment.

He nods and turns you around, pointing to the street you have to go to. Then he pushes you slightly to make you walk there, and he walks next to you, his hand still resting on your back, and you feel the warmth of his skin through the fabric of your clothes.

“You don’t have to bring me home,” you say with a shy smile on your lips.

“I know, but I want to. So I can make sure that you’re not getting lost again,” he explains, and you laugh softly.

On the way home, the two of you talk about a lot; you know more about him, about the time behind the scenes, and he asks you a few questions as well, letting you talk about everything you want to talk about.

It feels like ten minutes until you’re home again. While you look for your keys, he tells you more about his recent movie.

“It’s just a few blocks away from here. What about if I take you with me on set tomorrow and after we go out on a date?” Sebastian asks, his cheeks blushing slightly.

“I’m free tomorrow, of course. I’m already excited,” you mumble shyly.

He gives you his phone, so you can add your number. When you reach for it, your hands touch lightly, and even when he has his hand on your back, it still lets you shiver when you touch his bare skin. His hand is so soft, and you would like to take his hand in yours.

“I will write you,” he says, opening his arms to wrap them around your body.

You place your head against his shoulder and your arms around his waist while you inhale his scent. When you went for a walk earlier, you didn’t know you would meet Sebastian Stan, and especially not that you would fall head over heels in love with him. But you do, and feeling the warmth of his body around you and his touches makes you feel at home with him.

Taglist: @nicoline1998enilocin | @mrsbuckybarnes1917 | @sergeantbarnessdoll | @kandis-mom | @km-ffluv | @identity2212 | @bucky-barnes-lover | @felicitylemon | @bookishtheaterlover7 | @harleycao | @lunaalovesyouu

[ninisreading]

Can you do a spencer read x reader where they use shitty crack/gen z memes as a love language (for example those awful facebook meme edits) and they send them to spencer ALL. THE. TIME. And he is just so confused bc wha tthe hell is a "little scrunklo eebee deebee"? I imagine reader would send them to him when they become close friends ajd then when they get an established relationship they send him stupid ones like "this is us" and its two awfully photoshopped cats sitting together

i absolutely loved this request, still cant wrap my head around what this man could say but here you go! :) pairing! Spencer Reid x fem!reader

warnings! nothing really, fem!reader, mention of bars/clubs

“Hi pookie!” You greet Spencer as soon as you enter your apartment. After a long and definitely tiring day of work, you couldn’t wait to get back home to your boyfriend and some random take away you guys had the number on plastered on your fridge.

You had beyond any doubt tried to introduce Reid to new internet slang, times were changing and you wanted to be a part of it! Though this didn´t strike Spencer the same way, deeming it as “uncool” (that was the most you could get out of him), so you took it upon yourself to say the most random shit until he somehow, someway, picked it up and said it back.

So, that was the reason why he was looking at you with that weird face he makes when he doesn’t understand whatever you decided was the word of the day. Of course the “Internet revolution” had gotten it´s hands on him; he would never admit it, but he would start biting his nails and picking at his cuticles if he forgot to do the Wordle puzzle of the day when he woke up. And with that unusual demeanour he asked, “What did you call me?”

Yeah, he was a lost cause.

╼

“Another day, another slay!” You chanted as you made your way down the hall, fresh out the shower and already in a good mood, you got to head to the office with Spence later since neither of you had gotten called in for a case.

“Honey, I swear I love you, but your names of endearment are getting out of hand.” The doctor said. And that’s the story of how you ended up explaining what queen and being in your “slay era” meant. He was not getting out of that one easily.

╼

Friday night out, the BAU girls invited you to a female only bar, fighting with Penelope about it being a lesbian club however; you made your way inside. It pained you to leave your boyfriend behind at work, him claiming that he had some paperwork to finish, even if you knew that Reid was probably going to finish everybody´s paperwork.

At around eleven, you received a message from him. Hey, you did not send a picture of what you were going to wear. Take some and send me later. It read.

As a good girlfriend would do, you made your way across the bar to the bathroom and snapped a picture on the mirror, just to send it to him.  You laughed as you read his response.

Slay OOMF.

Well, you had a long way still.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The (open) web is good, actually

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library tonight (Monday, November 13) at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

The great irony of the platformization of the internet is that platforms are intermediaries, and the original promise of the internet that got so many of us excited about it was disintermediation – getting rid of the middlemen that act as gatekeepers between community members, creators and audiences, buyers and sellers, etc.

The platformized internet is ripe for rent seeking: where the platform captures an ever-larger share of the value generated by its users, making the service worst for both, while lock-in stops people from looking elsewhere. Every sector of the modern economy is less competitive, thanks to monopolistic tactics like mergers and acquisitions and predatory pricing. But with tech, the options for making things worse are infinitely divisible, thanks to the flexibility of digital systems, which means that product managers can keep subdividing the Jenga blocks they pulling out of the services we rely on. Combine platforms with monopolies with digital flexibility and you get enshittification:

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

An enshittified, platformized internet is bad for lots of reasons – it concentrates decisions about who may speak and what may be said into just a few hands; it creates a rich-get-richer dynamic that creates a new oligarchy, with all the corruption and instability that comes with elite capture; it makes life materially worse for workers, users, and communities.

But there are many other ways in which the enshitternet is worse than the old good internet. Today, I want to talk about how the enshitternet affects openness and all that entails. An open internet is one whose workings are transparent (think of "open source"), but it's also an internet founded on access – the ability to know what has gone before, to recall what has been said, and to revisit the context in which it was said.

At last week's Museum Computer Network conference, Aaron Straup Cope gave a talk on museums and technology called "Wishful Thinking – A critical discussion of 'extended reality' technologies in the cultural heritage sector" that beautifully addressed these questions of recall and revisiting:

https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2023/11/11/therapy/#wishful

Cope is a museums technologist who's worked on lots of critical digital projects over the years, and in this talk, he addresses himself to the difference between the excitement of the galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) sector over the possibilities of the web, and why he doesn't feel the same excitement over the metaverse, and its various guises – XR, VR, MR and AR.

The biggest reason to be excited about the web was – and is – the openness of disintermediation. The internet was inspired by the end-to-end principle, the idea that the network's first duty was to transmit data from willing senders to willing receivers, as efficiently and reliably as possible. That principle made it possible for whole swathes of people to connect with one another. As Cope writes, openness "was not, and has never been, a guarantee of a receptive audience or even any audience at all." But because it was "easy and cheap enough to put something on the web," you could "leave it there long enough for others to find it."

That dynamic nurtured an environment where people could have "time to warm up to ideas." This is in sharp contrast to the social media world, where "[anything] not immediately successful or viral … was a waste of time and effort… not worth doing." The social media bias towards a river of content that can't be easily reversed is one in which the only ideas that get to spread are those the algorithm boosts.

This is an important way to understand the role of algorithms in the context of the spread of ideas – that without recall or revisiting, we just don't see stuff, including stuff that might challenge our thinking and change our minds. This is a much more materialistic and grounded way to talk about algorithms and ideas than the idea that Big Data and AI make algorithms so persuasive that they can control our minds:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

As bad as this is in the social media context, it's even worse in the context of apps, which can't be linked into, bookmarked, or archived. All of this made apps an ominous sign right from the beginning:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

Apps interact with law in precisely the way that web-pages don't. "An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to defend yourself against corporate predation":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/27/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse/

Apps are "closed" in every sense. You can't see what's on an app without installing the app and "agreeing" to its terms of service. You can't reverse-engineer an app (to add a privacy blocker, or to change how it presents information) without risking criminal and civil liability. You can't bookmark anything the app won't let you bookmark, and you can't preserve anything the app won't let you preserve.

Despite being built on the same underlying open frameworks – HTTP, HTML, etc – as the web, apps have the opposite technological viewpoint to the web. Apps' technopolitics are at war with the web's technopolitics. The web is built around recall – the ability to see things, go back to things, save things. The web has the technopolitics of a museum:

https://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2014/09/11/brand/#dconstruct

By comparison, apps have the politics of a product, and most often, that product is a rent-seeking, lock-in-hunting product that wants to take you hostage by holding something you love hostage – your data, perhaps, or your friends:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

When Anil Dash described "The Web We Lost" in 2012, he was describing a web with the technopolitics of a museum:

where tagging was combined with permissive licenses to make it easy for people to find and reuse each others' stuff;

where it was easy to find out who linked to you in realtime even though most of us were posting to our own sites, which they controlled;

where a link from one site to another meant one person found another person's contribution worthy;

where privacy-invasive bids to capture the web were greeted with outright hostility;

where every service that helped you post things that mattered to you was expected to make it easy for you take that data back if you changed services;

where inlining or referencing material from someone else's site meant following a technical standard, not inking a business-development deal;

https://www.anildash.com/2012/12/13/the_web_we_lost/

Ten years later, Dash's "broken tech/content culture cycle" described the web we live on now:

https://www.anildash.com/2022/02/09/the-stupid-tech-content-culture-cycle/

found your platform by promising to facilitate your users' growth;

order your technologists and designers to prioritize growth above all other factors and fire anyone who doesn't deliver;

grow without regard to the norms of your platform's users;

plaster over the growth-driven influx of abusive and vile material by assigning it to your "most marginalized, least resourced team";

deliver a half-assed moderation scheme that drives good users off the service and leaves no one behind but griefers, edgelords and trolls;

steadfastly refuse to contemplate why the marginalized users who made your platform attractive before being chased away have all left;

flail about in a panic over illegal content, do deals with large media brands, seize control over your most popular users' output;

"surface great content" by algorithmically promoting things that look like whatever's successful, guaranteeing that nothing new will take hold;

overpay your top performers for exclusivity deals, utterly neglect any pipeline for nurturing new performers;

abuse your creators the same ways that big media companies have for decades, but insist that it's different because you're a tech company;

ignore workers who warn that your product is a danger to society, dismiss them as "millennials" (defined as "anyone born after 1970 or who has a student loan")

when your platform is (inevitably) implicated in a murder, have a "town hall" overseen by a crisis communications firm;

pay the creator who inspired the murder to go exclusive on your platform;

dismiss the murder and fascist rhetoric as "growing pains";

when truly ghastly stuff happens on your platform, give your Trust and Safety team a 5% budget increase;

chase growth based on "emotionally engaging content" without specifying whether the emotions should be positive;

respond to ex-employees' call-outs with transient feelings of guilt followed by dismissals of "cancel culture":

fund your platforms' most toxic users and call it "free speech";

whenever anyone disagrees with any of your decisions, dismiss them as being "anti-free speech";

start increasing how much your platform takes out of your creators' paychecks;

force out internal dissenters, dismiss external critics as being in conspiracy with your corporate rivals;

once regulation becomes inevitable, form a cartel with the other large firms in your sector and insist that the problem is a "bad algorithm";

"claim full victim status," and quit your job, complaining about the toll that running a big platform took on your mental wellbeing.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/18/broken-records/#dashes

The web wasn't inevitable – indeed, it was wildly improbable. Tim Berners Lee's decision to make a new platform that was patent-free, open and transparent was a complete opposite approach to the strategy of the media companies of the day. They were building walled gardens and silos – the dialup equivalent to apps – organized as "branded communities." The way I experienced it, the web succeeded because it was so antithetical to the dominant vision for the future of the internet that the big companies couldn't even be bothered to try to kill it until it was too late.

Companies have been trying to correct that mistake ever since. After three or four attempts to replace the web with various garbage systems all called "MSN," Microsoft moved on to trying to lock the internet inside a proprietary browser. Years later, Facebook had far more success in an attempt to kill HTML with React. And of course, apps have gobbled up so much of the old, good internet.

Which brings us to Cope's views on museums and the metaverse. There's nothing intrinsically proprietary about virtual worlds and all their permutations. VRML is a quarter of a century old – just five years younger than Snow Crash:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML

But the current enthusiasm for virtual worlds isn't merely a function of the interesting, cool and fun experiences you can have in them. Rather, it's a bid to kill off whatever is left of the old, good web and put everything inside a walled garden. Facebook's metaverse "is more of the same but with a technical footprint so expensive and so demanding that it all but ensures it will only be within the means of a very few companies to operate."

Facebook's VR headsets have forward-facing cameras, turning every users into a walking surveillance camera. Facebook put those cameras there for "pass through" – so they can paint the screens inside the headset with the scene around you – but "who here believes that Facebook doesn't have other motives for enabling an always-on camera capturing the world around you?"

Apple's VisionPro VR headset is "a near-perfect surveillance device," and "the only thing to save this device is the trust that Apple has marketed its brand on over the last few years." Cope notes that "a brand promise is about as fleeting a guarantee as you can get." I'll go further: Apple is already a surveillance company:

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

The technopolitics of the metaverse are the opposite of the technopolitics of the museum – even moreso than apps. Museums that shift their scarce technology budgets to virtual worlds stand a good chance of making something no one wants to use, and that's the best case scenario. The worst case is that museums make a successful project inside a walled garden, one where recall is subject to corporate whim, and help lure their patrons away from the recall-friendly internet to the captured, intermediated metaverse.

It's true that the early web benefited from a lot of hype, just as the metaverse is enjoying today. But the similarity ends there: the metaverse is designed for enclosure, the web for openness. Recall is a historical force for "the right to assembly… access to basic literacy… a public library." The web was "an unexpected gift with the ability to change the order of things; a gift that merits being protected, preserved and promoted both internally and externally." Museums were right to jump on the web bandwagon, because of its technopolitics. The metaverse, with its very different technopolitics, is hostile to the very idea of museums.

In joining forces with metaverse companies, museums strike a Faustian bargain, "because we believe that these places are where our audiences have gone."

The GLAM sector is devoted to access, to recall, and to revisiting. Unlike the self-style free speech warriors whom Dash calls out for self-serving neglect of their communities, the GLAM sector is about preservation and access, the true heart of free expression. When a handful of giant companies organize all our discourse, the ability to be heard is contingent on pleasing the ever-shifting tastes of the algorithm. This is the problem with the idea that "freedom of speech isn't freedom of reach" – if a platform won't let people who want to hear from you see what you have to say, they are indeed compromising freedom of speech:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

Likewise, "censorship" is not limited to "things that governments do." As Ada Palmer so wonderfully describes it in her brilliant "Why We Censor: from the Inquisition to the Internet" speech, censorship is like arsenic, with trace elements of it all around us:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMMJb3AxA0s

A community's decision to ban certain offensive conduct or words on pain of expulsion or sanction is censorship – but not to the same degree that, say, a government ban on expressing certain points of view is. However, there are many kinds of private censorship that rise to the same level as state censorship in their impact on public discourse (think of Moms For Liberty and their book-bannings).

It's not a coincidence that Palmer – a historian – would have views on censorship and free speech that intersect with Cope, a museum worker. One of the most brilliant moments in Palmer's speech is where she describes how censorship under the Inquistion was not state censorship – the Inquisition was a multinational, nongovernmental body that was often in conflict with state power.

Not all intermediaries are bad for speech or access. The "disintermediation" that excited early web boosters was about escaping from otherwise inescapable middlemen – the people who figured out how to control and charge for the things we did with one another.

When I was a kid, I loved the writing of Crad Kilodney, a short story writer who sold his own self-published books on Toronto street-corners while wearing a sign that said "VERY FAMOUS CANADIAN AUTHOR, BUY MY BOOKS" (he also had a sign that read, simply, "MARGARET ATWOOD"). Kilodney was a force of nature, who wrote, edited, typeset, printed, bound, and sold his own books:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/article-late-street-poet-and-publishing-scourge-crad-kilodney-left-behind-a/

But there are plenty of writers out there that I want to hear from who lack the skill or the will to do all of that. Editors, publishers, distributors, booksellers – all the intermediaries who sit between a writer and their readers – are not bad. They're good, actually. The problem isn't intermediation – it's capture.

For generations, hucksters have conned would-be writers by telling them that publishing won't buy their books because "the gatekeepers" lack the discernment to publish "quality" work. Friends of mine in publishing laughed at the idea that they would deliberately sideline a book they could figure out how to sell – that's just not how it worked.

But today, monopolized film studios are literally annihilating beloved, high-priced, commercially viable works because they are worth slightly more as tax writeoffs than they are as movies:

https://deadline.com/2023/11/coyote-vs-acme-shelved-warner-bros-discovery-writeoff-david-zaslav-1235598676/

There's four giant studios and five giant publishers. Maybe "five" is the magic number and publishing isn't concentrated enough to drop whole novels down the memory hole for a tax deduction, but even so, publishing is trying like hell to shrink to four:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/07/random-penguins/#if-you-wanted-to-get-there-i-wouldnt-start-from-here

Even as the entertainment sector is working to both literally and figuratively destroy our libraries, the cultural heritage sector is grappling with preserving these libraries, with shrinking budgets and increased legal threats:

https://blog.archive.org/2023/03/25/the-fight-continues/

I keep meeting artists of all description who have been conditioned to be suspicious of anything with the word "open" in its name. One colleague has repeatedly told me that fighting for the "open internet" is a self-defeating rhetorical move that will scare off artists who hear "open" and think "Big Tech ripoff."

But "openness" is a necessary precondition for preservation and access, which are the necessary preconditions for recall and revisiting. Here on the last, melting fragment of the open internet, as tech- and entertainment-barons are seizing control over our attention and charging rent on our ability to talk and think together, openness is our best hope of a new, good internet. T

he cultural heritage sector wants to save our creative works. The entertainment and tech industry want to delete them and take a tax writeoff.

As a working artist, I know which side I'm on.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/13/this-is-for-everyone/#revisiting

Image: Diego Delso (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Museo_Mimara,_Zagreb,_Croacia,_2014-04-20,_DD_01.JPG

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

[ofmermaidstories]

there’s something so bittersweet and lovely about fanfic, at it’s core. it’s so impermeable, because it’s so individual. fics don’t get finished. fics get lost because they were typed out and sent to friends, in the 70s, and somewhere along the way someone packed it up in a cardboard box and their kids shuffled it to the attic. websites go down. archives get built, but then people lose faith in the story or the canon or the creator and delete them. you read it at like, 3am, and can’t remember the title months later when you look for it again.

the tiktok these comments are from was lamenting about the loss of a favourite fic—it (the tiktok) had 85k+ likes, and over 700 comments, mostly similar to these. people talking about downloading fics to read on a tablet only for them to disappear the next day. using the wayback machine and combing through results, just to find something they loved. i think it’s sweet because it’s so human—how easily we love something, and how easily we lose it. i used to print out my favourite fics, as a kid—i still have a binder of them, buried under yearbooks and the old journals i kept during those topsy turvy preteen years. i could tell you the overarching plot to a Cardcaptor Sakura fantasy AU i read (and loved; it became my personality for months afterwards) but i can’t remember how it ended, or if it even did. i finally broke down and signed up for an account on AO3 specifically to bookmark an old, old fic that i had read somewhere else, years and years and years ago and found again on AO3 only because i accidentally stumbled on the author here on tumblr (i had only found the fic in the first place all those years ago because of a playlist). i used the same shade of lipstick for years purely because a fic i really liked had the main character apply it (it was a limited edition one at the time; i bought my first one from a ebay seller in the UK at double the retail price, lmao) while the love interest watched them, but i can’t remember the name of it, only how it made me feel (and how, for years afterwards, i would wear that shade whenever i felt like the day had something promising to it).

one of the first anon’s i ever got, in the early days of this tumblr, was someone who asked me if it was okay if they downloaded surrender—and of course it was. of course it is. there was a point, during the final stretch when i was trying to write the last chapter, that i almost lost the entirety of what i had written for that fic—and i mean, it was on AO3 by that stage so it would’ve only set me back a chapter or so, but it goes to show how fragile things can be. how sometimes fics only last in tiny ways—because of the unfinished PDF file someone downloads. The patchy memory of someone’s who’s jumbling it and three other fics together. Because someone wore the same shade of lipstick you mentioned, off-hand, for years afterwards.

(this is a love letter to the silent readers; the silent savers. the lurkers. fandom and the internet at large is made of lurkers (eighty-five thousand likes. seven hundred comments). people who saved fics and waybacked them and will reread them, even uncompleted. telling each other we did a good job, that we liked this or we liked that is wonderful, and fun, and a great (and important) way to build a community and has also given me my current friends—but sometimes something you make will matter and live on in a way you will never, ever know. and it’s just how it is. it’s part of the fun and it’s part of the charm. it’s just how we work as people.)

[crookedkryptonitebeliever]

Ok regarding that “can i make Yves do my homework if I give him my childhood pictures” ask, exactly how much access does Yves have to our lives? Does he have images or videos from when we were still a baby or would they be new information to him?

A bunch of my baby pictures and videos are lost because my dad lost the computer that had them but we recently found my aunt’s old camera filled with our childhood pictures, it was a pleasant surprise for us but would it be for Yves too?

It absolutely is. If Yves was there with you while your aunt showed you the photo gallery of her old camera, Yves would momentarily lose a bit of inhibition and let his pupils dilate to a maddening degree before instantly constricting it back to appear normal. It's a rare, super deluxe edition photos of you, there isn't anything else like it out there as they're most likely not uploaded to the internet or a cloud based service, where he could easily hack.

Him coming across media from your childhood or at least during those early days where people still go to and get their photos developed, is like winning the lottery for him. Because, although he tries to collect everything relating to your existence, there is only so much he can do in a day. He rather prioritizes the present and the future, as the past is the past; neither you nor him can change it, he can only understand or connect it to your current behaviours or thought patterns.

He does have some information about you as a baby or a child, but that is if they're "readily available" to him. (I.e., it can be found in predictable places like in your childhood home.), that is why, Yves would try to build a good relationship with people you grew up with, to extract information.

Despite being reclusive as he is, Yves would never fail to attend every and any family gathering he is invited to or expected to come. Encouraging that drunk uncle to drink more if he knew he has something to say about you, bribing your relatives with gifts and career opportunities, perhaps even drugging that really difficult and combative cousin to make them more bearable to interrogate.

As soon as he knew your aunt could be another goldmine of your data, he would get to work. Wasting no time building a rapport with her, it's a piece of cake given how obsessive and manipulative his nature is.

Inevitably, your aunt will come to love him and see Yves as family. By extension, her relationship with you will skyrocket too, she will invite you to her place much more often even though she might not be the most sociable person in the first place. Yves will find a way to make her bend to his whims.

The majority of their conversations would be about you, only sometimes Yves would talk about something else if it meant he could keep the drive to spill more about your lore going. His sharp ears and mind will pick up on clues as to where he might find more pictures or writings about you. He would then break into your aunt's home to give it a thorough shakedown and leave without a trace. Yves would repeat this process until he's positive that she has nothing left to offer. That camera is getting fucking stolen and replaced with a duplicate.

It didn't matter if your aunt was a minimalist or a severe hoarder, he would go through all her things just to try and find pieces of your puzzle. He would wade through cobwebs, dust piles, rat droppings and mould if he had to, Yves isn't scared to get dirty to obtain what he wants, "squeamish" isn't in his vocabulary.

When she is robbed of all your essence, Yves would become distant. Not hostile towards her, just cold and indifferent. He would still maintain some sort of relationship with her though, in case she becomes useful again later. As of now, he either puts his entire focus on your current peripheral and direct life, or start to hunt other members down- from his snooping, he had learned of other people who may have valuable input about your childhood.

All of this is happening in the background. You wouldn't suspect a thing, there wasn't a dip in his attention for you. In fact, he may have gotten a lot more smothering, as Yves would be shaking at the thought of testing out his new theories and hypothesis that were birthed from his new knowledge.

He just loves you so much that he couldn't help himself but to get greedy. Yves wants all of you; past, present and future. And any version of you that could have been.

[valyrfia]

I mean this the nicest way possible but have you considered the fact that you just .. hate RPF? Wich is fine, like you said it's a gray area. It's not everyone's cup of tea, actually! It's not even mine because I actually came across those trailers you said! And I instantly went "ew wtf" and I clicked not interested, and then I another showed up, and clicked not interested, and then the algorithm went ok got it, and it's been a while thankfully, that hasn't showed up. So, what I mean is, there is content in the internet that is weird, that's for sure, but there's like... Ways to avoid it? And the way that this has been a persistent subject in your blog in such a deep way makes me think that you suffer it more than anyone, wich is fine but just, don't look at it anymore? I don't know what to say honestly because, again no to be rude but youre making the MOST out of it. And it's like you're treating fandom culture like this deep dark secret when its as public as it can be and I promise you the most a person can do is feel weirded out and mute that content, and hope it doesn't show up.! But for example, I hate povs content, and that has to be the most persistent content I've seen so far on F1, full of "you're the wife/girl/sister" blah blah and I'm a lesbian, I've clicked not interested so many times I lost count and IT KEPT showing up (until i figured muting y/n, driver x reader helps) so if it keeps you more calm there are ways to avoid content you dont like!

I get where you’re going with this but also, nah. I’ve always loved RPF and will keep consuming it whenever I can. I just make a big stink out of seeing it outside of tumblr and ao3 because of algorithms and the way I was taught to interact with RPF about fifteen years ago in which….these things have to stay within their intended circles at all costs. This is back when fandom content was not cool and mainstream and unless you kept your fandom life and your actual life very separate you get bullied to hell for it. Now, I often feel like the pendulum has swung a little too far the other way and there’s such a massive influx of new people because fandom culture is trendy that fandom etiquette is starting to collapse. The treatment of RPF being one of them.

RPF differs from POV content in two ways. The first is that POV content is a little more accepted than RPF in the general consciousness, usually because it’s het but also because it’s very obvious this is a self insert fantasy which while I imagine is awkward for drivers to see, can be easily laughed off as being so obviously just a fantasy. RPF on the other hand builds off of pre-existing relationships and lore and is usually slash, which already introduces an awkward element (and you can say the men shouldn’t have toxic masculinity all you like, it’s not just them that’s the issue it’s everyone who perceives them and the content), also it’s more difficult because people DO talk about these pairings platonically. In order to not experience Lestappen on my tiktok FYP, I can’t interact with any video that mentions those two in the same breath ever because the algorithm will eventually push me ship content even if I don’t want to see it and I click not interested. This happens over and over again.

I love RPF which am just on super high alert about RPF safe spaces being breached because I know from lived experience that it doesn’t bode well. This is also just personally not the way I was taught to interact with fandom, and again I’ve seen enough shit in my time to understand why that etiquette had to be enforced.

[skylarkking]

I've been whacked with the valveplug stick again and I have headcannons for some of the Lost Light crew.

🔞 under cut

I'm gonna start off by simply listing the characters I know currently (I've read up to the issue where overlord first appears but have read other snippets scattered on the internet) and the list will begin with my favorites:

Rung

Definetly into BDSM

Uses interface as therapy

Despite being a fucking tiny adorable nerdy twink he knows how to work big bots

His glasses sometimes fall off during sessions and when they do he's often too blissed out or focused on the other bot to care

He is a moaner and makes all sorts of sounds that bots are obsessed with

He has tried everything and anything

He attended one of Ratchet's orgies during Ratchet's college years as a Party Ambulance

He and Froid DEFINETLY had angry interface before and you can't tell me otherwise

Rodiumus

Legit a horndog

This mf gets so worked up that throughout the day he has to step aside and take care of himself

He's a bottom who tries to play top and FAILS miserably

Drift and him are fuck buddies (you can't tell me otherwise)

He's capable of gentle and intimate interface with someone he loves, but due to his inexperience and somewhat childish attitude (not his fault I mean he's essentially a guy in his 20s) he prefers quickies over that

After interface he sometimes forgets about aftercare

Drift

Way hornier than he lets on

Loves to have his neck bitten

When he is in heat he is either gonna top every bot in his reach and make them beg through tears or he's gonna beg Ratchet with tears in his optics. I'm sorry I don't make the rules here

I think when he was a Decepticon he was Hella into knifeplay

And I mean HELLA into it

Like this bitch would pop a boner if someone licked a sword or some shit

He bottoms for Rodimus mostly but in a sort of bossy bottom sort of thing

Ultra Magnus/Minimus

This guy.... this guy may act like he's only into vanilla shit, but I fucking GUARENTEE he's a freak

He's fragged Swerve before (size kink when he's in the Magnus armor)

When he's in the Magnus armor sometimes the connections for his own spike and the armor's get wired wrong and he has to "adjust himself" (like human amabs have to do with their dicks)

Out of the Magnus armor he secretly feels extremely vulnerable and anxious when it comes to interface because of how tiny our little dill pickle is

Side note: give him a fucking HUG DAMMIT! HE NEEDS IT!

Swerve

If any of the bots would fuck a human, it would be this bastard

He'd also have human kinks (like mommy/daddy kink [thanks @archie-sunshine for rotting my brain with that idea])

Despite being a motormouth I think he can easily be silenced by a pair of thick thighs around his head

Side note: I think minibots have WAY HIGHER stamina verses their larger counter parts, so swerve will be going at it for a loooooong time

Secretly has a stash of human porn in his bar

Magnus has found said porn once and for a week Swerve was on edge in keeping his secret

Skids

Since he can learn anything really quickly I think this bastard can master the art of seduction

Like he could simply give a bot those bedroom eyes and BAM! He's fucking

He's a massive cuddler after interface

Has fragged Nautica at LEAST 15 times

When he overloads his headlights sometimes flick on by accident

Ratchet

Oh you cannot TELL ME this guy hasn't had a kinky past

Party Ambulance is fucking cannon and no one can tell me otherwise idc if it's only a fan thing ITS CANNON AND ILL FIGHT GOD ABOUT IT

Not as horny as he use to be but when Drift or Rodimus get their heat cycles you better fucking BELIEVE he's on the case

A true master of aftercare

Really into bondage

These are only a few lmao I have SO MANY MORE

[leeneir]

Duo AU; Pro Gamer Iso x Violinist!Reader (Part 1)

I check the iso x reader tag EVERYDAY. FOR ISO CONTENT. Sadly, Iso isn't that popular. Sigh. Guess I'll do it myself.

AU inspired by those public pianist trends on yt and my Iso x OC ship as always. Along with that one toxic pro gamer Iso x reader on here, i fking love that au sm. (Hes not toxic in this one tho lol)

Pro Valorant player Zhao Yu, better known by his internet name "Dead Lilac" is a mechanically gifted one-trick main whose name is famous all over the gaming community.

Professional Violinist "Reader", famous for their musical talent and prodigal like abilities, having climbed up the ranks and becoming renowed in the music community and on social media.

Iso finishes up a stream with a sigh, the ratio of wins to losses was bad today, how disappointing. Zhao Yu lays in bed, taking a brief moment of rest before he continued on with his day.

His roommate Omen is playing with the cat when he goes to the kitchen to get something to eat, they talk for a bit, and the cat starts purring at his feet. He picks it up and just does a stare off with the thing while it paws at his face (without claws), and blows a rasberry. Omen chuckles.

Omen brings up the fact that his friends are going out for an outting later, Zhao Yu decides to get ready. He wears his signature hoodie ofc.

Jamie, Sunwoo, Tala, Tayane, and Mateo come along. Sadly, Ryo couldn't come. He was too busy with his drift practice or whatever. Tala says her brother was just too lazy to come.

They all meet up at the mall where they go shopping and do whatever, discussing random whatnots and getting up to antics. And then they find a piano in public and Jamie tells Zhao Yu to play something, they'll record it and post it online because why not? He's really good at playing it too.

Zhao Yu decides to humor them and gets on the piano, trying to think of a piece to play before he starts.

His fingers cross the keys with grace and practiced ease, playing a romantic classical version of a popular song. Zhao Yu finds himself lost in the music piece as strangers began turning heads and pausing in their step. He can feel his friends' eyes on him as Phoenix' camera records him, and he finds himself becoming more confident with each note he plays.

Unbeknowst to him, as he was nearing the chorus, one stranger came up and opened a peculiar shaped bag, pulling out a violin out of it. The moment Zhao Yu plays the chorus note, a new instrument joined him.

He almost paused, but his fingers kept playing. Somehow, he and the violinist were perfectly in sync. He turned his head without lifting his fingers, and he see's the stranger playing the instrument, and he's awed by their ability.

More people crowd around as they watch the duet, enchanted by the melody and harmony while Jamie continues recording. Zhao Yu and the stranger play until the end of the song. When they finished, the whole crowd applauded and cheered. It sort of reminded Zhao Yu of the music recitals he did when he was younger.

He gets off the piano and approaches his duet, complimenting them on their skill and giving his name, which the stranger responded with their own.

Reader and Zhao Yu chat about the piece they just played, and Jamie and Mateo run in with the video, showing it to both of them. It's then that Zhao Yu saw Reader passing by before they decided to play, and he's amazed at how easily they synced up to him without missing a note.

Mateo then says that he was a fan of Reader which promptly confused Zhao Yu. Was Reader someone famous? Jamie asked for permission to post the video which Reader granted without issue.

They continued talking for a moment up until Reader said that they had an appointment to get to and excused themself.

By the time that was over, Zhao Yu's friend group went nuts. Apparently having held themselves back from "ruining his chances", whatever that meant. Jamie and Mateo however couldn't hold themselves which is why they approached. Sunwoo proceeded to shake him uncontrollably for not getting Reader's number. When he asked why he needed it, Tala called him a "lonely bastard".

He asks if they knew her since Mateo did, and he was told that Reader was a social media influencer known for their violin talent.

Jamie sent the video to Zhao Yu's editor and they continued on with their hangout. Though, the duet still played on the back of his mind throughtout.

Timeskip to later that night, Zhao Yu realized that maybe he should have gotten Reader's number, and also why Tala called him lonely. Omen watched the video too and acknowledged Reader's social media presence which made Zhao Yu wonder just how popular they were if even his roommate knew about them.

The next day, Iso's editor had the video ready and posted. And it was doing numbers.

As it turns out, a duet between a pro gramer and a famous violinist was bound to go viral and become so popular that it was trending on every platform.

Both to his confusion and surprise, his fans went crazy with the shipping. He knew what it was only because his online group and team engaged in such antics. Although he wasn't sure how Reader would react. He only just recently followed them on their socials and was surprised to find out that they were already a follower.

His twitch chat wouldn't shut up about the duet and he recounted the story of how that moment came to be. And they went haywire. Zhao Yu found ship edits of him and Reader from the duet video and things were getting out of hand. He was worried of how this would affect them considering they weren't part of this side of the community, much less even in this community.

He found a response from Reader regarding the duet, and to his relief it was mostly positive. They even addressed a part of the response directly to him, asking if they should record an official one if he wanted to.

Now, Zhao Yu was open to collabs. But for some reason, this one had him staring at his screen for minutes as the type bar blinked in the chat box, it was Reader's instagram.

He decided that it wouldn't hurt to add some music content into his gaming content and wanted to reach out to Reader to inquire about that collab idea they proposed. Except... he was nervous.

Why was he though? It made no sense. Zhao Yu didn't get nervous, so why was he? He's done this dozens of times, so why was it any different now?

Mustering up all the courage he could, he typed a few letters and sent the message without leaving room to think it over.

On Reader's phone, a notification popped up from instagram messages. They opened it up, it was from Iso?!

"Hey" they read.

Yknow, this has been sitting in my drafts for 3 weeks. Finally glad i got this out even if some parts are uncohseive

[niuniente]

I have multiple favorite characters. They're all equally beloved. I don't get to choose which one of them is on the spotlight - they come and go on their own.

Because of this, I have assigned a personal meaning to each character: this character means have more fun; this character means that keep your eyes on the price; this character means a time of transition; this character asks to rest more. Always works!

A month ago, Dragunov from Tekken appeared on the spotlight (this didn't happen with Tekken 7 so we can't blame the new Tekken being out).

Now, the first time he was on a spotlight was 15 years ago. I was in a horrible place back then. There was a legal mess which, if the shit hit the fan, would ruin the rest of my life. Literally. I wouldn't be able to get a rental apartment, make any new contracts like electricity, phone, internet, buy anything with monthly payments, get subscription services, I would lose part of my income. I was THIS CLOSE to lose it all and the worst thing was that there was nothing I could. I hadn't caused the mess but I had no way out of it either. I even went to a lawyer to ask for a legal help but he couldn't help.

I feared for my life and future, hoping it would turn out OK. What kept me sane was playing Tekken 6. I played it hours every day and always as Dragunov. I even did my art school final thesis of fan culture and Dragunov (I had much fun with a Russian fan who drew really pretty pics of Dragunov and gave me an access to her screencapture collection of Tekken 6 for my thesis)

Then, one day I figured what was Dragunov's assigned meaning; you will survive. No matter what the odds, even if it was the 3rd world war, you will survive and come out alive without any harm.

That's exactly what happened. Took 2 more years but I got out alive, unharmed. It was horrible time. I'm glad it's over.

So, when Dragunov NOW suddenly appeared on the spotlight after 15 years, my initial thought was "WHAT WHAT, WHAT'S THE BAD NEWS??? WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN?? WHAT DO YOU MEAN THE ODDS ARE HORRIBLE BUT I'LL SURVIVE????! "

Two weeks later, in a span of a week, without any prior warnings:

I got laid off because the company bankruptcy and fell on a social welfare

this happened while the current right-wing government made big cuts to social welfare and housing benefits (so I don't know if I can keep my current home)

while at the same time prices keep getting higher due to inflation

The IUD for anemia treatment came out on its own

Because of that I'm without any help to my iron anemia and the only solution will be hysterectomy in my case; doctors aren't giving those easily (even when needed)

I lost my workplace healthcare which would have been the easiest and the best way to get to hysterectomy

the sudden removal of IUD is causing me horrible withdrawal symptoms

my Japanese friend told me that she's unable to come to Finland this year and has to postpone her trip till 2025 :(((

(which also means I won't get my favorite cigarettes I smoke for fancy treats a few times a year because I can only get it from Japan - ordering tobacco online is illegal here)

noticed that wasps had made a nest to my balcony (that's being taken care off)

couldn't attend a free(!) ice-cream tasting for a feedback and for a free 15€ gift card because of the IUD withdrawal symptoms

found out that trains aren't operating normally and my home station is under construction and causes some issues

So yeah. He wasn't lying. It's been so bad that the first thing this morning when waking up was to take stomach medicine and have a smoke. And I'm not a smoker.

Horrible times are up ahead but I trust that I'll survive out of this phase just like I did 15 year ago.

(:::з」∠)

[thepixelelf]

and the universe said,

03 "this day will make the you of tomorrow"

genres/tags: soulmate au, idol au, comedy, romance, dumbassery chapter warnings: language, relationship(s): ot13 x reader

When soulmates are suddenly thrust upon the world, you are one in a million who wishes they weren't -- and that's before you meet the person (people?!) making your life much harder than it needs to be. And before someone asks you to sign an NDA.

series masterlist

prev ⭒ chapter three (2.9k) ⭒ next

It’s not lost on Lee Jihoon that, even though he's written love songs since he was fifteen and poems even before that — which is privileged information he’ll never share with anyone — he’s only been in love once.

And he’s grateful for that. Sometimes he thinks about her; about what kind of life he’d be living if certain things went certain ways. And he smiles. Not because she was beautiful — which she was — or because in his imagination, he acted braver — which he didn’t — but because even though that love would never know if it was returned, he still felt it. He knew it was real. It was at once an infinitely warm and bitingly cold feeling. Jihoon’s written quite a few songs from that first and last love.

Except, he doesn’t think that was his last love. Not really. Maybe it’s true in the romantic sense, but…

He won’t say it, of course. What he feels for his members. His friends. His brothers.

No… no. Speaking it out loud is unnecessary.

Mingyu’s hand grabs his, encasing it in a soft but tight grip as Yejung calls for the attention of the room. Jihoon doesn’t squeeze back, but his thumb lightly curls around Mingyu’s palm.

“If there really is a person that’s attached to all of you through your marks, we need to plan a course of action.” Yejung fidgets with her hands, and Jihoon can tell she wishes she was pointing at a slideshow on the wall and showing them interaction rates, rather than this unquantifiable soulmate business.

“We still don’t have a dating ban here,” Myungjun says, arms crossed as he lets his eyes roam to each of the boys. “But I think we all know what happens when famous heartthrobs get hitched. I was never worried about it before because you’re all, frankly—” He glances at Jihoon. “—bitchless, but…”

Chan makes an affronted sound, and someone whines, “Hyung!”

Jihoon can only hold in a pout because Myungjun looked at him when he said that, and he’s right.

Yejung lightly smacks Myungjun’s shoulder. “What we’re trying to say is this: Seventeen’s ratings are skyrocketing because of this whole soulmate thing,” she explains. “But I can’t imagine those numbers moving in a positive direction if these fans find out your marks connect you to someone unfamiliar rather than each other.”

Myungjun nods. “Whatever outcome, it wouldn’t be good.”

“Don’t Carats want us to be happy?” Seokmin dares to ask.

“Well—” Yejung's expression turns pained. “Yes, it’s just that—”

“You guys are one of the biggest kpop acts on the block right now,” Myungjun supplies easily. “Despite how good I’m sure most of your fans are, there will always be people who aren’t. Just a few bad apples can spoil the bunch.”

Yejung clarifies, “It’s about safety and privacy. There are sasaengs who follow you around and take pictures without your consent. There are people who would do anything to support their favourite celebrities, including defaming you guys by any means necessary. The internet is a powerful weapon. Who’s to say it won’t be used against you because of this?”

No one argues with that. Each of the members has dealt with the bad side of the internet more than once, if in different ways. Though none of them refute what Yejung said, it’s her next question that really gets their minds turning.

“Who’s to say your soulmate won’t get hurt?”

Your soulmate.

Jihoon’s soulmate.

Hurt? No.

No no no no no.

A rising panic stains the room, and Yejung and Myungjun share a look that all but a few miss.

“Which—” Yejung puts more volume into her voice to grab the attention of the members, and maybe to pull them away from whatever spiralling they were about to do. “—is why we’re asking you all to just lay low for a while.”

“Lay low?” Junhui echoes.

Myungjun nods again. “For now, the short-term plan is to continue propagating the idea that you’re all each other’s platonic soulmates.”

“Just while research is still being done,” Yejung says. “It also gives us at the company an opportunity to figure things out in the meantime.”

Seungcheol’s brows furrow, suspicious. “What are you asking us to do to” —he puts his fingers up in air quotes— “‘lay low’?”

Myungjun and Yejung share another look, and he sighs, knowing that he’s better adept to being the bearer of bad news.

“Don’t go looking for your soulmate.”

The room practically bristles.

Yejung puts both her hands out, as if the irritation in the air is something she can actually push down. “Actively,” she clarifies. “Don’t go actively searching for this person. The last thing we want is to stop you guys from finding, uh, love, but… you can understand how weird this all is, right? The entire situation is a grey area.”

For the first time since this whole meeting started, Jeonghan actually looks a bit put off. "But they're my soulmate," he says, ignorant to the way some of the boys react to his use of the word my.

"They're also an unknown variable," Myungjun replies. He too ignores the mumbles and grumbles of the members; he's had years of practice with that. "This is nowhere near the same thing as one of you having a secret boyfriend or girlfriend or partner. You guys are all connected to this person. We can't just walk into this blind. One wrong move, and your soulmate’s well-being could be at stake. If worst comes to worst, they might be forced to forget what ‘privacy’ even means.”

Jihoon can tell, easily, Myungjun is weaponizing the safety of his — their soulmate to influence their compliance, but shit, it works. He feels something itching under his skin, an urge to protect someone he doesn’t even know. “Okay,” he says.

Scandalized, Soonyoung gapes at Jihoon like he just claimed something truly offensive like, actually, tigers aren’t that cool. “Jihoon! You can’t be serious— my soulmate is waiting for me!”

Everyone’s getting a little too cozy with this whole my business…

But Jihoon just shrugs, his face the picture of stoicism and maturity. “It’s just for now.”

“Just for now,” Yejung reassures.

Seungcheol nods, his lips in a contemplative pout rather than the typical whining one. “You’re right,” he cedes to the staff. “It’ll be a media circus if word gets out.”

“Wouldn’t it be worth it?” Vernon asks no one in particular.

He doesn’t get an answer.

Myungjun clears his throat. “Look, we’re just asking for some time here. Everything I’ve heard about soulmates suggests that you will find this person, whether you go looking for them or not. I, for one, want to be prepared for when — not if — that happens.”

Relaxing a bit in his chair, Seokmin lets out a tiny sigh through his nose. He looks at his hands in his lap for a second, then back up at Myungjun. “Promise?”

Yejung seems to find relief in the gradual lessening of tension in the room, and she smiles. “Promise.”

Jihoon watches the way Seokmin’s smile grows, then gets pushed back as Seokmin tries and fails to hide his giddiness as he looks down at his lap again. The idea that this fated meeting is, well, fated is eliciting a similar reaction in many of them.

“For what it’s worth,” Myungjun cuts into whatever the heck is happening between the boys without care. “We’re asking you guys not to look for them, but if they find you…” He lets out a half-chuckle. “Well, not much we can do about that.”

⭒

Writer’s block is certainly not something Jihoon’s never dealt with, but as he sits there in his studio, one hand hovering over the keyboard and the other clutching uselessly to the mouse he hasn’t done anything with except swirl around for the last hour, he wonders if it’s ever been as bad as this. The same pressure as always weighs upon him. More songs. More hits. More collabs. More More More More More.

It’s strange, though. He’s had days where he’s not coming up with anything. Weeks. He’s gone through longer droughts, so why is this one night making his entire body ache? Why does the dull pain seep from his chest to the tips of his fingers?

He wants to write for you, but he doesn’t know who you are.

“Hyung?” Seungkwan pokes his head into the studio, hair still mussed from when he woke up. “Have you been here all night? It’s almost eight.”

Jihoon just grimaces in response, and Seungkwan clicks his tongue.

“And you say you love sleep so much… tch. We have that radio appearance in three hours, so I was sent to save you from yourself. The makeup team can take care of those dark eyebags” 

Though he could probably use the rest, Jihoon pinches the skin around his wrist to keep himself from falling asleep in the van as it gets driven from the salon to the broadcasting station. If he falls asleep now, it’ll be a whole hassle to get him back up and alert again.

He stares at his mark. The five straight lines just sit there, blank.

His soulmate hasn’t sang in a couple days — not since that meeting about them.

Jihoon has to wonder. Do they not know how the mark shared between them and the rest of the members works? Or… are they doing it on purpose? To sever the mark before it can lead him anywhere.

It’s almost like they know.

Oh? Your company doesn’t want you to find me? You got it, boss. Never liked singing anyway.

He has to admit, though, his soulmate didn’t sing much before, either. When he could catch his mark playing, it never lasted long, but he always pulled his phone out anyway to record it on video. He would play the video back, humming along to a clef and key he’d have to guess, then sing what he’d come up with into google and hope for the best. A couple of Day6 songs, some American artists, one Mozart and one Beethoven, some tunes he couldn’t even identify — maybe they sang out of key or just skipped notes they didn’t feel like hitting. He could hardly blame his soulmate for not singing every day. It’s not everyone’s job.

But if they know their soulmate can see it… wouldn’t they sing at least a little?

Jihoon is hungry.

“I would kill for an iced coffee right now,” Seungkwan says from the backseat.

Joshua doesn’t look up from his phone. “There will be some at the venue.”

“But their coffee always tastes so bad.” Wrinkling his nose, Seungkwan crosses his arms. “It’s like ninety-nine percent water, and then they pour it over a full cup of ice.”

“It’s free. What do you expect?” Jeonghan counters.

Seungkwan frowns. “Coffee.”

Seokmin opens his mouth to join the budding conversation, but he stops short when Jihoon groans out, “Can we pull over?”

Their driver meets Jihoon’s eyes in the rearview mirror, a bit surprised. She asks, worried, “Are you okay?”

“Just wanna grab something to eat.”

The car pulls up in front of a cafe, which looks empty enough for the staff member in the driver’s seat to give it their stamp of approval. The boys don’t generally run into trouble in public eateries, but they still try to be careful.

“I’m going to park around the corner,” the driver tells him.

“Get me an iced coffee while you’re in there!” Seungkwan yells out the window after Jihoon slides the van door in his face.

Jihoon lifts one non-committal hand halfway up in the air as he walks off, not caring if Seungkwan sees it or not.

Neither the coffee shop nor its menu are anything to write home about, but Jihoon stands patiently in line while the person in front of him tries to explain to the tired barista that they had to have the drink they want in stock because they ordered it last time, while the barista calmly states that they’ve never even heard of a frappu-cappu-latte. He eyes the pastries and sandwiches in the display case, and when the customer in front of him finally walks out with a huff, he orders something to eat for himself and a coffee for Seungkwan. Not because of feelings-that-shall-not-be-named, of course. Jihoon just felt like it is all.

He’s about to walk out when that familiar sensation pinches at his right hand, and he looks down at his mark. Notes, for the first time in 79 hours — not that he’s been counting — flit across the staff, and his eyes widen. With his left hand, he puts down the paper bag with the sandwich in it and pulls out his phone, ready to record the music, but he pauses. He recognizes the notes. It’s easy to read because it’s playing right now.

A soft rock song plays quietly through the cafe speakers, going on about zombies or something, and it corresponds exactly with the notes on the hand still holding Seungkwan’s precious coffee.

Jihoon whips his head up and around, desperate for something or someone just on the tip of his tongue. There aren’t that many people in the coffee shop, and he can quickly tell that neither the barista nor the old couple sitting in the corner are singing.

He sees your back first, your face hidden as you look out the window, and then he hears it.

Slowly, he approaches behind you, your humming becoming more and more clear with each step. He wants to roll around in a field of your voice. He wants to drink it like warm soup.

What the fuck? He needs to get his shit together.

Say hello, his brain oh so helpfully supplies. Don’t be weird.

And he means to. He really does. Jihoon is mature and chill and calm under duress. He’s pined after by millions. He’s humble and cool.

He’s pouring Seungkwan’s coffee on you.

Your entire body jolts, your drink flying out of your hand before you turn around with shock and fury mixed in your eyes.

Oh, god, your eyes.

“What the fuck!” you blurt out, and Jihoon’s eyes flick down to his hand, where the notes have disappeared and left only the five lines behind.

You’re real, you’re here, and—

“Hello?!”

—and you’re extremely pissed at him.

“Shit,” he whispers, so quiet even he can barely hear it, and no one could tell he’s saying anything underneath his mask. “Fuck. Shit. Fuck.”

“Why would you do that?!” You step closer to him, and in the back of his mind, Jihoon registers that he’s crushed both the cup in his right hand and the lid in his left. You squint, eyes skirting over his facial features not hidden by his mask. “Do I even know you?”

Jihoon stumbles back, half because this is exactly what his company told him not to do, and half because he’s incredibly intimidated. “I… I’m— Sorry, I didn’t mean—”

“Didn’t mean? Didn’t mean to straight up pour your coffee on me?”

Intelligently, he says, “It’s not my coffee.”

You scoff in clear disbelief, and Jihoon wants to smack himself. Lifting your hand, you open your mouth to no doubt tell him off some more — well deserved, honestly — but an alarm sounds. Gasping, you turn around and hurry back to your table, grabbing your phone and silencing the alarm with a quiet, “Damn it.”

Jihoon can only stand, frozen, while you quickly pack up your things. You almost speed-walk right past him to leave, but then you seem to change your mind, a determined frown of your face.

Weird how that’s cute, too.

“Give me your phone.” You hold your hand out.

Jihoon blinks. “My…?”

“Phone,” you finish for him, moving your fingers as if to say, come on, hand it over.

Well. How can he argue with that?

You type something into his phone that he can’t see because he’s busy being stupefied.

“Here.” You click his phone off and hand it back to him. “If you block me, I’ll kill you.”

And then you’re gone.

Jihoon just stands there, in the middle of the cafe, his phone in his hand and the plastic cup abandoned on another empty table.

On his phone, a text thread is open to an unknown number. Only one message has been sent, technically from him.

I’ll pay you back for the shirt

He stares at the text for a good while, a text from his soulmate to his soulmate.

Holy fuck this is his soulmate’s number.

Jihoon’s gawking is only interrupted by a message popping up over the unknown number.

[jeonghan] staff says get back here or we’re gonna be late

When Jihoon returns to the van, not just Seungkwan, but he and the rest of the vocal unit all give him a weird look. He’s holding his phone close to his chest, clutched so tight between his fingers you’d think it’s made of pure gold.

Yejung’s words from the meeting, right before dismissing everyone for the day, echo in the back of his mind.

“If you do happen to cross paths with your soulmate, tell us immediately. We need to keep this in-house.”

Jihoon smiles, almost a breath of a laugh, and he shakes his head to himself.

Oppositely, Seokmin frowns, and he leans closer to Joshua to stage-whisper, “I think he’s more sleep-deprived than we thought.”

Seungkwan addresses it directly, though. He scrutinizes Jihoon’s free hand, which is, well, free. 

“Did you even buy anything?”

⭒

In the cafe, a tired, broke, just-trying-to-get-through-college barista mops the floor clean of two drinks, muttering, “One more weirdo and I’m quitting this fucking job.”

prev ⭒ chapter three (2.9k) ⭒ next

updates for and the universe said, are not on a schedule. there is no taglist. thank you for reading!

[stinkysam]

Peter Parker - Did you know I love lizards ?

Warning : none

Genre : fluff

Synopsis : The reader has powers like the lizard because he took a more advance version of the serum that made the lizard what he was and now at will he can transform into his lizard state. So after the reader takes the serum he started to help around the city and Spiderman starts to investigate and finds out that this new hero is his boyfriend who was diagnosed with cancer and the reader had to take the serum or die

Reader : male (you/his)

A/N : part TWO

He came home earlier. Again.

It was weird.

This is not something that happens a lot and especially not multiple times in a row. At least not since he picked up the spider suit.

At first he was happy about it. Somehow New York city was being nice and had decided to give him some peace.

It allowed him to spend more time with you, his boyfriend.

He wouldn't have questioned it if his boyfriend hadn't been acting weird lately.

Despite your cancer, you never let it get the best of you, even during the hardest time. But this was something else.

You were hiding something, he could feel it. Sense it.

So he decided to follow you one day, to stalk you ; and you turned out to be pretty difficult to follow. Multiple times he lost you only to find you back later at a totally normal place. Nothing out of the ordinary except from these disappearances.

Which was weird as well because how could you escape him like that, so easily without even being aware you were being watched. Or so he thought.

Then, something caught his attention. Another "hero" appeared. It's what he heard in a conversation between two police officers. 

Hero or, as the police call it, "another criminal / madman / monster" wait what.

"Monster" ?

Peter wondered why they would call someone a monster, what did he do to be called such a thing ? Nothing, he found later at home. This "monster" did the same as him, handing criminals to the police. You were the one to tell him that.

Yet you couldn't explain the "monster" part. So later he browsed the internet only to find amateur videos about a lizard man. He thought they were fake at first. It wasn't the first time he saw those kinds of videos, but those relayed by the TV ? He had no choice but to believe it.

He wondered how such a thing could happen. Everyone who had been transformed into a lizard got turned back into humans thanks to the serum he launched right after. It couldn't have missed someone, right ? And be stuck as a lizard for years without making it known ? Weird. Was this "hero" really born that night ?

He had to find them to know and to help them fix it.

Peter thought that since they did the same thing as him, it would be easy to find them, where the crime is, there they are ! But each time they seemed to always be in the opposite place as him, always so far away as if they knew where he was and were avoiding him.

After a few days he remembered the sewers. He could catch them there, playing on their field.

And it didn't miss. After a few hours of waiting one of his webs moved.

Following its direction, another one vibrated, quickly he followed them and fast enough he found the lizard.

Quietly and slowly he hid, not wanting to be found just yet, waiting for a good and safe opportunity to show up.

But suddenly, they jump up the drain to leave the sewers and their shape changes, slimmer, smaller. And their face shows just for a second.

?!

They looked like you ?! Quickly, he followed you, them, ??? and found himself facing you as you were about to close the manhole. 

"[Name] ?"

"Pete- Spider-man ?"

"You're the lizard-man ?"

"No ?"

"...oh sorry for a moment I thought I saw the lizard turn literally into you. [Name]."

You sigh, helping him out the drain and explain yourself. For a moment he can't believe it's you and wonders if you don't have a clone or something like that. Then it made sense.

You had quitted your job, you had free time yet you were barely home. You didn't text him as much as before now, too busy to keep him company through text.

"So your cancer is, gone, gone ?"

"Yeah"

"How are you going to explain that to your friends ?"

"Well, my cancer is gone. I beat it. I won. I'm cancer free. Whatever cancer free person say."

For a moment he doesn't know what to say. Congrats ? You did the right thing ? It could've been dangerous you shouldn't have ? He's glad you're okay ?

So he says nothing, first taking in everything you told him and understanding how you felt and feel now. 

"Why didn't you tell me ?"

"I didn't know how to. I tried dropping hints but it was so lame I-"

"You said you loved lizards two weeks ago. I should've known."

"No."

[kiefbowl]

you know those anti smoking posters and ads that would show the timeline of what happens to you after you quit smoking starting from like 15 minutes and going into months and then years etc etc? like this:

I have no idea how scientific any of that is, that's just all preamble to give context to my other point: I feel like I can physically feel changes in my brain the longer away from the internet I am. Possibly psychosomatic, I'd be willing to concede that. But I feel like as my current job has left me with little to do but browse the internet all day, my social media and internet usage is way up again, and with that comes weird symptoms I've started to associate with it: brain fog, lack of focus, erratic thoughts, headaches, thought loops, low estimation of my capabilities, lack of trust in my own memory, and weird preoccupation with time and death. Granted, I struggle with depression and anxiety, but paired with increased internet usage I seem even more hyper vigilant at observing my internalization and I become extremely disconnected with my external realities, even so far as wondering "is this real?" That's at the most extreme end, usually I think I have over-all a pretty healthy relationship with the internet, especially due to great practice and awareness over the past few years, but can slide into over-usage pretty quickly. I've felt more aware of these "symptoms" as I've practice things like taking hiatuses (which I recommend) of all different lengths.

This moment in time I feel the most aware of the phenomenon of increased internet usage = symptoms impacting my physical life, maybe due to age or my increased awareness. The other day I realized the thought I was having was just an image looping in my mind like a gif. I was like...am I literally not thinking of anything? But the ability to recognize it stopped it and then I spent the rest of the day away from the computer and my phone and realized my mood was better and I was more present by the end of the day when at the beginning of the day I felt like I couldn't keep a straight thought about anything. I've also realized (in this current past few weeks) I've gotten into a habit of opening too many things on the internet...I'll open a youtube video and as it's loading, open tumblr, and as I'm scrolling realizing I've seen most the posts, so then I open a browser game, but that's boring, so I'm checking my email, and that reminds me of a task I haven't done but when I open another tab I can't remember it already so I'm back at the youtube video....trying to do eight things at once but never really fully committed to any of them. It's freaky to realize you've fallen into this habit when you can spend hours of the day acting like a normal person!

But that's the reason I bring up the cigarette posters is that the effects of "quitting" the internet seem almost immediate. I put my phone in the other room and sit with a book and the first few pages feel excruciating, but if I make myself keep going, 15 minutes later I'm reading like a normal person and yet part of my brain is going "why did you think that this was hard it's just reading so weird so weird so weird" and then 30 minutes later that part of my brain is silent and I'm really reading and it's fine. And I also notice when I leave the house, it takes any activity at all to get lost into being alive again rather than hyper vigilantly observing myself. But so many kids (and adults) joke about not wanting to leave the house. I think for normal and otherwise healthy people, you could easily reverse the effects of anti-social behavior your internet usage is convincing you of by simply "touching grass" (lol), but a lot of people are convinced of some intrinsic truth about themselves because they aren't as critical of their internet usage as other people are, so they don't see the connection between their usage and their life choices. You could literally go for a walk and feel normal again.

I don't really have a conclusion except maybe that the brain is very fascinating, and it's very capable of absorbing so much information at once, that to give it care we need to not overload it. But what I've found to work for me is to not "shut if off" but give it something else to do...a book to read, an art project, an errand to complete. These are thoughts I've been collecting in my mind for years but never felt the need to make a long winded post about, until recently when my circumstances change and that was enough to ramp up my internet usage after a lot of work to be more conscientious about it. I really wrote this off the hip, I just wanted to get some thoughts down.

[ms-demeanor]

Hello, I'm currently in the process of switching over to Firefox, and was wondering if you could help me with something. One big feature I am painfully missing from Chrome, is being able to group tabs together in collapsible categories. I have terrible ADHD and frequently need to leave groups of tabs open for multiple days until I can get back to them. I'm currently running Tree-Style Tabs extension, but it's not quite what I want Do you know of any plugins/extensions that can provide similar functionality to Chrome's tab grouping? Thanks!

Okay so at the moment i'm using Simple Tab Grouping, which appears to do what you're looking for but I just have to give you a word of caution that if you open a group of tabs in a window that you haven't created a group from it closes all the tabs in that window, which is how I lost like fifty of my open tabs (which, LBR, was probably a good thing).

I've been using it for a couple of weeks and so far it's really handy, especially combined with multi-account containers.

So for instance I've got tumblr open in a catch-all group which is where I go for random bullshit like webcomics and digging around wikipedia and reading the news and general internet surfing stuff; I have a separate group that is just youtube videos and any time i open a youtube video in a different group I move it to that other group so I don't clutter up my other groups. I have a "work" group which is where I keep work stuff and where I'm logged in with my work container accounts and I have a "fandom" group where I've got a bunch of ao3 tabs open and i'm logged into cryptpad and have WIPs open.

If I open a new window that new window doesn't go into a group unless i make it go into the group and if I'm in a new window and I select a group from the menu it opens those tabs in that window and closes anything that wasn't part of a group; if i'm in an open window in my "work" group and select my youtube group it opens all the youtube tabs in that window and exits out of the work tabs but the work tabs are preserved and i can just as easily switch back to them.

So what this means at this point is that instead of keeping eight windows with about 150 manually sorted tabs up at all times, I have three windows with about 10 tabs up at all times and I can open 10 other windows with different tabs in a few keystrokes.

I'm sure that doesn't explain anything actually, but Simple Tab Grouping is working out well for me and seems to do the thing you're describing but you'll want to play with it before you decide to stick with it and make sure you've got a record of any tabs you need to keep before you start clicking through stuff because oof.

[pronoun-fucker]

“I’m looking at a picture of my naked body, leaning against a hotel balcony in Thailand. My denim bikini has been replaced with exposed, pale pink nipples – and a smooth, hairless crotch. I zoom in on the image, attempting to gauge what, if anything, could reveal the truth behind it. There’s the slight pixilation around part of my waist, but that could be easily fixed with amateur Photoshopping. And that’s all.

Although the image isn’t exactly what I see staring back at me in the mirror in real life, it’s not a million miles away either. And hauntingly, it would take just two clicks of a button for someone to attach it to an email, post it on Twitter or mass distribute it to all of my contacts. Or upload it onto a porn site, leaving me spending the rest of my life fearful that every new person I meet has seen me naked. Except they wouldn’t have. Not really. Because this image, despite looking realistic, is a fake. And all it took to create was an easily discovered automated bot, a standard holiday snap and £5.

This image is a deepfake – and part of a rapidly growing market. Basically, AI technology (which is getting more accessible by the day) can take any image and morph it into something else. Remember the alternative ‘Queen’s Christmas message’ broadcast on Channel 4, that saw ‘Her Majesty’ perform a stunning TikTok dance? A deepfake. Those eerily realistic videos of ‘Tom Cruise’ that went viral last February? Deepfakes. That ‘gender swap’ app we all downloaded for a week during lockdown? You’ve guessed it: a low-fi form of deepfaking.

Yet, despite their prevalence, the term ‘deepfake’ (and its murky underworld) is still relatively unknown. Only 39% of Cosmopolitan readers said they knew the word ‘deepfake’ during our research (it’s derived from a combination of ‘deep learning’ – the type of AI programming used – and ‘fake’). Explained crudely, the tech behind deepfakes, Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), is a two-part model: there’s a generator (which creates the content after studying similar images, audio, or videos) and the discriminator (which checks if the new content passes as legit). Think of it as a teenager forging a fake ID and trying to get it by a bouncer; if rejected, the harder the teen works on the forgery. GANs have been praised for making incredible developments in film, healthcare and technology (driverless cars rely on it) – but sadly, in reality it’s more likely to be used for bad than good.

Research conducted in 2018 by fraud detection company Sensity AI found that over 90% of all deepfakes online are non-consensual pornographic clips targeting women – and predicted that the number would double every six months. Fast forward four years and that prophecy has come true and then some. There are over 57 million hits for ‘deepfake porn’ on Google alone [at the time of writing]. Search interest has increased 31% in the past year and shows no signs of slowing. Does this mean we’ve lost control already? And, if so, what can be done to stop it?

WHO’S THE TARGET?

Five years ago, in late 2017, something insidious was brewing in the darker depths of popular chatrooms. Reddit users began violating celebrities on a mass scale, by using deepfake software to blend run-of-the-mill red-carpet images or social media posts into pornography. Users would share their methods for making the sexual material, they’d take requests (justifying abusing public figures as being ‘better than wanking off to their real leaked nudes’) and would signpost one another to new uploads. This novel stream of porn delighted that particular corner of the internet, as it marvelled at just how realistic the videos were (thanks to there being a plethora of media of their chosen celebrity available for the software to study).

That was until internet bosses, from Reddit to Twitter to Pornhub, came together and banned deepfakes in February 2018, vowing to quickly remove any that might sneak through the net and make it onto their sites – largely because (valid) concerns had been raised that politically motivated deepfake videos were also doing the rounds. Clips of politicians apparently urging violence, or ‘saying’ things that could harm their prospects, had been red flagged. Despite deepfake porn outnumbering videos of political figures by the millions, clamping down on that aspect of the tech was merely a happy by-product.

But it wasn’t enough; threads were renamed, creators migrated to different parts of the internet and influencers were increasingly targeted alongside A-listers. Quickly, the number of followers these women needed to be deemed ‘fair game’ dropped, too.

Fast forward to today, and a leading site specifically created to house deepfake celebrity porn sees over 13 million hits every month (that’s more than double the population of Scotland). It has performative rules displayed claiming to not allow requests for ‘normal’ people to be deepfaked, but the chatrooms are still full of guidance on how to DIY the tech yourself and people taking custom requests. Disturbingly, the most commonly deepfaked celebrities are ones who all found fame at a young age which begs another stomach-twisting question here: when talking about deepfakes, are we also talking about the creation of child pornography?

It was through chatrooms like this, that I discovered the £5 bot that created the scarily realistic nude of myself. You can send a photograph of anyone, ideally in a bikini or underwear, and it’ll ‘nudify’ it in minutes. The freebie version of the bot is not all that realistic. Nipples appear on arms, lines wobble. But the paid for version is often uncomfortably accurate. The bot has been so well trained to strip down the female body that when I sent across a photo of my boyfriend (with his consent), it superimposed an unnervingly realistic vulva.

But how easy is it to go a step further? And how blurred are the ethics when it comes to ‘celebrities vs normal people’ (both of which are a violation)? In a bid to find out, I went undercover online, posing as a man looking to “have a girl from work deepfaked into some porn”. In no time at all I meet BuggedBunny*, a custom deepfake porn creator who advertises his services on various chatroom threads – and who explicitly tells me he prefers making videos using ‘real’ women.

When I ask for proof of his skills, he sends me a photo of a woman in her mid-twenties. She has chocolate-brown hair, shy eyes and in the image, is clearly doing bridesmaid duties. BuggedBunny then tells me he edited this picture into two pornographic videos.

He emails me a link to the videos via Dropbox: in one The Bridesmaid is seemingly (albeit with glitches) being gang-banged, in another ‘she’ is performing oral sex. Although you can tell the videos are falsified, it’s startling to see what can be created from just one easily obtained image. When BuggedBunny requests I send images of the girl I want him to deepfake – I respond with clothed photos of myself and he immediately replies: “Damn, I’d facial her haha!” (ick) and asks for a one-off payment of $45. In exchange, he promises to make as many photos and videos as I like. He even asks what porn I’d prefer. When I reply, “Can we get her being done from behind?” he says, “I’ve got tonnes of videos we can use for that, I got you man.”

I think about The Bridesmaid, wondering if she has any idea that somebody wanted to see her edited into pornographic scenes. Is it better to be ignorant? Was it done to humiliate her, for blackmailing purposes, or for plain sexual gratification? And what about the adult performers in the original video, have they got any idea their work is being misappropriated in this way?

It appears these men (some of whom may just be teenagers: when I queried BuggedBunny about the app he wanted me to transfer money via, he said, “It’s legit! My dad uses it all the time”) – those creating and requesting deepfake porn – live in an online world where their actions have no real-world consequences. But they do. How can we get them to see that?

REAL-LIFE FAKE PORN

One quiet winter afternoon, while her son was at nursery, 36-year-old Helen Mort, a poet and writer from South Yorkshire, was surprised when the doorbell rang. It was the middle of a lockdown; she wasn’t expecting visitors or parcels. When Helen opened the door, there stood a male acquaintance – looking worried. “I thought someone had died,” she explains. But what came next was news she could never have anticipated. He asked to come in.

“I was on a porn website earlier and I saw… pictures of you on there,” the man said solemnly, as they sat down. “And it looks as though they’ve been online for years. Your name is listed, too.”

Initially, she was confused; the words ‘revenge porn’ (when naked pictures or videos are shared without consent) sprang to mind. But Helen had never taken a naked photo before, let alone sent one to another person who’d be callous enough to leak it. So, surely, there was no possible way it could be her?

“That was the day I learned what a ‘deepfake’ is,” Helen tells me. One of her misappropriated images had been taken while she was pregnant. In another, somebody had even added her tattoo to the body her face had been grafted onto.

Despite the images being fake, that didn’t lessen the profound impact their existence had on Helen’s life. “Your initial response is of shame and fear. I didn't want to leave the house. I remember walking down the street, not able to meet anyone’s eyes, convinced everyone had seen it. You feel very, very exposed. The anger hadn't kicked in yet.”

Nobody was ever caught. Helen was left to wrestle with the aftereffects alone. “I retreated into myself for months. I’m still on a higher dose of antidepressants than I was before it all happened.” After reporting what had happened to the police, who were initially supportive, Helen’s case was dropped. The anonymous person who created the deepfake porn had never messaged her directly, removing any possible grounds for harassment or intention to cause distress.

Eventually she found power in writing a poem detailing her experience and starting a petition calling for reformed laws around image-based abuse; it’s incredibly difficult to prosecute someone for deepfaking on a sexual assault basis (even though that’s what it is: a digital sexual assault). You’re more likely to see success with a claim for defamation or infringement of privacy, or image rights.

Unlike Helen, in one rare case 32-year-old Dina Mouhandes from Brighton was able to unearth the man who uploaded doctored images of her onto a porn site back in 2015. “Some were obviously fake, showing me with gigantic breasts and a stuck-on head, others could’ve been mistaken as real. Either way, it was humiliating,” she reflects. “And horrible, you wonder why someone would do something like that to you? Even if they’re not real photos, or realistic, it’s about making somebody feel uncomfortable. It’s invasive.”

Dina, like Helen, was alerted to what had happened by a friend who’d been watching porn. Initially, she says she laughed, as some images were so poorly edited. “But then I thought ‘What if somebody sees them and thinks I’ve agreed to having them made?’ My name was included on the site too.” Dina then looked at the profile of the person who’d uploaded them and realised an ex-colleague had been targeted too. “I figured out it was a guy we’d both worked with, I really didn’t want to believe it was him.”

In Dina’s case, the police took things seriously at first and visited the perpetrator in person, but later their communication dropped off – she has no idea if he was ever prosecuted, but is doubtful. The images were, at least, taken down. “Apparently he broke down and asked for help with his mental health,” Dina says. “I felt guilty about it, but knew I had to report what had happened. I still fear he could do it again and now that deepfake technology is so much more accessible, I worry it could happen to anyone.”

And that’s the crux of it. It could happen to any of us – and we likely wouldn’t even know about it, unless, like Dina and Helen, somebody stumbled across it and spoke out. Or, like 25-year-old Northern Irish politician Cara Hunter, who earlier this year was targeted in a similarly degrading sexual way. A pornographic video, in which an actor with similar hair, but whose face wasn’t shown, was distributed thousands of times – alongside real photos of Cara in a bikini – via WhatsApp. It all played out during the run-up to an election, so although Cara isn’t sure who started spreading the video and telling people it was her in it, it was presumably politically motivated.

“It’s tactics like this, and deepfake porn, that could scare the best and brightest women from coming into the field,” she says, adding that telling her dad what had happened was one of the worst moments of her life. “I was even stopped in the street by men and asked for oral sex and received comments like ‘naughty girl’ on Instagram – then you click the profiles of the people who’ve posted, and they’ve got families, kids. It’s objectification and trying to humiliate you out of your position by using sexuality as a weapon. A reputation can be ruined instantly.”

Cara adds that the worst thing is ‘everyone has a phone’ and yet laws dictate that while a person can’t harm you in public, they can legally ‘try to ruin your life online’. “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth has even got its shoes on.”

Is it any wonder, then, that 83% of Cosmopolitan readers have said deepfake porn worries them, with 42% adding that they’re now rethinking what they post on social media? But this can’t be the solution - that, once again, women are finding themselves reworking their lives, in the hopes of stopping men from committing crimes.

Yet, we can’t just close our eyes and hope it all goes away either. The deepfake porn genie is well and truly out of the bottle (it’s also a symptom of a wider problem: Europol experts estimate that by 2026, 90% of all media we consume may be synthetically generated). Nearly one in every 20 Cosmopolitan readers said they, or someone they know, has been edited into a false sexual scenario. But what is the answer? It's hard for sites to monitor deepfakes – and even when images are promptly removed, there’s still every chance they’ve been screen grabbed and shared elsewhere.

When asked, Reddit told Cosmopolitan: "We have clear policies that prohibit sharing intimate or explicit media of a person created or posted without their permission. We will continue to remove content that violates our policies and take action against the users and communities that engage in this behaviour."

Speaking to leading deepfake expert, Henry Adjer, about how we can protect ourselves – and what needs to change – is eye-opening. “I’ve rarely seen male celebrities targeted and if they are, it’s usually by the gay community. I’d estimate tens of millions of women are deepfake porn victims at this stage.” He adds that sex, trust and technology are only set to become further intertwined, referencing the fact that virtual reality brothels now exist. “The best we can do is try to drive this type of behaviour into more obscure corners of the internet, to stop people – especially children and teenagers – from stumbling across it.”

Currently, UK law says that making deepfake porn isn’t an offence (although in Scotland distributing it may be seen as illegal, depending on intention), but companies are told to remove such material (if there’s an individual victim) when flagged, otherwise they may face a punishment from Ofcom. But the internet is a big place, and it’s virtually impossible to police. This year, the Online Safety Bill is being worked on by the Law Commission, who want deepfake porn recognised as a crime – but there’s a long way to go with a) getting that law legislated and b) ensuring it’s enforced.

Until then, we need a combination of investment and effort from tech companies to prevent and identify deepfakes, alongside those (hopefully future) tougher laws. But even that won’t wave a magic wand and fix everything. Despite spending hours online every day, as a society we still tend to think of ‘online’ and ‘offline’ as two separate worlds – but they aren’t. ‘Online’ our morals can run fast and loose, as crimes often go by unchecked, and while the ‘real world’ may have laws in place that, to some degree, do protect us, we still need a radical overhaul when it comes to how society views the female body.

Deepfake porn is a bitter nail in the coffin of equality and having control over your own image; even if you’ve never taken a nude in your life (which, by the way, you should be free to do without fear of it being leaked or hacked) you can still be targeted and have sexuality used against you. Isn’t it time we focus on truly Photoshopping out that narrative as a whole?”

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