#to people who saw the web

[lies]

[pyrriax]

(there's a cat in my garden, she reminds me of you. lying on her back, sunlight catching her fur in the prettiest way, all soft edges and love. i cried over you yesterday. did you know that? why couldn't you stay just a moment longer? now i have to grieve you, and i'll start with letting the cat in the garden inside. she'll sit in your spot, clean her paws of the dirt, and take up the empty space. i'll love her like i loved you. like i love you still.)

[benetnvsch]

I love it when im looking at my own post on my own Tumblr and it shows me the 'more like this' collection of posts and it shows posts from blogs I've blocked like?? Yes girl that’s exactly what I wonna see :D man this site is insufferable lol

[lulubeanie]

Had a dream about Eliot finding a big abandoned library that a giant spider person had made into their home. the spider person was very not nice and the experience left Eliot afraid of spiders even though normally he likes them (the spider person was also in control of all the normal spiders that lived there or something)

[soysaucevictim]

I swear, making entire different sets of ASCII/Unicode for text/lettering was a damn mistake.

This shit. Constantly. Gets. Past. Spam. Filters. =_=

[erabundus]

anonymous &&. said... hi sorry, this isn't an interaction, but is it alright to ask where your blog theme is from <;3?

oh, i don't mind!

i  actually  made  my  theme  myself  —  both  the  graphics  and  the  code.  (  except  the  little  floating  blobs;  you  can  find  that  here!  )

[kryjjovnik]

This photograph depicts a cadaveric spasm in a drowning victim grasping grass from the river bank. Also known as postmortem spasm, this is the instantaneous rigor cataleptic rigidity —a rare form of muscular stiffening that occurs at the very moment of death and persists into rigor mortis. Nevertheless the condition itself is not part of rigor mortis, which is characterized by a progressive rigidity of the deceased body due to biomechanical changes in muscles occurring 10-12 hours after death. It is a persistent occurrence when it happens, and the individual will continue to hold that pose from death until putrefaction allows for decay of the affected limb. However, cadaveric spasm can be seen in archaeological remains if the affected limb is buried. While the cause is still unknown, it’s generally associated with violent or traumatic deaths and intense emotion. It’s mostly seen in victims who have ended their lives.

[killmebythebeach]

Just finished tma. I have to go to fucking school tomorrow. How do I FUCKING BE A PERSON AFTER THAT?!?!

I'll probably reblog with more tags later (cuz 30 just isn't enough) but !!!

[thoughtportal]

Opinion Here’s how to get free Paxlovid as many times as you need it

When the public health emergency around covid-19 ended, vaccines and treatments became commercial products, meaning companies could charge for them as they do other pharmaceuticals. Paxlovid, the highly effective antiviral pill that can prevent covid from becoming severe, now has a list price of nearly $1,400 for a five-day treatment course.

Thanks to an innovative agreement between the Biden administration and the drug’s manufacturer, Pfizer, Americans can still access the medication free or at very low cost through a program called Paxcess. The problem is that too few people — including pharmacists — are aware of it.

I learned of Paxcess only after readers wrote that pharmacies were charging them hundreds of dollars — or even the full list price — to fill their Paxlovid prescription. This shouldn’t be happening. A representative from Pfizer, which runs the program, explained to me that patients on Medicare and Medicaid or who are uninsured should get free Paxlovid. They need to sign up by going to paxlovid.iassist.com or by calling 877-219-7225. “We wanted to make enrollment as easy and as quick as possible,” the representative said.

Indeed, the process is straightforward. I clicked through the web form myself, and there are only three sets of information required. Patients first enter their name, date of birth and address. They then input their prescriber’s name and address and select their insurance type.

All this should take less than five minutes and can be done at home or at the pharmacy. A physician or pharmacist can fill it out on behalf of the patient, too. Importantly, this form does not ask for medical history, proof of a positive coronavirus test, income verification, citizenship status or other potentially sensitive and time-consuming information.

But there is one key requirement people need to be aware of: Patients must have a prescription for Paxlovid to start the enrollment process. It is not possible to pre-enroll. (Though, in a sense, people on Medicare or Medicaid are already pre-enrolled.)

Once the questionnaire is complete, the website generates a voucher within seconds. People can print it or email it themselves, and then they can exchange it for a free course of Paxlovid at most pharmacies.

Pfizer’s representative tells me that more than 57,000 pharmacies are contracted to participate in this program, including major chain drugstores such as CVS and Walgreens and large retail chains such as Walmart, Kroger and Costco. For those unable to go in person, a mail-order option is available, too.

The program works a little differently for patients with commercial insurance. Some insurance plans already cover Paxlovid without a co-pay. Anyone who is told there will be a charge should sign up for Paxcess, which would further bring down their co-pay and might even cover the entire cost.

Several readers have attested that Paxcess’s process was fast and seamless. I was also glad to learn that there is basically no limit to the number of times someone could use it. A person who contracts the coronavirus three times in a year could access Paxlovid free or at low cost each time.

Unfortunately, readers informed me of one major glitch: Though the Paxcess voucher is honored when presented, some pharmacies are not offering the program proactively. As a result, many patients are still being charged high co-pays even if they could have gotten the medication at no cost.

This is incredibly frustrating. However, after interviewing multiple people involved in the process, including representatives of major pharmacy chains and Biden administration officials, I believe everyone is sincere in trying to make things right. As we saw in the early days of the coronavirus vaccine rollout, it’s hard to get a new program off the ground. Policies that look good on paper run into multiple barriers during implementation.

Those involved are actively identifying and addressing these problems. For instance, a Walgreens representative explained to me that in addition to educating pharmacists and pharmacy techs about the program, the company learned it also had to make system changes to account for a different workflow. Normally, when pharmacists process a prescription, they inform patients of the co-pay and dispense the medication. But with Paxlovid, the system needs to stop them if there is a co-pay, so they can prompt patients to sign up for Paxcess.

Here is where patients and consumers must take a proactive role. That might not feel fair; after all, if someone is ill, people expect that the system will work to help them. But that’s not our reality. While pharmacies work to fix their system glitches, patients need to be their own best advocates. That means signing up for Paxcess as soon as they receive a Paxlovid prescription and helping spread the word so that others can get the antiviral at little or no cost, too.

{source}

[gallusrostromegalus]

Move To A Darker Place

This is a story of Man Vs. Machine.

---

Last March, my father attempted to file his Taxes.

My beloved father is a Boomer. Unlike most Boomers, my father is rather handy with technology because he was one of the people that had a not-insignificant hand in Developing a hell of a lot of it. He was studying Computer Science at Cal Poly before the computer science degree existed. I have many fond childhood memories of skipping through the aisles of various electronic and computer part warehouses while Dad described something that either terrified the staff or made them worship him as a God.  He taught himself how to use his smartphone.  Internationally.

So when he saw the option to file digitally with the IRS through the “ID.me” program, he leapt at the chance to celebrate the Federal Government finally entering the Digital Age.

It was all going swimmingly for about six hours, until he was ready to file and the system told him that it needed to verify his identity. 

“Very Well.” said my father, a man unafraid of talking to himself and getting something out of the conversation. “It wouldn’t do for me to get someone else’s return.”

The System told him that it needed him to take a “Digital Image ID”.

a.k.a: A Selfie.

“A-ha!” Dad beams. Dad is very good at taking selfies. He immediately pulled out his phone, snapped one, and tried to upload it.

Please log into your Id.me Account and use the provided app to submit your Digital Image ID. The System clarified.

“Oh. You should have said so.”  Dad pouted, but used his phone to log onto the ID.me account, do the six security verification steps and double-checked that the filing looked the same as it did on the desktop, gave the IRS like nine permissions on his phone, and held up the camera to take his Federal Privacy Invasion Selfie.

Please align your face to the indicated grid. Said The System, pulling up a futuristic green-web-of-polygons approximation.

“Ooh, very Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry would HATE this!” Dad said cheerfully, aligning his face to the grid.  My father is a bit… cavalier, when it comes to matters of personal information and federal government, because he’s been on FBI watchlists since the late 60’s when he was protesting The Vietnam War and Ronald Regan before he’d broken containment. Alas.

Anyway, there is very little information the federal government does not have on him already, but he’s as good at stalking the FBI as they are at stalking him, and had worked out a solution:  He has something approaching a friendship with the local Federal Agent (Some guy named “Larry”. Allegedly), and got Larry hooked on Alternative Histories and Dad’s collection of carefully-researched “there is very likely buried treasure here” stories, and Larry is loath to bother his favorite Historical Fanfiction author too much.

But I digress.

After thinking for a minute, The System came back with an Error Message. Please remove glasses or other facial obstructions.

And here is where the real trouble began.

See, my father wears glasses that do substantially warp the appearance of his face, because he is so nearsighted that he is legally blind without them. His natural focal point is about 4 inches in front of his nose.  While Dad can still take a selfie because he (approximately) knows where his phone is if it’s in his hand, he cannot see the alignment grid.

He should ask someone to take it for him! I hear the audience say. Yes, that would be the sane and reasonable thing to do, but Dad was attempting to do taxes at his residence in Fort Collins, while his immediate family was respectively in Denver, Texas and Canada.  He tried calling our neighbors, who turned out to be in Uganda.

He looked down at the dog, Arwen, and her little criminal paws that can open doorknobs, but not operate cell phones.

She looked back at him, and farted.

“Well, I’ll give it a try, but if it gives me too much trouble, I’ll call Larry, and Larry can call the IRS about it.” Dad told her. 

She continued to watch him. Arwen is an Australian Kelpie (a type of cattle-herding dog), going on 14 years old, deaf as a post and suffering from canine dementia now, but she still retains her natural instinct to Micromanage. She was also trained as a therapy dog, and even if she can’t hear my dad, still recognizes the body language of a man setting himself up for catastrophe.

So, squinting in the late afternoon light next to the back door, Dad attempted to line his face up with a grid he could only sort-of see, and took A Federal Selfie.

The System thought about it for a few moments.

Image Capture Failed: Insufficient Contrast. The System replied. Please move to a darker place.

“...Huh.” Dad frowned. “Alright.”

He moved to the middle of his office, away from the back door, lit only by the house lighting and indirect sunlight, and tried again.

Image Capture Failed. Please move to a darker place.

“What?” Dad asked the universe in general.

“Whuff.” Arwen warned him against sunk costs.

Dad ignored her and went into the bathroom, the natural habitat of the selfie. Surely, only being lit by a light fixture that hadn’t been changed since Dad was attempting to warn everyone about Regan would be suitably insufficient lighting for The System.  It took some negotiating, because that bathroom is “Standing Room Only” not “Standing And Holding Your Arms Out In Front Of You Room”.  He ended up taking the selfie in the shower stall.

As The System mulled over the latest attempt, Arwen shuffled over and kicked open the door to watch.

Image Capture Failed. Please Move to a Darker Place.

“Do you mean Spiritually?” Dad demanded.

“Whuff.” Arwen cautioned him again.

Determined to succeed, or at least get a different error message that may give him more information, Dad entered The Downstairs Guest Room.  It is the darkest room in the house, as it is in the basement, and only has one legally-mandated-fire-escape window, which has blinds.  Dad drew those blinds, turned off the lights and tried AGAIN.

Image Capture Failed. Please Move To A Darker Place.

“DO YOU WANT ME TO PHOTOGRAPH MYSELF INSIDE OF A CAVE??” Dad howled. 

“WHUFF!” Arwen reprimanded him from under the pull-out bed in the room. It’s where she attempts to herd everyone when it’s thundering outside, so the space is called her ‘Safety Cave’.

Dad frowned at the large blurry shape that was The Safety Cave.

“Why not?” he asked, the prelude to many a Terrible Plan.  With no small amount of spiteful and manic glee, Dad got down onto the floor, and army-crawled under the bed with Arwen to try One Last Time. Now in near-total darkness, he rolled on his side to be able to stretch his arms out, Arwen slobber-panting in his ear, and waited for the vague green blob of the Facial grid to appear.

This time, when he tapped the button, the flash cctivated.

“GOD DAMN IT!” Dad shouted, dropping the phone and rubbing his eyes and cursing to alleviate the pain of accidentally flash-banging himself. Arwen shuffled away from him under the bed, huffing sarcastically at him.

Image Capture Failed. Please move to a darker place.

“MOTHERFU- hang on.” Dad squinted.  The System sounded strange. Distant and slightly muffled.

Dad squinted really hard, and saw the movement of Arwen crawling out from under the bed along the phone’s last known trajectory.

“ARWEN!” Dad shouted, awkwardly reverse-army crawling out from under the bed, using it to get to his feet and searching for his glasses, which had fallen out of his pocket under the bed, so by the time he was sighted again, Arwen had had ample time to remove The Offending Device.

He found her out in the middle of the back yard, the satisfied look of a Job Well Done on her face. She did not have the phone. 

“Arwen.” Dad glared. It’s a very good glare. Dad was a teacher for many years and used it to keep his class in order with sheer telepathically induced embarrassment, and his father once glared a peach tree into fecundity.  

Arwen regarded him with the casual interest a hurricane might regard a sailboat tumbling out of its wake. She is a force of nature unto herself and not about to be intimidated by a half-blind house ape.  She also has cataracts and might not be able to make out the glare.

“I GIVE UP!” Dad shouted, throwing his hands in the air and returning to the office to write to the IRS that their selfie software sucks ass. Pleased that she had gotten her desired result, Arwen followed him in.

To Dad’s immense surprise, the computer cheerfully informed him that his Federally Secure Selfie had been accepted, and that they had received and were now processing his return!

“What the FUCK?” Dad glared. “Oh well. If I’ve screwed it up, Larry can call me.”

---

I bring this up because recently, Dad received an interesting piece of mail.

It was a letter from the IRS, addressed to him, a nerve-wracking thing to recessive at the best of times.  Instead of a complaint about Dad’s Selfie Skills, it was a letter congratulating him on using the new ID.me System.  It thanked him for his help and expressed hopes he would use it again next year, and included the selfie that The System had finally decided to accept.

“You know, my dad used to complain about automation.” Dad sighed, staring at the image. “Incidentals my boy!  My secretary saves the state of California millions of dollars a year catching small errors before they become massive ones! He’d say. Fought the human resources board about her pay every year.  I used to think he was overestimating how bad machines were and underestimating human error, but you know? He was right.”

He handed me the image.

My father was, technically, in the image.  A significant amount of the bottom right corner is taken up by the top of his forehead and silver hair.  Most of the image, the part with the facial-recognition markers on it, was composed of Arwen’s Alarmed and Disgusted Doggy face.

“Oh no!” I cackled. “Crap, does this mean you have to call the IRS and tell them you’re not a dog?”

“Probably.” Dad sighed. “I know who I’m gonna bother first though.” he said, taking out his phone (Dad did find his phone a few hours after Arwen absconded with it when mom called and the early spinach started ringing). 

“Hey Larry!” Dad announced to the local federal agent. “You’re never gonna believe this. My dog filed my taxes!”

Larry considered this for a moment. “Is this the dog that stole my sandwich? Out of my locked  car?” he asked suspiciously.

“The very same.” Dad grinned.

“Hm. Clever Girl.” Federal Agent Larry sighed. “I figured it was only a matter of time before she got into tax fraud.”

---

I'm a disabled artist making my living writing these stories. If you enjoy my stories, please consider supporting me on Ko-fi or Pre-ordering my Family Lore Book on Patreon. Thank you!

[starlit-mansion]

trust me that i am so sincere when i say this: the new magic plane duskmourn is serving the backrooms so hard and i am HERE for it

[txttletale]

Saw a tweet that said something around:

"cannot emphasize enough how horrid chatgpt is, y'all. it's depleting our global power & water supply, stopping us from thinking or writing critically, plagiarizing human artists. today's students are worried they won't have jobs because of AI tools. this isn't a world we deserve"

I've seen some of your AI posts and they seem nuanced, but how would you respond do this? Cause it seems fairly-on point and like the crux of most worries. Sorry if this is a troublesome ask, just trying to learn so any input would be appreciated.

i would simply respond that almost none of that is true.

'depleting the global power and water supply'

something i've seen making the roudns on tumblr is that chatgpt queries use 3 watt-hours per query. wow, that sounds like a lot, especially with all the articles emphasizing that this is ten times as much as google search. let's check some other very common power uses:

running a microwave for ten minutes is 133 watt-hours

gaming on your ps5 for an hour is 200 watt-hours

watching an hour of netflix is 800 watt-hours

and those are just domestic consumer electricty uses!

a single streetlight's typical operation 1.2 kilowatt-hours a day (or 1200 watt-hours)

a digital billboard being on for an hour is 4.7 kilowatt-hours (or 4700 watt-hours)

i think i've proved my point, so let's move on to the bigger picture: there are estimates that AI is going to cause datacenters to double or even triple in power consumption in the next year or two! damn that sounds scary. hey, how significant as a percentage of global power consumption are datecenters?

1-1.5%.

ah. well. nevertheless!

what about that water? yeah, datacenters use a lot of water for cooling. 1.7 billion gallons (microsoft's usage figure for 2021) is a lot of water! of course, when you look at those huge and scary numbers, there's some important context missing. it's not like that water is shipped to venus: some of it is evaporated and the rest is generally recycled in cooling towers. also, not all of the water used is potable--some datacenters cool themselves with filtered wastewater.

most importantly, this number is for all data centers. there's no good way to separate the 'AI' out for that, except to make educated guesses based on power consumption and percentage changes. that water figure isn't all attributable to AI, plenty of it is necessary to simply run regular web servers.

but sure, just taking that number in isolation, i think we can all broadly agree that it's bad that, for example, people are being asked to reduce their household water usage while google waltzes in and takes billions of gallons from those same public reservoirs.

but again, let's put this in perspective: in 2017, coca cola used 289 billion liters of water--that's 7 billion gallons! bayer (formerly monsanto) in 2018 used 124 million cubic meters--that's 32 billion gallons!

so, like. yeah, AI uses electricity, and water, to do a bunch of stuff that is basically silly and frivolous, and that is broadly speaking, as someone who likes living on a planet that is less than 30% on fire, bad. but if you look at the overall numbers involved it is a miniscule drop in the ocean! it is a functional irrelevance! it is not in any way 'depleting' anything!

'stopping us from thinking or writing critically'

this is the same old reactionary canard we hear over and over again in different forms. when was this mythic golden age when everyone was thinking and writing critically? surely we have all heard these same complaints about tiktok, about phones, about the internet itself? if we had been around a few hundred years earlier, we could have heard that "The free access which many young people have to romances, novels, and plays has poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth."

it is a reactionary narrative of societal degeneration with no basis in anything. yes, it is very funny that laywers have lost the bar for trusting chatgpt to cite cases for them. but if you think that chatgpt somehow prevented them from thinking critically about its output, you're accusing the tail of wagging the dog.

nobody who says shit like "oh wow chatgpt can write every novel and movie now. yiou can just ask chatgpt to give you opinions and ideas and then use them its so great" was, like, sitting in the symposium debating the nature of the sublime before chatgpt released. there is no 'decay', there is no 'decline'. you should be suspicious of those narratives wherever you see them, especially if you are inclined to agree!

plagiarizing human artists

nah. i've been over this ad infinitum--nothing 'AI art' does could be considered plagiarism without a definition so preposterously expansive that it would curtail huge swathes of human creative expression.

AI art models do not contain or reproduce any images. the result of them being trained on images is a very very complex statistical model that contains a lot of large-scale statistical data about all those images put together (and no data about any of those individual images).

to draw a very tortured comparison, imagine you had a great idea for how to make the next Great American Painting. you loaded up a big file of every norman rockwell painting, and you made a gigantic excel spreadsheet. in this spreadsheet you noticed how regularly elements recurred: in each cell you would have something like "naturalistic lighting" or "sexually unawakened farmers" and the % of times it appears in his paintings. from this, you then drew links between these cells--what % of paintings containing sexually unawakened farmers also contained naturalistic lighting? what % also contained a white guy?

then, if you told someone else with moderately competent skill at painting to use your excel spreadsheet to generate a Great American Painting, you would likely end up with something that is recognizably similar to a Norman Rockwell painting: but any charge of 'plagiarism' would be absolutely fucking absurd!

this is a gross oversimplification, of course, but it is much closer to how AI art works than the 'collage machine' description most people who are all het up about plagiarism talk about--and if it were a collage machine, it would still not be plagiarising because collages aren't plagiarism.

(for a better and smarter explanation of the process from soneone who actually understands it check out this great twitter thread by @reachartwork)

today's students are worried they won't have jobs because of AI tools

i mean, this is true! AI tools are definitely going to destroy livelihoods. they will increase productivty for skilled writers and artists who learn to use them, which will immiserate those jobs--they will outright replace a lot of artists and writers for whom quality is not actually important to the work they do (this has already essentially happened to the SEO slop website industry and is in the process of happening to stock images).

jobs in, for example, product support are being cut for chatgpt. and that sucks for everyone involved. but this isn't some unique evil of chatgpt or machine learning, this is just the effect that technological innovation has on industries under capitalism!

there are plenty of innovations that wiped out other job sectors overnight. the camera was disastrous for portrait artists. the spinning jenny was famously disastrous for the hand-textile workers from which the luddites drew their ranks. retail work was hit hard by self-checkout machines. this is the shape of every single innovation that can increase productivity, as marx explains in wage labour and capital:

“The greater division of labour enables one labourer to accomplish the work of five, 10, or 20 labourers; it therefore increases competition among the labourers fivefold, tenfold, or twentyfold. The labourers compete not only by selling themselves one cheaper than the other, but also by one doing the work of five, 10, or 20; and they are forced to compete in this manner by the division of labour, which is introduced and steadily improved by capital. Furthermore, to the same degree in which the division of labour increases, is the labour simplified. The special skill of the labourer becomes worthless. He becomes transformed into a simple monotonous force of production, with neither physical nor mental elasticity. His work becomes accessible to all; therefore competitors press upon him from all sides. Moreover, it must be remembered that the more simple, the more easily learned the work is, so much the less is its cost to production, the expense of its acquisition, and so much the lower must the wages sink – for, like the price of any other commodity, they are determined by the cost of production. Therefore, in the same manner in which labour becomes more unsatisfactory, more repulsive, do competition increase and wages decrease”

this is the process by which every technological advancement is used to increase the domination of the owning class over the working class. not due to some inherent flaw or malice of the technology itself, but due to the material realtions of production.

so again the overarching point is that none of this is uniquely symptomatic of AI art or whatever ever most recent technological innovation. it is symptomatic of capitalism. we remember the luddites primarily for failing and not accomplishing anything of meaning.

if you think it's bad that this new technology is being used with no consideration for the planet, for social good, for the flourishing of human beings, then i agree with you! but then your problem shouldn't be with the technology--it should be with the economic system under which its use is controlled and dictated by the bourgeoisie.

[hedgehog-moss]

I feel secondhand embarrassment when I read goodreads reviews of like a british or australian book and find americans complaining that the unfamiliar turns of phrase and slang made the book hard to read, while non-native english speakers in the reviews are doing fine. Saw yet another review today where an american was like “it was enjoyable except for the way this book assumes I’m british and I get the slang” there are people on this web page who learnt your language as their third or fourth language and they’re dealing, have some shame

[ms-demeanor]

Why reblog machine-generated art?

When I was ten years old I took a photography class where we developed black and white photos by projecting light on papers bathed in chemicals. If we wanted to change something in the image, we had to go through a gradual, arduous process called dodging and burning.

When I was fifteen years old I used photoshop for the first time, and I remember clicking on the clone tool or the blur tool and feeling like I was cheating.

When I was twenty eight I got my first smartphone. The phone could edit photos. A few taps with my thumb were enough to apply filters and change contrast and even spot correct. I was holding in my hand something more powerful than the huge light machines I'd first used to edit images.

When I was thirty six, just a few weeks ago, I took a photo class that used Lightroom Classic and again, it felt like cheating. It made me really understand how much the color profiles of popular web images I'd been seeing for years had been pumped and tweaked and layered with local edits to make something that, to my eyes, didn't much resemble photography. To me, photography is light on paper. It's what you capture in the lens. It's not automatic skin smoothing and a local filter to boost the sky. This reminded me a lot more of the photomanipulations my friend used to make on deviantart; layered things with unnatural colors that put wings on buildings or turned an eye into a swimming pool. It didn't remake the images to that extent, obviously, but it tipped into the uncanny valley. More real than real, more saturated more sharp and more present than the actual world my lens saw. And that was before I found the AI assisted filters and the tool that would identify the whole sky for you, picking pieces of it out from between leaves.

You know, it's funny, when people talk about artists who might lose their jobs to AI they don't talk about the people who have already had to move on from their photo editing work because of technology. You used to be able to get paid for basic photo manipulation, you know? If you were quick with a lasso or skilled with masks you could get a pretty decent chunk of change by pulling subjects out of backgrounds for family holiday cards or isolating the pies on the menu for a mom and pop. Not a lot, but enough to help. But, of course, you can just do that on your phone now. There's no need to pay a human for it, even if they might do a better job or be more considerate toward the aesthetic of an image.

And they certainly don't talk about all the development labs that went away, or the way that you could have trained to be a studio photographer if you wanted to take good photos of your family to hang on the walls and that digital photography allowed in a parade of amateurs who can make dozens of iterations of the same bad photo until they hit on a good one by sheer volume and luck; if you want to be a good photographer everyone can do that why didn't you train for it and spend a long time taking photos on film and being okay with bad photography don't you know that digital photography drove thousands of people out of their jobs.

My dad told me that he plays with AI the other day. He hosts a movie podcast and he puts up thumbnails for the downloads. In the past, he'd just take a screengrab from the film. Now he tells the Bing AI to make him little vignettes. A cowboy running away from a rhino, a dragon arm-wrestling a teddy bear. That kind of thing. Usually based on a joke that was made on the show, or about the subject of the film and an interest of the guest.

People talk about "well AI art doesn't allow people to create things, people were already able to create things, if they wanted to create things they should learn to create things." Not everyone wants to make good art that's creative. Even fewer people want to put the effort into making bad art for something that they aren't passionate about. Some people want filler to go on the cover of their youtube video. My dad isn't going to learn to draw, and as the person who he used to ask to photoshop him as Ant-Man because he certainly couldn't pay anyone for that kind of thing, I think this is a great use case for AI art. This senior citizen isn't going to start cartooning and at two recordings a week with a one-day editing turnaround he doesn't even really have the time for something like a Fiverr commission. This is a great use of AI art, actually.

I also know an artist who is going Hog Fucking Wild creating AI art of their blorbos. They're genuinely an incredibly talented artist who happens to want to see their niche interest represented visually without having to draw it all themself. They're posting the funny and good results to a small circle of mutuals on socials with clear information about the source of the images; they aren't trying to sell any of the images, they're basically using them as inserts for custom memes. Who is harmed by this person saying "i would like to see my blorbo lasciviously eating an ice cream cone in the is this a pigeon meme"?

The way I use machine-generated art, as an artist, is to proof things. Can I get an explosion to look like this. What would a wall of dead computer monitors look like. Would a ballerina leaping over the grand canyon look cool? Sometimes I use AI art to generate copyright free objects that I can snip for a collage. A lot of the time I use it to generate ideas. I start naming random things and seeing what it shows me and I start getting inspired. I can ask CrAIon for pose reference, I can ask it to show me the interior of spaces from a specific angle.

I profoundly dislike the antipathy that tumblr has for AI art. I understand if people don't want their art used in training pools. I understand if people don't want AI trained on their art to mimic their style. You should absolutely use those tools that poison datasets if you don't want your art included in AI training. I think that's an incredibly appropriate action to take as an artist who doesn't want AI learning from your work.

However I'm pretty fucking aggressively opposed to copyright and most of the "solid" arguments against AI art come down to "the AIs viewed and learned from people's copyrighted artwork and therefore AI is theft rather than fair use" and that's a losing argument for me. In. Like. A lot of ways. Primarily because it is saying that not only is copying someone's art theft, it is saying that looking at and learning from someone's art can be defined as theft rather than fair use.

Also because it's just patently untrue.

But that doesn't really answer your question. Why reblog machine-generated art? Because I liked that piece of art.

It was made by a machine that had looked at billions of images - some copyrighted, some not, some new, some old, some interesting, many boring - and guided by a human and I liked it. It was pretty. It communicated something to me. I looked at an image a machine made - an artificial picture, a total construct, something with no intrinsic meaning - and I felt a sense of quiet and loss and nostalgia. I looked at a collection of automatically arranged pixels and tasted salt and smelled the humidity in the air.

I liked it.

I don't think that all AI art is ugly. I don't think that AI art is all soulless (i actually think that 'having soul' is a bizarre descriptor for art and that lacking soul is an equally bizarre criticism). I don't think that AI art is bad for artists. I think the problem that people have with AI art is capitalism and I don't think that's a problem that can really be laid at the feet of people curating an aesthetic AI art blog on tumblr.

Machine learning isn't the fucking problem the problem is massive corporations have been trying hard not to pay artists for as long as massive corporations have existed (isn't that a b-plot in the shape of water? the neighbor who draws ads gets pushed out of his job by product photography? did you know that as recently as ten years ago NewEgg had in-house photographers who would take pictures of the products so users wouldn't have to rely on the manufacturer photos? I want you to guess what killed that job and I'll give you a hint: it wasn't AI)

Am I putting a human out of a job because I reblogged an AI-generated "photo" of curtains waving in the pale green waters of an imaginary beach? Who would have taken this photo of a place that doesn't exist? Who would have painted this hypersurrealistic image? What meaning would it have had if they had painted it or would it have just been for the aesthetic? Would someone have paid for it or would it be like so many of the things that artists on this site have spent dozens of hours on only to get no attention or value for their work?

My worst ratio of hours to notes is an 8-page hand-drawn detailed ink comic about getting assaulted at a concert and the complicated feelings that evoked that took me weeks of daily drawing after work with something like 54 notes after 8 years; should I be offended if something generated from a prompt has more notes than me? What does that actually get the blogger? Clout? I believe someone said that popularity on tumblr gets you one thing and that is yelled at.

What do you get out of this? Are you helping artists right now? You're helping me, and I'm an artist. I've wanted to unload this opinion for a while because I'm sick of the argument that all Real Artists think AI is bullshit. I'm a Real Artist. I've been paid for Real Art. I've been commissioned as an artist.

And I find a hell of a lot of AI art a lot more interesting than I find human-generated corporate art or Thomas Kincaid (but then, I repeat myself).

There are plenty of people who don't like AI art and don't want to interact with it. I am not one of those people. I thought the gay sex cats were funny and looked good and that shitposting is the ideal use of a machine image generation: to make uncopyrightable images to laugh at.

I think that tumblr has decided to take a principled stand against something that most people making the argument don't understand. I think tumblr's loathing for AI has, generally speaking, thrown weight behind a bunch of ideas that I think are going to be incredibly harmful *to artists specifically* in the long run.

Anyway. If you hate AI art and you don't want to interact with people who interact with it, block me.

[drdemonprince]

just like going through the members of my family and my friend groups one by one, i can't think a single damn person i know who does not have a disability. ARFID. Autism. Metal rod in the spine. Arthritis. Cancer in remission. Long-term effects of repeated concussions. Bad back. Exhaustion. Crohn's. EDS. More Autism and ADHD. Migraines. Periods that lay them out for a week. Chronic depression. Alcoholism. Bipolar. Cataracts.

I do not know a single person who is not disabled, typically in multiple ways, and we all face increased disability as a natural consequence of aging. Literally every person on the planet becomes disabled on a long enough timeline. Yet we still talk about disability and organize around it as if it isn't social, economic, and contextual. people treat disability as an innate quality that some people have and some people do not have, and as if there is some large class of intrinsically abled people who are benefiting under capitalism and are withholding the fruits of their abilities from us or something.

i saw this post on twitter months ago that was like "I need people to understand that if you are in a relationship with a disabled person you are going to have to do more than them. you're not disabled and so you're going to have to do more of the work (around the house, logisticially, etc). that is what you owe them as an abled person."

and it just baffled me. because i have only ever seen disabled people in relationships with other disabled people, caring for one another in a stitched-together, messy web of interdependence and missed deadlines and dirty dishes and acceptance and love, not because disabled people are ontologically more generous than non-disabled people but because non-disabled people don't even actually exist.

the mythological abled person who can work a full time job, keep a clean home, do all the dishes, buy all the groceries, cook all the meals, run all the errands, stay on top of all the bills, carry everything, dash up the stairs, stand on their feet for hours, and have boundless energy without any mental consequences to that does not exist. it's an ideal created to oppress us all. it is an impossible standard the reification of which disables us all.

there is no one on this planet who is not disabled under capitalism and colonialism. there are only people who lack the class consciousness to recognize that they're disabled.

it's gonna have to be us taking care of one another. it's going to be the disabled caring for the disabled. it always will be that. that is the human condition.

[yeyinde]

touch starved reader with an oral fixation x kidnapper!Simon who’s all punishment and no physical affection? Please Simon just a little kiss? with tongues? :( (i just wanna make out with this man while my heart aches for him)

by Allah, you people are dogs. i will write the filth as usual.

DEAD DOVE, 18+ | dubcon. kidnapping. mean!Simon. dom!Simon. masking corporal punishment as affection. kissing. size kink, size difference. some thigh riding. degradation + humiliation (verbal). non-con pet play. marking (heavyyyyyy mentions of Simon biting you like a chew toy). choking. daddy kink (but in the awful, demeaning way). manipulation. forced affection. coersion. forced/manufactured dependency. brief mention of Simon stepping on your back to hold you down so he can whip you w a cat o nine tails. yanno. the usual Friday night.

idk. there's something so hot about you, completely naked, riding Simon's clothed thigh as he holds you up by your neck. tongue out, desperate for a kiss while he just mocks you the whole time.

It's survival. 

At first.  

A means of masking the innate horror of being stripped of your agency, your autonomy, by a man you barely even know. One you met once before (fate sealed), and now—outside of your apartment complex where he was idling by the foothold, smoking a cigarette as he leaned against the brick wall, head turned. Gaze narrowed as you approached. 

Waiting for someone, you assumed, thinking nothing else about the matter. 

Nothing else, except—

He looked familiar. You think you saw him before. He was staring at you. Hadn't stopped. Hasn't said a word, either. The silence was oppressive. Heavy. Your hands fumbled with the keys. Shaking. Trembling. 

He's pretty, you thought, suddenly. In the way car wrecks can sometimes be. Jarring and awful and hideous, but—

Mesmerising. 

Macabre. And that's what he is. Everything from the mask on his face (skulls, go figure), to the absurdity in his size, his width. The way space itself seemed to move around him, bending and distorting just to let him pass. His own gravitational pull. Magnetic. You feel it tugging on you as he pulls another lungful of smoke. Another. Another.  

(like an hourglass, a timebomb, almost. you wonder what will happen when it runs out—)

He gives you the creeps. Suddenly. Unexpectedly. A visceral sense of unease curdling in the pit of your belly as he keeps staring, staring. Eyes—crystalline under the broken headlamp, washout into crushed topaz—drilling into your back, sharp enough to flay skin. Everything inside of you says to run, but your key won't fit inside the lock. Won't—

Ever. 

And hindsight has always been a bitter thing, hasn't it? Cruel in her mockery. Had you known, then, that he wasn't a workman loitering by the complex, waiting for a friend; or a low-level drug dealer casting webs into the plum hewn aether, it might have saved you. Might have. 

Maybe. Because he was there, waiting for you, all along. 

Life has a funny way of paying back good deeds. All it took for your life to crumble down around you, rubble falling off of a shaking mountain, was kindness. Was seeing a large man in the pouring rain, already drenched. Black clothing sticking to the granite contours of his body, and offering sanctum in the shape of a rusting umbrella you found at a thrift store for three dollars. 

(“here,” you said, chipper. All smiles. “i live just down the street, and you look like you need it more than i do. do you want it?”

and he—

he simply stared. stared. his eyes liquid, molten, as they carelessly dropped, roaming down the length of your body at his own leisure. leering. assessing. it was odd. weird, but—

he huffed, then. seemingly satisfied by whatever you measured up to in his head. his neck lulled back, and he gazed at you from down the crooked length of his nose, tucked neatly away under the thick band of a facial mask. skulls. how could you be so stupid? 

slowly, like he was trying not to startle a mare, his gloved hand reached out, curling thick fingers around the hilt of it. he tugged once. in your stupor, you forgot to let go. embarrassment flooded in. he huffed again, quietly amused, as you untangled your numbed fingers from the umbrella. 

in your distraction, he moved closer. smelled of ash, of mildew. sweat and stale cigarettes. there was something predatory in the way he slipped through space. a preternatural quiet. an eerie stillness. 

you hadn't realised he was there, looming, until he rasped out, “more ‘n you could ever realise, pet.”

and you're sure why you do it. did it. but your hand slips into your shopping bag, eyes widen. heart thundering in your chest. 

“are you hungry? i, uh, i just bought some apples, um—”

his eyes are lavascapes. shackles. chains. “i could eat.”)

And now—

Forced to play this strange cat and mouse of his where he treats you like soot on the bottom of his shoe, and you pretend that it's affection. Love. How godless.  

Protection, he calls it. 

("mine," he whispers, orison soft, into your ear. "ain't go' nowhere else to go, do you, pet? world's big. would eat a small thing like you up. safer here. wit' me. only me.") 

You wonder what he'd do if you told him the biggest danger here was the madness nestled inside your head, the one that sometimes made you look at him like he was your salvation instead of the warden holding the end of your leash in a firm hand. Unyielding—like everything he does. Is. 

Withholding, too. Everything must be earned. Nothing given. Nothing handed out. And you know that this is a ploy, a tactic. Subterfuge meant to chisel into your sense of self, dehumanise you. Turn you into a simpering, obedient little doll for him to play with as he wishes. You know this, and yet—

It's survival, you promise yourself as he tugs on the hook latched to your collar, testing it for weakness. Survival, when his hands—bare, bare; warmed skin against skin, you could just weep—brush over your throat, nails skimming goosebumped flesh as he wedges one, then two inside, hirsute knuckles tickling your pulse. It tightens the collar to near choking. Intentional, you know. He likes it when you beg—for air, for food, water, him. 

Vile man. Awful. 

(You want to roll on your belly at his feet.)

This cold, cruel touch lights a fire under your skin. It's been months since he's last done so. Always wearing gloves when he has to. Using paddles, belts, when you misbehave. Never his bare hand. Not anymore. 

(“m’hand is for good girls,” he slurred, words merging, meshing together, painted with exertion. He wedged his boot against the small of your back, holding you down, and cracked the end of a cat over your bare ass, thighs. Unbothered by your howls, your screams, as the whip bit into your skin. You've never so much as been hit as a child for misbehaving, and now, as an adult, you have a madman standing over you, introducing you to something called a cat o’nine tails—a favourite in the army, lovie. “bad girls,” his boot pressed down harder, heel digging into your spine. “Bad girls get the whip—”)

Bad. Bad. Because you tried to run, to leave him. He dressed you up, called you Mrs Riley, and you—

Ducked out the back door when he turned away for a second. 

Stupid. It was poor timing. A test. He set you up, measuring your loyalty to him, your commitment, and you failed. Failed. 

(“this is what ‘appens when spoiled little cunts get their way too much. they act out, don't they? bitin’ the ‘and that feeds. you'll learn soon enough, though—”)

Ghost—sir, sir (master, maker, god; you'll call him anything he wants if he touches you again)—pulls his fingers away, depriving you of his touch once more. And it's all so stupid. So fundamentally wrong, deplorable, but you follow. Needy. Whining for it in the back of your throat. 

It's been months. Months without touch. Without sensation outside of leather lashing across your thighs, your ass; harsh, gloved fingers digging into your jaw, braced against the back of your head, as you swallow down his cock in an effort to prove to him you've been good. So good. Can be good. His good girl. 

You need to touch him. Need his touch. Ache for it, for something outside of this nook he placed you inside of, denied the privilege of living upstairs with him after you tried to escape. 

You want to. Badly. Your fingers twitch. Ghost sees it. Hums. 

“Need somethin', pet?” 

Your mouth is dry. You swallow. It burns. It hurts. “Yes—”

“Yes, what?”

“Sir—”

Behind the mask he's yet to take off for you fully, only ever hitching it under his chin to devour your cunt whenever you've been good, his jaw tightens, the fabric bunching up. 

You reel back from the look of sheer displeasure etching harsh lines into the hollow gaps of his eyes. Heart thundering. Stomach churning. 

“Mas—” he cuts you off with a soft sigh. Marked with his irritation. “D—dad—”

Dad. A new one. Daddy. He didn't seem like the sort to be into this type of play, not with his sardonic, deadpan eyes. His mockery. His dessicated humour, awful and biting. You'd have sooner expected him to laugh at you—in that slow, deep hum he gives; a little chuff, full of condescension and jeer—than to get off on it. On you, kneeling between his legs with your chin braced against his palm, mouth open, tongue out, as he fucks into the tight clench of his fist, groaning as you beg daddy to give you a taste. 

It's gross. Disgusting. 

It's not done for anything else other than to humiliate you. To crush you under the heel of his boot—little bug—so that you will always know where your place is in this scenario. His little wife. Mother, mum—

He pulls on the leash, jerking you forward. Purrs, “good girl,” and then steps back, moving away from you. Cruel. Dismissive. You hate him, hate him—

(Need him so deeply. With every fibre of your being—)

You watch him as he goes, mourning the loss of his presence already, as he paces around your space, your cage. Broad shoulders barely fitting inside. Head ducking to avoid hitting his crown on the popcorn ceiling. It's strange seeing him here like this. Prowling. He usually comes when he wants you, when he needs to enact more merciless punishment on you for whatever perceived evils you committed (not greeting him with a kiss when he walked in, not letting him suffocate himself in your cunt when he had you sit on his face, not making him cum all over your face quick enough when you knew he had other engagements to get to—), or when he ruts, heavily, between your thighs, cold and detached. Seeking pleasure from your icy flesh, and giving nothing in return but white hot agony. 

Him here, idling in your presence, is revolutionary. 

“S–sir—?”

He hums, quiet. Sits in the chair as you gather the fragments of yourself littered on the ground. His mood is malleable, it seems. 

You push, fingertips sinking into the putty of his agreeable temperament. “Can I—”

You waver when his sharp eyes raze over your bare body—clothes are for good girls, after all—pupils sloshing over the edges, bleeding into midnight blue. 

Your body is a battlefield. Every inch of skin branded with his mark—pretty, thrawn rings of teeth tattooed in silver, haloed in black and red, desecrate your flesh: neck, collarbones, breasts, belly, thighs (a particular favourite of his), ass, mons; all bitten through, chewed up. It weeps when you move, has blood trickling down your skin. The cracking scabs make him coo, poor thing, all bloody fer me? and he licks at them, sucks, until only a pinkish wound in the mimesis of canines remains. 

Uprooted, turned into something new—

His chest expands when he settles his gaze on the sliver of space between your spread thighs. Concealed in tenebrous, hidden from his leering, lecherous view. He cocks his head, considers something unknown to you. His thoughts, his mind, worlds away. Untouchable. 

(only to bad girls, he’d snarled out when you asked why—)

“Testin’ my patience still?” He doesn't rip his gaze away from your cunt, speaks to it sometimes more than he speaks to you. “Thought this alone time might’a cleared your ‘ead.”

You flush. Embarrassment roiling through you. His displeasure is a palpable thing. Heavy. You hate the weight of it. 

“I need—I need you.”

Another toneless hum. “‘Course you do. Ain't got anyone else.”

He's awful. Hideous. You want to rip his tongue out of his mouth. “I—I want you. Please.”

Ghost doesn't answer. You stopped expecting him to a long time ago, his moods odd measures of ebbs and flows; passive and mild, cracking terrible, awful jokes as he strokes your back, hands riveted to your skin, and then biting and caustic the next. Pushing and pushing until you lash out, snap, so he has a reason to push you down, punished and smothered under his bulk, as he ruts into you like a beast, a man starved. Tells you it's for your own good. That you need him. Would be lost without him. 

Bludgeoning a hole into you wide enough for him to crawl inside of. Poisoning you from the inside out with the same nocuous rot that flows in his veins. 

Maybe that's been his agenda all along. Maybe. To make you want him as badly as he wanted you. Desperate, obsessive. Going so far as to follow you home, lost little mutt waiting in the shadows outside of your door until you threw him another bone. And when that didn't work, when the food stopped being enough—

He took you. Held you captive in his house deep in the wilderness. A place so endlessly green that you sometimes stare out at it—unfathomable sea of phalthos and jasper—and feel dizzy. You'll get lost out there—

just like he says. 

As he turns your obsecration over in his head, you wait, supplicant to this man as you rest on your knees. Pretty pet with a golden collar adorned in gems. 

Fitting, you find. With his head cradled against his thick knuckles, you can't help but shiver at the way he looks shrouded in the gloaming embers of a fading twilight. Leonine. A king perfectly at ease in this thick, caliginous atmosphere.

His eyes burn, magmatic, in the low light. Vats of endless ink. Black holes that will swallow you whole if you get too close. But he's poised. Contemplative. Assessing. 

And then grips the end of the leash tight in his other hand. Tugs.  

You obey the wordless command, crawling on your hands and knees to where he's spread out on the recliner. Laxed, dripping with a careless indifference as you wander to him, resting your chin on the spread of his knee. 

Looking up, up, at him, waiting. Wanting. 

There's so much of him—a fact that has been the catalyst to your downfall the moment you saw him standing under the awning; this massive creature. Thighs wider than the width of your body. Burly forearms. Broad shoulders. He's big. Indomitable. Thick, endlessly so. But there's a give to his body. Valleys of softness hiding corded muscle. Firm, but—

Your fingers sink into the soft give of his belly when you reach out, bracing against stomach. Pulling yourself further into the bracket of his spread thighs, inching closer to him. 

He meets your reverent stare, eyes liquid along his lower lash line.

“Thought you were gonna keep me waitin’ all night,” he muses, giving another pull on the leash. It destabilises you. Your nose bumps into his sternum, and you moan at the sting. 

There's a dissonance in the back of your head. A hairline fracture in the line that keeps a degree of separation between pleasure and pain. They meet against the crack in the divide, merging into a abysmal polyphony conducted by his hand. 

He watches, amused, as you whimper, sniffing harshly against the burn. It's not bleeding, and not broken—small mercies, you suppose—and you let it simmer into a dull ache as you slowly clamber into his lap.

Ghost leans back as you settle, greedily taking in the sight of your thighs stretched wide over his leg, cunt pressed, tight, against the rough scrape of his jeans. The touch burns. He hasn't touched your pussy in weeks—

“C’mon,” he urges, hand spanning the width of your lower back. Coaxing. “Show me ‘ow good you can be.”

It's all the permission you need. Slowly, slowly, your hips start to gyrate, dragging your slit over the coarse material. The friction is agony. You need more—

He draws his other hand up, curls it around your neck, forcing your head back, back. You gasp, staring at him, dizzy, from down the slope of your nose. The clasp of the collar digs into your skin. It hurts. It's too much. 

you don't want him to stop. 

His hand is huge. It spans the entire length of your neck, thumb to your pulse, pinky grazing the hollow of your throat. It forces you to lift your chin higher just to let him fit.

He likes it, too, you know. His eyes darken as he takes in the sight of his bare hand, scarred and thick; dusted with a cropping of fine hairs along his scabbed knuckles, sitting against the whole of your throat. Swallowing you up. Can feel how much he enjoys the sheer depth between your sizes when his cock twitches, stiffening more

The look on his face is appraising, anatomising. There's a cold measure of distance in his gaze. A barren polynya. You want to cross it. Chart these untamed lands until they're deeply ingrained within your being. Cimmerian effigy burning to keep you warm. 

It's survival, you think, and arch into the palm of his hand. 

He holds you like a doll. One hand on your lower back, pressing your cunt to thigh. The other tightening around your throat. Bare skin against bare skin, and oh, you could just cry—

But this is not what you need. What you want. And he knows. He always does. Knows the inside of you like it's written down—inked on paper. Thumbs through the makeup of you, chapter by chapter, until no mystery remains. 

“Tell me what you need, pet. Beg for it.” 

“Let me—” his hands tighten, choking the air from your throat. Crushing your collar against your neck. “Lemme—kiss you, please, please—”

Tighter. Tighter. The world around you swims under a thin ocean. Phosphenes swim, untethered, in your periphery, ghosting along the curve of his shoulders. He might kill you yet. Keeping going, going, until those brittle, bird-like bones in your neck snap—

You'd let him, you think, muscles falling lax. Submissive. Just the way he says he likes even though you know he fucks you harder, touches you more, more, when you act out. Misbehave. 

“Kiss me?” He taunts, words abrasive. Strident. Scrubbing hard against your skin. “Ain't that jus’ the sweetest thing I ever ‘eard.” 

You burn, blister. “Please—”

“Reckon I ought to. Kissed your pretty cunt ‘fore I even kissed your lips, huh, pet?” 

Your chest folds over itself. Stomach knotting. Balling tight. Unease is a razor blade scraping your nerves. 

“Simon—”

“Ah, ah—” his hand tightens. Vicious. Chiding. “You ‘aven’t earned the privilege of sayin’ my name, ‘ave you? Cheeky thing. Might ‘ave to take a cane to you next.” 

“No, no, no—! I'm—”

“Sorry?” He mocks, cocking his head. Condescension drips from the corners of his eyes. 

“Please, sir—”

“Dad is gettin’ tired of this attitude of yours, pet—” his fingers dig into your skin, hard. Biting. A warning, you know. The blunt press of a blade to your jugular. But it thrums along the suture line to your desire, a wellspool of murk coiling low in your guts. You throb, cunt clenching down around nothing. Achingly empty. “Thought we got rid of it this time ‘round. Learned our lesson.”

The words are frank, prosaic. Had you any sense of self still malingering in the back of your head, you might have struck him for the blatant disrespect. But as you struggle to reach for it, pawing around in the vacuous abyss for any fragment of who you were before this, before him, you know—without any doubt—that none exists. Nothing. He’s too ingrained in your marrow, hewn into your skin. Copper sutures holding his filament within you. Cradled between your thighs, nestled in the rotting vacancy of your heart. 

He knows you. Every part—

“We did—we did, da—daddy, please—” 

It’s shallow. Muffled, like he’s trying to swallow it down, but you feel it rumble through his broad chest. A guttural sound. A groan. Drenched in pleasure, in want. So thick, you could almost taste it. 

He hides his need under a layer of derision. 

“Such a needy thing, ain't you? Desperate little slag like you wouldn't last out there, would you?” 

His hand digs into your hip, pushing you off of his thigh. Eyes skewering into the wet stain on his trousers. A huff spills out—the sound a near perfect mimicry of crushing charcoal in your hand. 

“No. You'd be eaten alive. Torn to pieces. World's too big for somethin' like you.”

Mindless, dazed, you nod. Arching into him. The leather leash snaps against your chest. “Yes, yes—”

His cock presses into your thigh, hard, fat. Your mouth waters. Drool dribbles down your chin. 

He smells of tinder when he leans in close, blood drenched words biting into your skin. “messy today, aren't you? Be lost without me. Tha’s why you wear a collar, isn't it?”

Pitifully, you nod. Eyes full of tears. Each word is a bludgeon into your resolve. Into your sense of self. 

But it earns you his affection, and his thumb presses into the corner of your mouth, unhinging your jaw until it falls open, lax. He holds you like that, mouth lax with his hand still around your neck. The other lifts away from your lips, goes to the thick band around the bridge of his nose, slips inside. 

There's no buildup to it. No lingering sense of anticipation. Practical, detached, he merely tugs it down, and lets it snap under his chin. 

Your breath is punched out of your lungs at the sight of him. Barefaced. Scarred. His nose is crooked; a jagged hook with scar tissue delineating the spots where it's been broken too many times. His lips are—

Full. 

Mangled. 

Scars run in thick slashes over them, denting the flesh in places. Burn marks line his pale flesh. Charcoal rubs into his eyes, highlighting the whites of his lashes against smeared soot. 

He's—

Pretty. 

Like a car crash. Calamity. The broken remains of a town after a hurricane, a tornado, ripped it apart. Ugly, brutal. His face looks like it's been mauled by a bear, a tiger. Scarred and hideous, and—

You shiver. His eyes drop, landing on your own lips. The soot on his brow flutters down, lands on his eyelashes when he lifts his brow up mockingly. Derision curdling an awful smirk on the corner of his mouth. Crooked. Like him. Like his teeth. His nose. His boxy jaw. His lips—

You kiss him. 

Can't help yourself, really. There's a pull. Gravitational. Magnetic. You need, need, to taste him. To quench this ache in your jaw that makes you want to wrap your tongue around something, play with it between your teeth. Soft and sweet—

Ghost's lips are plump beneath yours. The thick scar tissue is almost velveteen when it glides over your bottom lip. You moan into it, into the feeling; victory—however pyrrhic—swims like mercury in your veins. Finally. 

And he doesn't kiss you back. Doesn't make any effort to reciprocate at all, but he's not tense beneath you. Not stunned. Or reluctant. He’s pliant. Malleable. Agreeable, willing to let you devour his mouth, his taste, as much as you want. Doting. Letting you spoil yourself on him. With him.

Because you need him, don't you? 

Like the air you breathe. The food he gives you—apples, always, on rainy days; salmon and rice in a pretty bowl with your name etched into the porcelain—and the attention, the affection—

(suck my cock, pretty girl. don't make me put a gag on you—deeper, you can take it, can't you? take my fat cock all the way up inside your sweet little cunt—my pretty girl—)

—it’s all so divine. 

His hands on your body, your throat, spasm. Once. Just once. Against your leg, his cock twitches. Leaks prespend into the demin. You rut against his thigh, aching for it. Whimpering—

And then he's groaning into the kiss, snarling out your name until it wedges between your lungs, syphoned in from his scorching breath. Another brand in the shape of him. 

Ghost kisses the same way he eats—messy, sloppy; all teeth and tongue, and full pretty lips. Clumsy, like no one taught him how to properly hold his silverware and he's trying to mock what he saw on television. Brumish. A broken, contemptuous pastiche of sumptuosity. A starving dog, snarling around its plundered morsel. Protective. Possessive. 

It coils around you. Thick, smothering. 

He sucks your tongue into his mouth, catching it between his teeth. The sting brings tears to the corner of your eyes, and when you pry them open, you find him already staring at you (always, always, always—), lidded. Heavy pools of desire shaded in the brume of a winter dawn. A bonfire flickering in the distance of a whiteout. Sanctuary from the cold—

He seems to catch himself. Expression flickering. Warbling around the edges. It closes off in a blink. He pulls back. Locks into the ashlar veneer of this indifference he wears like a suit of armour. 

But you saw it. It was there. Within reach—

“Need me, don't you?” He drawls, timber a needlepoint between cruelty and desire. Sultry, low. Husky. He knows what it does to you. How he can unravel you at the seams with just his voice alone. “Need me so fuckin’ much, pet. Would be lost without me—”

“Please, Simon,” you whisper, feather-soft. Cunt throbbing, pulsing. Needy. “Please—”

The strident reprimand for using his name doesn't come. His hand tightens around your throat, unconscious. A paroxysm that has pleasure carving itself down your spine, electric. 

“Come get it, then,” he rasps, voice wrecked. Raw. Curling at the edges, thickening his accent until the words elide. 

Hand to your throat, he drags you close. Closer still. Keeps you sat pretty on his lap as he pulls you in for a bruising, hungry kiss. Tongue shoving between your teeth when you gasp.

His kisses are always hungry, but this is different. Greedy. He devours you whole. Eats you alive. His hand falls to your lower back, holding you tight to his chest.

You moan into it, fingers digging into the fabric of his shirt. Squeezing until your knuckles blanche, joints twinging in discomfort. 

After months of nothing, this alone is bliss. His taste soaking onto your tongue, drenching it in the bitter tang of sage, wheatgrass, and stale cigarettes. Intoxicating. It leaks into you, nocuous. Infects from the inside out. 

His plan coming to fruition, you think. What he sought out to do all along, ever since you wandered close to this untameable Tartarean guard, and offered yourself up to the jowls of a starving beast. 

He pulls away with a heavy breath, eyes charing around the edges; brittle briquette. 

“Gonna be a good girl from now on? Come upstairs, be a good mum for dad? Or am I gonna ‘ave to cane this—” his hand drops, grabbing a fistful of your ass in his hand, fingers digging into the skin between your cheeks. Possessive. It cracks like a whip down your nerves. “—tight lit’le arse?”

You shake your head instantly. Quickly. “I'll be good,” you whisper into his chin, tongue flicking out to lick across his scars. The dried sweat on his skin tastes briny. Reminds you of the ocean on a brumous November evening. The incipient yawn of a ravenous hurricane gathering its lot on the shore. 

Sirens blare in the distance. Fear curdles in your guts, sits heavy like a stone. An anchor. 

“So sweet f’me,” he mutters, words deepening as his head falls back, letting you pepper kisses across the underside of his jaw. Mouthing along the constellation of scars. His voice is rumble. It shivers across your lips, tongue. Shakes the marrow in your bones. “Better stay this way, pet.”

Into his pulse, you murmur, “I think you like it better when I’m bad.” 

You can feel the snarl brimming in the back of his throat. Your ass stings with the phantom burn of when he lashed out with the whip. It drags a whimper out from deep within your chest. 

His hand tightens around your neck. A warning. “Got some guests over f’dinner tonight. Would love to finally introduce them to my sweet little wife—” deft fingers slip across the dewy skin of your folds, knuckles grazing over your drenched hole. The touch makes you squirm. “But if you’re gonna be bad, then I’ll leave you locked up down ‘ere.”

“I’ll be good,” you swear, words a hushed breath over his jugular. His finger flattens, drawls soft, slow circles around your clit. “Ah, I’ll—I’ll be so, so good, Simon—”

“Good girls deserve rewards, don’t they?” His palm flexes possessively around your throat when you nip at old scar tissue. “Maybe I’ll let you sleep in our bed tonight instead of in your dog house. We can ‘ouse together. I’ll fuck you proper—” he roughly shoves two fingers into your hole, leering when you gasp, back arching in a bow. “Know this pretty pussy has been achin’ for me, ‘asn’t it? Gonna breed it full—”

There’s static in your head, ringing in your ear. The noise distorted, pulled underwater. You think you say something, plead—no, no, no, anything but that—but his hand tightens around your throat, fingers pushing up, up into you, notching against that spot inside that makes your head swim, your vision flicker. The abyssal chasm inside of you aches, rages; its waters swell, currents frothing, slamming against the ceiling of its iron prison, and—

Simon pulls away. Fingers stilling inside of you. No friction, no relief. Hypoxia renders the world silent. Muted. Held in stasis, stagnating at the edge of a gaping precipice he holds you over, secured by the fragile curve of your neck, fine bone china. 

Phosphenes swim by. The chossy wobbles.

This distance is agony. You need to be closer, closer, to crawl inside of him, to live in the brackets of his ribs, safe and protected from the world he warns you about. Stone cold. You mewl, whine—

“Gonna be my good little wife?”

Gasping with broken lungs, you nod. Nod, nod until you’re nauseous. Dizzy. Sick—

His spit cools on your lip. Your hackles raise, body shuddering in revulsion—some primal part rears, hisses it’s infectious. Wrong. Get rid of it—

“Not gonna run?”

Slowly, you lick your lips, catching his sickness on your tongue. Swallowing it down until it sinks like a stone to the bottom of your belly. Heavy, for such a small, damning thing. 

How absurd, you think. How absolutely mad. 

Then you whisper, paperthin, “kiss me again, please, Simon—”

And he moves. Liquid in the gloam. Made more for shadows, midnight, than for golden apricity, where the light is harsh on his face, unveiling ruins and ravines; monoliths meant to be paid tribute to in the dark. Your hands lift to his jaw when he moves in, catching your lips in a bruising, biting kiss. 

His touch is searing. Owning. He isn't laying claim: no, you're already his. 

It's possessive and angry. No finesse. All slate teeth and tender tongue. They slide together in a strange game; little fawn stupidly nipping at the tiger's heel. He lets you, groaning into your mouth when you arch back, hips pushing into his fingers, taking him deeper. A pale pantomime of what's to come when he lays you on his soft bed, sweet and divine, and buries himself deep. 

It should scare you. Ought to. And maybe it does. Survival, you think, but you still pull him closer. Deeper. Because it’s bliss, you find. The world around you falling dead. Silent. Pulled into a vacuum. Teetering on the edge of a black hole, event horizon. He drags you in. 

Simon hums, pulling you closer. Touching you—soft, sweet. Palms a gyve. Shackles, chains. His fingers lift from your neck, trailing down the slope of your throat until he reaches the golden loop of your collar's hook. His gaze glides, magmatic, down to where your leash dangles between your heaving breasts.

It's almost tender when he grabs it into his fist. When he pulls, pulls—

Your back arching. His fingers slipping deeper inside your cunt. Obedient little doll.

When he lifts his eyes, the look you find is hot enough to char bone. You taste blood in the back of your throat—

Into the seam of your mouth, he purrs, “good girl.”

—and you swallow it down with a moan. 

(after all, you know better than to run from starving dogs—)