#washing machine reviews

[moregraceful]

my eyeballs hurt so bad man i'm so over this biome

[exculis]

and i believe i have found my salad spinner

[other-peoples-coats]

great big meteor strikes earth 2k23 or whatever, please.

[alfamangle]

alfa you being an eye avatar makes Sense. you are simply assigned smartass <3

uquiz assigned people watcher :pensive:

[chasejlondon]

I'm excited to be trying out the NEW Fairy Outdoorable Cherry Blossom & Nordic Cotton Fabric Softener

• A dreamy Nordic Cotton & Cherry Blossom scent

• Unique SolarDry™ technology to give your laundry the freshness of drying outside wherever you dry 🌞

• Dermatologically tested and hypoallergenic

• Contains musty odour protection for lasting freshness

• Fairy was voted No. 1 laundry brand for sensitive skin* and was awarded the Skin Health Alliance seal of approval

#ad #FairyDreamyFresh #savvycircle @supersavvymeofficial @joyofclean #fabricsoftener #laundry #cleaning #washingmachine #outdoorable #cleaningcommunity #washing #cleaningmotivation #cleanfluence #sensitive #smellssogood #laundryproducts #smellsincredible #fairysoft #fairy #newfavourite #lovetoclean #cleanfreak

[marshmellowtea]

stop trying to joke with me i'm genuinely about to bomb the fucking rental office

[luveline]

hi! i just remembered a scene from friends where chandler says to monica it's ok she's high maintenance cause he likes maintaining her and i think this is soooo spencer and bombshell!reader coded. you're ok with writing this as a request? love u jadey

ty (ily)!! fem!reader

Spencer’s feet ache dully with each step he takes, but you have your hand in his, and you’re pulling him along with a smile. Your smile could cure anything, he thinks stupidly. It’s completely outside of his beliefs, goes against every book on medicine he’s ever read. 

“Why are you frowning?” you ask, swinging his hand as you turn the corner together. 

“I’m not.” 

You step closer, arm stuck to his arm, nearly one body walking together against the summer breeze. “You’re frowning, Spence. You have a very obvious pout. It is so so cute.” You lean in to kiss him quickly, his heart turning to a pitter-patter under his ribs. 

“I’m tired,” he explains, not wanting you to think his bad mood has anything to do with you. 

“You’ve had a long day, that’s why. When we get back to your place I’ll give you an incredible foot massage and everything will be okay again.” 

“I don’t want a foot massage. My feet don’t even hurt,” he lies.

“Don’t bother.” You untangle your fingers from his and wave him away. “I know all your tells, baby boy,” —he laughs through a wrinkled nose— “nothing gets past me.” 

“Why’d you choose a dry cleaners so far from your apartment?” he asks. You could’ve picked the one beside work, which has a yellow pages worth of fantastic reviews. The one second closest to his place is new but raved about at length. This dry cleaners is nearly twenty-five blocks away.

“They do things exactly how I like it, I guess. I never have to worry about it when I give them my best clothes, and it’s kind of expensive if they were to accidentally ruin something, right?” You have expensive taste; you like things sturdy, fitted, and fashionable. 

“Do you think I should get someone to do my laundry?” he asks. 

“You can afford it. But maybe not. There’s nothing wrong with your own washing machine and a steamer.” You side eye him carefully. “Maybe I’m over the top.” 

“You’re high maintenance,” he agrees. “Is it expensive, getting your clothes dry cleaned all the time? I could pay for that.” 

“What? Why would you pay for it?” 

“‘Cos we’re together?” He’s more worried than dry about it. “I’d like to pay for your manicures and your hair, too, but I didn’t think you’d let me.”

“And I won’t… s’kind of nice you want to though. Really nice, um.” You’re blinking funny. “I think that’s more of a husband thing. You really want to pay for me to get manicures?” 

Spencer pays for lots of your stuff because he loves you. Good food mostly, but treats, clothes, anything he might think you’re interested in, actually. He likes to spoil you. You tend to spoil him back, if not with money then affection. “I like maintaining you.” 

You curl your arm through his. “That’s a funny way to say it.” 

He laughs at your obvious delight. “I like taking care of you,” he admits. “You like being high maintenance, it makes you happy, and I like making you happy.” 

“Thank you very much,” you say, softer now as your hand works up his neck and you turn his face to you, the sidewalk and the streetlines melting away under your warm touch. “You make me happier than you know.” 

His cheeks turn pink. He doesn’t need to see himself to confirm. It’s a high statistical probability. 

“Kiss?” you ask, voice still soft. 

Spencer walks you back nearer to the side of a building and out of the way, his hands at your neck and waist as he leans down just a touch to close your gap. He acts selfishly, perhaps, taking your hand from his face in order to hold yours in both of his without anything in the way of it. He kisses, he breathes you in, his head tilting more heavily to the side as the kiss lengthens, lingers. You’re like a flower in his hand, blooming slowly under the effects of a little heat. 

“What if you pay for my dry cleaning,” you begin, a smile evident in your voice though Spencer keeps his eyes closed. Tracing the hill of your cheek with his fingers just a moment longer. “And I pay for yours?” 

Spencer thumbs along your jaw. “I don’t want anything from you, just you.” 

“Well, what if I treat us to some Indian takeout tonight?” you ask. “Would you eat that? Or am I enough to sustain you, my love?” 

He could enjoy being taken care of in turn, he thinks. 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Autoenshittification

Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car’s digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare — but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it’s a dream they can’t give up on.

Your car is stuffed full of microchips, a fact the world came to appreciate after the pandemic struck and auto production ground to a halt due to chip shortages. Of course, that wasn’t the whole story: when the pandemic started, the automakers panicked and canceled their chip orders, only to immediately regret that decision and place new orders.

But it was too late: semiconductor production had taken a serious body-blow, and when Big Car placed its new chip orders, it went to the back of a long, slow-moving line. It was a catastrophic bungle: microchips are so integral to car production that a car is basically a computer network on wheels that you stick your fragile human body into and pray.

The car manufacturers got so desperate for chips that they started buying up washing machines for the microchips in them, extracting the chips and discarding the washing machines like some absurdo-dystopian cyberpunk walnut-shelling machine:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/desperate-times-companies-buy-washing-machines-just-to-rip-out-the-chips-187033.html

These digital systems are a huge problem for the car companies. They are the underlying cause of a precipitous decline in car quality. From touch-based digital door-locks to networked sensors and cameras, every digital system in your car is a source of endless repair nightmares, costly recalls and cybersecurity vulnerabilities:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/quality-new-vehicles-us-declining-more-tech-use-study-shows-2023-06-22/

What’s more, drivers hate all the digital bullshit, from the janky touchscreens to the shitty, wildly insecure apps. Digital systems are drivers’ most significant point of dissatisfaction with the automakers’ products:

https://www.theverge.com/23801545/car-infotainment-customer-satisifaction-survey-jd-power

Even the automakers sorta-kinda admit that this is a problem. Back in 2020 when Massachusetts was having a Right-to-Repair ballot initiative, Big Car ran these unfuckingbelievable scare ads that basically said, “Your car spies on you so comprehensively that giving anyone else access to its systems will let murderers stalk you to your home and kill you:

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

But even amid all the complaining about cars getting stuck in the Internet of Shit, there’s still not much discussion of why the car-makers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe, and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips. Are car execs just the latest generation of rubes who’ve been suckered by Silicon Valley bullshit and convinced that apps are a magic path to profitability?

Nope. Car execs are sophisticated businesspeople, and they’re surfing capitalism’s latest — and last — hot trend: dismantling capitalism itself.

Now, leftists have been predicting the death of capitalism since The Communist Manifesto, but even Marx and Engels warned us not to get too frisky: capitalism, they wrote, is endlessly creative, constantly reinventing itself, re-emerging from each crisis in a new form that is perfectly adapted to the post-crisis reality:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html

But capitalism has finally run out of gas. In his forthcoming book, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis proposes that capitalism has died — but it wasn’t replaced by socialism. Rather, capitalism has given way to feudalism:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781847927279

Under capitalism, capital is the prime mover. The people who own and mobilize capital — the capitalists — organize the economy and take the lion’s share of its returns. But it wasn’t always this way: for hundreds of years, European civilization was dominated by rents, not markets.

A “rent” is income that you get from owning something that other people need to produce value. Think of renting out a house you own: not only do you get paid when someone pays you to live there, you also get the benefit of rising property values, which are the result of the work that all the other homeowners, business owners, and residents do to make the neighborhood more valuable.

The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the “passive income” that landowners got from taxing their serfs’ harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income — and lots of it.

Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The “free market” of Adam Smith wasn’t a market that was free from regulation — it was a market free from rents. The reason Smith railed against monopolists is because he (correctly) understood that once a monopoly emerged, it would become a chokepoint through which a rentier could cream off the profits he considered the capitalist’s due:

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

Today, we live in a rentier’s paradise. People don’t aspire to create value — they aspire to capture it. In Survival of the Richest, Doug Rushkoff calls this “going meta”: don’t provide a service, just figure out a way to interpose yourself between the provider and the customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Don’t drive a cab, create Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don’t found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders. Go meta.

This is your brain on the four-hour-work-week, passive income mind-virus. In Techno Feudalism, Varoufakis deftly describes how the new “Cloud Capital” has created a new generation of rentiers, and how they have become the richest, most powerful people in human history.

Shopping at Amazon is like visiting a bustling city center full of stores — but each of those stores’ owners has to pay the majority of every sale to a feudal landlord, Emperor Jeff Bezos, who also decides which goods they can sell and where they must appear on the shelves. Amazon is full of capitalists, but it is not a capitalist enterprise. It’s a feudal one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is the reason that automakers are willing to enshittify their products so comprehensively: they were one of the first industries to decouple rents from profits. Recall that the reason that Big Car needed billions in bailouts in 2008 is that they’d reinvented themselves as loan-sharks who incidentally made cars, lending money to car-buyers and then “securitizing” the loans so they could be traded in the capital markets.

Even though this strategy brought the car companies to the brink of ruin, it paid off in the long run. The car makers got billions in public money, paid their execs massive bonuses, gave billions to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, smashed their unions, fucked their pensioned workers, and shipped jobs anywhere they could pollute and murder their workforce with impunity.

Car companies are on the forefront of postcapitalism, and they understand that digital is the key to rent-extraction. Remember when BMW announced that it was going to rent you the seatwarmer in your own fucking car?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big-river/#beemers

Not to be outdone, Mercedes announced that they were going to rent you your car’s accelerator pedal, charging an extra $1200/year to unlock a fully functional acceleration curve:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price

This is the urinary tract infection business model: without digitization, all your car’s value flowed in a healthy stream. But once the car-makers add semiconductors, each one of those features comes out in a painful, burning dribble, with every button on that fakakta touchscreen wired directly into your credit-card.

But it’s just for starters. Computers are malleable. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing Complete Von Neumann Machine, which can run every program we know how to write. Once they add networked computers to your car, the Car Lords can endlessly twiddle the knobs on the back end, finding new ways to extract value from you:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

That means that your car can track your every movement, and sell your location data to anyone and everyone, from marketers to bounty-hunters looking to collect fees for tracking down people who travel out of state for abortions to cops to foreign spies:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7enex/tool-shows-if-car-selling-data-privacy4cars-vehicle-privacy-report

Digitization supercharges financialization. It lets car-makers offer subprime auto-loans to desperate, poor people and then killswitch their cars if they miss a payment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s

Subprime lending for cars would be a terrible business without computers, but digitization makes it a great source of feudal rents. Car dealers can originate loans to people with teaser rates that quickly blow up into payments the dealer knows their customer can’t afford. Then they repo the car and sell it to another desperate person, and another, and another:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/27/boricua/#looking-for-the-joke-with-a-microscope

Digitization also opens up more exotic options. Some subprime cars have secondary control systems wired into their entertainment system: miss a payment and your car radio flips to full volume and bellows an unstoppable, unmutable stream of threats. Tesla does one better: your car will lock and immobilize itself, then blare its horn and back out of its parking spot when the repo man arrives:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

Digital feudalism hasn’t stopped innovating — it’s just stopped innovating good things. The digital device is an endless source of sadistic novelties, like the cellphones that disable your most-used app the first day you’re late on a payment, then work their way down the other apps you rely on for every day you’re late:

https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/

Usurers have always relied on this kind of imaginative intimidation. The loan-shark’s arm-breaker knows you’re never going to get off the hook; his goal is in intimidating you into paying his boss first, liquidating your house and your kid’s college fund and your wedding ring before you default and he throws you off a building.

Thanks to the malleability of computerized systems, digital arm-breakers have an endless array of options they can deploy to motivate you into paying them first, no matter what it costs you:

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

Car-makers are trailblazers in imaginative rent-extraction. Take VIN-locking: this is the practice of adding cheap microchips to engine components that communicate with the car’s overall network. After a new part is installed in your car, your car’s computer does a complex cryptographic handshake with the part that requires an unlock code provided by an authorized technician. If the code isn’t entered, the car refuses to use that part.

VIN-locking has exploded in popularity. It’s in your iPhone, preventing you from using refurb or third-party replacement parts:

https://doctorow.medium.com/apples-cement-overshoes-329856288d13

It’s in fuckin’ ventilators, which was a nightmare during lockdown as hospital techs nursed their precious ventilators along by swapping parts from dead systems into serviceable ones:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3azv9b/why-repair-techs-are-hacking-ventilators-with-diy-dongles-from-poland

And of course, it’s in tractors, along with other forms of remote killswitch. Remember that feelgood story about John Deere bricking the looted Ukrainian tractors whose snitch-chips showed they’d been relocated to Russia?

https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8

That wasn’t a happy story — it was a cautionary tale. After all, John Deere now controls the majority of the world’s agricultural future, and they’ve boobytrapped those ubiquitous tractors with killswitches that can be activated by anyone who hacks, takes over, or suborns Deere or its dealerships.

Control over repair isn’t limited to gouging customers on parts and service. When a company gets to decide whether your device can be fixed, it can fuck you over in all kinds of ways. Back in 2019, Tim Apple told his shareholders to expect lower revenues because people were opting to fix their phones rather than replace them:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/

By usurping your right to decide who fixes your phone, Apple gets to decide whether you can fix it, or whether you must replace it. Problem solved — and not just for Apple, but for car makers, tractor makers, ventilator makers and more. Apple leads on this, even ahead of Big Car, pioneering a “recycling” program that sees trade-in phones shredded so they can’t possibly be diverted from an e-waste dump and mined for parts:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks

John Deere isn’t sleeping on this. They’ve come up with a valuable treasure they extract when they win the Right-to-Repair: Deere singles out farmers who complain about its policies and refuses to repair their tractors, stranding them with six-figure, two-ton paperweight:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

The repair wars are just a skirmish in a vast, invisible fight that’s been waged for decades: the War On General-Purpose Computing, where tech companies use the law to make it illegal for you to reconfigure your devices so they serve you, rather than their shareholders:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

The force behind this army is vast and grows larger every day. General purpose computers are antithetical to technofeudalism — all the rents extracted by technofeudalists would go away if others (tinkereres, co-ops, even capitalists!) were allowed to reconfigure our devices so they serve us.

You’ve probably noticed the skirmishes with inkjet printer makers, who can only force you to buy their ink at 20,000% markups if they can stop you from deciding how your printer is configured:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty But we’re also fighting against insulin pump makers, who want to turn people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/10/loopers/#hp-ification

And companies that make powered wheelchairs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/08/chair-ish/#r2r

These companies start with people who have the least agency and social power and wreck their lives, then work their way up the privilege gradient, coming for everyone else. It’s called the “shitty technology adoption curve”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Technofeudalism is the public-private-partnership from hell, emerging from a combination of state and private action. On the one hand, bailing out bankers and big business (rather than workers) after the 2008 crash and the covid lockdown decoupled income from profits. Companies spent billions more than they earned were still wildly profitable, thanks to those public funds.

But there’s also a policy dimension here. Some of those rentiers’ billions were mobilized to both deconstruct antitrust law (allowing bigger and bigger companies and cartels) and to expand “IP” law, turning “IP” into a toolsuite for controlling the conduct of a firm’s competitors, critics and customers:

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

IP is key to understanding the rise of technofeudalism. The same malleability that allows companies to “twiddle” the knobs on their services and keep us on the hook as they reel us in would hypothetically allow us to countertwiddle, seizing the means of computation:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

The thing that stands between you and an alternative app store, an interoperable social media network that you can escape to while continuing to message the friends you left behind, or a car that anyone can fix or unlock features for is IP, not technology. Under capitalism, that technology would already exist, because capitalists have no loyalty to one another and view each other’s margins as their own opportunities.

But under technofeudalism, control comes from rents (owning things), not profits (selling things). The capitalist who wants to participate in your iPhone’s “ecosystem” has to make apps and submit them to Apple, along with 30% of their lifetime revenues — they don’t get to sell you jailbreaking kit that lets you choose their app store.

Rent-seeking technology has a holy grail: control over “ring zero” — the ability to compel you to configure your computer to a feudalist’s specifications, and to verify that you haven’t altered your computer after it came into your possession:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/ring-minus-one/#drm-political-economy

For more than two decades, various would-be feudal lords and their court sorcerers have been pitching ways of doing this, of varying degrees of outlandishness.

At core, here’s what they envision: inside your computer, they will nest another computer, one that is designed to run a very simple set of programs, none of which can be altered once it leaves the factory. This computer — either a whole separate chip called a “Trusted Platform Module” or a region of your main processor called a secure enclave — can tally observations about your computer: which operating system, modules and programs it’s running.

Then it can cryptographically “sign” these observations, proving that they were made by a secure chip and not by something you could have modified. Then you can send this signed “attestation” to someone else, who can use it to determine how your computer is configured and thus whether to trust it. This is called “remote attestation.”

There are some cool things you can do with remote attestation: for example, two strangers playing a networked video game together can use attestations to make sure neither is running any cheat modules. Or you could require your cloud computing provider to use attestations that they aren’t stealing your data from the server you’re renting. Or if you suspect that your computer has been infected with malware, you can connect to someone else and send them an attestation that they can use to figure out whether you should trust it.

Today, there’s a cool remote attestation technology called “PrivacyPass” that replaces CAPTCHAs by having you prove to your own device that you are a human. When a server wants to make sure you’re a person, it sends a random number to your device, which signs that number along with its promise that it is acting on behalf of a human being, and sends it back. CAPTCHAs are all kinds of bad — bad for accessibility and privacy — and this is really great.

But the billions that have been thrown at remote attestation over the decades is only incidentally about solving CAPTCHAs or verifying your cloud server. The holy grail here is being able to make sure that you’re not running an ad-blocker. It’s being able to remotely verify that you haven’t disabled the bossware your employer requires. It’s the power to block someone from opening an Office365 doc with LibreOffice. It’s your boss’s ability to ensure that you haven’t modified your messaging client to disable disappearing messages before he sends you an auto-destructing memo ordering you to break the law.

And there’s a new remote attestation technology making the rounds: Google’s Web Environment Integrity, which will leverage Google’s dominance over browsers to allow websites to block users who run ad-blockers:

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity

There’s plenty else WEI can do (it would make detecting ad-fraud much easier), but for every legitimate use, there are a hundred ways this could be abused. It’s a technology purpose-built to allow rent extraction by stripping us of our right to technological self-determination.

Releasing a technology like this into a world where companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents is incredibly reckless and shortsighted. You want unauthorized bread? This is how you get Unauthorized Bread:

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

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

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

[Image ID: The interior of a luxury car. There is a dagger protruding from the steering wheel. The entertainment console has been replaced by the text 'You wouldn't download a car,' in MPAA scare-ad font. Outside of the windscreen looms the Matrix waterfall effect. Visible in the rear- and side-view mirror is the driver: the figure from Munch's 'Scream.' The screen behind the steering-wheel has been replaced by the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.']

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

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

[probablyasocialecologist]

Ending mass human deprivation and providing good lives for the whole world's population can be accomplished while at the same time achieving ecological objectives. This is demonstrated by a new study by the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) and the London School of Economics and Political Science, recently published in World Development Perspectives. About 80% of humanity cannot access necessary goods and services and lives below the threshold for "decent living." Some narratives claim that addressing this problem will require massive economic growth on a global scale, multiplying existing output many times over, which would exacerbate climate change and ecological breakdown. The authors of the new study dispute this claim and argue that human development does not require such a dangerous approach. Reviewing recent empirical research, they find that ending mass deprivation and provisioning decent living standards for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments. This would ensure that everyone in the world has access to nutritious food, modern housing, high-quality health care, education, electricity, induction stoves, sanitation systems, clothing, washing machines, refrigerators, heating/cooling systems, computers, mobile phones, internet, and transport, and could also include universal access to recreational facilities, theaters, and other public goods. The authors argue that, to achieve such a future, strategies for development should not pursue capitalist growth and increased aggregate production as such but should rather increase the specific forms of production that are necessary to improve capabilities and meet human needs at a high standard, while ensuring universal access to key goods and services through public provisioning and decommodification. In the Global South, this requires using industrial policy to increase economic sovereignty, develop industrial capacity, and organize production around human well-being. At the same time, in high-income countries, less-necessary production (of things like mansions, SUVs, private jets and fast fashion) must be scaled down to enable faster decarbonization and to help bring resource use back within planetary boundaries, as degrowth scholarship holds.

July 25 2024

[darkficsyouneveraskedfor]

Wicked Games 2

No tag lists. Do not send asks or DMs about updates. Review my pinned post for guidelines, masterlist, etc.

Warnings: non/dubcon, cheating, and other dark elements. My username actually says you never asked for any of this.

My warnings are not exhaustive but be aware this is a dark fic and may include potentially triggering topics. Please use your common sense when consuming content. I am not responsible for your decisions.

Character: Steve Rogers

Summary: you had a one night stand. Or did you?

As usual, I would appreciate any and all feedback. I’m happy to once more go on this adventure with all of you! Thank you in advance for your comments and for reblogging ❤️

You’re not ready but you have to be. The taxi ride doesn’t give you much time to get yourself together. You tip the driver and thank them before you get out to face the music.

The red brick building lures you back to reality. You barely get a step into the apartment before your name rings out. Barrett appears at the end of the hall and you shut the door.

You sigh and hang up your keys and purse. You keep your phone in your hand and face him. 

“Hey, I called work. Let them know I’d be starting late.” He sways at the threshold to the front room. He’s nervous, maybe even guilty. You ignore that tickle in the back of your head. 

You’re silent as you veer into the kitchen. He follows and looms behind you. He teeters in the doorway as you put your phone on the counter. You focus on making another coffee. 

“Are you feeling okay? You look tired.” He’s pandering just like he always does after a fight. He won’t apologise, he’ll just act like a dog with its tail between its legs. 

“Yeah, I’m tired. Exhausted. But don’t worry, I’ll make sure to wash my mug out.” 

You open the cupboard and take out a cup. He sniffs. “Honey, please, I swear, it wasn’t about the mug. I’m stressed and I miss you--” 

“So, you call me lazy? You yell at me?” You slam down the lid of the machine. The surge of anger quickly swells and erases the night already washed away with the vodka. “I told you, if you ever yell at me--” 

“I know, I know. It won’t happen again. I was emotional. I was stupid. I don’t know why I started it all. Really. I think...” he shakes his head and drops his chin. He looks up at you shyly and gives a sad smile. “I miss you. I guess having you mad at me is better than you ignoring me so--” 

“I wasn’t ignoring you. I asked for five minutes to change and you wouldn’t get off my back.” 

“Yeah.” He rubs his cheek and mopes. He stares at you and you stare back. You wait. The air roils between you as he thinks. You see the frantic glimmer in his eyes. “Oh, uh... I’m sorry?” 

“Are you apologising or are you just saying what I want to hear?” You challenge. 

“No, I’m sorry,” he says more firmly. 

“For?”  

His brows furrow and his lips part. “For... uh... babe... you know... what I did.” 

The machine quits grinding and you throw your hands up. You turn around and pour yourself a cup. You inhale the scent and it eases the hangover thumping in your skull. 

“Just go to work.” 

“Babe--” 

“Take some coffee, I don’t care,” you swipe up your phone and shuffle toward the other door. “But go. We need space.” 

He doesn’t speak until you reach the doorway, “I’m trying.” 

You don’t respond. You go to the bedroom and shut the door. You need a shower and sleep. You want to wash off yesterday and forget it all.  

You can hear Barrett in the kitchen. Your phone vibrates and you check the screen. You expect a call-in but find a text instead. It’s from a strange number. The message makes your heart skip. 

‘Last night was amazing. Would love to see you again. Let me know when’s good for you.’ 

Your hand shakes and you gape at the text. You tap your thumb to expand the options and hit the center; ‘block’. Last night did not happen. You put your coffee on the nightstand and chew your lip. 

As soon as the message swooshes away, another flies in. It’s Wendy; ‘hey, you good? You left before I woke up.’ 

Your blood slows and your head pulses. You have to sit down. You grimace at your phone. She doesn’t remember either. She has no idea you didn’t go back to her place. Good. That means it can all stay forgotten. 

You press reply and steady the phone with both hands. ‘Sorry, had to get back. Barrett called. Thanks for the night out.’ 

You hit send. As soon as your fingertips touches the screen, your stomach flips. You throw your phone on the bed and race to the door. You swing it open and scurry into the bathroom.

You hurl into the toilet as your husband calls from the kitchen, “babe? Everything okay? Want to me to stay home and take care of you?” 

You groan and lean your head on your arm. You heave and swallow back another wave of nausea.

“Just go!” You snarl back. 

Maybe it’s what he did. Maybe it’s what you can’t remember you did but you need him gone. You just need a chance to get your head straight and figure it all out.  Not just what happened or didn’t happen, but what’s going to happen next.

You can’t keep doing this with Barrett. This is the last fight you’re having about a goddamn dish. 

[bowlofsoob]

YEONJUN AS YOUR COLLEGE RA

yeonjun x gender neutral reader

strangers to friends to lovers, college setting

started out as you and yeonjun only communicating for things via dorm life but after a party breaks the ice you start to catch feelings for him after becoming friends with benefits

notes; idk if it’s different in other countries but RA means resident advisor and basically it’s the person in charge of your dorm floor and in charge of everyone

__________________ ׂׂૢ་༘࿐

The night was alive and the air was thick with multiple lights and smoke that you and the other students could have been underwater. It seems your roommates had gone all out with the smoke machines placed at the front of the dorm, blanketing it, as if it was a completely different world compared to the other silent dorms on the same floor.

You awkwardly nursed a cup of beer in your hands near the door as you anxiously wait for Yeonjun to arrive. It was stupid, but if you couldn’t have him you’d at least like to befriend him. Or take a body shot off of him. More so the latter.

“Hey,” you hear, a voice so low in your ear you almost jump and drench yourself in cheap beer.

“Hi,” you swallow, turning around and coming face to face with the man of your wet dreams.

You shove your drink into his hand, “Glad you could make it.”

“Wouldn’t miss the first party of the year,” Yeonjun lazily smiles, downing the cup in a second, not even flinching once.

A group of boys followed behind him, immediately running in and jumping to the music as Yeonjun stayed near you.

“Show me to the drinks,” Yeonjun hums, holding up two bottles he’d brought.

As you both walked deeper into the dorm you could hear the roar of the students and music thrumming straight through your body and into your eardrums. Bodies moved around you like sweaty gnats, the dim lights strung up on the walls being the only source of light guiding you through the hall beside Yeonjun, flickering between violets and hues of blue. It fit the theme perfectly for that night.

Once in the kitchen Yeonjun went to work pouring himself a drink.

“You want one of my famous drinks?” Yeonjun asks, rolling up his sleeves as he leans back on the counter.

“Famous?” you smile, “According to whom?”

A cold glass was shoved into your hand, liquid sloshing precariously against the edge. You brought the drink to your lips, the fizzling sensation causing a nostalgic feeling to wash over you. Yeonjun immediately drank one of his own, gulping it down as you cheered him on. He raised his arm above him once he was done.

“Pretty good, right?” he laughs, already working on another drink for you both.

It was at that moment you were ready to strip right then and there. There was something so intimate about you both being the only ones in the kitchen, red lights flickering every other second and illuminating Yeonjun’s sly smirk. His eyes on you.

“I suppose,” you shrug, “Get a couple more in me and we’ll see.”

“I like your vibe, Y/n,” Yeonjun hums, this time just making one drink and walking over to you. “I call this one the Lover’s Shot,” he slurs, bringing the glass to your lips.

“You use that line on everyone?” you question, letting Yeonjun tilt up your face with his finger and pour the concoction down your throat.

“Nah, specially curated for you,” Yeonjun answers, wiping the astray alcohol that missed your lip with his thumb.

“It’s…something,” you strain, the alcohol burning your throat, but not as much as Yeonjun’s eyes boring into yours.

“Not the best review but I’ll take it,” Yeonjun murmurs, placing an experimental hand on your waist. You try not to shriek as you feel your stomach churn.

You offer no words of protest as Yeonjun’s slender fingers slide underneath your top, caressing your bare skin.

Maybe it was the alcohol filtering your senses but a part of you wanted to make-believe that the entire campus’ crush wanted you too.

“I could show you something a bit tastier,” Yeonjun says, gently pinching your waist.

You feel hot.

“Yeah?” you manage to get out.

“Is this alright?” he innocently murmurs before kissing you on the corner of your mouth.

His breath against your cheek is soft and unimaginable.

“It is,” you answer before moving your head so his lips land on yours instead. You tried not to smile as you felt his pillowy lips upon yours, his other hand on the back of your neck as he tilted it.

The hairs on the back of your neck stand up as Yeonjun guides you and presses you against the counter, slipping a knee in between your legs as you reach over the tug on his hair.

“My room?” you slip out in between kisses.

“How about mine?” Yeonjun smiles, breath hot on your neck, “Nobody there to bother us.”

That was enough for you.

__________________ ׂׂૢ་༘࿐

the next morning and few weeks;

[riaki]

sick days ! gojo x reader ‧˚ - take a soda break…!

the rain outside your window is incessant.

it slides down the foggy glass panes in small rivulets that merge together and break apart, like the people outside on different paths of life. a sea of umbrellas moves like liquid in the streets below; a school of fish in a rainy city, under those fluorescent neons that shine like vibrant coral in the puddles of rain on the concrete.

there’s beauty even in the humid showers of tokyo, reflected in the broken lights and flickering signs; those food stalls full of warm life and fancy clothing stores that you always go in just to not buy anything, and best of all— the vending machines that dot the map.

watching raindrops race was one of your favorite hobbies as a kid. even now, you find yourself absentmindedly tracking the movements; the erratic nature of the blurry droplets as they slide down the glass makes you wonder if there’s hidden ridges on the panels that guide those watery paths.

your train of thought is rudely interrupted by another bout of coughing; that dry, itching feeling in your throat that you just can’t get rid of. drinking water to quell the cough has the same effect as telling your study buddy to stay focused for longer than five minutes. gojo is playing something on his phone again; a rhythm game, by the way he curses under his breath every time his fingers stutter and miss a beat.

you cover your mouth with your elbow, trying to expel the ghost dust that makes your breath hitch every time you try to speak, and he glances up at you, shifting in his seat. his lanky legs are cramped beneath the desktop; his frame doesn’t fit in your room. he has to duck when he enters, lest he hit his head like the first time he came over. like you, he has his head resting in his elbows. unlike you, he isn't ill with a fever so hot it burns cold and the stuffiness in your voice, and he also isn't studying.

"you sure you still wanna be reviewing? this exam doesn't really matter, y'know." gojo remarks, peering up at you from his arm pillow. "you should probably take a break, ’cus you look like shit."

he grins cheekily, pushing a pile of his papers and notes to the edge of the desk, where eraser shavings and broken bits of lead from when he couldn't solve a math problem are crammed. there's scratches and ink stains on the desk, a reminder of how you'd accidentally scribbled past the page’s edge in a sickness induced delirium. it’ll leave permanent marks; at this point you’re convinced you’re writing yourself a secret letter to the future. have you confessed to gojo yet? that’s what it’ll say. right now, it just says something unintelligible.

hopefully you’re still literate in the future, but you’re half-convinced you’re getting dumber every moment you spend caged in with this dunce of a genius.

you lean back in your chair, pulling your knee up to your chest. your pencil falls to the desk with a faint clack, soft yellow lamplight washing your faces warm as gojo scoots closer and peers over your shoulder at your progress. he has a pandora’s box of knowledge in that blue-tinted brain of his; he just refuses to apply it. it’s cocky, spoiled ego in the finest. you should hate him for it.

he snickers. "you're dumb."

"you missed forty-three notes." you countered, shooting him a glare as you point at the disappointed looking character next to a review of the stats from the song he was playing on his phone. gojo grimaces, pulling back like a sad little dog, floppy white hair covering his eyes.

"i was playing with my thumbs."

you ignore him, leaning against the wooden desk before hiding your face in your elbows again and letting out a long sigh. your hot breath curls up in the confines of your body, making you recoil slightly; uncomfortably. heat is the last thing you need with the fever you’re pretty sure you’re running.

"i hate being sick. and i hate studying. can we please give up?" you complained, glancing up at him out of the corner of your eye. your hair obscures your vision, so you can only see a faint glint of amusement in his azure irises as he studies you for a moment before scooting his chair back and standing up. without another word, he leaves the room.

wow. okay.

a moment of silence passes as you sit there, lamenting over your runny nose and the way you sound like you're about to cough a lung up every time you breathe, until you hear the soft sounds of his feet padding on the floorboards coupled with what you presume is ice clinking against glass, signaling his return. you lift your head, blinking blearily. each time you breathe in through your nose, your nostrils burn like dry ice pressed against your skin, only adding to your misery. the dreary weather outside isn't helping much, either.

the cold glass leaves a dark stain on the table, an uneven circle of condensation that soothes the aching in your fingers when your sick skin makes contact. gojo pops the can open, and you watch as he picks the glass up, tilting it to the side to pour the soda in.

“why are you holding it like that?” you asked curiously, a small yawn escaping your lips as you lean against the table. he glances down at you, a cheeky, tiny smile gracing his lips. the sound of bubbles fizzling and popping fills the cozy, cramped room; that cool, sweet liquid seems like the only thing that’ll cure your nasty cough.

“pouring it like this prevents the bubbles from escaping. you like it fizzy, don’t you?” he grins.

condensation clings to his fingers like morning dew upon flower petals as he sets the glass down. you watch the ice cubes bobble about in the soda, clinking against the cup like a mini wind chime. you’re sore from sitting in the same place with terrible posture for three hours, and there’s an ache between your fingers from gripping your pencil tight while you write.

you take a sip from the glass, letting out a contented sigh as the refreshing liquid drains down your scratchy throat. it’s not lemon honey tea for a cold, but it certainly helps. next to you, gojo takes his seat again, grabbing the throw blanket on your bed and tossing it over his legs before he grabs his pencil again. he’s using one of those short pencils, shaved down to a stub from months of use. you always offer him a mechanical pencil, but he refuses.

you sit there, waiting for him to get back to work before you realize he’s staring at you, legs crossed beneath the fuzzy blanket.

you frowned, shifting to face him as you lean against the desk. “what?”

“you’ll take care of me if i get sick too, right?” he tilts his head, like a curious bird.

“why would you get sick?”

you’re too relate to react when he makes a mad grab for your glass of soda, holding it out of your reach. a few droplets spill out and spatter onto your notebook, forcing a sigh from your lips.

“gojo…” you groaned, rubbing your temple with your fingers and praying for strength.

he just smirks, taking a lengthy sip. you watch his adam’s apple bob as a bit of condensation builds on his chin and trickles down his throat.

“you know what? i dont feel like studying either.” he announces, setting the glass back down on the wooden table with a loud thunk.

“so? what do you wanna do?” you huffed petulantly.

“download project sekai, and we can do a co-op live.”

“…you’re kidding.”

[lisafication]

Digging Graves for your Morals; Or, The Ethical Problem of Outlawry

Hello, yes, I am here again. This one is shorter, I swear (it’s under four thousand words, even). If this is the first post from me you’re seeing, this is a follow-up to my prior essay posted here on the game The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, although it should be able to mostly stand alone.

At the end of my last essay, I touched on both the game’s nearly uncompromising moral scepticism and relativity, but I didn’t really dig into it. I outlined that the game only textually frames actions as ‘morally bad’ in the context of a morality set by the society and the world that has treated them as no better than farm animals raised for the slaughter. Well, I have a lot to say on the topic of ethics on the topic of The Coffin of Andy and Leyley, so buckle in, this one’s going to talk about the social contract, moral scepticism and everyone’s favourite topic: Mrs. Graves.

As usual, this was originally posted and formatted for on Sufficient Velocity and you can perhaps more easily read it there. Spoilers abound, and my content warning from last time still applies.

She’s not too hot on either ethics or her mother

The Meat of the Matter

Since a lot of this is optional or otherwise missable information, let’s review the premise the game gives us. If you’re already aware of all of this, I apologise, it won’t take long.

First off the bat, the quarantine at the start of the game was a hoax-driven money-making scheme of which you can pick up more-or-less all the relevant details of. This is entirely missable and by the time it’s possible to discover, our protagonists have better things to dwell on and have dialogue about, so I’ll give you a summary of what you can deduce from reading the notes and thinking about it.

The quarantine is an organ harvesting operation, as per some documents you can discover in the wardens’ office. They entrap the residents, test their blood types and starve to death those they deem surplus to requirements — alternatively the starvation itself could be their method of ‘preparing the harvest’, there’s evidence in both directions and it hardly matters — harvesting the organs of the others for sale. As our protagonists are AB-typed, the ‘universal recipient’ or ‘most selfish blood type’, they’re some of the first on the chopping block.

If you read through the newspapers and the documents in Mr. Washing Machine’s car, you can discover that ultimately ToxiSoda are responsible, and a similar thing is happening in a different city under the guise of a ‘chemical leak’.  Should you further investigate matters, you will find mentions of the ‘man behind it all’, the doctor, or the Surgeon, as the fandom have been referring to him — you may recall Mrs. Graves mentioned someone similar! Yeah, he’s the guy who runs ToxiSoda, who are themselves partners with the water company that faked the parasite outbreak in the first place.

It’s all a life insurance scam, apparently

How much the details of the operation matter is something open to interpretation — it might just be something for players to figure out and Episode 3 will not cover the Surgeon at all, or he might play a major part; it's not particularly relevant to this essay. What matters is that it happened at all — indeed, it’s fairly easy to justify Ashley and Andrew in everything they did in Episode 1 (flashbacks aside), arguing that if they’d made any other decisions they’d have died — an argument that the victims dug their own graves, even if the Graves siblings put them in them. How correct that is is a matter of debate, but that you can make the argument at all matters, and we’ll be returning to this later. In my last essay (and again in the introduction here), I made an analogy to farm animals, raised without love and for slaughter. Let’s put a pin in the ‘for slaughter’ part for now and take a look at the ‘without love’ part. 

That’s right, it’s time to meet the parents.

As Andrew notes, there are significantly more compelling reasons for you to say that

They Fuck You Up, Your Mum & Dad

They really do. 

Our charming protagonists are, as with many things depicted in this game, an exaggerated, almost farcical example of this phenomenon — one that’s just grounded enough to still feel very real, just like the siblings themselves. 

The late and lamentable Mrs. Graves is just the same: originally a teen mother, hopelessly out of depth with two difficult children — even if one was good at masking it — and an unreliable, emotionally unavailable (at least to their children) partner who can’t hold down a job, ends up foisting them off on each other and doing a Parental Negligence because she simply Cannot Cope. That’s the real part. The part where she gets paid off by an organ harvesting operation to leave them to die, that’s the borderline-farcical exaggeration that throws all the nooks and crannies of her character into sharp relief.

Mrs. Graves does not have a good relationship with either of her kids. Having self-admittedly fobbed the job of raising Ashley off on her son, to the degree that they did not even celebrate her birthday as kids, both of them hold differing degrees and types of resentment for her.

For Ashley, it’s hate — perhaps not quite so clear cut as that, as it’s her that calls for the eulogy and she shows some potential signs of discomfort while cleaning up her parents’ corpses, but by and large, it’s fairly simple and straightforward, as usual for Ashley. The sentiment is not exactly unreturned, either.

This brings Ashley’s heart great delight!

The most clear incident raising her from everyday ‘neglectful’ to ‘wow she wanted nothing to do with this kid’ is the optional ‘birthday cake’ scene, obtained by finding the present in Ashley’s first ‘transitory world’ dream, in which we see Ashley’s birthday  and the founding of a lemon cupcake tradition between Leyley and Andy. She has received nothing from her family, notes that her ‘friends’ would say they were busy before she even told them the schedule and Andy takes her out to buy cupcakes with his pocket money.

This scene gets a callback in Andrew’s dream later. Just remember to Ask Nicely, rather than Kill Her.

Parents of the year, everyone.

So with Ashley it’s as straightforward and obvious as she herself is — she hates her mother, her mother hates her. With Andrew, as with Andrew himself, it’s a fair bit more complicated. His mother is a much more nuanced figure, who is believable in her role as an unfortunate teen parent who was trying her best. He has a degree of trust in her against, seemingly, his own good judgment In her conversation with Andrew, she acknowledges her fault in raising him and seemingly sincerely tries to offer him a ‘way out’, an olive branch.

I think many people have had relationships where they might say this

This scene in particular intrigues me, because she is acknowledging fault in a way that Andrew strictly avoids doing — and well, there’s nothing Andrew likes more than a good way to avoid acknowledging any fault of his own. With her dominant relationship over their father as a model for Andrew to draw comparisons to his own relationship with Ashley with, it’s no surprise that the narrative resonates with him to the point of ‘Accept’ being many people’s first completion.

Of course, that’s not all there is to it. There is a fascinating contrast with her later conversation with Ashley, where she — despite accusing Ashley of brainwashing Andrew — refers to Leyley and Andy as ‘two psychos’ and states that she always knew they were responsible for Nina’s death and that, implicitly, they owe her for not turning them in. 

There's something about mother-daughter relationships here that I just do not have the time or reading to dig into, unfortunately.

Meanwhile, when Andrew interrogates her on her possession of their death certificates, she has… an interesting, plausible story about a life insurance scam and claims that she really did think they died in the fire, implicitly denying the claim that she sold them. It’s entirely possible that she’s describing the details of the ‘scam’ correctly — you can even buy that she genuinely does care for Andrew in some way, if not Ashley, but her claim about being an honest, grieving parent shocked at their deaths… doesn’t add up?

This is a very normal reaction to your supposedly dead children showing up in your house.

As Andrew himself notes after hearing her story, she’s full of shit. This gets into speculation, because there are a few ways to read this, but the most plausible ‘gist’ is that she and her partner were paid off in money and jobs to not raise a fuss — the surgeon she mentioned is almost certainly the founder of ToxiSoda, remember?

The overwhelming difference in presentation between how she speaks to Andrew and Ashley invites investigation — and when Andrew turns down her offer and tells her he isn’t interested in her offer in Decline, her reaction isn’t… despair, it’s shock — and well, there’s a good reason for that.

Why do you think she did it in the first place?

This is the happiest we see her

Well — it’s so she can finally fit into society. That white picket fence, that idyllic 1950s life — hell you can call it the American Dream. She wants that, or as close to it as she can get — the working-class teen mother, living in poverty, aspiring to the middle-class. It’s a very common, very real and very grounded motivation.

And to that end, she effectively sold off her children. It’s no wonder she can’t fathom why Andrew wouldn’t choose the same.

That’s the part that makes you think — just like the deaths in Episode 1, well- maybe the siblings are justified here, too. It’s a weaker argument, but it’s still one you can make under many common moral paradigms today — what goes around comes around, all that jazz. Just look at how awful she was to Ashley.

She’s finally found what she’s been striving for.

Here’s the thing, here’s the thing though — what, reasonably, could she have done? Andrew and Ashley briefly highlight this in conversation about Ashley’s ‘friends’ in Episode 1 — was she supposed to fight gunmen to try and break them out? Throw food to the balcony from four stories?

Moreover, as she herself says to Andrew… would anyone really have been able to do better than her in her position? She was seventeen when Ashley was born, living in poverty with a partner who couldn’t even remember Andrew’s name when he was a kid. Anyone would have had difficulty, let alone with these kids.

Her evils are — they’re not any deliberate action, but rather… prompted inaction. She didn’t have the emotional energy, resources or plain capability to properly parent her children, she didn’t have any solutions to their murder of Nina in a state so blatantly hostile to its underclass, she didn’t have a way to connect with Ashley and she took the money rather than fight a futile and likely suicidal battle against a corporation and its armed goons in a dystopian setting.

Ashley, notably, does not deny this.

Her sin is the one we’re all, I think, guilty of — that of not trying hard enough, that of inaction in the face of difficult tasks, of not standing up on principle because it’s just too much that day and you don’t have the spoons, you’ll do it tomorrow (no you won’t). It’s a petty, everyday kind of evil — that of not doing enough. 

Is that enough to condemn her? Certainly, there’s a pretty manipulative read of her that likely has some truth to it — in the locked door in Ashley’s dream in ‘Decay’ you can discover that she has a ‘not-hatched’ tar soul — but consider that lens — the game won’t make up your mind for you, so you’ll need to choose that for yourself.

The dad is interesting in terms of negative space — but he’s mostly important in that he doesn’t matter, so I decided to not fit him in here. He has art, though — just no sprite, because, well, he’s never mattered to either sibling.

The Contract We Call Society

Right, it’s time to get a little bit Theoretical in here. Not much, but a little. Social contract theory is a complex topic with a lot of nuance, much of which I will be eliding in the name of not writing a twenty thousand word paper on semiotics, law, and anthropology, but the short analogy is… the idea that as long as you play by society’s rules, as long as you are a good citizen, a good person, the state, or the community, will take care of you.

In a number of ways, the harshest penalty levied by many historical states and legal codes was not death, but rather the criminal status of outlawry, a practice that’s cropped up a number of times in history — the practice of no longer being protected by the law. This meant one could be killed or worse with impunity — you were no longer protected by mob justice and, while overexaggerated as a term of reference, certain texts from Medieval England refer to outlaws as bearing a wolfshead, ‘for the wolf is a beast hated by all folk’. Never minding that wolves are actually delightful, this was a time when wolves were actively hunted and sold by people — and the same was intended to happen to outlaws. They were ‘fair targets’ as far as society was concerned, no longer to be treated as your fellow citizens.

This was the gravest punishment on the books, for most of these legal codes — something saved for those who had broken the social contract so completely that there could be no turning back (civil outlawry is… a bit different, that’s not the topic here). Among others, a modern critique of the concept is that it offers no incentive for improvement, no incentive to change or to cease harming society — if an outlaw has none of the social contract’s protections, what reason do they have to obey… any of the social contract? If that seems familiar, well, let me ask you this:

What if the state or community fails its end first? What responsibility does the innocent outlaw have to that contract?

It’s an interesting phrasing, that the world is better off.

It’s time to talk about the incest, and part of why it’s there. The cannibalism too, but that’s less impactful here. If you’ve seen me elsewhere, you might have seen me say that the incest is a load-bearing narrative pillar — in large part due to it being a critical facet of the siblings’ relationship, but in another large part due to it being an equally critical part of how the game uses taboo.

A taboo is in this context something that is considered repulsive and to be avoided by society. It’s a more complex term than that — you can also use it for certain sacred actions or utterances that are only permitted to certain people, for example — but that’s what it is here. Swearing, premarital sex, BDSM and murder are, approximately from weak to strong, some example taboos held in modern Anglospheric society. 

Strong taboos are a staple of horror — they shock, they disgust, they draw people’s attention and it’s that last one that’s critical here. Incest is a very strong taboo — while I am absolutely not segueing into its historical context, the very well-established Westermarck effect gives it a certain timelessness and immunity to desensitisation that most other taboos don’t have — murder, to contrast, is a taboo we’re largely desensitised to in modern media and works of modern media have to put in actual work to make a murder seem horrifying — through atmosphere, cinematography, evocative prose etc.

And this is important because the use of taboo I’m covering in this essay is that the incest is used to invite judgment — it is so ingrained as a ‘wrong thing’ in people’s brains almost regardless of background that it forces the player to engage with the work morally. And that’s where the fun starts.

I’ve mentioned before, very briefly, about the juxtaposition of tone between the Burial & Decay endings, contrasting with the very monstrous difference in morality. Burial is remarkably light-hearted — they play around with the drain blockage, they joke about their mother’s personality and this is further exaggerated on the Love path, where Andrew is much more comfortable with casual contact and the two make a game out of how far they can throw their parents’ skulls, the humour is directly contrasted against their abhorrent actions.

I’ll be real Ashley is far more merciful than I, I’m shuddering at the thought of that gunk in my hair

In comparison, Decay is… bleak. I’ve seen it being referred to as being ‘emotionally sandblasted’ and, yeah I think that’s fair — it’s uncomfortable, it’s heavy and it’s just not fun. And this is the route in which, if you chose Trust into Accept, Andrew has bought into the narrative that his mother’s offered — that he can fit just fine into society if he wasn’t stuck, if not for Ashley — the route that ‘fits’ most closely to the social contract, to Andrew feeling the guilt that we think he should and hating the monsters that they’ve become, as the social contract deems them. Given the pains the game takes to attach the player to the protagonists, this normative moral ending is very easily interpreted as the bad ending.

And well, isn’t it?

Thing is, as mentioned above, the social contract has never held up its end for them. The game takes careful pains to point out to a viewer that they’ve never had the life that society promises people, so why do its moral standards apply?

The game invites you to judge the characters, and in the same motion, asks you from what principles you judge them, making a pretty good guess in that, like most people who haven’t spent a large amount of time navel-gazing and reading some very boring books by very dusty old men, they come from the society around you.

Love even has Ashley express this sentiment directly after the incestuous dream — she asks you — well, Andrew, but this is also something for the player to mull over — why this is what’s engaged your morality or sense of revulsion, rather than the desecration, cannibalism or murder.

Andrew and Ashley are both very funny and very fascinating in this scene.

And that’s the framing that it casts all of its own moral judgement in — even the ‘tar-soul’ aspect is… well, it’s unclear what it even means. Mrs. Graves was a ‘not-hatched’ tar soul, after all. Other than that, it’s society and the world being better off without them, rather than any kind of assertion of objective morality. Due to the present of ‘soul colour’, we’ll presumably see the game make some moral statements in Episode 3, but as it stands?

It’s nearly completely morally sceptical, in and of itself — it’s not interested in moral assertions or education, it’s interested in making you question your own morals. Deconstructive (not that kind), rather than dialectic, to be mildly pretentious.

It uses taboo and shock to invite moral judgement, but then uses tone, charm and our instinct to look for the happiest end for our blorbos to get you to recognise that these are principles you yourself brought into the game, rather than any it’s handed you. 

To summarise: you’ve brought these principles in from society, but what do the siblings, the protagonists, the villains to the world, owe society? Enough that they should follow them? It failed them first, after all.

Closing Thoughts

This one is a bit less energetic than the last, tragically — my sleeping schedule is the stuff of nightmares recently, I love windy weather. Wait, no the opposite. Huge thank you to everyone who commented on the last one, you are the wind beneath my wings and the main reason I managed to get this out this week.

This essay is a bit more interpretative than my last one — certainly, there are alternative readings and I’ve been toying with the idea of deliberately taking a reading I don’t like very much and writing from that perspective as a demonstrative exercise recently — mostly that you shouldn’t just take my word for things!

Otherwise, if the last bit at the end seemed murky, I apologise — I did try to write a more detailed version, but firstly, it was three thousand words and secondly, I re-read it the next day and I could not understand what the fuck I was talking about. Personally, I blame Derrida — suffice to say that I strongly recommend playing through it with an eye towards considering culpability, morality and why you think certain characters are more or less forgivable than others, and for what deeds. See what you get out of it.

I managed to keep one particular thread open to wrap up with here —  I try to keep speculation on Episode 3 content to a minimum in the main essays, but it should be fine here — you might have noticed that I refer to Episode 1 and Episode 2 being on something of a spectrum of justifiability, with the siblings’ actions being ‘more’ justifiable in Episode 1 and ‘less’ justifiable — but still justifiable if you try — in Episode 2. 

To continue the thought of the happiest ending being the one in which they step the furthest away from common morality and to further jar the viewers’ sense of morality by contrasting societal morality and blorbo-oriented morality, Episode 3: Burial could continue this trend in having a major victim be someone who, well, has done nothing wrong and isn’t even guilty of bystander syndrome.

I wonder if there’s any good candidates, someone who’s sweet, harmless and will indisputably be an innocent victim…

…I’m sure she’ll be fine

[anticapitalistclown]

Clownie can I request lookism boys helping their s/o on their period. Like their s/o is having heavy flow and keeps ruining pants and underwear (samuel, gun, Jake, and any other characters you would like the add) tysm 😊

omg sure!

Samuel, Gun and Jake helping reader on their period, scenarios

Samuel

You were feeling terrible, your legs were numb, your head was giving you a stabbing pain, your ovaries were absolutely killing you and on top of that, you had the heaviest flow, all of that made you feel like you could die.

With all your efforts, you walked through your apartment in order to throw your stained pants inside the washing machine. A stabbing pain made you crouch down on the floor, just in time for your boyfriend to come in.

Samuel was fast, and he caught you with his arm, you grabbed at him and gave him an apologetic look "today I'm not feeling really well to go out, got my period, sorry" you never knew when or how your emotionally unavailable boyfriend would surprise you "I know" Samuel gave you a plastic bag, inside there were different chocolates and candies also a lot of sanitary products "I don't really know which ones you use, so I bought the ones with best reviews".

Your eyes became teary, you couldn't hide your emotions "Samueel" you sobbed "I love you a lot" Samuel sighted and smiled "what would be of you without me?" and there it was, his lil shit side of him, even though this time you couldn't deny that this detail was actually so helpful "thank you a lot" he denied "it's nothing".

You threw your pants into the washing machine, Samuel giving you some advice about how to remove blood stains, and then you both cuddled on the sofa, watching some TV and you enjoying your candies, maybe this man is the chosen one?

Gun

You are one of the few lucky ones that can visit his place, you are dating after all, and even though you both barely have been dating two months, the previous friendship and connection made him trust completely in you. So when Gun asked you to come over his place, you always appreciated that trust and went, even if your period is killing you inside.

You were talking to him while he was making dinner, in a moment a stabbing pain made you crouch down, your wince of pain alerted him, Gun rushed next to you helping you to stand up he was confused until he saw your hands traveling on your lower stomach, knowing the source of your pain made him feel more relieved "do you need some painkillers?" you nodded "sorry" you tried your best to not ruin your date, yet your body was betraying you, Gun rushed to the shelf where he keeps the medicine "if you don't mind I'll go to the bathroom" Gun nodded "sure".

You went to the bathroom, yet your period gave you another obstruction to make your date go well, you looked frustrated at your stained pants and underwear "shit" Gun knocked on the door "are you alright? I have a glass of water and the meds" he opened the door, but you stopped him "wait, things got messy" Gun sighted and opened the door, you forgot your boyfriend is stronger.

Gun arched an eyebrow, "this little stain is the mess?" you nodded to him with a pout, your cheeks red from the embarrassment. Gun gave you the glass of water and the painkiller "give me your clothes, I'll wash them, and I'll give you something from my closet" you gave him your clothes "if you're uncomfortable I can clean it myself" too late, Gun already took your clothes "do I look like some blood will gross me out?" you lowered your head "get in the shower I'll join you in a few minutes" you lifted your head your eyes sparkling, making him smile, Gun gave a peck to your forehead "I love you" you mumbled, he kissed your lips "get comfortable, I'm your boyfriend, ok?"

Jake

Jake's love language is acts of service, knowing that a little detail can just make your life easier, make you happy, motivates him to keep caring for you. So when you texted him, "I'm on my period :(" it just took minutes for him to appear at your place with all the supplies you needed: chocolates, painkillers, sanitary products...

You welcomed him with a big hug, his arms lifting you and taking you to the living room, I love yous falling from both your mouths "I love you, I love you a lot" Jake laughed and hugged you tightly "I love you a lot too" you gave tiny pecks to all his face, your man just felt so proud of himself for making you happy.

You ordered him to sit at the sofa, and you started to arrange the products he just bought "but I want to help" you scolded him "you helped enough, don't make me angry" Jake sighted "alright" he looked at how you arranged everything and then he spotted a little stain "babe" you kept organizing "hm?" "don't get upset, but you have a stain on your pants" you froze, your cheeks were burning and you just looked so upset "again?" you cried "this is the third I ruined today" oh poor baby, Jake's heart broke at your expression he quickly got up from the sofa and reached you, his hands caressing your cheeks "It's okay love, Sinu taught me how to clean blood properly, I'll wash it, fine?" you nodded "fine" he smiled "then we can cuddle" you hugged him "I need your hugs".

[chasejlondon]

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