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mostlysignssomeportents · 7 months

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Podcasting "How To Think About Scraping"

On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine. On October 2, I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab.

This week on my podcast, I read my recent Medium column, "How To Think About Scraping: In privacy and labor fights, copyright is a clumsy tool at best," which proposes ways to retain the benefits of scraping without the privacy and labor harms that sometimes accompany it:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-think-about-scraping-2db6f69a7e3d?sk=4a1d687171de1a3f3751433bffbb5a96

What are those benefits from scraping? Well, take computational linguistics, a relatively new discipline that is producing the first accounts of how informal language works. Historically, linguists overstudied written language (because it was easy to analyze) and underanalyzed speech (because you had to record speakers and then get grad students to transcribe their dialog).

The thing is, very few of us produce formal, written work, whereas we all engage in casual dialog. But then the internet came along, and for the first time, we had a species of mass-scale, informal dialog that also written, and which was born in machine-readable form.

This ushered in a new era in linguistic study, one that is enthusiastically analyzing and codifying the rules of informal speech, the spread of vernacular, and the regional, racial and class markers of different kinds of speech:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/24/because-internet-the-new-linguistics-of-informal-english/

The people whose speech is scraped and analyzed this way are often unreachable (anonymous or pseudonymous) or impractical to reach (because there's millions of them). The linguists who study this speech will go through institutional review board approvals to make sure that as they produce aggregate accounts of speech, they don't compromise the privacy or integrity of their subjects.

Computational linguistics is an unalloyed good, and while the speakers whose words are scraped to produce the raw material that these scholars study, they probably wouldn't object, either.

But what about entities that explicitly object to being scraped? Sometimes, it's good to scrape them, too.

Since 1996, the Internet Archive has scraped every website it could find, storing snapshots of every page it found in a giant, searchable database called the Wayback Machine. Many of us have used the Wayback Machine to retrieve some long-deleted text, sound, image or video from the internet's memory hole.

For the most part, the Internet Archive limits its scraping to websites that permit it. The robots exclusion protocol (AKA robots.txt) makes it easy for webmasters to tell different kinds of crawlers whether or not they are welcome. If your site has a robots.txt file that tells the Archive's crawler to buzz off, it'll go elsewhere.

Mostly.

Since 2017, the Archive has started ignoring robots.txt files for news services; whether or not the news site wants to be crawled, the Archive crawls it and makes copies of the different versions of the articles the site publishes. That's because news sites – even the so-called "paper of record" – have a nasty habit of making sweeping edits to published material without noting it.

I'm not talking about fixing a typo or a formatting error: I'm talking about making a massive change to a piece, one that completely reverses its meaning, and pretending that it was that way all along:

https://medium.com/@brokenravioli/proof-that-the-new-york-times-isn-t-feeling-the-bern-c74e1109cdf6

This happens all the time, with major news sites from all around the world:

http://newsdiffs.org/examples/

By scraping these sites and retaining the different versions of their article, the Archive both detects and prevents journalistic malpractice. This is canonical fair use, the kind of copying that almost always involves overriding the objections of the site's proprietor. Not all adversarial scraping is good, but this sure is.

There's an argument that scraping the news-sites without permission might piss them off, but it doesn't bring them any real harm. But even when scraping harms the scrapee, it is sometimes legitimate – and necessary.

Austrian technologist Mario Zechner used the API from country's super-concentrated grocery giants to prove that they were colluding to rig prices. By assembling a longitudinal data-set, Zechner exposed the raft of dirty tricks the grocers used to rip off the people of Austria.

From shrinkflation to deceptive price-cycling that disguised price hikes as discounts:

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071627182734180

Zechner feared publishing his results at first. The companies whose thefts he'd discovered have enormous power and whole kennelsful of vicious attack-lawyers they can sic on him. But he eventually got the Austrian competition bureaucracy interested in his work, and they published a report that validated his claims and praised his work:

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071673594791946

Emboldened, Zechner open-sourced his monitoring tool, and attracted developers from other countries. Soon, they were documenting ripoffs in Germany and Slovenia, too:

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071485142332765

Zechner's on a roll, but the grocery cartel could shut him down with a keystroke, simply by blocking his API access. If they do, Zechner could switch to scraping their sites – but only if he can be protected from legal liability for nonconsensually scraping commercially sensitive data in a way that undermines the profits of a powerful corporation.

Zechner's work comes at a crucial time, as grocers around the world turn the screws on both their suppliers and their customers, disguising their greedflation as inflation. In Canada, the grocery cartel – led by the guillotine-friendly hereditary grocery monopolilst Galen Weston – pulled the most Les Mis-ass caper imaginable when they illegally conspired to rig the price of bread:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_price-fixing_in_Canada

We should scrape all of these looting bastards, even though it will harm their economic interests. We should scrape them because it will harm their economic interests. Scrape 'em and scrape 'em and scrape 'em.

Now, it's one thing to scrape text for scholarly purposes, or for journalistic accountability, or to uncover criminal corporate conspiracies. But what about scraping to train a Large Language Model?

Yes, there are socially beneficial – even vital – uses for LLMs.

Take HRDAG's work on truth and reconciliation in Colombia. The Human Rights Data Analysis Group is a tiny nonprofit that makes an outsized contribution to human rights, by using statistical methods to reveal the full scope of the human rights crimes that take place in the shadows, from East Timor to Serbia, South Africa to the USA:

https://hrdag.org/

HRDAG's latest project is its most ambitious yet. Working with partner org Dejusticia, they've just released the largest data-set in human rights history:

https://hrdag.org/jep-cev-colombia/

What's in that dataset? It's a merger and analysis of more than 100 databases of killings, child soldier recruitments and other crimes during the Colombian civil war. Using a LLM, HRDAG was able to produce an analysis of each killing in each database, estimating the probability that it appeared in more than one database, and the probability that it was carried out by a right-wing militia, by government forces, or by FARC guerrillas.

This work forms the core of ongoing Colombian Truth and Reconciliation proceedings, and has been instrumental in demonstrating that the majority of war crimes were carried out by right-wing militias who operated with the direction and knowledge of the richest, most powerful people in the country. It also showed that the majority of child soldier recruitment was carried out by these CIA-backed, US-funded militias.

This is important work, and it was carried out at a scale and with a precision that would have been impossible without an LLM. As with all of HRDAG's work, this report and the subsequent testimony draw on cutting-edge statistical techniques and skilled science communication to bring technical rigor to some of the most important justice questions in our world.

LLMs need large bodies of text to train them – text that, inevitably, is scraped. Scraping to produce LLMs isn't intrinsically harmful, and neither are LLMs. Admittedly, nonprofits using LLMs to build war crimes databases do not justify even 0.0001% of the valuations that AI hypesters ascribe to the field, but that's their problem.

Scraping is good, sometimes – even when it's done against the wishes of the scraped, even when it harms their interests, and even when it's used to train an LLM.

But.

Scraping to violate peoples' privacy is very bad. Take Clearview AI, the grifty, sleazy facial recognition company that scraped billions of photos in order to train a system that they sell to cops, corporations and authoritarian governments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/20/steal-your-face/#hoan-ton-that

Likewise: scraping to alienate creative workers' labor is very bad. Creators' bosses are ferociously committed to firing us all and replacing us with "generative AI." Like all self-declared "job creators," they constantly fantasize about destroying all of our jobs. Like all capitalists, they hate capitalism, and dream of earning rents from owning things, not from doing things.

The work these AI tools sucks, but that doesn't mean our bosses won't try to fire us and replace us with them. After all, prompting an LLM may produce bad screenplays, but at least the LLM doesn't give you lip when you order to it give you "ET, but the hero is a dog, and there's a love story in the second act and a big shootout in the climax." Studio execs already talk to screenwriters like they're LLMs.

That's true of art directors, newspaper owners, and all the other job-destroyers who can't believe that creative workers want to have a say in the work they do – and worse, get paid for it.

So how do we resolve these conundra? After all, the people who scrape in disgusting, depraved ways insist that we have to take the good with the bad. If you want accountability for newspaper sites, you have to tolerate facial recognition, too.

When critics of these companies repeat these claims, they are doing the companies' work for them. It's not true. There's no reason we couldn't permit scraping for one purpose and ban it for another.

The problem comes when you try to use copyright to manage this nuance. Copyright is a terrible tool for sorting out these uses; the limitations and exceptions to copyright (like fair use) are broad and varied, but so "fact intensive" that it's nearly impossible to say whether a use is or isn't fair before you've gone to court to defend it.

But copyright has become the de facto regulatory default for the internet. When I found someone impersonating me on a dating site and luring people out to dates, the site advised me to make a copyright claim over the profile photo – that was their only tool for dealing with this potentially dangerous behavior.

The reasons that copyright has become our default tool for solving every internet problem are complex and historically contingent, but one important point here is that copyright is alienable, which means you can bargain it away. For that reason, corporations love copyright, because it means that they can force people who have less power than the company to sign away their copyrights.

This is how we got to a place where, after 40 years of expanding copyright (scope, duration, penalties), we have an entertainment sector that's larger and more profitable than ever, even as creative workers' share of the revenues their copyrights generate has fallen, both proportionally and in real terms.

As Rebecca Giblin and I write in our book Chokepoint Capitalism, in a market with five giant publishers, four studios, three labels, two app platforms and one ebook/audiobook company, giving creative workers more copyright is like giving your bullied kid extra lunch money. The more money you give that kid, the more money the bullies will take:

https://chokepointcapitalism.com/

Many creative workers are suing the AI companies for copyright infringement for scraping their data and using it to train a model. If those cases go to trial, it's likely the creators will lose. The questions of whether making temporary copies or subjecting them to mathematical analysis infringe copyright are well-settled:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/ai-art-generators-and-online-image-market

I'm pretty sure that the lawyers who organized these cases know this, and they're betting that the AI companies did so much sleazy shit while scraping that they'll settle rather than go to court and have it all come out. Which is fine – I relish the thought of hundreds of millions in investor capital being transferred from these giant AI companies to creative workers. But it doesn't actually solve the problem.

Because if we do end up changing copyright law – or the daily practice of the copyright sector – to create exclusive rights over scraping and training, it's not going to get creators paid. If we give individual creators new rights to bargain with, we're just giving them new rights to bargain away. That's already happening: voice actors who record for video games are now required to start their sessions by stating that they assign the rights to use their voice to train a deepfake model:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

But that doesn't mean we have to let the hyperconcentrated entertainment sector alienate creative workers from their labor. As the WGA has shown us, creative workers aren't just LLCs with MFAs, bargaining business-to-business with corporations – they're workers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/20/everything-made-by-an-ai-is-in-the-public-domain/

Workers get a better deal with labor law, not copyright law. Copyright law can augment certain labor disputes, but just as often, it benefits corporations, not workers:

https://locusmag.com/2019/05/cory-doctorow-steering-with-the-windshield-wipers/

Likewise, the problem with Clearview AI isn't that it infringes on photographers' copyrights. If I took a thousand pictures of you and sold them to Clearview AI to train its model, no copyright infringement would take place – and you'd still be screwed. Clearview has a privacy problem, not a copyright problem.

Giving us pseudocopyrights over our faces won't stop Clearview and its competitors from destroying our lives. Creating and enforcing a federal privacy law with a private right action will. It will put Clearview and all of its competitors out of business, instantly and forever:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-sue-companies-violate-your-privacy

AI companies say, "You can't use copyright to fix the problems with AI without creating a lot of collateral damage." They're right. But what they fail to mention is, "You can use labor law to ban certain uses of AI without creating that collateral damage."

Facial recognition companies say, "You can't use copyright to ban scraping without creating a lot of collateral damage." They're right too – but what they don't say is, "On the other hand, a privacy law would put us out of business and leave all the good scraping intact."

Taking entertainment companies and AI vendors and facial recognition creeps at their word is helping them. It's letting them divide and conquer people who value the beneficial elements and those who can't tolerate the harms. We can have the benefits without the harms. We just have to stop thinking about labor and privacy issues as individual matters and treat them as the collective endeavors they really are:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/26/united-we-stand/

Here's a link to the podcast:

https://craphound.com/news/2023/09/24/how-to-think-about-scraping/

And here's a direct link to the MP3 (hosting courtesy of the Internet Archive; they'll host your stuff for free, forever):

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_450/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_450_-_How_To_Think_About_Scraping.mp3

And here's the RSS feed for my podcast:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/doctorow_podcast

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/25/deep-scrape/#steering-with-the-windshield-wipers

Image: syvwlch (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Print_Scraper_(5856642549).jpg

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

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raceweek · 10 months

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welp alexs engineer just told him that at one point the stewards were twenty laps behind with checking track limits that’s😭

#i was ready to hunt him for sport for not telling alex how many strikes he had but omg that’s so fuckingkdjdfk WELP #alex albon #austria 2023

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j-ellyfish · 26 days

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I'm sorry but I'm too much of a sucker for angsty fluff, severe pining and hurt/comfort with no toxicity involved in my comfort ships, so I just cannot see Spaus as toxic marriage ;_; 👉👈 💕

The people around them? Like, their bosses? Yes, toxic pieces of shit that never cared about their opinions or feelings, but they actually loved each other to the end, despite the ups and downs, and they might've taken some things personal in the moment, but in the long run they knew it was just humans politics and things out of their power.

#I have once read a one-shot fic about their divorce and I was like YES YOU SEE MY SAME VISION THANK YOU 💗#because they didn't divorce on bad terms and it was clear they still loved each other 😔💕💕#I know that Antonio has canonically a dark side but this doesn't necessarily mean he ever used it against Roderich in their marriage #especially with how apologetic Spain sounds when he goes against Austria with France and Pru #and how calm and not really threatened Roderich felt when Antonio caught Feli to get to him #and even mentioned it took him three days to forget Spain's face #it just #nothing about them strikes to me as the result of a toxic marriage ended very badly on a personal level #ary spoke #spaus #aph spain #aph austria #It's almost 6am can't sleep and thinking about the otp 😔💕#hetalia

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archduchessofnowhere · 4 months

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“Did you bring the Heine souvenirs with you?”: Rudolf’s last Christmas present for his mother

As Christmas approached, I started to search for Habsburg stories related to this holiday to share with you, and almost inevitably I once again looked into Crown Prince Rudolf’s last Christmas. The Christmas Eve of 1888 is known mostly for having been full of ominous signs of Rudolf’s deteriorating mental health that his family either was unable to notice or simply chose to ignore. I have a second post coming up related to that, but in this post I’m covering a different topic: the last present Rudolf gave to his mother, Empress Elisabeth.

December 24 was a special day for the Imperial family not only because it was Christmas Eve, but also because it was Elisabeth’s birthday. It was, then, a double celebration for the family. And on the 24th of December of 1888 the Crown Prince surprised his mother with a very special gift: a bundle of letters written by her favorite author, the poet Heinrich Heine.

Elisabeth’s deep admiration for Heine was well known: months earlier she had publicly supported and financially collaborated in the creation of a monument in honor of Heine in Düsseldorf, the poet’s hometown. The project, however, had a huge backlash by the anti-semites and German nationalists (Heine was Jewish), and soon Elisabeth was attacked by them. The campaign against Heine’s devotees in the press was so strong that eventually Elisabeth was forced to withdraw her support; the monument, rejected from city to city in Germany, finally was placed in New York, where it still stands (Hamann, 1978, 1986).

Rudolf, who had long been a supporter of Jewish rights, was probably happy to find that his mother shared his sentiments regarding the growing anti-semitism of the late 19th century. It was likely the fiasco of the monument that prompted Rudolf to get the Empress a Heine-related birthday and Christmas gift. For this task he asked his friend, journalist Moritz Szeps, to travel to Paris and acquire for him a bundle of letters that Heine wrote to his friend Alexander Weill. We can find a mention of it in this undated letter Rudolf wrote to Szeps, likely from the first days of December (translation by DeepL, nuances may be lost):

Dear Szeps! I am glad to know you are here; I would like to thank Frischauer [another journalist friend of Rudolf and Szeps] very much for his letter yesterday and its enclosures. Did you bring the Heine souvenirs with you? I hope to see you in the next few days. With best regards Your Rudolf (Szeps, 1922, p. 168)

And again, on December 11:

Dear Szeps! Thank you very much for your letter. Please have Heine’s letters photographed and only then send them to me. I hope to be able to see you the day after tomorrow. With warmest regards Your Rudolf (ibid)

In 1908, writing in the December 25 edition of the Neue Freie Press, Hugo Wittmann claimed that Weill, instead of money, had demanded “nothing more for his treasure than that the Crown Prince asked him for it in writing and send him a photographic copy of the papers upon receipt” (DeepL translation) which would explain why Rudolf asked Moritz to first photograph the letters before sending them to him. Historian Brigitte Hamann, however, claims differently: according to her the Crown Prince in fact paid an exorbitant amount of money for the letters. Whatever the case, when the Imperial family opened their presents at 4 o’clock in the afternoon of Christmas Eve, Elisabeth found a packet full of letters of her favorite poet.

This was, no doubt, a touching personal present that shows how much Rudolf cared for his mother. But what did Elisabeth think of this gift? As always, Hamann’s The Reluctant Empress is very straightforward:

In order to prove that he revered his mother, Rudolf paid an outrageous price in Paris for eleven Heine autographs and placed them under the Christmas tree for the Empress. Elisabeth, however, was so preoccupied with her daughter's engagement that she did not pay Rudolf’s gift the attention he had expected. (1986, p. 339)

Reading this, I’ve always felt sorry for Rudolf: he clearly put a lot of thought into finding the perfect present for his mother, only for it to go unnoticed. At least, that’s what I believed until I read Hamann’s previous work, her biography of the Crown Prince published first in 1978:

Whether the Empress appreciated the shy homage of her son, whether she felt how much he practically vied for her understanding, since both of them were attacked by the same people, is highly unlikely. According to all sources, Elisabeth at this time was totally occupied with Valerie, her “only one,” with her engagement and the impending pain of parting with her favorite child. (2017)

“Highly unlikely”. No source backing this up. It was then when I realized that Elisabeth disregarding her son’s present was pure speculation on Hamann’s part. Between her biography of Rudolf and her biography of Elisabeth she seems to have convinced herself that the empress didn’t care for the letters at all, and “unlikely” became just “she did not pay attention”.

I won’t be too harsh on Hamann: I also think Elisabeth’s main concern that Christmas was Valerie’s engagement. According to Valerie’s diary, both her parents were very moved that day because she was going to get engaged in the evening. But that doesn’t have to mean that Elisabeth didn’t care for Heine’s letters. We just don’t know what Elisabeth thought of the gift, since (as far as I could find) none of the people that were present during the unwrapping of the gifts wrote down her reaction. Valerie only wrote in her diary that “Little Elisabeth [Rudolf’s daughter] was very happy about the presents and played with her things while we dined in the Alexandrian room on the left” (1998, p. 164). And the next time Rudolf wrote to Szeps, on December 27, the only allusion to the past Christmas Eve he made was thanking him for his “congratulations on the happy family event” (1922, p. 168) i.e. the engagement of his sister. No mention of Heine by anyone, anywhere.

We do also have, however, an interesting account of the opening of the presents in Egon Corti’s 1934 biography of Empress Elisabeth:

And so Christmas Eve, 1888, came round, and with it Elizabeth’s birthday. Rudolf and his wife were among the guests, and the Crown Prince presented his mother with Hugo Wittmann’s edition of Heine’s letters, at which Francis Joseph cast an ironical glance but made no comment. (p. 386)

No mention of Elisabeth’s reaction to the letters, but he does give us Franz Josef’s. Sadly Corti does not give a source for this account, which opens a new mystery: from where did he learn this? There is a mistake in the quoted fragment: the letters Rudolf acquired were original, written by Heine himself; Hugo Wittmann only published them in the aforementioned Neue Freie Press edition of 1908. But I wouldn’t straight up disregard this account either: not only Corti had access to now lost primary sources, he also worked closely with Valerie’s children. Who knows, maybe this was a family anecdote he learned from them.

So, did Elisabeth ignore her son’s thoughtful gift because all she cared about was Valerie’s engagement? We can’t know for certain. I think it is safe to assume Valerie was her main priority that day, but unless a primary source that explicitly states that she did not care for the letters appears, I don’t think it’s right (nor fair) to claim that she was indifferent to Rudolf’s present.

Sources:

Corti, Egon Caesar Conte (1936). Elizabeth, empress of Austria (translation by Catherine Alison Phillips)

Hamann, Brigitte (2017). Rudolf. Crown Prince and Rebel (translation by Edith Borchardt)

Hamann, Brigitte (1986). The Reluctant Empress: A Biography of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (translation by Ruth Hein)

Schad, Martha and Schad, Horst [ed.] (1998). Das Tagebuch der Lieblings Tochter von Kaiserin Elisabeth. 1878-1899

Szeps, Julius [ed.] (1922). Kronprinz Rudolf. Politische Briefe an einen Freund. 1882-1889

Wittmann, Hugo (1908, December 25). Ein Geschenk des Kronprinzen Rudolf an seine Mutter, Neue Freie Press

#tl;dr: hamann's bias strikes again #crown prince rudolf of austria #empress elisabeth of austria #heinrich heine #historian: brigitte hamman #historian: egon caesar conte corti

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sisionscreen · 9 months

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Philip Froissant (Emperor Franz Joseph) teased that the second season of The Empress (2022) will start shooting soon.

This means, as I already theorized a while ago, that this production is not covered by SAG-AFTRA and/or WGA but rather one or several of the German acting and writers' unions. Foreign unions are often forbidden from striking in solidarity.

#The Empress #Die Kaiserin #The Empress (2022)#costume drama #historical drama #period drama #Philip Froissant #emperor franz joseph #franz joseph of austria #german tv #german series #behind the scenes #Netflix #sag aftra #SAG strike #wga strike

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lena-in-a-red-dress · 1 year

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I'm watching Die Kaiserin on Netflix about Empress Sisi of Austria, and as someone who has read at least one biography about said Empress, I can officially say they have certainly dramatized her story.

My biggest sticking point is that the queen mother basically asks Sisi whether she wants to be Empress, and they have Sisi say "yes" with minimal hesitation.

You had ONE JOB.

#the reluctant empress #austria #die kaiserin #my thoughts #her biography was literally titled #she literally DID NOT WANT to be empress #sure she liked the emperor well enough #but still #also the show doesn't sell me on their chemistry #which is another strike against them

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aprilias · 7 months

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I know that it absolutely will not happen however I’m entering my delusional era of believing Jorge will win the championship (let’s see how long this lasts)

#austria is forgotten we’re starting a fresh ok #i genuinely think this will last probably one more round but delusion strikes #its doable he wont be allowed to do it but its doable nonetheless #motogp

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gremlingottoosilly · 4 months

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…idk if there’s bears in austria but i’m just imagining a scenario where könig comes home, only to find theres this grown ass bear on his front porch and Mrs. König is catering to it like it’s her own child or something

You gave your man a heart attack, congratulations!! He isn't as young as he used to be, he is going to have to visit a doctor after shit you just pulled up!! But, really, he is scared shitless. He is the type of guy to imagine what he would do if a bear randomly slammed its way into the room Konig was currently in, and exactly how many bears he could take before being overwhelmed...and you were wondering if he liked your outfit or not. So, when an actual bear just shows up on his porch, he is ready to take his gun out and strike. Austria has really strict gun laws, so he can only have a pistol at hand - not good against a brown bear, but he is pretty sure he could wrestle the beast if it means saving you. That is, until he noticed just how...chill you are around it. He is surprised, obviously, but then he remembers the news about some circus animals escaping from a traveling show, so he at least understands that the bear isn't, you know, actually wild. Still, Konig starts to get more and more scared of you - how are you not even the slightest bit frightened?? You could be dead by now!! He has to teach you how to shoot, it's only obvious now.....

#cod #konig x reader #konig

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thegoatsongs · 7 months

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Now some Vampire Lore, which also explains why Lucy mainly attacks children and is Voluptuous. Other than children being a much easier, vulnerable target for a new vampire, especially at night, and vampires being attractive to lure people to them:

One of Stoker's primary sources was Ármin Vámbéry, a Hungarian-Jewish traveler and orientalist. Van Helsing even gives him a shout-out in the book later. Stoker consulted him a lot about the legends in the Balkans and Austria-Hungary (where Transylvania was at the time).

Dracula is heavily based on the area's Strigoi. And partly on the Estries (which are associated with the Succubi: Beautiful, blood-thirsty female demons, with succubi thought to favor babies and young children as prey.) The Strigoi are closer to what we know as vampires due to them rising from the grave, or being created by something unholy. So Lucy turned into a child-drinking succubus.

The Strigoi and Estries both:

Gain vitality by drinking human blood

Can shapeshift into animals

Influence people's minds

Mainly feed on infants

the Strigoi target also young girls, the Estries all genders but mostly men

On the child feeding, Wilhelm Schmidt reports in 1865 the tradition "upon the birth of a child, when one tosses a stone behind oneself and exclaims "This into the mouth of the strigoi!" Note the stones found in the skulls of people suspected to have been vampires.

There are striking similarities between them and the Estries. Note the common "strix" root. Screaming is also a feature that they have, which is similar to the banshee, but this attribute is not as prominent in Dracula yet.

More about the Count and less about Lucy: The Strigoi are associated with sorcery, something that will be relevant in Dracula. The Strigoi influence people's minds, especially those who are ill, have sleeping issues, suffer from alcoholism, and more. This is shown by Dracula's influence on the sleepwalking Lucy and likely on Renfield.

#dracula daily #re: dracula #historical context #count dracula #lucy westenra #jack seward #mythological #dracula #jonathan harker #cw child death mention

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latenightdaydreams · 3 days

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Haii!

How do we feel about a smut with pornstar reader & pornstar Konig? Like- their comments in their vids/twts/etc. always saying to collab w/ eachother and after awhile, they finally do 👀

-🖤

(Also sorry if I already sent this- I forgot if I did😭)

You didn't! I love the idea of being shipped with Pornstar!König. The Austrian with a monster cock🤤

Pornstar!König x Pornstar!Reader (fem)

MDNI🔞

Master List

>cw: fem/afab, p in v, oral

3.1k word count

König is famous in the adult film world. During lock down he downloaded Only Fans and ended up making his own account. His striking blue eyes, hidden face mystery, and 6’10 280 lb frame of solid muscles weren’t the only reasons he became so famous; he also has a 10-inch cock the size of most women’s forearms.

You, on the other hand, are a cam girl turned OF girl. You are known by your fan base never being scared of a challenge. You use toys that make people's jaws drop. Your body being strikingly stunning along with a beautiful face and kinky appetite for sex, you blew up quickly on the platform.

Because of the material you make, your fans instantly made you aware of another content creator, König. After about the 100th comment, you decide to go on your X account and check out his page. Instantly you notice the mask covering his face and his blue eyes. His bio gives his height and weight, your jaw drops. You continue to scroll and see a photo he’s recently posted. He’s wearing gray sweatpants with no shirt. His body is stunning, but your eyes drop to the outline of his erection in his pants, his dick literally hanging down his leg. You smirk now, understanding why the fans think you two should film together. You go ahead and give him a follow.

◅ ◃ ▹ ▻

König has also seen the comments. After the first one he instantly looked you up. His eyes shot open when he saw the photo of toys on your profile. Scrolling down a few posts he sees you, and wow. You’re wearing a pink lace thong with your breast fully exposed. You have a sweet smile on your face and you’re standing in a field of wildflowers. You look ethereal. He instantly took notice of you, but contrary to his online persona, he is very socially awkward. He has no idea how to reach out to you, or any girl; that’s why he only posts solo. Then while he is scrolling looking at his feed, he gets a notification. You just followed him.

He quickly sits up and smiles. He clicks your profile and begins to look at all the photos you’ve posted again. His heart rate is picking up, he doesn’t know if he should message you or wait. That’s when your phone chimed and he got the notification that you messaged him.

> “Hey! I’m sure you know of me from your comments 😂, but I’m y/n!”

He reads your message probably ten times before getting the courage to respond to you.

> “Hey, ja, I know you. It’s nice to finally talk.”

He hits send quickly and waits for you to respond. He can feel his heart rate picking up. He hopes that you’re messaging him to make content together. He can feel his excitement rising as his leg bounces waiting for your next message.

You sit feeling nervous yourself as you look down at your phone. He responded so quickly it didn’t give you time to think of a smooth way to ask about a collab. You’ve only ever filmed solo or with women, never a man.

> “I was wondering if you’d be interested in maybe getting together? I see you mostly do solo, so please feel no pressure. I just figured the fans would love it.”

König stands and punches the air like his favorite sports team had just won the big game. Now he just has to act smoothly and not ruin this.

> “I’d love to.”

Both of you do a little celebration dance, feeling excited about the possibility of filming together. You both continue to message back and forth and work out how you’d both meet on account of him being based in Austria, but you both work something out.

◅ ◃ ▹ ▻

One week later you post on your social media accounts a photo of a plane at the airport. The comments explode with assumptions and more tagging of König. During the next few hours, you continue to post your travels while König doesn’t post at all.

That is until he posts a photo of a small feminine hand in his and then you post a bathroom mirror selfie with a man’s large arm around your waist. You sit with König in your Airbnb on the living room sofa, both giggling as people begin to realize the collab is about to happen.

König paid for you to fly to him, picked you up at the airport, and paid for your Airbnb. You knew König was 6’10, but seeing him in person actually blew you away. Plus, he is so sweet. In person, his face remains covered by the mask. You have questions, but you leave it alone.

Your first day together you spend the day going over health, boundaries, safe words, and any questions you might have for each other. Once everything is settled, you both plan to film the next day to allow you to get some rest.

◅ ◃ ▹ ▻

König wakes up early and works out the day of filming. He eats a light breakfast and takes a long shower to help with his nerves. He is excited to have sex with a woman that he knows is very capable of taking someone his size instead of having only the tip of his cock in someone. Getting dressed in sweats and a black shirt, he makes his way to you.

You are currently sitting on the floor in front of a full-length mirror to do your makeup. You just do a light natural look for today. You’re wearing a black silk robe over your nude body with two sets of lingerie set out, waiting to get König’s opinion.

A knock at the door, you jump up and rush to the front door. Smiling, you let König inside and motion for him to follow you to the main bedroom.

“Okay, so I have two options for today and I wanted your input.”

He follows you to see a large king size bed with white lush looking comforters and he feels his nerves spike again. He sees one black lingerie set and then a light pink one that looks like the one from the first photo he ever saw of you.

“Pink, it will look great with your skin tone.” König says looking at you with a soft smile behind his mask.

You grab pink and go to the connected bathroom to get dressed.

König walks around the room and sets up the ring lights and cameras for different angles. He stands looking around and waiting for you. Slowly he takes his shoes off when the bathroom door opens and he gets to see you. He’s seen you naked online, but in person you looked even more perfect. He stands and just looks at you for a while before speaking.

“You look lovely.”

“Thank you,” you can’t help but to find his Austrian accent attractive. “Thanks for setting up too.”

“Oh, it’s not a problem.” König reaches for the hem of his shirt and pulls it off.

Your eyes go over his body and smirk at how attractive he looks. You notice his erection forming as you walk to the bed.

“Do you want to film everything? Like role play and all?” You ask in a soft voice, the tension in the air heavy as you’re both ready now.

“Uh, let's film it all. I’d rather have more to edit from.” And also, because he’d want to watch these moments with you later.

◅ ◃ ▹ ▻

König lifts his mask slightly, the first time his audience will be seeing his sharp jawline and his thin soft lips. His lips meet yours in a tender first kiss as his hands begin to roam over your body. His hand squeezes your breast gently as your lips part and your tongues caress each other’s.

You move your hand down his chest, feeling the small amount of chest hair the covers his chest. His muscles twitch lightly at your touch. His penis now fully erect in his pants as he tastes your lips and feels the touch of your soft skin.

He moves his hands behind your back and begins to unhook your bra. Slipping the straps off your shoulders slowly before pulling it away from your body. He breaks the kiss and gently leans you back on the bed. His lips kiss all over your breasts until he finds one of your nipples. He licks in slow circles around it before closing his lips and sucking lightly. Opening his mouth again he begins to flick his tongue.

You let out a soft moan as your hand reaches for the back of his head, pressing him against you, the fabric of his mask soft. His other hand goes down to your thighs and begins to gently move up them, caressing the soft skin on the inside of your thighs.

He pulls away from your breasts and whispers to you, “Is it okay if I touch?”

“Yeah,” you smile at him asking for consent.

His hand grabs your leg and moves it to where the camera can see everything, He moves the thin fabric of your thong aside and begins to rub his thick fingers between your folds. You’re already wet when he touches you and that excites him knowing you’re so turned on. He moves his lips back to yours as he gently rubs your clit. Small moans leaving your lips, muffled into his. He eventually slips one finger down and pushes it gently into you. He feels the texture of your walls and feels how tight you are. He can only think about shoving himself deep inside of you, but he wants you to get off first.

He moves his kisses from your lips back down to your breast before kissing down your stomach. He moves your leg a little more as he rests his head on your thigh, he kisses your clit before flicking his tongue. Your legs jerk and you sit up to look down at him eating you out. He can’t get over how good you smell and taste. He is surprised you aren’t selling your panties; men would pay big money for this.

“Oh, fuck König,” you moan caressing the side of his face.

König slips in another finger as picks up his pace, as he continues to lick your clit. Hearing you moan his name means that he is on the right path to get you to orgasm for him. Your hand grasps the fabric of his mask, making him smirk before he switches to begin just sucking your clit. Your legs tremble as you drop your head back and lay back down. The sound of your wet cunt gets louder as you cum on his fingers. He keeps going for a while before pulling back.

You lie there panting before you giggle and sit up, “Your tongue is amazing.”

He chuckles and goes in to kiss you, making you taste your sweet pussy on your own lips. You move your hands to his chest before moving down to his cock, pulling back you pull at the waistband of his sweatpants. His heart rate began to pick up. The videos of you deep throating your toys comes into his mind and he gets excited. Lifting his ass, König helps you pull his sweats off of him, boxers as well.

Seeing his cock spring free makes you smile; his cock is as big as some of your toys. König leans back to support himself on his elbows to allow you room but he still wants to watch.

Grasping his dick at the base, you stroke it lightly as you lick the back of his tip. König’s breathing heavy as his blue eyes watch with anticipation. You move your hand and lick from the base all the way up his shaft, back and forth and a few times before finally wrapping your lips around the head of his cock. You begin to suck on the tip and move your head in a fast motion making König moan out. He reaches down and moves some of your hair out of your face.

“Ah, ja, just like that.” His voice shakes as you keep going.

Finally, you lower your head down the length of his shaft. Your full lips wrapping tightly around him as you take his ten inches inch by inch down your throat. König watches in amazement as he has never had a woman be able to take more than half his cock into their throat. He takes a sharp breath before letting a small moan out.

You feel a bit of pride being able to take someone like him, to make him moan like that. You look up at his eyes as you continue to suck his cock.

“Is this okay?” König asks as his hand moves to the back of your head.

“Mmhhmm,” you respond without stopping.

His hand gently guides you motion as the other one is behind him supporting himself. He lets himself enjoy the pleasure of your skills. Gently lifting your face with one hand he brings your lips to his, lifting his mask and kissing you. He wants you fully now.

Pushing your body back without breaking the kiss, his hands caress your body. You both agreed on no condom but to us the pull out method and since both of you are clean. Slowly pulling away from your soft lips he looks down at you and removes your thong, tossing it to the side.

“Are you ready, Schatz?”

“I am.”

“Gut.”

Grabbing you by your hips he drags you forward. He is such a massive man that he can easily move you. You giggle as he does and he responds with a chuckle of his own.

“Your voice is so sweet.” He tells you as he grasps your thigh as pulls one leg back for the camera view again. He rubs himself back and forth over your folds before he begins to push himself into you. His eyes watch your face to watch for pain or discomfort, yet he sees nothing but bliss.

König pushes himself as far in as your tight cunt will take at first. You moan out, grabbing his arm and the bed sheets. Your sweet pussy welcomes him with a warm wet hug and he pushes in more, a moan leaving his lips as you take him.

“You’re so tight, Schatz.” König speaks with a voice dripping with lust. His hips begin to thrust harder into you, letting his desire take over.

Your lips hug his fat cock as he pumps it into you leaving your creamy cum on his cock. He pulls out and stands to grab one of the cameras. He comes back and points it to your pussy as he slides his cock back into you, recording the way your tight cunt can easily stretch for him.

“Look at that beautiful pussy, you truly take cock so well. So fucking tight.” He picked up his pace, holding the camera in place as you reached down and put your own leg back. Your fingers digging into your own flesh as you moan out his name.

“Please König, fuck me.” You look into his eyes begging for him to get you off again.

König returns the gaze as he fucks you harder. The phone picking up the sounds your pussy is making and both of your moans.

“That’s it, cum for me, good girl.”

Your eyes flutter back as your body tenses, your cunt tightening around his cock. He puts the phone down and fucks you through your orgasm letting the other cameras pick it up. His body leaning into yours as your hands move to his back and begin to drag your nails along his pale skin.

“Good girl,” he whispers to you as he lifts his mask slightly to kiss you all over your neck and face. His hands grasp your body tightly as he continues to thrust into you. His balls begin to tighten and he feels the temptation of just cumming deep inside of you, but he can’t.

Quickly König pulls out and grabs the phone again to record. “Come here,” he grabs your hand to pull you up and sits at the edge of the bed. He points the camera down at you as you scoot closer to his cock.

Moving your pillowy lips up and down his cock, sucking as you do. You begin to lick your own wet from his cock.

“Suck it Liebling,” his voice breathy.

You move your mouth to wrap around his cock again. König grabs your hair in his hand to hold your head steady as he begins to buck his hops forward, face fucking you gently. You look up at him, not breaking eye contact as he looks down at you. He moves his 10-inch cock deeper and deeper as he fucks faster. Your eyes begin to water as you close your eyes.

“Open, look at me. Please.” König moans.

Once your eyes open and you look back up at him, he presses your head all the way down. His cock outline is visible in your throat. You gargle on his cock before he pulls it out and begins to jerk off quickly. You open your mouth and hold your breast up waiting for his load.

He cums on you, letting out loud grunts of pleasure as he does. His milky white seed shoots some on your breast, your mouth, but most on your face. He smiles at how beautiful you look covered in him. You play with it a little for the camera before he stops recording.

You both relax on the bed and pant, relaxing. König looks over to you and gestures for you to come snuggle with him. The other two cameras picked up the sweet moment.

◅ ◃ ▹ ▻

The video blows up on both of your pages. Fans ecstatic to see you get dominated by König’s monster cock finally. The chemistry you both had radiating through the camera adding to the passion. People requesting more and starting to ship the two of you.

You have 5 more days in Austria and König is excited to spend those few days with you. He’s at home, late at night, watching the clips of him snuggling you after sex. A small smile on his face as he watches it over and over. He didn’t want to, but he caught feelings. He wonders if you feel the same.

#konig #konig x reader #konig x y/n #könig #konig cod #könig x reader #konig smut #könig smut #könig cod #könig mw2 #konig x reader smut #konig x you #könig call of duty #könig x y/n #könig x you #smut #konig call of duty #cod smut

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awfcspencer · 1 month

Text

Long Live || leah williamson x reader

prompt: The journey of the Euros, Leah's ACL, and then returning.

warnings: mentions of injury, some instances of angst

“I said remember this moment. In the back of my mind. The time we stood with our shaking hands. The crowds in the stands went wild.”

All summer you had watched Leah and her England national teammates endlessly work for this opportunity, a chance to play in a Euro final and hopefully win the Euros on home soil. The tournament had begun swimmingly, solid wins against Austria, Norway, and Northern Ireland, ending the group perfect, with zero goals conceded. It was the perfect triumph heading into quarterfinals with Spain, a worthy competitor that brought a different style of play into the tournament. This would be the first time the England side would be thoroughly tested and you could only hope for the vital win.

The Spain match was certainly the most stressful thus far, it had you pacing back and forth praying to some sort of God to allow a miracle to happen and England to move forward. A goal slotted in the back of the net by Ester González sent you into a full-blown panic, but luckily Ella equalized near the end of regulation time to take the game to extra-time. A danger of a strike from Georgia sealed the 2-1 win for England to send them into the semifinals with Sweden.

Throughout the tournament, you were allotted minimal time with your girlfriend, between training and media duties, you had to rely on text messages and late-night facetime calls for communication. You even kept those to a minimum so that Leah’s main focus could be on leading England to a Euros final, especially because she was captaining the team. You vividly remember the night she had called you to let you know the news and your heart beamed for your lover every time she stepped on the pitch with the armband. The inability to not actually spend nearly enough time with Leah had been unfortunate for you, but you knew what this meant to her and you would do it every day over again if it meant that she could play to her very best. Later on you would find out that Leah had kept a very detailed journal of her days on camp, sharing every single memory and thought with you after the come down of the tournament when she returned home.

You could also tell just how the sport of women’s football was growing at each game, thousands of fans attended the matches, breaking records at each stadium. You even spotted several little girls and boys wearing your girlfriend’s kit, imaging one day your own kids wearing their mother’s number on their back. You swelled with pride at every match, seeing Leah’s passion for the game and her ability to lead her team, she and her team were finally getting the recognition they had worked so hard for and starting a new wave of young women playing football.

The next opponent, Sweden, brought one of the most historic goals with Alessia finding the back of the net with her backheel. A 4-0 win that sent England into the finals to face a powerful Germany team. You were overjoyed with happiness while you spent half the summer supporting your girlfriend at various stadiums across England and her dreams were so close you could taste it. At every single game, Leah would look up at her section and you would meet her with flashing eyes and a dimpled smile, you were always there and Leah loved every minute of it.

“I’m so proud of you baby! Onto the finals!” You congratulated her as she made long strides towards the section where you sat, hugging you desperately close. You mostly kept the interaction brief and short to allow her to visit with the several family members that had continuously showed up to support Leah.

She kept you close though, basking in your presence with an arm laced around your waist as she conversed with the people around you. You also spent some time congratulating different members of the England squad who you had come to know through Leah, ushering them well wishes and good luck’s as they passed by.

The Germany game brought you endless nervousness and stress, you desperately wanted your girlfriend to win, you saw all the hard work her and all her teammates had poured in and you wanted nothing more than them to be rewarding with a historic win. The first half ended goalless as you held close to Amanda, she had been by your side all tournament long and you both knew how desperately bad England and Leah wanted this win. Ella came on as a substitute and gave England the lead 1-0, but not long after, Germany unfortunately equalized, sending the match into extra time tied 1-1.

You hadn’t been able to sit the whole match, anxiously swaying back and forth as you watched. The next goal felt like it happened in slow motion, a corner kick by Lauren that bounced off of Lucy and luckily entered the patch of Chloe who nearly sealed the Euros win with an incredible goal. An all-around effort of time wasting and the final whistle blew, ‘England are European champions’ rang throughout a nearly sold-out Wembley stadium as the crowd erupted in cheers.

You jumped up and down while embracing several of Leah’s various family members into hugs, cheering amongst yourselves as you celebrated. England had done it and you were ecstatic for your girlfriend. Once finished with mandatory media duties and celebrating with her teammates, she made her way towards you.

“You’ve earned this love, Leah Williamson European champion!” You exclaimed with tears in your eyes as the confetti fell. “I am so, so proud of you. I’m speechless right now, just so happy baby. You did it!”

“I couldn’t have done it without your support.” She happily expressed, lifting you up while swinging you around as your fingers threaded through her hair, a wide smile cemented on your faces. You met her lips with a bruising kiss, thinking back to all the lonely nights in bed without your lover, remembering all the sacrifices she had made to make it to this moment made this moment all the more sweeter. Your childhood neighbor turned best friend and then eventually lover from Milton Keynes had led her country to a European championship and you couldn’t be happier.

To this day, watching her raise the trophy with her team had been one of your favorite memories, also the copious amount of partying and celebrating that ensued after the finals into the early hours of the next morning.

“You held your head like a hero.”

April 19th will always be a date forever engrained into your mind. A matchup between Manchester United and Arsenal at Leighs Sports Village where Arsenal looked to avenge a 2-3 loss to the Manchester side at the Emirates in the beginning half of the season, fighting to stay in the top of the WSL standings.

You’d woken up early this matchday, looking at the alarm clock that read a few minutes after 8 A.M. in red numbers. Stretching out your limbs and rolling over to your lover who lied in a deep sleep, her chest rising and falling slowly. She looked peaceful and you decided you would let her rest a little longer, knowing that waking a sleeping Leah too early resulted in a grumpy Leah, and you undeniably knew that Leah would snooze her alarm a few times before actually getting up anyways.

You took the time to properly make Leah a sufficient breakfast that included necessary carbs and protein to fuel the athlete, knowing the defender’s usual ham sandwich pregame meal would not be efficient enough for her to play to her best potential no matter how many times you had told her. You’d checked her kit bag twice to make sure she had everything she needed and even added a little post-it note that told her how much you loved her and wished her a good game, placing it in her left boot so she could find it right before the match.

“Good morning super star, ready for today?” You asked the blonde when she came shuffling into the kitchen a half an hour later, rubbing her tired eyes and still dressed in her pajamas. Meeting her upon her entrance in a warm embrace before you ushered her towards the kitchen table to eat her meal while you finished up making yourself a coffee. Manchester United always gave a valent effort, especially when they played against the Arsenal red, but you had little to no doubt that Leah and her squad could pull out an important win.

“Ready as ever, I feel good,” she told you in between bites. “You’ll be there right? I need my good luck charm in attendance.”

“Of course I will baby, wouldn’t miss it for the world.” You told her as you joined her at the table, a large grin plastered across the defender’s face. “But you really need to hurry, you have to leave in 20 minutes.”

“20 minutes?” the blonde questioned, glancing down at her watch to check the time which indicated she indeed need to put a pep in her step. “Where has the time gone? Thank you for breakfast baby.” Leah said placing her dishes in the sink and meeting you back at the table to pepper soft kisses on the side of your cheek.

“Leah, you hit the snooze button 4 times this morning and have the audacity to be shocked you’re running late? Honestly woman you surprise me every day.” You teased towards her as she ran to get dressed and do in her hair in the bedroom while you finished your breakfast at the table, mindlessly scrolling on your phone.

Several minutes later she waltzed out in the Arsenal sweatsuit combo with her sudoku book in hand and her iPad in the other. She met you at the door where you held her fully packed kit bag up for her as she sent you a thankful smile when you placed the bag on her shoulder. You carefully tucked a loose strand of her blonde hair behind her ear that had fallen out of her ponytail, secretly chuckling to yourself at the endless hours you told Leah how much she would regret getting a fringe after the photoshoot was over.

“Love you baby, play well today. Score a goal for me, yeah?” You whispered in her ear, throwing your arms around her neck, hugging her close before pulling her in for a passionate kiss, only forcing yourself to separate when you remembered Leah needed to be leaving or she would miss the bus.

Leah opened the door before turning back towards you, “Just one more hug before I leave? Please?” your girlfriend begged and who were you to deny her, pulling her in for another warm, tight embrace.

“Now go Williamson or you’re going to be late.” You told her, practically having to shove the blonde out the door and closing it quickly behind you to avoid her forming some sort of wild excuse for another hug or kiss. You quickly finished up cleaning the last reminiscent of breakfast before getting ready for the match yourself, throwing on your ‘Williamson 6’ kit and getting into your car to drive to the stadium.

------

The stadium was rambunctious, fans filling nearly every inch, excited to watch the next 90 minutes of football between two talented sides. You watched during warmups as Leah carefully scanned the crowd for her section of family and friends, sending her a wave and a smile when your eyes finally met hers as she returned the actions. Soon enough, warmups had ended, and the match was set to begin and you were on the edge of your seat, knees bobbing up and down until the whistle blew. Leah had already sent you a text that she found your little not, accompanying the message with a smile selfie holding the post-it.

Watching Leah play the sport she loved was something you would never take for granted, especially after this game.

It all happened so fast, one second Leah was on her feet and the next, she wasn’t. It was normal for Leah to play aggressively, using her body in ways to excel her game, not wanting to potentially give up anything to the opposition. It was a move she had done countless of times in training and on the pitch, so you expected her to bounce back up quickly and continue on. But she didn’t get up.

Looking down as your girlfriend lay face down on the pitch pounding her hand on the pitch in pain broke your heart in indescribable ways. Each second that passed that Leah did not get up sent a dagger farther and farther into your chest, wanting nothing more than to run onto the pitch and console your girlfriend. You were sure you hadn’t let out a single breath since she went down and it felt like every Arsenal fan, player, and coach also held their breath, they’d seen the injury with Beth, and then with Viv, and now they might have just witnessed another, the dreaded three letter word. The stadium fell eerily silent, everyone unsure of what to say or do next while the medics attended to your wincing lover, and it cut directly right through you.

You found yourself murmuring, “Get up Leah. Please, just get up baby. Please be okay,” as you watched from your seat, heartbroken with shaking legs and red rimmed eyes.

The images of your tear-stained girlfriend limping off the pitch haunted your eyes every time you closed them as you tried to regain your composure throughout the rest of the first half. You wanted to run back towards the changing rooms and demand someone to tell you what was going on, but it would do no good, Leah was with exactly who she needed to be with in this moment but that didn’t necessarily make you feel any better. Sat in the stands you thought about the next leg of the Champion League that she could possibly miss, or the World Cup that was set to happen in the summer, but you forced those thoughts out of your mind, reframing your brain into thinking that Leah would be okay, and it was a minor injury, nothing to worry or fret over. She would be okay, she had to be okay.

An Arsenal staff member had come and found you not long after the halftime whistle blew, he didn’t say much, just a request to follow him. He led you through the underbelly of the stadium and into the physio room where you saw the most gut-wrenching sight. Your girlfriend lied on the cushioned physio table as various trainers examined her knee, her baby blue no longer shed tears and her agonizing demeanor that she showed on the pitch was gone. Instead she lied in a catatonic state while everything happened around her, until she saw you enter.

You step forward towards her, meeting her at her side at the table, still unsure of what the diagnosis was. Your hands interlaced with hers immediately, brushing your thumb back and forth over your lover’s knuckles. She tilted her face to you and uttered the most gut-wrenching letters.

“ACL.” She said monotoned with a tightened jaw and thin lips. You knew she would still need a scan to properly confirm the diagnosis but the instant flash of pain that quickly subsided and the pop of the knee that she described to you after undoubtedly pointed to the tore muscle.

“Oh baby.” Your heart raced wildly. “I’m so sorry.” Releasing a shaky breath that you weren’t aware you were holding in. You don’t really know what to do, you open your mouth to say something, anything, but nothing comes out.

“Oh love, I wish I could take away all the pain from you.” You told her in a whispered hush just loud enough for her to hear. They were the only words that felt right in the situation as the trainers around the two of you talked among themselves on how to proceed next.

Leah wanted to leave as soon as the physios allowed her to, you assisted in getting her to your car that you had driven to the stadium while the Arsenal staff collected her belongings and brought them to you. You sent them a quick thanks and drove home as quickly as you could. This was all new uncharted territory, Leah had never been injured for a potential prolonged time like an ACL injury would have her sidelined and not being an athlete yourself, you couldn’t exactly understand what was going on in your lover’s mind.

The days before her scan were hard, Leah still didn’t say much, keeping to herself in your shared bed a majority of the time, but each night when she believed you were asleep, she would cry with sobs that wracked through her body and sent overwhelming pain and hurt through yours.

A doctor’s appointment and an MRI scan that you accompanied Leah to confirmed the dreaded injury. The medical team discussed the next steps to Leah and yourself about surgery and rehab treatments and after what left like hours, you were finally able to take Leah home.

In bed later that night, Leah worked tirelessly trying to type up a statement to say to her social media to let her fans know what was going on, but with each sentence she typed, she would quickly delete it, leaving her with a blank note once again. The two of you hadn’t really talked about the extent of the injury and what it means for the two of you just yet, again, it was all uncharted territory, and you didn’t want to say the wrong thing and make her more upset than she already was. She’d finally come up with the right words she was looking for and sent out the message, promptly closing her phone and setting it on the bedside table after.

You set down the book that you had been reading right before bed and turned to your girlfriend’s sad eyes.

“Oh my sweet, sweet Leah.” You cooed, pulling her into your arms, gently tilting her chin to look into her eyes before saying, “You know you don’t have to do this alone, because I care about you, okay? And I will be here every step of the way.”

“Please, just hold me.” She cried, and that is what you did, clutching onto her body with a strong hold, rubbing circles into her back as she sobbed into your arms until she eventually tired herself out and fell asleep.

“Of all the years that we stood there on the sidelines. Wishing for right now.”

Driving Leah to the hospital on the day of her operation was when the injury really felt real, up to this point the whole situation had felt like a bad dream, hoping to wake up and Leah would be perfectly fine, but that never happened. You tried your best to keep spirits high in the operation room and distract Leah the best you could by remembering to grab her sudoku book before leaving the house and making Leah pose in her oversized hospital gown for a picture. You told her every positive affirmation you could possibly think of as they wheeled her out of the room, clutching her hand until the last very second she wasn’t in reach, and then you waited, waited for what felt like years.

You’d already taken the time to text Beth and Viv separately to discuss in what ways you could best aid Leah during this journey, talking about what worked and what didn’t work. Several of the Arsenal girls had sent their well wishes to you for Leah, knowing by now she was already in surgery, you sent them a quick thank you message and promised to text as soon as she was out. You also already had the house set up to assist in rehab, purchasing the ice machine that Beth had raved about and miscellaneous things that you had bought online after reading about the best rehab techniques for ACL injuries.

Leah’s rehab was filled with the highest highs and the lowest of lows, but nonetheless, you were right by her side through every step, even when she didn’t want you to be. The first few weeks right after surgery were probably the worst part of her rehab and you could tell the toll it was taking on the defender as she would lash out at you over the simplest of things, quickly apologizing after she realized her negative outburst.

Leah had to physically relearn how to walk and relearn how to use the weak muscle and she felt herself doubting her body’s ability to measure up to what she was before the injury. She spent long days at the Arsenal facility, focusing on her rehab to the point where it was all she thought about, every move she made was to increase her ability to get back on the pitch.

You tried to coax Leah into confiding in you for how she was feeling but most nights it turned into an argument where Leah claimed she didn’t want to talk about it and that she was fine. You knew how badly she wanted to just play football, especially when she had to resort to watching the Champions league matches from the couch with her knee propped up with a few pillows.

“You don’t have to be so stoic all the time Leah, crying isn’t a sign of weakness, you know. You can’t just keep it all bottled up. You have to let it all out of you, otherwise you’ll just explode.” You told her as you watched the match, watching as Leah’s lip trembled a bit as she watched what was supposed to be her on the pitch.

“I’ll never be that me again, it wasn’t supposed to be like this. I don’t know who I am anymore without football.” She said, her eyes never left the television but you could tell the tears threatened to fall.

“You’re still you Leah, the same Leah who leads Arsenal’s defense, the same Leah who led England to a European championship, you just have a new ACL love.” Leah curled more into you, placing her head in your lap while you ran your fingers through her blonde hair.

“I am so very in love with you, thank you for everything, I know I haven’t been the best girlfriend recently but you are my everything.”

“Oh Leah, my sweet, sweet Leah, you are nothing but perfect, sure the journey has not been ideal but I’ve loved you since the moment I first laid my eyes on you and an ACL injury doesn’t change anything about how I feel about you. I just need you to let me in, talk to me about what is going on in that pretty little head of yours, okay?” You bent your head down to place a soft kiss on her cheek, and you felt Leah give a small nod in your lap.

Watching the World Cup from your shared home also felt like a punch to heart, knowing that if this injury hadn’t occurred, Leah would be there and you would too. The Australian times meant waking up early, most days you were up before the sun, but Leah woke up every match day and watched as her team continued to win throughout the major tournament. When England made the finals, you knew Leah needed to be there and she knew too, next thing you knew you were on the long flight over. The loss in the finals was hard but there was so much to be proud of and you knew the England girls found comfort in having Leah in attendance.

The second half of Leah’s rehab was much better, especially after the conversation you had as Leah now let you in, told you how she was feeling through every high and low of recovery. Once Leah was able to get back into the gym and very light football trainings, her spirits were lifted dramatically, she was closing in on her return to the pitch.

Throughout recovery, Leah did several media outings, finally getting the time to attend the events and let herself really enjoy having a break from football, trying to look at the positives in the situation. You accompanied her to nearly all the events and took the time to thoroughly enjoy just being a couple, relinquishing in the time allotted allowed to just be with Leah.

“Hold on to spinning around. Confetti falls to the ground. May these memories break our fall.”

With every month that passed since Leah’s injury, you knew she was getting closer and closer to stepping back on the pitch. She had now joined in on full training and was looking very solid. You thought back to all the tribulations Leah had overcame to get to this very moment, all the nights she sobbed in your arms and wished everything had gone down differently, all the days she spent cooped up inside doing her various stretches and rewatching her previous matches.

All of the members of the Arsenal physio staff had worked diligently to get Leah ready to return, they had done well in their efforts when Beth and Viv returned and you were sure they knew when Leah was ready, on account that Leah herself was ready to return.

You sat on the couch after returning home from work, searching through the television channels to find something on that was worthwhile that wasn’t some trashy reality show. A click of your front door and your girlfriend practically ran into the living room, jumping on top of you on the couch, screaming words you couldn’t exactly catch because she was speaking so quickly.

“Lee slow down. What happened?” You asked, pushing the heavy blonde off of you and throwing her to the side of the couch, chucking a small pillow at her as she made a loud huff when you forced her off you.

“It’s happening baby. They said I can come on during the Reading game, most likely in the second half” the blonde exclaimed from the top of her lungs, standing nearly bouncing off the couch with energy.

“This is everything you’ve been working towards baby, all your hard work has paid off. I’m so proud of you baby. You’ve earned this moment.”

You couldn’t help but jump up and down at the news, you were really the only person who was able to see every up and down of Leah’s rehab journey and you had stuck by her side every step of the way.

The League Cup against Reading couldn’t have been better, the Arsenal were up 4-0 when Leah came off the bench in the final half hour to replace Jen. The crowd roared like never before when Leah began warming up and erupted when she was finally subbed on.

To make the moment even sweeter, Leah went on to provide an assist to Beth near the 80th minute to make it 5-0. You held your breath each time she moved on the pitch, the images of her injury replayed in your mind over and over, but each time Leah moved and dribbled around, she proved that she was fit to come back and be an even better player than before. The game ended with a win and you couldn’t help but run towards the pitch as soon as the final whistle blew and Leah found you immediately.

You give in to the magnetic pull between the two of you, wrapping your arms around the back of her waist and pulling her against you, your lips crashing into hers. Your heads twist and tilt and readjust clumsily. You breath hard against her sweaty, salty skin as she drags her fingers down your jaw and off the end of your chin over and over, trying to pull you impossibly closer.

“Oh my Leah, you’ve really outdone yourself. I am so deeply proud of you.” You told her once the two of you separated, wiping the small tears that feel from her eyes.

It was nearly almost an exact year from the date the Leah tore her ACL that she made her return to Wembley for the England squad and you couldn’t be pleased with your lover.

“If you have children someday. When they point to the pictures. Please tell them my name.”

Several years down the road, you were sat with your wife and two daughters at the kitchen table looking over various scrapbooks and photo collections just reminiscing.

“When did mama get hurt?” Your eldest daughter, Emily, asked, pointing to a photo that you had taken of Leah in her oversized hospital gown right before her ACL surgery.

“I hurt my knee in a match and I had to get surgery to fix it.” Your wife told her.

“Was it scary?”

“It was a little bit scary, but I had mommy by my side and all your aunts at Arsenal to help me through it.” She explained, wrapping her arm around your waist and pulling you closer to her chair and giving you a small kiss on the cheek.

“This is the picture when mommy was able to play again. She was out for nearly 9 months.” You told her, shifting the photobook to the next page that had all the pictures you’d taken during the Reading match.

“9 months? That is like a million years.” Your youngest daughter piped in.

“It sort of felt like a million years some days.” Leah said looking down at her watch, “Okay girls, bedtime, remember we have to wake up early for Emily’s match.”

You gave each of your daughters a tight hug and kiss while wishing them a good night’s sleep and making sure to tell Leah no funny business, she had a habit of letting the girl’s convince her into reading more than one bedtime story.

While Leah put the girls to bed, you made sure to pack Emily’s kit bag, packing tiny ham sandwiches cut into triangles into the bag, a habit that your wife instilled in your daughter before each match. When Leah returned to the kitchen, she pulled the post-it notes from the junk drawer and began writing a note to Emily, wishing her good luck and telling her how much the two of you loved her, a habit you had done with Leah before her games.

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Kinda hate how this turned out but it is finished nonetheless

#woso x reader #woso imagine #woso one shot #woso fanfics #leah williamson x you #leah williamson x reader #leah williamson imagine #leah williamson #woso #woso community #woso soccer

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hotvintagepoll · 4 months

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Propaganda

Christopher Plummer (The Sound of Music)—you can't tell me your sexual awakening was NOT this man staring julie andrews down in a dark garden somewhere in 1940s austria

Keir Dullea (David and Lisa, Bunny Lake Is Missing, 2001: A Space Odyssey)—He's one of those 1960s pretty boys...only that he's beautiful. He may look like a 1960s Cillian Murphy but he's more than that...a unique actor with striking blue eyes with a strange filmography. If you watch 2001: A Space Odyssey you'll see that he's the most beautiful astronaut in cinema, and that's why his character hooks up with HAL9000 in the sequels.

This is round 1 of the bracket. All other polls in this bracket can be found here. Please reblog with further support of your beloved hot sexy vintage man.

#christopher plummer #keir dullea #2001 a space odyssey #the sound of music #hotvintagepoll #round 1

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matan4il · 3 months

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Daily update post:

There was an attempted terror attack today in Samaria, which was thwarted, the 16 years old terrorist tried to stab people, but he was neutralized before he managed to hurt anyone.

In Haifa, however, another terrorist was more successful. He managed to run over a 20 years old man with his car, seriously injuring him. Then the terrorist got out of the vehicle, wielding an axe, and started chasing down civilians who were at the scene, but thankfully there were was a soldier nearby, who neutralized him before any further damage was caused. A reporter mentioned the exact location inside the city where the attack happened, pointing out that it's a very crowded area, right by a hospital (it happens to be the one where my grandmother was hospitalized a few years ago, when a foreign worker ran her over and fled the scene, and I spent a week there with her, so I knew exactly what the reporter was talking about), so the odds of accidentally shooting a civilian while trying to stop the terrorist was high, yet the soldier managed to react quickly, effectively and accurately, and in this case, with no collateral damage. He's a hero. Here's a pic of the car used in this attack:

I got to hear an interview with Dr. Oren Tamari, an Israeli doctor who looked after an old Gazan woman, who was found tied to her bed. She was asked what happened, and according to her reply, two days prior, terrorists (there's no way of knowing whether they were members of Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad) tied her there, maybe intending for that to be a way of luring soldiers into a trap, when they'd fight with terrorists, and unknowingly kill her as well. Dr. Tamari was asked whether he had come across anything similar in Gaza, and he confirmed that it's not the first such usage of civilians by terrorists that he had encountered.

Germany, Japan, France, Romania and Austria have also announced that they're suspending their financial aid to UNRWA, and the EU said it is reviewing the matter, following the news that there's evidence some of this UN agency's employees have been involved in the Hamas massacre. In the case of one employee, he and a first degree relative were implicated in the kidnapping of an Israeli woman, while several others were killed during the Oct 7 massacre on Israeli soil, leaving no doubt of their complicity.

In reaction to the claim that the employees who participated in Hamas' massacre were "just a few bad apples," on top of the repeatedly proven wide scale complicity of UNRWA in encouraging antisemitism and terrorism, Israel is also pointing out that there is a structural connection between UNRWA and Hamas beyond the 12 employees that the UN had to concede participated in Hamas' atrocities. It was pointed out that about 10% of UNRWA's Gaza staff has ties to terrorists (23% of male staffers have ties specifically to Hamas), and 49% have close relatives who hold official positions in terrorist organizations, especially Hamas. In the past, Hamas has even directed the resignation and of a non-Palestinian director of UNRWA for his "crime" of not disputing that the IDF's strikes in Gaza in May 2021 were 'very precise' (meaning, not indiscriminate bombing). The participation in Hamas' massacre of UNRWA employees is just the inevitable end result of this symbiotic relationship between this UN agency, and Gaza's terrorist dictators.

Ironically, Arab countries which hardly donate to UNRWA felt completely free to attack the western countries that did, and decided to suspend this financial support until they know their money isn't going to terrorists. Shame really is dead.

For that matter, we can talk about the fact that in southern Lebanon, UN employees don't do anything about Hezbollah terrorist activity, even when Hezbollah fires at Israeli civilians from between two UN posts, and despite the UN's stated goal is to make sure this terrorist organization is not so much as present in this area, in accordance with UN resolution 1701. And we can also talk about the UN's complicity in crimes against civilians, like UN involvement in corruption in Russia, UN employees raping local women in Haiti (it's believed most women raped by a UN employee did not report the crime committed against them) and UN employees involved in sexual exploitation and abuse in Congo. The idea that the UN is an impartial, super-human force for good in this world is... just not true. It has been called out on its complicity in crimes before, it NEEDS to be called out for its systematic complicity in crimes against humanity, that Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists committed.

In not unrelated news, it only took almost 4 months, but the UN Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict, Pramila Patten (center in the pic below), has arrived in Israel with a team that will look into Hamas' sexual crimes on Oct 7. They're expected to work here for about a week.

It seems Nancy Pelosi is being attacked for urging the FBI to investigate whether Russia has links to protests in the US pushing for a ceasefire in Gaza. What these attacks seem to ignore is that her comments appear to follow the publishing of a US state department report on Soviet antisemitism, which is responsible for cultivating anti-Zionism as an anti-westeren tool, and that antisemitism and protest funding are tools currently employed by the Kremlin.

This is 21 years old Dor Reeder.

He moved to kibbutz Be'eri in order to take care of a kid with special needs there, while his parents live in the neighboring community of kibbutz Sa'ad. His father, Tzvi, is a Red Magen David paramedic, who on Oct 7 had a feeling that the rocket attack they started experiencing that morning was abnormally intense. Tzvi notified the emergency squad of kibbutz Sa'ad that they should be alert. Thankfully, they were and together with one tank, they managed to protect their community. Kibbutz Sa'ad was attacked by terrorists, but suffered no massacre. Tzvi continued in his work, evacuating the wounded under fire. Dorit, his wife, is a nurse, and was a part of opening an emergency field hospital in kibbutz Sa'ad. Some of the injured from the Nova music festival were brought for treatment at this hospital. While Dor lived in kibbutz Be'eri, he also found love there, a 19 years old girl named Tchelet. They were hiding together during the Hamas massacre, but were eventually found. While Tzvi managed to help save his own kibbutz, Dor and Tchelet were murdered by terrorists. It took 9 days of uncertainty for the news to be confirmed. May their memory be a blessing. Tzvi asked for everyone to be strong, raise Israel's flag, and hold our head up high.

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

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