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#creative labor markets
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Kickstarting the "Chokepoint Capitalism" audiobook
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My next book is Chokepoint Capitalism, co-written with the brilliant copyright expert Rebecca Giblin: it’s an action-oriented investigation into how tech and entertainment monopolies have destroyed creators’ livelihoods, with detailed, shovel-ready plans to unrig creative labor markets and get artists paid.
http://www.beacon.org/Chokepoint-Capitalism-P1856.aspx
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Ironically, the very phenomenon this book describes — “chokepoint capitalism” — is endemic to book publishing, and in audiobook publishing, it’s in its terminal phase. There’s no way to market an audiobook to a mass audience without getting trapped in a chokepoint, which is why we’re kickstarting a direct-to-listener edition:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/chokepoint-capitalism-an-audiobook-amazon-wont-sell
What is “chokepoint capitalism?” It’s when a multinational monopolist (or cartel) locks up audiences inside a system that they control, and uses that control to gouge artists, creating toll booths between creators and their audiences.
For example, take Audible: the Amazon division controls the vast majority of audiobook sales in the world — in some genres, they have a 90%+ market-share. Audible requires every seller — big publishers and self-publishers alike — to use their proprietary DRM as a condition of selling on the platform.
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That’s a huge deal. DRM is useless at preventing copyright infringement (all of Audible’s titles can be downloaded for free from various shady corners of the internet), but it is wildly effective at locking in audiences and seizing power over creators. Under laws like the USA’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act, giving someone a tool to remove DRM is a felony, punishable by 5 years in prison and a $500k fine.
This means that when you sell your audiobooks on Audible, you lock them to Audible’s platform…forever. If another company offers you a better deal for your creative work and you switch, your audience can’t follow you to the new company without giving up all the audiobooks they’ve bought to date. That’s a lot to ask of listeners!
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Amazon knows this: as their power over creators and publishers has grown, the company has turned the screw on them, starting with the most powerless group, the independent creators who rely on Amazon’s self-serve ACX system to publish their work.
In late 2020, a group of ACX authors discovered that Amazon had been systematically stealing their wages, to the tune of an estimated $100,000,000. The resulting Audiblegate scandal has only gotten worse since, and while the affected authors are fighting back, they’re hamstrung by Amazon’s other unfair practices, like forcing creators to accept binding arbitration waivers on their way through the chokepoint:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/03/somebody-will/#acx
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I have always had a no-DRM policy for my ebooks and audiobooks. Amazon’s Kindle store — another wildly dominant part of the books ecosystem — has always allowed authors to choose whether or not to apply DRM, but in Audible — where Amazon had a commanding lead from the start, thanks to their anti-competitive acquisition of the formerly independent Audible company — it is mandatory.
Because Audible won’t carry my DRM-free audiobooks, audiobook publishers won’t pay for them. I don’t blame them — being locked out of the market where 90%+ of audiobooks are sold is a pretty severe limitation. For a decade now, I’ve produced my own audiobooks, using amazing narrators like @wilwheaton​, Amber Benson and @neil-gaiman​.
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These had sold modestly-but-well, recouping my cash outlays to fairly compensate the readers, directors and engineers involved, but they were still niche products, sold at independent outlets like Libro.fm, Downpour, and my own online storefront:
https://craphound.com/shop
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But that all changed in 2020, with the publication of Attack Surface, an adult standalone novel set in the world of my bestselling YA series Little Brother. That time, I decided to use Kickstarter to pre-sell the audio- and ebooks and see if my readers would help me show other creators that we could stand up to Audible’s bullying.
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Holy shit, did it ever work. The Kickstarter for the Attack Surface audiobook turned into the most successful audiobook crowdfunding campaign in world history, grossing over $267,000:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/attack-surface-audiobook-for-the-third-little-brother-book
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Which brings me to today, and our new Kickstarter for Chokepoint Capitalism. We produced an independent audiobook, tapping the incomparable Stefan Rudnicki (winner of uncountable awards, narrator of 1000+ books, including Ender’s Game) to read it.
We’re preselling the audiobook ($20), ebook ($15), hardcover ($27), and bundles mixing and matching all three (there’s also bulk discounts). There’s also the option to buy copies that we’ll donate to libraries on your behalf. We’ve got pins and stickers — and, for five lucky high-rollers, we’ve got a very special artwork called: “The Annotated Robert Bork.”
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/chokepoint-capitalism-an-audiobook-amazon-wont-sell
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Robert Bork was the far-right extremist who convinced Ronald Reagan to dismantle antitrust protection in America, and then exported the idea to the rest of the world (Reagan tried to reward him with a Supreme Court seat, but Bork’s had been Nixon’s Solicitor General and his complicity in Nixon’s crimes cost him the confirmation).
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Bork’s dangerous antitrust nonsense destroyed the world as we knew it, giving us the monopolies that have wrecked the climate, labor protections and political integrity. These monopolies have captured every sector of the economy — from beer and pro-wrestling to health insurance and finance:
https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers
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“The Annotated Robert Bork” is a series of five shadow-boxes containing two-page spreads excised from Bork’s 1978 pro-monopoly manifesto
The Antitrust Paradox
, which we have mounted on stiff card and hand-annotated with our red pens. The resulting package is a marvel of museum glass and snark.
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[Image ID: A prototype of ‘The Annotated Robert Bork]
Bork’s legacy is monopolistic markets in every sector of the world’s economy, including the creative industries. Chokepoint Capitalism systematically explores how tech and entertainment giants have rigged music streaming, newspapers, book publishing, the film industry, TV, video streaming, and others, steadily eroding creators’ wages even as their work generated more money for the monopolists’ shareholders.
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But just as importantly, our book proposes things we can do right now to unrig creative labor markets. Drawing on both existing, successful projects and promising new experiments, we set out shovel-ready ideas for creators, artists’ groups, fans, technologists, startups, and local, regional and national governments.
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Artists aren’t in this struggle alone. As we write in the book, chokepoint capitalism is the final stage of high-tech capitalism, which atomizes workers and locks in customers and then fleeces workers as a condition of reaching their audiences. It’s a form of exploitation that is practiced wherever industries concentrate, which is why creators can’t succeed by rooting for Big Tech against Big Content or vice-versa.
It’s also why creative workers should be in solidarity with all workers — squint a little at Audible’s chokepoint shakedown and you’ll recognize the silhouette of the gig economy, from Uber to Doordash to the poultry and meat-packing industries.
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40 years of official pro-monopoly policy has brought the world to the brink of collapse, as monopoly profits and concentrated power allowed an ever-decreasing minority of the ultra-rich to extract ever-increasing fortunes from ever-more-precarious workers. It’s a flywheel: more monopoly creates more profits creates more power creates more monopoly.
The solutions we propose in Chokepoint Capitalism are specific to creative labor, but they’re also examples of the kinds of tactics that we can use in every industry, to brake the monopolists’ flywheel and start a new world.
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I hope you’ll consider backing the Kickstarter if you can afford to — and if you can’t, I hope you’ll check out one of the copies our backers have donated to libraries around the world:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/chokepoint-capitalism-an-audiobook-amazon-wont-sell
[Image ID: An image of a mobile phone playing the Chokepoint Capitalism audiobook, along with the title and subtitle of the book: 'Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We'll Win Them Back.']
[Image ID: Are you a writer, a musician, an artist? Is Big Tech eating your brain and sucking your financial blood? Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin’s new book, Chokepoint Capitalism’, tells us how the vampires crashed the party and provides protective garlic. Your brain must remain your own concern, however.’ — Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale]
[Image ID: I loved this book. It brings a clear and rigorous vision of the chokepoint controls that are breaking our spirit and an equally clear path forward. It speaks directly to creators, would-be artists, writers, and musicians, and all who want a free society alive with culture, dissent, creativity. It helps us all see the locks and chains, and the ways to chisel through them.’ — Zephyr Teachout, law professor and author of Corruption in America and Break ’Em Up]
[Image ID: Creators are being ground up by the modern culture industries, with little choice but to participate in markets that weaken their power and economic return. In this brilliant and wide-ranging work, Giblin and Doctorow show why, and offer a range of powerful strategies for fighting back.’ — Lawrence Lessig, Roy L. Furman Professor of Law and Leadership, Harvard Law School]
[Image ID: This compellingly readable indictment shows how ‘consumer welfare’ regulatory theory has allowed Big Tech to choke creators and diminish choice. Giblin and Doctorow demonstrate that the goal to lower consumer costs means ‘you get what you pay for’: paying less for cultural goods leads to getting fewer creative outputs and enterprises. Chokepoint Capitalism couples its legal-economic critique with provocative, sometimes utopian, prescriptions for fairly remunerating authors and performers.’ — Jane C. Ginsburg, Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law, Columbia University School of Law]
[Image ID: The great myth of the American economy is that it rewards creators and producers. But Chokepoint Capitalism dares to tell the real story of how it actually rewards the all-powerful middlemen fleecing both workers and consumers. This book is an absolute must-read for anyone who senses that the predominant economic mythology is a lie, who wants to know what’s really happening in this economy — and who is ready to finally start fixing the problem.’ — David Sirota, writer of Don’t Look Up and founder of The Lever]
[Image ID: We all know something is wrong about every click, stream, and purchase we make — unfairly depriving value creators of their worth, while enriching the wealthiest and most extractive entities in human history. Instead of just complaining about the corporate stranglehold over production and exchange, Giblin and Doctorow show us why this happened, how it works, and what we can do about it. An infuriating yet inspiring call to collective action.’  — Douglas Rushkoff, author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus and Survival of the Richest]
[Image ID: Twenty years of internet copyright wars got us nowhere — creators are still getting the shaft. Giblin and Doctorow persuasively argue that copyright can’t unrig a rigged market — for that you need worker power, antitrust, and solidarity.’ — Jimmy Wales, cofounder of Wikipedia]
[Image ID: Capitalism doesn’t work without competition. Giblin and Doctorow impressively show the extent to which that’s been lost throughout the creative industries, and how this pattern threatens every other worker. There’s still time to do something about it, but the time to act is now.’ — Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist]
[Image ID: Chokepoint Capitalism really is a tome for the times. It’s comforting to feel validated and terrifying to realize I was right all along! And now, to action! The revolution will not be spotified!’ — Christopher Coe, artist and cofounder of Awesome Soundwave]
[Image ID: If you have ever wondered why the web feels increasingly stale, Chokepoint Capitalism outlines in great detail how it is being denied fresh air. Over the past two decades, we have seen an immense consolidation of power, depriving us of fresh visions for what the web could be and contorting art and culture to flatter the objectives of a few platforms. This book does a remarkable job of identifying the blockages and surfacing ideas on the margins that could reroute us. I’m grateful it exists!’ — Mat Dryhurst, artist and researcher, NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music]
[Image ID: Chokepoint Capitalism is more than a clarion call for a new, necessary form of trustbusting. It’s a grand unified theory of a decades-long, corporate-led hollowing out of creative culture. It will make you angry, and it should.’ — Andy Greenberg, writer for WIRED and author of Sandworm and Tracers in the Dark]
[Image ID: If you’re halfway through this book and aren’t boiling mad over the way contemporary capitalism has deformed and crippled culture, get your head checked. Chokepoint Capitalism is a Why We Fight for a long-overdue uprising. Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow lay out their case in plain and powerful prose, offering a grand tour of the blighted cultural landscape and how our arts and artists have been chickenized, choked, and cheated. But it’s more than just a call to arms; it also provides a plan of battle with inspired strategy and actual tactics — ways that we can all channel that anger and make real change.’ — Kaiser Kuo, host and cofounder of The Sinica Podcast]
[Image ID: The story of how a few giant corporations are strangling the life out of our media ecosystem is one of the most important of the decade, and Giblin and Doctorow tell it better than anyone. Searing, essential, and incredibly readable.’ — Adam Conover, comedian and host of The G-Word]
[Image ID: Chokepoint Capitalism is not just a fascinating tour of the hidden mechanics of the platform era, from Spotify playlists to Prince’s name change, but a compelling agenda to break Big Tech’s hold. It presents a clear new way to think about corporate power — and a path to taking that power back for cultural creators and all of us.’ — Eli Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble and cofounder of Avaaz]
[Image ID: Chokepoint Capitalism is a masterwork. Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow lay out in chilling detail how the deck is stacked against artists, the relentless corporate drives to control production and distribution through technology and deregulation, and how oligopolies deprive gifted artists of fair compensation by eliminating true competition. But they don’t stop there: this is also a useful handbook to take on that power structure. Giblin and Doctorow remind us that when individuals understand the value of their work, they can create the necessary leverage to challenge the status quo and retake what is rightfully theirs. Both frightening and uplifting, it’s a necessary read for any artist in the entertainment industry.’ — David A. Goodman, writer, executive producer of The Orville, and former president of the WGA Wes]
[Image ID: Anyone who cares about culture can see that something is deeply amiss in the ‘creator economy’ that today’s artists are obligated to participate in. Rather than simply lamenting the problem or falling back on clichés about starving artists, what Rebecca Giblin and Cory Doctorow do in Chokepoint Capitalism is to make clear the overall pattern that drives the exploitation of artists, from music to gaming to film to books. And they lay out a credible, actionable vision for a better, more collaborative future where artists get their fair due. Every creator will find inspiration here.’ — Anil Dash, CEO of Glitch]
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katisconfused · 9 months
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You know, I at least understand some level of why people want to use AI to write them things. I am not a very good writer, I rarely have enough of a cohesive idea of what I'm trying to make to turn it into a coherent story. I am sympathetic to ex, people plugging a prompt into a program to generate something like a fanfic (especially one containing triggering content) they can't legally/reasonably commission, assuming it just stays on their hard drive vs being posted alongside legitimate writing.
But this is baffling to me.
Like the reason I found this was I was scrolling through notes on this post, full of reblogs of people responding to the prompt. Writing prompt posts with decent amounts of notes literally hand you dozens of free short stories on whatever the post is about. Someone, usually several someones, has completed the task for you already! ...But instead you clog the notes up with your entry courtesy of The Homework Machine™️.
Idk something about that is just an exceptional illustration of how making art has been warped into this mindless "Create Content™️" action. Making more similar stuff ceases to be a "wow two cakes" situation when people are just filling the table with a bunch of cheap bland store bought cakes that push the ones acting on inspiration further back.
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silverliing · 8 months
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ok but why is OP asking free labor out of houndreds of thousands of people for the convenient price of £500 💀
and they didn’t even make the poster either? they’re asking for free marketing and creative input for a product they don’t even know the story of this is where we’re at
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There is no obvious path between today’s machine learning models — which mimic human creativity by predicting the next word, sound, or pixel — and an AI that can form a hostile intent or circumvent our every effort to contain it. Regardless, it is fair to ask why Dr. Frankenstein is holding the pitchfork. Why is it that the people building, deploying, and profiting from AI are the ones leading the call to focus public attention on its existential risk? Well, I can see at least two possible reasons. The first is that it requires far less sacrifice on their part to call attention to a hypothetical threat than to address the more immediate harms and costs that AI is already imposing on society. Today’s AI is plagued by error and replete with bias. It makes up facts and reproduces discriminatory heuristics. It empowers both government and consumer surveillance. AI is displacing labor and exacerbating income and wealth inequality. It poses an enormous and escalating threat to the environment, consuming an enormous and growing amount of energy and fueling a race to extract materials from a beleaguered Earth. These societal costs aren’t easily absorbed. Mitigating them requires a significant commitment of personnel and other resources, which doesn’t make shareholders happy — and which is why the market recently rewarded tech companies for laying off many members of their privacy, security, or ethics teams. How much easier would life be for AI companies if the public instead fixated on speculative theories about far-off threats that may or may not actually bear out? What would action to “mitigate the risk of extinction” even look like? I submit that it would consist of vague whitepapers, series of workshops led by speculative philosophers, and donations to computer science labs that are willing to speak the language of longtermism. This would be a pittance, compared with the effort required to reverse what AI is already doing to displace labor, exacerbate inequality, and accelerate environmental degradation. A second reason the AI community might be motivated to cast the technology as posing an existential risk could be, ironically, to reinforce the idea that AI has enormous potential. Convincing the public that AI is so powerful that it could end human existence would be a pretty effective way for AI scientists to make the case that what they are working on is important. Doomsaying is great marketing. The long-term fear may be that AI will threaten humanity, but the near-term fear, for anyone who doesn’t incorporate AI into their business, agency, or classroom, is that they will be left behind. The same goes for national policy: If AI poses existential risks, U.S. policymakers might say, we better not let China beat us to it for lack of investment or overregulation. (It is telling that Sam Altman — the CEO of OpenAI and a signatory of the Center for AI Safety statement — warned the E.U. that his company will pull out of Europe if regulations become too burdensome.)
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wildwren · 4 months
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hey y'all, since it's spotify wrapped season, can i beg a moment of your time? no, im not about to get on a soapbox about spotify. spotify sucks but that's not what i want to talk about.
did you know that most recording artists in the united states don't have the legal right to organize a union? some musicians are unionized as part of SAG-AFTRA or the American Federation of Musicians (for instrumental musicians), but lyricists and composers are classified as "independent contractors." This decision was handed down by the national labor relations board in 1984 and has not been overturned.
this means that musicians cannot organize or negotiate for better deals from, for instance, spotify, without the threat of being sued due to antitrust laws. musicians who are not represented by a major label or who are not part of a large musical organization such as an orchestra have very little bargaining power. source
fixing this situation will take a lot of work -- there's not a single easy solution. but in an era where we're seeing union growth and historic labor wins, i think now is the time to dream big. musicians need to organize ourselves on the ground to create collective power. we also need wider political interest and momentum around the necessity of musicians' rights.
this isn't time for you to say "yea im never gonna pay full price for music, sorry" or "musicians just have to accept that the market's saturated and devalued." this is time for us to try to envision a music industry where artists can be compensated for their creative labor and music can still remain accessible and easy to discover. changing the labor situation in the united states is just one piece of changing a global music industry, but it could have a big impact on the future.
if you're in the united states, there are two active efforts that you can ask your representatives to support -- one congressional bill introduced by Deborah Ross, and a resolution introduced by Rashida Tlaib.
H.R. 5576 - Protect Working Musicians Act of 2023 - sponsored by Artist Rights Alliance
H.Con.Res. 102 - Resolution for a new Streaming Royalty - sponsored by United Musicians and Allied Workers
i know there is so much to organize around right now. but if you're in the united states and have predominantly used spotify this year, or posted about spotify wrapped, please take a moment to send a message to your representatives about these bills. all you need to do is fill in your info, the letters are already written for you.
and please share this widely. thank you!!
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breelandwalker · 8 months
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Witchcraft Books Aren't Free. Pay Your Writers.
Since it seems some people still need telling , this is your regularly-scheduled reminder that it’s not okay to illegally download and distribute free copies of recently-published books from a niche market where the authors depend directly on monthly royalties to pay their bills.
Books are a luxury. If you can’t afford a title, save your pennies or check out a copy from your local library. There are plenty of free resources and public domain texts available in the meantime.
It’s worth mentioning that plenty of authors in the witchcraft and pagan markets make a point of providing free resources and advice to the community on a regular basis, myself included. To take that information and then turn around and steal from us on top of it is not only petty, it’s cruel, especially considering the financial hardship we’re all facing in the current economy.
I see so many witches complaining about the lack of good books out there, but if authors aren't going to be paid for their labor, what motivation is there to write books for publication? Creative labor is still LABOR and writers should be properly paid for their published works, especially in limited markets like witchcraft, paganism, and occultism, where every single sale counts not only for paying the bills now, but for the possibility of being able to publish material in the future.
If you claim to be supporting the witchy community but you're doing so by distributing stolen digital copies of witchcraft books still under recent copyright, you are stabbing your fellow practitioners in the back. If you want to actually support the community, PAY THE WRITERS and encourage others to do the same.
Download overpriced textbooks and public domain titles, not witchcraft books.
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bogleech · 10 months
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Ok but I have seen you talk about this so many times, even referencing it in your old cartoons, so I gotta ask - when and how did you fall in love with neopets, like that?
Wait, is it that obscure now? I didn't know a single person from its inception to roughly 2010 who didn't have a neopets account. It was the single biggest gaming-esque name on the internet for years. Celebrities casually mentioned playing it, it got mainstream marketing tie-ins, it had plush toys people waited in line to buy up and a TCG made by the same company as Magic the Gathering. It's not that I especially "fell in love with neopets" like it's a niche thing but that there was a time it was almost outselling Pokemon, so it's just another huge cultural phenomenon that was a big part of everyone's lives during my teens to twenties, and hits my special interest in creature design since it has THOUSANDS (beyond the pets alone) ranging in quality from extremely creative to just plain heinous. I personally only got invested in it when they introduced the mutant pets, though, because it started out having almost like a "rule" against making any pets that were "ugly." They'd joke about it as a prank for instance, and originally only featured the mutants as part of a storyline they never intended players to actually adopt. They even had a fake alternate version of the site with fake "adoptions coming soon" and somehow didn't anticipate the userbase genuinely wanting the slime creatures.
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The Chia and Aisha were my favorites but mainly the chia because that kind of "scuzzy" creature was already my own design aesthetic, polar opposite of the site's established style and reminded me of if Jeff Goldblum got fused with a tardigrade instead of a fly:
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Is that just me? I feel like the tardigrade similarity jumps right out but I think it was an accident and they were possibly actually thinking of the rotting giant from Nausicaa:
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The fact that they intended its design to be unlovably ugly and were surprised anyone wanted it only made it more sympathetic. Eventually they made mutants available and I got fully invested into playing, at the time having to spend hours a day on their little flash games until I could afford a mutant after months of labor. But then a couple of years later they just abruptly decided they really didn't feel like having its design around anymore and "updated" it, which back then was automatic for all pets owned by all players with no going back:
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It had unfortunately been fairly common that they'd just completely, totally redo a pet like this with no warning and no user poll to make sure it's what anyone wanted. You just had to pray they never did it to your favorites.
All the other mutants in that earlier image would also get completely changed or never released at all. They still kept some of the other "gross" mutants and would make even grosser, so that wasn't even part of the reasoning. Just the random whims of mad gods I guess. I think what killed the game for a lot of people was actually when they did this to basically everyone at once, standardizing almost all the pet artwork so they could wear clothes in their new dressup system. It wasn't as drastic as replacing a sludge guy with some kind of hairy leaf guy but it did eliminate hundreds of technically unique designs from the site, and I found someone else's examples they put together so I thankfully don't have to do it myself:
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If anyone's not familiar enough with neopets or didn't figure that out from the last paragraph, the ones on the right are just recolors of the same exact art as all members of their species with added accessories (now wearable items) Players used to work hard to get pets they wanted based on their unique poses and personality, but you could only keep the original art for a small number of these. The customization feature kind of attracted a different new fandom, from what people say, but it never approached a fraction the site's peak, which is probably how the brand wound up getting sold to some NFT bros who aren't even involved in the site itself and supposedly never even spoken to its remaining staff outside some business emails? This is unrelated to the brief period it was bought by scientologists and the siterunners had to fight back against their propaganda leaking into it. I really didn't expect to turn this response into a mini article, I should really just make a thing on bogleech.com about it sometime. Some of my tumblr mutuals to this day are people I met through the neopets fandom and probably have equally lengthy memories/complaints.
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Harry’s Home
(PART I.)
Pairing: Roommate!Harry // Nameless 1st-Person Femme Protagonist
Word Count: ~ 12k words
‼️Mature/18+‼️
⚠️ Content Warnings: Adult Language, Lots of Flirting, Pining, Love/Hate Dynamic, References to Body Weight (“Chubby” Reader), Body Objectification (M & F), References to Masturbation (F), Mentions of Body-Type Biases, Alcohol Consumption (Legal & Responsible Drinking), References to Ovulation & Implications to Breeding
**ANY & ALL IMAGES USED ARE NOT MINE**
Likes, Comments, Reblogs, and Follows are 100% welcome 💕
Weeknights deserve more credit. For many of us, it’s the peaceful resolution to our day. It’s the time when we come home after being excused from our lectures or meetings, or when we clock-out at the end of our shifts. We’ll safely make it back to our comfort zones and our open time slot can be occupied with whatever we want. Those few free hours are sacred. They give adults a necessary recharge. Personally, I share my humble homestead with an egotistical, British businessman—Harry Styles.
Harry was employed as a marketing executive for a unisex fashion brand located in Portland, Oregon. ‘Vol. 6’ started out as a small business, and had recently made waves in the industry with its diverse designs and overall style inclusivity. The company’s roots were planted by a few local, starving artists who set up an online shop with the most modest of intentions. The amateurs were blindsided by how their ideas blew up in overwhelming popularity via the internet. It was like winning the lottery. They eventually accumulated so many orders that they needed to expand their operations—hiring an A-team of designers, tailors, and legal professionals(for copyright purposes, of course). International sweatshops and inhumane labor conditions were far from what Vol. 6 sought to create. And so they stayed in Portland—keeping their focus upon ensuring exceptional product quality, as well as enforcing flexible, comfortable, and progressive working environments for its employees. Although an underdog in the fashion scene, Vol. 6’s excellent reputation continued to soar without a hitch. It turns out that a cohesive process of structured business management and clever marketing can be achieved without sacrificing empathy, creativity, realness, or substance. The only disadvantage is the limited supply of merchandise whilst there’s a metastasizing demand. It’s not like this kind of business structure is rare. High-status designer brands have been known to keep their stock low—or at least that’s what they say—for their popular items to seem more valuable and special. As an operation that works against those capitalist games, Vol. 6 values employee and customer satisfaction over profit. The company’s active attention and true kindness are what separates them from the rest.
So, as I mentioned before, Harry is a part of Vol. 6’s marketing team. He often collaborates with the designing team when he’s working on new promotions or adverts. Creative cohesiveness is essential to successful marketing. Hence why Harry and Mitch became close friends as they had consistently developed ads together for a couple of years.
Some have referred to the boys as yin and yang. One of the two tended to present himself as intimidating and pretentious, whilst the other was comparatively quite mild and personable. It was a mystery how these men befriended one another instead of becoming enemies. Harry was the type that wanted to complete tasks his way, and his way only. In total contrast, Mitch liked spontaneity—preferring to ‘go with the flow’ rather than planning ahead. That method of living was despised by Harry. He was set in his ways. It didn’t make sense to him how his friend could act so unbothered by the world’s chaos. Maybe it was just his hot temper, or maybe it was the way his natural responses to conflict were either instigating a verbal quarrel or using bitter humor as a defense mechanism…but Harry just wasn’t a people person. Mitch had thankfully brought him out of his comfort zone a few times—reminding Harry of his university days when his mates had turned him into a womanizer. The results, however, differed from those times due to Harry developing a bleeding heart as he progressed through his twenties. He was open to new experiences and fun banter with strangers as long as Mitch accompanied him. And so they became somewhat of a package-deal. Well, at least that had been the case before Mitch started dating Sarah Jones.
Harry had nothing to dislike about Mitch’s girlfriend. They got along just fine. However, Mitch became less and less available to Harry outside of work…Which meant Harry wasn’t going out much, and that was his issue. Of course he was happy for his friend—Mitch was supportive of him when he was in a serious relationship a few years back. There was no reason for Harry to be bitter. I personally believe he was just lamenting; that he was struggling to accept the fact that life would no longer be the same as it was. He looked back to when he was working towards a degree and reminisced about how he felt more socially fulfilled from living with, and eventually befriending, complete strangers. Those college memories had been the stepping stones of Harry’s development into true adulthood. He had no intention to ever stop growing and improving as a man. Thus why Harry sought to make a big lifestyle change in order to work towards branching out on his own accord. No more was he to reside in a bachelor-pad apartment with a shitty landlord who had never fixed the rattling air-conditioner. He was going to move somewhere more permanent. A place where he could enter his thirties as successful, single, and not lonely. A housemate would solidify the latter.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Having met him briefly a few times, Sarah recognized a few of Harry’s traits as noticeably familiar. She knew someone personally with identical mood swings, a goofy laugh, and an annoyingly specific taste regarding every little thing. The combination of resemblances felt bizarre to witness up close. She felt like Harry had been performing as some sort of parody—speaking in hyperboles and absolutes as a joke. But she soon realized she was wrong and that he was just like that. Reacting emotionally was actually his genuine response to any sort of change. Sure, she’d interacted with the moody type before. She’d also certainly met plenty of picky control-freaks. Only, the person Harry reminded her of was unique in that she was entertainingly campy, yet sincerely empathetic; and Harry was the same. That person who’d come to her mind was me. And as soon as Sarah heard the news that Harry was looking for a roommate, her ears perked up and she reached out to me immediately.
But I guess I should probably explain the origin story of Harry and me, together, in more detail…here, I’ll start over:
My introduction to Harry was when a friend of mine, Sarah, gave me the news that her boyfriend’s officemate, Harry, was looking to lease a new place. The house was located in a nice suburban area just outside of Portland. Seeing that the neighborhood had been on the upscale side, he wanted to find a roommate to split the pricey rent with. Me, working full time and desperately seeking a replacement for living with my parents, saw this as the golden opportunity to finally have true independence. My initial excitement almost deterred me from wondering whether this ‘Harry’ dude was decent, or reliable, or if he was just some complete prick. I’d never met the guy. I didn’t know a single thing about him besides his name, and yet I’d already begun to mentally pack my bags. I still should’ve had more reservations about it. But then again, I was already aware of how uncomfortable living with a complete stranger was—thanks to college life in the U.S., of course. Also, Sarah’s boyfriend, Mitch, was (and still is) a respectable guy and I was sure he’d only surround himself with people of the like…logically speaking. After all, he was my closest friend’s boyfriend. If Harry stepped on my toes even once, Mitch would endure a hurricane of wrath from my Sarah.
The added layer of safety provided by my best friend’s loyalty was comforting. But this was still a gigantic step for me as a young adult. I’d be actually moving out of my parents’ house entirely for the first time ever. You could say I was blissfully naive of what challenges and obstacles my future held. Apart from all my idealistic daydreaming, I couldn’t help seeking a clearer picture of who Harry actually was (literally and figuratively).
Sarah had given me a basic description:
“He’s a sweet guy. But he tends to act kind of… ambiguous at times? His vibes go back and forth, you know? Kind of unpredictable. Hot ‘n cold…” she trailed on.
Ok. That obviously required significant elaboration—of which she’d eventually come around to providing after I sang the classic Katy Perry lyrics she’d unintentionally referenced.
“…Yeah, yeah, yeah…” She dismissed me, my sing-songy tangent coming to a giggly close.
“…But I’m serious—Mitch has told me all about Harry’s passive narcissism and how much of a stubborn grump he can be…I don’t know, maybe it’s a British thing. A stereotype, I know; but he switches from sarcastic to compassionate on the flip of a dime…” Sarah rambled.
I squinted at her and shook my head in disbelief. This was starting to sound a little sketchy. A grumpy, moody, narcissist? Awesome.
“Psh, so he’s a crabby geriatric divorceé? Wonderful…It’s no wonder he’s got that old-timey name, to boot. The guy just needs a caretaker…also, why would Volume 6 hire an old dude to handle their marketing campaigns..?” I joked.
Sarah shook her head and laughed as if I’d just said something utterly ridiculous.
“HA! Oh, god…I’ll have to remember to tell Mitch all of what you just said.” Sarah wheezed, entertained by my very false assumptions of Harry.
I blinked at her, not understanding why she found what I said so funny.
“…You have it all wrong, babe. He moved here from the UK, like, 10 years ago I think? Mitch said he hopped around from LA to New York City, then from New York to…um, well…to here, in sweet ole Portlandia.” She concluded.
As a young woman in her early-twenties, I wasn’t very enthusiastic about this living arrangement coming to life.
The look on my face must have revealed my doubts because my friend chuckled, waving her hands around for emphasis, and quickly clearing the air for me.
“Wait, wait, hold on! Before you tune out—He’s in his late 20’s! Just realizing how weird that sounded…Yeesh, I’d never let you live with some stinky, old, Englishman, you dummy!”
Phew…That sounded much better. It wouldn’t be too different from living with my older brother, then. But that one word, ‘ambiguous’—it wouldn’t leave my mind. Adjectives like that just leave too much to the imagination…well, to mine, anyway. What was Harry being all ambiguous about? My overzealous curiosity pushed me to spiral, conjuring up whatever dirty secrets that would be instant deal-breakers for me…
Did he smoke inside? Did he hate cats? Dogs? Or worse, was he the leader of some creepy murder cult? And if so, would he reserve our living room for their weekly meetings?!
...Would I be spared as a sacrifice because of my not-so-virgin blood?
Was he a fratty douchebag who peaked in college and succumbed to alcoholism?
Was he the type who’d refuse to be my roommate once he saw that I wasn’t a size-00? Would he feel catfished and tell me I looked “bigger in person?” …Not like that sort of thing really mattered to me—I’d just heard that before from a few guys around his age who were surely expecting to be faced with some petite porcelain doll…
Anyway, I guess I just hoped he’d be direct enough to tell me…you know…anything worth mentioning before I’d officially become his roommate. For all I knew, he was probably just a snobby little brat with an annoying, pompous accent.
Amidst my internal ramblings, Sarah added that Harry was a perfectionist.
So, I was right—he was a brat.
I wanted to stay positive, though. Maybe he was just a neat freak, and that’s what Sarah was implying. I mean, that didn’t sound too intolerable, right? And if he was moody, maybe he’d just keep to himself most of the time. I was perfectly fine with that. I tended to keep to myself most of the time, too...though, I never thought of myself as that moody…
Whoever he was, I just crossed my fingers that he wouldn’t have any attitude similarities to Simon Cowell. Just imagining that possibility made my head hurt and my self-confidence plummet. Whatever. That was probably unlikely, right?
Nonetheless, I was desperate for answers. Sarah just shrugged at me and told me to look him up myself if I wanted to know more. And so, I went to work.
Who was Harry Styles? Aye, that was the question…sorry, I’ll continue:
Doing some basic Googling, it seemed that Harry was at least somewhat active on social media…enough that he wasn’t untraceable, at least. This was one of those (very)few times where I was legitimately grateful for the existence of online social platforms. I scrolled and scrolled, and clicked, and scrolled some more…for probably 3 solid hours. Daylight had actually run out by the time I’d realized how badly my corneas were stinging. I’d looked at myself in the black reflection of my phone and could see the popped blood vessels in the whites of my eyes. At least I found what I was searching for.
Luckily for me, his—albeit, ancient—Facebook page looked genuine and free of any red flags. To my dismay, I had to send a friend request and a follow request to his socials in order to actually have access to the profiles. Did that make it obvious that I was in the middle of e-stalking him? Quite likely, yes…But I’d let my excitement and curiosity overtake my sense of self-preservation that night. Tiptoeing around so I could naturally stumble across a morsel of information would’ve been agonizing. My main objective was more important to me than playing mind games with that stranger, Mister Harry Styles. I wanted so badly to free myself from the confines of my childhood home, regardless. Ugh! I was the only one in my friend group who still lived with their parents, and the lack of privacy only weighed heavier on me as time progressed. My dear friend, Sarah, kindly gifted me my long-awaited chance at freedom by sending Harry’s offer my way, and I wanted to run with it.
Yes, I may have been diving face-first into a serious commitment with a complete stranger. Sure, I’ve never lived with a man who wasn’t related to me. And, yeah, I was nervous that this guy was going to reject me because I was younger, eager, and…kinda on the chubby side, to be honest. I know, I know…
My size shouldn’t matter, I knew that, and I still know that. It never truly matters. I knew my situation wasn’t the same as meeting a lousy Tinder date or whatever, but I felt paranoid regardless. All sorts of men have burned me in the past with their shallowness, so I wasn’t about to hold onto a false guise of confidence just for my big break to disappoint me in the end. The age difference felt somewhat significant on top of that. I’d been made aware that Harry was a few years my senior, but it didn't bother me. I hoped it wouldn’t bother him, either…that, and everything else about me, of course…I just had to wait and see.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
He accepted my friend/follow requests immediately, and I dove head-first into research (lowkey-stalker) mode. From awkward prom photos and blurry, live music performances, the innocence of his Facebook profile finally put my worries at ease. His most recent profile picture was of him, his mother, and his sister. The candid, selfie-style photo successfully pulled a smile out of me. It’s not a secret that there are wolves in sheep’s clothing out there. But my gut assured me he was safe—that he was a decent guy. The back and forth comments on those family photos were friendly enough for me to assume a close bond between the two siblings, especially. My cheeks started to ache from my incessant smiling and giggling. The pictures were just so cute, I had to message Sarah about it.
[Text Messages]
Me: stfu this guy is adorable 😫
Sarah: HA I’ll have Mitch let him know u think so 😏 ❤️
Me: Oh my god, fr pls don’t
Sarah: Too late 😉
Me: Alrighty 🙂 Brb…gonna go play in traffic 🤪
Sarah: Ur such a drama queen lol
Me: Yep, that’s me 😚
Sarah: xoxo 😘💋
** one week later **
Sarah told me Harry was a bit different than the way he seemed in those family photos. She said he had tattoos and that he was a total frat boy at heart. All shyness aside, “…his true colors shine their brightest when he’s riled up…I’ve seen it. Little crabby pants man-child.” It was safe to say that Sarah was explicitly giving me a warning for Harry’s hot temper. I looked past it at the time because–as a sensitive crybaby myself–I assumed he was just in-tune with his emotions. I saw nothing wrong with that. I actually found it to be quite refreshing. A handsome man who isn’t an emotionless narcissist or a bird-brained himbo? Sounded pretty exciting to me! I looked forward to possibly cohabitating with someone who had a solid connection to their empathetic side.
Also, basically everyone and their mom has a tattoo or a sleeve. Harry wasn’t different or special in that way to me at all. I completely shrugged it off. Who cared? Still curious as all hell, I scrolled around for a link to his Instagram. The link was right there on his Facebook profile.
Nice.
This is just too easy, I thought. I’ve got all this information on this man at my fucking fingertips.
Wow wow wow wow…
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So, uh…Needless to say, Harry presented himself as a little less, um…well, I definitely wouldn’t have pegged him as a “mama’s-boy.” I mean, it wasn’t like he was unrecognizably different or anything. Sarah’s depiction of him, although vague, was right on the nose. All of this was meant for research purposes only. But it was objectively true that he was insanely gorgeous. It was just a fact. Pretending like Harry was average in attractiveness…I mean, why would I do that? Why would I lie to myself when the man was just an innocent sight for my sore eyes? That’s all he was…he was cute. Handsome. Adorable. It was as simple as that. I just don’t know why I couldn’t stop coming back to his Instagram time and time again. No matter how paranoid I’d been about accidentally liking a post from like…5 years ago…I still kept clicking on his profile for more.
He had a few videos of him working out—pull ups, bench presses, deadlifts—all of which featured a very sweaty, and very shirtless Harry.
He also had a few group shots with friends. Sometimes there would be a picture of him with his mom or his sister.
The latest posts revealed his plethora of tattoos to my unexpecting eyes. It was obvious that he knew he was attractive. He knew he wasn’t some average Joe. And I swear he had to have known I was looking. Surely he was looking at mine, too. But I was quite conservative and innocent on my instagram profile—similar to the way he looked on his Facebook. I had to admit, the general vibe of this virtual scrapbook was indeed leaning on the fratty side. Sarah was right. He also seemed aloof in some ways. It looked like he preferred small gatherings to larger ones. He didn’t post very often, and it was hardly ever him who’d be taking photos of himself. Someone else would capture Harry’s beauty.
The contrast between the two online profiles distracted the hell out of me. Specifically, I found myself gawking at him in his sweaty workout videos. His defined shoulder muscles quickly caught my attention, my gaze drifting across the defined blades until I ventured lower. The butterfly on his abdomen was both creepy and beautiful. It reminded me of the moth from Silence of the Lambs. Its wings glistened with a layer of moisture as he pulled himself up and down on the steel bar. Beads of sweat made his chestnut curls cling damply to his skin. I salivated watching this man strain and flex continuously; and I felt myself arch my back while I sat, pressing and grinding my clothed core against my mattress.
Jesus…What was happening to me?!
So, uh…the truth is…I thought Harry was really fucking hot. There was no point in lying about it. His hair just looked so soft and silky, and I wanted to run my fingers through it. I wanted to pull at it. I wanted to slide my soapy hands across the art on his body under a steaming hot shower. I wanted to kiss my way down until I was met with what I was 10000% convinced would stand a girthy, 7-inch masterpiece. Oddly specific, I know. But it was obvious he had a gorgeous dick to compliment the rest of him. He just had this vibe—this aura about him. It’s hard to explain. What was worse was how it seemed as if he knew he exuded that ‘big-dick energy,’ too.
So why 7 inches? Well, the dildo I’d been using for a while was about 6 inches—which was very nice, don’t get me wrong. But it just didn’t quite fill me…completely. And so I’d begun to fantasize about how Harry could stuff my holes instead. Fantasy Harry was a motherfucking dreamboat, let me tell ya. I couldn’t stop daydreaming about him—from carrying heavy boxes into the house and helping me unpack, to flat-out forcing me onto all fours, spanking my ass, and fucking me to tears. The fantasies only evolved over time, no matter how hard I tried to push those perverse thoughts away…but to be honest, I didn’t want to…
Nevermind his admittance of vanity, he still had a gentleness about him…hiding somewhere beyond those pale, teal eyes. Or maybe it was my overwhelming attraction to him that cast a rosy hue to how I perceived his character. I guess that was possible. However, I tended to have a good radar for these sorts of things—people, I mean. Harry made me feel excited, secure, comfortable, and very horny. I had no intentions of backing out from signing that lease, and I decided it was time to officially confirm that with him.
My addiction had only worsened from there. I’d begun to shamelessly use his posts as some sort of spank bank for my regular sessions of alone time. My body reacted quite positively to the change in routine. I couldn’t get too into it, though, as I hardly ever had the house to myself. That was one reason why I wanted out of there. Of course, I was still able to have my fun; I just needed to keep quiet. But fucking myself to Harry made staying quiet extremely difficult. It was like masturbating on Hard Mode. I was constantly hyper aware of how I handled my phone with my one free hand—so as to not double-tap. Then there were some photos of him where I’d pinch and zoom in closer, straining my eyes to see if I could make out the outline of his bulge. He wore black athletic shorts a lot of the time, so he was usually protected by the camouflage of the dark fabric. In one of his weight-lifting videos, though, he brought the bar up from the floor up to his knees, then slid it up just below his hips, and—oh my god. The metal pressed so closely to the tops of his thighs that he had his whole package propped up. His shorts tightened perfectly around him. It was so subtle, most people would probably miss it upon first glance. But I didn’t. I saw it. And now I can’t unsee it.
Oh…but he wouldn’t post him with a…or would he…?
Ugh, that cocky little smirk…Fucking asshole.
I hated him.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Of course, I felt really dirty for thinking about my new roommate like that.
Oh, yeah…Sorry, uh, I forgot to mention: the two of us had e-signed the lease. I know, I know…but I needed to take the offer! How could I pass up the chance to 1.) move out of my parents’ house, and 2.) move in with a sexy, brooding, successful British man whom I could trust because he was a mutual friend AND…I honestly loved the house. It was old, but not broken or in shambles. The floors were amber hardwood, and the whole house was finished with matching carved, wooden railings and accent wall paneling. Having recently been remodeled, the kitchen was in excellent shape. Appliances were updated. The property was managed by an association which handled the lawn, utilities, and small, miscellaneous amenities. We had our own driveway, a connected two-car garage, and our mailbox was labeled with both of our last names.
The charming little cottage condo was now officially, and contractually, mine and Harry’s. I was ecstatic about it, honestly. We still hadn’t met in person yet, which I knew wasn't the smartest approach, but we’d at least chatted a bit over text and shared some friendly phone calls. His voice was insanely sexy, might I add. I knew he was from the UK, as per Sarah, and so of course I was expecting to be greeted with that accent. What I was not expecting was this slow, deep…rough…
Eek, sorry—um, I wasn’t expecting a voice like that to come out of the speaker, that’s all. Dare I say it, he actually sounded nervous to talk to me on that first call. He’d stutter his words whenever I posed a question, and I could practically hear his boyish smile through my phone. It also took forever for him to end our calls—our goodbyes resembling the never-ending midwestern kind that I was unfortunately very familiar with. They didn’t feel nearly as painful or awkward, though. Listening to his accented mumbles on the other line released a flutter of butterflies in my belly.
I later learned that Harry had performed his own research on me. The only difference was that he’d done most of it a week or so before we’d e-signed the lease together.
It was simple. At work, Mitch mentioned me in a conversation regarding the house Harry had his eye on. He was interested the moment my name was suggested, a gut-feeling making him latch onto me. Once he’d discovered my online profiles by searching through Mitch’s mutuals, his infatuation with me soared. He had a juvenile crush on me from the get-go.
Feeling 17 again, Harry would look for openings in their casual discussions so that he could bring me up. Mitch, being a good sport, spent day after day playing his role as the messenger between the 4 of us. He wished Sarah had just given Harry my phone number straight away instead. If she did, Mitch would’ve been able to eat his lunches in peace. Not only did Mitch lack the answers to those questions, but he’d also only interacted with me a handful of times. He struggled to provide Harry with even the barebones descriptions. How was he supposed to know whether I was a morning or a night person, or what my thermostat preference was, or which days I did my laundry, or how often I had guests over? My private social media accounts offered better information about me than that of the fleeting memories my best friend’s boyfriend stored in his brain.
Harry intended to use somewhat of a surreptitious approach to voicing his curiosity to Mitch. But his sly efforts were useless, as Mitch caught onto his scheme quite easily. There wasn’t anything indicating to me that he was interested in me in any way. Well, not until Sarah let it slip that Harry couldn’t keep my name out of his mouth whenever he spoke to Mitch. But I thought he was just curious…I mean, I was a random, younger woman whom he was going to be living with. It made sense to me that he wanted to know so much about me. I was just as curious.
Casual lunch conversations between the two men had begun to form a particular pattern of redirection. At first, Mitch thought Harry was simply just eager to send in his deposit before anyone else could. The rent cost was a steal for how nice the house was and for the lovely neighborhood it was in. However, he knew all this enthusiasm was directed towards me, in particular, when Harry’s eyes were perma-glued to his screen whilst scrolling through my photos. I didn’t really have that much to scroll through, but apparently Harry spent enough time staring at each individual picture that one may have assumed I had an endless gallery. He’d even taken the liberty of digging further and eventually found my LinkedIn page. I remember how the week before our first phone call, I’d gotten a notification from LinkedIn telling me that someone viewed my profile…I didn't even know why I kept the app on my phone since I was content with my current job. Nevertheless, Harry’s investigation wasn’t as covert as he’d hoped.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Harry was scrolling around on my LinkedIn profile in the Vol. 6 breakroom. Without thinking, he outwardly deduced to Mitch, “She must be the commitment type,” referring to my short, yet impressive résumé. He promptly followed up his inference by chiming,“She’s lookin’ for something’ serious then, hm?”
As soon as the words escaped his lips, Harry’s nonchalance disappeared.
Mitch stopped in his tracks as Harry decided to drag the comment out further.
“I-I mean, like, for a serious living arrangement, y’know?” Harry squeaked.
Mitch cringed in discomfort as the cracking of Harry’s voice pierced his eardrums. To the man’s dismay, his friend didn’t know how to shut his mouth.
“…Some people can be quite fickle ‘bout it, yeah? And what, she’s 24? Surely she’s been disappointed by dozens of pricks by now. Must be dying for someone she can actually rely on, dontcha think?”
Mitch pursed his lips and half-heartedly agreed, “Mhm, probably sick of the fear-of-commitment type.”
Harry nodded and pulled at his lip with his thumb and forefinger. He then continued to ramble on.
“Now tha’ I’m edging on 30…I dunno…’guess I’m just looking—” He paused to clear his throat and scratch his nose with his knuckle. He looked considerably anxious. “—looking forward to, uh, commitments, and all tha’.”
Mitch’s eyes narrowed towards his friend who kept fidgeting with his hands on top of the table and dodging all eye contact. He found Harry’s clumsiness entertaining. He wanted to see how long he could get him to chase his tail. Instigating, Mitch said,“Yeah…So, uh, did you find anything else interesting about her?”
Harry lifted his head up to meet with the other man’s suspecting stare.
“Huh? Well, y-yes, definitely! ‘Course I did. She, uh…well, she’s—”
“—She’s a pretty girl…yeah, H?” Mitch interrupted, cutting him off from his stuttering. Harry swallowed dryly in response. At that point, it seemed to him that Mitch had finally picked up on his crush.
“Uhm, yeah…yeah, I think she is. Quite lovely, now that y’mention it.” His eyes blinked down at the zoomed image of me in a bridesmaid’s dress displayed on his clutched phone screen. Mitch patted Harry’s shoulder, heartily laughing at the glassy-eyed brunette in front of him.
Except, Harry wasn’t laughing. The shells of his ears turned red hot and his knee bobbed awkwardly under the table, unintentionally knocking on the hard surface a few times.
“Ah! Fuck.” He cursed under his breath, holding his nervous knee down.
“Harry, it’s ok if you have a lil crush on her...” Mitch assured him. Harry gnawed on the inside of his lip as Mitch kept on. “…God, y’know, I haven’t seen you down this bad since…well, since Cam, I think...”
Harry gulped at the mention of the woman’s name…the woman who broke his heart several years earlier. His discomfort with the subject was apparent to his friend who then swiftly rephrased. “Shit…Sorry…I just mean, like, you’ve got heart-eyes for a girl you’ve never even met. You don’t know her. She doesn’t know you…”
Harry stayed silent.
“…Honestly, I’m surprised. ‘Used to you always going for the Barbie-type. It’s nice to see you’re, uh, broadening your horizons, hm?” He smirked and drew an exaggerated hourglass in the air with his hands.
Harry furrowed his eyebrows and got defensive at the suggestive implication. “Besides having dated all women, I’ve never had a type, Mitchell.” He scoffed. “And another thing—” Harry quipped, his pupils swallowing the soft green of his irises. Mitch, unintimidated, seemed quite amused by his friend’s sensitive temper.
“—You shouldn’t talk about her like tha’. Inn’ she close with Sarah?! That’s your girlfriend’s best friend. ‘S fucked up.”
Mitch nodded in agreement with a dismissing chuckle. “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sarah’s known her for years, but I was just messing with you, man. Relax.”
The men were quiet for a few moments before Mitch sent a warning Harry’s way.“Don’t fuck around with her, ok? ‘less you’re looking to mop up the poor girl’s tears every day. You’re signing a 3-year lease, remember? Try not to think with the wrong head.”
Harry glared at Mitch.
Wha—mopping up tears?! That’s a bit dramatic…
Contrary to Mitch’s assumptions, Harry wasn’t planning to create an uncomfortable living space. That’s the last thing he wanted. Sure, he was attracted to me and felt little butterflies fluttering in his belly when he read my posts and my texts. So what?! That’s his business if he had a teeny tiny crush on his potential housemate. It felt like Mitch was deliberately egging him on, and that’s precisely how the conversation escalated.
“What—? What are you going on about?” His voice strained to release the words. Mitch was done beating around the bush—he realized how the aftermath of Harry’s pursuit of me could end with lots of crying on my part; and worst of all, a very angry Sarah Jones. He wanted to avoid that outcome as much as possible.
“H, you’re stalking her Facebook and shit—”
“—Oi! ’S not like tha’! I just wanna know who I’m asking to move in w’me!”
“Ok, well I’m pretty sure you don’t keep looking through all her photos because you wanna know how good she is about washing the dishes.”
“You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about…” Harry huffed. “…’Sides, you know it takes me a bit to get comfortable with people. Not to mention, I've never had a bloody roommate befo’, either.”
He was telling the truth—omitting some personal details in the process, but that didn’t matter. Not to Harry, at least. He knew Mitch was terrible at keeping secrets and that Sarah would be in the know before he could even finish a confession. There was no way he was going to risk jeopardizing such a safe and pleasant option with sharing his feelings so soon.
“Okay…” Mitch trails off. The air in the room was still and it made him uneasy. Harry scratched the shadow of stubble adorning his jaw. His impulsive mouth thankfully filled the silence that was suffocating them previously. As grown men and friends, the boys seemed to act like stubborn adolescents when it came to women—specifically, when it came to Harry and women.
“Um…so, you said you’ve met her before, yeah?” Harry couldn’t let it go.
Mitch drank from his water bottle and gave Harry the thumb’s up with his free hand.
“Then uh, why don’t you tell me ‘bout her? Like…Wha’s she like in person…?” Mitch took a deep breath and screwed the cap back onto the bottle. He then rubbed his thumb and forefinger against his chin mockingly. It was like Mitch was searching for ways to further tease Harry about his crush. Harry chose to ignore it this time.
Despite lacking approval in Harry’s newfound love-interest, Mitch offered him his honest knowledge anyway.“Hmm…well, I first met her at Sarah’s birthday party a few years back…She was nice, just a little on the quiet side. Seemed like she was holding herself back in that way, you know?”
The sincerity of his recollection shocked Harry. He was expecting to be turned down or mocked once again—he was even planning in his head what to send me via DM to further get to know me, assuming Mitch would’ve ended the conversation by that point. Luckily, he was mistaken.
“I remember her, like, tearing up at a picture of Lexi’s daughter. I thought that was a bit dramatic—the crying, I mean—but, I guess she hadn’t seen Lexi and her baby in almost a year or something..? I dunno…”
Harry frowned, empathizing with my reaction. It broke his heart whenever he couldn’t see his godchildren for long stretches of time, too. Mitch then tapped his fingertips against the table, traveling deeper into his memory to provide more details for Harry.
“…I’d say she’s sensitive in general, though. Sar told me how she’s always the one crying at movies, crying’ in arguments…cries whenever she sees a cat video on TikTok. Kind of a hot-mess, if you ask me…”
Harry’s lips twitched into a smile imagining my expressive emotions.
“...OH!” Mitch clapped his hands and chuckled before proceeding.
“She’s got this laugh that’s, uh, it’s like low-key really loud. Like, sometimes it’ll be this crazy wheeze and then, right away, she’s as red as a fuckin’ tomato. Sarah thinks it’s hilarious and they’ll basically laugh at each other for an hour. But yeah, you can tell she gets all weird and embarrassed after she laughs, though—and she apologizes for everything, all the time. Always sayin’ sorry when she literally didn’t do anything. I swear, dude…Someone could knock her onto her ass and she’d be the one to apologize. Wait, I think she’s from somewhere in the Midwest—like the northern nicey-nice states, y’know, so maybe it’s that? I’m not sure.”
“That’s…kinda cute.” Harry mumbled, his cheeks turning rosy.
Mitch grinned. “Oh, you think so?” A pink hue then washed over Harry’s skin entirely and he bashfully ran his hand through his loose curls. “Yeah, she seems quite lovely—I mean…”Harry stumbled over his admiration, trying his best to sound cool and detached. He failed miserably.
“…I-I dunno…Jus’ forget it.” He then buried his face in his hands, shamefully admitting defeat.
Mitch rolled his eyes and chuckled at his lovelorn friend. He guessed Harry was only randomly feeling things for me because he’s lived in a bachelor’s paradise for too long. It was also a known fact that he’d only have short flings once every blue moon. Those flings have become fewer and farther between as of late. Romance and commitment weren’t really Harry’s forte.
It’s not that he didn’t want a partner, but that he viewed the whole relationship-building process to be strenuous and stressful. Life and work were already difficult enough to balance. And so, for the past few years, Harry let himself be completely occupied by his job at Vol. 6. The go-to excuse to his friends (and especially his mother) for not settling down yet was that he carried a heavy workload, and he didn’t want to be an absent partner because of it. He’d end those conversations with a snippy “‘S as simple as that” phrase.
Even so, Harry was praying to God in the privacy of his lonely bedroom that he’d have the chance to settle down soon. All his adult life, he’d aspired to meet ‘the one’ and for him to give that one all his love and all his babies—a hopeless, hungry romantic Harry was. Dreams like these passed through his subconscious more frequently the more he aged. The British businessman was famished, desperate for love and connection.
Dating around was disappointing and redundant, and one-night-stands made him feel gross. He wasn’t simply a dumb, horny teenager anymore, he wasn’t even much of a dumb hornball of a man in his early adult years. Nay. He always kept an underlying craving for passion and compatibility. Harry was going to enter his 30’s in less than a year and he desired more than lackluster, meaningless sex with boring strangers. He needed more than arm candy. He needed more than a weak flame. He longed for an all-encompassing wildfire to eat away at his flesh from the inside out. He wanted to feel someone’s presence consume him.
Recently, Harry’s dreaming intuition had been signaling to him that he wouldn’t have to wait much longer to finally find his person. He was so needy for someone to genuinely love, and he felt overwhelmingly drawn to me from the very start—to my smile, my innocence, and my bleeding heart that matched his own. My lucky arrival into his life had only increased his determination towards lifelong romantic and sexual fulfillment. He just knew.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The time had come for us to meet in person. We’d gone out for drinks with Mitch and Sarah one weekend. It was a safe choice. This way, no one would feel uncomfortable, left out, or excluded. But in all honesty, it felt more like a double-date than a friendly gathering at a local bar.
I had been somewhat apprehensive about drinking around Harry knowing how I was a bit of a flirty(slutty) drunk. All it took was 1.5 cocktails for me to be a giggling, cock-hungry devil woman. Sarah knew this about me. She’d witnessed my nymphomania from the sidelines whenever we’d go out for a girls’ night. Yet, this knowledge did nothing to prevent her from ordering the 4 of us tequila shots before I’d even stepped into the establishment.
Of course, I was late—I’m late to everything. But that night, it was different. I was on the verge of a mental breakdown with hangers and loose clothes strewn across my bed and crumpled in clumps on the floor. Even my mother felt the need to knock on my door after one of my particularly loud outbursts of frustration—making sure I wasn’t actually in pain. I was fine. I just needed to look my absolute-fucking-best when I met my dream guy face-to-face for the first time! Was that such a crime to try and accomplish?!
My mom didn’t get it.
I’d finally slipped into a pair of high-waisted, dark wash jeans that made my ass look like a big, juicy peach, and a red, ruffled peplum-blouse that deliciously hugged my curves—my large breasts, especially. I topped it off with a tin cup choker and a pair of black, knee-high, heeled leather boots. My self-confidence switched from plummeting to soaring once I’d done a final mirror check on my way out the door.
I knew I had the ability to somewhat ‘make an entrance’ (in dim lighting, at least). However, as soon as Harry and I locked eyes, I saw his mouth hanging open as if I was an A-List celebrity approaching him. My stomach glittered with butterflies at witnessing the effects of my gorgeously buxom appearance. The high-pitched ring of Sarah’s playful wolf-whistle pulled me back to reality.
There he was. He was real. And he was even hotter than I thought he was. Yet, it was him whose features reacted to me with lusty enchantment.
His pupils were devouring me as we stood in a lull. My hand extended towards him for a cordial handshake. But as his large hand gripped mine, he pulled me into his chest for a hug—planting a soft kiss on my cheek. What was even more unexpected was how natural it felt to have his arms around me. The four of us then did a few rounds of shots that night. As a (heavy-weighted) lightweight, I was giggling like crazy after the first two throws. Harry laughed every time I did, and vice-versa, and so we’d run out of breath repetitively—basically falling to the floor on top of each other. We looked like a goofy, touchy couple out on a double date, but we were completely ignoring the other couple. Sarah found our loopy mingling to be quite entertaining, as did Mitch. They both had intimate knowledge the other didn’t. The night eventually wound down and the snoozy (actual)couple left for home via car service. I definitely wasn’t sober enough to drive, either. Thinking back, I suddenly remember sharing a private moment with Harry around that time. Nothing R-rated. Not even PG-13, really.
Our friends had already parted ways, leaving the two of us drunk and cozy at a corner-table in the back of the bar. He ordered us some ice water, of which I’d gratefully accepted. I was mid-gulp when I felt his fingers tuck a section of my hair behind my ear. In hindsight, that was a cheesy, 90’s romcom thing for him to do. However, it felt so gentle and sweet in the moment, I didn’t care. My eyes blinked up at him, my mouth occupied with chilled fluids, and he smiled dreamily down at me. Swallowing and setting my glass down, a soft giggle escaped my lips.
“You’re even prettier in person, y’know.” Harry drawled. More light laughter came out of me before I returned the compliment. “Mmm, you too, Mr. Styles.” His cheeks dimpled and he shook his head at me. “Tha’s cute, but I’m serious.”
I raised my eyebrows at his accusation. “So am I.” My arms folded over my chest in playful defiance. We sat there for a few beats, deeply drinking each other in as if the other person was the bartender’s last call. Harry broke the trance first. “Need t’get ya home, love.” His hand moved to cover mine on the tabletop. Out of instinct, my glassy eyes followed his touch. He was cold, clammy even, yet I could feel my skin flush red-hot in retaliation.
Harry seemed hardly intoxicated or loopy anymore. He had more to drink than me, for sure. However, I had to hold onto him for stability in order to exit the building. Leaving the bar that night gave me the same satisfaction as going home after an amazing first date. I hadn’t met a guy so instantly enamored by my presence since high school…back when I was a size 8! As a size 16 in my early twenties, I’d gotten used to men talking over me and looking right through me. There was no reason for them to treat me that way. I’d always been told that I’m the nicest person in the world—that I was beautiful and hilarious and passionate and brilliant. None of that mattered, though. I was either met with pure indifference or blatant, manipulative narcissism from the opposite sex. But Harry was the diamond in the rough. He treated me better than just decently. He made me feel like a person deserving of much more than the bare minimum—more than just mere kindness—worth love, attention, effort, adoration, and affection. I hadn’t felt that in a long time…if ever.
And don’t worry, neither of us drove home. Harry ordered an Uber for me and rode along so that he could make sure I got inside my parents’ house safely—escorting me to the door like a proper gentleman would. I’d only really experienced that kind of ‘chivalry’ once or twice before. Not that every guy I’ve dated was a complete asshole to me, but the bare minimum was certainly a chore for some…It was refreshing to be treated so delicately—by someone who hardly knew me, to boot.
That entire first impression…it was a solid confirmation for me.
I liked Harry.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Harry and I have grown to be quite friendly with one another since we first met a little over a year ago. However, we sure as hell didn’t start out that way—yeah, the amazing time at the bar was a false first impression. Sure, Harry would still have his moments where he was genuinely caring and gentle. But for the most part, his demeanor changed into that of an antagonistic older brother. So, you could say the initial acquaintanceship was tense.
For starters, we had that 5 year age-gap; and so Harry used that as a pass to be an arrogant, cynical, pretentious know-it-all. It was like he always needed to be the one and only expert on everything. And I’m certain he’s always gotten off on every rare instance where I’ve shown to be naive. Yelling-matches would occur every so often for months as both of us are sensitive hot-heads. We ended that streak of arguing when Harry’s big mouth had inevitably put me in tears. I think it was around the 6-month mark (of living together) when it happened. What’s silly is how his comment didn’t even deserve my dramatics, really. I’d already been in a piss-poor mood that night, and I’m just a crybaby in general. So you betcha any joke about me and my body, no matter how innocent the intentions behind it, throws just enough of a punch to unleash the hysterics.
I was in our living room watching YouTube when Harry came home from work. The video on the TV had pulled a full-blown guffaw out of me a minute or so before the door opened—which felt like a wave of relief after a long, miserable day at my job. I typically would spend more of my time enclosed in my bedroom, but I guess I just felt like switching things up that day. Besides, Harry acted as if he owned the whole goddamn place. The house was 50% mine, too (per our rental agreement). I had every right to venture away from my compact sleeping quarters for the evening. There was still a high probability that Harry would be a grump about it.
Fucking whatever.
If I wanted to enjoy our shared entertainment room, then I was gonna fucking enjoy it! My confidence was torn out from underneath me the moment that prick made his entrance. The door swung open, and there he was—white-collared, spotless, and as smug as ever. He released a generous sigh, an attempt at drawing my attention, but I refused to acknowledge his homecoming. What? Did he want a freaking ‘welcome home, honey’ from me or something?! Being a part of Harry’s House’s Greeting Committee wasn’t in the fine print of our lease. Plus, the last time I kindly acknowledged him after work, he brutally mocked me.
[“Hi!!!” I exclaimed with a sweet smile.
He raised an eyebrow as he slipped his shoes off. “Uh, hello.”
I was in the middle of stowing the last of the groceries away. I’d been in a pretty good mood that afternoon. I don’t know why or what made me so excited for Harry to come home, but I just was. Typically, I wouldn’t be keen on asking him to talk about his day. But, again, I was just feeling good. I didn’t understand why that deserved such an adverse response from the man.
“How was your day?! Oh yeah, you had that big meeting, or whatever, right?”
“Mhmm.” He muttered, unbuttoning the wrist cuffs of his shirt and rolling the sleeves up to his shoulders.
I grinned brightly at him and opened the fridge. The way Harry looked with his stuffy work clothes always made me melt. He kept his tattoos well-hidden, but simply pulling his sleeves back would reveal the art…and that was something he’d do as soon as he got home. The action was so small and innocent, but witnessing it so closely—whilst simultaneously inhaling the faint notes of his expensive cologne—sent rushes of heat down to my core. He had no idea how hot he was when he did that…actually, he probably knew exactly how hot he was…little shit…
“So…Did your presentation go ok?”
“Uh, yeah, ‘went fine. It was fine...glad to be home, though.” Harry sighed, but I saw him fighting a smile once I’d turned around to face him.
“Oh? Just fine?” Judging by his subtle cheekiness, I had thought he had some news to tell me. It just seemed that way to me, at least. Or maybe that he was hiding something, or about to make a joke. My latter suspicion was quickly confirmed as true.
“I dunno…It went well, I guess…couldn’t wait to get home...” Why was he smirking at me?
I giggled and continued the banter.
“What are you being so modest about? I’m sure the reps at Gucci fell in love with the designs.”
Harry slipped onto one of the bar stools and watched me unpack the remainder of paper bags from behind the kitchen island. He leaned back against the seat’s backing with his arms folded and resting comfortably atop his abdomen. After making silent eye contact for a moment, I resorted to laughing lightheartedly and raising my eyebrows at the man.
“Eh?”
Harry just smirked.
I’d begun to fold up the empty paper bags. My cheeks were definitely blushed pink, reacting sheepishly to his stare. To conceal my submissive appearance, I reached up—pushing up onto my tiptoes—to stack the paper bags above the refrigerator. It didn’t matter that my back was facing him. I could still feel his eyes following my every move. Why did he have to intimidate me so much?
“Fine, be that way. Just so you know, I bought cookies for us, but now I'm not gonna share!”
“Oh really?” He hummed, leaning up to rest his forearms on the counter.
Scoffing, I stepped forward to face him from the other side of the island and grabbed onto the edge of the countertop. My upper half was angled towards him so that I could talk more directly to him.
“Really, really.” I purred, not realizing my voice would sound so erotic. Instead of backtracking, I just ran with it. Harry’s pupils expanded much like a feline’s when they’re hunting their prey.
But he just sat there smirking at me. My pleasant mood wasn’t to be ruined by his teasing. I wasn’t going to allow it. I could play, too, Styles.
“What kind of cookies did you get us, hm?” His low, British drawl sent chills down my back.
“Oreos.” I didn’t sink into that ‘subspace’ as they call it. Not yet.
Harry basically moaned a hum out in approval. I swallowed, still combating my natural instinct to surrender like a desperate little puppy. This was getting more difficult.
“You know those are my favorite, don’t you?”
I blinked. “Uh huh.”
“I bet you got’em just f’me…you weren’t gettin’ them for us...” He paused for a moment. “…were you, sweet girl?”
“I…maybe…” I squeaked, earning Harry’s immediate amusement.
“I’m gonna take a guess at something real quick, a‘right, doll?”
“Ok…” He was so close to me. I was just thankful I’d been chewing gum at the time…
“Are you ovulating right now? Is that why you’re being so doting and domestic?”
My face fell.
“Wha—Excuse me?!” I stepped back from the counter and put my hands on my hips. What kind of guessing game was that?! Who even asks that?!
In the most annoying way, Harry stood up from his stool and copied my stance. He was using far too much sass and flamboyance to be accurate, though. I did not look like that…
“Oh, don’t you give me that look, sweetheart.” Harry chuckled, walking over to me. He then reached his long index finger up to *boop* the tip of my nose. I huffed in response. The breaking point was nearing closer with every word he’d spoken. But submission was not an option.
I knew that he knew. He had to have known. He must have caught onto my shyness, saw how much he made me blush, sensed how bratty I’d become whenever he teased me. I was putty in his hands.
“Awe, You’re cute…” He mumbled under his breath. His hand rose to my shoulder and he twirled a lock of my hair around his finger.
I was furious. It was obvious he was just trying to rile me up. That’s all this was…reaction bait.
“Harry…—”
“—I’m just sayin’, one might think you were trying to sweet talk me into letting you milk me dry and put a baby in ya. I’m sure you’re just as fertile as you look, aren’t you, babe?” He grinned and drummed his rings back against the marble counter, now leaning back all cockily.
There it was again—that smug little smirk on his stupid, perfect, dimpled face. What did he mean by, “as fertile as I look?!” God, a woman can’t be mean or nice without a man having some bullshit to say about it. Whatever. I told myself at that moment that the next man who dared to comment on my missing smile would be a dead one.
I gave him a dirty look and hustled my ass up the stairs to my room. Thankfully, I was finished putting all the groceries away. There was no reason for me to stick around playing this silly game with Harry. As I was making my way up, he called out to me, “I may have a high sperm count, but I’m not quite ready to be a daddy, yet, love!”
“Shut up!” I groaned and slammed my door shut. I think I could still hear him snickering to himself downstairs. Such a dick. Also, how the hell did he know I was ovulating..?! Ugh!
Oh, and Harry wasn’t even finished with his jokes yet, because he’d leapt up the steps in long strides and knocked on my door…just 5 minutes later. I opened it, having then changed into a crop top and pajama shorts in the meantime. Not only was my round ass falling out of the shorts, but my heavy, unsupported tits were also threatening to peak out from the bottom hem of my shirt.
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Typically, I wouldn’t want to be caught dead wearing that kind of getup in front of anyone. However, I thought I looked deliciously thick and absolutely, downright-fuckable that night. Of course I’d been aware of this, as well. And so I used my innate feminine sexuality to my advantage. As soon as I opened the door, Harry’s eyes (unsurprisingly) flickered back and forth between my chest and my face. How classy… I took the liberty of folding my arms together in front of me to feign some modesty.
Looking back on it now, I definitely watched a similar scene in porn...
He just stood there at my door, all of a sudden at a loss for words. I wish that silence would have lasted longer. It took only a few seconds before he was flashing me his signature dimpled smirk again. He then mirrored my body language and leaned his shoulder against the doorframe.
“Well, well, well. What do we have here?” He teased, plucking at the hem of the shirt sleeve that hung loosely past my shoulder.
My back straightened up, an attempt at asserting a smidge of self-confidence amidst my pink cheeks and pounding pulse.
“What do you want, Harry?” I tried to act annoyed, but I think I sounded too timid…and to be honest, the idea of Harry filling me up with his cum had caused my panties to dampen significantly. They were surely leaking through my shorts, but fortunately my thighs were meaty enough to hide it.
“Hmm…No bra? Tha’s interesting…” I could tell he lowered his canter when he said that, but I still heard him.
“Gross, you pervert.” I spat, squeezing my arms closer against my chest.
“Ay, hold on, little miss sunshine. What’s with the bratty attitude, huh?”
“Shut up, mister big loads. Go impregnate a sock.” My expressive irritability only further inflated his ego.
“Hmm, I’ve gotta say, tha’s tempting, but…I wouldn’t wanna make you jealous.” I wanted to scream.
“Ugh! Get out of my room!” I pushed at the door, but Harry held it open with his hand—and there was no way I could win against him in that impossible match of strength.
“First of all, I’m not in your room.”
I closed my eyes and tried to control my breathing.
“Second,” he held his finger up. “Would you like f’me to order us some dinner?”
I huffed. “What I’d like is for you to leave.”
He shook his head and tsk’d in response. “Mm-mm, tha’s not what I asked.”
My teeth clenched at his audacious snark.
“I don’t care, Harry.”
His rings then tapped awkwardly against the smooth wood.
“Ah…” he sighed with his head bowed. “…Look, I’m sorry. I was just tryin’ to mess with you...I didn’t mean to make you feel embarrassed…”
Even though I couldn’t stand him, I’d begun to feel my heart soften at his puppy-eyed expression. Why did he have to be so irritating and so adorable at the same time?! Just choose one!
Hmph…whatever.
“…Well, I know you’re hungry…I’ll pay…?”
I sighed and chewed at my lip. I was starving…
His boyish apology was reluctantly accepted, but I made a point out of picking something expensive. He could afford it.
We ate and watched a movie on the couch together. To my surprise, there were no more stupid comments coming out of his mouth for the rest of the evening. Impressive. I noticed his eyes turned basically black. It wasnt like we had all the lights off; plus, it was August—the sun didn’t set completely until 9pm. I felt those pupils following me.
It was apparent that Harry found me attractive. That night he certainly did. Or maybe he was just high? Either way, after he’d pointed out my lack of undergarments, I decided to brush him off as simply horny. At least that was the best explanation I could come up with for all the sneaky eye-fucking. There was no way I could’ve convinced myself he was actually giving me that kind of attention consciously…
After we’d finished eating, he went out of his way to fetch me a blanket(our good one, no less) and then proceeded to drape it around my back and shoulders, tucking me in as if he’d done it a million times before. Look who’s the doting one now, Styles!
I also remember how he basically bolted for the bathroom and took a shower as the film wrapped up with the end credits…Ok, ok…so, I may have purposefully bent over in those shorts while cleaning up the coffee table…but surely he just had a long day and was desperate for a hot shower…Surely.]
It’s safe to say that I toned down the ‘domestic’ part of me from that point on. Even though Harry just likes to get my goat, I still wanted to make it more difficult for him to have a reason to tease me. The night when our door to the garage swung open, his voice echoed through the house with such vigor that it sent yucky chills down my spine. Oh, the irony...
“Well, shit—Mitch wasn’t kiddin’ ‘bout y’laugh being loud as’ell! ‘Could hear ya from the driveway!”
This man survived off of my agitation, I swear. I shifted in my seat to face him and my eyes narrowed at the sight of his stupid, cocky face. I’ve always felt embarrassed about my somewhat-loud, slightly obnoxious laugh—and the thought that it’s been a main point of discussion between Harry and Mitch (and who knows who else) stung even worse.
It’s fine. Don’t listen to him. Don’t react. Just…breathe…
“Hi, Harry.” My intonation was as unimpressed as I could make it sound. He of course snorted at my brattiness, slipping his shoes off and tossing his wallet and keys onto the kitchen counter before taking long-legged strides in my direction.
“Good evening, doll.”
I huffed and waved my hand half-assedly. Something that drove me mad was how he was fiercely antagonistic towards me, and he insisted upon giving me little pet names. I knew he was just teasing me. That’s why I made sure to always swallow my bashful giggles whenever he said them. My subby-ness was not to be easily accessible anymore.
“So, what’s this, hm? Grown tired of hiding from me all the time?” He casually gestured to me with his flat, open palm.
I exhaled through my nose in aggravation as he plopped abruptly down onto the couch—his arm propped up next to him and one leg resting on the opposite knee. His draping arm was stretched out towards me. I refused to take part in Harry’s game at that time, and so I returned his question with silence. But it didn’t even matter because he could tell I was holding my anger in.
“Oh, I get it. It’s some sort of opposite day or summat.”
He stretched his fingers closer to where my head was resting on the back of the couch. They wrapped themselves around a smooth lock of my hair and twirled it continuously. This man thought it was absolutely hilarious to get even the faintest reaction out of me. Harry was generally the ‘touchy’ type of person when he’s around those he’s comfortable with. It made me feel special whenever he went out of his way to be affectionate towards me because…well, I had a crush on him for a while. And so, at first, I naively understood those soft touches as hints for his deeper feelings. At least that’s how I perceived things privately. But the more time I’d spent living with him, the more I had to come to terms with the fact that he was out of my league, and that he probably only viewed me as a little sister. My mind convinced me that Harry just enjoyed taking advantage of my innate submissiveness. He would never be attracted to someone like me. In order to protect my heart from the shattering effects of rejection, I chose to play into the little sister dynamic and behave as though Harry Styles was just a stupid fucking boy, and nothing more.
My behavior shift from the bashful sweetheart to the indifferent recluse somehow drew him closer to me anyway. I was so fucking pissed. I was sick of his games! Most of all, I hated Harry Styles. I hated him, and I hated his wandering hands, and his cockiness, and his giant ego.
My hair is not a toy, and I am not a doll reserved for Harry’s cruel amusement. And yet I kept living with all these antics because I…
…Because I liked his attention…honestly, I loved his attention. I’ll admit it! There was no way he could ever find that out, though!
That night when he (once again) twisted a piece of my hair around his long fingers, I pretended it didn’t make my heart flutter. My face stayed emotionless. It had truly been an award-winning performance by yours truly. To an outsider, this scene would’ve looked as if Harry and I were a bickering couple. They’d probably assume I was just a crabby girlfriend punishing her partner with the silent treatment. To be honest, that’s what it felt like for a second before I caught myself leaning into his gentle contact. I smacked his hand away from my hair and he just smiled at me.
Ugh!
He smiled at me, and then he poked my cheek with his index finger. I swear to God, my skin was on fire.
“So what’s next on the opposite day schedule? ‘You gonna go for a run?” Harry snickered and let out an amused sigh. “That would be the shock of the century, wouldn’t it?!”
He kept laughing at his juvenile dig. I let out a weak scoff, unable to swallow my pride that time. The air in the room was stale. Harry faced the television screen and sunk further back into the cushions. I sat there in mopey silence.
So I live a sedentary lifestyle, so what? And yes, I’m overweight—I’ve been struggling with my body my entire life, so there’s no need for anyone to give me a reminder. Regardless of the obvious and regardless of Harry’s ‘opposite day’ joke, I wasn’t in the right mindset to just brush it off…not that night. Starting a fight wasn’t the route I wanted to take either. I was exhausted. A retreat into solitude felt like my best option.
But, God…why did he have to fucking say that?
My bottom lip quivered and I was unable to blink back the tears for a moment longer. Every last ounce of patience I had left was dried up at this point. My long hair shielded my face whilst I bowed and dabbed my dripping eyelashes with my sleeves. Noticing the lack of verbal retort from me, Harry turned his head back in my direction. His breath hitched in his throat and his sage irises washed over to stormy blue.
“Oh, shit…” he muttered.
I sniffled and got up from the couch, making a beeline for the privacy of my bedroom. He never meant to make me cry. It was obvious Harry was just poking fun at me, but words can still hurt regardless of the speaker’s intent. It was too late for him to consider that now. Harry quickly jumped in front of me. He leapt into action so fast that I was physically startled back against my bare heels.
“What the fuck, Harry? Move!” I whined frustratedly at the man as he stood there with similarly glossy eyes.
Then he reached out and held my shoulders in his strong hands. His thumbs did that rubbing thing that most people only do when comforting their loved ones. Back then, I wished so badly that the simple gesture hadn’t sent such soothing goosebumps down my arms. It was so infuriating how this man held that kind of power over me.
“I-I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it like that, love. Please don’t cry. I—”
I gritted my teeth at his pity.
“—why? Are my big, fat tears too loud?! Or are you worried I’m so huge that I’ll get stuck, and my arms and legs will burst out of the fucking house?!”
Harry’s brows furrowed at my imagery. “Uh, wait—are you trying to reference…Alice in Wonderland—”
“—ALSO! Last time I checked, YOU were the one who ate all the cookies last night—YOU and your RABBIT TEETH fucking decimated my Oreos! So why don’t you go for a fucking run!”
Harry seemed amused with that one. His stupid dimples popped out at me and I was fed up.
“Get out of my way!”
I pushed against his chest, but he stood firmly on the carpet in front of the stairs. I remember fighting my urge to stomp my feet like a toddler. He wasn’t letting me retreat. He wouldn’t get out of my fucking FACE!
“I know you want to yell at me, so do it.”
“No, I don’t want to yell at you! I want you to move so I can go to my room!”
“Cmon, love. Talk to me…Give me all y’got. I know you have it in ya.”
“MOVE!”
Then he laughed. Why? Because I actually stomped my fucking foot—just like how I’d previously forbade myself to. And I’m sure the performance was quite entertaining for him.
“Don’t you throw a tantrum on me, sweet girl. Use your words!”
“You’re such a fucking smartass.”
“Oi, don’t talk about my ass like that! I’ll have you know, it’s quite dumb!” He grinned.
Un-fucking-believable. I can’t believe that got me to crack a smile. Harry instantly mirrored my surrendering, his hands drifting down from my shoulders to my elbows. My arms were crossed over my chest, but he wiggled them loose.
“YES! There’s that pretty smile…”
I huffed and groaned, feeling like a total child.
“…Don’t you be teasing me for my teeth—Y’look like a bunny just like me, babe.”
I giggled and playfully shoved his chest. “I do not!”
“Uh-huh! You definitely do!”
My hand rose up to cover my mouth and Harry just laughed at me. Lowering himself closer to my height, he *booped* my nose which caused me to scrunch it up in response.
“Aww, you are just a lil’ bunny, aren’t you?”
I squirmed and whined, annoyed as all hell with his patronizing.
“Don’t you start stomping your feet again, sweet Bunny. You’re better than that!”
I couldn’t help myself from just letting my guard all the way down at that moment. Inhaling deeply, I circled my arms around Harry’s middle and buried my face against his chest.
“Sorry…I just want us to get along, H.” My small voice was muffled against his shirt.
Harry frowned and wrapped his arms around me, reciprocating my surrendering embrace. My ear was pressed against his chest. There was a strong beat beyond his hard surface–my head pulsed with each fierce thump. That was the closest we’d ever been to each other. One of his hands slid up to my hair and combed through it.
“I do, too…I’m sorry.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Sharing a house was less expensive for both of us 20-somethings, and rent has thankfully stayed reasonable and affordable since we two moved in a couple of years ago. I’m happy in my living space with my roommate. It’s a platonic situation between me and Harry—regardless of what family and friends want to believe. And I doubt it will ever venture beyond friendship any time soon. It can’t. Things are perfect right now…exactly the way they are. I keep my little fantasies to myself within the privacy of my bedroom. Harry can never know.
I’ve been single for a while. It’s possible that my holes are the tightest they’ve ever been, and that it might feel like I’m losing my virginity again whenever I do get some dick. So what, sometimes I think about what would happen if I just accidentally sent a racy photo to Harry…
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…Whether he’d keep it and pretend he never saw it (as a way to be gentlemanly)…if he’d be disgusted and laugh at my body…or if he’d turn feral like I hope he would, bursting through my bedroom door and finally taking all that I’ve unconsciously reserved for him…
Don’t fret, my pet — smut will come in part 2 😈
Writer’s Notes: Hi, everyone🥰 Phew…well, there she is! Part 1! Thought I’d celebrate my birthday today by posting my first H piece💕 I’ll start off by saying…I’m kind of an obsessive perfectionist when it comes to my writing…so I won’t be super speedy when posting updates on my work, as I really want to be certain that I’m posting exactly what I want you to read. I know that other content creators on here are excellent at keeping a quick, reliable posting schedule—and I will be trying my best to do the same(I hope to make it in the same ballpark as them, at least). However, please be patient with me💕🙏🏻 💕 I have devoted a lot of time, love, and creativity into my work just so that I can share it online with strangers for free. I greatly appreciate any and all support, suggestions, criticism, questions, etc., so please don’t hesitate to comment or send me messages/asks. (Anons are welcome!) I’ve been working on this piece for a while now and I’d really like to get your feedback on it. If you would like to be tagged in future updates/parts, please let me know!!!👏🏻💗👏🏻🩷👏🏻💖 👏🏻
xoxo ~ Regan 😘💕
@victoria-styles @harrystylessmuttyfics @therealhousewifeofharrystyles
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ohnoitstbskyen · 1 year
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Hey TBskyen, what's your opinion on AI taking over, or at least really hurting the creative field. Like say taking over writing, art etc etc.
Sorry if this was asked before, AI just makes me wary of my own aspirations as a writer cause if an ai can just do what I do a lot better and faster is there a point in trying to publish that work?
What AI art and writing is a threat to is your professional career first and foremost. It is automation, and the function of automation is to drive down labor costs and outcompete artisans by sheer volume. I can't promise you that you'll be able to earn a living from writing in the future, this technology could genuinely destroy the commercial market, but if your worry is that the AI is going to simply be better than you, then let me put your fears to rest.
The AI cannot and will never be better than you.
These machine learning algorithms (which are not actually even AI, I should say), can only ever do one thing, which is reproduce the data that is fed into them. They can mix and remix that data in a hundred billion different configurations according to whatever parameters are specified, but they can't actually create anything.
Algorithms have nothing to add, they don't invent anything. They have no experience, they have no perspective, they have no intent. Algorithms will never write a story to express anything, they'll only reassemble parts of other stories to fit a desired output.
This is not to say that algorithm art won't pass the Turing test, that's a fairly low bar, just that fundamentally, algorithms will never, ever generate something that is of higher quality than what's fed into them. And they will never invent anything new, or add anything to the conversation.
Something which is true and will remain true forever is that somewhere out there, there is someone who needs the thing that you create. And they need that thing from you, in your voice, from your perspective and informed by your experiences. This isn't poetic fancy, this is observed experience. Humans tell stories and create art because we fucking need to. And we need these things to connect with one another.
That is always going to matter.
You might only have an audience of one. You might never make any money doing it. You might not even be alive when the person who needs your work finally finds it, or if shit goes really bad, it might be lost to time and they never find it.
But it fucking matters that you tried. Algorithm art is the mechanisms of capital trying to suck the soul out of one of the few areas of human existence that they haven't managed to drain completely yet, and to keep writing and creating while under this assault is a form of resistance that we sorely need.
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homonationalist · 10 months
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At present, it is standard among practically all communities to fête the family as a bastion of relative safety from state persecution and market coercion, and as a space for nurturing subordinated cultural practices, languages, and traditions. But this is not enough of a reason to spare the family. Frustratedly, Hazel Carby stressed the fact (for the benefit of her white sisters) that many racially, economically, and patriarchally oppressed people cleave proudly and fervently to the family. She was right; nevertheless, as Kathi Weeks puts it: “the model of the nuclear family that has served subordinated groups as a fence against the state, society and capital is the very same white, settler, bourgeois, heterosexual, and patriarchal institution that was imposed by the state, society, and capital on the formerly enslaved, indigenous peoples, and waves of immigrants, all of whom continue to be at once in need of its meagre protections and marginalized by its legacies and prescriptions” (emphasis mine). The family is a shield that human beings have taken up, quite rightly, to survive a war. If we cannot countenance ever putting down that shield, perhaps we have forgotten that the war does not have to go on forever.
This is why Paul Gilroy remarked in his 1993 essay “It’s A Family Affair,” “even the best of this discourse of the familialization of politics is still a problem.” Gilroy is grappling with the reality that, in the United Kingdom as in the United States, the state’s constant disrespect of the Black home and transgression of Black households’ boundaries, as well as its disproportionate removal of Black children into the foster-care industry, understandably inspires an urgent anti-racist politics of “familialization” in defense of Black families. Both the British and American netherworlds of supposedly “broken” homes (milieus that are then exoticized, and seen as efflorescing creatively against all odds), have posed an obstinate threat to the legitimacy of the family regime simply by existing, Gilroy suggests. The paradox is that the “broken” remnant sustains the bourgeois regime insofar as it supplies the culture, inspiration, and oftentimes the surrogate care labor that allows the white household to imagine itself as whole. As a dialectician, “I want to have it both ways,” writes Gilroy, closing out his essay. “I want to be able to valorize what we can recover, but also to cite the disastrous consequences that follow when the family supplies the only symbols of political agency we can find in the culture and the only object upon which that agency can be seen to operate. Let us remind ourselves that there are other possibilities.
There are other possibilities! Traces of the desire for them can be found in Toni Cade (later Toni Cade Bambara)’s anthology The Black Woman, published in America in 1970, not long after the publication of the US labor secretariat’s “Moynihan report,” The Negro Family: The Case for National Action. The open season on the Black Matriarch was in full swing. And certainly not all of the anthology’s feminists, in their valiant effort to beat back societal anti-maternal sentiment (matrophobia) and the hatred of Black women specifically (more recently known as “misogynoir”), make the additional step of criticizing familism within their Black communities. But one or two contributors do flatly reject the notion that the family could ever be a part of Black (collective human) liberation. Kay Lindsey, in her piece “The Black Woman as a Woman,” lays out her analysis that: “If all white institutions with the exception of the family were destroyed, the state could also rise again, but Black rather than white.” In other words: the only way to ensure the destruction of the patriarchal state is for the institution of the family to be destroyed. “And I mean destroyed,” echoes the feminist women’s health center representative Pat Parker in 1980, in a speech she delivered at ¡Basta! Women’s Conference on Imperialism and Third World War in Oakland, California. Parker speaks in the name of The Black Women’s Revolutionary Council, among other organizations, and her wide- ranging statement (which addresses imperialism, the Klan, and movement- building) purposively ends with the family: “As long as women are bound by the nuclear family structure we cannot effectively move toward revolution. And if women don’t move, it will not happen.” The left, along with women especially of the upper and middle classes, “must give up ... undying loyalty to the nuclear family,” Parker charges. It is “the basic unit of capitalism and in order for us to move to revolution it has to be destroyed.”
Forty years later, the British writer Lola Olufemi is among those reminding us that there are other possibilities: “abolishing the family...” she tweets, “that’s light work. You’re crying over whether or not Engels said it when it’s been focal to black studies/black feminism for decades.” For Olufemi as for Parker and Lindsey, abolishing marriage, private property, white supremacy, and capitalism are projects that cannot be disentangled from one another. She is no lone voice, either. Annie Olaloku-Teriba, a British scholar of “Blackness” in theory and history, is another contemporary exponent of the rich Black family-abolitionist tradition Olufemi names. In 2021, Olaloku-Teriba surprised and unsettled some of her followers by publishing a thread animated by a commitment to the overthrow of “familial relations” as a key goal of her antipatriarchal socialism. These posts point to the striking absence of the child from contemporary theorizations of patriarchal domesticity, and criticize radicals’ reluctance to call mothers who “violently discipline [Black] boys into masculinity” patriarchal. “The adult/child relation is as central to patriarchy as ‘man’/‘woman,’” Olaloku-Teriba affirms: “The domination of the boy by the woman is a very routine and potent expression of patriarchal power.” These observations reopen horizons. What would it mean for Black caregivers (of all genders) not to fear the absence of family in the lives of Black children? What would it mean not to need the Black family?
Sophie Lewis in “Abolish Which Family?” from Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation, 2022.
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I miss the old, good internet, but I don’t want to bring it back.
I want a new, good internet. One where users can’t be locked in because we make it legal to:
• reverse-engineer products and services, so you can leave a social media platform but still send and receive messages from the people you leave behind;
• jailbreak your devices so you can remove antifeatures like surveillance, ink-locking or repair-blocking; • move your media and files out of the silo whence they originated and into any player you want.
I want a new, good internet where we constrain the conduct of tech companies, banning unfair labor practices, deceptive marketing, corporate hostage-taking and other forms of rent-extraction.
I want a new, good internet where it’s both illegal to impose bossware on your employees, and where those employees can legally hack the bossware their bosses shove down their throats.
I want a new, good internet where creative workers and their audiences can reliably connect with one another, where news reporting isn’t held hostage to extractive processes.
I want a new, good internet where we seize the means of computation so that the digital infrastructure that connects our romantic, personal, political, civic, economic, educational and family and social lives is operated by and for the people who use it.
-Enshitternet: The old, good internet deserves a new, good internet
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letabbyfight · 4 months
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Opinion: If the PWHL Jerseys Can Sink the League, We Have Bigger Problems
by Zoë Hayden November 18 - 2023 - 9 min read
When the PWHL revealed jerseys for their inaugural 2024 season on November 14, the reception was almost universally negative. The vast majority of social media comments under every single team post about the uniforms were derogatory. Even people who have not been particularly critical of the PWHL up until this point were openly disgusted. While the initial backlash has died down, and there have been some positive reactions as well, the immediate response was pretty ugly. Some people in the comments are always going to be haters, but in a lot of friends and colleagues I also recognized the frustration that only comes when you really, really give a shit.
The jerseys all follow the same basic concept (the team market name is written in diagonal letters across the front), with variations in colors and striping. Each team has a home jersey (dark) and an away jersey (light).
The mock-ups provided vary somewhat compared to the real-life versions modeled by players on November 14 – the colors for Ottawa, Boston, and Minnesota are significantly darker, for example, and the turquoise for New York is more blue than the rendering.
As was first prominently mentioned in a Michael Russo profile of Minnesota GM Natalie Darwitz in The Athletic in early October, having team names and logos before opening night is not really expected. PWHL Board member Stan Kasten more or less confirmed this again in a media availability on November 14.
"I will tell you that for at least the first month or maybe half a season or more, we will have a line of merchandise... featuring city names and variations on some of the designs you've seen so far," he said. "My hope is within a month or two thereafter, maybe we'll be able to supplement that with logo merchandise."
The jerseys we saw on Tuesday are just a first look – so there may be further variation with the versions that players don in January. The Canadian teams will sport patches from sponsor Canadian Tire, and there will be additional patches (both for sponsors and otherwise) on the jerseys as worn in-game. These prototype jerseys (or "sneak peeks" as Kasten said) do have visible issues with stitching, which shouldn't be present on the versions that players actually receive for gameday.
All of this comes back to the timeline. After the Premier Hockey Federation acquisition was finalized in late June 2023, the executives and players for the nascent new league agreed and committed to have a season commence in January 2024. This gave everyone six months to spin up six professional teams – a frankly absurd timeline that, on its face, suggested that there would be some aspects of the inaugural PWHL season that would be more in "first draft" stage than finished. At the same time, expectations are sky-high. The tight turnaround is the source of constant tension, and some compromise.
On a six-month timeline, getting high-quality, embroidered, custom jerseys produced for six teams is a challenge in and of itself. It's not much lead time, and many manufacturers would be unable to turn the project around, if only because they have other uniforms to make which were ordered first. Stan Kasten confirmed this as well in his media availability this week: "We had to order uniforms right away," he said, referring to the period over the summer immediately after the PHF acquisition. "By the time we got this started, every other league had already put their orders in and the big companies were already swamped doing it, so we found someone who could do this. And we did this in maybe early August... once we knew what our cities were. And we opted to go at the time with kind of this vintage look, which we thought was pretty cool. Our players' reactions have been great."
Creative labor to design logos and brand identities, too, takes time – especially if you're engaging established professionals who may have other clients and obligations. That doesn't mean it was impossible to have six brand identities ready in six months, or that fans should be happy with the placeholder jerseys. But with the logistical challenges involved in starting a league from scratch in six months, it may have seemed like the least-important important thing. Kasten also confirmed that the PWHL's new Senior Vice President of Business Operations, Amy Scheer, is currently reviewing the team branding.
The branding isn't materially necessary for league operations – you can still play a hockey game without team names and logos, or continue to work on them while you finalize other, more essential things. But people aren't exactly thrilled with what might be going on behind the scenes on this front, either. When some potential team names were discovered via trademark filings in October, they were also roundly mocked. In the social media sphere, the jerseys and team names have become a sort of referendum on the PWHL itself – potentially indicative of a level of carelessness or unpreparedness that could be wholly discrediting.
The PWHL is, as we all know, the product of a player-led labor action which began four years ago when many of the world's best players refused to play in the PHF due to concerns about professional standards. The PWHPA players – many of whom are now unionized in the PWHL – are seen as directly responsible for the PHF's downfall. Everything that came after is viewed in that context: that something was eliminated to pave the way for what we have now. And especially in the beginning, it will always be framed by the question of Well, was it worth it? The PHF did have seven teams of players and a dedicated fan community. Many of those players have found themselves without roster spots since the league folded, or playing overseas. Many fans still feel that the thing they loved was unceremoniously killed. There's bitterness there that won't be easily soothed.
And the PHF did have brands. For my own part, most of them weren't brands I particularly liked (though the Connecticut Whale consistently had my favorite sock designs in all of hockey). But each of the seven PHF team brands was visually distinctive and executed with enthusiasm, and they were obviously beloved by women's hockey fans.
When I saw the PWHL jerseys, my initial thought was that I liked the designs and the color choices – I'm a minimalist at heart and I love classic, simple hockey sweaters and diagonal lettering. They also aligned with my expectations for what the league's Year One would look like. Also, good branding can cover up a litany of sins, and as media, there's been something refreshing about getting to see more of the raw product, with less artifice. Rough around the edges isn't always bad.
But that hasn't been good enough for a women's hockey community that has been forced to work with low expectations for so many years. There have been proclamations that the PWHL should have just re-used the PHF brands (which they really can't) or shouldn't have launched in January at all if they weren't prepared to do so with team branding. (Would everyone involved have accepted going over one calendar year without a North American professional league at this stage? I don't know the answer to that question.)
While the branding doesn't matter to me, I'm not the person the PWHL front office has to convince on this. Nor are the players – up until this point, it's been all about them, and that shows if you're paying attention. To date and across all six teams, the league has hired world-class staff and secured high-end practice facilities. They conducted the biggest professional draft in women's hockey history and each team has a wealth of talent at training camps kicking off this week, both drafted and undrafted. There is a collective bargaining agreement in place to ensure the ownership fulfills obligations to the players – a first in women's hockey, and the first known CBA in North American professional sports history to be in place before beginning operations. From the hockey ops side, everything seems to be going well. Training camps are underway, and there's a lot of media and fan interest. The players are already benefiting.
But not everyone knows about the behind-the-scenes struggle to get to this point. And for those who do, and know it intimately, every misstep is going to feel like Oh shit, here we go again, whether because of the thing itself or the discourse around it. We have had two major North American women's hockey leagues fold in the last five years. Every little thing counts if the PWHL is to deliver on its promise to be the league that is here forever. They will need to make money. They will need to market themselves well and appeal to a wide swath of fans – not just woho lifers, but people who are new to hockey, people who are new to non-NHL hockey, people who are new to women's hockey. The team branding will need to be part of that.
These jerseys are going to get the basic job done – they'll have numbers and nameplates and will provide a visual distinction between teams on the ice. Hopefully they will also be functional and comfortable for the players. But what they won't do is reliably capture the imaginations of fans. While I don't think this is the unmitigated disaster that some are making it out to be, I know the league is going to have to do better and prioritize their branding going forward. The social media comments have been rough to see, especially derisive ones directed at players, who are the people who deserve them the least.
The CWHL and PHF didn't fold because of branding, at the end of the day. They had some good branding, but they also had much more serious and intractable issues. Even so, people in the women's hockey community believed in each of them for many years, and wanted to believe in them. They weren't dead on arrival, and they got a lot of chances to make mistakes with things that were deeply consequential. In their early years, or during times of transition, they were frequently defended because we believed these mistakes were part of the growing pains and learning processes that could make the sport better. I wouldn't go so far as to say the PWHL Board deserves grace on this, but I do think it's important to view what's happened with a sense of proportion. Long-term success isn't necessarily about getting everything perfect the first time. It's more about how you evolve.
As I've sat with it the last few days, I think I've come to understand why this is so frustrating. Women's hockey has been so woefully behind where other major women's sports are in terms of salaries and exposure. When there's a new WNBA or NWSL expansion team, we learn about it with years of lead time; we get slick marketing and beautiful, finished kit. We keep speedrunning women's hockey for some reason, though. This time, the timing feels especially urgent. We're getting another Winter Olympics in 2026, and the PWHL ownership group wants its elite pro league well established and on television before the most-watched women's hockey tournament in the world drops the puck. And if this fails, the weight of the wasted potential will keep us from having another chance like this anytime soon.
We are desperate for hockey to catch up because this is the biggest women's sports have ever been, globally. The stakes are high and everything that isn't perfect is going to feel like a raw nerve. Now is the time to get it right. But I don't think the jerseys and logos are enough to sink the entire operation before it gets off the dock. If they are, then so much else has already gone wrong. We know that the players have more support and resources in place than ever before. Based on that fact, I genuinely believe the sport is in a better position to succeed than it has ever been before. And I want to see what comes next.
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crimethinc · 1 year
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April 15 is Steal Something from Work Day!
Is your boss—or the economy itself—forcing you to work this Saturday? Make them pay!
http://crimethinc.com/stealfromwork
Work steals the hours of our days, the time we would like to spend with our families and friends and lovers, the energy we would otherwise direct towards pleasurable, creative, unselfish pursuits. It steals our imaginations: even today’s most innovative employees and entrepreneurs are still inventing inside the very narrow frame of what can compete in the market rather than, for example, what might bring joy to human beings.
It steals into our leisure hours, into our most intimate relationships: the work of competing for social capital, of answering emails and text messages, of paying bills and taxes and insurance premiums—and preparing, yet again, to go back to work.
Work—the aggregate labor of all humanity since the Industrial Revolution—has already done permanent harm to the biosphere we all depend upon.
Another century like this—another century of work—and our species will be done for, along with countless others. Work—which is to say, all activity that is determined by the necessity to make a profit for someone, rather than chosen on account of its intrinsic value—is precisely what prevents us from fulfilling our needs.
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Over the past decade, deregulation and the growing dominance of streaming video have laid the groundwork for a media landscape where just three companies—Disney, Amazon, and Netflix—are poised to be the new gatekeepers. This report from the WGAW details how these three companies have amassed power through anticompetitive practices and abusing their dominance to further disadvantage competitors, raise prices for consumers, and push down wages for the creative workforce. Pay and working conditions for writers have become so dire, and media conglomerates so unresponsive, that 11,500 writers went on strike in May 2023. Without intervention from antitrust agencies and lawmakers, consolidation will continue to snowball, leaving the future of media in peril. These new gatekeepers have amassed market power through mergers and other anti-competitive practices, offering an alarming window into the future of media. Disney has grown through a series of multibillion-dollar acquisitions, using its power to reduce film output, shut down competing studios, foreclose independent content from its distribution networks, expand control of the labor market, and force creators to give up financial participation in future licensing revenue. Amazon has gained a sizeable footprint in media in a short time by utilizing the well-documented playbook critical to its ascendance as a tech company. Though anticompetitive behavior and vertical integration, Amazon has harmed competitors, privileged its related business, and abused employer leverage to underpay writers. Netflix was once an innovative competitor, but is now using its position as the largest streaming service in the world to abuse its leverage as an employer, decrease innovative content spending and raise prices for consumers. The company has cut out independent producers and severely underpaid writers in multiple areas, and a series of recent acquisitions signal its intent to further increase dominance and market power in order to reduce innovative content investment.
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regularsizedsally · 29 days
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The Deception of The Unknown: A Tale of Fraud and Fear
I asked ChatGPT to write a backstory for "The Unknown", a non-canon character from Glasglow's "Willy Wonka Experience".
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In the fantastical world of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, where sugar spun clouds dotted the sky and chocolate rivers flowed freely, there existed a sinister figure known only as "The Unknown." Concealed within the labyrinthine walls of the factory, hidden behind a mysterious mirror, he was a specter of darkness and deceit. Adorned in a somber judge's robe, with hair reminiscent of Gene Simmons and a face concealed behind a gleaming silver mask, The Unknown struck terror into the hearts of all who crossed his path. But who was this enigmatic being, and what secrets lay hidden beneath his ominous facade?
The tale of The Unknown began in the bustling streets of Glasgow, where a young man named Douglas McGregor harbored dreams of striking it rich in the world of chocolate. Born into poverty, Douglas was determined to escape the confines of his humble upbringing and make a name for himself. Armed with nothing but ambition and a thirst for success, he set out on a path that would lead him to the fabled gates of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.
Upon arriving at the factory, Douglas McGregor quickly realized that his dreams of becoming a renowned chocolatier were beyond his reach. Denied entry into the inner sanctum of the factory, he harbored a simmering resentment towards Willy Wonka and all who basked in his glory. Fuelled by his bitterness and envy, Douglas vowed to usurp his rival and claim the spotlight for himself.
But Douglas McGregor was not blessed with the talent or creativity of a true chocolatier. Desperate to achieve success by any means necessary, he resorted to deception and fraud. With cunning and guile, he established a fraudulent chocolate-making operation in a vast warehouse hidden within the confines of the factory, accessible only through a secret passageway concealed behind the mysterious mirror.
Inside the warehouse, Douglas McGregor, now known as The Unknown, employed a team of unsuspecting workers whom he exploited mercilessly. Promising them riches beyond their wildest dreams, he subjected them to grueling hours of labor without compensation, their hopes and dreams shattered by the cruel reality of their exploitation.
But The Unknown's deception did not end there. Using advanced computer technology, he created counterfeit chocolates that bore a striking resemblance to Willy Wonka's famed creations. With the aid of his elaborate scheme, he flooded the market with fraudulent chocolates, deceiving consumers and tarnishing the reputation of his rival in the process.
As whispers of The Unknown's nefarious deeds spread throughout the factory, a sense of fear and distrust permeated the once vibrant halls. Children who had once frolicked joyfully amidst the sugary delights of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory now cowered in terror at the mere mention of The Unknown's name, their innocent hearts tainted by the specter of fraud and deceit.
And so, amidst the swirling confections and candy-coated wonders of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, the tragic tale of The Unknown unfolded, a cautionary reminder of the dangers of greed and deception. As the shadows of his deception grew ever darker, Douglas McGregor found himself ensnared in a web of lies and deceit of his own making, his quest for success ultimately leading to his downfall.
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olderthannetfic · 8 months
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I always get ticked off from people who keep trying to push for the monetization of AO3 because that's my favorite thing about the site, honestly. 1) No one here, i don't believe, said fanfic/fanart isn't real art. 2) Fan-made products are taken off of etsy all the time. Every single day this exact thing happens. Etsy shop owners get their shops taken off the site for this! exact! thing! 3) Japan has different copyright laws than in the USA, where AO3 is based. Doujinshi does get some creators in copyright trouble in Japan if they try to create new characters based on the pre-existing work. It happens fairly often. 4) Writers always improve the same way: they write often, read often, edit, repeat, over and over again. We expect writers to break into commercialization the same way the people before them have: you write a novel or a short story anthology, edit, rewrite (rinse repeat), send queries to agents, wait for agents to come back with good news from publishers, then market the hell out of your book along with the publisher (if the publisher has the money to do it). And if none of that is your thing, self-publish. You don't get to monetize your fellow fans' labor just because you're too lazy to figure out how to market your work to let people know it exists. It's easier than ever with the internet. And I wish entitled crybaby fans would get this through their heads: no👏🏽one👏🏽 has the right, or should have the right, to make money off of someone else's story, hard work, or imaginative work. If you're a writer, create something new and do the market research to figure out how to best market it. No one has the responsibility to fund your creative dreams but yourself. Why should anyone care to follow a writer of original works who's most known for writing derivatives of others' IP? Now that we're in the age of IP and copyright ownership of art, why does this need to constantly be repeated? AO3 is free and open for everyone to use. If you want to market yourself and your work, you'll have to do it somewhere else. The internet is vast. Stop being lazy and put in the work like other writers do. 🤷🏽‍♀️
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Yeah. Fandom is where I honed my craft.
That's the great thing about fandom! People read so much kind of half-baked stuff and genuinely enjoy it. They wouldn't give that same leeway to commercial products. There's also more space for niche interests. That allows a writer to figure out what they actually like instead of just chasing the thing that someone else says sells best.
Lots of people who go pro, including me, write very fandomy stuff. You pick up almost any m/m self- or indie-pub book, and you know in five minutes this is a fic writer. But if we're any good, we can build enough scaffolding for our own worlds and characters. Change the names. Beef up your own setting. Write a complete plot that doesn't rely on being a missing scene from something else. It's not that complicated.
Frankly, if someone "needs" to sell fic, that makes me think they aren't confident in their writing being attractive to others without a major crutch.
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