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spamzineglasgow · 7 years

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(REVIEW) Tinkering with the Code of Reality: An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in GTA Online, Michael Crowe (Studio Operative)

Text by Denise Bonetti

>Between the 18th and the 20th October 1974, Oulipo BAE Georges Perec - a Pisces - sits in a Parisian cafe on Place Saint-Sulpice, meticulously recording in his notebook every detail of the busy life of the square. His eyes are alert to 'what happens when nothing happens'. The more inconsequential the particulars he manages to pick up on, examine, or classify, the more excited he seems to become:

'Means of locomotion: walking, two-wheeled vehicles (with and without motor), automobiles (private cars, company cars, rented cars, driving school cars), commercial vehicles, public services, public transport, tourist buses.'

>The conceptual/obsessive experiment in cataloguing is a response to a writing prompt of his own devising, published about a month before in a collection of essays on public and private spaces (the adorably-named Species of Spaces and Other Pieces). Perec's practical exercise calls for the reader/writer to carefully observe the street around them and note *everything* down: one must set about it slowly, 'almost stupidly'; forcing oneself to see the space 'more flatly'. 'If nothing strikes you', says Perec, then 'you don't know how to see'. As it turns out, Perec himself is really good at seeing: after 3 days on Place Saint-Sulpice, his notes are over 50 pages long - mainly one-line annotations about buses, passersby, pigeons, gestures, more buses. He calls it An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris.

>Perec made of this modality (a dry and neutral encyclopedic gaze at the unnoticed) a manifesto. In both writing and living, he called for a shift of attention from the exceptional to the ordinary, for an abandonment of the charmingly exotic in favour of the invisibly unexceptional - according to a philosophy he labels 'anthropology of the endotic'. In the essay 'Approaches to What?', in a somewhat self-referential aphorism, he remarks that 'railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers are killed, the more the trains exist.' That the ordinary, in other words, only lives in our attention as soon as it stops being ordinary.

>If this statement is true as it sounds, then, the virtual world of Grand Theft Auto Online must without a doubt be more real than the one we live in. The game's universe is expansive and hyperrealistic to the extent that navigating its space is an experience of an undecidable quality; the abundance of detail is so accurately mimetic and uncannily convincing it that the digital artifice both disappears into an ambient background, and never leaves the centre of the stage. The minutia of IRL city-walking, and of existing in a world that follows its own will (flecks of dust dancing in the wind, catching the sun; overheard fragments of strangers' phone conversations; the gas station attendant's body language in between serving customers), are alienated from us, digitally re-engineered, and presented back to us in the guise of a crime-ridden fictional world. In this sense, the GTA series is one of the most Perecquian exercises to ever exist. (Of course, amusingly enough, Perec's aphorism is also appropriate here on a more literal level: the game franchise is entirely built upon the premise that derailing trains - but also provoking car accidents, and especially murdering innocent pedestrians - is recommended if not required).

>Because of these underlying continuities between Perec's 'infraordinary' and the process of hyperrealistic world-making in sandbox video games, when I first read about Michael Crowe's re-enactment of Perec's experiment in GTA online (in a cafe, open-mouthed, holding a scone mid-air), I just blurted out 'Of course!' to the stranger sitting across from me. It made complete sense; the connection was there all along, only no one had ever written about it. In his wonderful introduction to the small volume, Jamie Sutcliffe confesses that he is 'jealous and frustrated [Crowe] got there first'. Although he follows this with praise for the book's undeniable 'inventiveness, inquisitiveness and relentless mirth,' I think the underlying reason for the (admittedly shared) envy is not only that Crowe exhausted a conceptual exercise skilfully, and in beautiful prose. He also hit a nerve, exposed a crucial side of the relationship between video games, literature, realism and simulation - and he did it playfully.

>At times, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in GTA Online time follows closely Perec's model: it obsesses over weather, numbers and registration plates, the colour of people's clothes, passersby (especially women) eating things, commercial slogans, etc. Of course, these strong echoes can only highlight the essential polarities between the two universes: what in Perec's Paris is nature or chance (clouds, the pedestrians' trajectories, their conversations), is always artifice and intentionality in GTA. Even if the the game's phenomenology might be randomised, it is always layers of carefully contrived code that engender it: the player can never forgets this.

>One other definition that Perec devised for the kind of everydayness that escapes our perception is 'the infra-ordinary' - the swarm of details that hover just below the threshold of attention. If Perec's term is certainly appropriate for his preferred subject of writing, the choice of word seems even more significant in the context Crowe's Attempt because its meaning necessarily expands to the digital nature of the space explored. In the city-space of GTA, the 'endotic' and the 'infra' quite literally consist of the hidden workings below (or behind) the surface of game: the structure of its programming, the software's rationale - mechanisms that Crowe often lingers on, his phenomenological descriptions often slipping into conjectures about the game's logical engines:

'That woman is still parked at a green light. Melt down. As other cars approach they brake differently, some jerkily in stages, others in a smoother manner. The computer players seem to have different levels of driving proficiency.'

'There's a pristine jewellery exchange store opposite. Dilapidated buildings probably cost more to design and create in this game, as they would generally have far more detail. ... Directly opposite is the Elkridge Hotel. It can't be entered. I wonder what's inside. Is the book/cube poured full of colour, or transparency, with the road/pavement continuing on the floor? If hollow, how thin are the impenetrable walls?'

Crowe's asides often touch - more or less directly - upon questions of realism and effective simulation:

'The palm trees in front of me are slightly different heights. None look copied and pasted'

'It would be great if learner driver were going around, veering off cliffs, etc.'

'It's a shame there are no birds, it would add greatly to a sense of realism ... Perec had all kinds of pigeon action in his book'

>Even more interestingly, at times his observations go as far as hinting at the inherent opacity of the concept of mimetic representation itself: what is realism, when truly accurate depictions often seem even more surreal in their uncanny effect? Doesn't GTA's lifelike graphic rendering - like meticulously inventorial writing - draw attention to the very artifice of artistic creation?

'Very light rain. This slight rain seems realistic, but in Perec's reality the rain stops "very suddenly". If that happened in GTA it would seem like poor attention to detail'.

>In a review of Auerbach's Mimesis, Terry Eagleton elaborates on Brecht's idea that realism really is a matter of effect, not a matter of technique. The definition cannot be applied at the level of production or its methods, it has to depend on reception - at the level of reading, or, in this case - playing. Realism happens between the artwork and the audience's expectations; it's not about verisimilitude, or about whether a text (or video game) recalls something familiar; it's about whether or not the experience of the work matches an unmediated experience of reality: 'Realism is as realism does'.

>Eagleton concludes that 'artistic realism, then, cannot mean "represents the world as it is", but rather "represents it in accordance with conventional real-life modes of representing it". Realism as we normally understand it, then, has more to do with convention; it is more like an autonomous process of creation than a neutral mode of reporting. At one point, Crowe wonders 'what poets like T.S. Eliot would've added [to the game] by way of details within details'; the underlying idea here is that a deeper and deeper level of realism can only come from fabrication and designed artifice. A truly realistic world doesn't exist, it has to be manufactured and carefully weaved together. Perec, Eliot, the nerds at Rockstar Games: all mods, tinkering with code to fashion a world that feels more real than the invisible one we live in.

>The most prominent strand of reflections in Crowe's Attempt, however, is dedicated to imagining a future in which GTA is so utterly realistic that it surpasses reality itself. Crowe pictures the horizon towards which the GTA series is moving not only as a simulation indistinguishable from its original, but as a utopian uber-world populated by perfect AI characters:

'In future games, players will be able to chat with all computer characters about any topic, for any length of time. The only problem would be that the computer characters would likely find us too boring and go off to chat with another computer character that has also read every line of text and seen every film/artwork.'

'I wonder how detailed these games will become. Could growing a zit in the game affect your character's day? ... Could millions of players all live as microorganisms on the face of a GTA character?'

>The beautifully apocalyptic scale of Crowe's prophecy is made somewhat more ominous by the hazy, yet closed, temporal arc that his little book follows. Whereas Perec opens and concludes every section of his Attempt declaring the time window of his observations, Crowe rarely if never talks about the passage of time in the game ('I dont keep track of time as i should, here or irl'). The only real time marks - vague, atmospheric, possibly just conceptual - are in the names of the 5 sections the book is divided into: '(Daybreak)', '(Morning)', '(Break)', '(Nightfall)', '(Night)'. Crowe's 24-hour cycle - whether referring to IRL or GTA temporality - is possibly more compellingly symbolic than Perec's 3 days. The self-contained movement from dawn, to sunset, and then darkness, lends the volume a sense of closure that it would otherwise lack - given its status as a semi-conceptual exercise aimed at an inherently unattainable objective ('exhausting' a place).

>This explicitly closed timeline also means that Crowe's subject, and thus his literary project, assume more gravitas than one might expect. What could begin in the reader's mind as a playful pastiche actually becomes more like a tragedy, with Crowe's avatar helplessly standing and witnessing unstoppably violent events, most of which utterly gratuitous. The text is so ridiculously faithful to the Aristotelian unities of time and place (one day, one place), that one might turn a blind eye on its complete lack of any unity of action ('events strictly tied together as cause and effect, adding up to one single story' sounds pretty much like everything this book is not). The book does funny, but it also does serious, poetic - although possibly not cathartic. In a sense, Crowe's avatar is a bit like a postmodern Hamlet: a passive and melancholic intellectual antihero, surrounded by farcical death in a corrupted society.

>In the last section of Crowe's Attempt, '(Night)', the more beautifully poetic descriptive fragments that populate the book gradually increase in number as if to signal the nearing calmness of closure. These are nominal phrases that choose to go nowhere; many are about things that are far away, abandoned, or circular:

'A very high crane in the distance.' '1000s of lights visible from my spot.' 'The window lights have different hues, every light isn't just white. Slight yellow, greens.' 'One side of the sky is pink, the other blue, held apart by purple.' 'A plane flying by way off in the distance.' 'An ambulance is burnt out, two people inside burnt entirely black.' 'A human is spinning around in circles in their car (...).' 'Dropped cigarette on the floor.'

>Before you know it - much, much before the last section - you'll feel stupid for ever thinking this book would be just a parody to lol at, or a kool koncept show your other Highbrow x Lowbrow friends and pat each other on the back for knowing the experimental French literature reference. You'll be moved by how beautiful Los Santos can be - the geometry of its facade architecture; its computer-generated clouds drifting above sports cars, reflecting the light in coupé red or neon purple; private (NPC) citizens relaxing on benches or outside cafes, smoking, eating donuts, eating bagels, talking into their phones to their private (NPC) citizen friends about their job, their boyfriends, their drug problem. I won't say you'll forget the world you're in is a video game you're in - because Crowe won't let you - but I think you will stop caring.

>An Attempt at Exhausting a Pace in GTA Online is published by Studio Operative, and can be bought at Glasgow's Good Press, or here.

#review

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solangundersen · 4 years

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DentOnes 5 Chapter 1 part 1

I have a few responses to chapter 1 of endotes 5.

The chapter, in keeping with the overall introspective focus of the text as a whole, is an account of the underlying historical and theoretical frameworks that informs the group’s work. Endnotes present three areas of focus for their collective intellectual work:

1) Conceptions and critiques of organisation that emerged in the second revolutionary wave of the 20th century, primarily among councilists, situationists, and left communists.

2) The “open marxist” understanding of theory as based on a conversation involving mutua recognition, practical reflexivity, and immanent critique, as exemplified in some texts by Richard Gunn.

3) Psycho-dynamic conceptions of groups and thinking, especially those associated with Wilfred Bion.

I am not very knowledgable about the “open marxist” tradition they describe or the psycho-dynamic conceptions of groups and thinking associated with Wilfred Bion. I had never heard of either. These sections of the chapter were by and large very interesting to me, presenting some familiar problems in new terms that felt clarifying. That said, I am going to focus on their historical critique of organisation, because there were several things in this account that I found unconvincing. It’s a little unclear from the text whether endotes are presenting a historical overview of a tradition that has informed their work, or whether the critique they present is their synthesis of these traditions and reflects the groups collectively held politics. So I am not sure if i am criticising endotes as such; I think there are significant flaws in the tradition as they present it, and I am curious how those flaws might inform their wider argument as it is developed in the rest of the text.

In the reading group, I mentioned in passing that I was frustrated by endotes inattentiveness to anti-colonial struggles. Basically, they identify two revolutionary waves 20th century Europe, just after WW1 and the 1968-1977 years, as the cycles of struggle that informs their work the most. They don’t claim these waves (or their reading of them) as an exhaustive account of proletarian struggle, but they nevertheless choose to center these two cycles to near-total exclusion of other events. They do mention, in passing, the experiences of 36 as well, but in no great detail. As I will discuss later, it’s really just a rhetorical afterthought. They also mention, in a footote, anti-colonial struggles, but only to say that these have been susceptible to authoritarian socialist ideas because of the latter’s capacity to turn peasants into workers by means of terror, or something to that effect, it’s not much to go on. Given that anti-colonial struggles had a massive impact on their two favourite revolutionary cycles in Europe, this seems like a shortcoming.

I am going to write a bit about these two revolutionary moments, not because I am trying to be pedantic about the details, but rather because I think paying attention to these struggles would help overcome (or at least unsettle) the central theoretical problem that seems to plague the endotes group (or the councilists etc that they are writing about). The central theoretical framing in their historical overview is a pretty sharp divide between spontaneous proletarian action on the one hand, and the tragicomic twatting around of small communist groups on the other. The former is crisp and clear: it takes place at the site of production itself, is undertaken by those directly involve din response to the objective material conditions undergirding the situation. It is not taken on the basis on the ideas of those involved, it is somehow pure, uncomplicated, authentic:

“what to do from the ‘inside’ is immediately apparent, the possibilities defined by the workers’ positions, their role in the enterprise, the enterprise’s place in the economy, their relations with those they work with, etc”

Again, its unclear if this is endotes take, or if they are presenting someone else’s ideas (in this case Sam Moss’s). But this sentence is word soup. I don’t think anyone who is involved in a workplace struggle would say that what to do is “immediately apparent”, that just makes no sense, its insanely complicated even in tiny workplaces, in part for the very reasons they cite as rendering the situation transparent.

On the other end of the spectrum from the spontaneous proletarian action is the “willed group”, people with communist politics who want to get involved in struggles because the ideas they hold lead them to ascribe a great deal of significance to them:

“What one can do from the ‘outside’ is usually not much, unless it is an activity requested by those directly involved”

This is a big “unless”: in my experience a group of committed “activists” engaging in a workplace struggle they are not directly involved in can be cringe and awkward, but it can be a massive help as well if done with even a little good sense: the modest but significant gains of the base unions in the UK are predicated on this model.

So anyway, there’s a contrast between effective and meaningful but very rare “spontaneity” on the one hand and more or less ineffective, semi-compulsive larping on the other hand. The two historical revolutionary cycles both present outbursts of spontaneity, which is then recuperated and dissipated by the goofy machinations of the various organisations and groups. In this way, they trace a fairly coherent narrative: the german social democrats crush the Spartacist uprising because the proletarian spontaneity destabilises their willed organisation; the bureaucracy preserves itself by destroying the movement. Pretty much the same thing happens in Spain, where the anarchist leadership takes ministerial posts and advocates unity with the republic, causing their membership to be destroyed by PCE reaction. And then it happens again in the 60′s and 70′s, as communist parties and trade union confederations in France and Italy unite with the bourgeoisie to wreck the revolutionary movement there.

So basically, there is this pretty sharp divide between spontaneous and willed action that seems to sit at the heart of their political tradition as they describe it. I think this frame of analysis is fundamentally flawed on two levels: it is a very simplistic analysis of the events they do discuss at some length, but also the events and perspectives that they don’t really include in the narrative would actually be really helpful in overcoming this issue.

To start with the anti-colonial struggles. First of all, in both revolutionary cycles they describe, anti-colonial politics played a major part in shaping the conditions that led to the revolts: both cycles of struggle were accompanied by major upheavals in colonial territories. Particularly in the second cycle, anti-colonial struggles really shaped participants political imaginary, from the vietcong, FLN, the MPLA’s impact on the revolution in Portugal, right up to the use of indigenous and Black Power imagery by Italian radicals in the late 1970s. In Britain as well the Black uprisings starting around 1976 were a major manifestation of the cycle of class struggle here, and were even extensively theorised as such by people like Stuart Hall.

Anyway, these struggles represent a challenge for the spontaneous-willed dyad that Endnotes is working with. There is first of all the problem of uneven development, of various degrees of integration into capitalism by insurgent colonised peoples. There is always a dense tapestry of radical traditions and imaginaries involved in this; one can’t imagine these insurgents, even spontaneous acts like burning a cane field, as existing outside of a complex political inaginary (though I don’t really think one can imagine German workers in 1920 in this state either to be fair). There is a sort of similar thread in Gramsci and also in Mouffe and Laclau’s discussion of the working class movement in the Hapsburg state: basically, in the multi ethnic Hapsburg empire there were so many different traditions of struggle and so many different cultures and languages, as well as so many different modes of production coexisting that social democrats had to work to position themselves as the central articulation of a huge diversity of struggles, instead of directing a single proletarian struggle.

The question for the intellectuals involved in these struggles has often been a mission to draw on and develop these political imaginaries. Sylvia Wynter, who was involved in the struggle for Jamaican independence and the movement for socialism in Guyana, speaks of the anticolonial struggle in jamaica in terms that are kind of similar, but also really different, from endnotes. She discusses the clash within the independence movement between colonial elites (which she associates with the People’s National Party) who conceptualised independence as Jamaica entering the community of nations by building a national state, ie adopting and extending the political logic of the state (which is by nature imperial), with the grassroots movement of wildcat strikes and rural uprisings who she argues were drawing on an indigenising tradition of resistance. For Wynter, this political imaginary is the substance from which an alternative society could be built, as opposed to disciplining them into a nation state. The paradox here, which I don’t exactly recall where I read it, is that the nascent post-colonial state needs to both achieve maximum political distance from the receding colonial state (and, by correlation, maximum proximity to resistance movement) at the same time as it needs to adopt its political authority: it needs to achieve a repressive apparatus clothed in the trappings of the resistance movement that brought it to power.

The classic iteration of this is the colonial tragedy of Haiti. The Haitian movement managed to defeat French colonialism, but the leadership quickly set about expanding military discipline and the plantation economy, both as an exigency of national defence (and raising funds to pay the huge indemnity France was demanding) but also, to an extent, because of a conceptualisation of the nation built on colonial/imperial ideals. The Guyanese writer Wilson Harris casts this dynamic between leadership and grassroots in anti-colonial struggles in slightly mystical terms: everyone carries a little bit of everything around in them, even unawares: the colonised need to be particularly sensitive and attentive to the psyche of the coloniser, because they are very likely to share many of these beliefs and structures of feeling themselves.

All in all, the tradition of radical anti-colonial writing is very, very concerned with the contradiction between popular movements in revolt (often informed by radical traditions that are not reducible to Marxist categories of interpretation) and “willed groups” keen to impose their version of order on the situation. But the problem is framed in very different terms. For one thing, there is no spontaneity as such: mass action is understood as the outpouring of popular beliefs and the expression of embodied cultures of resistance. The leftcom tradition, as far as I can tell, has little interest in the sources of proletarian spontaneity: it’s kind of a “natural” expression of the frictions in the accumulation of capital. On the other hand, for anti-colonial writers, the texture and detail of this mass action, generally informed by non-capitalist political imaginaries in a violent dialectic with the imposition of capitalism, is exactly the most important resource for building the new world. I think part of the reason why Europe in 1918 and 1968 are the leftcom’s preferred frame of reference is because these are perhaps more easily understood as pure proletarian somehow, because all the “noise” of culture and politics can be pushed to the background more easily, though I still think it’s a shoddy analysis even of those events.

This kind of points to a big issue I have with a lot of Marxist thought, is that it really seems to take little interest in the actual thoughts of working class people in revolt. It gets extra frustrating sometimes: like Rosa Luxemburg writing about the 1905 revolt in Russia as workers spontaneously revolting and spontaneously forming councils: these workers were really into anarchism! That was their beliefs, that was what was informing their decisions. They had ideas! These ideas informed their actions! In many cases, they got these ideas from other workers who were putting in loads of leg work to agitate for them. But because there were no Marxists involved (at that time), Luxemburg (who I generally like) is like: look at the workers go! next time we’ll be along for the ride to guide them properly, but this spontaneity is pretty sick, the anarchists have got it all wrong.

I am not just salty about this because anarchism, but it’s also a total lack of interest in working class people’s own ideas, because ideas are something intellectuals have. Luxemburg does argue for a party to provide ideas to the masses, and the endnotes lot I guess argue that they shouldn’t, but neither seems to take much interest in the living political imaginaries that play a major part in revolts, relegating thinking and imagining to something that actual workers don’t really do. I would really recommend the essay “The Misadventures of Critical Thought” by Jacques Ranciere for a succinct statement of this. Or, if you have a lot of time, check out Proletarian Nights, its really dope.

Now I don’t think this is necessarily true of endnotes, but I don’t know how else to interpret the contradiction between spontaneity and willed groups: the massive problem I have is not really with their criticism of willed groups (though I have other issues with that) but the category of spontaneity in this framework seems to be just this weird black box that one cannot make sense of (except I guess by a kind of historical determinism?)

Again, I appreciate that this is all based on a couple of pages summary of a vast and complex tradition, but still.

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endotwrites · 3 months

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thinking about situationship!simon who accidentally got you pregnant and instead of being his usual distant self who comes over for a quick fuck and leaves, is now basically living in your house and taking care of you. dishes are done, laundry is folded and it’s barely 10am. meanwhile, you waddle around trying to vacuum when simon seizes it from your hands, immediately scolds you with a tut and tells you off.

“back to bed, tired of telling you twice.”

part two

picture from pinterest!

a/n: a little bedtime drabble, goooodniiighttt :) xx

#ghost call of duty #ghost mw2 #simon ghost x reader #ghost x reader #simon ghost riley #ghost cod #simon riley x you #simon riley x reader #simon riley #ghost drabble #drabble #situationships #situationship!simon #endot writes

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endotwrites · 3 months

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prompt: you and simon are sleepy asf

warnings: simon is half naked 🫨

thinking about simon laying wide legged on the bed with a warm cup of tea resting against his thigh whilst he’s just in boxers. his eyes are droopy with sleep and to comfort him even more, you’ve joined him in bed to cuddle into his side.

you both sigh with content, an unspoken love mingling in the bubble you are both consumed in.

your cheek smushes against simon’s upper bicep with warmth emanating from him as your eyes begin to flutter close.

“oi, you said you’d watch the rest of this with me.” he mumbles lowly, clearly fatigued as much as you.

“m’tired, si.” you say defensively with your eyelids shut.

simon reaches to grab at your legs to intertwine with his, sipping at his tea and letting another hum loose from his throat. he lifts his arm that you lay against to pull you closer. with annoyance, you drape your arm against his lower stomach and let sleep finally take you in like a warm embrace.

simon doesn’t need to look down to know that you won’t be getting up again until the sun seeps through the blinds.

“every bloody time.” he says, knowing next week you’ll repeat the cycle of begging to watch a documentary and never seeing the end of it.

a/n: my mind is corrupted by big, burly simon in his briefs 🙂

#ghost call of duty #cod x reader #cod modern warfare #ghost cod #cod #simon ghost x reader #simon riley x reader #simon ghost riley #simon riley #call of duty #cod mw2 #cod mw3 #endot writes

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endotwrites · 3 months

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simon takes up a lot of space

cw: gn reader, insecurity surrounding physical appearance

a/n: i’m running out of ideas to write about so gimme some time to think mwah 🥹

simon sometimes forgets he takes up so much space. he’ll reach for something across from him only to knock something else off the table. or he’ll try and tiptoe down the stairs for a sneaky cigarette only for the stairs to groan under his weight.

sometimes, simon wishes he could manoeuvre in a way that no one would even realise he was there. like a ghost, drifting through the hallways instead of a 6’4 man with the broadest shoulders known to man.

when simon sits with his thoughts and prays to whoever will listen to just make him the slight amount smaller, you’re there to remind him how much you adore him.

all of him.

his large biceps that encapsulates the whole of you when you pout at him for a bear hug. his wide back that he lets you sit on when doing push ups. his soft stomach that have stretch marks similar to your own.

teaching one another to love themselves for who they are was always a massive part of your relationship and as much as simon reminds you that he will love you no matter what, you are always there to say the same for him.

even if he takes up 3/4 of your bed.

#endot writes #simon ghost riley #ghost call of duty #ghost cod #simon ghost x reader #simon riley #simon riley x reader #cod modern warfare #cod #cod x reader #simon riley x you #simon riley fanfic #ghost x reader #ghost drabble #ghost mw2 #cod mwii #cod mw3 #call of duty #endot sfw

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endotwrites · 3 months

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prompt: you and simon finally communicate after a dispute

wc: 450 (if you saw a different number before, no you didn’t) not proofread :(

when you and simon argue, he never lets the night end without being in the same bed as one another. he’s definitely simmered down from earlier, pushing the fight to the back of his mind until you storm into the room and roughly climb into bed and pull the covers over you.

a promise that simon had you make was that anything you had to say was written on the other person’s back with their finger.

he distinctly remember one’s fight in particular where you had purposely used your pinky finger and written incredibly tiny to punctuate just how much you had to say. when you started to reach a third down, simon would just flip over and pull you over him which only you made you laugh and exclaim “i’m not even halfway done yet!”

but tonight was different.

it seemed too much was said out loud and you both only wish you could reverse time and scribble your thoughts onto his shoulder blades.

simon is sat up in bed, television on but low volume and the rest of the room encompassed in darkness. simon did a silent prayer that you would finally turn to him and mutter a little “hi” to wave some sort of white flag. but when he hears your soft snores, it only deepens the hole in his heart.

when you wake the bedroom remains pitch black. naturally, your hands splays against the opposite side of the mattress to feel for your lovers warmth but realising the bed is barron only makes you panick.

rubbing your eyes and bounding out of bed, the only thoughts that race in your mind is “was this the night i lose him?” the stairs groan with each foot that lands heavily on it. you call out to simon and round a corner to only be caught in his grip. he holds your upper arms with his eyes examining your face madly. “what’s happened, love? what’s going on?”

the distressed tone of simon’s voice is what makes you crack and collapse into his arms. you hiccup with tears streaming down your face “i forgot to write to you, a-and i fell asleep as i was thinking of what to say! m’sorry, i forgot to write- forgot to tell you i still love you.“

simon can only feel aghast at your stumbling, knowing he could have kissed you awake to show that his anger had dissipated hours ago. his large hand cups the back of your head to his chest and lifts you gently to sit in his lap at the bottom of the stairs. you pull back, trying to regain some form of composure.

“honey, i knew. i will always know.”

a/n: i looveheidjke love writing simon being in love and reader being in love with simon like you’re my babies

#endot writes #simon ghost riley #ghost call of duty #simon ghost x reader #ghost cod #simon riley #simon riley x reader #cod #cod modern warfare #cod x reader #cod mw3 #cod mwii #call of duty #ghost drabble #ghost mw2 #ghost x reader #simon riley x you #simon riley fanfic #endot sfw

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endotwrites · 3 months

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still thinking about situationship!simon winding you up even whilst heavily pregnant. he swings his keys in his hands as he heads to the door but you’re quick to stop him with a “where the hell are you going? i was about to make lunch.” he curses under his breath and mutters “you said that an hour ago…” you stare at him blankly, waiting for him to repeat himself but all he does is drop his keys back on the hook and kick off his shoes. he walks over to kiss your temple and say “i’ll help cut up the vegetables” whilst he silently sulks about the pint he’s just missed out on.

part one

picture is from pinterest! again…

a/n: another one because i said so 🧍🏽‍♀️

#cod x reader #cod mw3 #ghost call of duty #ghost cod #cod modern warfare #cod #cod mw2 #cod mwii #call of duty #simon ghost x reader #ghost drabble #ghost x reader #ghost mw2 #simon ghost riley #simon riley x you #simon riley smut #situationship!simon #simon riley x reader #endot writes

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endotwrites · 3 months

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simon introduces a new woman to his daughter

thinking about simon who already has a little girl and somehow stumbles across you one day. your relationship with him progresses over the months of date (which his daughter helps him get ready for) and when he finally brings you to his house for a home-cooked meal, you can’t help but fall in love with his little one. although simon is apprehensive with the introduction of a new woman in his life, this clearly isn’t a shared feeling as his daughter is by your side the entire time you’re there. she is overwhelmed with questions - some you have to look at simon to clarify if you can answer - but the lack of malicious intent makes it a breeze to reply.

watching you grab your bag to leave only makes her cling to you more, pleading with you stay a little longer or even the night. when simon has to explain that you’ll return soon, she gives you one big hug to end the night.

as the door clicks shut behind you, simon can only release a massive sigh of contentment from the amount of love that was shared tonight and how much more there is to come.

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endotwrites · 3 months

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based off this tiktok i just watched…

cw: injury but no blood

you’re getting ready for bed, freshly showered and still fuzzy from a glass or two that simon had to ween you off of. as you step back to grab a face cream, something presses into your foot and slices it open.

“ah!” you yelp, immediately inspecting the issue. you don’t hear a voice from the room over, only pounding footsteps that resonate throughout the house.

“what’s going on?!” simon exclaims, profusely examining you from head to toe. you steady yourself against the cupboard, turn your foot over to apply pressure around the wound and test for pain.

“jus’ a small cut, must’ve been old glass or someth-“. simon immediately carries you bride-style to the bedroom to aid you quickly. “si, this isn’t necessary. like at all!” you smile down at his knelt position with his brows all furrowed. his head falls against your knee which only makes you run your fingers through his hair.

“need you to be more careful, hm? clumsy thing.”

a/n: my baby my baby, love you simon riley xx

#endot writes #simon ghost riley #ghost call of duty #ghost cod #simon ghost x reader #simon riley #simon riley x reader #cod #cod modern warfare #cod x reader #ghost drabble #ghost mw2 #ghost x reader #simon riley x you #simon riley fanfic #cod mwii #cod mw3 #call of duty #endot sfw

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endotwrites · 3 months

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thinking about you and simon making out and him just becoming so giggly and smiley.

wc: 503 | cw: angsty, shy simon & more dominant reader

the day started off as a lazy one - simon surprisingly sleeping in until you both drag yourselves out of bed to have a late breakfast. your conversation is quiet and trivial. words to fill the space of when you’re not holding one another.

both your bodies drift back upstairs to the safety of your sheets and low buzz of the tv. simon flicks through channels and streaming services leisurely, indecisive of what show will occupy the rest of the day. you grow tiresome of the mundane “this one?” shortly followed by a “nah.” and place your arm as far across simon’s torso as you can. your chin sits on his upper bicep as you flutter your eyelashes up at him. “you’re asking for trouble now,” simon acknowledges, not even chancing a glance at you, aware of the spell you’re trying to put him under. you litter gentle kisses all over the arm closest to you which only grow to small licks and bites.

simon’s hand stutters whilst typing in a particular movie and you know your advances are working. with your legs already intertwined, you use a small amount of momentum to straddle his lap and connect your lips. simon’s hand lets the remote fall to the bed and now grasp at your thighs, kneading them effortlessly. as you grow hungry with lust, you feel simon’s lips part and feel the dimples form under your hands that caress his cheeks.

you pull back slightly, only enough for him to see your confused face. “stop,” you groan. “m’sorry, can’t help it,” simon replies as you elicit a low chuckle from him. your tongues dance a choreography that only you two know - yours being calculated and focus whilst simon is smooth and graceful.

everything around you two feels stuffy with your breaths being swallowed by one another and the placement of your core sitting right on top of simon’s hardening cock. the hem of your shirt is the first place your fingers reach for to pull over your head and with no bra on underneath, half naked for simon to admire.

his eyes are droopy, drunk off love as he admires you quietly with his palms rubbing up and down your sides and the small gesture of licking his lips. you latch your lips on his neck which simon sighs at, morphing into a moan that is dragged out for god knows how long. as you hips begin to grind in circles, simon reaches for the nape of your neck and tugs you back to his mouth, desperate for your taste.

“si, what are you doing to me?” you yearn quietly. “dunno but i love the way you’re reacting to it.” simon’s head tips back to attempt concealing the growing blush on his cheeks. you tease a smile, laughing into his chest at how easily shy he becomes.

you murmur weakly “god, making out with you is fun.”

a/n: oh my god, he’s literally my baaaabbbbbyyyyy i miss him and i’ve never MET HIM

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