#<- for legal reasons this message is a joke

[antennatoheaven]

why is it that whenever i buy a product that advertises itself as being red velvet it either doesn't taste like red velvet at all or contains raspberries instead of chocolate

[pinkpastels113]

Makes we wonder how chaotic is it when they are together😭

they kiss platonically at parties 😀

[spiritshaydra]

Ahem

I believe in she/they Giratina supremacy ✨

That is all ~ 😌💅✨

[shikai-the-storyteller]

I feel like if a job's payrange is less than what I earned when working for a nonprofit (especially if they expect me to do more, and ESPECIALLY if it's a contract job) I should legally be allowed to kill them

[asanjou]

my finale piece definitely isn't gonna be finished on time so this is my sincere request to all artists better at drawing than me please don't have the same idea or ill be embarrassed

[lingering-sunrise]

mormon post below

so. it turns out the general conference focus on temples and wearing of the garment of the holy priesthood was a message for ~*~ me personally ~*~. the rest of you can breathe easy. 😌 carry on.

[generalsmemories]

Mentally preparing myself for Jingliu's quest (I won't be ready at all and I'll prob cry myself to sleep after it)‼️

- ⌛️

mentally preparing myself will help with nothing high cloud lore will without fail break my heart and soul and mind without fail.

SO I SHALL GO OUT WITH JINGLIU'S QUEST YEEHAW

[babygirlbdubs]

doc and ren want to recruit bdubs for their next bit of vengeance against scar my work is done rendubs reunion soon

[madame-fear]

If you kill William and Harry you have to kill George, Charlotte, Louis, Archie and Lilibet too or else your child will still be 6th in line of succession

Do we have to kill Camilla, Catherine and Meghan too? 🤔

[ragnars-tooth]

HELLO. YOUR UPDATE IS THAT THIS FLAT IS ACTUALLY INCAPABLE OF RECEIVING AN INTERNET CONNECTION. I HATE LANDLORDS. I HATE ESTATE AGENTS. I AM GOING TO WALK INTO THE SEA.

[jettlawrence]

i've come so far from taking literally 2 seconds of seeing him on the left and immediately thinking he was a douche in january to him being my boy all season lmaooo and winning 3 championships this year <333

[jackhues]

WHO WILLIAM? - PADDOCK PASS, BABY [ PART TWO ]

in which y/n's enjoying playing the part of paddock princess after a... not so great race (bahrain 24)

[ prev ] | [ next ] | [ notes ] | [ masterlist ]

--

y/nhamilton

liked by lewishamilton, charles_leclerc, maxverstappen1 & others

y/nhamilton: motorsports is alive and well people 🏎️

tagged: logansargeant, alex_albon

y/nhamilton: also @/landonorris i want my bracelet back -> landonorris: no. -> username: lando + stealing y/n's accessories. name a better duo -> y/nhamilton: him giving them back to me

username: i bet her and the williams boys were just talking shit about all of the cars and eating ice cream liked by y/nhamilton

logansargeant: you're welcome for the ice cream! -> y/nhamilton: thank you very much logan, the ice cream was my favourite part of the day -> logansargeant: favorite* -> y/nhamilton: go away you american -> username: is this new? i don't know if i've seen this before -> username: personally i love it

charles_leclerc: where's my ice cream? -> y/nhamilton: you have to be at the williams garage if you want some. george is here too -> georgerussel63: you're supposed to keep it a secret -> username: AHAHAHA- y/n just outing george -> username: i'm gonna miss them next year 😢 -> y/nhamilton: mate, my dad's switching teams. he's not retiring. besides, georgie can't get rid of me if he tried -> georgerussel63: and i HAVE tried -> username: don't even george. we all know you love her liked by y/nhamilton & georgerussel63

mercedesamgf1: our paddock princess out there doing paddock princess things -> scuderiaferrari: enjoy your last season with her! -> mercedesamgf1: 🤕 -> username: poor merc admin just catching strays

maxverstappen1: am i not going to get any credit for pointing out that your hair made a heart? -> y/nhamilton: will you give my dad the 2021 wdc trophy? -> y/nhamilton: for legal reasons, my above comment is a joke. max is aware of this sentiment and the two of us have an ongoing thing where we bring it up at any minor inconvenience. -> y/nhamilton: besides it's his name on the trophy he doesn't care no more -> username: LMAOO y/n got possessed by mercedes pr for a minute liked by y/nhamilton & maxverstappen1

lewishamilton: is this the first time i haven't made the gp dump? i'm offended -> lewishamilton: this is what they mean when they say kids grow up so fast -> roscoelovescoco: i didn't makes the cuts eithers? wow... -> username: lewis commenting from his AND roscoe's account 😭 that man's actually hurt by this -> y/nhamilton: the last slide is literally your feature -> y/nhamilton: roscoe i'm sorry. i've failed you

carlossainz55: 🏎️🏎️ -> y/nhamilton: 🚗🚗 -> username: oh thank god they're still communicating in weird emojis -> username: frr, i was so scared they weren't going to be friends anymore -> username: if y/n and max made it out alive after ad21, i think her and carlos can survive this

alex_albon: that was probably the best ice cream i've had in my life -> y/nhamilton: it's sweeter bcz i'm around

--

---

TAGLIST: @67-angelofthelordme-67 , @somepeoplemaybe , @nothaqks , @theforevermorereject , @thatonesblog <3

send a message/comment/ask to be added to the taglist!

NOTE: second part out! if you guys want to see something that already happened in prev seasons, send in an ask/comment! don't forget to like + reblog &lt;3

[wonton4rang]

What would bnd be like as fwb?? 🤔

oh my fucking god you are CRAZY but i think about fwb bnd EVERY SINGLE DAY, at least once, at least one member but EVERYDAY. so watch me rant about it below 😭

pairing: bnd legal line x reader.

warnings: +18, smut.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

sungho; i don't see him being the typical fwb tbh, idek how you got him like that but if he is, i see him being this type of loner that no one would ever think is being someone's fwb, he's the type to give married vibes so it's not something usual to see him being a fwb. he would be loyal asf, you guys are just fucking but he ain't even looking to anyone else cause he's just that respectful. he would be the type to say a simple "hi" to you when you meet in public with a soft smile, you automatically receiving a text after he went out fo your sight saying "you look so beautiful today, as always". but he wouldn't be confusing tho, you guys would have things clear which is good to avoid any hard feelings.

riwoo; everyone, and i mean EVERYONE, will know you guys have something going on, the only reason they wouldn't specifically go for fwb is because they think sanghyeok has never seen a pussy before. he looks like a lost puppy behind you all the time so they know that he either likes you or you are leading him on. funny how he fucks the shit out of you while he lets out little whines "you feel so good, so warm" he would have a thing for fucking from behind, your ass pressing against his pelvis and you just know he's gonna loose it when his hands hold your boobs and his lips just keep kissing your ear and softly moaning.

jaehyun; contrary to sanghyeok, no one knows y'all have a thing, not because he's good at hiding it but because he's just always joking around and flirting with everyone and everything. i see you getting into an argument with him because of this too, it gets to a point where you don't feel comfortable knowing he's fucking and kissing others as well, he would just excuse himself by saying you guys are not dating so there's no exclusivity involved. was he a bitch? yes, were you going to leave him because of that? no. you loved every moment you spent together and he was so loving when he wanted to that even if it crossed your mind leaving a thousand times, a thousand and one times you'll stay.

taesan; dongmin is not a very clingy person, not even during an stablished relationship, let alone when he's just fucking you sometimes. the lack of response, of affection, of sympathy would be driving you nuts, but when you finally meet in person he's such a sweetheart that you just forget you were mad at him and let him do whatever he wants to do with you. he is VERY misleading, he would say a few lies to keep you close, making promises he doesn't keep but he still has you wrapped around his finger. he would be a little bit rough during sex but even if he's a bitch, he would make you feel good and take care of you afterwards. one of the main reasons of your confusion was that he acted like your boyfriend in private, being jealous over stuff and telling you you're his, only to ignore you in person and don't even read your messages.

leehan; the most misleading one by far. he would act like your boyfriend fr, say cute things to you, wink at you if he ever sees you in public, takes pictures with you, asks you out for dinner at his place without actually fucking you afterwards. all this for him to break your heart when you see him flirting with another girl at the library, getting close to him to ask what's going on and only earning a bad look before he held the other girl's hand and got away from there. he would drop by your place that night and tell you how much he cares about you and how sorry he is, kissing your tears away and making love to you in such a sweet way that you forgot everything he did before. he would stay with you overnight and you would wake up in his arms, only to see him back to normal, barely looking at you before he picked up his things and left you alone. at least he doesn't run away in your sleep and kisses you goodnight.

[txttletale]

can you elaborate on the reasons ? what criticisms do you disagree with?

criticisms i disagree with:

"they character assassinated jane" amiguita there was no character to assisnate.

"they character assassinated dirk" dirk is at his most interesting and likeable ever and is just about the only redeeming thing about these

"they were just written to spite the fans" if true tht would have been Epic, and Based. but they very obviously werent

"its too violent and sexual for cheap shock humour" did you. read homestuck, the web comic? what were you Expecting... also like it or not the sexual content isnt just random or gratuitous it is obviously trying to be a conclusion to the whoel coming-of-age theme of homestuck as a work.

"so-and-so is out of character" homestuck characters are malleable little dolls that can be rearranged to suit the narrative at a whim. this is true about all fictional characters ofc but it is like explicitly textually metaphysically true in homestuck

my criticisms:

the heavy-handed political messaging is fucking tedious and awful and so profoundly of its time in a bad way. its clearly a reaction to trump but it doesnt have anything interesting to say about him or fascism or racism or anything, really, except, um. Cheeto in the white house?. the whole Evil Jane plot is too stupid and contrived for the sake of the satire to take seriously but also its awful satire written by liberals who think fascism as invented in 2016 by the orange man

god can we fucking talk about how fucking embarassing the obama shit is. jesus fucking christ. for a start it's a callback to a running jhoke in homestuck that is straight up just super racist. and they decide to pivot from the joke being 'its funny that theres a black president', which is good, but they pivot it to 'obama seems so heroic and magical now that we're stuck with the Orange Man', which, admittedly, is better than Being Racist, but also sucks shit. he killed people amiguitas.

'post-canon' is cheap bullshit. like, the work makes a big deal about tryng to talk about What Canon Is, without ever acknowledging the concept of, like, IP law. claiming to just be a non-canon continuation like any other when it's made by people with the Official Exclusive Legal Rights just feels hollow and detooths any liberatory/deconstructive potential there. unironically my opinion of it would go up like tenfold if it had been actually published in AO3 instead of just joking about it.

in general i think that all of the attempt to deconstruct fiction or storytelling is rooted in a really weird and flawed model of storytelling. a lot of it seems to be taking an extremely long route to writing something bad on purpose and then saying 'see, if you wrote something like this, it would be bad'. Okay. i like deconstructive collapsing narrative shit in e.g. if on a winter's night a traveller because i think calvino has trenchant and interesting insights about literature and storytelling. i do think hussie also has those but they essentially dropped and explored all of them in homestuck and the epilogues just seem like an attempt to connect ohomstuck's disparate and contradictory approaches to Narrative into one overarching schemata and then crtiique that schemata, which i think is a doomed project that results in little of interest to me.

[daycourtofficial]

Falling in Love on the Fourth Floor - Part 9

Summary: Out of an act of desperation, you move in with a guy you kind of know who happens to have a really hot brother who lives next door.

Author’s note: anyone else excited for me to actually update?? This part’s a bit short, sorry! Gotta set some things up tbh. I’m so so so excited for part 10. Cassian has big annoying little brother energy in this. Honestly Az does not make an in person appearance in this part, but just you wait 😉

(Masterlist)

The warm water of the shower felt incredible, your mind unwinding as the water falls down your body. Thoughts of last night swirl through your mind, remembering how Azriel’s skin felt on yours.

You start going over the previous night again, from the way his eyes wandered over your body to the grip he had on you on the way home.

You were fucked.

You were pouring shampoo into your hand, trying to decide the odds that this was all a joke to Azriel, when the door to your bedroom opened.

You usually leave the door unlocked because Cassian has to reset the router pretty regularly, but you don’t think much of it until he is swinging open the door to your bathroom, letting in a cool breeze. You stick your head out of the curtain, hiding the rest of your body.

“Cassian,” you hiss, “what are you doing?”

“I don’t like eating alone,” he tells you, shrugging as he peels an orange.

“Cassian.”

“What?” He asks, words garbled from speaking through his orange slice.

“I’m in the shower.”

“So?”

You roll your eyes, pulling a hand out to emphasize your point. “I’m naked. In the shower.”

“There’s a curtain for a reason,” his tone sounding bored of this argument.

“You got a text from Az,” he says, annoyed as he looks at your screen that he can’t view the message. You drop your conditioner at his words, the clang of it echoing in the small room as you bend down to pick it back up.

“Just leave it, I’ll check it in a minute.”

"I hope it's a poem about how beautiful you are."

You roll your eyes, despite Cassian not being able to see you.

"I bet it says how annoying you are."

Cassian's gasp fills the room, "I am not annoying."

You poke your head out of shower, "we have weekly meetings to discuss how annoying you are."

In an act of complete maturity, you follow your statement by sticking your tongue out at him. Cassian holds your phone up to your face, letting it unlock the screen for him.

He sticks his tongue back out at you, "Thanks!"

He starts scuttling out of the room, yelling behind him, "if I'm lucky, you've sent Azzy some classy nudes!"

You start sputtering, yanking the shower curtain away, grabbing your towel, and quickly wrapping it around yourself as you follow after Cassian, not even turning the shower off.

"Aww, in this text he called you cute."

"Cassian."

He starts typing a response, his fingers flying over your phone. You hear the woosh of a sent message, and you stare at him, mouth open.

"What did you send him?"

He waggles his eyebrows, then hands you back your phone.

"You'll never know."

You look down at the phone in your hands, and sure enough, Cassian had sent him a text and promptly deleted it. The sick bastard.

"Cassian."

Your roommate simply shrugs at the tenseness of your tone, "I told him how you love him and how you want his precious babies."

You grit your teeth as Cassian makes kissing noises at you, debating the legal and moral ramifications of murdering Cassian when your phone chimes in your hands.

Azriel: thanks, I like your hair too :)

You look up at Cassian, a shit-eating grin on his face.

"You told him I liked his hair?"

"Yep," he says, biting into an apple, its crunch aggrevating some deep part of your brain.

“You’re the worst,” you say, opening your door and shutting it quickly behind you.

Later that night, Rhys decides to stop by to see Cassian, wanting to watch a rugby match on Cassian’s tv. Much to Rhys’s horror, Cass does have the larger tv.

Rhys starts to come in through the door to the apartment, but he can’t get the door opened more than a few inches because of a weight blocking him.

“What are you doing?” You ask, head peaking in the six inch crack of the door.

He looks confused, then looks around. “Trying to come in to watch rugby with Cass.”

“No you’re not.”

He tries to push against the door, but you keep it firmly in place. “I’m certainly trying to.”

“You’re not coming in - it’s girl’s night.”

He looks inside, confusion on his face as he huffs, “I see Cassian over there.”

“We voted to let him stay.”

Rhys looks offended. “And why not me?”

You lower your voice, leaning in closer to him, “because Feyre doesn’t invite boys she wants to talk about.”

His smirk grows predatory, as he surveys Feyre, Mor, and Cassian inside the apartment. “And why wasn’t Az invited?”

Your face flushes with heat, “we didn’t think it was his scene.”

Rhys snorts, leaning against the door frame. Knowing Rhys, he’d stay there until he got what he wanted to hear. “Az loves gossip more than anyone. Tell me why he isn’t invited and I’ll leave you be.”

You two glare each other down, a sight which must have looked quite amusing to anyone who didn’t note the seriousness of both of your faces.

You mumble out, “we don’t invite boys we want to talk about.”

He puts a hand around his ear, “I’m so sorry, dear, what was that?”

You grit you teeth, looking upward in hopes a god or a titan or someone would smite Rhysand and his stupid smug grin on the spot.

You let out a long breath, trying to let all the anger out so you can say distinctly, “we do not invite the boys we want to talk about.”

His eyes dance with amusement, his weight dropping from the door almost causing you to fall. “Well why didn’t you just say so? Maybe we’ll have a boys night - talk about you divine feminine creatures.”

He starts strolling back down the hall, “tell Cassian he’s welcome to join us.”

You close the door on him, dead-bolting the door so he can’t come in, turning back to reclaim your spot next to Feyre on one of the couches, Mor and Cassian next to each other on the other one.

“Now, I know we all gathered here to spend time together, but I showed up because I wanted someone to tell me what the hell is going on between you and Azriel.”

Mor stabs her teriyaki chicken with her fork, pointing it at you. You choke, trying not to laugh as the chicken falls off the fork back into the takeout container.

Cassian interrupts, his mouth full of rice as he says, “yeah what’s going on between you two?”

Your cheeks heat, all the attention in the room on you as you say, “nothing’s going on, Mor,” and grab a mouthful of sesame chicken with your chopsticks to prevent them from probing further.

It does not work. Instead, Feyre chimes in, “you guys were awfully close last night at karaoke.”

Mor points at Feyre with her fork, “she sat on his lap to and from Rita’s.”

Feyre gasps, sitting up, “you sat on his lap?” Then she looks at you with a mischievous glint, “could you feel him?”

She waggles her eyebrows as you throw an eggroll at her, earning you a soft hey in response.

“Feyre, watch your language around Cassian’s virginal ears.”

Mor spits out her drink, “there’s nothing virginal about what we do at night.”

She high fives Cassian, who is suspiciously quiet during this whole exchange.

“Hey,” you say to him, getting him to look up from his rice at you, “why’d you say it was good that my date was bad?”

“When’d I say that?” Cassian asks, tucking his phone under his thigh.

You roll your eyes, “literally yesterday when Az and I dropped off lunch for you.”

Mor whistles, “Az took you for a ride.”

Feyre’s eyes light up and you roll your eyes at her sing-song voice, still looking to your roommate. Cassian starts fidgeting, unsure what to do with his hands, “uh nothing he just was- kinda ugly.”

Your brows press down in a hard line, “okay, Cassian, he might not have been your cup of tea but he certainly wasn’t ugly.”

“But he wasn’t pretty like Azriel,” Mor chimes in, a smirk on her lips.

You throw your hands up, “whoa whoa whoa, I invited you guys over for chinese food and silly romcoms, why am I being ambushed about Azriel?”

“Because he likes you,” Feyre says, pouring herself a glass of rosé. You look to Feyre, trying to silently tell her you don’t want to have this conversation here with Cassian, but she keeps her eyes on her lo mein, a noodle slipping from her chopsticks.

“Az sure did enjoy you in the Barbie costume last night, babe.” Mor had an absolutely feral look to her as she starts, “I bet he had a fun night thinking about it with his hand wrapped around his- hey!”

You threw a pillow in her direction, trying desperately to get her to shut up.

“Hey, even Cassian thinks you guys would be cute, and he isn’t the most observant.”

Cassian picks the pillow up, hitting Mor with it again. “Thanks, Mor.”

“You’re welcome, baby.”

You turn to Feyre and the two of you make kissing noises at each other, then direct them at Mor and Cassian.

“Hey, we’re mature adults who just fool around. And do you know why we work so well?”

You put your head on your hand, looking up to Mor, “oh wise and beautiful Mor, please tell me why you and my roommate are so good at having sex with each other.”

Feyre snorts, but Mor responds, “because we talk to each other. We’re adults.”

“It’s different,” you say, going back to your chicken.

“How is it any different?”

“There aren’t any stakes for you two,” you say, and Feyre nods eagerly. “There aren’t any emotions - you two just have sex and you know that’s what you both want.”

Feyre nods enthusiastically, and you narrow your eyes at her, “and why aren’t we grilling you about the other boy? Hmmmm?”

Her cheeks blush, as her mouth opens and closes, trying to form words.

“Because she didn’t spend all of karaoke night whispering to him. Especially not during my performance.” Cassian ends his words with a huff, taking a swig of his beer.

“You mean our performance?” Mor ask, “we made it what it was.”

Cassian rolls his eyes, but lets it go, pulling his phone back out. “I’m going to order more Chinese - anyone want anything?”

Everyone’s responses echo, but you make out both Feyre and Mor asking for more crab rangoons.

Cassian lets out a soft, “it’ll be here in 30 minutes, let’s start this chick flick.”

Mor smacks him on the chest, “Pride and Prejudice is not a chick flick! It is cinema!”

As Mor and Feyre try to convince Cassian that he will love Kiera Knightley, your thoughts linger to the other side of the wall you shared. You wondered what they were up to tonight, what Azriel was doing, if Cassian and Rhys give him a hard time about you.

Of all the thoughts you had of them, the thought hadn’t occurred to you that Cassian would be texting Rhys updates throughout the night.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How a billionaire’s mediocre pump-and-dump “book” became a “bestseller”

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

I was on a book tour the day my editor called me and told me, "From now on, your middle name is 'Cory.'"

"That's weird. Why?"

"Because from now on, your first name is 'New York Times Bestselling Author.'"

That was how I found out I'd hit the NYT list for the first time. It was a huge moment – just as it has been each subsequent time it's happened. First, because of how it warmed my little ego, but second, and more importantly, because of how it affected my book and all the books afterwards.

Once your book is a Times bestseller, every bookseller in America orders enough copies to fill a front-facing display on a new release shelf or a stack on a bestseller table. They order more copies of your backlist. Foreign rights buyers at Frankfurt crowd around your international agents to bid on your book. Movie studios come calling. It's a huge deal.

My books became Times bestsellers the old-fashioned way: people bought and read them and told their friends, who bought and read them. Booksellers who enjoyed them wrote "shelf-talkers" – short reviews – and displayed them alongside the book.

That "From now on your first name is 'New York Times Bestselling Author' gag is a tradition. When @wilwheaton's memoir Still Just A Geek hit the Times list, I texted the joke to him and he texted back to say @jscalzi had already sent him the same joke (and of course, Scalzi and I have the same editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden):

https://www.harpercollins.com/products/still-just-a-geek-wil-wheaton

But not everyone earns that first name the same way. Some people cheat.

Famously, the Church of Scientology was caught buying truckloads of L Ron Hubbard books (published by Scientology's own publishing arm) from booksellers, returning them to their warehouse, then shipping them back to the booksellers when they re-ordered the sold out titles. The tip-off came when booksellers opened cases of books and found that they already bore the store's own price-stickers:

https://www.latimes.com/local/la-scientology062890-story.html

The reason Scientology was willing to go to such great lengths wasn't merely that readers used "NYT Bestseller* to choose which books to buy. Far more important was the signal that this sent to the entire book trade, from reviewers to librarians to booksellers, who made important decisions about how many copies of the books to stock, whether to display them spine- or face out, and whether to return unsold stock or leave it on the shelf.

Publishers go to great lengths to send these messages to the trade: sending out fancy advance review copies in elaborate packaging, taking out ads in the trade magazines, featuring titles in their catalogs and sending their sales-force out to impress the publisher's enthusiasm on their accounts.

Even the advance can be a way to signal the trade: when a publisher announces that it just acquired a book for an eyebrow-raising sum, it's not trumpeting the size of its capital reserves – it's telling the trade that this book is a Big Deal that they should pay attention to.

(Of all the signals, this one may be the weakest, even if it's the most expensive for publishers to send. Take the $1.25m advance that Rupert Murdoch's Harpercollins paid to Sarah Palin for her unreadable memoir, Going Rogue. As with so many of the outsized sums Murdoch's press and papers pay to right wing politicians, the figure didn't represent a bet on the commercial prospects of the book – which tanked – but rather, a legal way to launder massive cash transfers from the far-right billionaire to a generation of politicians who now owe him some rather expensive favors.)

All of which brings me to the New York Times bestselling book Read Write Own by the billionaire VC New York Times Bestselling Author Chris Dixon. Dixon is a partner at A16Z, the venture capitalists who pumped billions into failed, scammy, cryptocurrency companies that tricked normies into converting their perfectly cromulent "fiat" money into shitcoins, allowing the investors to turn a massive profit and exit before the companies collapsed or imploded.

Read Write Own (subtitle: "Building the Next Era of the Internet") is a monumentally unconvincing hymn to the blockchain. As Molly White writes in her scathing review, the book is full of undisclosed conflicts of interest, with Dixon touting companies he has a direct personal stake in:

https://www.citationneeded.news/review-read-write-own-by-chris-dixon/

But this book's defects go beyond this kind of sleazy pump-and-dump behavior. It's also just bad. The arguments it makes for the blockchain as a way of escaping the problems of an enshittified, monopolized internet are bad arguments. White dissects each of these arguments very skillfully, and I urge you to read her review for a full list, but I'll reproduce one here to give you a taste:

After three chapters in which Dixon provides a (rather revisionistd) history of the web to date, explains the mechanics of blockchains, and goes over the types of things one might theoretically be able to do with a blockchain, we are left with "Part Four: Here and Now", then the final "Part Five: What's Next". The name of Part Four suggests that he will perhaps lay out a list of blockchain projects that are currently successfully solving real problems.

This may be why Part Four is precisely four and a half pages long. And rather than name any successful projects, Dixon instead spends his few pages excoriating the "casino" projects that he says have given crypto a bad rap,e prompting regulatory scrutiny that is making "ethical entrepreneurs … afraid to build products" in the United States.f

As White says, this is just not a good book. It doesn't contain anything to excite people who are already blockchain-poisoned crypto cultists – and it also lacks anything that will convince normies who never let Matt Damon or Spike Lee convince them to trade dollars for magic beans. It's one of those books that manages to be both paper and a paperweight.

And yet…it's a New York Times Bestseller. How did this come to pass? Here's a hint: remember how the Scientologists got L Ron Hubbard 20 consecutive #1 Bestsellers?

As Jordan Pearson writes for Motherboard, Read Write Own earned its place on the Times list because of a series of massive bulk orders from firms linked to A16Z and Dixon, which ordered between dozens and thousands of copies and gave them away to employees or just randos on Twitter:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7emkx/chris-dixon-a16z-read-write-own-nyt-bestseller

The Times recognizes this in a backhanded way, by marking Read Write Own on the list with a "dagger" (†) that indicates the shenanigans (the same dagger appeared alongside the listing for Donald Trump Jr's Triggered after the RNC spent a metric scientologyload of money – $100k – buying up cases of it):

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/books/donald-trump-jr-triggered-sales.html

There's a case for the Times not automatically ignoring bulk orders. Since 2020, I've run Kickstarters where I've pre-sold my books on behalf of my publisher, working with bookstores like Book Soup and wholesalers like Porchlight Books to backers when they go on sale. I signed and personalized 500+ books at Vroman's yesterday for backers who pre-ordered my next novel, The Bezzle:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53531243480/

But there's a world of difference between pre-orders that hundreds or thousands of readers place that are aggregated into a single bulk order, and books that are bought by CEOs to give away to people who may not have any interest in them. For the book trade – librarians, reviewers, booksellers – the former indicates broad interest that justifies their attention. The latter just tells you that a handful of deep-pocketed manipulators want you to think there's broad interest.

I'm certain that Dixon – like me – feels a bit of pride at having "earned" a new first name. But Dixon – like me – gets something far more tangible than a bit of egoboo out of making the Times list. For me, a place on the Times list is a way to get booksellers and librarians excited about sharing my book with readers.

For Dixon, the stakes are much higher. Remember that cryptocurrency is a faith-based initiative whose mechanism is: "convince normies that shitcoins will be worth more tomorrow than they are today, and then trade them the shitcoins that cost you nothing to create for dollars that they worked hard to earn."

In other words, crypto is a bezzle, defined by John Kenneth Galbraith as "The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it."

So long as shitcoins haven't fallen to zero, the bag-holders who've traded their "fiat" for funny money can live in the bezzle, convinced that their "investments" will recover and turn a profit. More importantly, keeping the bezzle alive preserves the possibility of luring in more normies who can infuse the system with fresh dollars to use as convincers that keep the bag-holders to keep holding that bag, rather than bailing and precipitating the zeroing out of the whole scam.

The relatively small sums that Dixon and his affiliated plutocrats spent to flood your podcasts with ads for this pointless 300-page Ponzi ad are a bargain, as are the sums they spent buying up cases of the book to give away or just stash in a storeroom. If only a few hundred retirees are convinced to convert their savings to crypto, the resulting flush of cash will make the line go up, allowing whales like Dixon and A16Z to cash out, or make more leveraged bets, or both. Crypto is a system with very few good trades, but spending chump change to earn a spot on the Times list (dagger or no) is a no-brainer.

After all, the kinds of people who buy crypto are, famously, the kinds of people who think books are stupid ("I would never read a book" -S Bankman-Fried):

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/29/sam-bankman-fried-reading-effective-altruism/

There's precious little likelihood that anyone will be convinced to go long on crypto thanks to the words in this book. But the Times list has enough prestige to lure more suckers into the casino: "I'm not going to read this thing, but if it's on the list, that means other people must have read it and think it's convincing."

We are living through a golden age of scams, and crypto, which has elevated caveat emptor to a moral virtue ("not your wallet, not your coins"), is a scammer's paradise. Stein's Law tells us that "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop," but the purpose of a bezzle isn't to keep the scam going forever – just until the scammer can cash out and blow town. The longer the bezzle goes on for, the richer the scammer gets.

Not for nothing, my next novel – which comes out on Feb 20 – is called The Bezzle. It stars Marty Hench, my hard-driving, two-fisted, high-tech forensic accountant, who finds himself unwinding a whole menagerie of scams, from a hamburger-based Ponzi scheme to rampant music royalty theft to a vast prison-tech scam that uses prisoners as the ultimate captive audience:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

Patrick Nielsen Hayden – the same editor who gave me my new first name – once told me that "publishing is the act of connecting a text with an audience." Everything a publisher does – editing, printing, warehousing, distributing – can be separated from publishing. The thing a publisher does that makes them a publisher – not a printer or a warehouser or an editing shop – is connecting books and audiences.

Seen in this light, publishing is a subset of the hard problem of advertising, religion, politics and every other endeavor that consists in part of convincing people to try out a new idea:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/04/self-publishing/

This may be the golden age of scams, but it's the dark age of publishing. Consolidation in distribution has gutted the power of the sales force to convince booksellers to stock books that the publisher believes in. Consolidation in publishing – especially Amazon, which is both a publisher and the largest retailer in the country – has stacked the deck against books looking for readers and vice-versa (Goodreads, a service founded for that purpose, is now just another tentacle on the Amazon shoggoth). The rapid enshittification of social media has clobbered the one semi-reliable channel publicists and authors had to reach readers directly.

I wrote nine books during lockdown (I write as displacement activity for anxiety) which has given me a chance to see publishing in the way that few authors can: through a sequence of rapid engagements with the system as a whole, as I publish between one and three books per year for multiple, consecutive years. From that vantagepoint, I can tell you that it's grim and getting grimmer. The slots that books that connected with readers once occupied are now increasingly occupied by the equivalent of the botshit that fills the first eight screens of your Google search results: book-shaped objects that have gamed their way to the top of the list.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy

I don't know what to do about this, but I have one piece of advice: if you read a book you love, tell other people about it. Tell them face-to-face. In your groupchat. On social media. Even on Goodreads. Every book is a lottery ticket, but the bezzlers are buying their tickets by the case: every time you tell someone about a book you loved (and even better, why you loved it), you buy a writer another ticket.

Meanwhile, I've got to go get ready for my book tour. I'm coming to LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Calgary, Phoenix, Portland, Providence, Boston, New York City, Toronto, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Tucson, Chicago, Buffalo, as well as Torino and Tartu (details soon!).

If you want to get a taste of The Bezzle, here's an excerpt:

https://www.torforgeblog.com/2023/11/20/excerpt-reveal-the-bezzle-by-cory-doctorow/

And here's the audiobook, read by New York Times Bestselling Author Wil Wheaton:

https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_459/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_459_-_The_Bezzle_Read_By_Wil_Wheaton.mp3