#30 percent off sale...

[alliluyevas]

help me university of north carolina academic press savor the south cookbook collection. save me unc savor the south cookbook collection.

[lettherebemonsters]

My worthless Myers-obsessed ass is thiiiiis close to buying way too much merch at HotTopic.

[barbarana]

Just five days left of the shop sale, and then the store will be closed until further notice

[thunderrode]

30% OFF all Pre-Loved Merchandise now through November 28th! https://thunder-rode.com/pre-loved/ #preloved #preowned #30off #30offsale #30percentoff

[frankiecatphotography]

Green Tractor Water Bottle 30% off!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

MIT libraries are thriving without Elsevier

I'm coming to BURNING MAN! On TUESDAY (Aug 27) at 1PM, I'm giving a talk called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE!" at PALENQUE NORTE (7&E). On WEDNESDAY (Aug 28) at NOON, I'm doing a "Talking Caterpillar" Q&A at LIMINAL LABS (830&C).

Once you learn about the "collective action problem," you start seeing it everywhere. Democrats – including elected officials – all wanted Biden to step down, but none of them wanted to be the first one to take a firm stand, so for months, his campaign limped on: a collective action problem.

Patent trolls use bullshit patents to shake down small businesses, demanding "license fees" that are high, but much lower than the cost of challenging the patent and getting it revoked. Collectively, it would be much cheaper for all the victims to band together and hire a fancy law firm to invalidate the patent, but individually, it makes sense for them all to pay. A collective action problem:

https://locusmag.com/2013/11/cory-doctorow-collective-action/

Musicians get royally screwed by Spotify. Collectively, it would make sense for all of them to boycott the platform, which would bring it to its knees and either make it pay more or put it out of business. Individually, any musician who pulls out of Spotify disappears from the horizon of most music fans, so they all hang in – a collective action problem:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/21/off-the-menu/#universally-loathed

Same goes for the businesses that get fucked out of 30% of their app revenues by Apple and Google's mobile business. Without all those apps, Apple and Google wouldn't have a business, but any single app that pulls out commits commercial suicide, so they all hang in there, paying a 30% vig:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/15/private-law/#thirty-percent-vig

That's also the case with Amazon sellers, who get rooked for 45-51 cents out of every dollar in platform junk fees, and whose prize for succeeding despite this is to have their product cloned by Amazon, which underprices them because it doesn't have to pay a 51% rake on every sale. Without third-party sellers there'd be no Amazon, but it's impossible to get millions of sellers to all pull out at once, so the Bezos crime family scoops up half of the ecommerce economy in bullshit fees:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

This is why one definition of "corruption" is a system with "concentrated gains and diffuse losses." The company that dumps toxic waste in your water supply reaps all the profits of externalizing its waste disposal costs. The people it poisons each bear a fraction of the cost of being poisoned. The environmental criminal has a fat warchest of ill-gotten gains to use to bribe officials and pay fancy lawyers to defend it in court. Its victims are each struggling with the health effects of the crimes, and even without that, they can't possibly match the polluter's resources. Eventually, the polluter spends enough money to convince the Supreme Court to overturn "Chevron deference" and makes it effectively impossible to win the right to clean water and air (or a planet that's not on fire):

https://www.cfr.org/expert-brief/us-supreme-courts-chevron-deference-ruling-will-disrupt-climate-policy

Any time you encounter a shitty, outrageous racket that's stable over long timescales, chances are you're looking at a collective action problem. Certainly, that's the underlying pathology that preserves the scholarly publishing scam, which is one of the most grotesque, wasteful, disgusting frauds in our modern world (and that's saying something, because the field is crowded with many contenders).

Here's how the scholarly publishing scam works: academics do original scholarly research, funded by a mix of private grants, public funding, funding from their universities and other institutions, and private funds. These academics write up their funding and send it to a scholarly journal, usually one that's owned by a small number of firms that formed a scholarly publishing cartel by buying all the smaller publishers in a string of anticompetitive acquisitions. Then, other scholars review the submission, for free. More unpaid scholars do the work of editing the paper. The paper's author is sent a non-negotiable contract that requires them to permanently assign their copyright to the journal, again, for free. Finally, the paper is published, and the institution that paid the researcher to do the original research has to pay again – sometimes tens of thousands of dollars per year! – for the journal in which it appears.

The academic publishing cartel insists that the millions it extracts from academic institutions and the billions it reaps in profit are all in service to serving as neutral, rigorous gatekeepers who ensure that only the best scholarship makes it into print. This is flatly untrue. The "editorial process" the academic publishers take credit for is virtually nonexistent: almost everything they publish is virtually unchanged from the final submission format. They're not even typesetting the paper:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00799-018-0234-1

The vetting process for peer-review is a joke. Literally: an Australian academic managed to get his dog appointed to the editorial boards of seven journals:

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/olivia-doll-predatory-journals

Far from guarding scientific publishing from scams and nonsense, the major journal publishers have stood up entire divisions devoted to pay-to-publish junk science. Elsevier – the largest scholarly publisher – operated a business unit that offered to publish fake journals full of unreveiwed "advertorial" papers written by pharma companies, packaged to look like a real journal:

https://web.archive.org/web/20090504075453/http://blog.bioethics.net/2009/05/merck-makes-phony-peerreview-journal/

Naturally, academics and their institutions hate this system. Not only is it purely parasitic on their labor, it also serves as a massive brake on scholarly progress, by excluding independent researchers, academics at small institutions, and scholars living in the global south from accessing the work of their peers. The publishers enforce this exclusion without mercy or proportion. Take Diego Gomez, a Colombian Masters candidate who faced eight years in prison for accessing a single paywalled academic paper:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/colombian-student-faces-prison-charges-sharing-academic-article-online

And of course, there's Aaron Swartz, the young activist and Harvard-affiliated computer scientist who was hounded to death after he accessed – but did not publish – papers from MIT's JSTOR library. Aaron had permission to access these papers, but JSTOR, MIT, and the prosecutors Stephen Heymann and Carmen Ortiz argued that because he used a small computer program to access the papers (rather than clicking on each link by hand) he had committed 13 felonies. They threatened him with more than 30 years in prison, and drew out the proceedings until Aaron was out of funds. Aaron hanged himself in 2013:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

Academics know all this terrible stuff is going on, but they are trapped in a collective action problem. For an academic to advance in their field, they have to publish, and they have to get their work cited. Academics all try to publish in the big prestige journals – which also come with the highest price-tag for their institutions – because those are the journals other academics read, which means that getting published is top journal increases the likelihood that another academic will find and cite your work.

If academics could all agree to prioritize other journals for reading, then they could also prioritize other journals for submissions. If they could all prioritize other journals for submissions, they could all prioritize other journals for reading. Instead, they all hold one another hostage, through a wicked collective action problem that holds back science, starves their institutions of funding, and puts their colleagues at risk of imprisonment.

Despite this structural barrier, academics have fought tirelessly to escape the event horizon of scholarly publishing's monopoly black hole. They avidly supported "open access" publishers (most notably PLoS), and while these publishers carved out pockets for free-to-access, high quality work, the scholarly publishing cartel struck back with package deals that bundled their predatory "open access" journals in with their traditional journals. Academics had to pay twice for these journals: first, their institutions paid for the package that included them, then the scholars had to pay open access submission fees meant to cover the costs of editing, formatting, etc – all that stuff that basically doesn't exist.

Academics started putting "preprints" of their work on the web, and for a while, it looked like the big preprint archive sites could mount a credible challenge to the scholarly publishing cartel. So the cartel members bought the preprint sites, as when Elsevier bought out SSRN:

https://www.techdirt.com/2016/05/17/disappointing-elsevier-buys-open-access-academic-pre-publisher-ssrn/

Academics were elated in 2011, when Alexandra Elbakyan founded Sci-Hub, a shadow library that aims to make the entire corpus of scholarly work available without barrier, fear or favor:

https://sci-hub.ru/alexandra

Sci-Hub neutralized much of the collective action trap: once an article was available on Sci-Hub, it became much easier for other scholars to locate and cite, which reduced the case for paying for, or publishing in, the cartel's journals:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.14979

The scholarly publishing cartel fought back viciously, suing Elbakyan and Sci-Hub for tens of millions of dollars. Elsevier targeted prepress sites like academia.edu with copyright threats, ordering them to remove scholarly papers that linked to Sci-Hub:

https://svpow.com/2013/12/06/elsevier-is-taking-down-papers-from-academia-edu/

This was extremely (if darkly) funny, because Elsevier's own publications are full of citations to Sci-Hub:

https://eve.gd/2019/08/03/elsevier-threatens-others-for-linking-to-sci-hub-but-does-it-itself/

Meanwhile, scholars kept the pressure up. Tens of thousands of scholars pledged to stop submitting their work to Elsevier:

http://thecostofknowledge.com/

Academics at the very tops of their fields publicly resigned from the editorial board of leading Elsevier journals, and published editorials calling the Elsevier model unethical:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2012/may/16/system-profit-access-research

And the New Scientist called the racket "indefensible," decrying the it as an industry that made restricting access to knowledge "more profitable than oil":

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24032052-900-time-to-break-academic-publishings-stranglehold-on-research/

But the real progress came when academics convinced their institutions, rather than one another, to do something about these predator publishers. First came funders, private and public, who announced that they would only fund open access work:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06178-7

Winning over major funders cleared the way for open access advocates worked both the supply-side and the buy-side. In 2019, the entire University of California system announced it would be cutting all of its Elsevier subscriptions:

https://www.science.org/content/article/university-california-boycotts-publishing-giant-elsevier-over-journal-costs-and-open

Emboldened by the UC system's principled action, MIT followed suit in 2020, announcing that it would no longer send $2m every year to Elsevier:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/12/digital-feudalism/#nerdfight

It's been four years since MIT's decision to boycott Elsevier, and things are going great. The open access consortium SPARC just published a stocktaking of MIT libraries without Elsevier:

https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-knowledge-base/unbundling-profiles/mit-libraries/

How are MIT's academics getting by without Elsevier in the stacks? Just fine. If someone at MIT needs access to an Elsevier paper, they can usually access it by asking the researchers to email it to them, or by downloading it from the researcher's site or a prepress archive. When that fails, there's interlibrary loan, whereby other libraries will send articles to MIT's libraries within a day or two. For more pressing needs, the library buys access to individual papers through an on-demand service.

This is how things were predicted to go. The libraries used their own circulation data and the webservice Unsub to figure out what they were likely to lose by dropping Elsevier – it wasn't much!

https://unsub.org/

The MIT story shows how to break a collective action problem – through collective action! Individual scholarly boycotts did little to hurt Elsevier. Large-scale organized boycotts raised awareness, but Elsevier trundled on. Sci-Hub scared the shit out of Elsevier and raised awareness even further, but Elsevier had untold millions to spend on a campaign of legal terror against Sci-Hub and Elbakyan. But all of that, combined with high-profile defections, made it impossible for the big institutions to ignore the issue, and the funders joined the fight. Once the funders were on-side, the academic institutions could be dragged into the fight, too.

Now, Elsevier – and the cartel – is in serious danger. Automated tools – like the Authors Alliance termination of transfer tool – lets academics get the copyright to their papers back from the big journals so they can make them open access:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/09/26/take-it-back/

Unimaginably vast indices of all scholarly publishing serve as important adjuncts to direct access shadow libraries like Sci-Hub:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#cornucopia-concordance

Collective action problems are never easy to solve, but they're impossible to address through atomized, individual action. It's only when we act as a collective that we can defeat the corruption – the concentrated gains and diffuse losses – that allow greedy, unscrupulous corporations to steal from us, wreck our lives and even imprison us.

Community voting for SXSW is live! If you wanna hear RIDA QADRI and me talk about how GIG WORKERS can DISENSHITTIFY their jobs with INTEROPERABILITY, VOTE FOR THIS ONE!

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/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-the-elsevier

[maddiethedogstories]

Sarah's Playground - 1

As I looked around the park near my apartment, I couldn't help but appreciate how beautiful the weather was. The sun was shining and there was a light breeze keeping it warm, but not to hot. It was perfect tank top and skirt weather, and I was taking full advantage of that.

My name is Sarah Jenkins. I'm 22 years old, blonde, and, if you don't mind me saying so myself, beautiful. I love this type of weather, because it really lets me show off the curves that I've worked hard for. Okay, so maybe not that hard, but I still like showing them off.

You see, about six months ago I was at a garage sale and came across this beautiful ruby necklace for sale. The old woman running the sale sold it to me for a steal, but gave some cryptic advise of 'being careful what you wish for,' and some other bullshit nonsense.

That night, I wore the necklace out for drinks with my girlfriends. At one point, I said something like, "I wish we had some more drinks," and, like magic, some dude immediately bought our table a round.

Now, I have been into the ABDL scene for a bit and understood pretty quickly what was going on based on all of the smutty diaper-fetish fiction I'd read. The old lady at the garage sale was clearly a witch and sold me a magic amulet that granted all of my wishes. Score.

I also realized pretty early on that I would have to been careful as I altered the world, because, I know based on those same stories, magic like this can have a downside if you aren't careful with it. So, for the last six months, I've been incredibly careful. That said, I've also changed a lot of things.

One of the first things I changed was my body. I was never bad looking, but, I had a dream. You see, I have always wanted to be the perfect, most beautiful ABDL Mommy possible. So, I made myself into my dream Mommy. I'm 6'6" tall. My double-D breasts are firm and, more often than not, full of breast milk, ready to feed any hungry adult baby.

I am also fit. I gave myself a large, feminine ass, but the whole thing is made of muscle. I can lift most other adults and easily carry them like small children. My arms are ripped, and I have large hands perfect for spanking disobedient littles.

I've also changed the world to better suit my fantasies. Currently, based on my wishes, when people turn 18, 25 percent of people are randomly forced to regress to adult babies by society. Those people are forced to act like giant toddlers for the rest of their lives. Other people can adopt and care for that portion of the population, doing to them whatever they want, within reason.

Looking out across the park on this beautiful day, I am pretty happy with how things turned out. Beyond the normal sights of parents and their children playing at the playground, young men and women out on runs or sun bathing, and elderly couples out for a stroll, the park is filled with adults of all shapes and sizes acting like the giant babies I've turned them into.

I stopped and watched as one particulary cute young woman wearing nothing but a yellow onesie and gigantic diaper squats down, balls up her fists, and pushes a huge mess into her pants. I watched as she blushed, her adult mind aware of how humiliating it was to shit her pants, but unable to stop herself out of fear of being punished for violating the rules of society I created.

Being the bad witch in charge feels so good!

I continued my stroll through the park, enjoying watching two 30-year-old men in nothing but diapers crawl in a sandbox as there caregivers looked on like disinterested parents letting their kids get energy out at the park.

As I continued, I saw an 18-year-old woman beant over an older man's lap, her bare ass in the air and a pull-up bunched around her ankles.

"Naughty girl! You are an adult baby now, not an adult! You do not take your pull-up off! I'm going to have to demote you to diapers for this!" The man said as he ruthlessly spanked the young woman, who was clearly struggling with her new lot in life.

It's music to my Mommy Domme ears.

Speaking of ears, what was that noise? I reached into my purse and found my cellphone alarm going off. Was it time to go home already? My tits ached. It must be feeding time for my own little ball of joy.

To bad I can't bring her out here. For my own amusement, I've left my own adult baby completely aware of how the world was prior to my intervention. When I take her out in public, she tends to make a scene. Oh well! Time to get back to Mommy duty!

I started walking down the quickest path home, the ruby necklace dangling in my ample cleavage glittering in the sunlight.

NEXT CHAPTER

[plxnetn1ne]

since everyone in this fandom and their mum seem to be giving their piece about the ‘update’ coming to Hogwarts Legacy on the 6th, i figured id give my piece even if no one has asked

ive been seeing a lot of posts and replies about how “we should just take what we get and be grateful” and “the devs are working hard, do you know how hard game development is?”

im very aware of how difficult game development can be and how mentally taxing it is. i dont doubt that they’ve been through the mill.

the update is trash. its that simple. we’re allowed to feel upset about it, and for people saying that its not fair to be upset — it is fair. we shouldnt have to expect the bare minimum from a game that sold 22 million copies and reached nearly 2 billion dollars in revenue, a game that had 14 nominations for awards and 3 wins.

we were told we were getting a summer update alongside the Haunted Hogsmeade quest — the quest they promised to release to PC and Xbox in march when the game celebrated one year of release. they said, and i quote;

“As we near the one-year anniversary of Hogwarts Legacy, we wanted to let our community know that the Hogwarts Legacy PlayStation-exclusive content will be available on other platforms later this summer, along with additional updates and features for the game. Stay tuned in the coming months for more details on what’s coming to Hogwarts Legacy this year.” copy and pasted straight from Hogwarts Legacy’s official twitter page. along with additional updates and features to the game.

yes — i know, thats a very vague statement. it could have been taken in any way, but typically when additional updates and features — plural — is put into a sentence, you assume that there will be more than one new feature. it wasnt wrong for the community to assume that there was more than a few new additions coming to the game.

okay, we got photo mode — thats great for console players, but it isnt new for us PC players. im happy for my console buddies that finally get to bring their mc to life in the way ive been able to. im looking forward to seeing the uptick in photos upon the updates release. PC and Xbox got the new haunted hogsmeade quest, and thats great, considering the release of it was delayed by 3 months, but atleast we’re getting it. but basically. PS5 was fucked in the process, because everything minus photo mode is stuff they already had, and honestly, thats not fair. and double honest — thats not an update. thats the release of exclusive content plus a new addition.

for several months a summer update was hyped up, and the result was…. ps5 getting fucked, a photo mode that im going to bet my ass on will be buggy as all hell, and some cosmetics. so no — i wont be grateful. especially when we keep getting promised things and then getting fucked by a hot iron in the process. because i havent forgotten the documentary that was supposed to come out, and i still remember during September when they hyped up a digital surprise for Back to Hogwarts day and it ended up being 30 percent off on a game most of us already had, only for the game to go on sale for half off the following Nov/Dec for the holiday sales.

since the release of the game, modders have been basically picking up the slack by working their asses off to create bug fixes, better cosmetic options, enhanced schedules, companions, and so much more to keep the community somewhat entertained. this as well as the file miners that are constantly digging things up that we were robbed of, like the relationship list for companions, gaunt manor, other house specific quests, more quests concerning Isadora, on and on. on top of this, ive seen first hand how much of the outer parts of the map was developed only to be cut out. i spent a solid hour and a half today using free cam to fly around the outskirts of the map — buildings, caves, entire areas laid out for towns or poacher camps, all thrown out on top of all of the discarded quests and content.

and while im at it — ill be one of the few to say it, but Hogwarts Legacies storyline was not well thought out, or at the very least it wasnt very well portrayed. there were hundreds of questions we were left with upon beating the game. where did Anne go? what happened to the keepers after the final battle? why wasnt Isadora in her portrait? what were the keepers hiding? did inhaling the magic actually make a difference or was it just for shock value? how much of Isadora’s story did we miss? how was the undercroft tied in with Isadora when it was apparently a Gaunt secret? what even really was the undercroft?

yes, i know — “well arent they making a second one?” and yeah, im pretty sure they are, and maybe thats why we’ve gotten nothing more than a pile of bricks in the last year and a half. but, they should probably finish the first game before starting on a second.

this doesnt mean i dont love Hogwarts Legacy. i love the people ive met, the stories ive read, and i love capturing the screenshots i take from that game. the entire situation is just frustrating to no end.

[ask-the-biggering-onceler]

I really would like to see what it looks like outside the valley.

...Tsk.

...WELL I'D LIKE YOU TO INSTEAD GET UPDATED ON MY NEW THNEED SALE!! 30% PERCENT OFF ANY THNEED YOU PURCHASE!!

(O-Only around 2.78 dollars...crap.)

...B-BUT UH, YES!! THNEEDS ARE ALL YOU NEED, DEAR CITIZENS!!

...This should get 'em quiet for now...

[deluxewhump]

The Scry

Ch 11: Call If You'd Like Help

Prev

CW: whumpee with powers, human trafficking, forced labor

In the weeks following his return to Max Kelly, Spartan left them more or less alone. Whenever Carlo would get overly involved in the numbers they were putting up, or stress about their position on a leaderboard, Max would gently redirect him. He had the account under control, their numbers were steady, their position as a team solid. 

He said this so Carlo would focus on his own wellbeing, but it sometimes made him feel less useful than he liked. Being needed was safety. Max would call on him for help and he’d nearly jump at the chance, using his powers to the best of the ability to scry elusive leads like a bloodhound. He’d go back to his side of the office after, head pounding, blood pressure low, happy. Max didn’t like that it hurt him, but there was no denying the look on his face when they landed another hefty contract, when the documents came back signed and he handed it off to the next department. Carlo knew he liked it. He liked winning, he liked having the upper hand. He liked the money and the job security. Who wouldn't?

Max had tried to open him a bank account but couldn’t, since he was a precognitive belonging to Spartan Enterprises and didn’t have the appropriate documents to do so. So he opened a second checking account within his own account and got a debit card for it, which he gave to Carlo. Every four weeks, fifty percent of his monthly commission check was automatically deposited into Carlo’s account. “You earned it,” he'd said gruffly.

Carlo had fifteen thousand dollars in the account by late summer, and had only used the card a handful of times. He’d bought himself a personal laptop, new clothes. A few iced lattes. Other than that it accrued, his by way of his user’s magnanimity. Of course, Max could take it away in a heartbeat, could transfer his little 15K back into his own checking or simply change the pin on the card. Carlo didn’t think he would, but he was acutely aware the money was a gift, a gesture of good will. 

By August he was comfortable. He and Max had a routine. They’d grown closer over the weeks and months since his return from Martin Olsen’s side project, so close it was like they had a shorthand with one another. Ingrid had started treating him more like a family member than a guest. She grew more apt to ask him to help her with things, or take out the trash, and at the same time grew more comfortable around him, less stilted and more affectionate. 

Alex Clair became a friend of their little family. He came over maybe once a month with Zee. They’d all have drinks and then dinner and talk about everything but work until inevitably work would find its way into the conversation, and Carlo and Zee would exchange a glance. They each wondered what the other’s inner life was like. 

Carlo liked Alex, it was hard not to. Everyone liked Alex. Alex was young, though, possibly only a few years older than him. There was something in Max that felt endlessly stable and experienced, even beyond his years, and Carlo knew if he and Zee’s places were switched that he would miss it. 

This routine of happily playing house came to an abrupt end in early September. The humidity of summer still choked the city with a tight lid, lifting only for a few hours at night before returning when the morning fog burned off.

One Friday afternoon Martin Olsen called a meeting for the precog sales team. It was 3:30, and everyone was annoyed. They could taste the weekend, it was nearly time to log off and head out, and now there was a mandatory meeting to attend. There was never a time limit with Martin, either. He might keep them all there until 5:30 and not even acknowledge it. 

He suffered through a long preamble and a talk about sales this quarter, and was thoroughly checked out when the news came, bringing him sharply back into focus. 

“We have had an excellent run. I’m extremely proud of this team, and I know we have some great things in our future,” Martin said. “Having said that, I hope you will understand the reasoning behind the decision to part ways with our precognitive partners.”

Tension filled the room like static electricity. Alex raised his eyebrows. Elle Davenport looked like she might be sick. “I’m sorry?” she blurted. Her precognitive, Belle, stared at the conference table in front of her with a look of placid indifference. Carlo understood it. He was afraid he was wearing a similar look, despite his heart jackhammering in his chest.

“I know you’ve grown accustomed to the help,” Martin placated, his icy eyes roving over everyone at the table. Carlo dropped his so he wouldn’t have to look directly at the man he’d grown so intimately accustomed with over the course of a week, that miserable week that still made him shudder to remember.

Disappointment and panic numbed him. If he tried, he could probably convince himself this was a bad dream and wake up in his bed at Max’s, the familiar print of the brown hare staring at him from the wall. 

“It is a final decision. Know a lot of thought went into it. You were all considered.”

“Where are they sending them?” Max asked sharply. 

Martin spread his hands. “I’m afraid that information is not shared with the likes of me, Max. This is a decision from the top.”

“Bullshit,” Alex said flatly. An uncomfortable silence settled over the meeting room. Carlo noticed it was now past four.  He and Max always left at four on Fridays. He longed for the sickly heat of the city block outside, the smell of concrete and asphalt having baked all day in the sun, the oppressive cloth oven of the truck before the AC started working.

“Has Spartan sold them to a private company?” Max asked Martin directly. “Or are they being returned to the government ?”

Martin ignored him. “I want you all to go home this weekend and process your feelings about this,” he said with clear condescension, pausing for a moment to look at Alex for the first time since his outburst.

“Think about how far you’ve come in eight short months. Think about the challenges you overcame and the adaptations you made. Think about your accounts and the exponential growth they’ve seen. You will continue to reap the benefits of that growth in the months to come. We will maintain those relationships with those new clients. Those deals we closed are not going away. And we will close new contracts, just as we always have. We will continue to grow.”

No one was listening. Zee was watching Alex from the corner of his eye, his face pale under his auburn hair, cut short at the start of summer. Carlo didn’t notice the meeting had just sort of ended until Max was pulling him up by the elbow, pointing him toward the door. 

“This is insane,” Elle Davenport muttered as they walked the hallway together back to their offices. Carlo didn’t know if she was talking more to them or herself. She dug irritably in her purse for her phone. “Are we supposed to go back to fucking cold calling? Really? Where’s the stability? I bought a house. I can’t have my commission checks go to shit.”

Max had a hand between Carlo’s shoulder blades the entire time, steadying him, grounding him. They stopped by the office to shut down and grab their things, and rode the elevator in opressive silence. 

Alex Clair's name flashed on the truck's dash display as he called repeatedly. Max ignored it.

“I’ll call him later,” he muttered on the third time, and switched his phone off. 

Instead of going home, he drove them to the north side of town and parked in front of a brick building hedged in a short wrought iron fence. A white sign at the front read Shrader and Svenson. 

“Am I coming in?” Carlo asked dully, knowing the answer already. 

“Can you wait here?” 

He shrugged, slouching in the passenger seat and looking the other way, out the window to a heat-dried row of shrubs with pieces of plastic and aluminum trash stuck in their yellowed branches like sad ornaments. 

Max wanted to talk to his lawyer friends about him, but without him. It annoyed him. Did he think anything they might discuss would shock him? As if he hadn't already seen the worst case scenario, lived in it? Whose innocence were they trying to protect, exactly? Max could be this way when he was trying to be protective. Seeing Carlo's posture, he didn't try to placate him. He left the keys in the ignition and shut the door. 

Eventually, Carlo glanced between his feet at the bag he’d grabbed before they left, an over-the-shoulder carrier he brought back and forth every day with his personal laptop tucked inside. There was a slim manilla envelope sticking out of the side pocket that caught his eye as out of place. He frowned. He’d never seen it before. It was only big enough to contain a folded check, or a key, something of that sort. He pulled it out and turned it over. It was unmarked.

He looked all around the truck outside before coaxing the fold open. Inside was a single piece of unlined paper. 

Call if you’d like help, it read in a swooping cursive penned with black ink. A phone number followed. From the corner of his eye, he saw Max exiting the practice. He shoved the envelope into his bag and zipped it shut.

[mariacallous]

At the end of 2022, Dmitry Medvedev—Russia’s former prime minister and the current deputy chairman of its Security Council—offered his predictions for the coming year. He warned that Europeans would suffer badly from Russia’s decision to curb natural gas exports to the European Union, suggesting that gas prices would jump to $5,000 per thousand cubic meters in 2023—around 50 times their prewar average. He probably assumed that that sky-high prices would translate into a windfall for Russian state-owned energy company Gazprom, which was still supplying several European countries via pipeline, ramping up exports of liquefied natural gas, and eyeing new deals with China. Perhaps Medvedev also hoped that Europeans would beg the Kremlin to send the gas flowing again.

It turns out that Medvedev might want to polish his crystal ball: Last year, European gas prices averaged a mere one-tenth of his number. And just this month, Gazprom posted a massive $6.8 billion loss for 2023, the first since 1999.

Gazprom’s losses demonstrate the extent to which the Kremlin’s decision to turn off the gas tap to Europe in 2022 has backfired. In 2023, European Union imports of Russian gas were at their lowest level since the early 1970s, with Russian supplies making up only 8 percent of EU gas imports, down from 40 percent in 2021. This has translated into vertiginous losses for Gazprom, with the firm’s revenues from foreign sales plunging by two-thirds in 2023.

Gazprom’s woes are very likely setting off alarm bells in Moscow: With no good options for the company to revive flagging gas sales, its losses could weigh on Russia’s ability to finance the war in Ukraine. This is especially ironic given the fact that EU sanctions do not target Russian gas exports; the damage to the Kremlin and its war effort is entirely self-inflicted.

The most immediate impact of Gazprom’s losses will be on Russian government revenues, a crucial metric to gauge Moscow’s ability to sustain its war against Ukraine. Poring over Gazprom’s latest financials paints a striking picture. Excluding dividends, Gazprom transferred at least $40 billion into Russian state coffers in 2022, either to the general government budget or the National Welfare Fund (NWF), Moscow’s sovereign wealth fund.

This is no small feat. Until last year, Gazprom alone provided about 10 percent of Russian federal budget revenues through customs and excise duties as well as profit taxes. (Oil receipts usually account for an additional 30 percent of budget revenues.) This flood of money now looks like distant history. In 2023, the company’s contribution to state coffers through customs and excise duties was slashed by four-fifths, and like many money-losing firms, it is due a tax refund from the Russian treasury.

For Moscow, this is bad news on several fronts. Because of rising military expenses, the country’s fiscal balance swung into deficit when Moscow invaded Ukraine. To help plug the gap, the Kremlin ordered Gazprom to pay a $500 million monthly levy to the state until 2025. Now that the company is posting losses, it is unclear how it will be able to afford this transfer. In addition, Gazprom’s contribution to the NWF will probably have to shrink. For the Kremlin, this could not come at a worst time: The NWF’s liquid holdings have already dropped by nearly $60 billion, around half of its prewar total, as Moscow drains its rainy-day fund to finance the war. Finally, Gazprom’s woes could prompt the firm to shrink its planned investments in gas fields and pipelines—a decision that would, in turn, hit Russian GDP growth.

As if this was not enough, a closer look at Gazprom’s newly released financials suggests that the worst may be yet to come, with three telltale signs that 2024 could be even more difficult than 2023.

First, Gazprom’s accounts receivable—a measure of money due to be paid by customers—are in free fall, suggesting that the firm’s revenue inflow is drying up. Second, accounts payable shot up by around 50 percent in 2023, hinting that Gazprom is struggling to pay its own bills to various suppliers. Finally, short-term borrowing nearly doubled last year as Russian state-owned banks were enlisted to support the former gas giant.

Whereas these figures come from Gazprom’s English-language financials, the company’s latest Russian-language update yields two additional surprises—both of which show that the firm’s situation has worsened even further since the beginning of the year.

First, short-term borrowing during the first three months of 2024 roughly doubled compared to the previous quarter. If Russian state-owned banks continue to cover Gazprom’s losses, the Russian financial sector could soon find itself in trouble. This begs a tricky question: With the NWF’s reserves dwindling and Moscow’s access to international capital markets shut down, who would pay a bailout bill? Second, Gazprom’s losses were almost five times greater in the first quarter of 2024 than in the same period of 2023, hinting that the firm may post an even bigger loss this year than it did in 2023.

Looking ahead, 2025 will be an especially tough year for Gazprom. The transit deal that protects gas shipments through Ukraine via pipeline to Austria, Hungary, and Slovakia will probably expire at the end of this year, further curbing what’s left of Gazprom’s exports to Europe. A quick glance at a map makes it clear that China is now the only remaining option for Russian pipeline gas.

Yet Beijing is not that interested: Last year, it bought just 23 billion cubic meters of Russian gas, a mere fraction of the 180 billion cubic meters that Moscow used to ship to Europe. Negotiations to build the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline, which would boost gas shipments to China, have stalled. And in truth, China is not a like-for-like replacement for Gazprom’s lost European consumers. Beijing pays 20 percent less for Russian gas than the remaining EU customers, and the gap is predicted to widen to 28 percent through 2027.

Without pipelines, raising exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) is the only remaining option for Moscow. However, Western policies make this easier said than done. Western export controls curb Russia’s access to the complex machinery needed to develop LNG terminals, such as equipment to chill the gas to negative160 degrees Celsius so that it can be shipped on specialized vessels. And Washington has recently imposed sanctions on a Singapore-based firm and two ships working on a Russian LNG project, signaling that it will similarly designate any entity willing to work in the sector. Finally, U.S. sanctions make it much harder for Russian firms to finance the development of new liquefaction facilities and the gas field designed to supply them. In December, Japanese firm Mitsui announced that it was pulling staff and reviewing options for its participation to Russia’s flagship Arctic LNG 2 project. As a result, the Russian operator announced last month that it was suspending operations of the project, which was originally slated to launch LNG shipments early this year.

Gazprom’s cheesy corporate slogan—“Dreams come true!”—does not ring so true anymore as Moscow’s former cash cow becomes a loss-making drain. Data from the International Energy Agency confirms the extent of the Kremlin’s miscalculation when it turned off the gas tap to Europe: The agency predicts that Russia’s share of global gas exports will fall to 15 percent by 2030—down from 30 percent before Moscow’s full-blown invasion of Ukraine.

This was probably predictable. It is hard to imagine how a gas exporter configured to serve European customers and reliant on Western technology could thrive after refusing to serve its main client—signaling to every other potential customer, including China, that it is an unreliable supplier. Corporate empires tend to rise and fall, and it looks like Gazprom will be no exception to the rule.

[barbarana]

Only four prints left of this Vampire Weekend inspired illustration! Shop sale will run for 12 more days and then the store will be closed temporarily.

[proxis-shattered-expectations]

Have a big sale going on my Ko-fi shop today, all my B/C grade Darksiders pins are currently marked down! Have low stock left so grab them before they are gone, each order comes with a random sticker and print!

On top of that, All Star wars related merch is 30 percent off, and the Star wars Acrylic charms I have in stock are 2$ off! Use the code

MAYTHEFORCE

at checkout to get the discount of 30% off all star wars! The Star wars sale ends Sunday 11:59 pm, while the Darksiders flawed grade pins are always marked down!

Proxi-Dreams Ko-fi shop

[rpgsandbox]

5th-level Banish Rumour (Abjuration). Casting time: 1 Action. Components: Verbal, Material (A single public statement).

Dungeons & Dragons is in a bizarre place right now—it's on the verge of the totally-not-a-new-edition ruleset revamp and an in-development virtual tabletop project, riding high off the back of Baldur's Gate 3. But Wizards of the Coast (WotC) has also suffered from a massive round of layoffs, and the bruises of the catastrophic OGL fiasco a year ago are still smarting.   This has laid the groundwork for a swarm of rumours regarding a potential sale to Tencent—a massive conglomerate and holding company with its fingers in dozens of different pies including Remedy Entertainment, Paradox Interactive, FromSoftware, Epic Games and (most importantly to the matter at hand) Larian Studios. Said whispers began when the Chinese news outlet Speed Daily (as translated by Pan Daily) reported that WotC parent company Hasbro was "seeking to sell its well-known IP 'Dungeons & Dragons'", citing Hasbro's "financial crisis" as a reason for the speculation. That's despite D&D being a huge earner for Hasbro, achieving record years (as per a financial report last October) for the company. 

Shucking D&D as a property entirely would be like throwing a crate of diamonds overboard to stop your ship from sinking—not something you'd do unless you were definitely about to drown. Which isn't completely out of the question. That same report noted Hasbro's total revenue was down "13-15%", and repeatedly cites a difficult situation for toys across the board. Still, I'm not sure if things are dire enough for a spontaneous bout of violin-playing. That's been confirmed in a comment provided to Dicebreaker, where Wizards of the Coast writes the following: "We regularly talk to Tencent and enjoy multiple partnerships with them across a number of our IPs. We don’t make a habit of commenting on internet rumours, but to be clear: we are not looking to sell our D&D IP. We will keep talking to partners about how we bring the best digital experiences to our fans. We won't comment any further on speculation or rumours about potential [mergers and acquisitions] or licensing deals." So there you have it: D&D isn't being sold to anyone. What's more likely is that Tencent—which owns a 30% stake in Larian Studios—might be thinking about pouring money into another D&D game. That should surprise nobody, considering the meteoric success of Baldur's Gate 3. Another licensing deal isn't just 'not out of the question', it's a plain good idea. Under any other circumstances I'm not sure any of this would've made waves in forums and headlines. But the environment surrounding D&D at the moment is, understandably, one of fear. Hasbro's layoffs included several senior members of staff. Game designers, art directors, and Liz Schuch—the company's former Head of Publishing and Licensing, who was with Wizards of the Coast for 28 whole years.  There's a bordering-on-zero percent chance something like this would actually happen, but the background radiation of 'strange times' has a lot of TTRPG fans without a fuller scope of the situation willing to buy into speculative panic, and I can't say I necessarily blame them.

[soon-palestine]

Oxfam experts, together with cocoa farmers, will be at the World Cocoa Conference in Brussels (21-24 April), taking place against a backdrop of unprecedented production shortfalls and skyrocketing cocoa prices, which topped $11,000 per metric ton for the first time.

Chocolate giants have already raised prices for consumers to offset rising cocoa costs and, despite years of soaring profits and massive payouts to shareholders, have consistently pushed back on anything that could reduce their profit margins. New Oxfam analysis has found: - Lindt, Mondelēz, and Nestlé together raked in nearly $4 billion in profits from chocolate sales in 2023. Hershey’s confectionary profits totaled $2 billion last year. - The four corporations paid out on average 97 percent of their total net profits to shareholders in 2023. - The collective fortunes of the Ferrero and Mars families, who own the two biggest private chocolate corporations, surged to $160.9 billion during the same period. This is more than the combined GDPs of Ghana and Ivory Coast, which supply most cocoa beans.

Decades of low prices have made farmers poorer and hampered their ability to hire workers or invest in their farms, limiting bean yield. Old cocoa trees are particularly vulnerable to disease and extreme weather. Many farmers are abandoning cocoa for other crops, or selling their land to illegal miners.

Speaking ahead of the conference, Oxfam’s Policy Advisor Bart Van Besien said: “It’s ironic —the cocoa price explosion could have been averted if corporations had paid farmers a fair price and helped them make their farms more resilient to extreme weather. And it’s hypocritical —chocolate giants are paying high prices now that the market demands it, but have pushed back every single time that cocoa farmers have. The only way forward is fairly rewarding farmers for their hard work.”

And Ismael Pomasi, Chairman of Ghana’s Cocoa Abrabopa Association, said: "Nothing is more demotivating —all my hard work on the farm barely pays off. Between battling pests and the drought that is killing my cocoa trees, I'm really struggling. I wish I could afford irrigation. If the multibillion-dollar chocolate industry paid fair prices for cocoa, I could actually tackle these problems and make a decent living."

Oxfam spokespersons and farmers available for interviews in Brussels:Nana Kwasi Barning Ackay, project officer at SEND Ghana and Coordinator of the Ghana Civil Society Cocoa Platform (GCCP) (English) Ismael Pomasi, Chairman of Ghana’s Cocoa Abrabopa Association (English) Anouk Franck, Policy Advisor on Business and Human Rights, Oxfam Novib (Dutch, English) Bart Van Besien, Policy Advisor, Oxfam Belgium (Dutch, English, French)

Key dates: Oxfam spokespersons and farmers will come together to hand out chocolate produced by Ghana’s Women in Cocoa Cooperative (Cocoa Mmaa), and will be available for interviews and photos. 7:30-9:00am CET on 22 April at Place d’Albertine, in front of the World Cocoa Conference.

[brf-rumortrackinganon]

Crunching some numbers for Spare

An article today in the Washington Post included some talk about how publishing contracts, sales, and advances work. Here are some excerpts:

A book can end up on a bestseller list by selling 5,000 or more books in a week.

Under most contracts with major publishing companies, an author earns a royalty of 15 percent of the cover price of a hardcover book. A book priced at $30 would earn the author $4.50 per sale.

Publishers will generally offer an author an advance payment. Once enough books are sold to cover the advance, the author begins to earn additional income. In other words, a person receiving a $1 million advance would need to sell more than 222,000 books at $30 each to earn back the advance.

(source)

What does this mean for Spare? It means...it's bad.

First off, $30 is the average cost for a hardcover book here in the US. However we know Spare isn't actually selling at $30 because it's been heavily discounted since its release. US Amazon is selling it at $19 a copy so let's go with that. At $19 a copy, if Harry's contract has him seeing royalties at 15%, he makes $2.85 a copy.

The publishers are claiming that Harry sold 3.5 million copies of Spare in the first week of publication. That number is definitely inflated; it includes audiobooks (which are free for a lot of people through Audible and other audiobook subscription services) and it probably includes some projected figures. So let's deduct 15% for those ghost copies, which leaves us with 2.9 million and at $2.85 per copy, he made $8.2 million just from royalties.

So per the Washington Post, Harry has to sell enough copies of Spare to cover the advance before he can make money on the memoir. If Harry doesn't cover the advance, he doesn't earn royalties. Which is the juicy bit: the Daily Mail has claimed that Harry received a $20 million advance from Penguin to write Spare. Based on these projections (2.9 million copies sold that first week at $2.85 a copy), Harry hasn't paid off his advance yet. He's still got $12 million to give back.

Now take into consideration that sales for Spare steadily declined since publication. Spare might've sold 3.5 million in the first week, but it's not selling 3.5 million the next week. In fact, Forbes Magazine reported that as of July 1, 2023, Spare sold 1,174,137 copies here in the US. That's 33% of the 3.5 million from the first week of sales - in other words, sales really dropped off. Maybe even flatlined.

So getting very hypothetical here, let's add 33% to 3.5 million, and assume that's how many copies of Spare Harry has sold as of July 1. That's 4.6 million. 4.6 million times $2.85 = $13.3 million. Harry still hasn't paid back his alleged advance. Even if we give him 20% of royalties ($3.80 per copy for a profit of $17.4 million), he still hasn't paid back the alleged advance.

So while all these numbers are most likely made up, what probably isn't made up is that Harry hasn't earned back his advance and isn't making any kind of profit. And we know this because a) real cumulative data on Spare isn't easily available and b) there's been no talk of Harry's next book - either the second memoir alleged to be part of the deal or the book on Invictus Games confirmed to be part of the deal. If Spare performed well, or even beyond expectations, the sales would constantly be in the news as new updates are issues and Harry's second book would have been announced immediately to piggyback on Spare's success. But that hasn't happened. It'll be very interesting to see how it all tallies up at the end of the year.

I don't think we'll see any more books from Harry. Or if we do, they'll be updated/reissued versions of Spare that count towards his 4-book deal so Penguin can move on.

(I'm also side-eyeing the Daily Mail's claim that his advance was $20 million. Bruce Springsteen received a $10 million advance and Keith Richards only $1 million. And these guys have legitimate and proven track records that they can sell content. Harry has no record of even writing his own speeches.)