#Galaxys For Hire

[cabinette]

give him a second to figure it out.

[moonlightcycle571]

More on Lanterns and Marvel

See original post here: https://www.tumblr.com/moonlightcycle571/765612915343704064/lantern-corps-and-a-10-year-old-child-in-a-last

I talked about the Lantern list (a ranking of people who to this day refuse lantern offers) and having Billy Batson be number 1, and have Captain Marvel be number 2.

This would naturally attract the attention of Lantern Cores everywhere (like what do you mean they received offers from multiple lanterns multiple times), the space community (why does the Terra City of Fawcette have dominating spots) as well as the JL (Cap, why are you outclassed by a civilian from your own city).

I also fully believe Lois Lane is on the same boat as Billy Batson when it comes to Lantern offers. One does not jump off buildings or sneak into war zones without a great deal of will power and induce a great deal of fear. Lois Lane is definitely in the top 10.

Coincidentally, in the top 50, you will find Cat Grant, Vic Sage and surprisingly Vicki Vale (if she can make BATMAN shudder and be wary of her, she can make anyone fear her).

So it’s been accepted that journalists have a lot of will power, a lot of rage and can put the fear of god into you. Clark is not bitter that he’s not on the list, no sire. Never mind that Jimmy Olsen is in the Top 100.

Batman might want to study this phenomenon.

But anyways. One does not stay at the top without ridiculous numbers. As the only top 10 ers on earth, they have grown used to random rings trying to get them on space politics quests or whatnot.

So now imagine this: Lois Lane and Billy collab on a project. While they are speaking, random rings start to show up. Instinctively, both swat them away like flies while maintaining eye contact. They don’t realise what they are doing. Clark is having an aneurism.

At some point, they both realise that the other is swatting the rings away with the same nonchalance as the other. They immediately understand what’s up. The shit eating grin they both had made a bunch of yellow rings swarm around them.

Billy gets asked on why he doesn’t want to join the Green lanterns? Billy says it’s because he hates cops. Lois nods.

Hal cries himself to sleep that night.

Bonus:

Batman stalking a civilian named Batson who for some reason is number one in the Lanterns List, with an alarming amount of yellows.

Batman finds a black hair, blue eyes, orphan child.

Batman: Alfred call the guy

Bonus 2:

Nightwing, trying to meet his future maybe brother: Hi 👋

Billy, sees an authority figure in Blue that wields batons and electricity: …

Billy immediately kicks Nightwing while yelling ACAB

Billy runs away

Nightwing cries himself to sleep that night.

[gh0st-c0mpany]

I'm the one who assigns all the clones their CT numbers. CT-7834, CT-8825, RC-1443 I can do this all day.

[marveltournaments]

[comicpolls]

[cultofgalaxy]

✨WE'RE HIRING✨

We are very excited to be recruiting for a 2D level artist to join the Kinoko and the Cult of Galaxy project on a freelance basis. If you're a talented level artist with the ability to produce beautiful and engaging environments we want to hear from you!

Even if this isn't the role for you, we'd still really appreciate your help in spreading the word. All the money we raised from commissions and donations has all led up to this, so we're lucky to have a fairly decent budget set aside for level artwork. We really want to find someone who's the perfect fit and can really help bring our planets to life, so if you can please reblog and spread the word, we would be most thankful!

[exceptionally-stupid]

I want to make a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy video game. I know, book-to-video-game adaptations are usually shit, but hear me out:

One of the key features of H2G2 was the world building, and the technique used to make it so entertaining was to go off on wild tangents that become largely irrelevant to the story within 3 pages, but still stick out in your mind. I’ll never forget the description of the dragon planet. Was it at all relevant to the story? No. Did Eccentrica Galumbits, the triple breasted whore of Eroticon 6 ever make an appearance? Absolutely not, but she was mentioned in every single book.

The game doesn’t have a central storyline, but rather acts like an anthology. You play as a newly hired editor to the guide, whose sent to explore the galaxy for things to write home about. You go planet hopping, meeting new people and collecting things, exploring new places, take notes, just filling out and completing funny side quests. These grant collectables, stories, and even methods to reach planets or places you haven’t been to yet.

For every few quests you complete on a planet, your character writes something about the place to hitchhiker headquarters, who publishes it for the player to read in the guide.

Game play consists of a whole variety of things, like combats, rhythm and dance, racing, a whole thing.

[vaguely-concerned]

me @ me: hey don't cry. the fact that blue will just. look at zero (he likes looking at zero :) ) and completely lose his train of thought about anything else is literally canon. okay?

[ohfugecannada]

They would have the biggest beef with each-other.

[leggerefiore]

DID YOU SEE THE TOGEPI? THAT MEANS THAT VOLO IS LIKELY GOING TO MAKE AN APPEARANCE

NOT TO MENTION GIRATINA BEING UPSET AND ON EDGE

Does Volo just find Togepis wherever he goes? Are they his calling card? His little minions?

[agentem]

Movie Pitch: Rocket Raccoon and Nebula Are NOT Guardians of the Galaxy

Set during the middle of Endgame. Rocket and Nebula are the only two remaining members of the Guardians of the Galaxy.

Rocket has fixed the Benatar on Earth. Nebula, who was not able to fix said ship even with the help of Tony Stark and all her android parts, is beginning to see him in a new light. Not just a pet to be kept around by her sister. That he was a real friend worth having.

But he is not her friend. And he is angry with her. He's angry with everyone. Thanos killed everyone Rocket cared about. And that is the one thing he has in common with Nebula, because she only cared about her sister.

While "The Avengers" get back to their lives. Nebula and Rocket have nothing. No purpose. No aim. They could stay on Earth with Natasha and do whatever she wants. But Earth isn't their home and the Avengers aren't their team. (Plus the Earth people keep calling Rocket a "raccoon" and that sounds like something dumb! He's NOT a raccoon!)

Rocket reveals he thinks "Pete's plan" would have worked to stop Thanos if he hadn't gone with Thor. (But then, Nebula points out, the tree would not have been there to forge the weapon that did kill Thanos.)

Rocket feels like Quill and Gamora were the leaders of the Guardians, and they had to tell him and Drax and Mantis what to do. He wasn't the Captain. He was just part of the crew.

Nebula didn't even get that far. She tells Rocket that Gamora invited her to join the team at the end of Vol 2. But she wanted to kill Thanos herself. She was consumed with vengeance for what he had done to her. She thought Gamora would be there to help her stop being an a-hole when she got back.

She would rather have Gamora alive than Thanos dead, something she never thought was possible.

So they decide to give it a try. They be Guardians of the Galaxy. Rocket will try to do what he thinks Quill would do. Nebula will try to do what he thinks Gamora would do.

There are people out there in their galaxy that need saving and that idiot Captain Marvel and her dumb haircut isn't on the strange, outside the powerful Empires plants that they frequent. That's where folks really need saving.

The actual plot would revolve around them initially helping the wrong people in a conflict (sort of similar to the twist that the Skrulls were refugees). Rocket has to trust his instincts about who is "good."

ETA: Possibly something about the Collector. On paper he is "good" because he tried to keep an Infinity Stone from Thanos. But he's also stealing beings and putting them in cages.

Maybe he tells them to retrieve a former being in his collection that was "very dangerous" but it turns out to be Howard the Duck or Cosmo or something.

Nebula learns to be a bit more vulnerable with Rocket and admit her cybernetics have been malfunctioning. She doesn't like asking for help. (Though it shouldn't be the arm that is burned off later or the wifi that causes problem later.) So I guess something with her eye. That could lean into the theme of them literally not seeing that the "goodness" to be "real" Guardians of the Galaxy has always been in them.

Ends with them deciding the Guardians need to buy a place to bring refugees to. Misfits, like them. Knowhere is considered but the Collector has too steep an asking fee. (Oh, I'll get those credits, says Rocket.)

[yranigami]

After finding Luke Cage a month ago, I finally got around to shooting my first photo of the classic duo!

HEROES FOR HIRE

2025 -Disney +

Plot: An unlikely alliance is forged between a reluctant teen executive from Manhattan and a disadvantaged youth from Harlem in this Marvel coming of age drama set in mid-seventies New York.

Brady Hepner as Danny Rand

Jharrel Jerome as Luke Cage

Vince Vaugh - Joseph Maggia

Malcom McDowell as Jonas Harrow

Ice Cube as Leroy Tallon

[etxaaron]

FOLLOW ME & HIRE ME

You found me - thanks for the visit...

Just a boring guy who likes to be creative and design and help my fans and clients. If you are using social media to sell anything you need to stand out from the rest.

PS: Below I will be sharing 2025 my designs and ways I am helping my clients.

[comicpolls]

[velvetandsilver]

They should make a pokemon that's ghost/normal that's an old TV with rabbit ear antennae but they're actual rabbit ears (ghostly) and there's a rabbit on the TV screen

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Amazon annihilates Alexa privacy settings, turns on continuous, nonconsensual audio uploading

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in SAN DIEGO at MYSTERIOUS GALAXY on Mar 24, and in CHICAGO with PETER SAGAL on Apr 2. More tour dates here.

Even by Amazon standards, this is extraordinarily sleazy: starting March 28, each Amazon Echo device will cease processing audio on-device and instead upload all the audio it captures to Amazon's cloud for processing, even if you have previously opted out of cloud-based processing:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/03/everything-you-say-to-your-echo-will-be-sent-to-amazon-starting-on-march-28/

It's easy to flap your hands at this bit of thievery and say, "surveillance capitalists gonna surveillance capitalism," which would confine this fuckery to the realm of ideology (that is, "Amazon is ripping you off because they have bad ideas"). But that would be wrong. What's going on here is a material phenomenon, grounded in specific policy choices and by unpacking the material basis for this absolutely unforgivable move, we can understand how we got here – and where we should go next.

Start with Amazon's excuse for destroying your privacy: they want to do AI processing on the audio Alexa captures, and that is too computationally intensive for on-device processing. But that only raises another question: why does Amazon want to do this AI processing, even for customers who are happy with their Echo as-is, at the risk of infuriating and alienating millions of customers?

For Big Tech companies, AI is part of a "growth story" – a narrative about how these companies that have already saturated their markets will still continue to grow. It's hard to overstate how dominant Amazon is: they are the leading cloud provider, the most important retailer, and the majority of US households already subscribe to Prime. This may sound like a good place to be, but for Amazon, it's actually very dangerous.

Amazon has a sky-high price/earnings ratio – about triple the ratio of other retailers, like Target. That scorching P/E ratio reflects a belief by investors that Amazon will continue growing. Companies with very high p/e ratios have an unbeatable advantage relative to mature competitors – they can buy things with their stock, rather than paying cash for them. If Amazon wants to hire a key person, or acquire a key company, it can pad its offer with its extremely high-value, growing stock. Being able to buy things with stock instead of money is a powerful advantage, because money is scarce and exogenous (Amazon must acquire money from someone else, like a customer), while new Amazon stock can be conjured into existence by typing zeroes into a spreadsheet:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/06/privacy-last/#exceptionally-american

But the downside here is that every growth stock eventually stops growing. For Amazon to double its US Prime subscriber base, it will have to establish a breeding program to produce tens of millions of new Americans, raising them to maturity, getting them gainful employment, and then getting them to sign up for Prime. Almost by definition, a dominant firm ceases to be a growing firm, and lives with the constant threat of a stock revaluation as investors belief in future growth crumbles and they punch the "sell" button, hoping to liquidate their now-overvalued stock ahead of everyone else.

For Big Tech companies, a growth story isn't an ideological commitment to cancer-like continuous expansion. It's a practical, material phenomenon, driven by the need to maintain investor confidence that there are still worlds for the company to conquer.

That's where "AI" comes in. The hype around AI serves an important material need for tech companies. By lumping an incoherent set of poorly understood technologies together into a hot buzzword, tech companies can bamboozle investors into thinking that there's plenty of growth in their future.

OK, so that's the material need that this asshole tactic satisfies. Next, let's look at the technical dimension of this rug-pull.

How is it possible for Amazon to modify your Echo after you bought it? After all, you own your Echo. It is your property. Every first year law student learns this 18th century definition of property, from Sir William Blackstone:

That sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the world, in total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.

If the Echo is your property, how come Amazon gets to break it? Because we passed a law that lets them. Section 1201 of 1998's Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes it a felony to "bypass an access control" for a copyrighted work:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/24/record-scratch/#autoenshittification

That means that once Amazon reaches over the air to stir up the guts of your Echo, no one is allowed to give you a tool that will let you get inside your Echo and change the software back. Sure, it's your property, but exercising sole and despotic dominion over it requires breaking the digital lock that controls access to the firmware, and that's a felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for a first offense.

The Echo is an internet-connected device that treats its owner as an adversary and is designed to facilitate over-the-air updates by the manufacturer that are adverse to the interests of the owner. Giving a manufacturer the power to downgrade a device after you've bought it, in a way you can't roll back or defend against is an invitation to run the playbook of the Darth Vader MBA, in which the manufacturer replies to your outraged squawks with "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

The ability to remotely, unilaterally alter how a device or service works is called "twiddling" and it is a key factor in enshittification. By "twiddling" the knobs and dials that control the prices, costs, search rankings, recommendations, and core features of products and services, tech firms can play a high-speed shell-game that shifts value away from customers and suppliers and toward the firm and its executives:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

But how can this be legal? You bought an Echo and explicitly went into its settings to disable remote monitoring of the sounds in your home, and now Amazon – without your permission, against your express wishes – is going to start sending recordings from inside your house to its offices. Isn't that against the law?

Well, you'd think so, but US consumer privacy law is unbelievably backwards. Congress hasn't passed a consumer privacy law since 1988, when the Video Privacy Protection Act banned video store clerks from disclosing which VHS cassettes you brought home. That is the last technological privacy threat that Congress has given any consideration to:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

This privacy vacuum has been filled up with surveillance on an unimaginable scale. Scumbag data-brokers you've never heard of openly boast about having dossiers on 91% of adult internet users, detailing who we are, what we watch, what we read, who we live with, who we follow on social media, what we buy online and offline, where we buy, when we buy, and why we buy:

https://gizmodo.com/data-broker-brags-about-having-highly-detailed-personal-information-on-nearly-all-internet-users-2000575762

To a first approximation, every kind of privacy violation is legal, because the concentrated commercial surveillance industry spends millions lobbying against privacy laws, and those millions are a bargain, because they make billions off the data they harvest with impunity.

Regulatory capture is a function of monopoly. Highly concentrated sectors don't need to engage in "wasteful competition," which leaves them with gigantic profits to spend on lobbying, which is extraordinarily effective, because a sector that is dominated by a handful of firms can easily arrive at a common negotiating position and speak with one voice to the government:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Starting with the Carter administration, and accelerating through every subsequent administration except Biden's, America has adopted an explicitly pro-monopoly policy, called the "consumer welfare" antitrust theory. 40 years later, our economy is riddled with monopolies:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/17/monopolies-produce-billionaires/#inequality-corruption-climate-poverty-sweatshops

Every part of this Echo privacy massacre is downstream of that policy choice: "growth stock" narratives about AI, twiddling, DMCA 1201, the Darth Vader MBA, the end of legal privacy protections. These are material things, not ideological ones. They exist to make a very, very small number of people very, very rich.

Your Echo is your property, you paid for it. You paid for the product and you are still the product:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Now, Amazon says that the recordings your Echo will send to its data-centers will be deleted as soon as it's been processed by the AI servers. Amazon's made these claims before, and they were lies. Amazon eventually had to admit that its employees and a menagerie of overseas contractors were secretly given millions of recordings to listen to and make notes on:

https://archive.is/TD90k

And sometimes, Amazon just sent these recordings to random people on the internet:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/12/20/amazon-alexa-user-receives-audio-recordings-stranger-through-human-error/

Fool me once, etc. I will bet you a testicle* that Amazon will eventually have to admit that the recordings it harvests to feed its AI are also being retained and listened to by employees, contractors, and, possibly, randos on the internet.

*Not one of mine

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/2025/03/15/altering-the-deal/#telescreen

Image: Stock Catalog/https://www.quotecatalog.com (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexa_%2840770465691%29.jpg

Sam Howzit (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SWC_6_-_Darth_Vader_Costume_(7865106344).jpg

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