#I'm going through my FB notes

[z-haven]

Chlavisy Adventures

We're angsty, we’re woobie We're all a little kookie In this epic story We're sizzling your TV

No smutty filters We mash up all the censors On Chlavisy Adventures Get a dose of remedy

So here's small town Sm*llville It’s meteor capital Our home strange home, never alone Where weirdness never stalls

Our scripts were accepted But expect the unexpected Cause Chlavisy Adventures is about to start

They're tipsy, they're funny They're Clark and Lois Laney Oliver Queen has the money Lionel is insane

There's Martha and hubby DP Reporter Chloe Davis is an EMT and Lex Luthor is insane

At Chlavis University We earn our smut degree The onion reports Of enormous sorts Since the first look in Plastique

We're angsty, we’re woobie We're all a little kookie It's Chlavisy Adventures Come and watch with us.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

My McLuhan lecture on enshittification

IT'S THE LAST DAY for the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

Last night, I gave the annual Marshall McLuhan lecture at the Transmediale festival in Berlin. The event was sold out and while there's a video that'll be posted soon, they couldn't get a streaming setup installed in the Canadian embassy, where the talk was held:

https://transmediale.de/en/2024/event/mcluhan-2024

The talk went of fabulously, and was followed by commentary from Frederike Kaltheuner (Human Rights Watch) and a discussion moderated by Helen Starr. While you'll have to wait a bit for the video, I thought that I'd post my talk notes from last night for the impatient among you.

I want to thank the festival and the embassy staff for their hard work on an excellent event. And now, on to the talk!

Last year, I coined the term 'enshittification,' to describe the way that platforms decay. That obscene little word did big numbers, it really hit the zeitgeist. I mean, the American Dialect Society made it their Word of the Year for 2023 (which, I suppose, means that now I'm definitely getting a poop emoji on my tombstone).

So what's enshittification and why did it catch fire? It's my theory explaining how the internet was colonized by platforms, and why all those platforms are degrading so quickly and thoroughly, and why it matters – and what we can do about it.

We're all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit.

It's frustrating. It's demoralizing. It's even terrifying.

I think that the enshittification framework goes a long way to explaining it, moving us out of the mysterious realm of the 'great forces of history,' and into the material world of specific decisions made by named people – decisions we can reverse and people whose addresses and pitchfork sizes we can learn.

Enshittification names the problem and proposes a solution. It's not just a way to say 'things are getting worse' (though of course, it's fine with me if you want to use it that way. It's an English word. We don't have der Rat für Englisch Rechtschreibung. English is a free for all. Go nuts, meine Kerle).

But in case you want to use enshittification in a more precise, technical way, let's examine how enshittification works.

It's a three stage process: First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

Let's do a case study. What could be better than Facebook?

Facebook is a company that was founded to nonconsensually rate the fuckability of Harvard undergrads, and it only got worse after that.

When Facebook started off, it was only open to US college and high-school kids with .edu and k-12.us addresses. But in 2006, it opened up to the general public. It told them: “Yes, I know you’re all using Myspace. But Myspace is owned by Rupert Murdoch, an evil, crapulent senescent Australian billionaire, who spies on you with every hour that God sends.

“Sign up with Facebook and we will never spy on you. Come and tell us who matters to you in this world, and we will compose a personal feed consisting solely of what those people post for consumption by those who choose to follow them.”

That was stage one. Facebook had a surplus — its investors’ cash — and it allocated that surplus to its end-users. Those end-users proceeded to lock themselves into FB. FB — like most tech businesses — has network effects on its side. A product or service enjoys network effects when it improves as more people sign up to use it. You joined FB because your friends were there, and then others signed up because you were there.

But FB didn’t just have high network effects, it had high switching costs. Switching costs are everything you have to give up when you leave a product or service. In Facebook’s case, it was all the friends there that you followed and who followed you. In theory, you could have all just left for somewhere else; in practice, you were hamstrung by the collective action problem.

It’s hard to get lots of people to do the same thing at the same time. You and your six friends here are going to struggle to agree on where to get drinks after tonight's lecture. How were you and your 200 Facebook friends ever gonna agree on when it was time to leave Facebook, and where to go?

So FB’s end-users engaged in a mutual hostage-taking that kept them glued to the platform. Then FB exploited that hostage situation, withdrawing the surplus from end-users and allocating it to two groups of business customers: advertisers, and publishers.

To the advertisers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we wouldn’t spy on them? We lied. We spy on them from asshole to appetite. We will sell you access to that surveillance data in the form of fine-grained ad-targeting, and we will devote substantial engineering resources to thwarting ad-fraud. Your ads are dirt cheap to serve, and we’ll spare no expense to make sure that when you pay for an ad, a real human sees it.'

To the publishers, FB said, 'Remember when we told those rubes we would only show them the things they asked to see? We lied!Upload short excerpts from your website, append a link, and we will nonconsensually cram it into the eyeballs of users who never asked to see it. We are offering you a free traffic funnel that will drive millions of users to your website to monetize as you please, and those users will become stuck to you when they subscribe to your feed.' And so advertisers and publishers became stuck to the platform, too, dependent on those users.

The users held each other hostage, and those hostages took the publishers and advertisers hostage, too, so that everyone was locked in.

Which meant it was time for the third stage of enshittification: withdrawing surplus from everyone and handing it to Facebook’s shareholders.

For the users, that meant dialing down the share of content from accounts you followed to a homeopathic dose, and filling the resulting void with ads and pay-to-boost content from publishers.

For advertisers, that meant jacking up prices and drawing down anti-fraud enforcement, so advertisers paid much more for ads that were far less likely to be seen by a person.

For publishers, this meant algorithmically suppressing the reach of their posts unless they included an ever-larger share of their articles in the excerpt, until anything less than fulltext was likely to be be disqualified from being sent to your subscribers, let alone included in algorithmic suggestion feeds.

And then FB started to punish publishers for including a link back to their own sites, so they were corralled into posting fulltext feeds with no links, meaning they became commodity suppliers to Facebook, entirely dependent on the company both for reach and for monetization, via the increasingly crooked advertising service.

When any of these groups squawked, FB just repeated the lesson that every tech executive learned in the Darth Vader MBA: 'I have altered the deal. Pray I don’t alter it any further.'

Facebook now enters the most dangerous phase of enshittification. It wants to withdraw all available surplus, and leave just enough residual value in the service to keep end users stuck to each other, and business customers stuck to end users, without leaving anything extra on the table, so that every extractable penny is drawn out and returned to its shareholders.

But that’s a very brittle equilibrium, because the difference between “I hate this service but I can’t bring myself to quit it,” and “Jesus Christ, why did I wait so long to quit? Get me the hell out of here!” is razor thin

All it takes is one Cambridge Analytica scandal, one whistleblower, one livestreamed mass-shooting, and users bolt for the exits, and then FB discovers that network effects are a double-edged sword.

If users can’t leave because everyone else is staying, when when everyone starts to leave, there’s no reason not to go, too.

That’s terminal enshittification, the phase when a platform becomes a pile of shit. This phase is usually accompanied by panic, which tech bros euphemistically call 'pivoting.'

Which is how we get pivots like, 'In the future, all internet users will be transformed into legless, sexless, low-polygon, heavily surveilled cartoon characters in a virtual world called "metaverse," that we ripped off from a 25-year-old satirical cyberpunk novel.'

That's the procession of enshittification. If enshittification were a disease, we'd call that enshittification's "natural history." But that doesn't tell you how the enshittification works, nor why everything is enshittifying right now, and without those details, we can't know what to do about it.

What led to the enshittocene? What is it about this moment that led to the Great Enshittening? Was it the end of the Zero Interest Rate Policy? Was it a change in leadership at the tech giants? Is Mercury in retrograde?

None of the above.

The period of free fed money certainly led to tech companies having a lot of surplus to toss around. But Facebook started enshittifying long before ZIRP ended, so did Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Some of the tech giants got new leaders. But Google's enshittification got worse when the founders came back to oversee the company's AI panic (excuse me, 'AI pivot').

And it can't be Mercury in retrograde, because I'm a cancer, and as everyone knows, cancers don't believe in astrology.

When a whole bunch of independent entities all change in the same way at once, that's a sign that the environment has changed, and that's what happened to tech.

Tech companies, like all companies, have conflicting imperatives. On the one hand, they want to make money. On the other hand, making money involves hiring and motivating competent staff, and making products that customers want to buy. The more value a company permits its employees and customers to carve off, the less value it can give to its shareholders.

The equilibrium in which companies produce things we like in honorable ways at a fair price is one in which charging more, worsening quality, and harming workers costs more than the company would make by playing dirty.

There are four forces that discipline companies, serving as constraints on their enshittificatory impulses.

First: competition. Companies that fear you will take your business elsewhere are cautious about worsening quality or raising prices.

Second: regulation. Companies that fear a regulator will fine them more than they expect to make from cheating, will cheat less.

These two forces affect all industries, but the next two are far more tech-specific.

Third: self-help. Computers are extremely flexible, and so are the digital products and services we make from them. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing-complete Von Neumann machine, a computer that can run every valid program.

That means that users can always avail themselves of programs that undo the anti-features that shift value from them to a company's shareholders. Think of a board-room table where someone says, 'I've calculated that making our ads 20% more invasive will net us 2% more revenue per user.'

In a digital world, someone else might well say 'Yes, but if we do that, 20% of our users will install ad-blockers, and our revenue from those users will drop to zero, forever.'

This means that digital companies are constrained by the fear that some enshittificatory maneuver will prompt their users to google, 'How do I disenshittify this?'

Fourth and finally: workers. Tech workers have very low union density, but that doesn't mean that tech workers don't have labor power. The historical "talent shortage" of the tech sector meant that workers enjoyed a lot of leverage over their bosses. Workers who disagreed with their bosses could quit and walk across the street and get another job – a better job.

They knew it, and their bosses knew it. Ironically, this made tech workers highly exploitable. Tech workers overwhelmingly saw themselves as founders in waiting, entrepreneurs who were temporarily drawing a salary, heroic figures of the tech mission.

That's why mottoes like Google's 'don't be evil' and Facebook's 'make the world more open and connected' mattered: they instilled a sense of mission in workers. It's what Fobazi Ettarh calls 'vocational awe, 'or Elon Musk calls being 'extremely hardcore.'

Tech workers had lots of bargaining power, but they didn't flex it when their bosses demanded that they sacrifice their health, their families, their sleep to meet arbitrary deadlines.

So long as their bosses transformed their workplaces into whimsical 'campuses,' with gyms, gourmet cafeterias, laundry service, massages and egg-freezing, workers could tell themselves that they were being pampered – rather than being made to work like government mules.

But for bosses, there's a downside to motivating your workers with appeals to a sense of mission, namely: your workers will feel a sense of mission. So when you ask them to enshittify the products they ruined their health to ship, workers will experience a sense of profound moral injury, respond with outrage, and threaten to quit.

Thus tech workers themselves were the final bulwark against enshittification,

The pre-enshittification era wasn't a time of better leadership. The executives weren't better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power.

So what happened?

One by one, each of these constraints was eroded until it dissolved, leaving the enshittificatory impulse unchecked, ushering in the enshittoscene.

It started with competition. From the Gilded Age until the Reagan years, the purpose of competition law was to promote competition. US antitrust law treated corporate power as dangerous and sought to blunt it. European antitrust laws were modeled on US ones, imported by the architects of the Marshall Plan.

But starting in the neoliberal era, competition authorities all over the world adopted a doctrine called 'consumer welfare,' which held that monopolies were evidence of quality. If everyone was shopping at the same store and buying the same product, that meant it was the best store, selling the best product – not that anyone was cheating.

And so all over the world, governments stopped enforcing their competition laws. They just ignored them as companies flouted them. Those companies merged with their major competitors, absorbed small companies before they could grow to be big threats. They held an orgy of consolidation that produced the most inbred industries imaginable, whole sectors grown so incestuous they developed Habsburg jaws, from eyeglasses to sea freight, glass bottles to payment processing, vitamin C to beer.

Most of our global economy is dominated by five or fewer global companies. If smaller companies refuse to sell themselves to these cartels, the giants have free rein to flout competition law further, with 'predatory pricing' that keeps an independent rival from gaining a foothold.

When Diapers.com refused Amazon's acquisition offer, Amazon lit $100m on fire, selling diapers way below cost for months, until diapers.com went bust, and Amazon bought them for pennies on the dollar, and shut them down.

Competition is a distant memory. As Tom Eastman says, the web has devolved into 'five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four,' so these giant companies no longer fear losing our business.

Lily Tomlin used to do a character on the TV show Laugh In, an AT&T telephone operator who'd do commercials for the Bell system. Each one would end with her saying 'We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.'

Today's giants are not constrained by competition.

They don't care. They don't have to. They're Google.

That's the first constraint gone, and as it slipped away, the second constraint – regulation – was also doomed.

When an industry consists of hundreds of small- and medium-sized enterprises, it is a mob, a rabble. Hundreds of companies can't agree on what to tell Parliament or Congress or the Commission. They can't even agree on how to cater a meeting where they'd discuss the matter.

But when a sector dwindles to a bare handful of dominant firms, it ceases to be a rabble and it becomes a cartel.

Five companies, or four, or three, or two, or just one company finds it easy to converge on a single message for their regulators, and without "wasteful competition" eroding their profits, they have plenty of cash to spread around.

Like Facebook, handing former UK deputy PM Nick Clegg millions every year to sleaze around Europe, telling his former colleagues that Facebook is the only thing standing between 'European Cyberspace' and the Chinese Communist Party.

Tech's regulatory capture allows it to flout the rules that constrain less concentrated sectors. They can pretend that violating labor, consumer and privacy laws is fine, because they violate them with an app.

This is why competition matters: it's not just because competition makes companies work harder and share value with customers and workers, it's because competition keeps companies from becoming too big to fail, and too big to jail.

Now, there's plenty of things we don't want improved through competition, like privacy invasions. After the EU passed its landmark privacy law, the GDPR, there was a mass-extinction event for small EU ad-tech companies. These companies disappeared en masse, and that's fine.

They were even more invasive and reckless than US-based Big Tech companies. After all, they had less to lose. We don't want competition in commercial surveillance. We don't want to produce increasing efficiency in violating our human rights.

But: Google and Facebook – who pretend they are called Alphabet and Meta – have been unscathed by European privacy law. That's not because they don't violate the GDPR (they do!). It's because they pretend they are headquartered in Ireland, one of the EU's most notorious corporate crime-havens.

And Ireland competes with the EU other crime havens – Malta, Luxembourg, Cyprus and sometimes the Netherlands – to see which country can offer the most hospitable environment for all sorts of crimes. Because the kind of company that can fly an Irish flag of convenience is mobile enough to change to a Maltese flag if the Irish start enforcing EU laws.

Which is how you get an Irish Data Protection Commission that processes fewer than 20 major cases per year, while Germany's data commissioner handles more than 500 major cases, even though Ireland is nominal home to the most privacy-invasive companies on the continent.

So Google and Facebook get to act as though they are immune to privacy law, because they violate the law with an app; just like Uber can violate labor law and claim it doesn't count because they do it with an app.

Uber's labor-pricing algorithm offers different drivers different payments for the same job, something Veena Dubal calls 'algorithmic wage discrimination.' If you're more selective about which jobs you'll take, Uber will pay you more for every ride.

But if you take those higher payouts and ditch whatever side-hustle let you cover your bills which being picky about your Uber drives, Uber will incrementally reduce the payment, toggling up and down as you grow more or less selective, playing you like a fish on a line until you eventually – inevitably – lose to the tireless pricing robot, and end up stuck with low wages and all your side-hustles gone.

Then there's Amazon, which violates consumer protection laws, but says it doesn't matter, because they do it with an app. Amazon makes $38b/year from its 'advertising' system. 'Advertising' in quotes because they're not selling ads, they're selling placements in search results.

The companies that spend the most on 'ads' go to the top, even if they're offering worse products at higher prices. If you click the first link in an Amazon search result, on average you will pay a 29% premium over the best price on the service. Click one of the first four items and you'll pay a 25% premium. On average you have to go seventeen items down to find the best deal on Amazon.

Any merchant that did this to you in a physical storefront would be fined into oblivion. But Amazon has captured its regulators, so it can violate your rights, and say, "it doesn't count, we did it with an app"

This is where that third constraint, self-help, would sure come in handy. If you don't want your privacy violated, you don't need to wait for the Irish privacy regulator to act, you can just install an ad-blocker.

More than half of all web users are blocking ads. But the web is an open platform, developed in the age when tech was hundreds of companies at each others' throats, unable to capture their regulators.

Today, the web is being devoured by apps, and apps are ripe for enshittification. Regulatory capture isn't just the ability to flout regulation, it's also the ability to co-opt regulation, to wield regulation against your adversaries.

Today's tech giants got big by exploiting self-help measures. When Facebook was telling Myspace users they needed to escape Rupert Murdoch’s evil crapulent Australian social media panopticon, it didn’t just say to those Myspacers, 'Screw your friends, come to Facebook and just hang out looking at the cool privacy policy until they get here'

It gave them a bot. You fed the bot your Myspace username and password, and it would login to Myspace and pretend to be you, and scrape everything waiting in your inbox, copying it to your FB inbox, and you could reply to it and it would autopilot your replies back to Myspace.

When Microsoft was choking off Apple's market oxygen by refusing to ship a functional version of Microsoft Office for the Mac – so that offices were throwing away their designers' Macs and giving them PCs with upgraded graphics cards and Windows versions of Photoshop and Illustrator – Steve Jobs didn't beg Bill Gates to update Mac Office.

He got his technologists to reverse-engineer Microsoft Office, and make a compatible suite, the iWork Suite, whose apps, Pages, Numbers and Keynote could perfectly read and write Microsoft's Word, Excel and Powerpoint files.

When Google entered the market, it sent its crawler to every web server on Earth, where it presented itself as a web-user: 'Hi! Hello! Do you have any web pages? Thanks! How about some more? How about more?'

But every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Facebook, Apple and Google were doing this adversarial interoperability, that was progress. If you try to do it to them, that's piracy.

Try to make an alternative client for Facebook and they'll say you violated US laws like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and EU laws like Article 6 of the EUCD.

Try to make an Android program that can run iPhone apps and play back the data from Apple's media stores and they'd bomb you until the rubble bounced.

Try to scrape all of Google and they'll nuke you until you glowed.

Tech's regulatory capture is mind-boggling. Take that law I mentioned earlier, Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or DMCA. Bill Clinton signed it in 1998, and the EU imported it as Article 6 of the EUCD in 2001

It is a blanket prohibition on removing any kind of encryption that restricts access to a copyrighted work – things like ripping DVDs or jailbreaking a phone – with penalties of a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.

This law has been so broadened that it can be used to imprison creators for granting access to their own creations

Here's how that works: In 2008, Amazon bought Audible, an audiobook platform, in an anticompetitive acquisition. Today, Audible is a monopolist with more than 90% of the audiobook market. Audible requires that all creators on their platform sell with Amazon's "digital rights management," which locks it to Amazon's apps.

So say I write a book, then I read it into a mic, then I pay a director and an engineer thousands of dollars to turn that into an audiobook, and sell it to you on the monopoly platform, Audible, that controls more than 90% of the market.

If I later decide to leave Amazon and want to let you come with me to a rival platform, I am out of luck. If I supply you with a tool to remove Amazon's encryption from my audiobook, so you can play it in another app, I commit a felony, punishable by a 5-year sentence and a half-million-dollar fine, for a first offense.

That's a stiffer penalty than you would face if you simply pirated the audiobook from a torrent site. But it's also harsher than the punishment you'd get for shoplifting the audiobook on CD from a truck-stop. It's harsher than the sentence you'd get for hijacking the truck that delivered the CD.

So think of our ad-blockers again. 50% of web users are running ad-blockers. 0% of app users are running ad-blockers, because adding a blocker to an app requires that you first remove its encryption, and that's a felony (Jay Freeman calls this 'felony contempt of business-model').

So when someone in a board-room says, 'let's make our ads 20% more obnoxious and get a 2% revenue increase,' no one objects that this might prompt users to google, 'how do I block ads?' After all, the answer is, 'you can't.'

Indeed, it's more likely that someone in that board room will say, 'let's make our ads 100% more obnoxious and get a 10% revenue increase' (this is why every company wants you to install an app instead of using its website).

There's no reason that gig workers who are facing algorithmic wage discrimination couldn't install a counter-app that coordinated among all the Uber drivers to reject all jobs unless they reach a certain pay threshold.

No reason except felony contempt of business model, the threat that the toolsmiths who built that counter-app would go broke or land in prison, for violating DMCA 1201, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, trademark, copyright, patent, contract, trade secrecy, nondisclosure and noncompete, or in other words: 'IP law.'

'IP' is just a euphemism for 'a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers.' And 'app' is just a euphemism for 'a web-page wrapped enough IP to make it a felony to mod it to protect the labor, consumer and privacy rights of its user.'

We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company.

But what about that fourth constraint: workers?

For decades, tech workers' high degrees of bargaining power and vocational awe put a ceiling on enshittification. Even after the tech sector shrank to a handful of giants. Even after they captured their regulators so they could violate our consumer, privacy and labor rights. Even after they created 'felony contempt of business model' and extinguished self-help for tech users. Tech was still constrained by their workers' sense of moral injury in the face of the imperative to enshittify.

Remember when tech workers dreamed of working for a big company for a few years, before striking out on their own to start their own company that would knock that tech giant over?

Then that dream shrank to: work for a giant for a few years, quit, do a fake startup, get acqui-hired by your old employer, as a complicated way of getting a bonus and a promotion.

Then the dream shrank further: work for a tech giant for your whole life, get free kombucha and massages on Wednesdays.

And now, the dream is over. All that’s left is: work for a tech giant until they fire your ass, like those 12,000 Googlers who got fired last year six months after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years.

Workers are no longer a check on their bosses' worst impulses

Today, the response to 'I refuse to make this product worse' is, 'turn in your badge and don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.'

I get that this is all a little depressing

OK, really depressing.

But hear me out! We've identified the disease. We've traced its natural history. We've identified its underlying mechanism. Now we can get to work on a cure.

There are four constraints that prevent enshittification: competition, regulation, self-help and labor.

To reverse enshittification and guard against its reemergence, we must restore and strengthen each of these.

On competition, it's actually looking pretty good. The EU, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, Japan and China are all doing more on competition than they have in two generations. They're blocking mergers, unwinding existing ones, taking action on predatory pricing and other sleazy tactics.

Remember, in the US and Europe, we already have the laws to do this – we just stopped enforcing them in the Helmut Kohl era.

I've been fighting these fights with the Electronic Frontier Foundation for 22 years now, and I've never seen a more hopeful moment for sound, informed tech policy.

Now, the enshittifiers aren't taking this laying down. The business press can't stop talking about how stupid and old-fashioned all this stuff is. They call people like me 'hipster antitrust,' and they hate any regulator who actually does their job.

Take Lina Khan, the brilliant head of the US Federal Trade Commission, who has done more in three years on antitrust than the combined efforts of all her predecessors over the past 40 years. Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal has run more than 80 editorials trashing Khan, insisting that she's an ineffectual ideologue who can't get anything done.

Sure, Rupert, that's why you ran 80 editorials about her.

Because she can't get anything done.

Even Canada is stepping up on competition. Canada! Land of the evil billionaire! From Ted Rogers, who owns the country's telecoms; to Galen Weston, who owns the country's grocery stores; to the Irvings, who basically own the entire province of New Brunswick.

Even Canada is doing something about this. Last autumn, Trudeau's government promised to update Canada's creaking competition law to finally ban 'abuse of dominance.'

I mean, wow. I guess when Galen Weston decided to engage in a criminal conspiracy to fix the price of bread – the most Les Miz-ass crime imaginable – it finally got someone's attention, eh?

Competition has a long way to go, but all over the world, competition law is seeing a massive revitalization. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher put antitrust law in a coma in the 80s – but it's awake, it's back, and it's pissed.

What about regulation? How will we get tech companies to stop doing that one weird trick of adding 'with an app' to their crimes and escaping enforcement?

Well, here in the EU, they're starting to figure it out. This year, the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act went into effect, and they let people who get screwed by tech companies go straight to the federal European courts, bypassing the toothless watchdogs in Europe's notorious corporate crime havens like Ireland.

In America, they might finally get a digital privacy law. You people have no idea how backwards US privacy law is. The last time the US Congress enacted a broadly applicable privacy law was in 1988.

The Video Privacy Protection Act makes it a crime for video-store clerks to leak your video-rental history. It was passed after a right-wing judge who was up for the Supreme Court had his rentals published in a DC newspaper. The rentals weren't even all that embarrassing!

Sure, that judge, Robert Bork, wasn't confirmed for the Supreme Court, but that was because he was a virulently racist loudmouth and a crook who served as Nixon's Solicitor General.

But Congress got the idea that their video records might be next, freaked out, and passed the VPPA.

That was the last time Americans got a big, national privacy law. Nineteen. Eighty. Eight.

It's been a minute.

And the thing is, there's a lot of people who are angry about stuff that has some nexus with America's piss-poor privacy landscape. Worried that Facebook turned Grampy into a Qanon? That Insta made your teen anorexic? That TikTok is brainwashing millennials into quoting Osama Bin Laden?

Or that cops are rolling up the identities of everyone at a Black Lives Matter protest or the Jan 6 riots by getting location data from Google?

Or that Red State Attorneys General are tracking teen girls to out-of-state abortion clinics?

Or that Black people are being discriminated against by online lending or hiring platforms?

Or that someone is making AI deepfake porn of you?

Having a federal privacy law with a private right of action – which means that individuals can sue companies that violate their privacy – would go a long way to rectifying all of these problems. There's a big coalition for that kind of privacy law.

What about self-help? That's a lot farther away, alas.

The EU's DMA will force tech companies to open up their walled gardens for interoperation. You'll be able to use Whatsapp to message people on iMessage, or quit Facebook and move to Mastodon, but still send messages to the people left behind.

But if you want to reverse-engineer one of those Big Tech products and mod it to work for you, not them, the EU's got nothing for you.

This is an area ripe for improvement, and I think the US might be the first ones to open this up.

It's certainly on-brand for the EU to be forcing tech companies to do things a certain way, while the US simply takes away tech companies' abilities to prevent others from changing how their stuff works.

My big hope here is that Stein's Law will take hold: 'Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop'

Letting companies decide how their customers must use their products is simply too tempting an invitation to mischief. HP has a whole building full of engineers thinking of new ways to lock your printer to its official ink cartridges, forcing you to spend $10,000/gallon on ink to print your boarding passes and shopping lists.

It's offensive. The only people who don't agree are the people running the monopolies in all the other industries, like the med-tech monopolists who are locking their insulin pumps to their glucose monitors, turning people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers.

Finally, there's labor. Here in Europe, there's much higher union density than in the US, which American tech barons are learning the hard way. There is nothing more satisfying in the daily news than the latest salvo by Nordic unions against that Tesla guy (Musk is the most Edison-ass Tesla guy imaginable).

But even in the USA, there's a massive surge in tech unions. Tech workers are realizing that they aren't founders in waiting. The days of free massages and facial piercings and getting to wear black tee shirts that say things your boss doesn't understand are coming to an end.

In Seattle, Amazon's tech workers walked out in sympathy with Amazon's warehouse workers, because they're all workers.

The only reason the tech workers aren't monitored by AI that notifies their managers if they visit the toilet during working hours is their rapidly dwindling bargaining power. The way things are going, Amazon programmers are going to be pissing in bottles next to their workstations (for a guy who built a penis-shaped rocket, Jeff Bezos really hates our kidneys).

We're seeing bold, muscular, global action on competition, regulation and labor, with self-help bringing up the rear. It's not a moment too soon, because the bad news is, enshittification is coming to every industry.

If it's got a networked computer in it, the people who made it can run the Darth Vader MBA playbook on it, changing the rules from moment to moment, violating your rights and then saying 'It's OK, we did it with an app.'

From Mercedes renting you your accelerator pedal by the month to Internet of Things dishwashers that lock you into proprietary dishsoap, enshittification is metastasizing into every corner of our lives.

Software doesn't eat the world, it enshittifies it

But there's a bright side to all this: if everyone is threatened by enshittification, then everyone has a stake in disenshittification.

Just as with privacy law in the US, the potential anti-enshittification coalition is massive, it's unstoppable.

The cynics among you might be skeptical that this will make a difference. After all, isn't "enshittification" the same as "capitalism"?

Well, no.

Look, I'm not going to cape for capitalism here. I'm hardly a true believer in markets as the most efficient allocators of resources and arbiters of policy – if there was ever any doubt, capitalism's total failure to grapple with the climate emergency surely erases it.

But the capitalism of 20 years ago made space for a wild and wooly internet, a space where people with disfavored views could find each other, offer mutual aid, and organize.

The capitalism of today has produced a global, digital ghost mall, filled with botshit, crapgadgets from companies with consonant-heavy brand-names, and cryptocurrency scams.

The internet isn't more important than the climate emergency, nor gender justice, racial justice, genocide, or inequality.

But the internet is the terrain we'll fight those fights on. Without a free, fair and open internet, the fight is lost before it's joined.

We can reverse the enshittification of the internet. We can halt the creeping enshittification of every digital device.

We can build a better, enshittification-resistant digital nervous system, one that is fit to coordinate the mass movements we will need to fight fascism, end genocide, and save our planet and our species.

Martin Luther King said 'It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.'

And it may be true that the law can't force corporate sociopaths to conceive of you as a human being entitled to dignity and fair treatment, and not just an ambulatory wallet, a supply of gut-bacteria for the immortal colony organism that is a limited liability corporation.

But it can make that exec fear you enough to treat you fairly and afford you dignity, even if he doesn't think you deserve it.

And I think that's pretty important.

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/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel/a>

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

Image: Drahtlos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Motherboard_Intel_386.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

 -   

cdessums (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monsoon_Season_Flagstaff_AZ_clouds_storm.jpg

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

[hyperions-light]

Making Fanfic Banners/Collages with Canva for FREE

Hello friends! Canva is an online software tool that mostly gets used for creating social media advertisements, but YOU can use it to make pretty, custom banners/collages/images for your fanfiction! For FREE!

WHY should you do this?

Fun

Custom art thing for your fic!

If you put pictures on your fic posts, sometimes you get more notes (sometimes)

The joy of creation!!!

I will walk you through it (with pictures) below the cut!

STEP ONE: GO TO CANVA, MAKE AN ACCOUNT

You can sign up with email, gmail, or FB. Gmail is the most convenient, but I think they do 2FA no matter what, so take that into account.

STEP TWO: DON'T PAY ANY MONEY & IGNORE AI

Every time you login or make stuff or do ANYTHING, Canva will try to get you to pay for Canva Pro. Don't do that. I've had access to the Pro and free versions and there's no reason to pay for anything on here. Also, they have an AI that's supposed to make things for you, but it sucks & isn't fun. Ignore it.

STEP 3: CHOOSE A TEMPLATE

Okay, so if you're a graphic designer... I mean I'm not sure why you're reading this tutorial, you can definitely make cooler stuff than I can! You should just use the 'create blank [post type]' button and go to town! But if you're not (like me) what I usually do is pick a type of template that Canva has (like blog banners, instagram posts, facebook covers, etc) and go browse their designs. My advice is not to look for something that you completely like, but something that has the right vibe-- you're going to be messing with all the individual aspects of the post anyway, so just pick based on aesthetics. Try to make sure that if you're going to put your fic title on your work that you pick/create a design where the text is clearly displayed/in an easily legible font.

NOTE: Some of the designs will have a little crown in the corner, and these designs are only available if you pay for premium. If they have a little $ on them, instead, that just means they have individual paid elements in them that you can get rid of, so feel free to use those, too!

STEP 4: CHOOSE YOUR PICTURES

Okay, so I like this screaming seagull one. I clicked on it, and selected 'customize template'. So now I want to get rid of the seagull, and replace him with my own stuff. You can do this a couple of ways: if you have screenshots from your game/show/other media, you can upload them by clicking on the little cloud icon on the left side that says "Uploads". If you DON'T have pictures, or you don't have ones you need, there are a couple options:

You can try to browse Canva's selection of pictures. It is in the "Elements" tab; you type in a search, and then select the "photos" filter from the little marquee below the search bar. My advice is to only use one word search terms, because Canva loves showing you all the photos that you can use if you pay for them, and if you use more words, they do that more often. There ARE free photos in there, but you have to scroll a bit.

If you don't want to deal with the search system or can't find what you're looking for, sites like Pixabay, Pexels, and Unsplash provide free photos that you can use without attribution, and do not require you to have an account to download. Please DO NOT just search using google/other engines and take things from there-- those photos are often not licensed for free use. The sites I linked will try to sell you pictures, but not as much as Canva, and there's usually a lot of free stuff to choose from. Download the pictures you want in a good resolution and upload them to Canva!

STEP 5: MESS AROUND WITH STUFF!

Okay, so now you can add your stuff and mess around with it!! Just click on the element (like the seagull) and delete it. Then go to your uploads and click + drag the image you want onto the canvas. You can use them as the background by dragging them to one of the corners, but you can also just put them on the canvas and mess around with them. In the left picture, you can see some of the options you have to resize and move around the image, so different elements appear on top of or behind it. If you click on the button that says 'edit' on the little bar menu that comes up when you select the image, you'll get the menu in the right picture, where you can mess with filters and colors, etc. It's not a completely comprehensive editing software, but you can do a lot of things! I encourage you to mess around and see what looks cool!

STEP SIX: ADD MORE STUFF, IF YOU WANT!

I love adding more stuff. You can change and add text by clicking on the textboxes that are already there, or you can use the "text" section on the left menu to add new blocks. They have some fun combinations and a lot of fonts! A thing I like to do is go in the elements tab and search for 'patterns'; you can add them on top of your image or elsewhere! The opacity setting is your best friend; you can overlay a bunch of stuff and create interesting/unique collages! You can also add basic shapes, frames, moving elements, and clipart, if you want!

STEP SEVEN (FINAL): DOWNLOAD YOUR THING!

When you're done, the 'share' menu in the upper right corner will let you download your image in a bunch of different formats (I'm pretty sure you could make a looping GIF for your fic here on Canva, too!) I usually do PNGs for the quality. I haven't had any issues uploading on Tumblr (or on Twitter, when I used it).

Anyway, I hope you'll try making these! I didn't show it, but there are a lot of different templates you can use, so if you want to make a collage instead, just look around! I think it's super fun to do for my fics! If you have any questions, you can bother me on my blog or in the replies section of this post, just please be polite! Thanks for reading!

[runabout-river]

Thoughts on JJK chapter 261 (Spoilers)

The Fuck

We start with Yuji's last attack and a redraw of last chapter's last scene. Yuji didn't manage to injure Sukuna's heart further and gets thrown to the side being forgotten immediately together with Todo because Sukuna has a new/old opponent now: fucking Yuta.

We do get one more panel of Yuji thinking of Choso which fits my recent post about Yuji's accumulated trauma. Other than that Yuji/Todo get sidelined for the rest of the chapter but that was needed to explain what the fuck Yuta had done

Also, Okkotsu Yuta is now on name-basis with Sukuna, a place only very few people have reached at this point like Fushiguro Megumi and Gojo Satoru.

When I first saw the stitches on Gojo's head, I thought of Kenjaku and Kenjaku only. Even after Sukuna called him Yuta I needed a moment to understand what had happened here. Do you all understand how awesome that is 👀 JJK has an active theory based fanbase and I at least have never heard or thought of this possibility 😣

We get a flashback to explain how we got to this point: the idea of taking over Gojo's body came from Yuta and most people were initially against it. Of note: Yuji was not part of this discussion probably for the same reason why no one told him about Todo.

We get a reminder why it has to be done this way but Maki throws in that Yuta's copy only lasts 5 minutes. So the question is, what happens when those 5 minutes are up?

Yuta dies because Kenjaku's possession ability needs to be active constantly

Yuta dies at some point because Kenjaku's possession ability needs to be activated again and again

Yuta's new body permanently becomes Gojo's body

Honestly, I don't think 3) will be endgame for Yuta. It might happen that he will become Gojo in body permanently but story-wise his death signs are through the roof. I don't believe that Yuta will survive inside Gojo 😢

1) is has to be false otherwise Kenjaku wouldn't be able to use other CTs like CM and AGS. 2) is a probable option as in Kenjaku had to intermittently re-activate his original CT but he still had the option of using other CTs as well.

Also, secret 4th option: Yuta dies but his body hopping shenanigans bring Gojo back to life.

It's good to see how Yuta is concerned about Gojo. Yuji would've been right there with him. He told Gojo about his plan but the guy was absolutely sure that he wouldn't lose anyway, haha...

Gojo speculates that Yuta might also be the descendent of the Fujiwara in addition to being one of the Sugawara and I'm not a genetics experts but I'm pretty sure that after 1000 years without migration happening in your family tree that you're descendent of everyone who lived that long ago. Except for Sukuna because he never had children.

Also, the original gang from JJK 0 came together to be part of some murder. The deaths of the higher-ups we saw at the very beginning of the Sukuna fight is now explained: Gojo killed them for a better future of the JJ Society but he was a little hesitant about it.

The flashback jumps first to Yuji's old friend who's name I forgot. We learn that his CT is sugar (??) based which leads to him becoming part of the medical team. Then the FB jumps to the aftermath of Yuta's fight against Sukuna: he was cut in half and is about to die

In a funny call back to when Yuji died at the Detention Center, Gojo is both dead and completely naked on a table. Just like Yuji, he also rises again albeit not completely alive when it comes to himself.

(Why did Yuta waste crucial seconds to put a shirt on?)

Shoko says that she fully sutured Gojo's bisected body and because Kenjaku's CT (as far as we know) only works on dead bodies, we have the confirmation that Gojo has indeed died against Sukuna. Except of course that he's about to be revived again.

Let's not forget that as far as Kenjaku's CT is involved, body and mind are treated the same. Something that will involve Gojo and his consciousness is going to happen at some point because of Yuta's decision to do this body hopping.

A new Domain Battle between Sukuna and GojoYuta is about to start. Yuta not only watched the previous battles, he also acquired Gojo's memories so it's exciting to see how that will play out.

It's also interesting how the visuals of the domain clashes changed so much. GojoYuta's is still the same (the first confirmation that a possessor can use the possessed's DE) while Sukuna's deteriorated somewhat, represented with the beastly construct in the background. He also has to use Gojo's handsign.

Break next week but now we can speculate to hell and back about what will happen now.

[gallawitchxx]

weekly tag wednesday thursday <3

omg how is it wednesday thursday again already?! where has this week gone? i've basically been MIA here since the last one lol so thank you to @jrooc @creepkinginc @energievie @deedala @gardenerian

@blue-disco-lights @sgtmickeyslaughter @vintagelacerosette for the tags! i love you all! i love this place! i'm so happy we get to scream about it today!

- - - - OKAY LET'S GET INTO IT - - - -

how did you get into the fandom? i fully fell into gallavich in the spring of 2021 & starting shoving fics in my face faster than ian & mickey took their clothes off when ian went to get the gun back, mickey. then i started noticing that people were linking their tumblrs in the end notes & so i lurked suuuper hard through the summer until i finally made my own blog!

how long have you been here? almost three glorious years <3

what’s the first fandom channel you found? (Youtube, Reddit, Tumblr, Insta, Twitter, FB, other?) i suppose youtube is correct because i watched a bunch of edits that really cemented my obsession, but tumblr was the first place i interacted with fandom friends :)

what’s your favourite now? i'm a tumblrina for life!

which mutual have you known the longest in the fandom? this will always make me so fucking emotional -- my first mutual was @metalheadmickey & now i've been to their wedding *sobs forever*

which tumblerino’s did you have your first fandom crush(es) on and wanted to get to know? oooohalskfj this is a hard one! there have been so many! when i first showed up, i started collecting beloved mutuals like pokemon... but to steal from mel, there was a real HUZZAH moment around getting a message from @whatwouldmickeydo & now i'm gonna go to their wedding *continues sobbing forever*

first Gallavich fan fic you read (or that blew you away that you remember) the holy trinity of my early fandom days were absolutely like real people do by grayola, restoration by @palepinkgoat & the increasingly poor decisions of ian gallagher by @goodkwuestion

first fan art that blew your mind? yooo we are so blessed around these parts & at the beginning it was another trilogy lol - @steorie @psychicskulldamage & @darthvaders-wife

fanfic trope that you were sure wasn’t for you but now you low key (or high key) love? a/b/o! truly shocking to discover & then love & then WRITE A WHOLE MULTI-CHAP FIC OF

What surprised you most about this fandom? omg how smushy soft everyone is! halskfjalfj - like, it's a pretty hard show to watch at times & the characters are all so messy & not saying we have it altogether over here or anything, but everyone's just a kind little marshmallow! :)

moment in the show (or YT vids if you’re one of those) that you fell in hyperfixation with Gallavich? the first one was probably s3 "not everybody gets to blurt out how they fucking feel every minute!" because i was like, OHHH OH THIS IS GONNA HURT ME & then it just kept getting worse....

Ian or Mickey? mickey baby ily so much. but to echo others, they really are two halves of the same brain cell & they've fought so hard to be together. so idk how you choose!

Which Gallagher or Milkovich are you? jeeeez, maybe fiona? lip? liam? hahaha probably none of them tbh, but i love 'em like family!

- - - - -

tagging @thisdivorce @rereadanon @sickness-health-all-that-shit @crossmydna & @heymrspatel if you wanna play! if not, i'm smooching you on your nose <3

[theinkedknight]

Rose Quartz

Based off this post by @cryptotheism that I saw on FB

I sat behind the counter, looking up at the twin sets of flat screens perched over the high shelves carrying boxes of cereal and multipacks of toilet paper. On the left screen, a multiple panel view of the various security cameras set up all around the bodega, the right screen a rerun of Judge Judy. I was mostly paying attention to the right one.

At the table set along the window to the outside sat an older Puerto Rican man, his straw triby on the table next to him, brushing something I couldn't see off the tank top he wore under his unbuttoned bowling shirt.

“Listen, I'm telling you. New yor-wiccan.” He said, drawing out the word.

“Shut up Danny.” Called out the older woman behind the deli counter as she worked the grill.

“What? It's good! I can see it on the shirts.” He retorted.

“You're not even wiccan.” I said, shaking my head.

“So what? You think everyone selling gold crosses is a Christian?”

The door alarm dinged as a pair of young people entered. I could smell the tourist on them. Spend enough time behind a counter in Manhattan and you'd be able to as well. It's the wide eyed gaze and almost deer-like quiver.

They start to roam what amounts to aisles in the cramped store. Next to the cup soups, various small packages of laundry soap, and ice salt stood Catholic candles of various colors and saints, icons from a dozen various idols from the faiths of the people who lived or worked in the neighborhood, and bins of assorted crystals. Through the windows and on the cameras I could see the piles of garlic, oranges, apples, and bundled dried herbs for sale under the shop’s awning.

“He has a point, Flora.” I say, eyes returning to the court show.

“You're so full of shit, Danny,” she replied with a tone that sounded like this was a basic fact of reality.

The two tourists came up to the front counter, either sisters or very, very close friends. Their auras looked as though they were the same, or else rhyming so closely it was hard to tell the difference.

“Do you…um…do you sell rose quartz?” The slightly taller one asked.I continued watching Judy for a beat, as it was about to go to commercial anyway, before looked down at the two.

“Flora, we got rose quartz?” I called over to the grill. A black cat walked around from the corner and wove herself around their legs before jumping up to the table next to Danny’s hat. Flora walked around the counter with an aluminum tray filled to the brim with boiled yucca, pickled red onions, grilled sausage, and fried eggs. She put the tray next to Danny, his hat, and the cat, pulling a fork and small bottle of hot sauce from her apron and all but dropping both on the table with them.

“Yeah, no. Fresh out, remember that little bracelet brujita always buys me out. The one with the green hair. Plant name.”

“Aspen.” I supplied.

“Yes, her.” She looked the two women up and down. “What you need if for? You looking for someone?” Their cheeks reddening was all the older witch needed to hear.

She walked behind one aisle, muttering to herself in Spanish. When she returned, she held a pair of pink candles in an unmarked glass cylinder and two cans of soup.

“Damien, get them two vials of rose water.” She told me. She continued speaking to the girls as I turned my back to search the wall of incense, oils, single dose packs of Advil, condoms, and “nail polish remover” behind the counter. “What you wanna do is anoint yourself and the candle and burn it next to your bed at night.”

The taller one nodded as if taking mental notes. “And the soup?”

“Cook it for him. Men love soup.” Flora said as if speaking to an idiot.

As her friend/sister was turning redder still, the shorter one was looking at Danny eating his breakfast.

“Isn't it, like, unhygienic to have a cat in a place serving food like that?” She asked, genuine concern in her voice.

“I'm cleaner than you are, Princess Midwest.” The cat replied, looking up at her with emerald green eyes. “This one needs some Florida water too, Damien. Her aura is a little…much.”

I tried to keep the smirk from my face as she jumped.

“Hannah, I told you if you're going to talk to customers, you need to be a person.” Flora admonished. The cat sighed, jumping from the table to the other chair. Between one blink and the other, the cat was gone and a pale skinned woman in a black dress replaced her. For a moment she still had feline eyes, before blinking and her human form completing.

“Anyway, spritz it on yourself after you shower. If you're good, you'll clear that…” Hannah made a general hand gesture to encompass what must be the woman's aura. “...in about a week.”

They both stepped up to the counter, wide eyed and more than a touch shaken. “So, would that be all together or separate?” I asked, trying to calm them with a gentle smile.

They indicted together and made to pay, pulling out a crystal bedazzled iPhone to tap on the terminal. I wrapped the candles in yesterday's Daily News and put everything into an ‘I HEART NY’ bag. As quickly as they could without running, they were out of the store again.

“I would buy that shirt.” Hannah said, reaching over and stealing a slice of meat from Danny's plate, who moved to slap her hand but was too slow.

“See! And she is wiccan. I am smart.” Danny proclaimed.

“Full of shit.” Flora replied, shaking her head and returning to the deli counter.

[yvesdot]

I'm writing to ask some advice on the pros and cons of social media for writers. Specifically, do you think it's worth it to make a bluesky account as a writer right now, and why or why not? I am a writer with a several semipro pub credits currently in the process of querying my first novel with agents. My only active social media is my main tumblr, a less active side tumblr where I post about writing, and accounts on instagram, fb and xitter that I haven't touched in years. I am very averse to marketing myself and I dislike the twitter/bluesky format, but I'm aware that there are probably opportunities I'm missing out on by not being on there (i.e. another writer I know irl mentioned an upcoming manuscript pitch event on bsky). In your opinion, is it worth it to hold my nose and do the little marketing dance in the hopes it will improve my chances, or are the benefits negligible? Any thoughts you have on the subject are greatly appreciated

The best advice I've received on the social media game is to pick the thing you can stick with and do that. So, if you think you'll use bluesky, worth being there. If you're only ever forcing yourself to post, it likely wouldn't be of much use to curate a regular presence. You can always take note of the general timing of various events and/or follow them through your friends and other spaces like Discord or, well, Tumblr! (Also a good reminder to post about various opportunities you see in your communities—I am especially bad at this.)

To actually answer your specific question... I admit to liking Bluesky despite disliking the Twitter format, which I maintain is awful. The main reason I enjoy Bluesky is its improved moeration and its teeny-tinyness right now, which may fade, but for the moment gives an increased intimacy to your interactions with individual artists that I very much like. People actually see your replies, which is encouraging.

I haven't yet used it for any sort of writerly things, in part because it's just so exhausting keeping up with anything. I am on the Authors Against Book Bans giant starter pack, so I get a lot of followers from that, but so far little to no 'engagement' with what I'm posting (if you're averse to marketing lingo look the other way!), which I suspect is simply what happens when people follow you as part of a massive group of people who are going to post more and chat more and general out-social-media-you. So I only post what I feel like putting into the void ^__^

I do think Bluesky is very clearly where all the writerfolk fed up with Twitter are moving. I initially made an account because my publisher (tRaum Books) was there, and I've since seen quite a few celebrated trans authorfolk post and even like my replies to their posts, which is, as I say, heartening. I would imagine "writing professional who is fed up with Twitter" is a good sort of person/page to surround oneself with.

But people have gotten agents before Bluesky and they will again. If you have writing credits, you most certainly have an advantage. You don't need to play the games if you don't want to (though, as you've noted, it can help). I'm not playing any games right now! And I have never signed with an agent for a novel. Shop this one around, and make your own pros and cons list, and see how you feel. Congrats on the publications!

[loveislandthegame]

thoughts on todays volume! we're not even halfway through the season and i'm already over it . i'm lowkey struggling to write these posts 😭

first up is excess baggage, where we get another glimpse into our forced backstory: MC didn't go to her season's afterparty, and later on it's revealed that finn was the host (i'm just like, why the hell has he been a host twice? what was he even doing in love island australia? but FB is putting zero thought into writing these seasons, so i should just put zero thought into analysing them)

like i've said before, it wouldn't be a LITG challenge without some bullshit. they decided to make finn's baggage "saying that MC is the sexiest love island star," that's great for people romancing him, but i was just grossed out 🫠 unfortunately it only gets worse from here

melissa and henri got dumped . at least it wasn't natasha or kelly, though kelly suddenly no longer cares about my MC, so it seems like that chat with melissa did lock in one wlw LI

kelly and finn get everyone together to play one of those guessing games, idk what it's actually called. but more importantly, tf is wrong with these people ? you weren't thinking that MC would be tired of everyone and their mother constantly bringing up the guy she was with for two weeks? at this point i wouldn't be surprised if they revealed that MC and stefan were engaged or some shit

side note, lyle's evening outfit looks beyond ridiculous but i kinda love that (tbh it looks like some shit tyler the creator would wear)

MC gets a note inviting her to the pool, i thought it was gonna be chen or maybe natasha, turns out it's fucking finn. we should've had the option to cuss him out 👹 (and a scene like this should've only been triggered if you're on his route, but FB cannot be bothered to branch, we're forced into this for the ridiculous drama/cliffhanger later)

i cant lie, this was freakin adorable, i would be a little tempted if i wasn't focused on natasha ... and if he didn't dump my ozzy route s6 MC for ivy 😫 (side note: with the amount of times he's been calling the other guys attractive...it goes without saying that straight dudes can compliment each other, but idk, make him bi/pan you cowards)

we barely had time with natasha this volume, so i had the gem scene date with her. cuteeee

i didn't screenshot it and i'm too lazy to go back for it, but she said something about us being in the hideaway together. (if you didn't see my other post, i did want to go with her but stuck with chen because i thought it'd be too awkward) i don't know what's up with all the glitches, i hope it doesn't cause issues later on, like in a movie night or some shit 😭

we return from our dates, and shocker, finn's note has kelly fighting with kat. i just hope we can clear everything up immediately, i'll be so damn mad if they drag this out for the whole volume 🤦🏽‍♀️

[aprillikesthings]

stuff about an au fic where they go on the Camino that I haven't started (and won't until next year) but am seriously considering writing, and I know I've mentioned it before, but--

so I've half-joked about writing a fic where Catra and Adora go on the Camino. A good portion of it would, obviously, be based on my own experiences. They'd be sleeping in the same albergues I did, doing the same km per day. Like I'd literally be going through my tweets and facebook posts (...which is why I literally can't even start the fic until late April of next year, when those posts come up in my fb memories lol, I'd be copy/pasting my posts into the doc to use as inspo), and tbh I could probably even hotlink some of my photos (...the ones that don't have me in them) into the fic

And I already know how I'd structure it, to some extent--there'd be really upbeat "blog posts" Adora writes in first person mixed into swapping 3rd person limited scenes.

What's funny to me is that, of course, the first time I thought of this I asked myself: why the FUCK would Catra do the Camino? and of course the answer is "because Adora asked her to," and obviously they're not a couple at the start of the fic and are by the end lol

(do they have their first kiss in the square in front the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, or do they do it earlier than that? hmmmm. either way it'll be fun to write them lying in separate bunks at some albergue or another, struggling to sleep because they're thinking about each other. the next morning they both blame a loud snorer for their lack of sleep.)L

OKAY ANYWAY so here's the thing I worry about:

I did, in fact, do the Camino in part for religious reasons. I went to mass as often as I could, I prayed the rosary most days, I prayed for people I knew all the time, I did morning prayer in both big and tiny churches, and evening prayer sometimes. And some of the most profound experiences of my Camino were faith-related.

And......I don't know how to work those in, or if I should.

Catra I figured out first, she'd be a lapsed Catholic with very mixed feelings about God and The Church. I know a lot of people like that.

And the temptation is to just make Adora an Episcopalian, like me. Or even just someone who grew up Episcopalian, and she's not sure if she's Christian necessarily, but she has neutral-to-good feelings about it.

BUT. My worry is that if I include some of my own experiences re: faith, it's going to sound like I'm evangelizing to people.

Which is not the point of the fic, obviously!

I dunno. I am probably over-thinking this. I feel like I can just write an author's note that's like: "Hi, I'm not trying to convert anyone; but this fic is based on my own experiences, and so I included some of the religious stuff."

Some of those experiences I've rarely shared with people, because they're hella personal. (I think I've posted about them to the Episcopal subreddit and that's it.) Like some of them I don't even think I've told my partner. So it's...kinda weird to put them in a fictional story with a focus on the romance?

But also there's stories from my Camino that I can already figure out how to work into the fic--

Like the time a few of us got into a, uh, vigorous discussion about religion at the dinner of an albergue in Navarette, and it was mmmmostly this Korean-Australian dude who was bordering on anti-theist, arguing with a woman from Texas who was a "non-denominational" evangelical. And I kept trying to butt in to point out that there's another way of looking at a lot of the things they were arguing about, but it was difficult because I could barely get a word in edgewise. And by the time we were all done eating, I got so frustrated I stood up fast (and my chair made a hideous scraping noise on the floor) and everyone stared at me as I announced "SO ANYWAY I'M GOING TO CHURCH" and walked off. And I did go to the church, which was open, but they weren't having mass that day, so I just whipped out my phone and the Venite app and did evening prayer and then just sat for a bit admiring the HUGE retablo and trying to identify the saints/biblical stories.

^literally that one! Look at it. It's INSANE. The full-sized image was too big for tumblr lol. Also I can spot St James, and Mary being crowned Queen of Heaven, and baby Jesus being presented at the temple, among other stuff.

I just want to point out: Navarette is small. And yet. Look at that fucking retablo--the actual altar is at the bottom of the photo. Not every small town had a church that ornate, obviously; some were far smaller and plainer than that. But it was always wild to be in some small town of a few thousand people and it would have a church that was built in the late-medieval era and was far grander than the diocesan cathedral at home.

ANYWAY in my fic it would obviously be Adora trying to get in a word in edgewise and failing and then announcing she's going to church, and Catra would follow shortly after and just silently sit next to her. And then they'd have a discussion about the other people arguing where Adora would be like "well, they each only know the Christianity they grew up with," and Catra's like "they don't have to be assholes about it though," and then Adora's shushing her like "omg don't say things like that in a church" but she's giggling.

Ugh. I just. I don't want to write a fic where the plot ends up being "Adora and/or Catra find God." Especially given how much of the show's plot was in response to Nate's religious trauma. The fact that his trauma is from conservative Calvinism wouldn't make it any less shitty.

Lots and LOTS of non-religious people do the Camino. In fact, the people there for religious reasons are absolutely the minority these days, even if lots of other people would say "spiritual" reasons. So it wouldn't be inaccurate to leave most of the religious stuff out.

(I've repeatedly joked: The Camino is a long walk about Jesus. The amount of Jesus is optional to some extent, but if any Jesus bothers you, the Camino might not be the long walk for you.)

ANYWAY I have like six months to think about this before I could start writing it lol

[collecosplay]

All Hallow's Eve LARP by L'Chaim Games - Meiserich (my ghost OC, yes he was shot in the face)

aka "Ghost Ball! Ghost Ball!", London, 02.12.23

Photos by Astora Photography on FB

My jester took so long to make because I took inspiration from Diana Wynne Jones' 'Howl's Moving Castle' where Sophie cuts up Howl's suit into triangles and then sews it back together, so Meiserich's outer layer is all triangles.

I wanted to make Meiserich out of scraps from previous projects, so virtually all of the cost of the outfit is the time that went into it. I worked on him for six months in virtually any free minute I could find the energy for. But it was worth it.

It's not 100% historically accurate, but this outfit was designed to double as a cosplay for the Fool from Robin Hobb's 'Assassin's Apprentice' and the rest of the Farseer Trilogy. (I still have to read the other books! No spoilers please though I have seen some sneak peeks thanks to fanart <3)

More about Meiserich as a character under the cut!

Meiserich (anglicised pronunciation: My-Zer-Rick) is a colloquial German name for galium odoratum, sweet woodruff. It's a flavour you can get commonly in German desserts and schnapps (Waldmeister), but I've never come across the flavour in the UK.

Meiserich is a jester from the early 1400's and lived in a part of the Holy Roman Empire that is now Germany, namely within the Roman Catholic Diocese of Münster. At the court of Droste zur Aa Meiserich had a close relationship with Lady Klara of the keep. In 1412 this court took part in a knights' jousting tournament in Buda where the future Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund was also in attendance. Whilst there, through social occasions, Lady Klara found out and obtained evidence that Sigismund was the one who poisoned the previous King of Germany, Jobst of Moravia. She confided in Meiserich what had happened.

It comes to light that Lady Klara knows too much, so Sigismund sends soldiers to Münster to besiege the keep. Meiserich encourages his Lady to run and hide with the evidence of the poisoning. As a jester it was also Meiserich's job to act as a messenger and diplomat at times. However, the siege negotiations failed, he was shot dead with an early arquebus design and the castle was fired upon with trebuchets. Lady Klara initially survived in the rubble in an airpocket but ultimately suffocated.

Meiserich usually haunts the ruins of the castle keep he used to live in. It is now a tourist destination and he likes to tease the tourists. He also eavesdrops and through them and the keep staff learns of other things going on in the world. He has not forgotten about Lady Klara and wants to reveal the truth she uncovered to the world.

Please note: The poisoning plot is fictional, Sigismund doing this is something I made up based on some Wikipedia reading I did.

His wish to have fulfilled at the LARP was to have the keep in Münster renovated and restored, revealing the buried corpse of Lady Klara. In her hand are a vial of poison and a letter proving Sigismund was the one who poisoned the previous king of Germany, Jobst of Moravia. It will be a joy for the historians and great to hear the tour guides at the keep bring this up in perpetuity.

And he got his wish fulfilled at the game! I'm so happy. Monsieur Roc Flamboyant (a French noble, 1600's) was touched enough by Meiserich's story and devotion to Lady Klara that he made the wish for Meiserich. I could not have asked for a better end to this game.

Shout out to the podcasts that helped me put together Meiserich as a character:

Gone Medieval by History Hit

We're Not So Different - esp. episode "Medieval Fail Sons: Wenceslas IV & Sigismund"

Weird Medieval Guys - esp. episode "Sieging for Dummies"

The Court Jester by Kleio Pethainou

I'm glad I picked the early 1400's for Meiserich's death, this is still before the Western printing press, Columbus sailing off to the detriment of many, the fall of Constantinople, and the big witch hunting craze, so he died in a bygone world on the cusp of the Early Modern Period.

If I could give him one power like in BBC Ghosts, I'd say that the two bells on his hat are audible to the living.

[hell0mega]

uh oh

going to my hours-old death note post made old death note posts of mine show up as recommended, so i went through some of them, and ended up back in 2011. so i scrolled for just a second. and saw my ex. and the post still linked to his account. i thought, surely he's not using the same account. surely he's not active. i clicked. he is. last reblog 2 weeks ago. i checked JUST to make sure he didn't follow me and he doesn't. that would've been fucking WILD. but it is 5:30am and i need to go to bed before i do anything i'll definitely regret.

the girl he basically left me for (over ten years ago lmao) uuuuh died last year. they'd been broken up for a while i'm pretty sure so. but. i did consider reaching out, idk, to give my condolences? but i never did because that would be fucking weird. i also haven't spoken to him since 2013.

he really, really hurt me. he was kind of a terrible boyfriend. i'm currently the happiest i have ever been with the best fiance in the fucking universe of 9.5 years. so it's DEFINITELY not that. but. we were friends first. and there's a tiny, TINY, minuscule part of me that STILL misses that. he's a big reason why i am the way i am today, in both good and bad ways. and it would be weird to reach out regardless. it would be weird and bad. but every once in a while i'll think about it. it'll come up in my head. and this is the closest i've ever gotten to doing it, physically, i mean. like, i'd have to unblock him on fb and who knows if he blocked me back, or even checks messenger. but i actually went to his blog and he's still there.

i'm not gonna do it. i may never do it. i'm ESPECIALLY not gonna do it at 5:30am. but. i think about it. i've actually dreamt about it. we ran into each other at a restaurant and i pretended to need to take a call to meet him outside. i told him my new name and that was the extent of the dream. i remember feeling angry in it though lol. maybe i was going to tell him off. idk.

a big reason for me not doing it (other than it being a terrible fucking idea) is holy shit i can only IMAGINE what all my friends' reactions would be if i told them we reconnected. they're be like BITCH WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU OOOONNNN WHAT ARE YOU DOIIIING so i'm like. not gonna do it lol

[animehouse-moe]

June 2023 Collection Update: The Iceberg

You know the comparison I'm making here. You start at the tip of the iceberg, and think it's not too bad, then you continue working your way down.... and it just keeps going, never seeming to stop. Well, I think I've made it past the surface of the iceberg, and am staring down the absolute scale of what remains submerged. So yeah, Mt. Everest is left to climb still, but I've also got a pretty sizeable hill behind me to share.

I'll start with a haul that came in today (and one I picked up yesterday). Used manga and light novels has been a gold mine for me lately, though you do have to be careful with some listings as you might get volumes in worse conditions than they appear (though most of the time not something sandpaper can't fix).

The No Game No Life was just sorta a bonus to the Is This A Zombie?, but it actually helped bring down the cost per volume thanks to a deal I made (always try and barter for a few dollars here and there through stuff like FB Marketplace and Mercari and the like). I'd been looking for Is This A Zombie? for a while though, and was incredibly excited to come across a completed set. Though I do wish they'd bring the light novels over.

Following this up, or I guess coming before it(?), was this very interesting manga haul which is best explained as a story.

Originally, I had found a dirt cheap Rosario to Vampire manga box set on Facebook Marketplace (to the tune of 90CAD), and asked about getting more pictures because the only image was of the outside of the box set. Seller doesn't respond for a week, and then sends the image out of nowhere. I talk about going through with the sale and getting a shipping label sorted out (cause even with shipping it'd be crazy cheap). They don't respond, at least not until Thursday of last week which was about another week's wait. They say "hey, I'm going to be in your city on Sunday, are you good to meet me to pick up the set?". Immediately, I feel like I'm either going to get scammed or mugged, but it was neither. They show up with the 90 dollar box set and I leave with all my organs and my wallet alongside the box set.

Now, onto a bit of explanation. As you could tell from the images above, I'm kinda running out of space. I know, I need to get another bookshelf to store it all on, but finding the right spot for it and getting a cheaper Billy is a PITA, so instead I've been putting that focus and effort into finding more and more cool sets and series.

Like this Reiko The Zombie Shop. It's an older Josei horror series which I thought was super cool, and when I found a listing for it for just around 10CAD a vol I jumped on it. It's a very interesting piece of history to have from Dark Horse as they only printed it to the halfway point, though it's also a very intriguing read. Leans very heavy into gore and that very "serious but not all that great" story.

Equal parts crazy and cool though, this Empty Box and Zeroth Maria set. If memory serves, it was less than 10CAD a volume for such a hard to find set. Unbelievably happy to have such a well maintained set in my collection, and am 100% going to be sharing the love/set with friends.

Just a side note, the seller I got it from was super cool, as I got a partial set of Konosuba from them as well for the same price. Once more, Facebook Marketplace, so if you're looking for good deals on used series, I can't recommend checking out what's around you enough.

The good deals just keep on coming, huh. Hit the jackpot with this Rose of Versailles set. I was just going to bide my time until the end of year Indigo hardcover sale, and see if I could try my luck on finding them in store at a good price, but came across this listing for 100CAD and immediately jumped on it, since it works out to be massively cheaper than the Indigo 30% off hardcovers they do at year's end.

And I have to say, Udon hardcovers are outstanding. The Rose of Versailles of course stands at the top with it's wonderfully intricate cover design and heavy and glossy paper, but their other titles are no slouches either.

Just take a look at this Summertime Rendering (and Darling In The Franxx) set. Sometimes you'll come across things you just can't refuse. This listing was one of them. Summertime Rendering and DiTF for less than the retail of Summertime Rendering. Good deal, especially when you factor in that DiTF is still sealed, and that the seller never read Summertime Rendering.

But at the same time, getting books in conditions like this feels a bit sad almost. The seller was getting rid of their collection because they needed to repay students loans, so a lot of it was untouched and at very cheap prices. If I were to go back and do it again, I probably would have just sent money to them rather than purchased the sets, as I feel somewhat guilty having these when I'm able to pay retail for them no problem. But I can't revisit the past, so at the very least I'm glad I had the humility to not try and work them down on price, and will certainly be reading them over and over (DiTF is still on the TBR list right now though).

And last but not least for the used hauls, this super weird set. I got the whole thing for 5CAD a volume, which is a pretty great deal, and includes a lot of interesting things. Hidamari Sketch (I refuse to call it Sunshine Sketch), GA Geijutsuka Art Design Class and Bamboo Blade (not shown), and this very odd helping of loose stuff that includes an old style Seven Seas LN, a child's manga, and a very unique volume from a defunct publisher.

I couldn't help but go for it when I saw the oddities and old series that were within. Hidamari Sketch in particular is a headache and a half to collect, and I'd never even seen a volume of Iono-Sama Fanatics before. Very cool stuff, and definitely things I wanted to share. I never even knew Seven Seas used to print light novels so small, and seeing the difference in paper quality circa Spring 2010 was very interesting as well.

Now, last but not least, Jojos. I waited a very long time to buy these at retail, and am incredibly sad that the box for Jojoveller came crumpled in that one corner (already talked it out with support, and got a refund on it), but thankfully the books inside are intact. But man, these things are cool as all hell, I'll absolutely be sharing a post of them (alongside Jojo 6521) down the road.

And that's where I am, collecting an insane number of series and art books, and continuing to realize just how wide this world of manga is that I've immersed myself in. It's incredibly daunting thinking about the numbers I'm racking up, but at the same time it's such an amazing hobby that I'm able to support. There's a world of stuff out there, and I want to experience that all.

[ashen-crest]

a stats report on the rk ashwick books (as of April 2023)

some folks responded positively to the idea of seeing data on how my books have done (for indie author research and benchmark purposes), so here you go!

I'll put everything under the cut:

📚 What do I write?

Cozy fantasy romance under the pen name R.K. Ashwick.

📚 Why do I write?

Because I love it. I have a full-time job that isn't related to writing, so I write in my spare time. I should also note that I do not have dependents, am not a caregiver, and I do have anxiety and ADHD. I am not certain that I want to be a full-time writer, given the financial instability and the joy it could take away from writing. However, I want my books to be and perform the best they can, so I try to be professional about my product and methods.

(To me, this is all important context to be up-front about. Finances, family size, and health all have a huge impact on an author's goals and strategies.)

📚 How many books do I have out?

The Stray Spirit: released August 2022. First in a planned trilogy.

A Rival Most Vial: released March 2023. First in a planned trilogy.

📚 Online Visibility

Here's what I have going on:

Paid:

Website (requires $ for hosting)

BookFunnel for newsletter promos, sales promos, and ARC distribution (site requires $ to join)

Unpaid:

Newsletter (currently managing on free version of Mailerlite, since I'm under 1000 followers)

Facebook page (not consistently maintained, mostly for SEO)

Instagram, posting 5x/wk

TikTok, posting 5k/wk

Tumblr- hi!

using things like LibraryThing, GoodReads forums, Reddit, and FB pages to find more ARC readers

I was doing Amazon ads, but recently nixed them, as I didn't feel they were really getting me anything. I'll likely return to them once I have more books out.

A Note on Follower Count: I have, like 10 FB followers, 400-ish Insta followers, 1500 TikTok folders, and almost 1600 Tumblr followers. I've been on Tumblr the longest and TikTok second longest. TikTok had the fastest growth, Insta the slowest. However, general advice is that engagement rate is more important than follower count. I'll be real, I'm not doing that hot on that front. I'll consistently get around 20 likes on Insta posts and TikTok often caps my video views at around 200 or 300. The videos that do the best on TT often aren't the ones related to my books. Fun times.

A Note on Newsletter Stats: I have a pretty consistent open rate of 25-30%, which I think is okay. I'd like for it to be closer to 40%. (It's also hard to actually track open rates, so that number isn't entirely reliable.)

A Note on ARC Reader Stats: I got 100 readers for TSS and almost 200 for ARMV. This resulted in a ballpark count of 20 reviews for TSS and 30 reviews for ARMV around release time.

📚 Other Marketing Strategies

What you see above under Visibility is my ongoing work. I also do more limited-run strategies, like:

occasional free book giveaways on social media

pre-order gifts for my book

I sent out around 20 pre-order gift envelopes for TSS and 45 for ARMV. I operate the pre-order gifts at a loss, but I really enjoy doing it, so I'm okay with it. I also have lots of leftover stickers and bookmarks that I can bundle with giveaways.

📚 Distribution

I distribute wide through:

Amazon: both ebook and paperback

IngramSpark: paperback only

Draft2Digital: ebook only

📚 Orders & Royalties

So, what did all this work and shennanery get me?

From July 2022-April 2023 (10 months):

Books Sold: 575

Total Royalties, paid and unpaid: $1543.49 ($2.68 per book)

📚 Is that good or bad?

I have no idea!! And I think in the end, it all depends on your goals.

If my goal was to make a living: welp, it's def not enough.

If my goal was to break even: between website set up, DBA set up, cover cost, editing cost, illustrator cost: nah. I'd have to make about $4,000 more to safely say I've broken even.

If my goal was to get strangers, and not just family and friends, to read my books: oh hey, I did that!!

I hope this information helps you set a goal, so you're not mentally wandering around like I am.

📚 Other Notes

A big factor in having a financially successful indie book is fitting genre conventions in your chosen subgenre, or 'writing to market.' I will say that A Rival Most Vial is more written to market than The Stray Spirit is. The Stray Spirit sort of straddles cozy, historical, and academic fantasy without actually leaning in to any of those things, so it's a little harder to market.

I also spent a lot on cover, editing, and illustration. That makes it harder to be a financially viable business, but it's what I wanted to do to have a strong finished product. I am lucky in that my full-time job can cover these expenses.

I'm not very good at social media. I've never had anything go viral on any of the sites.

The most rewarding part of all this is seeing how people react to the book: reviews, videos where they're almost crying over the book, podcast invitations, and [something a bit bigger than I'll announce in the summer.] At the end of the day, if I have a small group of buyers who are vocal in engaging with my books, that's far more rewarding than a large group of buyers who don't engage.

📚 Parting Thoughts

I'm happy to talk about any and all aspects of my self-publishing experience. If you have more questions or want more details, feel free to reply, send an ask, or DM me!

[shpadoinkle-day]

hi again!! its 1st time cannibal the musical watcher again- i might start signing my asks or somethin cus i keep wanting to talk but like you're always sharing such obscure random stuff.. DO YOU HAVE A FAVORITE THING YOU'VE DISCOVERED OR FOUND?? specific quote of an interview or a particular photo you've found ???

hiii anon lovely to see you back! feel free to tag yourself if you prefer that way, but either way you're much appreciated 🥰

I have so much stuff I found (I'd say it more like... was lucky to run into while researching 😵‍💫) that I love, but to name a few...

"My lovely wife Matt Stone" aka Trey's BOM speech from Feb 25 2013 at the first west end preview. How I found this: So, sometimes when I'm bored I'll pick a random mattrey blog that's been active for a long time, open an old post from their archive, see if there's old inactive mattrey blogs in the notes, and look through their archive to see if there's any posts I could make resurface that had stopped circulating, right? The funny thing is I'll go on reblog sprees, so I actually hadn't listened to the audio when I reblogged it. I was only informed of what it said when I saw others freak out about it.

Daily Show with Craig Kilborn. Why it's my fav? Well, aside from being adorable and iconic, it landed my youtube channel in the lost media wiki! How I found it is actually quite easy, when you look up fansites on the web archive you can do specific search for the files the web archive has saved from it. Turns out sometimes quicktime files work! Four parts were in canniballovers and one in dtisfu if I remember correctly, I just edited them together and posted it. Still wish someone could find it in better quality though. 😔

I'm gonna list a bunch of pictures now... because there's many. 😭 But my absolute N1 is probably the Halloween Robert Smith Trey picture. How I found it is simple, just looking up random words on facebook. Probably "trey parker", nothing special. This and this from the Ron Jeremy website on the web archive, though I think maybe the second one had already been circulating I'm not exactly sure. Showgirl Halloween Trey. The kiss pictures. Pink haired Trey!! This NATPE (?) picture. These older Trey pics where he's serving absolute cunt. This Lapdance/Sundance (?) pic. And these too. This reverse cap one altho this was from twitter I don't think I was the first to come across it tbh. These three from the "A Million Laughs" fb page... Bowl hat... Trey with the blue umbrella full pic... tho I wouldn't say I "found it" only that I got to it first the day it was posted... Trey in the matching christmas pajama from 2018... I'm gonna stop but my heart is pretty big and I like all pics...

These measly 7 secs of SDCC footage only because of the first mattrey pic included because that pose from Trey is everythinggg.

This oscars clip because Trey does such a graceful hair flip 😭

Le Petit Package pics though all I did was waltz into the lost media thread and see they had been posted...

The forbidden mattrey slides which we may never see... these were all from worthpoint, which is just a website that archives past ebay bids.

Annual Diversity Awards for the Trey serve ofc.

And finally, I'm very partial to "Matt's a cock".

As to how I come across anything... it's lots of free time. Like I'm talking hours daily just picking a random lead and following it. It may be a website you think hasn't been thoroughly searched (I've tried fb, ig, twitter, worthpoint, ebay, wordpress, tripod, weebly, various fansites on webarchive, footage.net, bilibili/baidu, vimeo, dailymotion, flickr, a load of sketchy other websites I don't remember anymore... basically trey parker has brought me to places I wouldn't go with a gun...) a combination of words, a new search engine that may give u different results (I've tried the ones listed in the lost media wiki guide, my favorite is startpage). Using targeted searching like "word" or site:x "word" or "word combo" before:year, basically trying to make google your bitch. I also use gettyimages like a visual wiki of events Trey's been to+the date, it's quite useful... ik you didn't ask the "how" part but aaaa I like talking about it 😭 I have a lot of fun. Even though sometimes I just come up empty handed even after hours of research. More often than not tbh. Also I'm an obsessed weirdo who checks the words "trey parker" daily on twitter, tumblr, ig, fb, yt, web archive and ebay. 🫠

And also the concept of finding is weird because it has happened to me that I thought I had found something and then it actually had been circulating already, so I tried really hard to answer you by only listing stuff I was fairly sure hadn't been circulating before I got to it, but I mean... it doesn't really matter! I'm here to serve, I just like sharing whatever stuff I run into, it'll happen that it's new to me but it really isn't. 😵‍💫 I try...

I like this too also but I didn't find it, it was pretty available already fjdkg you know Jack Shih was at that dodgeball event?

Favorite funfact that I haven't had a chance to share yet, so now you know!

[danthediamondminecart]

could you share some facts/headcanons about the clones of the hosts? :3 (or just recoded idc)

I can! But just note, I have less headcanons about these guys,,,though there is a certain thing I'm working on that once it's out I can talk more about these guys in that thing haha

Recoded (Russo)

Moreso a robot programmed to act like Russo than a flesh and blood clone. Hence, 'robot clones'. He was only successful compared to the Great Woman due to Mr B's assistance.

Loyal to JP to a fault. He's aware he's a robot and that's his creator, of course he's going to be loyal.

Probably wants to take over Russo's place permanently rather than temporarily. He'd absolutely adore the spotlight.

Recoded was supposed to be present in the final battle with the taxi, and then if/when the player destroyed the clone and the hosts got on it, Recoded would have turned on the hosts and JP could attack you with his assistance.

In the canon timeline, he isn't aware of the Great Woman's existence. He thinks he's the first clone that JP created and that JP has loyalty in return to him. He is wrong. JP would absolutely betray him if it meant getting ahead.

--> Russo makes this very clear to him during the final battle, when he stole the keys to the taxi and returned back to the hosts, by informing him about the Great Woman's existence. By force. Using the robotic resonators.

Due to his failure in the final battle, JP imprisoned him in the maze alongside the Great Woman. This is a perfect recipe to get an angry robot clone on their ass if he is ever freed, but JP is filled with hubris.

Guns Blazing is his theme tune.

If he's present in AUs, he's Russo's twin brother. He's present in the Superhero AU currently, I haven't figured out his place in the other AUs I have

The Great Woman (Sabrina)

I'm gonna refer to her as GW because I'm not writing out Great Woman multiple times

She was JP's first attempt at robot cloning a host, which failed miserably. This is why they kidnapped Mr B in the Hunt event (I HC that takes place between S2 and S3) to try to improve their programming for their attempt at a Russo clone.

She basically just,,,could not contain the sentience. I'm not perfectly sure what caused her to break, but she went crazy pretty quickly and is now a feral robot wandering the halls of that maze thing.

She's sentient enough to like...understand English and be able to write, just vaguely murderous. (See, that note that I can't find an image of and I don't want to go through the FB again to find it)

When Recoded gets stuck with her, she's actually rather nice to him - well, as nice as a murderous robot can be anyway. Kindred spirits and allat.

Even if she had worked as she should've initally, she would've failed and gone mad eventually.

She's not really present in many of my AUs, but she is present in the TMA AU (the revamp) as a Not-Sabrina. She's not alive anymore though. DJ made sure of that.

[tina-mairin-goldstein]

@sarcasticsciencefictionwriter tagged me! Thanks for the tag!

How many fics do you have on AO3?

20.

2. What's your total word count on AO3?

211,799.

3. What fandoms do you write for?

Hannibal (TV), Fantastic Beasts, Doctor Strange, and Pokémon.

4. What are your top five fics by kudos?

His Shadow Suspended on Dust (Hannibal TV, Will/Hannibal)- 182

Autumnal (Hannibal TV, Will/Hannibal)- 154

For Remembrance (Holes in the Floor of the Mind) (Hannibal TV, Will/Hannibal)- 71

Estivel (Hannibal TV, Will/Hannibal)- 70

The Kissing Bough- 45

5. Do you respond to comments?

Yes, I do! When I first started out, I was very nervous and shy, so I didn't always, but I try to respond to every comment. Unless you pester me about updating. I'm not going to respond to any of those any more.

6. What is the fic you wrote with the angstiest ending?

No Man in the Mirror (Fantastic Beasts)- It's about Percival Graves thinking of the man he was before Grindelwald, and deciding that man was gone, hence the title. He no longer sees that man in the mirror, no longer sees anyone.

Or, Haven't Been the Same (Since I Expired), another FB Percival story where his identity has been stripped away, and he, um, sort of steals Grindelwald's, becoming Grindelwald himself.

7. What is the fic you wrote with the happiest ending?

Hmm, I think it would depend on how you classify it, so here are the three:

More (Harry Potter, Luna/Rolf)- Luna and Rolf get their twins at the end, after suffering through a lot of heartache to have them.

The Kissing Bough (Fantastic Beasts, Newt/Tina)- It's a SOD ending extended scene with a Newtina kiss. So that's happy, I guess.

For Remembrance (Holes in the Floor of the Mind) (Hannibal TV, Will/Hannibal)- Uh, won't spoil, but after Hannibal gets amnesia, they eventually get to a happy place.

8. Do you get hate on fics?

Not so far.

9. Do you write smut? If so, what kind?

Nope, don't write smut. I recently wrote two sex scenes in La Sposa del Mostro, but I don't think they count as smut. They weren't particularly detailed. Kind of cringe, actually, but I've got a body count of zero, so that's to be expected.

10. Do you write crossovers? If so, what's the craziest one?

Another hard one! I would say probably my Hannibal/Caraval crossover, or one that's in the early stages with Hannibal/The Third Day (HBO). Probably the latter, considering I have not actually seen The Third Day, just snippets, though both have psychological things that tie in nicely.

Oh, wait, or my Pokémon Anime/The Jewel by Amy Ewing. It's like a magical, less graphic version of The Handmaid's Tale crossed over with Pokémon XYZ anime. So yeah, that one's crazy.

11. Have you ever had a fic stolen?

Not to my knowledge.

12. Have you ever had a fic translated?

Not that I know of.

13. Have you ever co-written a fic?

Trying to with sarcasticsciencefiction writer, but I think I'm just going to have to suck it up and write the Winchester boys myself.

14. What's your all time favorite ship?

I'm dividing this between straight and gay couples, because it's tied.

Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter and Newt Scamander/Tina Goldstein (closely followed by The Ancient One/Kaecilius).

15. What are your writing strengths?

Violence, action, gore, certain emotions.

16. What are your writing weaknesses?

Humor, certain emotions, romance.

17. Thoughts writing dialogue in another language?

I like putting it in, especially when I have a character whose native language isn't English, or if they know a lot of different languages. I'll place a note at the bottom with the translation.

18. First fandom you wrote for?

Pokémon Adventures. My favorite childhood fandom.

19. Favorite fic you've written?

Oh, wwwwhhhhhhhhhhyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy?

His Shadow Suspended on Dust (Hannibal TV, post-fall Will/Hannibal omega verse). I love the tone I got it set in, even if I don't really like writing from Jack's POV.

(Beneath the Brine, my first Hannibal fic, will always have a special place, though)

No-pressure tagging- @keepmeinmind-01, @creative-girl, @pragnificent, @inastarlesssky, and any of my other mutuals who write fics (I don't know if you do, to be honest).