#Sterling Industries

[theslimeologist]

Its viscerally upsetting that our preferences are apparently respected but we’re all automatically opted in for tumblr’s AI 3rd party “partners” to supposedly scrape our posts and content? L O L

BLOG SETTINGS -> VISIBILITY -> ENABLE “PREVENT 3RD PARTY SHARING”

If you’re on mobile *you must first update the tumblr app*

THIS MUST BE DONE FOR EVERY INDIVIDUAL PUBLIC BLOG YOU HAVE

[professionalgeekgirly]

the new seasons of Industry and Slow Horses being on at the same time is extremely therapeutic for me because no matter how bad of a day I’m having, Rob and River are having a worse one

[isthissoup]

Steph has been one of the only people reporting on the video game industry that I trust for years now. Most of gaming “journalism” is just advertising, and Steph’s commitment to effectively (and entertainingly) reporting on the actual state and conditions of the industry is so admirable. I cannot more highly recommend her work, especially to anybody who plays games and cares about workers rights.

Caring about gaming means caring about the people who make games, not the companies who employ them.

All skirt/dress wearers when we discover they have functional pockets 😍

[murkyhazed]

veronica sterling edit 1/?

© @murkyhazed

[yondamoegi]

Nintendo's $80 Games Give Greed A Green Light

[quantaprocess]

Sterling Oil and Gas: A Key Player in the Energy Sector

The global demand for energy continues to rise, making the oil and gas industry one of the most critical sectors in the world. Among the key players driving this change is Sterling Oil and Gas, a company known for its dedication to innovation, sustainability, and operational excellence. This article will explore the role of Sterling Oil and Gas in the energy industry.

The Role of Sterling Oil and Gas in the Industry

Sterling Oil and Gas is a prominent player in the oil and gas sector, specializing in the exploration, extraction, and distribution of energy resources. With its dedication to providing reliable and cost-effective energy solutions, the company has established itself as a trusted name in the industry.

As the world increasingly moves towards sustainable energy, Sterling Oil and Gas continues to prioritize environmental responsibility while fulfilling energy needs. The company works on developing new technologies and strategies to minimize environmental impacts while maximizing energy production.

Services That Engineering Consultants Provide

Design & Feasibility Studies – Ensuring cost-effective and practical solutions for projects.

Process Automation – Improving efficiency through advanced technology.

Regulatory Compliance – Helping companies adhere to safety and environmental standards.

Energy Efficiency Strategies – Reducing waste and improving sustainability.

Conclusion

As the demand for energy continues to rise globally, companies like Sterling Oil and Gas play a vital role in providing reliable, sustainable energy solutions. By collaborating with engineering consultants such as Quanta Process Solutions, they ensure operational efficiency, safety, and environmental responsibility. With a focus on continuous innovation and sustainability, Sterling Oil and Gas is well-positioned to address the evolving challenges of the energy sector and contribute to a sustainable energy future.

[creekfiend]

something that drives me insane on a relatively regular basis as a body jewelry understander is talking to people who have sensitive skin who are like "oh well I just can't wear any earrings without my ears getting inflamed" and I say "well what have you tried" and they say "well I've tried sterling silver and I've tried gold..." and it's like. ok. I don't know how gold and sterling somehow got spun by the jewelry industry as being especially good for sensitive skin but whenever I'm like "well have you tried implant grade titanium" they're always like "no....... but I've tried sterling silver... and it didn't work ..." like. I don't know how this narrative about sterling silver somehow got so strong but when they put pins in your fucking legs when you snap your leg in half are those pins made of sterling silver or are they made of implant grade titanium or surgical steel????????? HELLO. HI. YOU MIGHT BENEFIT FROM TRYING IMPLANT GRADE TITANIUM I AM JUST SAYING

[howyouducan]

The One Where Microsoft Admits Game Studios Are F*cked (The Jimquisition)

[grlsbstshot]

Hi! We're B & S! If you've found your way here, it's for a reason. Let's get the official stuff out of the way:

Disclaimer: These fics are intended for mature audiences (18+ only) due to themes, language, and explicit content. The content on the blog is not safe for work. We are not responsible if minors choose to ignore this warning. By proceeding, you confirm that you are of the proper age to engage with this content. Respect the Content Warnings: The stories and one-shots written on this blog by us may include sensitive topics, themes, or character behavior. Please check any content warnings provided before reading. They will always be at the start of the post. Be sure to read them carefully before proceeding. Updates: Due to work schedules and other activities, updates may not always be frequent, but patience is appreciated. Encouragement: Please feel free to reblog, comment, etc. on posts and story updates. We absolutely would love to read comments and geek out with everyone. Commentary: While we do love hearing from you guys, please refrain from using slurs or the like about our characters. Especially the women. Don't call black women monkeys or whores. Especially not on this blog. You will be blocked.

Masterlist below the cut !

NEON LIGHTS Novella - Chapters

In the glitzy world of Hollywood, it can be easy to crash and burn under the California sun. Few are more self-sabotaging than R&B singer/songwriter, Jameson Lucas. The only thing the charming playboy is known for more than his long list of lovers is his Grammy wins. Imani St. Cirie, an emotive singer/songwriter herself, is the latest in a long line of women he's wronged but she's determined to different. Imani refuses to let Jameson make or break her. The two A-listers are consistently drawn together by an electric chemistry that neither can deny or easily manage. As common sense pulls them in opposite directions -- friendships are tested, old flames resurface, and new opportunities threaten to tear them apart for good. They must decide if their love is strong enough to withstand the weight of the mistakes in their past. In this industry, dreams can make or break you -- but what happens when love becomes the gamble of a lifetime?

Chapters:

Chapter I | Chapter II | Chapter III Chapter IV | Chapter V | Chapter VI Chapter VII | Chapter VIII | Chapter IX Chapter X | Chapter XI | Chapter XII Chapter XIII | Chapter XIV | Chapter XV Chapter XVI | Chapter XVII | Chapter XVIII Epilogue

Extra, Extra:

Gossip Patrol | RHYTHM Interview | Gossip Patrol Pt. 2The Crashout | PAPER Interview | Gossip Patrol Pt. 3 Gossip Patrol Pt. 4 | Therapy, Baby

Music Releases:

Imani: Diary | EP Jameson: Midnight & Dawn | Album

Main Cast:

Aaron Pierre as Jameson Lucas Megan Pete as Imani St. Cirie Jayme Lawson as Genie Adesanya Kelvin Harrison Jr. as Ellington Dupree

Supporting Cast:

Lori Harvey as Sloane Lennox Kofi Siriboe as Christian McKay Kysre Gondrezick as Camille Leferve Skepta as Isaiah Ellis

Guest Appearances:

Halle Berry as Ana��s Lucas, Jameson's mother Beyoncé Knowles-Carter as Toni St. Cirie, Imani's aunt Sterling K. Brown as Kendrick Adesanya, Genie's father Nia Long as Nina Dupree, EJ's mother Marsai Martin as Ella Dupree, EJ's sister Michael Ealy as Julian Gautreau, Jameson's father Marcus Scribner as Lucian Gautreau, Julian & Toni's son

LOVE LANGUAGE Novella - Chapters

Overcoming emotional obstacles and family dysfunction, Genie and EJ prepare for their lavish Parisian wedding. The couple and their loved ones arrive in Paris the week before the big day. Beneath the glamorous façade of wedding plans simmers a deep-seated tension and a little calculated sabotage goes a long way to shatter the joyful occasion. As Genie navigates the turmoil of her fractured family unit, Camille Leferve stands on the precipice of a life-altering revelation. The truth about the father of her unborn child emerges and she has to pick up the pieces of her life as Kendrick’s guilt threatens to swallow him whole. After a fateful encounter, Jameson stumbles upon a shocking family secret when he meets his younger brother, Lucian. The revelation of Lucian’s origins – a concealed affair between Imani’s aunt and Jameson’s father – sends shockwaves through their lives, challenging their perceptions of loyalty and family connections. As the wedding day draws near, the city becomes a stage for a crescendo of secrets and revelations, each poised to collide with explosive force at any moment.

Chapters:

Chapter I | Chapter II | Chapter III Chapter IV | Chapter V | Chapter VI Chapter VII | Chapter VIII | Chapter IX Chapter X | Chapter XI | Chapter XII Epilogue

Main Cast:

Aaron Pierre as Jameson Lucas Megan Pete as Imani St. Cirie Jayme Lawson as Genie Adesanya Kelvin Harrison Jr. as Ellington Dupree

Supporting Cast:

Lori Harvey as Sloane Lennox Kofi Siriboe as Christian McKay Kysre Gondrezick as Camille Leferve Marcus Scribner as Lucian Gautreau

Guest Appearances:

Halle Berry as Anaïs Lucas, Jameson's mother Beyoncé Knowles-Carter as Toni St. Cirie, Imani's aunt Sterling K. Brown as Kendrick Adesanya, Genie's father Nia Long as Nina Dupree, EJ's mother Marsai Martin as Ella Dupree, EJ's sister Michael Ealy as Julian Gautreau, Jameson's father

ONE-SHOTS Short Stories

A collection of standalone moments from the lives of various characters. These snapshots delve into untold encounters and fleeting drama.

Make Her Mine

Model-turned-actress-turned-hotshot publicist, Toni St. Cirie, puts her career first over any man. But what happens when actor, Nasir Holmes, enters her life hoping to become her next beau? Cast: Beyoncé Knowles-Carter as Toni St. Cirie Lucky Daye as Nasir Holmes

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Petard, Part III

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

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/01/miskatonic-networks/#landlord-telco-industrial-complex

Last week, Trump's FCC chair Brendan Carr reversed a rule that banned your landlord from taking kickbacks in exchange for forcing you to use whatever ISP was willing to pay the biggest bribe for the right to screw you over:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/fcc-chair-nixes-plan-to-boost-broadband-competition-in-apartment-buildings/

Corporate fascists and their captured regulators are, of course, that most despicable of creatures: they are plagiarists. Like so many of our tech overlords, they have mistaken dystopian sf as a suggestion, rather than as a warning. I take this personally, because I actually wrote this as an sf story in 2013, and it was published in 2014 in MIT Tech Review's Twelve Tomorrows, edited by Bruce Sterling and published in 2014:

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262535595/twelve-tomorrows-2014/

I adapted it for my podcast, in four installments:

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_278

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_292

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_293

https://archive.org/details/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_294_-_Petard_04

And, given the new currency of this old story, I thought it was only fitting that I serialize it here, on my blog, also in four parts.

Here's part one:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/30/landlord-telco-industrial-complex/#part-one

Here's part two:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/31/the-blood-speech/#part-two

And now, onto part three:

One of the early Ftp code contributors was now CTO for an ISP, and they'd gotten their start as a dorm co-op at Brown that had metastasized across New England. Sanjay had been pretty important to the early days of Ftp, helping us get the virtualization right so that it could run on pretty much any cloud without a lot of jiggery and/or pokery. Within a day of emailing Sanjay, I was having coffee with the vice-president of business development for Miskatonic Networks, who was also Sanjay's boyfriend's girlfriend, because apparently ISPs in New England are hotbeds of Lovecraft-fandom polyamory. Her name was Kadijah and she had a southie accent so thick it was like an amateur theater production of Good Will Hunting.

"The Termite Mound?" She laughed. "Shit yeah, I know that place. It's still standing? I went to some super sketchy parties there when I was a kid, I mean sooooper sketchy, like sketch-a-roony. I can't believe no one's torched the place yet."

"Not yet," I said. "And seeing as all my stuff's there right now, I'm hoping that no one does for the time being."

"Yeah, I can see that." I could not get over her accent. It was the most Bostonian thing I'd encountered since I got off the train. "OK, so you want to know what we'd charge to provide service to someone at the Termite Mound?"

"Uh, no. I want to know what you'd charge per person if we could get you the whole Mound — every unit in the residence. All 250 of them."

"Oh." She paused a second. "This is an Ftp thing, right?"

"Yeah," I said. "That's how I know Sanjay. I, uh, I started Ftp." I don't like to brag, but sometimes it makes sense in the context of the conversation, right?

"That was you? Wicked! So you're seriously gonna get the whole dorm to sign up with us?"

"I will if you can get me a price that I can sell to them," I said.

"Oh," she said. Then "Oh! Right. Hmm. Leave it with me. You say you can get them all signed up?"

"I think so. If the price is right. And I think that if the Termite Mound goes with you that there'll be other dorms that'll follow. Maybe a lab or two," I said. I was talking out of my ass at this point, but seriously, net-censorship in the labs at MIT? It was disgusting. It could not stand.

"Damn," she said. "Sounds like you're majoring in Ftp. Don't you have classes or something?"

"No," I said. "This is basically exactly what I figured college would be like. A cross between summer camp and an Stanford obedience experiment. If all I wanted to do was cram a bunch of knowledge into my head, I could have stayed home and mooced it. I came here because I wanted to level up and fight something tough and even dangerous. I want to spend four years getting into the right kind of trouble. Going to classes too, but seriously, classes? Whatever. Everyone knows the good conversations happen in the hallway between the formal presentations. Classes are just an excuse to have hallways."

She looked skeptical and ate banana bread.

"It's your deal," she said.

I could hear the but hanging in the air between us. She went and got more coffees and brought them back along with toasted banana bread dripping with butter for me. She wouldn't let me pay, and told me it was on Miskatonic. We were a potential big account. She didn't want to say "But" because she might offend me. I wanted to hear the "but."

"But?"

"But what?"

"It's my deal but…?"

"But, well, you know, you don't look after your grades, MIT'll put you out on your ass. That's how it works in college. I've seen it."

I chewed my banana bread.

"Hey," she said. "Hey. Are you OK, Lukasz?"

"I'm fine," I said.

She smiled at me. She was pretty. "But?"

I told her about my talk with AA, and about Juanca, and about how I felt like nobody was giving me my propers, and she looked very sympathetic, in a way that made me feel much younger. Like toddler younger.

"MIT is all about pranks, right? I think if I could come up with something really epic, they'd –" And as I said it, I realized how dumb it was. They laughed at me in Vienna, I'll show them! "You know what? Forget about it. I got more important things to do than screw around with those knob-ends. Work to do, right? Get the network opened up around here, you and me, Kadijah!"

"Don't let it get to you, you'll give yourself an aneurism. I'll get back to you soon, OK?"

#

I fished a bead out of my pocket and wedged it into my ear.

"Who is this?"

"Lukasz?" The voice was choked with tears.

"Who is this?" I said again.

"It's Bryan." I couldn't place the voice or the name.

"Bryan who?"

"From the Termite Mound's customer service desk." Then I recognized the voice. It was the elf, and he was having hysterics. Part of me wanted to say, Oh, diddums! and hang up. Because elves, AMR? But I'm not good at tough love.

"What's wrong?"

"They've fired me," he said. "I got called into my boss's office an hour ago and he told me to start drawing up a list of people to kick out of the dorm — he wanted the names of people who supported you. I was supposed to go through the EULAs for the dorm and find some violations for all of them –"

"What if they didn't have any violations?"

He made a sound between a sob and a laugh. "Are you kidding? You're always in violation! Have you read the EULA for the Mound? It's like sixty pages long."

"OK, gotcha. So you refused and you got fired?"

There was a pause. It drew out. "No," he said, his voice barely a whisper. "I gave them a bunch of names, and then they fired me."

Again, I was torn between the impulse to hang up on him and to hear more. Nosiness won (nosiness always wins; bets on nosiness are a sure thing). "Nicely done. Sounds like just deserts to me. What do you expect me to do about it?" But I knew. There were only two reasons to call me after something like this: to confess his sins or to get revenge. And no one would ever mistake me for a priest.

"I've got the names they pulled. Not just this time. Every time there's been any kind of trouble in the Termite Mound, MIT Residence has turfed out the troublemakers on some bogus EULA violation. They know that no one cares about student complaints, and there's always a waiting list for rooms at the Termite Mound, it's so central and all. I kept records."

"What kind of records?"

"Hardcopies of emails. They used disappearing ink for all the dirty stuff, but I just took pictures of my screen with my drop and saved it to personal storage. It's ugly. They went after pregnant girls, kids with disabilities. Any time there was a chance they'd have to do an air quality audit or fix a ramp, I'd have to find some reason to violate the tenant out of residence." He paused a moment. "They used some pretty bad language when they talked about these people, too."

The Termite Mound should've been called the Roach Motel: turn on the lights and you'd find a million scurrying bottom-feeders running for the baseboards.

I was going to turn on the lights.

"You've got all that, huh?

"Tons of it," he said. "Going back three years. I knew that if it ever got out that they'd try and blame it on me. I wanted records."

"OK," I said. "Meet me in Harvard Square, by the T entrance. How soon can you get there?"

"I'm at the Coop right now," he said. "Using a study-booth."

"Perfect," I said. "Five minutes then?"

"I'm on my way."

The Coop's study booths had big signs warning you that everything you did there was recorded — sound, video, infrared, data — and filtered for illicit behavior. The signs explained that there was no human being looking at the records unless you did something to trip the algorithm, like that made it better. If a tree falls in the forest, it sure as shit makes a sound; and if your conversation is bugged, it's bugged — whether or not a human being listens in right then or at some time in the infinite future of that data.

I beat him to the T entrance, and looked around for a place to talk. It wasn't good. From where I stood, I could see dozens of cameras, the little button-sized dots discretely placed all around the square, each with a little scannable code you could use to find out who got the footage and what it's policy was. No one ever, ever, ever bothered to do this. Ever. EULAs were not written for human consumption: a EULA's message could always be boiled down to seven words: "ABANDON HOPE, ALL YE WHO ENTER HERE." Or, more succinctly: "YOU LOSE."

I felt bad about Bryan's job. It was his own deal, of course. He'd stayed even after he knew how evil they were. And I hadn't held a gun to his head and made him put himself in the firing line. But of course, I had convinced him to. I had led him to. I felt bad.

Bryan turned up just as I was scouting a spot at an outdoor table by an ice-cream parlor. They had a bunch of big blowing heaters that'd do pretty good white-noise masking, a good light/dark contrast between the high-noon sun and the shade of the awning that would screw up cameras' white-balance, and the heaters would wreak havoc on the infra-red range of the CCTVs, or so I hoped. I grabbed Bryan, clamping down on his skinny arm through the rough weave of his forest-green cloak and dragged him into my chosen spot.

"You got it?" I said, once we were both seated and nursing hot chocolates. I got caffeinated marshmallows; he got Thai ghost pepper-flavored — though that was mostly marketing, no way those marshmallows were over a couple thousand Scovilles.

"I encrypted it with your public key," he said, handing me a folded up paper. I unfolded it and saw that it had been printed with a stegoed QR code, hidden in a Victorian woodcut. That kind of spycraft was pretty weaksauce — the two-dee-barcode-in-a-public-domain-image thing was a staple of shitty student clickbait thrillers — but if he'd really managed to get my public key and verify it and then encrypt the blob with it, I was impressed. That was about ten million times more secure than the average fumbledick ever managed. The fact that he'd handed me a hardcopy of the URL instead of emailing it to me, well, that was pretty sweet frosting. Bryan had potential.

I folded the paper away. "What should I be looking for?"

"It's all organized and tagged. You'll see." He looked nervous. "What are you going to do with it?"

"Well, for starters, I'm going to call them up and tell them I have it."

"What?" He looked like he was going to cry.

"Come on," I said. "I'm not going to tell them where I got it. The way you tell it, I'm about to get evicted, right?"

"Technically, you are evicted. There's a process-server waiting at every entrance to the Termite Mound doing face-recognition on the whole list. Soon as you go home, bam. 48 hours to clear out."

"Right," I said. "I don't want to have to go look for a place to live while I'm also destroying these shitbirds and fixing everyone's Internet connection. Get serious. So I'm going to go and talk to Messrs Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral and explain that I have a giant dump of compromising messages from them that I'm going public with, and it'll look really, really bad for them if they turf me out now."

It's time for a true confession. I am not nearly as brave as I front. All this spycraft stuff, all the bluster about beating these guys on their home turf, yeah, in part I'm into it — I like it better than riding through life like a foil chip-bag being swept down a polluted stream on a current of raw sewage during a climate-change-driven superstorm.

But the reality is that I can't really help myself. There's some kind of rot-fungus that infects the world. Things that are good when they're small and personal grow, and as they grow, their attack-surface grows with them, and they get more and more colonized by the fungus, making up stupid policies, doing awful stuff to the people who rely on them and the people who work for them, one particle of fungus at a time, each one just a tiny and totally defensible atomic-sized spoor of rot that piles up and gloms onto all the other bits of rot until you're a walking, suppurating lesion.

No one ever set out to create the kind of organization that needs to post a "MIT RESIDENCY LLC OPERATES A ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICY TOWARD EMPLOYEE ABUSE. YOU CAN BE FINED UP TO $2000 AND/OR IMPRISONED FOR SIX MONTHS FOR ASSAULTING A CAMPUS RESIDENCE WORKER" sign. You start out trying to do something good, then your realize you can get a little richer by making it a little worse. Your thermostat for shittiness gets reset to the new level, so it doesn't seem like much of a change to turn it a notch further towards the rock-bottom, irredeemably shitty end of the scale.

The truth is that you can get really rich and huge by playing host organism to the rot-fungus. The rot-fungus diffuses its harms and concentrates its rewards. That means that healthy organisms that haven't succumbed to the rot-fungus are liable to being devoured by giant, well-funded vectors for it — think of the great local business that gets devoured by an awful hedge-fund in a leveraged takeover, looted and left as a revolting husk to shamble on until it collapses under its own weight.

I am terrified of the rot-fungus, because it seems like I'm the only person who notices it most of the time. Think of all those places where the town council falls all over itself to lure some giant corporation to open a local factory. Don't they notice that everyone who works at places like that hates every single moment of every single day? Haven't they ever tried to converse with the customer-service bots run by one of those lumbering dinos?

I mean, sure, the bigs have giant budgets and they'll take politicians out for nice lunches and throw a lot of money at their campaigns, but don't these guardians of the public trust ever try to get their cars fixed under warranty? Don't they ever buy a train ticket? Don't they ever eat at a fast food joint? Can't they smell the rot-fungus? Am I the only one? I've figured out how to fight it in my own way. Everyone else who's fighting seems to be fighting against something else — injustice or inequality or whatever, without understanding that the fungus's rot is what causes all of those things.

I'm convinced that no normal human being ever woke up one morning and said, "Dammit, my life doesn't have enough petty bureaucratic rules, zero-tolerance policies, censorship and fear in it. How do I fix that?" Instead, they let this stuff pile up, one compromise at a time, building up huge sores suppurating with spore-loaded fluids that eventually burst free and beslime everything around them. It gets normal to them, one dribble at a time.

"Lukasz, you're don't know what you're doing. These guys, they're –"

"What?" I said. "Are they the mafia or something? Are they going to have me dropped off a bridge with cement overshoes?"

He shook his head, making the twigs and beads woven into the downy fluff of his hair clatter together. "No, but they're ruthless. I mean, totally ruthless. They're not normal."

The way he said it twinged something in my hindbrain, some little squiggle of fear, but I pushed it away. "Yeah, that's OK. I'm used to abnormal." I am the most abnormal person I know.

"Be careful, seriously," he said.

"Thanks, Bryan," I said. "Don't worry about me. You want me to try and get your room back, too?"

He chewed his lip. "Don't," he said. "They'll know it was me if you do that."

I resisted the urge to shout at him to grow a spine. These assholes had cost him his home and his job (OK, I'd helped) and he was going to couch-surf it until he could find the rarest of treasures: an affordable place to live in Cambridge, Mass? Even if he was being tortured by his conscience for all his deplorable selloutism, he was still being a total wuss. But that was his deal. I mean, he was an elf, for chrissakes. Who knew what he was thinking?

"Suit yourself," I said, and went and made some preparations.

#

Messers Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral had an office over the river in Boston, in a shabby office-block that only had ten floors, but whose company directory listed over 800 businesses. I knew the kind of place, because they showed up whenever some hairy scam unravelled and they showed you the office-of-convenience used by the con-artists who'd destroyed something that lots of people cared about and loved in order to make a small number of bad people a little richer. A kind of breeding pit for rot-fungus, in other words.

At first I thought I was going to have to go and sleuth their real locations, but I saw that Amoral, Nonmoral and Immoral had the entire third floor registered to them, while everyone else had crazy-ass, heavily qualified suite numbers like 401c(1)K, indicating some kind of internal routing code for the use of the army of rot-fungus-infected spores who ensured that correspondence was handled in a way that preserved the illusion that each of the multifarious, blandly named shell companies (I swear to Cthulhu that there was one called "International Holdings (Holdings), Ltd") was a real going concern and not a transparent ruse intended to allow the rot-fungus to spread with maximal diffusion of culpability for the carriers who did its bidding.

I punched # # #300# # # on the ancient touchscreen intercom, its surface begrimed with a glossy coat of hardened DNA, Burger King residue and sifted-down dust of the ages. It blatted like an angry sheep, once, twice, three times, then disconnected. I punched again. Again. On the fourth try, an exasperated, wheezing voice emerged: "What?"

"I'm here to speak to someone from MIT Residences LLC."

"Send an email."

"I'm a tenant. My name is Lukasz Romero." I let that sink in. "I've got some documents I'd like to discuss with a responsible individual at MIT Residences LLC." I put a bit of heavy English on documents. "Please." I put even more English on "Please." I've seen the same tough-guy videos that you have, and I can do al-pacinoid overwound Dangerous Dude as well as anyone. "Please," I said again, meaning "Right. Now."

There was an elongated and ominous pause, punctuated by muffled rustling and grumbling, and what may have been typing on an old-fashioned, mechanical keyboard. "Come up," a different voice said. The elevator to my left ground as the car began to lower itself.

#

I'd expected something sinister — a peeling dungeon of a room where old men with armpit-stains gnawed haunches of meat and barked obscenities at each other. Instead, I found myself in an airy, high-ceilinged place that was straight out of the publicity shots for MIT's best labs, the ones that had been set-dressed by experts who'd ensured that no actual students had come in to mess things up before the photographer could get a beautifully lit shot of the platonic perfection.

The room took up the whole floor, dotted with conversation pits with worn, comfortable sofas whose end-tables sported inconspicuous charge-plates for power-hungry gadgets. The rest of the space was made up of new-looking worksurfaces and sanded-down antique wooden desks that emitted the honeyed glow of a thousand coats of wax buffed by decades of continuous use. The light came from tall windows and full-spectrum spotlights that were reflected and diffused off the ceiling, which was bare concrete and mazed with cable-trays and conduit. I smelled good coffee and toasting bread and saw a perfectly kept little kitchenette to my left.

There were perhaps a dozen people working in the room, standing at the worksurfaces, mousing away at the antique desks, or chatting intensely in the conversation pits. It was a kind of perfect tableau of industrious tech-company life, something out of a recruiting video. The people were young and either beautiful, handsome or both. I had the intense, unexpected desire to work here, or a place like this. It had good vibes.

One of the young, handsome people stood up from his conversation nook and smoothed out the herringbone wool hoodie he was wearing, an artfully cut thing that managed to make him look like both a young professor and an undergraduate at the same time. It helped that he was so fresh-faced, with apple cheeks and a shock of curly brown hair.

"Lukasz, right?" He held out a hand. He was wearing a dumbwatch, a wind-up thing in a steel casing that was fogged with a century of scratches. I coveted it instantly, though I knew nothing about its particulars, I was nevertheless certain that it was expensive, beautifully engineered, and extremely rare.

The door closed behind me and the magnet audibly reengaged. The rest of the people in the room studiously ignored us.

"I'm Sergey. Can I get you a cup of coffee? Tea? Some water?"

The coffee smelled good. "No thank you," I said. "I don't think I'll be here for long."

"Of course. Come and sit."

The other participants in his meeting had already vacated the sofas and left us with a conversation pit all to ourselves. I sank into the sofa and smelled the spicy cologne of a thousand eager, well-washed people who'd sat on it before me, impregnating the upholstery with the spoor of their good perfumes.

He picked up a small red enamel teapot and poured a delicious-smelling stream of yellow-green steaming liquid into a chunky diner-style coffee-cup. He sipped it. My stomach growled. "You told the receptionist you wanted to talk about some documents?"

"Yeah," I said, pulling myself together. "I've got documentary evidence of this company illegally evicting tenants — students — who got pregnant, complained about substandard living conditions and maintenance issues, and, in my case, complained about the network filters at the Termite Mound."

He cocked his head for a moment like he was listening for something in the hum and murmur of the office around him. I found myself listening, too, but try as I might, I couldn't pick out a single individual voice from the buzz, not even a lone intelligble word. It was as though they were all going "murmurmurmurmur," though I could see their lips moving and shaping what must have been words.

"Ah," he said at last. "Well, that's very unfortunate. Can you give me a set and I'll escalate them up our chain to ensure that they're properly dealt with?"

"I can give you a set," I said. "But I'll also be giving a set to the MIT ombudsman and the The Tech and the local Wikileaks Party rep. Sergey, forgive me, but you don't seem to be taking this very seriously. The material in my possession is the sort of thing that could get you and your colleagues here sued into a smoking crater."

"Oh, I appreciate that there's a lot of potential liability in the situation you describe, but it wouldn't be rational for me to freak out now, would it? I haven't seen your documents, and if I had, I can neither authenticate them nor evaluate the risk they represent. So I'll take a set from you and ensure that the people within our organization who have the expertise to manage this sort of thing get to them quickly."

It's funny. I'd anticipated that he'd answer like a chatbot, vomiting up Markov-chained nothings from the lexicon of the rot-fungus: "we take this very seriously," "we cannot comment on ongoing investigations," "we are actioning this with a thorough inquiry and post-mortem" and other similar crapola. Instead, he was talking like a hacker on a mailing list defending the severity he'd assigned to a bug he owned.

"Sergey, that's not much of an answer."

He sipped that delicious tea some more. "Is there something in particular you wanted to hear from me? I mean, this isn't the sort of thing that you find out about then everything stops until you've figured out what to do next."

I was off-balance. "I wanted –" I waved my hands. "I wanted an explanation. How the hell did this systematic abuse come about?"

He shrugged. He really didn't seem very worried "Hard to say, really. Maybe it was something out of the labs."

"What do you mean, 'the labs'?"

He gestured vaguely at one cluster of particularly engrossed young men and women who were bent over screens and worksurfaces, arranged in pairs or threesomes, collaborating with fierce intensity, reaching over to touch each others' screens and keyboards in a way I found instantly and deeply unsettling. "We've got a little R&D lab that works on some of our holdings. We're really dedicated to disrupting the rental market. There's so much money in it, you know, but mostly it's run by these entitled jerks who think that they're geniuses for having the brilliant idea of buying a building and then sitting around and charging rent on it. A real old boys' club." For the first time since we started talking, he really seemed to be alive and present and paying attention.

"Oh, they did some bits and pieces that gave them the superficial appearance of having a brain, but there's a lot of difference between A/B splitting your acquisition strategy and really deep-diving into the stuff that matters."

At this stage, I experienced a weird dissonance. I mean, I was there because these people were doing something genuinely villainous, real rot-fungus stuff. On the other hand, well, this sounded cool. I can't lie. I found it interesting. I mean, catnip-interesting.

"I mean, chewy questions. Like, if the median fine for a second citation for substandard plumbing is $400, and month-on-month cost for plumbing maintenance in a given building is $2,000 a month, and the long-term costs of failure to maintain are $20,000 for full re-plumbing on a 8-10 year basis with a 75 percent probability of having to do the big job in year nine, what are the tenancy parameters that maximize your return over that period?"

"Tenancy parameters?"

He looked at me. I was being stupid. I don't like that look. I suck at it. It's an ego thing. I just find it super-hard to deal with other people thinking that I'm dumb. I would probably get more done in this world if I didn't mind it so much. But I do. It's an imperfect world, and I am imperfect.

"Tenancy parameters. What are the parameters of a given tenant that predict whether he or she will call the city inspectors given some variable setpoint of substandard plumbing, set on a scale that has been validated through a rigorous regression through the data that establishes quantifiable inflection points relating to differential and discrete maintenance issues, including leaks, plugs, pressure, hot water temperature and volume, and so on. It's basically just a solve-for-x question, but it's one with a lot of details in the model that are arrived at through processes with a lot of room for error, so the model needs a lot of refinement and continuous iteration.

"And of course, it's all highly sensitive to external conditions — there's a whole game-theoretical set of questions about what other large-scale renters do in response to our own actions, and there's a information-theory dimension to this that's, well, it's amazing. Like, which elements of our strategy are telegraphed when we take certain actions as opposed to others, and how can those be steganographed through other apparent strategies.

"Now, most of these questions we can answer through pretty straightforward business processes, stuff that Amazon figured out twenty years ago. But there's a real risk of getting stuck in local maxima, just you know, overoptimizing inside of one particular paradigm with some easy returns. That's just reinventing the problem, though, making us into tomorrow's dinosaurs.

"If we're going to operate a culture of continuous improvement, we need to be internally disrupted to at least the same extent that we're disrupting those fat, stupid incumbents. That's why we have the labs. They're our chaos monkeys. They do all kinds of stuff that keeps our own models sharp. For example, they might incorporate a separate business and use our proprietary IP to try to compete with us — without telling us about it. Or give a set of autonomous agents privileges to communicate eviction notices in a way that causes a certain number of lawsuits to be filed, just to validate our assumptions about the pain-point at which an action or inaction on our side will trigger a suit from a tenant, especially for certain profiles of tenants.

"So there's not really any way that I can explain specifically what happened to the people mentioned in your correspondence. It's possible no one will ever be able to say with total certainty. I don't really know why anyone would expect it to be otherwise. We're not a deterministic state-machine, after all. If all we did was respond in set routines to set inputs, it'd be trivial to innovate around us and put us out of business. Our objective is to be strategically nonlinear and anti-deterministic within a range of continuously validated actions that map and remap a chaotic terrain of profitable activities in relation to property and rental. We're not rentiers, you understand. We don't own assets for a living. We do things with them. We're doing commercial science that advances the state of the art. We're discovering deep truths lurking in potentia in the shape of markets and harnessing them — putting them to work."

His eyes glittered. "Lukasz, you come in here with your handful of memos and you ask me to explain how they came about, as though this whole enterprise was a state-machine that we control. We do not control the enterprise. An enterprise is an artificial life-form built up from people and systems in order to minimize transaction costs so that it can be nimble and responsive, so that it can move into niches, dominate them, fully explore them. The human species has spent millennia recombining its institutions to uncover the deep, profound mathematics of power and efficiency.

"It's a terrain with a lot of cul-de-sacs and blind alleys. There are local maxima: maybe a three-move lookahead shows a good outcome from evicting someone who's pregnant and behind on the rent, but the six-move picture is different, because someone like you comes along and makes us look like total assholes. That's fine. All that means is that we have to prune that branch of the tree, try a new direction. Hell, ideally, you'd be in there so early, and give us such a thoroughgoing kicking, that we'd be able to discover and abort the misfire before the payload had fully deployed. You'd be saving us opportunity cost. You'd be part of our chaos-monkey.

"Lukasz, you come in here with your whistleblower memos. But I'm not participating in a short-term exercise. Our mission here is to quantize, systematize, harness and perfect interactions.

"You come in here and you want me to explain, right now, what we're going to do about your piece of information. Here's your answer, Lukasz: we will integrate it. We will create models that incorporate disprovable hypotheses about it, we will test those models, and we will refine them. We will make your documents part of our inventory of clues about the underlying nature of deep reality. Does that answer satisfy you, Lukasz?"

I stood up. Through the whole monologue, Sergey's eyes had not moved from mine, nor had his body-language shifted, nor had he demonstrated one glimmer of excitement or passion. Instead, he'd been matter-of-fact, like he'd been explaining the best way to make an omelet or the optimal public transit route to a distant suburb. I was used to people geeking out about the stuff they did. I'd never experienced this before, though: it was the opposite of geeking out, or maybe a geeking out that went so deep that it went through passion and came out the other side.

It scared me. I'd encountered many different versions of hidebound authoritarianism, fought the rot-fungus in many guises, but this was not like anything I'd ever seen. It had a purity that was almost… seductive.

But beautiful was not the opposite of terrible. The two could easily co-exist.

"I hear that I'm going to get evicted when I get back to the Termite Mound — you've got a process-server waiting for me. That's what I hear."

Sergey shrugged. "And?"

"And? And what use is your deep truth to me if I'm out on the street?"

"What's your point?"

He was as mild and calm as a recorded airport safety announcement. There was something inhuman — transhuman? — in that dispassionate mein.

"Don't kick me out of my place."

"Ah. Excuse me a second."

He finished his tea, set the cup down and headed over to the lab. He chatted with them, touched their screens. The murmur drowned out any words. I didn't try to disguise the fact that I was watching them. There was a long period during which they said nothing, did not touch anything, just stared at the screens with their heads so close together they were almost touching. It was a kind of pantomime of psychic communications.

He came back. "Done," he said. "Is there anything else? We're pretty busy around here."

"Thank you," I said. "No, that's about it."

"All right then," he said. "Are you going to leave me your documents?"

"Yes," I said, and passed him a stack of hardcopies. He looked at the paper for a moment, folded the stack carefully at the middle and put it in one of the wide side-pockets of his beautifully tailored cardigan.

I found my way back down to the ground floor and was amazed to see that the sun was still up. It had felt like hours had passed while Sergey had talked to me, and I could have sworn that the light had faded in those tall windows. But, checking my drop, I saw that it was only three o'clock. I had to be getting home.

There was a process-server waiting ostentatiously in the walkway when I got home, but he looked at me and then down at his screen and then let me pass.

It was only once I was in my room that I realized I hadn't done anything about Bryan's eviction.

[misfitwashere]

ROBERT REICH

FEB 7

Friends,

I wanted to make sure you saw this piece by Lina Khan, who until a few days ago was chair of the Federal Trade Commission. IMHO — as someone who was once an official of the FTC — Khan was one of the wisest and most courageous of its leaders. She wrote the following in the February 4 edition of The New York Times.

Stop Worshiping the American Tech Giants

By Lina M. Khan

When Chinese artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek shocked Silicon Valley and Wall Street with its powerful new A.I. model, Marc Andreessen, the Silicon Valley investor, went so far as to describe it as “A.I.’s Sputnik moment.” Presumably, Mr. Andreessen wasn’t calling on the federal government to start a massive new program like NASA, which was our response to the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite launch; he wants the U.S. government to flood private industry with capital, to ensure that America remains technologically and economically dominant.

As an antitrust enforcer, I see a different metaphor. DeepSeek is the canary in the coal mine. It’s warning us that when there isn’t enough competition, our tech industry grows vulnerable to its Chinese rivals, threatening U.S. geopolitical power in the 21st century.

Although it’s unclear precisely how much more efficient DeepSeek’s models are than, say, ChatGPT, its innovations are real and undermine a core argument that America’s dominant technology firms have been pushing — namely, that they are developing the best artificial intelligence technology the world has to offer, and that technological advances can be achieved only with enormous investment — in computing power, energy generation and cutting-edge chips. For years now, these companies have been arguing that the government must protect them from competition to ensure that America stays ahead.

But let’s not forget that America’s tech giants are awash in cash, computing power and data capacity. They are headquartered in the world’s strongest economy and enjoy the advantages conferred by the rule of law and a free enterprise system. And yet, despite all those advantages — as well as a U.S. government ban on the sales of cutting-edge chips and chip-making equipment to Chinese firms — America’s tech giants have seemingly been challenged on the cheap.

It should be no surprise that our big tech firms are at risk of being surpassed in A.I. innovation by foreign competitors. After companies like Google, Apple and Amazon helped transform the American economy in the 2000s, they maintained their dominance primarily through buying out rivals and building anticompetitive moats around their businesses.

Over the last decade, big tech chief executives have seemed more adept at reinventing themselves to suit the politics of the moment — resistance sympathizers, social justice warriors, MAGA enthusiasts — than on pioneering new pathbreaking innovations and breakthrough technologies.

There have been times when Washington has embraced the argument that certain businesses deserve to be treated as national champions and, as such, to become monopolies with the expectation that they will represent America’s national interests. Those times serve as a cautionary tale.

Boeing was one such star — the aircraft manufacturer’s reputation was so sterling that a former White House adviser during the Clinton administration referred to it as a “de facto national champion,” so important that “you can be an out-and-out advocate for it” in government. This superstar status was such that it likely helped Boeing gain the regulatory green light to absorb its remaining U.S. rival McDonnell Douglas. That 1997 merger played a significant role in damaging Boeing’s culture, leaving it plagued with a host of problems, including safety concerns.

On the other hand, the government’s decision to enforce antitrust laws against what is now AT&T Inc., IBM and Microsoft in the 1970s through the 1990s helped create the market conditions that gave rise to Silicon Valley’s dynamism and America’s subsequent technological lead. America’s bipartisan commitment to maintaining open and competitive markets from the 1930s to the 1980s — a commitment that many European countries and Japan did not share — was critical for generating the broad-based economic growth and technological edge that catapulted the United States to the top of the world order.

While monopolies may offer periodic advances, breakthrough innovations have historically come from disruptive outsiders, in part because huge behemoths rarely want to advance technologies that could displace or cannibalize their own businesses. Mired in red tape and bureaucratic inertia, those companies usually aren’t set up to deliver the seismic efficiencies that hungry start-ups can generate.

The recent history of artificial intelligence demonstrates this pattern. Google developed the groundbreaking Transformer architecture that underlies today’s A.I. revolution in 2017, but the technology was largely underutilized until researchers left to join or to found new companies. It took these independent firms, not the tech giant, to realize the technology’s transformative potential.

At the Federal Trade Commission, I argued that in the arena of artificial intelligence, developers should release enough information about their models to allow smaller players and upstarts to bring their ideas to market without being beholden to dominant firms’ pricing or access restrictions. Competition and openness, not centralization, drive innovation.

In the coming weeks and months, U.S. tech giants may renew their calls for the government to grant them special protections that close off markets and lock in their dominance. Indeed, top executives from these firms appear eager to curry favor and cut deals, which could include asking the federal government to pare back sensible efforts to require adequate testing of models before they are released to the public, or to look the other way when a dominant firm seeks to acquire an upstart competitor.

Enforcers and policymakers should be wary. During the first Trump and then the Biden administrations, antitrust enforcers brought major monopolization lawsuits against those same companies — making the case that by unlawfully buying up or excluding their rivals, these companies had undermined innovation and deprived America of the benefits that free and fair competition delivers. Reversing course would be a mistake. The best way for the United States to stay ahead globally is by promoting competition at home.

[liliesmultiverse]

⋆ˊˎ-•̩̩͙- *̩̩̥͙ I’VE GOT A LIST OF NAMES AND YOURS IS IN RED UNDERLINED... pretty little liars reality intro!!

┊ ➶ ｡˚ ° liliana amore black [born sept. 10, 2007] is rosewood’s sweetheart. i was born in rosewood, pennsylvania to sirius orion black iii & cerese isabella black née di angelo. at 6 years old, i met alison dilaurentis in kindergarten and it was a fast connection. in 8th grade, we became friends with spencer hastings, aria montgomery, emily fields & hanna marin. the six of us were all extremely close but once alison disappeared, the friend group slowly dissolved. three weeks after ali disappeared, my family moved to paris and 3 weeks ago we moved back to rosewood.

┊ ➶ ｡˚ ° my family

༉‧₊˚. sirius orion black iii [born nov. 3, 1986] is the rosewood high softball coach. he was born in versailles, france to orion cepheus black & walburga irma black as the oldest of 2 children. he first met my mom in primary school and they got married when he was 20. when i was 2 years old, the 3 of us moved to rosewood.

༉‧₊˚. cerese kaia black née di angelo [born jan. 14, 1987] is the rosewood high art teacher. she was born in cefalù, italy as an only child. growing up, she became extremely passionate in art and is one of the most talented people i know, as well as my biggest inspiration.

༉‧₊˚. regulus arcturus black ii [born dec. 24, 1987] is the ceo of celestial industries. he was born in versailles, france to orion cepheus black & walburga irma black as the youngest of 2 children. when his parents passed, he quickly managed to find & reconnect with my dad and split the inheritance their parents had left. ever since, he’s been a prominent figure in my life and visits every once in awhile.

┊ ➶ ｡˚ ° sterling aaron rose [born jun. 25, 2002] is the best friends brother. he was born in rosewood, pennsylvania to ella montgomery née rose & an unknown father as the oldest of 3 children. i actually met sterling before i met aria due to him being best friends with jason since they were 5 and i’ve had a crush on him since i was 13. he doesn’t have a good relationship with byron and is very protective of ella, aria & mike. he currently works as a bartender.

[pocketmolly]

Headcanon that because of the terrifying expenses superheroing costs, heroes have to take on sponsors

TW: Smoking/Cigarettes, only a little nudity! (It's John Constantine :/), Alcohol (Damian... [Not underage drinking tho])

Like I watched the Crisis On Two Earths movie and that watchtower looks so expensive... Sure Bruce Wayne is rich but he isn't that rich

John Constantine definitely has atleast one cigarette sponsor. Probably Sterling which is British and he's somehow featured on the front of the box in this specific pose despite having never gone for a photoshoot. He laughs it off but he's secretly horrified

Black Canary is fought over by every music app to ever exist but (inevitably) Spotify wins and she becomes the annoying voice that tells you to try Spotify Premium which causes the Arrow Kids to not speak to her for like a month

Wonder Woman, Artemis, Donna Troy, Cassie Sandsmark and Yara Flor get together to do a Lululemon commercial (with colour coding and everything). It goes super viral and sets fashion trends for the next 50 years much to the dismay of Artemis.

The Flashes get a slick Ferrari ad. Like Barry in the front seat of a classic red Ferrari car delivering a smooth line in a seductive tone then it moves to the rest of the Flashes just chilling in sunglasses in the back

Robin has Lego as a sponsor which comes with free trips to Lego Land and free Lego sets. This only serves to piss Damian off and he promptly gets a Malibu (alcohol) sponsorship in the second week of being Robin. This gives Batman and Nightwing simultaneous heart attacks.

While we're on the topic, Batman mysteriously has zero sponsors (the Wayne Industries symbol is secretly on his cape but both are the same black color) and Nightwing has a Wingstop sponsor and his own 'Nightwings' meal that consists of electric blue wings which are very unhealthy and not quite safe

Okay lightning round now!

Zatanna gets Prada

Red Robin gets Red Robin (haha)

All the Green Lanterns get Whatsapp (they have their own sticker pack that the rest of the heroes overuse)

Barbra gets Oracle (haha ×2)

Starfire gets Dior and Tiffany & Co

Red Hood gets Snickers (You're not yourself when you're hungry)

[lufyuu]

(I accidentally deleted the ask last time so bare w me, I'm so sorry anon😓 , it was about how my ocs would react to a trans reader)

Well I'll start with that none of my ocs will treat you differently regardless of the fact you're cis or not! Maybe they have different thoughts of you though

➤Eun Hyunwoo

He probably didn't know you were trans before working with you. He just thought you're a very pretty man<3 I mean, there are feminine looking men in the industry too so it doesn't matter if you're feminine/masculine presenting! He'd be extra careful during sex though, he's not ready to be a father and with your job...it's impossible for you to be pregnant whilst working at the same time. He's also always going to be there for you when the gender dysphoria hits, he doesn't understand it as he himself has never felt it but he'll do anything in his power to make you feel better. He often affirms your gender by calling you all sorts of things. "My pretty boy" is what he loves to say the most. He also loves to refer to you as his boyfriend a lot. And I mean a lot. He's partially flexing the fact that he's dating you too.

➤River Sterling

Mans didn't pay much attention to you before your first meeting, but he had heard about the rumors of you being afab. He brushed it off since it's really none of his business. When anyone talks shit about you just for being trans, he's ready to give them the "shonen background character treatment" if you know what I mean lmao. He's always going to use protection during sex! You're both in your early 20s! No way he's going to be a dad! Loves the idea of it though. He probably once tried to turn you into a cis man, not because he wants you to be one, but it was when you were having major gender dysphoria. He thought he'd be a good boyfriend and give you a dick and balls. Unfortunately, even the powers of a protagonist have their limits. His efforts were still appreciated, though! Loves stroking your hair while calling you "the loveliest boy he's ever met". He's an ass at times but can be sweet when needed!

➤Liu Zihao

Couldn't care less that you're trans. He has a duty to uphold, and that is to punish you for your wrongdoings. Though he does think it's convenient since getting you pregnant would be easier now. Who could blame him for wanting to breed you full of his cum? He's been waiting for you for so long it's only right for him to take what he wants now. He isn't the type of guy to babytrap you though. Gender dysphoria? Now that, you have to explain to him. Despite being in a powerful man both in the political stand and in general, he's only learned about the laws. He doesn't really understand humans. When he does get it though, expect him to be very supportive. Maybe overly supportive. Probably empathizes the word "boy" a lot when referring to you. Not that there's a lot of people he can talk about you to. He just doesn't care what you have under your pants.

➤Han Minho

I'm not sure how this one would work as the way reader met Minho was through military training where everyone was amab but let's say they do meet. Again, doesn't care much. Though he's ready to be a father, it all depends on you whether you want to start a family with him or not. He'd rather your parents know about the situation first before anything that far happens. He doesnt strike as a guy who knows that much about gender dysphoria. Probably awkwardly caressing your back as he tries to again, awkwardly comfort you. "You're a boy..I don't know what's the problem..?", he's trying his best.

[hedwyn-here]

I still see people obsessively hating on Hello Games for the launch of No Man's Sky, saying they will never trust them, never buy a game from them etc... A very ambitious game made by (for most of it's development) less than 10 employees had to cut some of it's planned content before launch. They were (reportedly) pressured into announcing the game before they were ready, their studio flooded, they had to borrow internet from their neighbours by running ethernet out of the windows, they had a huge company suddenly advertising it as the next big AAA release despite the fact the studio was running out of money...

They aren't blameless, but it doesn't take a whole lot to see how a small group who were incredibly passionate about their work (and without a PR team) could get caught up in this situation.

But you know what? They've spent the last 10 years continually working on that game. Adding more and more content, getting it to where people expected it to be and even beyond in ways nobody could have predicted. Every single trailer they've released since has shown nothing but precicely what the game will offer. And we still see people treating them like industry villains.

There's a particular reason this bothers me so much, and it's name is Randy Pitchford.

A few years before No Man's Sky was released, Gearbox advertised the game Aliens: Colonial Marines with fabricated trailers, gameplay and screenshots. Not just things that had to be removed from the game for budgetary or time reasons, but literally just things they faked purely to advertise the game. What can only be construed as an intentional attempt to lie to the audience so they would buy a game. They were accused of using money SEGA had given them for the development of the game to fund their own proejct, Borderlands. Not only did Gearbox never try to fix Colonial Marines, to my knowledge they never even acknowledged any of the shitty stuff they did. Pitchford routinely attempted to slide that blame onto others (and if I remember rightly even said some pretty unpleasant stuff abotu Steff Sterling for daring to criticise the game on multiple occasions). Yet people are still more than happy to jump on Gearbox games uncritically. Even though they reportedly treat their staff like shit. Have very questionable means of paying their staff that afford them the opportunity to deny them bonuses even management (like Pitchford) are taking home huge bonuses of their own.

This is an example of a large developer very intentionally and maliciously lying to the audience and nobody seemed to give a shit about it even as little as a year after release.

For my money, Hello Games have proven themselves. I'll take an over-ambitious passionate group of artists who can't quite deliver on their promises over a malicious and predatory corporation any day of the week.

Fuck Gearbox.

<3 Hello Games.

I can't fuckin wait to play Light no Fire, I will buy that shit day 1.

[fan-burns]

The Robots sequel except I didn’t jump the shark lol.

Don’t panic, I’m not abandoning the original sequel! I’m just playing around with a more “realistic” idea for a sequel and I wanted to share them!

Story wise, Bigweld kicks the bucket and everyone mourns (especially Rodney). Press bots and Paparazzi of course want to harass interview him, and so Rodney disappears from public eye and shuts down Bigweld Industries. 3 years later he decides to re-open it to the public, but doesn't allow any press inside.

Aspiring inventor Leadbetter sees this as his chance to make it big and meet his idol Rodney one on one. He's surprised to find that he's the only one at the event, but he runs into Rodney's financial advisor Tony Sterling.

Sterling immediately tries kicking him out, saying that Rodney needs to “focus on studying”, when Rodney stops him and immediately takes Lead under his wing (smiling for the first time in years). Of course, now that Sterling has competition for inheritance (and that Rodney gave up on studying for Business in order to mentor Lead), he's even more eager to get Rodney out of the picture...with Lead as collateral damage.

Now this is why I like this new idea. It's a retelling of the original (Leadbetter as Rodney and Rodney as Bigweld/Sterling as Ratchet and Ratchet as M. Gasket) with new elements. It's the same premise as the original, but introduces new elements that make it interesting.

Honestly, if anyone wanted to make a legit sequel fanfiction that stays in line with the original, this is the way to do it. You reuse the same formula that worked before, but include your own unique twists and takes to make it interesting. It's as simple as that.

While my sequel is more action and akin to early dystopia writings, this idea is more in line with the original, which is what is more in line with what people would expect in a sequel. Had I come up with this idea sooner, I would've went with this route. In fact, if I run out of steam with the current sequel, I might pick this idea up and use it!

Again, I'm not dropping the current sequel! I'm going to continue with it for as long as I can! I just wanted to share this idea!