#Thatcher park

[aizjascabaret]

My TikTok @m.u.asia

[wiinterz]

i live in a home where the writers hate my guts

[bugmangaka]

Several more of my zines have been listed on Ets.y and Kofee, including my "Mae and Friends" zine that I originally sold 3 years ago!! After a long long wait it is back in stock with it's second edition, this time featuring monochrome color! The Chilchuck zine is also back and available in a larger size!

[seasonalmoss]

SOME ONE PLEASEEE GIVE ME ASKS ON THESE CHARACTERS PLEASEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

Thatcher Davis (TMC)

Sarah Heathcliff (TMC)

Evelin Miller (TMC)

Adam Murray (TMC)

Odysseus (EPIC)

Penelope (EPIC)

Telemachus (EPIC)

Eurylochus (EPIC)

Polites (EPIC)

Wooly (ATA)

Amanda (ATA)

Joanne (ATA)

Kate (ATA)

GIVE ME ART REQUESTS, I CATIFY WANNA SEE THAT? WANNA SEE THESE CHARACTERS AS CATS??? DHDIDJJDJHDJDJD I MAKE CROSS OVER AUS WANNA SEE THAT?? HDIDHDJDBDHDHDJDJEH JUST ASK ME ANYTHING PLEASEEEEEEE DJDHDKDNDJFNDNDNDBDBDBHDHDHDHD IM BEGGING PLEASE

[b4rk1ng-l0t]

Eve and Sarah

Ruth and Thatcher

Mark and Dave

Adam and Jonah and Cesar

[meravalemoi]

this took an hour

[frixey]

life is roblox

[hollywoodfamerp]

UNFOLLOW (5+ DAYS OF INACTIVITY: THE FOLLOWING HAVE BEEN REOPENED)

Bruna Marquezine ( @brunamrqzn )

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Park Soo-Young (Joy) ( @soovelvetjoy )*AT PLAYERS REQUEST

Perrie Edwards ( @pez-edwrdz )

Sophie Thatcher ( @sthatcherz )

Sydney Sweeney ( @sydney--sweenxy )

WARNING (3 - 4 DAYS OF BEING INACTIVE/INCONSISTENT ACTIVITY)

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Paul Mescal ( @mcscals )

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*Inconsistent activity, only answering memes, signing on the day before an activity check, reblogging/posting social media and photos do not count as activity. Bubble warning is for members who fall under what HFRP considers to be bubble rping. Further explanation of bubble rping is defined in our rules.

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[tvmilfs]

Maybe I am delulu or biased but I truly believe simone deserves an emmy nom

[analog-autistic]

Mandela catalogue fans (me)

woah this character is so cool i wish they were covered in blood their whole body trembling with a look of absolute horror on their face as theyre struggling to breathe in panic

[meek-shall-inherit]

what aboouut . their favorite amusement park rides

pandora: the one that like goes up really high directly straight up and then drops down you know the one . he likes the view laz: the one thats like . its a circle track and theres little car things and 2 people can get in one and it just goes in a circle and sometimes backwards and the operator makes you scream to make it go faster . hes lost his voice multiple times on that one temperence: the gravitron one hundred percent the gravitron . huge fan of specifically the ones without a roof

[analog-autistic]

there are three (3) kinds of bad decision

mark: this was mostly unavoidable. directly negatively impacts you

thatcher: this was mostly unavoidable. directly negatively impacts you and at least one other person

lynn: this was completely avoidable. What The Fuck.

[supercalifragipopculturevomit]

Long live peaches in cinema!

Ah, the late 2010s... what a time to be a peach.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Ideas Lying Around

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in DC TOMORROW (Mar 4), and in RICHMOND on WEDNESDAY (Mar 5). More tour dates here. Mail-order signed copies from LA's Diesel Books.

I get a special pleasure from citing Milton Friedman. I like to imagine that as I do, he groans around the red-hot spit protruding from his jaws, prompting howls of laughter from the demons who pelt him with molten faeces for all eternity.

If you're lucky enough not to know about Friedman, here's the short version. Friedman was a kind of court sorcerer to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Augusto Pinochet, and other assorted authoritarian, hard-right leaders who set us on the path to the hellscape we inhabit today. But before Friedman rose to prominence and influence, he was a crank. Specifically, he was a crank who dedicated his life to rolling back all the progress of the New Deal and re-establishing the Gilded Age:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/06/the-end-of-the-road-to-serfdom/

In his crank days, people were justifiably skeptical of this project. "Milton," they'd say, "people like New Deal programs. They like the minimum wage, the 40-hour work-week, and the assurance that they won't be maimed, poisoned, burned alive, or otherwise killed on the job. They relish a dignified retirement, quality education for their children, and the assurance that no one is starving to death in their country's borders. People like national parks! They like Medicare! They like libraries, museums, and reliable weather forecasts! How, Milton, do you propose to convince the vast majority of people that they should settle for being forelock-tugging plebs, groveling before their social betters for the chance to scrub their toilets?"

Friedman had an answer: "In times of crisis, ideas can move from the fringe to the center in an eyeblink. Our job is to keep good ideas lying around, in anticipation of that crisis."

When the oil crisis hit, when prices spiked in the USA and abroad, Friedman seized his opportunity. The years following the oil crisis saw a violent political revolution in which organized labor, social justice movements, and the political opposition to oligarchy were crushed under police batons and the guns of Pinochet's thugs. The world was transformed. Left parties like UK Labour were remade as austerity-pilled neoliberals (not for nothing did Margaret Thatcher call Tony Blair "her greatest accomplishment," and it took Bill Clinton to pass a welfare "reform" bill that was too extreme even for Reagan to get through Congress).

Friedman was a monster.

But.

He had a hell of a theory of change.

When prices spiral, when people can't pay their bills anymore, when their retirement savings are wiped out, anything is possible. The oil crisis wasn't Jimmy Carter's fault, but the voters still delivered a Ba'ath Party-style Republican majority in 1980. The covid shocks weren't the fault of the world governments that presided over pandemic inflation, but they were creamed in the ensuing elections.

Let's talk about Trump's tariffs here. Trump's goal is to force a re-shoring of the American industrial capacity that was shipped to low-wage, low-regulation corporate havens around the world after the Reagan revolution. The pandemic provided a vivid lesson about the problems with long, brittle supply chains where all the slack has been extracted and converted to dividends and stock buybacks. That kind of system may work well – at least to the extent that it keeps Walmart's shelves full of cheap goods – but holy shit did it ever fail badly. Re-shoring is a good idea, as are other forms of pro-resiliency industrial policy.

But re-shoring doesn't happen overnight. As we saw during China's covid lockdowns, when one supplier ceases to ship goods, other suppliers can't spring up overnight to take up the slack. China itself became a manufacturing powerhouse thanks to extensive state support and planning, and it took decades. That kind of patient, long-run, planned process is the best-case scenario (and it still caused wrenching dislocations to Chinese society). Simply throwing up tariff walls and demanding that industry figure it out – amid the resulting economic chaos and the political instability it brings – isn't a plan, it's a disaster.

Redistributing the means of production around the world is a necessary and urgent project, but it won't be advanced through Trump's rapid, unscheduled mid-air disassembly of the global system of trade. Tariffs will cause breakdowns in neoliberalism's fragile supply chains, and the ensuing chaos – mass unemployment, shortages, political rage – will make it even harder for countries (including the USA) to rebuild the productive capacity vaporized by 40 years of neoliberalism.

This is our oil crisis, in other worlds: a moment in which a belligerent superpower's ill-considered monkeying with the underpinnings of global production will cause chaos, the crisis in which "ideas can move from the periphery to the center" in an eyeblink. If Steve Bannon can call himself a Leninist, then leftists can call themselves Friedmanites. This is our opportunity.

Or rather, it's our opportunity to seize – or lose. Governments are defaulting to retaliatory tariffs as the best response to Trump's tariffs. This is political poison: making everything your country imports from the USA more expensive is a very weird way to punish America for its trade war. Remember the glaring lesson of pandemic inflation: a government that presides over rising prices will be destroyed by the electorate.

There's a much better alternative, one that strikes at the very roots of American oligarchy, whose extreme wealth and corrosive political influence comes from its holdings in rent-extracting monopolies, especially Big Tech monopolies.

Tech giants are the major factor in US economic health. Take Big Tech stocks out of the S&P 500 and you've got a stagnant market punctuated by periods of decline. Superficially, US tech companies have different sources of extraordinary profit, but a closer look reveals that they all share the same foundation: Big Tech makes the bulk of its money in the form of monopoly rents, backstopped by global IP treaties.

Apple and Google take a 30% cut of every dollar spent in an app, and it's a felony to jailbreak a phone to make a new app store with the industry standard 1-3% transaction fees. Google and Meta take 51% out of every ad dollar, and publishers and advertisers are locked into their ecosystems by abusive contracts and technological countermeasures. HP charges $10,000/gallon for the colored water you put in your printer, and third-party ink and refills violate the anti-circumvention laws the US has crammed down the throats of every country's legislature. Tesla makes its fattest margins by renting you features that are installed in your car at the factory, from autopilot to the ability to use your battery's whole charge, raking in monthly fees from you and anyone you sell your car to – and the reason your mechanic can't just permanently unlock all that DLC for $50 is the IP laws that your country agreed to enforce in order to trade with the USA. Mechanics pay $10k/year per manufacturer for the tools to interpret the error codes generated by your car, and the only reason no one is selling a $50/month universal diagnostic service is – once again – US-originated IP laws that came in a parcel with trade agreements that gave your country's exporters access to US markets. Farmers pay John Deere $200 every time they fix their own tractors, because the repairs won't work until a technician comes out and types an unlock code into the tractor's keyboard – and bypassing that unlock code is a crime under the laws passed to comply with international treaties.

These aren't profits – they're rents. It's money Big Tech gets from owning a factor of production, not money it gets from actually making something. The app maker takes all the risks, but Apple and Google cream off 30% of their gross income. Big Tech's profits are almost an afterthought when compared to its rents, the junk-fee platform fees and farcically expensive consumables. For tech firms, capitalism was a transitional phase between feudalism…and technofeudalism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

America's robust GDP figures are a mirage, artificially buoyed up by the monopoly rents extracted by US Big Tech, who prey on Americans and foreigners:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/18/pikettys-productivity/#reaganomics-revenge

But foreigners don't have to tolerate this nonsense. Governments around the world signed up to protect giant American companies from small domestic competitors (from local app stores – for phones, games consoles, and IoT gadgets – to local printer cartridge remanufacturers) on the promise of tariff-free access to US markets. With Trump imposing tariffs will-ye or nill-ye on America's trading partners large and small, there is no reason to go on delivering rents to US Big Tech.

The first country or bloc (hi there, EU!) to do this will have a giant first-mover advantage, and could become a global export powerhouse, dominating the lucrative markets for tools that strike at the highest-margin lines of business of the most profitable companies in the history of the human race. Like Jeff Bezos told the publishers: "your margin is my opportunity":

https://www.marketplacepulse.com/articles/the-cost-of-your-margin-is-my-opportunity

In times of crisis, ideas can move from the periphery to the center in an eyeblink. Many of us have spent decades organizing and mobilizing against these extractive, dangerous, destabilizing abuses of technology, where the computer-powered devices we rely on for everything are designed to serve their manufacturers' shareholders, at our expense. And yet, these technologies have only proliferated, infecting everything from insulin pumps and ventilators to coffee makers and "smart" TVs.

It's time for a global race to the top – for countries to compete with one another to see who will capture US Big Tech's margins the fastest and most aggressively. Not only will this make things cheaper for everyone else in the world – it'll also make things cheaper for Americans, because once there is a global, profitable trade in software that jailbreaks your Big Tech devices and services, it will surely leak across the US border. Canada doesn't have to confine itself to selling reasonably priced pharmaceuticals to beleaguered Americans – it can also set up a brisk trade in the tools of technological self-determination and liberation from Big Tech bondage.

Taking the margins for Big Tech's most profitable enterprises to zero, globally, will strike at the very heart of American oligarchy, and the hundreds of millions tech giants flushed into the political system to put Trump into office again. A race to the top for technological liberation benefits everyone – including Americans.

Truly, it would be a rising tide that lifted all boats (except for oligarchs' superyachts - those, it will swamp and sink).

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

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/03/friedmanite/#oil-crisis-two-point-oh

[ledetlore]

Once Upon a Pub Night

Silly OUAW AU

Setting: England. The Krew does run a shitty carnival at one point. Mostly the same, with some English additives for flavours. This can be read as human!au but it's funnier if they're all still fantasy creatures.

Gricko Grimgrin:

Post-punk pub dad =- calls everyone ‘darling’, ‘gorgeous’ or ‘love’. Somehow knows your dad ‘from a gig a couple years back’. Never completed school. Employed (maybe?) – does something to afford the blunts he smokes behind Sainsbury’s and drink all day. Probably on benefits for a ‘gammy knee’. Proud divorced dad of one girl – she’s his perfect angel, his Ex-Wife is in Majorca with the alimony. Always dressed in baggy joggers and a ratty band shirt/ratty printed joke shirt with absolutely ruined converse trainers. Has shitty tattoos done by his drunk mate from college. Spends his money on beer and his kid. Runs the pub barbeque in summer. Body mods for days. Hates Thatcher as much as Scabatha.

Morning Frost:

Chinese exchange student, went to oxford because he couldn’t get into Cambridge, staying with a stout catholic family. Early thirties and a scholar, wants to be a professor of Psychiatry. Reads in Café Nero and talks to no one. Always spotted with a massive backpack and a massive flask. Got bullied out of the Chinese Society because his mandarin was pure shit, and he only spoke Cantonese. Judges everyone on his dorm floor for being loud and going clubbing when he doesn’t. Has a cochlear implant and takes it off when he’s sick of listening to people. Gricko learned sign language so he couldn’t escape.

Torbek:

Unemployed. Pathetic. Hangs out in ratty tracksuits and smokes cigarette butts he finds in the bins. Lives in Bedford. Somehow has a network of homeless guys. Couch Surfer Supreme. Great guy. Likes to get a tesco meal deal and sit in the park with a cider can. Feeds ducks. Accidentally scares kids when he’s just trying to get a sarnie. Everyone in town knows him and half love him and half think he’s rabble. Can get the fuck down at a club though.

Gideon Coal:

Still from Texas?? Was kidnapped by a gang as a kid, managed to get out and away in England and then proceeded to find a way to make it. Lived in Manchester for a while. Wears Man United merch around Man City supporters and vice versa to start fights. He uses his accent to pull girls and Gricko gets uppity about it. He gets called a yank and people love when he’s around. Drinks whiskey in bars but only the cheap shit. Spends his time wearing jeans and wifebeaters in the dead of winter. Has an old zip-up hoodie with a bunch of patches from Gricko, or a leather biker jacket (he has no bike). Carries around shiny stickers to put on people’s suits when they’re not looking.

Kremy LeCroux:

Lived in Brighton mostly. Has a good RP accent, but mostly speaks like he’s from Hertfordshire. When he’s drunk his true self comes to life – he’s from Sheffield lads. He wears a three-piece suit daily but looks gay as hell. Dresses nice but has to get it from Charity Shops. He gets his accessories from Unikorn. All of his make-up is stolen from Claires and Primark. He’s got a lifetime ban from WHSmith for stealing shitty romance books. Waterstones hates to see this man on a Wednesday afternoon sat in the corner. Does drag but used to be a stripper in his early twenties. Toxic Situationship with his old boss.

Hootsie:

Random kid that’s always with them, Gricko's daughter. Dressed in pink velvet tracksuits and has offbrand uggs. Runs around with her big autistic eyes and gets pound coins from pub regulars for the sweet machine. Draws in the corner and sleeps in the booths when she gets tired. Has run three men out the pub. Besties with the Barmaids, gets free J2O’s when she sits at the bar to do her homework. Gricko lets her listen to music she probably shouldn’t and watch Jeremy Kyle on the weekends. In the park afterschool everyday to sit silently on the swings. Does ballet class and Gymnastics. Selective mute but when she speaks you LISTEN. AAC device on LOCK.

[hollywoodfamerp]

UNFOLLOW (5+ DAYS OF INACTIVITY: THE FOLLOWING HAVE BEEN REOPENED)

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Yang Jungwon ( @jvngwons ) *reclaimed within 24hrs

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WARNING (3 - 4 DAYS OF BEING INACTIVE/INCONSISTENT ACTIVITY)

Sophie Thatcher ( @sophicher )

Kim Namjoon ( @kvmnamjoons )*

Xiao Dejun ( @xiaodejxnn )*

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BUBBLE WARNING (DO NOT UNFOLLOW)

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*Inconsistent activity, only answering memes, signing on the day before an activity check, reblogging/posting social media and photos do not count as activity. Bubble warning is for members who fall under what HFRP considers to be bubble rping. Further explanation of bubble rping is defined in our rules.

Those who have been unfollowed are more than welcome to return! You have 24 hours to message us via ask box POLITELY if you’d like to reclaim your character before it officially gets reopened. Don’t forget, if you feel like you need to step away - you can always ask for a hiatus!