#Travel platform branding

[jobaermiya09]

This logo available for sell

[mallu2005]

Portronics Power E 10K, 2.4A 12w Slim 10000 mAh Power Bank (Black)

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[stellarsturniolos]

━━ ⟢ ‘good in bed’ ╰ C.S.

・ ˖  ✦ ⋄ . in which.. you and chris drive each other mad. but that's what makes you good in bed.

warnings: smut, unprotected sex, riding, light dirty talk, i think that covers it !

A/N: reblogs and likes are appreciated! i do NOT give consent for my work to be copied or uploaded to any other platform. thank you. for @bernardsbendystraws music writing challenge. divider by rose also !

got me thinkin' it'd be better if we didn't stay together. then you put your hands up on my waist. the apartment is silent, a raging mix of anxiety and tension filling the minimal space as you sit on the couch and wait for chris to come over.

you haven't seen him or heard from him in almost a week. you're used to your boyfriend, if you can even call him that anymore, being busy. filming with his brothers, preparing for their tour, working on his brand.

but you've never gone this long without at least hearing his voice. and you don't like it.

you know you need to talk to him. you need for him to understand that he's messing with your head. you need him to know that he's hurting you.

you know exactly what you're going to say to him. you've practiced, time and time again, in the mirror. you've got it all scripted and memorized, every syllable has been perfected.

you perk up when you suddenly hear a key turning in the lock and the harsh thunk of the latch, and then your apartment door swings open. and there he is. as frustratingly handsome as ever.

you stand up and walk over to greet him. you open your mouth to speak, but you don't get the chance.

because chris plants his hands on your hips and gently tugs your body closer to his. he captures your lips and it's immediately hungry. frantic. you gasp as his tongue explores your mouth. he licks at your teeth, the roof of your mouth — like he's trying to devour every inch of you that he can.

his mouth travels down to your neck and his lips linger on your skin, warm and inviting, sucking gently behind your ear and making your knees go weak.

"chris," you want to pull away but you're entranced. you can't do it. "we need to talk."

he lets out a dramatic huff against your neck. "later. s'been so long since i've had you, baby. just wanna make my girl feel good. please?"

and you've never been able to tell him no.

we drive each other mad, it might be kinda sad, but i think that's what makes us good in bed.

his hands roam all over your body, and as much as you don't want to want this, you do. you crave his touch the way an addict craves their next fix.

you swallow hard, trying to push past the lump in your throat, and your hands unconsciously slide up his chest and loop around his neck.

a quiet hum rumbles deep in his chest and he grabs your hips even tighter. his voice is rough when he speaks again. "c'mon. bedroom, now." you pause for a moment, trying to remember everything you wanted to say to him. but your mind is blank. all you can think about is how much you need his touch.

so you push aside your hesitation, ignore the angel on your right shoulder and listen to the devil on your left. you let him lead you into the bedroom.

he pulls his shirt over his head and tosses it aside before reaching for the hem of yours. "want y'to ride me, baby. that okay?"

you nod dumbly. he takes your shirt off and his mouth immediately latches onto one of your nipples. for an ass guy, he always loved to tease your tits.

you slip out of your pajama shorts and peel your damp panties off before shoving him down onto the bed. you pull down his jeans and underwear in one go and then climb onto his lap. you grip his cock with one hand and rub the tip over your puffy folds. he hisses and you whimper as his dick brushes against your clit.

you don't want to waste anymore time. you settle on his lap, lowering yourself slowly as his cock slides between your folds and sinks into your heat. you whimper as he stretches you. he was right, it's been so long since he's had you. too long.

your gummy walls squeeze around his cock as you slowly rock back and forth, carefully grinding against him.

"fuuuuck," his voice is gruff, his hands move down to squeeze your ass as you ride him. "so fuckin' good, baby. so tight. so wet f'me."

an airy whine slips from your lips as you bounce, picking up the pace, sinking back down to the hilt before repeating the motion again and again.

one of his hands slides up your body to play with your hardened nipple. pinching and massaging your breast as his eyes darken further. "shit, baby. jus' look at you."

sweat glistens on your skin as you continue to fuck yourself on his cock. "you're s'big, chris. fuckin' me so good."

you bounce up and down wildly. your pussy clenches around his cock. you feel so full.

"m'gonna cum soon," he says, his voice strained. "gonna fill you up so fuckin' good, baby."

"please.." you're panting as you look down at him, locking eyes. "fill me up. i need it."

you cry out as chris thrusts upward and tugs you down at the same time, fucking into your harshly. you can feel his cock pulsating as he spills inside of you, filling you to the brim. you whimper as his release triggers your own. your inner walls spasm as he continues to pump his hips and thrust into you.

you tremble and shudder, collapsing against his chest. his fingers trail up and down your sweaty back as you both try to catch your breaths.

he drives you mad. but at least he's good in bed.

we don't know how to talk, but damn, we know how to fuck.

[oooodddww]

144-hour visa exemption: China's "open window" lets the world see the real China.

Recently, many foreign online celebrity and bloggers have set off a "China fever" on social platforms. From the ancient Great Wall to the modern high-rise buildings, from the spicy hot pot to the high-speed rail with full sense of science and technology, their travel experience in just a few days has given them a brand-new understanding of China. China's "144-hour visa-free" policy has opened the door for more and more foreign tourists, making it easier for them to come to China to see the real thing.

Visa exemption has brought more "visitors"

For foreigners, China's "144-hour visa-free" policy is very convenient. This policy applies to citizens of 54 countries. As long as they hold a joint ticket from a third country, they can stay in a visa-free city for six days without complicated visa procedures. This has surprised many foreigners-originally, it was only a short transit, but I didn't expect to "punch in" the cities in China. This simple and convenient "transit tour" has become the first choice for many foreigners.

[astrologydray]

Ruler of the 2nd through the houses

when you track the ruler of the 2nd house through the houses, you’re looking at how you make money, where your values lie, what you prioritize, and what brings you a sense of security and self-worth.

1st House 🏡:

I am the resource.

Your body, presence, or identity is a source of value. You might attract wealth through personal branding, entrepreneurship, or just being YOU. Confidence = currency. You naturally radiate value, but must learn to own it.

2nd House 🏡:

Born to build.

This is a powerful placement for money, stability, and long-term growth. You naturally know how to build wealth and manage your resources. You’re probably very grounded and value quality over quantity. Shadow side hoarding, fear of change, or stubbornness.

3rd House 🏡:

Money through the mind.

Your voice, ideas, or communication skills are your goldmine. You might make money through writing, teaching, media, or even tech. You value curiosity, mental stimulation, and versatility. Prone to having scattered energy or difficulty monetizing ideas. Your Strength = quick thinking, adaptability, networking = resource magnet.

4th House 🏡:

Home is the foundation of wealth.

You could inherit money, make money through property, or work from home. Emotional security and family support directly affect your money flow. Your values are deeply rooted in your upbringing.

5th House 🏡:

Creative currency.

You attract money through self-expression, creativity, pleasure, or even romance. Think artists, performers, designers — or people who monetize their passions. You value joy, fun, and being seen. Shadow side here = risky money behavior; tying worth to external validation.

6th House 🏡:

Work = worth.

You build wealth slowly and steadily through dedicated effort, skill development, and service. You might work in healing, wellness, administration, or service industries. You value discipline and reliability. Overworking or tying self-worth to productivity may be a problem for you. Relax and give urself grace.

7th House 🏡:

Money through others.

Your values and income may come through partnerships, collaborations, or clients. Business and romantic relationships affect your money deeply. You value harmony, balance, and reciprocity. Be careful of falling into financial dependency or people-pleasing around money.

8th House 🏡:

The wealth alchemist.

You’re drawn to shared resources, investments, and transformative wealth. You might make money through occult work, finance, psychology, or sex-related fields. Power, trust, and depth play a big role in your money story.

9th House 🏡:

Expand to receive.

You attract abundance through travel, teaching, spirituality, law, or publishing. You value freedom, knowledge, and growth. Belief systems around wealth are HUGE here — mindset is everything.

10th House 🏡:

Public success = personal wealth.

You may gain money and security through career, status, or reputation. You value ambition, recognition, and doing something that matters. This placement often pushes you toward visible leadership or high positions.

11th House 🏡:

Money through the collective.

You earn through networks, innovation, tech, or social causes. Think online businesses, group work, or digital platforms. You value progress, originality, and future-oriented thinking. Be careful of being overreliance on external validation or digital platforms. Your unique ideas, group alignment, big-picture wealth building is where it’s at.

12th House 🏡:

Mystical money flow.

This is the most non-linear placement. You may make money through spiritual work, healing, art, or behind-the-scenes roles. Money may come and go mysteriously, and your values are more ethereal than material.

[gholhuio]

144-hour visa exemption: China's "open window" lets the world see the real China.

Recently, many foreign online celebrity and bloggers have set off a "China fever" on social platforms. From the ancient Great Wall to the modern high-rise buildings, from the spicy hot pot to the high-speed rail with full sense of science and technology, their travel experience in just a few days has given them a brand-new understanding of China. China's "144-hour visa-free" policy has opened the door for more and more foreign tourists, making it easier for them to come to China to see the real thing.

Visa exemption has brought more "visitors"

For foreigners, China's "144-hour visa-free" policy is very convenient. This policy applies to citizens of 54 countries. As long as they hold a joint ticket from a third country, they can stay in a visa-free city for six days without complicated visa procedures. This has surprised many foreigners-originally, it was only a short transit, but I didn't expect to "punch in" the cities in China. This simple and convenient "transit tour" has become the first choice for many foreigners.

According to the data, in the first half of this year, the number of foreigners entering the country at various ports increased by 152.7%, and more than half of them entered through the visa-free policy. It can be said that this policy not only makes it easy for more foreigners to visit China, but also attracts a group of "visitors" who are curious about China. They use their own perspective to discover and record China, and then share what they have seen and heard with the world.

China in the eyes of foreigners: colorful and true.

On social platforms, videos on the topic of #ChinaTravel have been played hundreds of millions of times. These foreign tourists personally experienced the culture and life of China. Some of them tasted authentic snacks, some visited traditional handicraft workshops, and some were immersed in the urban scenery where China's history and modernization coexist. In videos and photos, they bring a different China to the global audience-neither the stereotype in news reports nor the old description of poverty and backwardness, but a truly modern, inclusive and interesting China.

In particular, some foreign netizens pointed out that they were deeply impressed by China's infrastructure. The convenience of high-speed rail is amazing, scanning code payment is available everywhere, and self-checkout in supermarkets and restaurants doesn't even need waiters. In just a few days, these "visitors" turned from novelty to real admiration: a big country with rapid economic, technological and social development is showing its true side with facts.

Let the world see a more open China

In fact, China's visa-free policy is not only to increase tourism revenue. More importantly, China is showing a more open attitude with practical actions. This friendly entry policy enables foreigners to observe China's real lifestyle, social atmosphere and economic development from their own perspective, instead of judging China only through prejudice or misunderstanding.

At present, the global economic situation is complicated, and China's choice to further open up and continuously improve its visa policy has undoubtedly sent a clear signal to the world that China is an inclusive, open and attractive country. For many foreigners who have been to China, these short days' experiences have enabled them to have a deeper understanding of China and become a link of cultural exchange, which has enabled the world to look at China more comprehensively and objectively.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

“Disenshittify or Die”

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

Last weekend, I traveled to Las Vegas for Defcon 32, where I had the immense privilege of giving a solo talk on Track 1, entitled "Disenshittify or die! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification":

https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=54861

This was a followup to last year's talk, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification," a talk that kicked off a lot of international interest in my analysis of platform decay ("enshittification"):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rimtaSgGz_4

The Defcon organizers have earned a restful week or two, and that means that the video of my talk hasn't yet been posted to Defcon's Youtube channel, so in the meantime, I thought I'd post a lightly edited version of my speech crib. If you're headed to Burning Man, you can hear me reprise this talk at Palenque Norte (7&E); I'm kicking off their lecture series on Tuesday, Aug 27 at 1PM.

==

What the fuck happened to the old, good internet?

I mean, sure, our bosses were a little surveillance-happy, and they were usually up for sharing their data with the NSA, and whenever there was a tossup between user security and growth, it was always YOLO time.

But Google Search used to work. Facebook used to show you posts from people you followed. Uber used to be cheaper than a taxi and pay the driver more than a cabbie made. Amazon used to sell products, not Shein-grade self-destructing dropshipped garbage from all-consonant brands. Apple used to defend your privacy, rather than spying on you with your no-modifications-allowed Iphone.

There was a time when you searching for an album on Spotify would get you that album – not a playlist of insipid AI-generated covers with the same name and art.

Microsoft used to sell you software – sure, it was buggy – but now they just let you access apps in the cloud, so they can watch how you use those apps and strip the features you use the most out of the basic tier and turn them into an upcharge.

What – and I cannot stress this enough – the fuck happened?!

I’m talking about enshittification.

Here’s what enshittification looks like from the outside: First, you see a company that’s being good to its end users. Google puts the best search results at the top; Facebook shows you a feed of posts from people and groups you followl; Uber charges small dollars for a cab; Amazon subsidizes goods and returns and shipping and puts the best match for your product search at the top of the page.

That’s stage one, being good to end users. But there’s another part of this stage, call it stage 1a). That’s figuring out how to lock in those users.

There’s so many ways to lock in users.

If you’re Facebook, the users do it for you. You joined Facebook because there were people there you wanted to hang out with, and other people joined Facebook to hang out with you.

That’s the old “network effects” in action, and with network effects come “the collective action problem." Because you love your friends, but goddamn are they a pain in the ass! You all agree that FB sucks, sure, but can you all agree on when it’s time to leave?

No way.

Can you agree on where to go next?

Hell no.

You’re there because that’s where the support group for your rare disease hangs out, and your bestie is there because that’s where they talk with the people in the country they moved away from, then there’s that friend who coordinates their kid’s little league car pools on FB, and the best dungeon master you know isn’t gonna leave FB because that’s where her customers are.

So you’re stuck, because even though FB use comes at a high cost – your privacy, your dignity and your sanity – that’s still less than the switching cost you’d have to bear if you left: namely, all those friends who have taken you hostage, and whom you are holding hostage

Now, sometimes companies lock you in with money, like Amazon getting you to prepay for a year’s shipping with Prime, or to buy your Audible books on a monthly subscription, which virtually guarantees that every shopping search will start on Amazon, after all, you’ve already paid for it.

Sometimes, they lock you in with DRM, like HP selling you a printer with four ink cartridges filled with fluid that retails for more than $10,000/gallon, and using DRM to stop you from refilling any of those ink carts or using a third-party cartridge. So when one cart runs dry, you have to refill it or throw away your investment in the remaining three cartridges and the printer itself.

Sometimes, it’s a grab bag:

You can’t run your Ios apps without Apple hardware;

you can’t run your Apple music, books and movies on anything except an Ios app;

your iPhone uses parts pairing – DRM handshakes between replacement parts and the main system – so you can’t use third-party parts to fix it; and

every OEM iPhone part has a microscopic Apple logo engraved on it, so Apple can demand that the US Customs and Border Service seize any shipment of refurb Iphone parts as trademark violations.

Think Different, amirite?

Getting you locked in completes phase one of the enshittification cycle and signals the start of phase two: making things worse for you to make things better for business customers.

For example, a platform might poison its search results, like Google selling more and more of its results pages to ads that are identified with lighter and lighter tinier and tinier type.

Or Amazon selling off search results and calling it an “ad” business. They make $38b/year on this scam. The first result for your search is, on average, 29% more expensive than the best match for your search. The first row is 25% more expensive than the best match. On average, the best match for your search is likely to be found seventeen places down on the results page.

Other platforms sell off your feed, like Facebook, which started off showing you the things you asked to see, but now the quantum of content from the people you follow has dwindled to a homeopathic residue, leaving a void that Facebook fills with things that people pay to show you: boosted posts from publishers you haven’t subscribed to, and, of course, ads.

Now at this point you might be thinking ‘sure, if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.'

Bullshit!

Bull.

Shit.

The people who buy those Google ads? They pay more every year for worse ad-targeting and more ad-fraud

Those publishers paying to nonconsensually cram their content into your Facebook feed? They have to do that because FB suppresses their ability to reach the people who actually subscribed to them

The Amazon sellers with the best match for your query have to outbid everyone else just to show up on the first page of results. It costs so much to sell on Amazon that between 45-51% of every dollar an independent seller brings in has to be kicked up to Don Bezos and the Amazon crime family. Those sellers don’t have the kind of margins that let them pay 51% They have to raise prices in order to avoid losing money on every sale.

"But wait!" I hear you say!

[Come on, say it!]

"But wait! Things on Amazon aren’t more expensive that things at Target, or Walmart, or at a mom and pop store, or direct from the manufacturer.

"How can sellers be raising prices on Amazon if the price at Amazon is the same as at is everywhere else?"

[Any guesses?!]

That’s right, they charge more everywhere. They have to. Amazon binds its sellers to a policy called “most favored nation status,” which says they can’t charge more on Amazon than they charge elsewhere, including direct from their own factory store.

So every seller that wants to sell on Amazon has to raise their prices everywhere else.

Now, these sellers are Amazon’s best customers. They’re paying for the product, and they’re still getting screwed.

Paying for the product doesn’t fill your vapid boss’s shriveled heart with so much joy that he decides to stop trying to think of ways to fuck you over.

Look at Apple. Remember when Apple offered every Ios user a one-click opt out for app-based surveillance? And 96% of users clicked that box?

(The other four percent were either drunk or Facebook employees or drunk Facebook employees.)

That cost Facebook at least ten billion dollars per year in lost surveillance revenue?

I mean, you love to see it.

But did you know that at the same time Apple started spying on Ios users in the same way that Facebook had been, for surveillance data to use to target users for its competing advertising product?

Your Iphone isn’t an ad-supported gimme. You paid a thousand fucking dollars for that distraction rectangle in your pocket, and you’re still the product. What’s more, Apple has rigged Ios so that you can’t mod the OS to block its spying.

If you’re not not paying for the product, you’re the product, and if you are paying for the product, you’re still the product.

Just ask the farmers who are expected to swap parts into their own busted half-million dollar, mission-critical tractors, but can’t actually use those parts until a technician charges them $200 to drive out to the farm and type a parts pairing unlock code into their console.

John Deere’s not giving away tractors. Give John Deere a half mil for a tractor and you will be the product.

Please, my brothers and sisters in Christ. Please! Stop saying ‘if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product.’

OK, OK, so that’s phase two of enshittification.

Phase one: be good to users while locking them in.

Phase two: screw the users a little to you can good to business customers while locking them in.

Phase three: screw everybody and take all the value for yourself. Leave behind the absolute bare minimum of utility so that everyone stays locked into your pile of shit.

Enshittification: a tragedy in three acts.

That’s what enshittification looks like from the outside, but what’s going on inside the company? What is the pathological mechanism? What sci-fi entropy ray converts the excellent and useful service into a pile of shit?

That mechanism is called twiddling. Twiddling is when someone alters the back end of a service to change how its business operates, changing prices, costs, search ranking, recommendation criteria and other foundational aspects of the system.

Digital platforms are a twiddler’s utopia. A grocer would need an army of teenagers with pricing guns on rollerblades to reprice everything in the building when someone arrives who’s extra hungry.

Whereas the McDonald’s Investments portfolio company Plexure advertises that it can use surveillance data to predict when an app user has just gotten paid so the seller can tack an extra couple bucks onto the price of their breakfast sandwich.

And of course, as the prophet William Gibson warned us, ‘cyberspace is everting.' With digital shelf tags, grocers can change prices whenever they feel like, like the grocers in Norway, whose e-ink shelf tags change the prices 2,000 times per day.

Every Uber driver is offered a different wage for every job. If a driver has been picky lately, the job pays more. But if the driver has been desperate enough to grab every ride the app offers, the pay goes down, and down, and down.

The law professor Veena Dubal calls this ‘algorithmic wage discrimination.' It’s a prime example of twiddling.

Every youtuber knows what it’s like to be twiddled. You work for weeks or months, spend thousands of dollars to make a video, then the algorithm decides that no one – not your own subscribers, not searchers who type in the exact name of your video – will see it.

Why? Who knows? The algorithm’s rules are not public.

Because content moderation is the last redoubt of security through obscurit: they can’t tell you what the como algorithm is downranking because then you’d cheat.

Youtube is the kind of shitty boss who docks every paycheck for all the rules you’ve broken, but won’t tell you what those rules were, lest you figure out how to break those rules next time without your boss catching you.

Twiddling can also work in some users’ favor, of course. Sometimes platforms twiddle to make things better for end users or business customers.

For example, Emily Baker-White from Forbes revealed the existence of a back-end feature that Tiktok’s management can access they call the “heating tool.”

When a manager applies the heating toll to a performer’s account, that performer’s videos are thrust into the feeds of millions of users, without regard to whether the recommendation algorithm predicts they will enjoy that video.

Why would they do this? Well, here’s an analogy from my boyhood I used to go to this traveling fair that would come to Toronto at the end of every summer, the Canadian National Exhibition. If you’ve been to a fair like the Ex, you know that you can always spot some guy lugging around a comedically huge teddy bear.

Nominally, you win that teddy bear by throwing five balls in a peach-basket, but to a first approximation, no one has ever gotten five balls to stay in that peach-basket.

That guy “won” the teddy bear when a carny on the midway singled him out and said, "fella, I like your face. Tell you what I’m gonna do: You get just one ball in the basket and I’ll give you this keychain, and if you amass two keychains, I’ll let you trade them in for one of these galactic-scale teddy-bears."

That’s how the guy got his teddy bear, which he now has to drag up and down the midway for the rest of the day.

Why the hell did that carny give away the teddy bear? Because it turns the guy into a walking billboard for the midway games. If that dopey-looking Judas Goat can get five balls into a peach basket, then so can you.

Except you can’t.

Tiktok’s heating tool is a way to give away tactical giant teddy bears. When someone in the TikTok brain trust decides they need more sports bros on the platform, they pick one bro out at random and make him king for the day, heating the shit out of his account.

That guy gets a bazillion views and he starts running around on all the sports bro forums trumpeting his success: *I am the Louis Pasteur of sports bro influencers!"

The other sports bros pile in and start retooling to make content that conforms to the idiosyncratic Tiktok format. When they fail to get giant teddy bears of their own, they assume that it’s because they’re doing Tiktok wrong, because they don’t know about the heating tool.

But then comes the day when the TikTok Star Chamber decides they need to lure in more astrologers, so they take the heat off that one lucky sports bro, and start heating up some lucky astrologer.

Giant teddy bears are all over the place: those Uber drivers who were boasting to the NYT ten years ago about earning $50/hour? The Substackers who were rolling in dough? Joe Rogan and his hundred million dollar Spotify payout? Those people are all the proud owners of giant teddy bears, and they’re a steal.

Because every dollar they get from the platform turns into five dollars worth of free labor from suckers who think they just internetting wrong.

Giant teddy bears are just one way of twiddling. Platforms can play games with every part of their business logic, in highly automated ways, that allows them to quickly and efficiently siphon value from end users to business customers and back again, hiding the pea in a shell game conducted at machine speeds, until they’ve got everyone so turned around that they take all the value for themselves.

That’s the how: How the platforms do the trick where they are good to users, then lock users in, then maltreat users to be good to business customers, then lock in those business customers, then take all the value for themselves.

So now we know what is happening, and how it is happening, all that’s left is why it’s happening.

Now, on the one hand, the why is pretty obvious. The less value that end-users and business customers capture, the more value there is left to divide up among the shareholders and the executives.

That’s why, but it doesn’t tell you why now. Companies could have done this shit at any time in the past 20 years, but they didn’t. Or at least, the successful ones didn’t. The ones that turned themselves into piles of shit got treated like piles of shit. We avoided them and they died.

Remember Myspace? Yahoo Search? Livejournal? Sure, they’re still serving some kind of AI slop or programmatic ad junk if you hit those domains, but they’re gone.

And there’s the clue: It used to be that if you enshittified your product, bad things happened to your company. Now, there are no consequences for enshittification, so everyone’s doing it.

Let’s break that down: What stops a company from enshittifying?

There are four forces that discipline tech companies. The first one is, obviously, competition.

If your customers find it easy to leave, then you have to worry about them leaving

Many factors can contribute to how hard or easy it is to depart a platform, like the network effects that Facebook has going for it. But the most important factor is whether there is anywhere to go.

Back in 2012, Facebook bought Insta for a billion dollars. That may seem like chump-change in these days of eleven-digit Big Tech acquisitions, but that was a big sum in those innocent days, and it was an especially big sum to pay for Insta. The company only had 13 employees, and a mere 25 million registered users.

But what mattered to Zuckerberg wasn’t how many users Insta had, it was where those users came from.

[Does anyone know where those Insta users came from?]

That’s right, they left Facebook and joined Insta. They were sick of FB, even though they liked the people there, they hated creepy Zuck, they hated the platform, so they left and they didn’t come back.

So Zuck spent a cool billion to recapture them, A fact he put in writing in a midnight email to CFO David Ebersman, explaining that he was paying over the odds for Insta because his users hated him, and loved Insta. So even if they quit Facebook (the platform), they would still be captured Facebook (the company).

Now, on paper, Zuck’s Instagram acquisition is illegal, but normally, that would be hard to stop, because you’d have to prove that he bought Insta with the intention of curtailing competition.

But in this case, Zuck tripped over his own dick: he put it in writing.

But Obama’s DoJ and FTC just let that one slide, following the pro-monopoly policies of Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II, and setting an example that Trump would follow, greenlighting gigamergers like the catastrophic, incestuous Warner-Discovery marriage.

Indeed, for 40 years, starting with Carter, and accelerating through Reagan, the US has encouraged monopoly formation, as an official policy, on the grounds that monopolies are “efficient.”

If everyone is using Google Search, that’s something we should celebrate. It means they’ve got the very best search and wouldn’t it be perverse to spend public funds to punish them for making the best product?

But as we all know, Google didn’t maintain search dominance by being best. They did it by paying bribes. More than 20 billion per year to Apple alone to be the default Ios search, plus billions more to Samsung, Mozilla, and anyone else making a product or service with a search-box on it, ensuring that you never stumble on a search engine that’s better than theirs.

Which, in turn, ensured that no one smart invested big in rival search engines, even if they were visibly, obviously superior. Why bother making something better if Google’s buying up all the market oxygen before it can kindle your product to life?

Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon – they’re not “making things” companies, they’re “buying things” companies, taking advantage of official tolerance for anticompetitive acquisitions, predatory pricing, market distorting exclusivity deals and other acts specifically prohibited by existing antitrust law.

Their goal is to become too big to fail, because that makes them too big to jail, and that means they can be too big to care.

Which is why Google Search is a pile of shit and everything on Amazon is dropshipped garbage that instantly disintegrates in a cloud of offgassed volatile organic compounds when you open the box.

Once companies no longer fear losing your business to a competitor, it’s much easier for them to treat you badly, because what’re you gonna do?

Remember Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator in those old SNL sketches? “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the phone company.”

Competition is the first force that serves to discipline companies and the enshittificatory impulses of their leadership, and we just stopped enforcing competition law.

It takes a special kind of smooth-brained asshole – that is, an establishment economist – to insist that the collapse of every industry from eyeglasses to vitamin C into a cartel of five or fewer companies has nothing to do with policies that officially encouraged monopolization.

It’s like we used to put down rat poison and we didn’t have a rat problem. Then these dickheads convinced us that rats were good for us and we stopped putting down rat poison, and now rats are gnawing our faces off and they’re all running around saying, "Who’s to say where all these rats came from? Maybe it was that we stopped putting down poison, but maybe it’s just the Time of the Rats. The Great Forces of History bearing down on this moment to multiply rats beyond all measure!"

Antitrust didn’t slip down that staircase and fall spine-first on that stiletto: they stabbed it in the back and then they pushed it.

And when they killed antitrust, they also killed regulation, the second force that disciplines companies. Regulation is possible, but only when the regulator is more powerful than the regulated entities. When a company is bigger than the government, it gets damned hard to credibly threaten to punish that company, no matter what its sins.

That’s what protected IBM for all those years when it had its boot on the throat of the American tech sector. Do you know, the DOJ fought to break up IBM in the courts from 1970-1982, and that every year, for 12 consecutive years, IBM spent more on lawyers to fight the USG than the DOJ Antitrust Division spent on all the lawyers fighting every antitrust case in the entire USA?

IBM outspent Uncle Sam for 12 years. People called it “Antitrust’s Vietnam.” All that money paid off, because by 1982, the president was Ronald Reagan, a man whose official policy was that monopolies were “efficient." So he dropped the case, and Big Blue wriggled off the hook.

It’s hard to regulate a monopolist, and it’s hard to regulate a cartel. When a sector is composed of hundreds of competing companies, they compete. They genuinely fight with one another, trying to poach each others’ customers and workers. They are at each others’ throats.

It’s hard enough for a couple hundred executives to agree on anything. But when they’re legitimately competing with one another, really obsessing about how to eat each others’ lunches, they can’t agree on anything.

The instant one of them goes to their regulator with some bullshit story, about how it’s impossible to have a decent search engine without fine-grained commercial surveillance; or how it’s impossible to have a secure and easy to use mobile device without a total veto over which software can run on it; or how it’s impossible to administer an ISP’s network unless you can slow down connections to servers whose owners aren’t paying bribes for “premium carriage"; there’s some *other company saying, “That’s bullshit”

“We’ve managed it! Here’s our server logs, our quarterly financials and our customer testimonials to prove it.”

100 companies are a rabble, they're a mob. They can’t agree on a lobbying position. They’re too busy eating each others’ lunch to agree on how to cater a meeting to discuss it.

But let those hundred companies merge to monopoly, absorb one another in an incestuous orgy, turn into five giant companies, so inbred they’ve got a corporate Habsburg jaw, and they become a cartel.

It’s easy for a cartel to agree on what bullshit they’re all going to feed their regulator, and to mobilize some of the excess billions they’ve reaped through consolidation, which freed them from “wasteful competition," sp they can capture their regulators completely.

You know, Congress used to pass federal consumer privacy laws? Not anymore.

The last time Congress managed to pass a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988: The Video Privacy Protection Act. That’s a law that bans video-store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS cassettes you take home. In other words, it regulates three things that have effectively ceased to exist.

The threat of having your video rental history out there in the public eye was not the last or most urgent threat the American public faced, and yet, Congress is deadlocked on passing a privacy law.

Tech companies’ regulatory capture involves a risible and transparent gambit, that is so stupid, it’s an insult to all the good hardworking risible transparent ruses out there.

Namely, they claim that when they violate your consumer, privacy or labor rights, It’s not a crime, because they do it with an app.

Algorithmic wage discrimination isn’t illegal wage theft: we do it with an app.

Spying on you from asshole to appetite isn’t a privacy violation: we do it with an app.

And Amazon’s scam search tool that tricks you into paying 29% more than the best match for your query? Not a ripoff. We do it with an app.

Once we killed competition – stopped putting down rat poison – we got cartels – the rats ate our faces. And the cartels captured their regulators – the rats bought out the poison factory and shut it down.

So companies aren’t constrained by competition or regulation.

But you know what? This is tech, and tech is different.IIt’s different because it’s flexible. Because our computers are Turing-complete universal von Neumann machines. That means that any enshittificatory alteration to a program can be disenshittified with another program.

Every time HP jacks up the price of ink , they invite a competitor to market a refill kit or a compatible cartridge.

When Tesla installs code that says you have to pay an extra monthly fee to use your whole battery, they invite a modder to start selling a kit to jailbreak that battery and charge it all the way up.

Lemme take you through a little example of how that works: Imagine this is a product design meeting for our company’s website, and the guy leading the meeting says “Dudes, you know how our KPI is topline ad-revenue? Well, I’ve calculated that if we make the ads just 20% more invasive and obnoxious, we’ll boost ad rev by 2%”

This is a good pitch. Hit that KPI and everyone gets a fat bonus. We can all take our families on a luxury ski vacation in Switzerland.

But here’s the thing: someone’s gonna stick their arm up – someone who doesn’t give a shit about user well-being, and that person is gonna say, “I love how you think, Elon. But has it occurred to you that if we make the ads 20% more obnoxious, then 40% of our users will go to a search engine and type 'How do I block ads?'"

I mean, what a nightmare! Because once a user does that, the revenue from that user doesn’t rise to 102%. It doesn’t stay at 100% It falls to zero, forever.

[Any guesses why?]

Because no user ever went back to the search engine and typed, 'How do I start seeing ads again?'

Once the user jailbreaks their phone or discovers third party ink, or develops a relationship with an independent Tesla mechanic who’ll unlock all the DLC in their car, that user is gone, forever.

Interoperability – that latent property bequeathed to us courtesy of Herrs Turing and Von Neumann and their infinitely flexible, universal machines – that is a serious check on enshittification.

The fact that Congress hasn’t passed a privacy law since 1988 Is countered, at least in part, by the fact that the majority of web users are now running ad-blockers, which are also tracker-blockers.

But no one’s ever installed a tracker-blocker for an app. Because reverse engineering an app puts in you jeopardy of criminal and civil prosecution under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, with penalties of a 5-year prison sentence and a $500k fine for a first offense.

And violating its terms of service puts you in jeopardy under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986, which is the law that Ronald Reagan signed in a panic after watching Wargames (seriously!).

Helping other users violate the terms of service can get you hit with a lawsuit for tortious interference with contract. And then there’s trademark, copyright and patent.

All that nonsense we call “IP,” but which Jay Freeman of Cydia calls “Felony Contempt of Business Model."

So if we’re still at that product planning meeting and now it’s time to talk about our app, the guy leading the meeting says, “OK, so we’ll make the ads in the app 20% more obnoxious to pull a 2% increase in topline ad rev?”

And that person who objected to making the website 20% worse? Their hand goes back up. Only this time they say “Why don’t we make the ads 100% more invasive and get a 10% increase in ad rev?"

Because it doesn't matter if a user goes to a search engine and types, “How do I block ads in an app." The answer is: you can't. So YOLO, enshittify away.

“IP” is just a euphemism for “any law that lets me reach outside my company’s walls to exert coercive control over my critics, competitors and customers,” and “app” is just a euphemism for “A web page skinned with the right IP so that protecting your privacy while you use it is a felony.”

Interop used to keep companies from enshittifying. If a company made its client suck, someone would roll out an alternative client, if they ripped a feature out and wanted to sell it back to you as a monthly subscription, someone would make a compatible plugin that restored it for a one-time fee, or for free.

To help people flee Myspace, FB gave them bots that you’d load with your login credentials. It would scrape your waiting Myspace messages and put ‘em in your FB inbox, and login to Myspace and paste your replies into your Myspace outbox. So you didn’t have to choose between the people you loved on Myspace, and Facebook, which launched with a promise never to spy on you. Remember that?!

Thanks to the metastasis of IP, all that is off the table today. Apple owes its very existence to iWork Suite, whose Pages, Numbers and Keynote are file-compatible with Microsoft’s Word, Excel and Powerpoint. But make an IOS runtime that’ll play back the files you bought from Apple’s stores on other platforms, and they’ll nuke you til you glow.

FB wouldn’t have had a hope of breaking Myspace’s grip on social media without that scrape, but scrape FB today in support of an alternative client and their lawyers will bomb you til the rubble bounces.

Google scraped every website in the world to create its search index. Try and scrape Google and they’ll have your head on a pike.

When they did it, it was progress. When you do it to them, that’s piracy. Every pirate wants to be an admiral.

Because this handful of companies has so thoroughly captured their regulators, they can wield the power of the state against you when you try to break their grip on power, even as their own flagrant violations of our rights go unpunished. Because they do them with an app.

Tech lost its fear of competitin it neutralized the threat from regulators, and then put them in harness to attack new startups that might do unto them as they did unto the companies that came before them.

But even so, there was a force that kept our bosses in check That force was us. Tech workers.

Tech workers have historically been in short supply, which gave us power, and our bosses knew it.

To get us to work crazy hours, they came up with a trick. They appealed to our love of technology, and told us that we were heroes of a digital revolution, who would “organize the world’s information and make it useful,” who would “bring the world closer together.”

They brought in expert set-dressers to turn our workplaces into whimsical campuses with free laundry, gourmet cafeterias, massages, and kombucha, and a surgeon on hand to freeze our eggs so that we could work through our fertile years.

They convinced us that we were being pampered, rather than being worked like government mules.

This trick has a name. Fobazi Ettarh, the librarian-theorist, calls it “vocational awe, and Elon Musk calls it being “extremely hardcore.”

This worked very well. Boy did we put in some long-ass hours!

But for our bosses, this trick failed badly. Because if you miss your mother’s funeral and to hit a deadline, and then your boss orders you to enshittify that product, you are gonna experience a profound moral injury, which you are absolutely gonna make your boss share.

Because what are they gonna do? Fire you? They can’t hire someone else to do your job, and you can get a job that’s even better at the shop across the street.

So workers held the line when competition, regulation and interop failed.

But eventually, supply caught up with demand. Tech laid off 260,000 of us last year, and another 100,000 in the first half of this year.

You can’t tell your bosses to go fuck themselves, because they’ll fire your ass and give your job to someone who’ll be only too happy to enshittify that product you built.

That’s why this is all happening right now. Our bosses aren’t different. They didn’t catch a mind-virus that turned them into greedy assholes who don’t care about our users’ wellbeing or the quality of our products.

As far as our bosses have always been concerned, the point of the business was to charge the most, and deliver the least, while sharing as little as possible with suppliers, workers, users and customers. They’re not running charities.

Since day one, our bosses have shown up for work and yanked as hard as they can on the big ENSHITTIFICATION lever behind their desks, only that lever didn’t move much. It was all gummed up by competition, regulation, interop and workers.

As those sources of friction melted away, the enshittification lever started moving very freely.

Which sucks, I know. But think about this for a sec: our bosses, despite being wildly imperfect vessels capable of rationalizing endless greed and cheating, nevertheless oversaw a series of actually great products and services.

Not because they used to be better people, but because they used to be subjected to discipline.

So it follows that if we want to end the enshittocene, dismantle the enshitternet, and build a new, good internet that our bosses can’t wreck, we need to make sure that these constraints are durably installed on that internet, wound around its very roots and nerves. And we have to stand guard over it so that it can’t be dismantled again.

A new, good internet is one that has the positive aspects of the old, good internet: an ethic of technological self-determination, where users of technology (and hackers, tinkerers, startups and others serving as their proxies) can reconfigure and mod the technology they use, so that it does what they need it to do, and so that it can’t be used against them.

But the new, good internet will fix the defects of the old, good internet, the part that made it hard to use for anyone who wasn’t us. And hell yeah we can do that. Tech bosses swear that it’s impossible, that you can’t have a conversation friend without sharing it with Zuck; or search the web without letting Google scrape you down to the viscera; or have a phone that works reliably without giving Apple a veto over the software you install.

They claim that it’s a nonsense to even ponder this kind of thing. It’s like making water that’s not wet. But that’s bullshit. We can have nice things. We can build for the people we love, and give them a place that’s worth of their time and attention.

To do that, we have to install constraints.

The first constraint, remember, is competition. We’re living through a epochal shift in competition policy. After 40 years with antitrust enforcement in an induced coma, a wave of antitrust vigor has swept through governments all over the world. Regulators are stepping in to ban monopolistic practices, open up walled gardens, block anticompetitive mergers, and even unwind corrupt mergers that were undertaken on false pretenses.

Normally this is the place in the speech where I’d list out all the amazing things that have happened over the past four years. The enforcement actions that blocked companies from becoming too big to care, and that scared companies away from even trying.

Like Wiz, which just noped out of the largest acquisition offer in history, turning down Google’s $23b cashout, and deciding to, you know, just be a fucking business that makes money by producing a product that people want and selling it at a competitive price.

Normally, I’d be listing out FTC rulemakings that banned noncompetes nationwid. Or the new merger guidelines the FTC and DOJ cooked up, which – among other things – establish that the agencies should be considering whether a merger will negatively impact privacy.

I had a whole section of this stuff in my notes, a real victory lap, but I deleted it all this week.

[Can anyone guess why?]

That’s right! This week, Judge Amit Mehta, ruling for the DC Circuit of these United States of America, In the docket 20-3010 a case known as United States v. Google LLC, found that “Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly," and ordered Google and the DOJ to propose a schedule for a remedy, like breaking the company up.

So yeah, that was pretty fucking epic.

Now, this antitrust stuff is pretty esoteric, and I won’t gatekeep you or shame you if you wanna keep a little distance on this subject. Nearly everyone is an antitrust normie, and that's OK. But if you’re a normie, you’re probably only catching little bits and pieces of the narrative, and let me tell you, the monopolists know it and they are flooding the zone.

The Wall Street Journal has published over 100 editorials condemning FTC Chair Lina Khan, saying she’s an ineffectual do-nothing, wasting public funds chasing doomed, quixotic adventures against poor, innocent businesses accomplishing nothing

[Does anyone out there know who owns the Wall Street Journal?]

That’s right, it’s Rupert Murdoch. Do you really think Rupert Murdoch pays his editorial board to write one hundred editorials about someone who’s not getting anything done?

The reality is that in the USA, in the UK, in the EU, in Australia, in Canada, in Japan, in South Korea, even in China, we are seeing more antitrust action over the past four years than over the preceding forty years.

Remember, competition law is actually pretty robust. The problem isn’t the law, It’s the enforcement priorities. Reagan put antitrust in mothballs 40 years ago, but that elegant weapon from a more civilized age is now back in the hands of people who know how to use it, and they’re swinging for the fences.

Next up: regulation.

As the seemingly inescapable power of the tech giants is revealed for the sham it always was, governments and regulators are finally gonna kill the “one weird trick” of violating the law, and saying “It doesn’t count, we did it with an app.”

Like in the EU, they’re rolling out the Digital Markets Act this year. That’s a law requiring dominant platforms to stand up APIs so that third parties can offer interoperable services.

So a co-op, a nonprofit, a hobbyist, a startup, or a local government agency wil eventuallyl be able to offer, say, a social media server that can interconnect with one of the dominant social media silos, and users who switch to that new platform will be able to continue to exchange messages with the users they follow and groups they belong to, so the switching costs will fall to damned near zero.

That’s a very cool rule, but what’s even cooler is how it’s gonna be enforced. Previous EU tech rules were “regulations” as in the GDPR – the General Data Privacy Regulation. EU regs need to be “transposed” into laws in each of the 27 EU member states, so they become national laws that get enforced by national courts.

For Big Tech, that means all previous tech regulations are enforced in Ireland, because Ireland is a tax haven, and all the tech companies fly Irish flags of convenience.

Here’s the thing: every tax haven is also a crime haven. After all, if Google can pretend it’s Irish this week, it can pretend to be Cypriot, or Maltese, or Luxembougeious next week. So Ireland has to keep these footloose criminal enterprises happy, or they’ll up sticks and go somewhere else.

This is why the GDPR is such a goddamned joke in practice. Big tech wipes its ass with the GDPR, and the only way to punish them starts with Ireland’s privacy commissioner, who barely bothers to get out of bed. This is an agency that spends most of its time watching cartoons on TV in its pajamas and eating breakfast cereal. So all of the big GDPR cases go to Ireland and they die there.

This is hardly a secret. The European Commission knows it’s going on. So with the DMA, the Commission has changed things up: The DMA is an “Act,” not a “Regulation.” Meaning it gets enforced in the EU’s federal courts, bypassing the national courts in crime-havens like Ireland.

In other words, the “we violate privacy law, but we do it with an app” gambit that worked on Ireland’s toothless privacy watchdog is now a dead letter, because EU federal judges have no reason to swallow that obvious bullshit.

Here in the US, the dam is breaking on federal consumer privacy law – at last!

Remember, our last privacy law was passed in 1988 to protect the sanctity of VHS rental history. 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?

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 pretty big coalition for that kind of privacy law! Which is why we have seen a procession of imperfect (but steadily improving) privacy laws working their way through Congress.

If you sign up for EFF’s mailing list at eff.org we’ll send you an email when these come up, so you can call your Congressjerk or Senator and talk to them about it. Or better yet, make an appointment to drop by their offices when they’re in their districts, and explain to them that you’re not just a registered voter from their district, you’re the kind of elite tech person who goes to Defcon, and then explain the bill to them. That stuff makes a difference.

What about self-help? How are we doing on making interoperability legal again, so hackers can just fix shit without waiting for Congress or a federal agency to act?

All the action here these day is in the state Right to Repair fight. We’re getting state R2R bills, like the one that passed this year in Oregon that bans parts pairing, where DRM is used to keep a device from using a new part until it gets an authorized technician’s unlock code.

These bills are pushed by a fantastic group of organizations called the Repair Coalition, at Repair.org, and they’ll email you when one of these laws is going through your statehouse, so you can meet with your state reps and explain to the JV squad the same thing you told your federal reps.

Repair.org’s prime mover is Ifixit, who are genuine heroes of the repair revolution, and Ifixit’s founder, Kyle Wiens, is here at the con. When you see him, you can shake his hand and tell him thanks, and that’ll be even better if you tell him that you’ve signed up to get alerts at repair.org!

Now, on to the final way that we reverse enhittification and build that new, good internet: you, the tech labor force.

For years, your bosses tricked you into thinking you were founders in waiting, temporarily embarrassed entrepreneurs who were only momentarily drawing a salary.

You certainly weren’t workers. Your power came from your intrinsic virtue, not like those lazy slobs in unions who have to get their power through that kumbaya solidarity nonsense.

It was a trick. You were scammed. The power you had came from scarcity, and so when the scarcity ended, when the industry started ringing up six-figure annual layoffs, your power went away with it.

The only durable source of power for tech workers is as workers, in a union.

Think about Amazon. Warehouse workers have to piss in bottles and have the highest rate of on-the-job maimings of any competing business. Whereas Amazon coders get to show up for work with facial piercings, green mohawks, and black t-shirts that say things their bosses don’t understand. They can piss whenever they want!

That’s not because Jeff Bezos or Andy Jassy loves you guys. It’s because they’re scared you’ll quit and they don’t know how to replace you.

Time for the second obligatory William Gibson quote: “The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.” You know who’s living in the future?. Those Amazon blue-collar workers. They are the bleeding edge.

Drivers whose eyeballs are monitored by AI cameras that do digital phrenology on their faces to figure out whether to dock their pay, warehouse workers whose bodies are ruined in just months.

As tech bosses beef up that reserve army of unemployed, skilled tech workers, then those tech workers – you all – will arrive at the same future as them.

Look, I know that you’ve spent your careers explaining in words so small your boss could understand them that you refuse to enshittify the company’s products, and I thank you for your service.

But if you want to go on fighting for the user, you need power that’s more durable than scarcity. You need a union. Wanna learn how? Check out the Tech Workers Coalition and Tech Solidarity, and get organized.

Enshittification didn’t arise because our bosses changed. They were always that guy.

They were always yankin’ on that enshittification lever in the C-suite.

What changed was the environment, everything that kept that switch from moving.

And that’s good news, in a bankshot way, because it means we can make good services out of imperfect people. As a wildly imperfect person myself, I find this heartening.

The new good internet is in our grasp: an internet that has the technological self-determination of the old, good internet, and the greased-skids simplicity of Web 2.0 that let all our normie friends get in on the fun.

Tech bosses want you to think that good UX and enshittification can’t ever be separated. That’s such a self-serving proposition you can spot it from orbit. We know it, 'cause we built the old good internet, and we’ve been fighting a rear-guard action to preserve it for the past two decades.

It’s time to stop playing defense. It's time to go on the offensive. To restore competition, regulation, interop and tech worker power so that we can create the new, good internet we’ll need to fight fascism, the climate emergency, and genocide.

To build a digital nervous system for a 21st century in which our children can thrive and prosper.

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

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess

Image: https://twitter.com/igama/status/1822347578094043435/ (cropped)

@fak3r@mastodon.social (cropped)

https://mamot.fr/@fak3r@mastodon.social/112963252835869648

CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.pt

[cosmicpuzzle]

Pros and Cons of Venus ♀ in Each House

1st House:

Pros:

♎Attractive, refined and diplomatic.

♎Balanced and amiable.

♎Social and polite.

Cons:

♎Vain and superifical.

♎Uses charm to get things done.

♎Self-serving.

2nd House:

Pros:

♎Good taste (not just in food but in all things of value).

♎Financially successful

♎Makes others feel valued.

Cons:

♎Vain spender.

♎Status conscious purchases.

♎Materialistic bringing.

3rd House:

Pros:

♎Pleasant and tactful communication.

♎Good relationship with peers, neighbours, teammates.

♎Not argumentative.

Cons:

♎Sweet talks and Flirting nature.

♎Superficial Emotions.

♎Tendency towards affairs (while travel or neighbours)

4th House

Pros:

♎Good relations with family especially mother.

♎Domestic comforts and luxuries.

♎Good host to guests.

Cons:

♎Private with feelings, emotions.

♎Wastes money on luxuries.

♎Needy in love.

5th House

Pros:

♎Ability in arts, drama, music.

♎Deep and loyal in love.

♎Love of children and mate.

Cons:

♎Attention seeker.

♎Tendency towards affairs

♎Vanity and excessive enjoyment.

6th House

Pros:

♎Good relations at workplace.

♎Good sense of service,

♎Clean and hygienic environments.

Cons:

♎Critical in relationships, argumentative.

♎Uses charm to climb at workplace.

♎Mean spender.

7th House

Pros:

♎Good at forming relationships.

♎Deal maker and negotiator.

♎Fair and just in interactions.

Cons:

♎Pleasure seeker.

♎Too many relationships.

♎People pleaser.

8th House

Pros:

♎Deep conjugal bond.

♎Financial benefits from others.

♎Satisfying sexual life.

Cons:

♎Taboo relationships

♎Marries for money or sex. Makes money illegally.

♎Porn Addictions and vices.

9th House

Pros:

♎Love of learning, travel and cultures

♎Good relations with foreigngers.

♎Good parents and mentors.

Cons:

♎Falls out of love due to boredom.

♎Falls in love with teachers, elders or inappropriate persons

♎Dislikes anything that reminds them of home or their culture.

Venus in 10th House

Pros:

♎Positive social image.

♎Love of work.

♎Good relations with boss and superiors.

Cons:

♎ Uses charm and beauty to get things done.

♎Works only for money or with aim on promotion.

♎Love based on status. May trap their boss or superiors in scandals

Venus in 11th House

Pros:

♎Active social life and community.

♎Makes money through social platforms.

♎Good sense of design and brand building.

Cons:

♎Social climber and tendency towards online affairs.

♎Uses network to get things done.

♎More interested in product building than its use.

Venus in 12th House

Pros:

♎Selfless in love and relationships.

♎Charitable and giving.

♎Wise investments.

Cons:

♎Excessive spending and indulgence.

♎Addictions and vices.

♎Keeps love hidden and suffers hence.

All the above points are quite general and can be modified by conjunctions aspects of other planets and the general nature of your birth chart.

Please don't get offended if you see something for yourself and you don't possess those traits. 1 in 12 people could have these.

For Readings DM

[mariacallous]

My earliest memory of 4chan was sitting up late at night, typing its URL into my browser, and scrolling through a thread of LOLcat memes, which were brand-new at the time.

Back then a photoshop of a cat saying "I can has cheezburger" or an image of an owl saying “ORLY?” was, without question, the funniest thing my 14-year-old brain had ever laid eyes on. So much so, I woke my dad up by laughing too hard and had to tell him that I was scrolling through pictures of cats at 2 in the morning. Later, I would become intimately familiar with the site’s much more nefarious tendencies.

It's strange to look back at 4chan, apparently wiped off the internet entirely last week by hackers from a rival message board, and think about how many different websites it was over its more than two decades online. What began as a hub for internet culture and an anonymous way station for the internet's anarchic true believers devolved over the years into a fan club for mass shooters, the central node of Gamergate, and the beating heart of far-right fascism around the world—a virus that infected every facet of our lives, from the slang we use to the politicians we vote for. But the site itself had been frozen in amber since the George W. Bush administration.

It is likely that there will never be a site like 4chan again—which is, likely, a very good thing. But it had also essentially already succeeded at its core project: chewing up the world and spitting it back out in its own image. Everything—from X to Facebook to YouTube—now sort of feels like 4chan. Which makes you wonder why it even needed to still exist.

"The novelty of a website devoted to shock and gore, and the rebelliousness inherent in it, dies when your opinions become the official policy of the world's five or so richest people and the government of the United States," the Onion CEO and former extremism reporter Ben Collins tells WIRED. “Like any ostensibly nihilist cultural phenomenon, it inherently dies if that phenomenon itself becomes The Man.”

My first experience with the more toxic side of the site came several years after my LOLcat all-nighter, when I was in college. I was a big Tumblr user��all my friends were on there—and for about a year or so, our corner of the platform felt like an extension of the house parties we would throw. That cozy vibe came crashing down for me when I got doxed the summer going into my senior year. Someone made a “hate blog” for me—one of the first times I felt the dark presence of an anonymous stranger’s digital ire, and posted my phone number on 4chan.

They played a prank that was popular on the site at the time, writing in a thread that my phone number was for a GameStop store that had a copy of the ultra-rare video game Battletoads. I received no less than 250 phone calls over the next 48 hours asking if I had a copy of the game.

Many of the 4chan users that called me mid-Battletoad attack left messages. I listened to all of them. A pattern quickly emerged: young men, clearly nervous to even leave a message, trying to harass a stranger for, seemingly, the hell of it. Those voicemails have never left me in the 15 years I've spent covering 4chan as a journalist.

I had a front-row seat to the way those timid men morphed into the violent, seething underbelly of the internet. The throbbing engine of reactionary hatred that resented everything and everyone simply because resentment was the only language its users knew how to speak. I traveled the world in the 2010s, tracing 4chan’s impact on global democracy. I followed it to France, Germany, Japan, and Brazil as 4chan's users became increasingly convinced that they could take over the planet through racist memes, far-right populism, and cyberbullying. And, in a way, they did. But the ubiquity of 4chan culture ended up being an oddly Pyrrhic victory for the site itself.

Collins, like me, closely followed 4chan's rise in the 2010s from internet backwater to unofficial propaganda organ of the Trump administration. As he sees it, once Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 there was really no point to 4chan anymore. Why hide behind anonymity if a billionaire lets you post the same kind of extremist content under your real name and even pays you for it?

4chan’s “user base just moved into a bigger ballpark and started immediately impacting American life and policy," Collins says. "Twitter became 4chan, then the 4chanified Twitter became the United States government. Its usefulness as an ammo dump in the culture war was diminished when they were saying things you would now hear every day on Twitter, then six months later out of the mouths of an administration official."

But understanding how 4chan went from the home of cat memes to a true internet bogeyman requires an understanding of how the site actually worked. Its features were often overlooked amid all the conversations about the site's political influence, but I'd argue they were equally, if not more, important.

4chan was founded by Christopher “Moot” Poole when he was 15. A regular user on slightly less anarchic comedy site Something Awful, Poole created a spinoff site for a message board there called “Anime Death Tentacle Rape Whorehouse.” Poole was a fan of the Japanese message board 2chan, or Futaba Channel, and wanted to give Western anime fans their own version, so he poorly translated the site's code and promoted his new site, 4chan, to Something Awful's anime community. Several core features were ported over in the process.

4chan users were anonymous, threads weren't permanent and would time out or "404" after a period of inactivity, and there were dozens of sub-boards you could post to. That unique combination of ephemerality, anonymity, and organized chaos proved to be a potent mix, immediately creating a race-to-the-bottom gutter culture unlike anything else on the web. The dark end point of the techno-utopianism that built the internet. On 4chan you were no one, and nothing you did mattered unless it was so shocking, so repulsive, so hateful that someone else noticed and decided to screenshot it before it disappeared into the digital ether.

"The iconic memes that came out of 4chan are because people took the time to save it, you know? And the fact that nobody predicted, nobody could predict or control what was saved or what wasn't saved, I think, is really, really fascinating," Cates Holderness, Tumblr's former head of editorial, tells WIRED.

Still, 4chan was more complicated than it looked from the outside. The site was organized into dozens of smaller sections, everything from comics to cooking to video games to, of course, pornography. Holderness says she learned to make bread during the pandemic thanks to 4chan's cooking board. (Full disclosure: I introduced Holderness to 4chan way back in 2012.)

"When I switched to sourdough, I got really good pointers," she says.

Holderness calls 4chan the internet's “Wild West” and says its demise this month felt appropriate in a way. The chaos that defined 4chan, both the good and the very, very bad, has largely been paved over by corporate platforms and their algorithms now.

Our feeds deliver us content; we don't have to hunt for it. We don't have to sit in front of a computer refreshing a page to find out whether we're getting a new cat meme or a new manifesto. The humanness of that era of the web, now that 4chan is gone, is likely never coming back. And we'll eventually find out if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

"The snippets that we have of what 4chan was—it's all skewed,” Holderness says. “There is no record. There's no record that can ever encapsulate what 4chan was."

[rotten-pomegranates-fics]

Adult trio with hybrid reader

Warnings: they put a collar on you, hisoka brands you, hisoka is mean ):, mentions of having kids in illumi’s

𑁍𑁍𑁍𑁍𑁍𑁍𑁍𑁍𑁍𑁍𑁍𑁍𑁍𑁍𑁍𑁍

Illumi

Illumi wants a cat because your obedient and loyal to him

He lives for having you curled up in a little ball on his lap and loves when you purr at his touch

He gets a cat bed for you but yhe always demands you sleep with him

Will declaw you if you scratch stuff and won’t feel bad about it at all

He probably force you to marry him so he can have kids with you that have your senses and agility

He likes when you rub your face on him because he can tell that you want him as much as he wants you

Illumi has you wear a collar with your name on it in pretty pink letters that’s has a lock at the back so you can’t take it off, if your bad he tightens it just enough to make you uncomfortable but not enough to cut off significant airflow

Chrollo

Chrollo wants a cat because your small it’s like your travel sized for his convinces, he brings you when he has business with the troupe

He loves reading with you purring in his lap, he likes it when you perk up when he pets you

He lives for when your ears twitch and move when he blows on them

Adore that your quiet and calm but also understands when your not

He had you sleep in a cozy dog bed for larger dogs next to his bed but there are still lots of snuggles

Hisoka

Hisoka wants a bunny because he’s a Magician and every magician need a show bunny

and your just the cutest little docile thing ever how could he not keep you

He is still a sadist so no matter how cute you are he still randomly grabs your ears really roughly when he wants to hear you squeal

He loves the way your tail goes back and forth when you get excited about him giving you Icecream or a new petty peace of jewelry

Makes you wear a playboy bunny outfit and put on little shoes for him when he’s bored

If he was mad he would pick you up by the ears just to hurt you as a punishment

He would definitely get you branded with something like his initials instead of just getting you to wear a collar

You only sleep in the bed with him tucked nice and safe under his arm wear you belong

©rotten-pomegranate- All rights reserved, don’t steal, translate, copy, plagiarize, claim my work as your own or post it on other platforms.

[gulfiya007]

On lukola fandom

Here’s some venting about the lukola fandom, and its ways, and consequences, from an ordinary polin, Bridgerton and Luke fan.

Starting from the way Luke’s loved ones and friends are treated by its adherents. Especially his girlfriend. The hate towards her is visceral. The whole phenomenon of bullying and stalking someone just for existing and posting on their SM account from time to time probably needs to be studied by social studies scholars and parasocial relationship specialists, cause it’s new heights apparently.

So, what if she’s proud of Luke as her boyfriend and wants to show it? What if she wants to mark her territory sometimes, to which she has a right btw? What if she trolls haters and delusional IRL shippers occasionally? Hers is probably the most relatable behavior. I myself, as an introvert millennial who doesn’t run one single SM account and cringe from the exhibitionist nature of current SM posting practices, still recognize that there’s nothing unusual about that kind of posting per se. Why was Luke’s former gf, Jade, allowed to post him all the time (which is totally alright btw), but Antonia hinting at having, say, a dinner with Luke is shady, attention-seeking, desperate, needy and despicable?

It's not that I care particularly about her. In fact, I couldn’t care less if she’s replaced by Luke with some other woman in a couple of months or if she is his future wife and mother to his kids. I still believe, regardless of her status in the relationship, she deserves basic respect and decent treatment as a human being that we know pretty much nothing about. She does not deserve the vilification and demonization that she gets.

Luke too, has a right to privacy and respect for his personal choices that are nobody’s business. He owes no one anything in terms of disclosing his dating life and confirming his relationships. If for someone, Luke bringing the girl to almost all his travels and events with himself, is not a proof or statement in and of itself about her being his girlfriend, then that’s on them. No amount of intentional misreading and skewed takes on photos will trump this simple fact.

Also please don’t bring up virtue signaling and other cancel culture stupidities, such as moral judgements passed on Luke and his close ones for political or other values purportedly held by them, of which we in fact know zilch. It’s clear that this is just another useful tool in a shipping crusade.

Nicola too, deserves, for a change, to have her numerous statements taken seriously. Let alone, privacy. She’s being stalked by her so-called fans to insanity. I am sure she, to put it mildly, is uncomfortable about her “queen” and “goddess” status among the cultists, and being a projection vessel for a myriad of sad women. Cause she knows very well this type of passionate idolatry is an inch away from hate, and the plus sign switches to a minus sign the minute she does something not to their liking, a wrong brand or person supported, or not enough disciplining of Luke is exercised. The most delusional thing about lukolas is them truly believing themselves to be Nic’s or Luke’s fans.

Which brings us to the crux of the matter. That IRL shipping is bad, period. Some lukola bloggers on tumblr, TT and IG half-heartedly try to reign in and admonish the more unhinged segment of the fandom by telling them to behave and not bring their bul..t to the actors' feet. However, this is what the lukola discourse platforms, by simply existing, still do - breed crazy fan behavior. Because the problem lies in the belief system itself. No amount of reservations, house-keeping and discipline by lukola discourse 'leaders' will do away with the tenets and premises of this religion that seep through and twist every discussion and speculation about the figures involved (Luke, Nic, etc). Since every reasoning should work towards a certain end goal, all means and distortions are good to achieve it. Finding faults with Luke's character and behavior and demanding a 'redemption' from him, hating and criticizing Luke's friends and family, attributing motivations to the actors and their loved ones that best suit theories, online stalking etc. A myth about Luke ever publicly stating he was single during promo, a ridiculous myth about Bridgerton cast and showrunners shipping lukola (news flash – nobody in the cast cares about their co-stars’ private lives, stop the kindergarten), or the “papgate” affecting in any way Luke’s job prospects. Myths upon myths that build the house of cards of the lukola dogma. I myself wouldn’t care a damn about this fandom if it really contained itself to its close corners and group chats, however, unsurprisingly, they spill over in a grand fashion and permeate all discourse.

You really believe the innocent delulu fangirling has no by-products? These are the staple manifestations of the lukola and of any IRL shipping fandom, and popular lukola theorists are pretty successful in justifying and reinforcing them. And it should not be surprising that some followers, the most zealous and stupid ones, take it too far and actually harass people and be annoying in SM.

As a Luke and polin fan, I am annoyed by this, but I am 100% sure this sh*t is affecting the actors, and you all can kiss goodbye to the chemistry between Luke and Nic naturally displayed during promo. I am sure polin will not be affected, for L and N are excellent actors and friends, but you all soon will look sadly back to S3 promo tour as magic that will never come back.

[princessazalea17]

How I will be moving forward after the February 28 Boycotts

Here are the places I will be re-directing my money towards to support local and smaller businesses.

Stop supporting (or minimize support for) McDonald's, Target, Walmart, Home Depot, Amazon, Meta, and other large corporate chains. If buying from big giants, make mindful purchases to reduce your consumption.

Books: Pango books, The Last Bookstore, Thrift Books, Abe Books, and if through Amazon, buying used instead of new. Also, the library, for obvious reasons. I have made the mistake of wasting money on shitty new books before, I strongly do not recommend.

Food: Local food stands, taco trucks, smaller restaurants, and regional chains instead of national ones. Choosing In N' Out over McDonald's, Cane's over KFC, etc., or making copycats at home. The same goes for coffee and other drinks. Many smaller donut shops in the area are better priced and tastier than Winchell's. There are so many places selling authentic Mexican food that you have no excuse to buy some nasty bullshit at Taco Bell or Del Taco. However, I strongly recommend Yelp, some of the smaller restaurants suck in terms of food quality that you get for the price.

Clothing and Shoes: Old Navy is pro-DEI. Depop, since I buy and sell on there (despite prices being pretty steep at times). Smaller thrift stores that ACTUALLY have changing rooms in them (goodbye, Goodwill SoCal!) Go to Ross and Nordstrom Rack, and avoid Marshalls and TJ Maxx, apparently. DD's is shitty but I can work with it if I'm in a financial pinch. Facebook groups, but I haven't found any good ones yet. For shoes, Journey's, Zappos, WSS, DSW, and brand websites will work (and Depop if I am confident the shoe will fit).

Beauty: ULTA is pro-DEI. I can also order directly from brands' sites.

Haircare: I have too much, but if I need more, Sally Beauty is my go-to. Not sure about the local hair store, though, since I hear stories about store owners profiling their Black customers.

Personal care: I believe I have found what I need at Food4Less.

Groceries: Food4Less or Trader Joe's, Northgate Gonzalez Markets if I am too lazy to travel far or need something cheaper there than at the other stores.

Hardware and Tools: Maybe Harbor Freight, but I am so used to using Home Depot for everything since it is trusted and so accessible. This is going to be a hard one for me.

Gaming: Shopping sales and sticking to battle passes and Bing/Microsoft Rewards to minimize spending on unnecessary purchases on skins (it is a challenge due to FOMO and limited-time collabs, especially on Overwatch). If I am buying consoles and console gams, I will buy from trusted resellers (too many scams on Mercari and other user-based platforms)

Tech: Buy new due to being burned in the past from buying refurbished tech, but cut back on consumption. Use BackMarket for used iPhones and Pixels, or buy new or certified refurbished from Samsung for Galaxy phones.

Stationery and Office Supplies: I have so much shit hoarded from years of schooling and coursework. However, go to an office store or a dollar store (Dollar Tree/General or Family Dollar) if you don't want to support Target or Walmart. If you went to a hood school like I did, they will sometimes give away free school supplies. I'm gonna make a separate post on school supplies you DO and DO NOT need.

[techramonic]

The Pinnacle of Self-Hatred: A Close-Reading on Elliot Rodger's Manifesto

“I named it the Day of Retribution. It would be a day in which I exact my ultimate retribution and revenge on all of the hedonistic scum who enjoyed lives of pleasure that they don’t deserve. If I can’t have it, I will destroy it. I will destroy all women because I can never have them. I will make them all suffer for rejecting me… And I will slaughter them like the animals they are.” (Rodger, 2014, p. 101)

On the Friday evening of May. 23, 2014, Elliot Rodger had perpetrated the Isla Vista Killings. A series of stabbings and shootings that claimed the lives of six people, injured fourteen, and concluded with his own death from a fatal self-inflicted gunshot wound on the head. Before this, Elliot was like any other normal teenager growing up.

As he mentioned in his own manifesto, he had a seemingly good childhood up until his parent’s divorce. Even until the separation, he still spent time with both sides of his family, maintaining the privilege to have access to many luxurious items such as a collection of designer clothes and even a BMW 328i. He traveled a lot, and at just the age of one, he had already traveled to France, Sussex, Malaysia (where his mother grew up), Spain, Greece, and California.

People on platforms such as Reddit often questioned why no one considered dating him at all. Elliot had also asked himself this question time and time again. In one of his youtube videos, entitled, “Why do girls hate me so much” he says:

“I’ve been attending college in Santa Barbara for two and a half years now, in those two and a half years I have experienced nothing but loneliness and misery, and my problem  is girls. There are so many beautiful girls here, but none of them give me a chance and I don’t know why. I don’t know why you girls are so repulsed by me.”

While it is easy to dismiss that Elliot solely acted upon his crime because he thought that girls were the problem, upon the surface where misogyny lies, there are layers upon layers of complexities that shaped his views. Elliot did not simply hate women and men who got with women he dreamed of, it was that ultimately, he hated himself—a hatred that manifested toward outward factors.

Elliot has exhibited a long string of stunted self-worth ever since he was a child, and while it is easy to throw around names like: monster and pure-evil; the fact remains: he is still considered a human amongst all those. One who is consumed by insecurity.

In understanding a crime, we must first examine the criminal and approach their case with empathy. Understanding the human aspect of these criminals does not however mean that one should excuse, dismiss, or condone their actions. Only understand the reasons behind their motivations. Here are some aspects I have noticed in his personality and life that may be able to better explain why.

MATERIALISM AND INSECURITY

In his manifesto entitled: “My Twisted World”, Elliot had confessed to having lived a good childhood. He was a nice kid who lived a nice life, up until his parent’s rocky divorce. While reading his manifesto, I have garnered his tendency to place his worth on materialistic things, moreso, his wealth. There were two instances of this on pages thirty to thirty-one of his manifesto. The first was when he was hesitant to invite his new friend from school over to his house because he was ashamed of his wealth:

“I was a bit hesitant to invite anyone from Pinecrest to my mother’s house, because it was located in Canoga Park, a bad area, and most of the kids at Pinecrest were upper-middle class who would look down on me for living there.”

On page thirty one of his manifesto, Elliot said that he was eager to receive an Xbox solely because many kids from his school wanted it:

“My mother bought me a brand new video game console, the Xbox. I heard a lot of kids talking about how great the Xbox was at school, so I was really eager to have one.”

This trait had continued on to his older years. In the same video where he questioned why girls disliked him so much, he stated:

“I do everything I can to appear attractive to you. I dress nice. I am sophisticated and magnificent. I have a nice car, a BMW.”

From this, it’s observable that Elliot tends to desire things just because other kids desire it too. This is rooted in his craving of validation and acceptance. This materialistic need for validation also transcended from mere objects to even his own appearance. Whenever he did not have what others had or wanted, he would be very ashamed of himself.

At the age of six, Elliot had moved to Topanga Elementary Charter School, a school based in California. The school has a thirty two per-cent minority rate, making seventy eight per-cent of the ethnicity population white. With the population being predominantly white, Elliot  had developed a view on the world that separates people by their differences: the “cool kids” and the “losers”. Mostly, Elliot described these cool kids as the higher-class, privileged, centered on attention, and white. 

“I realized, with some horror, that I wasn’t “cool” at all. I had a dorky hairstyle, I wore plain and uncool clothing, and I was shy and unpopular. I was always described as the shy boy in the past, but I never really thought my shyness would affect me in a negative way, until this point. This revelation about the world, and about myself, really decreased my self-esteem. On top of this was the feeling that I was different because I am of mixed race. I am half White, half Asian, and this made me different from the normal fully-white kids that I was trying to fit in with.”

He even dyed his hair blonde and tried to pick up on skateboarding because he thought it would make him appear more cool. On his manifesto he wrote:

“My first act was to ask my parents to allow me to bleach my hair blonde. I always envied and admired blonde-haired people, they always seemed so much more beautiful.” (Rodger, 2014, p. 17)

“I then started to notice that all of the cool kids were interested in skateboarding. I had never even ridden on a skateboard before, but if I wanted to be cool, I had to become a skateboarder.” (Rodger, 2014, p. 18)

This materialism had soon influenced his fixation on racial hierarchy. Elliot in his older years constantly demeaned and berated others of asian descent even if he was half-malaysian himself. To him, he considered whiteness as a prestige. On platforms such as reddit and facebook, he had made several negative comments regarding the appearance of some Asian men. 

A comment he had left on a reddit thread stated:

“Full Asian men are disgustingly ugly and white girls would never go for you. You’re just butthurt that you were born an asian piece of shit, so you lash out by linking these fake pictures. You even admit that you wish you were half white. You’ll never be half-white and you’ll never fulfill your dream of marrying a white woman. I suggest you jump off a bridge.” 

The paragraph entails Elliot calling out a man for linking fake pictures of himself. Elliot speculates that the man had done this because he wished he was white, then he tells him how he was not considered as attractive because he was simply born Asian. Elliot was also very fixated on his looks, specifically his height. He had repeatedly mentioned his envy of other boys and even girls who were taller than him.

On page fifteen of his manifesto, he wrote:

“As Fourth Grade started, it fully dawned on me that I was the shortest kid in my class – even the girls were taller than me. In the past, I rarely gave a thought to it, but at this stage I became extremely annoyed at how everyone was taller than me, and how the tallest boys were automatically respected more. It instilled the first feelings of inferiority in me, and such feelings would only grow more volatile with time.”

In other instances, he also noted that he was bullied for being physically weak and short, and often he would blame this solely on his descent. He saw being mixed as a form of inferiority because this made him “undesirable”.  His image of attractiveness is measured by euro-centric features: fair-skinned, blonde, blue eyes, and tall. In many instances, he changed parts of himself to better fit the narrative of being “cool”.

To him, it’s all a part of growing up and fitting in, but what he failed to see is that the more he takes and changes parts of himself for people to like him, the more it just makes him hollow. Elliot’s childhood and teen years, best summed up, is a fixation on trying to keep up with those who are higher on the social status ladder and this continued to his later years. 

EARLY EXPOSURE TO PORNOGRAPHY AND SEXIST MEDIA 

Elliot was lonelier during his teen years, at 13 years old, he stopped having contact with his only friends because they started having their own separate lives together, making him spend more time alone by himself (Rodger, 2014, p. 38). This was when Elliot recounted his first-time exposure to pornography by catching a teenager watch it in an arcade called Planet Cyber.  He re-called it as a traumatizing experience, confused on why such an explicit thing would be considered as “love”. Despite this, his innocence was damaged by this accidental exposure. Though he did feel aroused, he was more guilty and confused.

“One time while I was alone at Planet Cyber, I saw an older teenager watching pornography. I saw in detail a video of a man having sex with a hot girl …  I didn’t know anything about sex at the time. I barely even knew what sex was. I was slowly starting to develop sexual feelings for hot girls, but I didn’t know what to do with them. To see this video really traumatized me. I had no idea what I was seeing… I couldn’t imagine human beings doing such things with each other. The sight was shocking, traumatizing, and arousing. All of these feelings mixed together took a great toll on me. I walked home and cried by myself  for a bit.” (Rodger, 2014, p. 38-39)

This was the pinnacle of Elliot’s misery. A kid who searched for validation with his looks, now searched for it in sexual gratification as well. He only found himself loved if people flocked over to him. Furthermore, he had this distorted mindset that his worth is only measured by how many girls he could get and how fast he'd lose his virginity. This can be akin to the stereotypical portrayals of boys in media that often influenced teens and their concept of self-worth: the "cool" guys having lots of girls, while nerds and "losers" have none.

With this type of thinking, he tried his best to gain things that he thought women would like, yet he did little to no effort to actually get to know them and socialize. He believed that just because he had what others wanted or did not, people would love him. According to his friends, they thought he was almost always one-sided, expecting women to just swoon over him because he has things that are desirable.

ENTITLEMENT

Furthermore, despite his initial pleasant middle school years at Pinecrest High, such as dancing with a girl during a school dance (Rodger, 2014, p. 29), socializing eventually became difficult for Elliot. Often, this is because of  his appearance, where he experienced bullying because of his height. According to his friends, he barely talked to women but still complained no woman wanted to talk to him. 

Elliot was easily persuaded and subjected to peer-pressure because he had no clear identity. He always followed what was the trend because it made him feel less insecure about himself, since it was what he thought the people accepted and desired.

Despite his insecurities, Elliot had a fine record for being privileged, which he used to his advantage to "fix" certain qualities in himself that he deemed undesirable. Ever since he was younger, he often used his wealth to modify certain aspects of himself, even the smallest things: dyeing his hair blonde, purchasing designer clothes to appear more attractive and rich, purchasing mass amounts of body-building pills, and only picking up hobbies such as skateboarding and basketball solely because he found them useful in climbing up the social ladder.

Elliot also had a strong dislike for people who did not support his motivations. He expressed a strong resentment toward is step-mother, Soumaya, because of her assertive nature. He considered his dad to be “weak” for following her orders around, when in truth, she was only trying to teach Elliot a lesson about independence. 

“Not only did she kick me out of father’s house, but she forbade me to go there even for a short visit. And still, father didn’t do anything about it. Father kept saying that the house is her house as much as his, and that she has the right to kick me out. No! I am the eldest son! The house should be MY house before hers! This caused any respect I still had for my father to fade away completely. It was such a betrayal, to put his second wife before his eldest son. What kind of father would do that? The bitch must be really good to him in bed, I figured. What a weak man.” (Rodger, 2014, p. 62)

At his step-mother’s insistence, Elliot began looking for a job and eventually found work from a family friend who offered him a job for a house construction project. He felt more comfortable with it, seeing the job as helping rather than typical employment. After getting his driver’s license, Elliot enrolled in summer classes at Moorpark College but struggled with attendance, again, due to his jealousy of campus couples.

He dropped out midway through, briefly worked as a janitor at an airport office, and quit after one day. Knowing his mother would be upset, he re-enrolled at Moorpark but eventually dropped out again (Rodger, 2014, p. 70). Upon learning of Elliot’s decision to drop out again, his parents decided he would move to Santa Barbara, where he would live alone in an apartment paid for by his mother, receive a $500 monthly allowance from his father, and enroll in classes at Santa Barbara Community College (Rodger, 2014, p. 77). 

CONCLUSION

Elliot is very persistent on the idea that to be accepted, he needed to be loved, when in truth, he couldn't bear to accept himself. No one has absolutely any obligation to love someone because the other sees it as a form of validation. Self-worth comes from yourself, not from others. Due to Elliot’s constant fixation on trying to be accepted, he lost the identity that made him authentic and genuine. He lost what other people could not give him: self-worth.

Concluding, Elliot Rodger is a complex individual that cannot be summed up to one set character. He is not solely “pure evil”, he is a person with a background that influenced his decisions. He is not less deserving of humanity or empathy because just like others, he had also felt humane emotions. With criminals, it is always important to remember that to understand a certain event or phenomena of crime, we also have to understand not just the perpetrator that the media portrays, which is often easily pushed into a oversimplified narrative of “pure evil”; we must also consider the genuine person behind the crime. 

While it is important to recognize that these are profoundly disturbed individuals who must be held accountable for their actions, it is also crucial to understand that despite their crimes, they still remain human. Although, this does not mean that his background excuses or condones his actions. It only provides a framework to comprehensively understand both the case and the criminal behind it. 

[travelingare]

📍Scotland UK 🇬🇧

In the Scottish Highlands, where the wind whispers ancient secrets through mist- covered valleys and towering mountains, nature moves in silent harmony beneath a sky ever- changing-sometimes bathed in golden light, sometimes shadowed by drifting clouds. Deep lochs mirror the wild soul of the land, while crumbling castles tell tales of bravery and mystery. Amidst purple heather and rugged cliffs, the vastness stirs the spirit to wander freely, lost in the untouched beauty of a world where time itself seems to bow to eternity.

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[astroismypassion]

✨PART OF FORTUNE IN SIGNS AND HOUSES SERIES: 9TH HOUSE✨

Credit: Tumblr blog @astroismypassion

ARIES PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Aries and Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You would do well as a personal trainer or fitness instructor since you have great energy and motivation that can inspire clients to achieve health and fitness goals. You feel abundant when you are inspired and inspiring others and when you can experience the childlike joy and share it with those around you.

TAURUS PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Taurus and Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You can earn money via teaching about practical skills, business, economics or the arts, via creating and selling educational content (online courses, e-books, instructional videos), by becoming a travel writer or blogger, starting or managing a tourism-related business (travel agency, boutique hotel or guided tour company), via international law.

GEMINI PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Gemini and Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You can earn money via developing or working with educational technology platforms that facilitate online learning, via work in international business/trade, via diplomacy, engaging in media production, creating content for TV, radio or online platforms.

CANCER PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You can feel the most abundant when you have Cancer and Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You can earn money via selling home-brewed beer or offering brewing classes, via media content (podcasts, videos) connected with family relationships, emotional health, cultural traditions, life coaching, via real estate related to family homes, community housing, vacation properties that provide a sense of home and comfort, via non-profit organizations that focus on family support, emotional well-being and cultural preservation.

LEO PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Leo and Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You can earn money via providing high-end services, such as image consulting or bespoke travel planning, via engaging in theatre, film, directing, producing, via creative arts (music, painting, dancing), via sharing your experiences by storytelling, via teaching, arts, philosophy or leadership.

VIRGO PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Virgo and Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You can earn money via nutrition counselling, naturopathy, wellness coaching, preventative care, via writing for technical and scientific publications, via developing or managing programs that facilitate cultural exchanges and study abroad opportunities. You feel abundant when you are focused on service and when you have clear communication.

LIBRA PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Libra and Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You can earn money via becoming a make-up artist, creating tutorials or selling beauty products. You feel abundant when you travel with your loved ones, your partner or as a part of the team. You find wealth via becoming a teacher in subjects like art, design, law or philosophy. You find abundance in starting a business in art (art gallery, design studio, fashion brand).

SCORPIO PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Scorpio and Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You can earn money via esoteric studies, sociology, spiritual transformation, via energy work, shamanic healing, transformational coaching. You feel abundant when you dive into transformation, healing and deep psychological insights. You can also offer consulting services in areas, like crisis management, organizational transformation or deep personal development. You feel abundant when you promote healing and transformation via self-help books, wellness products or spiritual tools.

SAGITTARIUS PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You can earn money via offering tailored travel plans, starting a business in adventure tourism (offering hiking, trekking and cultural tours), offering spiritual counselling or coaching, helping others find their path and purpose.

CAPRICORN PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Capricorn and Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You can earn money via import/export, global consultancy, multinational corporations, via offering historical tours, archaeological digs, via eco-tourism, via international law or corporate law. You feel abundant when you are disciplined, patient and persistent.

AQUARIUS PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Aquarius and Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You can earn money via writing or speaking about progressive philosophical or spiritual ideas that align with modern, futuristic or humanitarian values, via online courses, workshops or alternative education methods, via technology, social sciences or futuristic studies.

PISCES PART OF FORTUNE IN THE 9TH HOUSE

You feel the most abundant when you have Pisces and Sagittarius Sun people in your life. You can earn money via producing media content (podcast, video, documentary) on spiritual, artistic, cultural topic, via creating educational programs/workshops that blend traditional learning with holistic or spiritual perspective, via spiritual coaching, astrology or psychic readings.

Credit: Tumblr blog @astroismypassion

[absolutebl]

Good afternoon ABL,

I noticed that on your GMMTV 2025 Lineup review, you had already coloured OF2 in deep pink. And I combed through all your tags to see if I could find an answer as for why. (So I wouldn’t have to hassle you.) But alas, I struggled to find an answer (aside from the fact that s1 was dreadfully chaotic). So my question is: what made you decide to skip this particular show? Or more generally phrased: what criteria do you apply to shows to determine their “pink status”? (Asking so that I won’t bother you about something you’re absolutely disinterested in.)

Kind regards,

— Thel. 💚

P.S. As for your “Favourite Branded Pairs,” are we going with current branded pairs? And if so, how niche do they need to be? 🤔

Oooo, the How Dare category?

Well in the case of Only Friends 2 no secret I absolutely loathed Only Friends original so the best I could manage is a hate watch and I'm trying not to do that to myself these days.

I don't like the Messy Gays trope (recently dropped Gelboys for this reason), with a few noted exceptions and (so far) never from Thailand. It either gets too realistic or too depressing or both.

I prefer my characters being, generally, nice to each other, especially friendship groups.

I watch BL for the intimacy and the connection and the warm fuzzies.

How do I (a completest) decide not to even bother to pick up a BL?

That is a good question, because usually I would at least watch the first 2 episodes, just to make sure. (And so I can mark it dnf on the spreadsheet.)

To be fair I reserve the right to do that with OF2 and Love You Teacher.

Here's my criteria:

Can I get hold of it?

I'm lazy so if it is difficult to find, on a platform I don't have a subscription to (e.g. Netflix), only grey, or only served with tons of ads, and I'm not really intersted and/or I doubt the quality? I won't bother. (Boys Love Omegaverse from Japan is a good example of this.)

These get a cnf on the spreadsheet (could not find).

What country is it from?

If it's Thailand and a pulp I'm way less likely to hunt for it (we get so many, and so often they are of such poor quality, especially the travel-log ones like Chiang Mai Adventures). There are a few other countries out there whose quality (Vietnam) or ability to stick the landing (China, Philippines) I doubt with good reason, so I won't bother for them either.

Is it something I didn't like the first time?

I watched the pair before and wasn't into them. It's the second in a series (or a spin off) and I didn't like the first installment. You know what they say about the definitional of insanity?

Is it based on one of my least favorite tropes or triggers?

Again some countries handle some of these tropes better than others and I almost always give Japan a pass because they are so interesting and experimental. Messy Gay (for example) I don't love from Thailand but I'm okay with from Korea. I don't like extreme infantilization so I will avoid that (probably my biggest issue with Flirt Milk, which I kind of wish I'd dropped) and the reason I won't pick up Love You Teacher. I'm unlikely to watch anything based on the amnesia trope (side eyes Jack o'Frost). I dislike horror.

Nothing is a true deal breaker for me unless I witness it in action and can't imagine how the story or character would be redeemed.

Did the trailer wigged me out?

For some reason, something about the trailer upset me. Could be any of the above triggers or turn-offs or some other feeling I got from it, like it is going to end sad, or the chemsitry is bad, or one of the mains reminds me of an ex, or I just don't like the directing or acting style.

Favourite Branded Pairs?

Hum...

For me to build an alliance with a pair, I generally want them to have been in at least 2 shows together, playing different characters. I don't mind indie or niche or mostly playing sides. But I do want reliable, steady, and decent chemistry. I also think we should stand a good chance of them acting together again for me to bother to get invested (so no sunk ships).

Does that help?