#abuse in sports

[ooooo-mcyt]

Lizzie and Scott are both sacrificial lambs, but like.

Lizzie is a sacrificial lamb in the sense of. A wounded animal fighting against its bindings, because it isn't fair for its life to be reduced, time and time again, to what cleansing flames can offer other people.

On the other hand, Scott is a sacrificial lamb in the sense of. An animal who follows you and lays down in your lap as you prepare to slaughter it, because it's accepted that it's only worth is in the gain of other people.

If this makes sense to anyone.

[benevolenterrancy]

Wangxian in the brain rn.

What if WWX didn't get kicked out the cloud recesses in his disciple era and he stayed for the whole school year?

Anyways the prompt is Wei Wuxian and Lan Wangji playing in the snow. Maybe the lake in caiyi town would freeze over and WWX would invent his ancient china's version of ice skating.

Wei Wuxian staying for the entire lectures would play absolute havoc on Lan Wangji's mental well-being u.u especially since I definitely see Wei Wuxian having an "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em!" approach to mountain winters

[thatexygurl]

there's so many things in tsc that just come at you all at once, so it's hard to focus on just one thing to break down, but the most glaring thing that stood out to me is how hard it is to really put someone back together. especially someone so shattered that it's nigh impossible to glue them back and pray they don't crumble under your ministrations.

if jean is neil's foil, then jeremy is andrew's direct antithesis. whereas andrew is a steady bedrock because he's been broken too many times to know how to weather the storm, jeremy is too soft hands and an even softer soul. he cares and cares and cares. so empathetic and so gentle it almost breaks your heart. you pray for the impossibility that jeremy can survive knowing the truth because if he doesn't, then what hope does jean have? so you pray he can be steady too. that he can weather the storm as well. that he will not break when knowing that just under the surface lies shark-infested waters.

but then you remember the beginning. "even knowing everything could go completely sideways, you'd make that choice every time"

in every other universe, jean has not survived. but in every other universe, he did not have the trojans.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (May 3) in CALGARY, then TOMORROW (May 4) in VANCOUVER, then onto Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Even Google admits – grudgingly – that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

It's nice that Google has finally stopped gaslighting the rest of us with claims that its search was still the same bedrock utility that so many of us relied upon as a key piece of internet infrastructure. This not only feels wildly wrong, it is empirically, provably false:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

Not only that, but we know why Google search sucks. Memos released as part of the DOJ's antitrust case against Google reveal that the company deliberately chose to worsen search quality to increase the number of queries you'd have to make (and the number of ads you'd have to see) to find a decent result:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Google's antitrust case turns on the idea that the company bought its way to dominance, spending the some of the billions it extracted from advertisers and publishers to buy the default position on every platform, so that no one ever tried another search engine, which meant that no one would invest in another search engine, either.

Google's tacit defense is that its monopoly billions only incidentally fund these kind of anticompetitive deals. Mostly, Google says, it uses its billions to build the greatest search engine, ad platform, mobile OS, etc that the public could dream of. Only a company as big as Google (says Google) can afford to fund the R&D and security to keep its platform useful for the rest of us.

That's the "monopolistic bargain" – let the monopolist become a dictator, and they will be a benevolent dictator. Shriven of "wasteful competition," the monopolist can split their profits with the public by funding public goods and the public interest.

Google has clearly reneged on that bargain. A company experiencing the dramatic security failures and declining quality should be pouring everything it has to righting the ship. Instead, Google repeatedly blew tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks while doing mass layoffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Those layoffs have now reached the company's "core" teams, even as its core services continue to decay:

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

(Google's antitrust trial was shrouded in secrecy, thanks to the judge's deference to the company's insistence on confidentiality. The case is moving along though, and warrants your continued attention:)

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-2-trillion-secret-trial-against

Google wormed its way into so many corners of our lives that its enshittification keeps erupting in odd places, like ordering takeout food:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Back in February, Housefresh – a rigorous review site for home air purifiers – published a viral, damning account of how Google had allowed itself to be overrun by spammers who purport to provide reviews of air purifiers, but who do little to no testing and often employ AI chatbots to write automated garbage:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

In the months since, Housefresh's Gisele Navarro has continued to fight for the survival of her high-quality air purifier review site, and has received many tips from insiders at the spam-farms and Google, all of which she recounts in a followup essay:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

One of the worst offenders in spam wars is Dotdash Meredith, a content-farm that "publishes" multiple websites that recycle parts of each others' content in order to climb to the top search slots for lucrative product review spots, which can be monetized via affiliate links.

A Dotdash Meredith insider told Navarro that the company uses a tactic called "keyword swarming" to push high-quality independent sites off the top of Google and replace them with its own garbage reviews. When Dotdash Meredith finds an independent site that occupies the top results for a lucrative Google result, they "swarm a smaller site’s foothold on one or two articles by essentially publishing 10 articles [on the topic] and beefing up [Dotdash Meredith sites’] authority."

Dotdash Meredith has keyword swarmed a large number of topics. from air purifiers to slow cookers to posture correctors for back-pain:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/keyword-swarming-dotdash.jpg

The company isn't shy about this. Its own shareholder communications boast about it. What's more, it has competition.

Take Forbes, an actual news-site, which has a whole shadow-empire of web-pages reviewing products for puppies, dogs, kittens and cats, all of which link to high affiliate-fee-generating pet insurance products. These reviews are not good, but they are treasured by Google's algorithm, which views them as a part of Forbes's legitimate news-publishing operation and lets them draft on Forbes's authority.

This side-hustle for Forbes comes at a cost for the rest of us, though. The reviewers who actually put in the hard work to figure out which pet products are worth your money (and which ones are bad, defective or dangerous) are crowded off the front page of Google and eventually disappear, leaving behind nothing but semi-automated SEO garbage from Forbes:

https://twitter.com/ichbinGisele/status/1642481590524583936

There's a name for this: "site reputation abuse." That's when a site perverts its current – or past – practice of publishing high-quality materials to trick Google into giving the site a high ranking. Think of how Deadspin's private equity grifter owners turned it into a site full of casino affiliate spam:

https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publishing/

The same thing happened to the venerable Money magazine:

https://moneygroup.pr/

Money is one of the many sites whose air purifier reviews Google gives preference to, despite the fact that they do no testing. According to Google, Money is also a reliable source of information on reprogramming your garage-door opener, buying a paint-sprayer, etc:

https://money.com/best-paint-sprayer/

All of this is made ten million times worse by AI, which can spray out superficially plausible botshit in superhuman quantities, letting spammers produce thousands of variations on their shitty reviews, flooding the zone with bullshit in classic Steve Bannon style:

https://escapecollective.com/commerce-content-is-breaking-product-reviews/

As Gizmodo, Sports Illustrated and USA Today have learned the hard way, AI can't write factual news pieces. But it can pump out bullshit written for the express purpose of drafting on the good work human journalists have done and tricking Google – the search engine 90% of us rely on – into upranking bullshit at the expense of high-quality information.

A variety of AI service bureaux have popped up to provide AI botshit as a service to news brands. While Navarro doesn't say so, I'm willing to bet that for news bosses, outsourcing your botshit scams to a third party is considered an excellent way of avoiding your journalists' wrath. The biggest botshit-as-a-service company is ASR Group (which also uses the alias Advon Commerce).

Advon claims that its botshit is, in fact, written by humans. But Advon's employees' Linkedin profiles tell a different story, boasting of their mastery of AI tools in the industrial-scale production of botshit:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg

Now, none of this is particularly sophisticated. It doesn't take much discernment to spot when a site is engaged in "site reputation abuse." Presumably, the 12,000 googlers the company fired last year could have been employed to check the top review keyword results manually every couple of days and permaban any site caught cheating this way.

Instead, Google is has announced a change in policy: starting May 5, the company will downrank any site caught engaged in site reputation abuse. However, the company takes a very narrow view of site reputation abuse, limiting punishments to sites that employ third parties to generate or uprank their botshit. Companies that produce their botshit in-house are seemingly not covered by this policy.

As Navarro writes, some sites – like Forbes – have prepared for May 5 by blocking their botshit sections from Google's crawler. This can't be their permanent strategy, though – either they'll have to kill the section or bring it in-house to comply with Google's rules. Bringing things in house isn't that hard: US News and World Report is advertising for an SEO editor who will publish 70-80 posts per month, doubtless each one a masterpiece of high-quality, carefully researched material of great value to Google's users:

https://twitter.com/dannyashton/status/1777408051357585425

As Navarro points out, Google is palpably reluctant to target the largest, best-funded spammers. Its March 2024 update kicked many garbage AI sites out of the index – but only small bottom-feeders, not large, once-respected publications that have been colonized by private equity spam-farmers.

All of this comes at a price, and it's only incidentally paid by legitimate sites like Housefresh. The real price is borne by all of us, who are funneled by the 90%-market-share search engine into "review" sites that push low quality, high-price products. Housefresh's top budget air purifier costs $79. That's hundreds of dollars cheaper than the "budget" pick at other sites, who largely perform no original research.

Google search has a problem. AI botshit is dominating Google's search results, and it's not just in product reviews. Searches for infrastructure code samples are dominated by botshit code generated by Pulumi AI, whose chatbot hallucinates nonexistence AWS features:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/pulumi_ai_pollution_of_search/

This is hugely consequential: when these "hallucinations" slip through into production code, they create huge vulnerabilities for widespread malicious exploitation:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

We've put all our eggs in Google's basket, and Google's dropped the basket – but it doesn't matter because they can spend $20b/year bribing Apple to make sure no one ever tries a rival search engine on Ios or Safari:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-payments-apple-reached-20-220947331.html

Google's response – laying off core developers, outsourcing to low-waged territories with weak labor protections and spending billions on stock buybacks – presents a picture of a company that is too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Google promised us a quid-pro-quo: let them be the single, authoritative portal ("organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"), and they will earn that spot by being the best search there is:

https://www.ft.com/content/b9eb3180-2a6e-41eb-91fe-2ab5942d4150

But – like the spammers at the top of its search result pages – Google didn't earn its spot at the center of our digital lives.

It cheated.

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/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Image: freezelight (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spam_wall_-_Flickr_-_freezelight.jpg

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

[republicanidiots]

Nicole Simpson would be 64 years old if Simpson hadn't murdered her.

Fuck mourning OJ Simpson. He was a football player. Nicole was a young woman with children who tried to get away.

Here come the journalists weighing in about OJ Simpson's "complicated history" -- it's not complicated. He killed his wife because she wouldn't take his abuse.

[beemovieerotica]

so I guess if you describe a decades-long international crisis involving multiple world powers as "complex" then somebody on tumblr is gonna be like "umm where is the complexity here?" to try and gotcha you?

and then you realize that their idea of simplicity is based solely on declaring who is morally at fault, and having decided that and posting about it online they're relieved the burden of ever conceptualizing an actual outcome to everything going on, because their activism begins and ends with identifying the "good guys" versus "bad guys" and not talking about what the fuck is supposed to happen next, and definitely not addressing any of the actual core political problems or history therein that have enabled this genocide

[polepositioned]

max + jos verstappen x journal, day three by richard siken / manufacturing by alan r. shapiro / i am an atheist who says his prayers by karl shapiro / a thousand splendid suns by khaled hosseini / the merchant of venice by william shakespeare, and other assorted quotes

articles: x , x , x , x , x , x , x , x , x

this was a tough one, and i did my best to convey the right emotions in every slide. hopefully that comes across!

[ @carbonmono, @28ms28 , @nicaeno, @vesrtapen , @grise-and-rind , @mvlionheart, @dafunzies ]

[nco05]

Gianpiero either calls their working relationship a succesfull marriage or brotherhood, depending on how much chaos he wants to feed the masses

[gomzdrawfr]

Cringe worthy priceraven doodle - ghostface thing

Follow Ghost’s orders

[local-hellhound-steals-spaghetti]

Sh*t has hit the fan in equestrian sport and I genuinely wonder if this is the beginning of the end of it's social license to operate.

I used to respect Charlotte Dujardin as "one of the kinder riders out there". Sadly it seems like this was all just marketing. She just happened to have a horse like Valegro that tolerated her harsh handling (she described him as "hard mouthed" which is a pretty good indication that he had poor training to start with).

But she was the golden girl of dressage and the UK's darling of the sport. Now the curtain is peeled back to reveal casual whipping of a horse's legs over 24 times, commenting how the whip "doesn't whip hard enough."

Methodical and not at all seeming angry or disregulated while the 15 year old on the panicked horse's back cries out. This is not a one off. It's a technique. I've seen it before. Instuctors that chase after "lazy" horses in riding schools with a whip so that the horse "doesn't get away with it."

What about horses getting chased around a round yard with a whip until rearing in panic and lathered up in sweat? I've seen that too, during an equine science program where we were supposed to be learning how to break in weanlings.

It just happens to be a Olympic gold medalist doing it and getting caught.

In the article it says "you can't force a 400-500kg animal to do something." You absolutely can and horses are regularly forced into things they don't want to do. They're flighty prey animals. They say "no" pretty clearly in competition rings but then the whip comes out, the spurs go on and the horse shuts down. Despite the blue tongues from lack of oxygen, mouths strapped shut with tight nosebands, bits that they can't escape from, froth and blood in their mouths, they continue. Because they have no choice.

When your training principle relies on negative reinforcement and positive punishment, escalation like this inevitably occurs. When your training principle is based in domiance, on "not letting them get away with it" and on "making them do it", this is where it goes. The horse's autonomy and feelings diminished into "naughty" or "just trying to be lazy" ... not fear or pain or just a simple struggle to do something they're not physically able to do.

And it becomes normalised, laughed off and accepted, especially when a gold medalist Olympian does it.

The only reason this is a scandal is because an elite rider got caught doing it. But this is not a one off or a "bad apple" this is what the entire traditional horse training model is based on.

The FEI is making a big show of this because they want to look tough on horse welfare so the Olympics doesn't throw out Equestrian sport. But just wait until the dressage kicks off. We will see the same tense, stressed out horses, toe flicking and hollow with hop-step piaffes that are an insult to the Classic masters of old.

The sport of dressage will crash and burn if it continues on its current trajectory. Equestrian sport will follow as a whole when the public realises these are not animals "enjoying their jobs". Unless the FEI allows for a huge paradigm shift where people can compete tackless and use positive reinforcement (actual +R and not the pathetic pat on the neck they pass off as +R), the sport will fall to ruin and the elites will have only themselves to blame.

[deathbysports]

ngl, sports fandom has made some of you get way too comfortable with creepy behavior.

you really don't need to know where your favorite athlete lives, who they're dating, what they're eating, what they're doing right this very second at the time of this post, anything.

unless they themselves made it public (either via their social media accounts or through a major sports league post), it is none of your business! be fucking respectful of their privacy holy shit!

and while we're at it, yall need to especially stop being fucking weird about their dating lives in general. the obsession around their love lives is... pretty gross. and that's not even getting into the misogyny around it.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI is a WMD

I'm in TARTU, ESTONIA! AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (TOMORROW, May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (TOMORROW, May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

Fun fact: "The Tragedy Of the Commons" is a hoax created by the white nationalist Garrett Hardin to justify stealing land from colonized people and moving it from collective ownership, "rescuing" it from the inevitable tragedy by putting it in the hands of a private owner, who will care for it properly, thanks to "rational self-interest":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

Get that? If control over a key resource is diffused among the people who rely on it, then (Garrett claims) those people will all behave like selfish assholes, overusing and undermaintaining the commons. It's only when we let someone own that commons and charge rent for its use that (Hardin says) we will get sound management.

By that logic, Google should be the internet's most competent and reliable manager. After all, the company used its access to the capital markets to buy control over the internet, spending billions every year to make sure that you never try a search-engine other than its own, thus guaranteeing it a 90% market share:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Google seems to think it's got the problem of deciding what we see on the internet licked. Otherwise, why would the company flush $80b down the toilet with a giant stock-buyback, and then do multiple waves of mass layoffs, from last year's 12,000 person bloodbath to this year's deep cuts to the company's "core teams"?

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

And yet, Google is overrun with scams and spam, which find their way to the very top of the first page of its search results:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The entire internet is shaped by Google's decisions about what shows up on that first page of listings. When Google decided to prioritize shopping site results over informative discussions and other possible matches, the entire internet shifted its focus to producing affiliate-link-strewn "reviews" that would show up on Google's front door:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

This was catnip to the kind of sociopath who a) owns a hedge-fund and b) hates journalists for being pain-in-the-ass, stick-in-the-mud sticklers for "truth" and "facts" and other impediments to the care and maintenance of a functional reality-distortion field. These dickheads started buying up beloved news sites and converting them to spam-farms, filled with garbage "reviews" and other Google-pleasing, affiliate-fee-generating nonsense.

(These news-sites were vulnerable to acquisition in large part thanks to Google, whose dominance of ad-tech lets it cream 51 cents off every ad dollar and whose mobile OS monopoly lets it steal 30 cents off every in-app subscriber dollar):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

Now, the spam on these sites didn't write itself. Much to the chagrin of the tech/finance bros who bought up Sports Illustrated and other venerable news sites, they still needed to pay actual human writers to produce plausible word-salads. This was a waste of money that could be better spent on reverse-engineering Google's ranking algorithm and getting pride-of-place on search results pages:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

That's where AI comes in. Spicy autocomplete absolutely can't replace journalists. The planet-destroying, next-word-guessing programs from Openai and its competitors are incorrigible liars that require so much "supervision" that they cost more than they save in a newsroom:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/29/what-part-of-no/#dont-you-understand

But while a chatbot can't produce truthful and informative articles, it can produce bullshit – at unimaginable scale. Chatbots are the workers that hedge-fund wreckers dream of: tireless, uncomplaining, compliant and obedient producers of nonsense on demand.

That's why the capital class is so insatiably horny for chatbots. Chatbots aren't going to write Hollywood movies, but studio bosses hyperventilated at the prospect of a "writer" that would accept your brilliant idea and diligently turned it into a movie. You prompt an LLM in exactly the same way a studio exec gives writers notes. The difference is that the LLM won't roll its eyes and make sarcastic remarks about your brainwaves like "ET, but starring a dog, with a love plot in the second act and a big car-chase at the end":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

Similarly, chatbots are a dream come true for a hedge fundie who ends up running a beloved news site, only to have to fight with their own writers to get the profitable nonsense produced at a scale and velocity that will guarantee a high Google ranking and millions in "passive income" from affiliate links.

One of the premier profitable nonsense companies is Advon, which helped usher in an era in which sites from Forbes to Money to USA Today create semi-secret "review" sites that are stuffed full of badly researched top-ten lists for products from air purifiers to cat beds:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

Advon swears that it only uses living humans to produce nonsense, and not AI. This isn't just wildly implausible, it's also belied by easily uncovered evidence, like its own employees' Linkedin profiles, which boast of using AI to create "content":

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg

It's not true. Advon uses AI to produce its nonsense, at scale. In an excellent, deeply reported piece for Futurism, Maggie Harrison Dupré brings proof that Advon replaced its miserable human nonsense-writers with tireless chatbots:

https://futurism.com/advon-ai-content

Dupré describes how Advon's ability to create botshit at scale contributed to the enshittification of clients from Yoga Journal to the LA Times, "Us Weekly" to the Miami Herald.

All of this is very timely, because this is the week that Google finally bestirred itself to commence downranking publishers who engage in "site reputation abuse" – creating these SEO-stuffed fake reviews with the help of third parties like Advon:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

(Google's policy only forbids site reputation abuse with the help of third parties; if these publishers take their nonsense production in-house, Google may allow them to continue to dominate its search listings):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

There's a reason so many people believed Hardin's racist "Tragedy of the Commons" hoax. We have an intuitive understanding that commons are fragile. All it takes is one monster to start shitting in the well where the rest of us get our drinking water and we're all poisoned.

The financial markets love these monsters. Mark Zuckerberg's key insight was that he could make billions by assembling vast dossiers of compromising, sensitive personal information on half the world's population without their consent, but only if he kept his costs down by failing to safeguard that data and the systems for exploiting it. He's like a guy who figures out that if he accumulates enough oily rags, he can extract so much low-grade oil from them that he can grow rich, but only if he doesn't waste money on fire-suppression:

https://locusmag.com/2018/07/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/

Now Zuckerberg and the wealthy, powerful monsters who seized control over our commons are getting a comeuppance. The weak countermeasures they created to maintain the minimum levels of quality to keep their platforms as viable, going concerns are being overwhelmed by AI. This was a totally foreseeable outcome: the history of the internet is a story of bad actors who upended the assumptions built into our security systems by automating their attacks, transforming an assault that wouldn't be economically viable into a global, high-speed crime wave:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/24/automation-is-magic/

But it is possible for a community to maintain a commons. This is something Hardin could have discovered by studying actual commons, instead of inventing imaginary histories in which commons turned tragic. As it happens, someone else did exactly that: Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom:

https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons/

Ostrom described how commons can be wisely managed, over very long timescales, by communities that self-governed. Part of her work concerns how users of a commons must have the ability to exclude bad actors from their shared resources.

When that breaks down, commons can fail – because there's always someone who thinks it's fine to shit in the well rather than walk 100 yards to the outhouse.

Enshittification is the process by which control over the internet moved from self-governance by members of the commons to acts of wanton destruction committed by despicable, greedy assholes who shit in the well over and over again.

It's not just the spammers who take advantage of Google's lazy incompetence, either. Take "copyleft trolls," who post images using outdated Creative Commons licenses that allow them to terminate the CC license if a user makes minor errors in attributing the images they use:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/24/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator/

The first copyleft trolls were individuals, but these days, the racket is dominated by a company called Pixsy, which pretends to be a "rights protection" agency that helps photographers track down copyright infringers. In reality, the company is committed to helping copyleft trolls entrap innocent Creative Commons users into paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars to use images that are licensed for free use. Just as Advon upends the economics of spam and deception through automation, Pixsy has figured out how to send legal threats at scale, robolawyering demand letters that aren't signed by lawyers; the company refuses to say whether any lawyer ever reviews these threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/13/an-open-letter-to-pixsy-ceo-kain-jones-who-keeps-sending-me-legal-threats/

This is shitting in the well, at scale. It's an online WMD, designed to wipe out the commons. Creative Commons has allowed millions of creators to produce a commons with billions of works in it, and Pixsy exploits a minor error in the early versions of CC licenses to indiscriminately manufacture legal land-mines, wantonly blowing off innocent commons-users' legs and laughing all the way to the bank:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/02/commafuckers-versus-the-commons/

We can have an online commons, but only if it's run by and for its users. Google has shown us that any "benevolent dictator" who amasses power in the name of defending the open internet will eventually grow too big to care, and will allow our commons to be demolished by well-shitters:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

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/2024/05/09/shitting-in-the-well/#advon

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

--

Catherine Poh Huay Tan (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/68166820@N08/49729911222/

Laia Balagueró (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/lbalaguero/6551235503/

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

[blackholesun]

can all the parasocial hockey fans stop acting like their rich conservative white man team would be special and skip the white house visit. why are you setting yourself up like that

[flowersandskeletons526]

"Put Your Gloves Up" - Warriors concept album (Part 1/?)

This is both a modern AU and somewhat a sports AU if you squint. The idea came to me at 1 am and I ran with it. Based on two of the prompts that @asthedeathoflight suggested. Enjoy!

TW for violence and physical abuse. Nothing super harsh, but it might be triggering if you've experienced it. Just be warned.

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Rembrandt hissed as Swan pressed an alcohol soaked rag to the scrape on her forehead. “Easy, man, that stings!” 

It was the last of many minor injuries Swan had to fix for her that night, following a busted lip, a black eye, and a possibly broken nose, just to name a few. “Chill,” Swan mumbled. “You smacked your head off the sidewalk, I don’t want you catching any diseases because this wasn’t disinfected right.”

“That can happen?” asked Fox nervously from her spot at the other end of the couch.

“No, it can’t,” Rembrandt said, shooting Swan a pointed look.

“It could. The sidewalks are pretty disgusting,” Swan replied. “You know they’ve found live diseases in the Gowanus Canal before.”

“Well, I didn’t fall into the canal.”

“What about when all those needles washed up on the beach?”

“That was fucking years ago and - no, Fox, you can’t actually - dammit, Swan, stop scaring the kid! You’re doing this on purpose!”

Swan smirked and rolled her eyes. “Alright, run it back for me. This bitch and her two friends followed you out of school, chased you into an alley, and started beating on you. Then you…?”

“I smashed her in the face with one of my paint cans and knocked out her tooth,” Rembrandt answered bluntly. 

“Why were they going after you, anyway?”

“She’s got a crush on this creep in my fourth period and heard that he asked me out so she decided to make sure I stayed away from ‘her man,’ or whatever the fuck.”

“She knows you’re gay, right?”

“Helen Keller would know Rembrandt’s gay,” Fox quipped.

“They both know! But he’s a weird perv and she’s practically stalking him so now I gotta deal with this bullshit,” Rembrandt said. Swan hummed and set the rag aside. She leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and inclined her head, looking at Rembrandt expectantly. Rembrandt rolled her eyes. She knew that look. “Swan, no.”

“You’re sure?”

“I don’t need you to fight my battles. I scared them off just fine. I got it.”

Swan raised her hands and backed off. “Alright. Well, if you’re insisting on fighting your own battles now, why don’t you at least learn how to fight? You’re not always gonna have something in your hands to hit with. Sometimes all you got is your hands and all you can do is be glad you got ’em.”

“When have you ever known her not to have spray paint on her?” Fox chimed in. Swan shot her a stone cold look that silenced her real quick.

“Anyway,” she continued. “Cleon’s got a friend named Cochise who does MMA lessons at that boxing gym on West 28th street. She’s ex-military but really nice and she knows what she’s doing. She’d give you free lessons if I dropped the line.” 

Rembrandt made a face and looked down at her bruised, paint stained hands. She didn’t really know Cleon, not like Swan did, and the idea of Swan “dropping lines” for Rembrandt on a connection she made through the Queen of Coney, it didn’t sit right with her. She and Swan had known each other since elementary school and always found some solace in each other, despite their separately shitty home situations. When Rembrandt stopped getting taller at age ten and became an easy target, Swan took it upon herself to become a protector of sorts. Even though Rembrandt was a senior now and Swan had dropped out almost two years ago, she still tried. 

“I don’t know,” she finally said. “I’m a little small for fighting.”

“Cochise is about your same height. She’ll teach you how to work around that.”

“Maybe.” Rembrandt glanced over at the clock on the wall and swore under her breath. “I gotta go.”

Swan and Fox stood to follow her to the door, the younger girl saying, “He’s probably already blackout drunk. Is he really gonna notice if you’re home a little later than normal?”

“Fox, don’t,” Swan said gently, spotting the way Rembrandt tensed. “But Rem, you know, you don’t have to go back there.”

“My dad checks to make sure I’m in my room once and then I can sneak out and do whatever I want, but I have to make it home for that one check. He loses his mind if I’m not, you know that.”

“Olivia-”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, don’t use that name. I haven’t been Olivia since I was twelve, Maria.”

“Your government name is Maria?” Fox asked.

Swan pressed, “I meant you don’t have to go back there, period.”

“We don’t all have Big Sister Cleon to fall back on,” Rembrandt grumbled as she grabbed her backpack, which was maybe a little mean.

“Except you do. She already offered you a bed here. Plus, you’re eighteen!”

“With no documentation. And fuck knows he’s not gonna give me it, if he even remembers where it is. Let me get that figured out first and then I’ll talk to Cleon about moving in. Deal?”

Swan sighed and gave Rembrandt a quick one-armed side hug. “Deal. Get home safe.”

Easier said than done. 

Even though the walk home from Swan and Cleon’s apartment was short, it was getting dark earlier and earlier at this time of year. Around every corner were beat cops with the worst intentions and groups of men who leered at her with sinister smiles and crude catcalls. There were all the people who she’d pissed off by simply being herself: the quiet little art kid in the back of the classroom, the girl who had one of the fiercest fighters in Coney Island always hovering by her shoulder, the one who would verbally eviscerate you when she finally opened her mouth. 

Rembrandt was easy pickings for the worst kind of people. She could force most of them to back off with a few well-placed reads if needed, but being a smartass didn’t always help her. Sometimes certain people did in fact need a spray paint can to the face in order to get the message. Swan was right; she couldn’t count on improvised weapons and bullies who were more bark than bite every time. And Swan was off with the legendary Cleon doing who knew what so often now that Rembrandt couldn’t even count on her best friend’s intimidation factor anymore. 

She never used the front door to her building anymore. The cops busted it down to raid one unit or another so often that it didn’t even close correctly. Instead, she jumped on top of the dumpster, climbed the rickety fire escape, and snuck into her room through a window with a broken lock. 

The second her feet hit the carpet, there was a knock on her bedroom door. Her heart sank. She briefly considered taking off right back the way she came but that would only make things worse when she couldn’t avoid coming back.

“Angel?” a gravelly, slurred voice called. “You in there?”

“Yeah, Dad?” Rembrandt replied timidly. 

“Open the door.”

Rembrandt gathered all her courage and opened the door. She was met with a vicious backhand the moment she did. 

She hit the floor hard at his feet. He scoffed, and she could smell the alcohol on his breath even from there, holding her head as pain exploded behind her eyes. “Get up,” he said with all the inflection of a cinder block. She did as she was told and kept her eyes on the floor. “You’re supposed to be home by eight.”

“I’m sorry,” Rembrandt whispered, because anything else would get her hit again.

“Where were you?”

“Studying.”

“With who?”

Rembrandt swallowed hard. She couldn’t lie completely. There were only so many people in the world who would corroborate her alibis. “Maria.”

“You’re supposed to stay away from that rat.”

“Dad-”

He grabbed her jaw and forced her head up, and she was already bruised from the backhand and getting jumped earlier in the day and she tried but couldn’t hide her flinch. She looked into eyes that weren’t always clouded with liquor, eyes that used to smile at her and hands that used to hold her tight and make her feel safe and a voice that told her she was destined for great things. But now, all that was left was… this.

“Got beat up, huh? I told you nothing good comes from hanging around those types of people. There are a lot worse things in the world than me, angel. That’s why you’re supposed to be home by eight.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

He shoved her backwards and barked a harsh, “Go to bed!” before slamming the bedroom door. 

The next day, with fresh bruises prominent on her face, she found Swan before school and let herself cry just for a minute in her friend’s embrace. After school, she made her way to the boxing gym on West 28th. 

Swan waited for her with someone new at her side: a tall, lithe woman with a mischievous grin and a cowboy hat decorated rather garishly with colorful beads and… pigeon feathers? Were those seriously pigeon feathers?

“Hey, Rem,” Swan said, slinging an arm around her shoulders. “Rembrandt, this is Cowgirl. Cowgirl, Rembrandt.” 

Fitting.

“How’s it going?” Cowgirl said with a smirk and a little nod. Rembrandt returned the nod in reply. “You a friend of Cleon’s, too?”

“Friend of mine,” Swan answered, and then to Rembrandt, “Cowgirl’s old friends with Cochise. She’s doing the same lesson so I asked if we could just sit in on it for the day. See if you want to make it a thing.” 

Rembrandt just nodded again. 

As they followed Cowgirl into the gym, Swan called her out on it. “You’re quiet.”

“I’m always quiet.” 

“Rem, there are gonna be people in active fights here. It’s real brawlers. We can come back on a different day if you don’t feel up to it.”

“I’ll be fine.” She took a deep breath, hesitating, but Swan was the only person she’d ever been honest with, so she asked, “I’m not actually gonna be in the ring today, right?”

“No, you’re not. You won’t be for a long time. Cochise is just gonna teach you proper form to start and that might take awhile.”

“I’m not that helpless.”

“Never said you were.” 

The gym was… rowdy, to say the least. There were shouts and cheers, laughter and lighthearted chatter. There was the sound of fists against pads and punching bags and weights clanging and, coming from the rings in the back section, the sound of fists hitting flesh. It made Rembrandt cringe just for a moment before she grounded herself.

Swan and Cowgirl led her to a secluded, quieter corner of the gym. Cowgirl went ahead and threw her arms around a woman idly going at a punching bag. The woman, who Rembrandt assumed to be Cochise, was about her height but with a far stronger, more solid build. She held herself like ex-military: spine ramrod straight, steps sure and even, every movement measured as she looked around with intensely focused eyes. Despite all that, she looked at Cowgirl with a wide smile and laughter in her expression. 

“What’s up?” she greeted as Swan and Rembrandt approached. “Swan, how you doing?”

“Doing alright,” Swan replied. 

“And you must be Rembrandt. Nice to meet you, kid. I like the name.” She extended a hand that Rembrandt was just a little reluctant to take, but Rembrandt had never taken kindly to strangers, even those that Swan vouched for. “Just sitting in for today, right?”

“Yeah,” Rembrandt mumbled. 

“Well, I’m glad to have you here. Swan’s hyped you up quite a bit,” Cochise said with a friendly grin. Rembrandt was definitely going to have a conversation with Swan about that. “Locker rooms are in the back. Why don’t you guys go put your bags up and then meet me here and we’ll start.”

Rembrandt, Swan, and Cowgirl went back to the locker rooms. Cowgirl reluctantly left behind her hat in the same way Rembrandt hesitated to take her eyes off her backpack full of spray paint. Shit was expensive. 

She looked around the gym as they returned to Cochise’s corner. The overall vibe was upbeat. Maybe not nice, per se, since most participants were whaling on each other, but she saw smiles on almost everyone. Until she heard the yelling. Rembrandt spotted two blockheads shoving each other back and forth, embroiled in some argument that looked like it was about to brutally exceed a simple sparring match. She grabbed Swan’s arm to stop her. 

Before Swan could even notice, a woman jumped in between the fighters, roughly separating them with a snarl plastered across her face. There was a flurry of threats and very creative curses thrown at the two men. Both of them raised their hands, and it seemed that whatever the woman said was enough to send them slinking back to opposite sides of the gym.

Rembrandt studied the woman with an artist’s eye. Her gaze flitted over the built, toned muscles, the pale scars on tan skin, the long braids tied in a ponytail to keep them out of her face. She took note of the angular features and hardened eyes. The woman turned. That steely gaze locked on Swan, and her expression flipped from a violent glower to a sly, wicked grin. 

The woman cupped her hands around her mouth and hollered, “Hey, Swanie!”

Swan rolled her eyes and let out a disgusted, “Ugh, god.”

“Who is that?” Rembrandt asked quietly. She followed the slope of her shoulders and her confident swagger, tracking her as she made her way across the gym. 

“That would be Ajax,” she grumbled. “She’s trouble. Keep away from her.”

Cowgirl nudged Swan with her shoulder and flashed a smirk. “You say that like you don’t ogle her every time she shows up.”

“I’ve ogled once,” Swan corrected, “like every other woman in Coney Island. And that was before I heard her open her mouth.”

Rembrandt tilted her head. “Did she go to school with us?”

“My grade, a year above you. Dropped out a little before I did. All I ever heard of her back then was that she got into fights almost every day.” 

“You ever meet her in juvie?” 

“Shockingly, no. They probably kept her in solitary if she was there.”

Ajax grinned and crossed her arms as she stepped up to Swan. “’Sup, songbird?”

“Swans aren’t songbirds,” Swan deadpanned. Rembrandt almost cracked a smile at that. No matter how nerdy it made her look, Swan never could resist correcting an animal fact. 

Ajax chuckled. Her eyes fell on Rembrandt, looking her up and down. Rembrandt didn’t miss the way Swan discreetly put herself between the two of them. 

“Artist friend,” the fighter said, pointing to Rembrandt. “I heard about you.”

“Don’t you have rounds to make?” Swan asked coldly. 

“Eh, those idiots made enough of a show to give me a break.” 

“Ajax,” said Cochise lightly, “you’re interrupting my lesson. I’m trying to do my job. Go do yours.”

Ajax waved her hand and gave a silly bow to Cochise. Rembrandt smirked, against her better judgement. Swan raised an eyebrow at her. 

“Fine, fine,” Ajax sighed. “I’m going. Gotta make an incident report anyway.” She winked at Swan. “See you later, songbird.”

“They’re not songbirds!” Swan shouted at the woman’s back. 

Cowgirl grabbed Swan’s shoulders and gave her a playful shake. “You really need to stop doing that if you want her to take you seriously.”

“She does take me seriously.”

“Sure.” 

Rembrandt slipped away from Swan and turned to Cochise. “Is she security or just respected here?” she asked quietly.

“Security,” Cochise answered, “and respected. Well, intimidating, mostly. You’ll see her around if you decide to stay.”

Rembrandt nodded slowly. Swan gave her another weird look. She ignored it.

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Note: Rembrandt and Swan's government names were pulled from other characters their actresses have played. I couldn't think of something more creative.

[lucky-slice]

low key i think to deny Riko's trauma is to deny his narrative importance in the story.

like Riko's trauma related to his father parallels neil's. His concept of brotherhood adds complexity to Andrew and Aaron's relationship. He acts not just as an antagonist but as a foil to other character's relationship to trauma and violence.

to solely view riko through the lense of his actions is to miss the point. He is a character in a story, not a real breathing human being.

[rafole]

When that unemployed bum Kygrios stop being involved in tennis conversation I will start to find peace