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batboyblog · 9 months ago

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Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #10

March 15-22 2024

The EPA announced new emission standards with the goal of having more than half of new cars and light trucks sold in the US be low/zero emission by 2032. One of the most significant climate regulations in the nation’s history, it'll eliminate 7 billion tons of CO2 emissions over the next 30 years. It's part of President Biden's goal to cut greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030 on the road to eliminating them totally by 2050.

President Biden canceled nearly 6 Billion dollars in student loan debt. 78,000 borrowers who work in public sector jobs, teachers, nurses, social workers, firefighters etc will have their debt totally forgiven. An additional 380,000 public service workers will be informed that they qualify to have their loans forgiven over the next 2 years. The Biden Administration has now forgiven $143.6 Billion in student loan debt for 4 million Americans since the Supreme Court struck down the original student loan forgiveness plan last year.

Under Pressure from the administration and Democrats in Congress Drugmaker AstraZeneca caps the price of its inhalers at $35. AstraZeneca joins rival Boehringer Ingelheim in capping the price of inhalers at $35, the price the Biden Admin capped the price of insulin for seniors. The move comes as the Federal Trade Commission challenges AstraZeneca’s patents, and Senator Bernie Sanders in his role as Democratic chair of the Senate Health Committee investigates drug pricing.

The Department of Justice sued Apple for being an illegal monopoly in smartphones. The DoJ is joined by 16 state attorneys general. The DoJ accuses Apple of illegally stifling competition with how its apps work and seeking to undermining technologies that compete with its own apps.

The EPA passed a rule banning the final type of asbestos still used in the United States. The banning of chrysotile asbestos (known as white asbestos) marks the first time since 1989 the EPA taken action on asbestos, when it passed a partial ban. 40,000 deaths a year in the US are linked to asbestos

President Biden announced $8.5 billion to help build advanced computer chips in America. Currently America only manufactures 10% of the world's chips and none of the most advanced next generation of chips. The deal with Intel will open 4 factories across 4 states (Arizona, Ohio, New Mexico, and Oregon) and create 30,000 new jobs. The Administration hopes that by 2030 America will make 20% of the world's leading-edge chips.

President Biden signed an Executive Order prioritizing research into women's health. The order will direct $200 million into women's health across the government including comprehensive studies of menopause health by the Department of Defense and new outreach by the Indian Health Service to better meet the needs of American Indian and Alaska Native Women. This comes on top of $100 million secured by First Lady Jill Biden from ARPA-H.

Democratic Senators Bob Casey, Tammy Baldwin, Sherrod Brown, and Jacky Rosen (all up for re-election) along with Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, and Sheldon Whitehouse, introduced the "Shrinkflation Prevention Act" The Bill seeks to stop the practice of companies charging the same amount for products that have been subtly shrunk so consumers pay more for less.

The Department of Transportation will invest $45 million in projects that improve Bicyclist and Pedestrian Connectivity and Safety

The EPA will spend $77 Million to put 180 electric school buses onto the streets of New York City This is part of New York's goal to transition its whole school bus fleet to electric by 2035.

The Senate confirmed President Biden's nomination of Nicole Berner to the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. Berner has served as the general counsel for America's largest union, SEIU, since 2017 and worked in their legal department since 2006. On behalf of SEIU she's worked on cases supporting the Affordable Care Act, DACA, and against the Defense of Marriage act and was part of the Fight for 15. Before working at SEIU she was a staff attorney at Planned Parenthood. Berner's name was listed by the liberal group Demand Justice as someone they'd like to see on the Supreme Court. Berner becomes one of just 5 LGBT federal appeals court judges, 3 appointed by Biden. The Senate also confirmed Edward Kiel and Eumi Lee to be district judges in New Jersey and Northern California respectively, bring the number of federal judges appointed by Biden to 188.

#Thanks Biden #Joe Biden #Democrats #politics #US politics #climate change #climate crisis #student loans #debt forgiveness #shrinkflation #women's health #drug prices

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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Everything advertised on social media is overpriced junk

In “Behavioral Advertising and Consumer Welfare: An Empirical Investigation,” a trio of business researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Pamplin College investigate the difference between the goods purchased through highly targeted online ads and just plain web-searches, and conclude social media ads push overpriced junk:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4398428

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/08/late-stage-sea-monkeys/#jeremys-razors

Specifically, stuff that’s pushed to you via targeted ads costs an average of 10 percent more, and it significantly more likely to come from a vendor with a poor rating from the Better Business Bureau. This may seem trivial and obvious, but it’s got profound implications for media, commercial surveillance, and the future of the internet.

Writing in the New York Times, Julia Angwin — a legendary, muckraking data journalist — breaks down those implications. Angwin builds a case study around Jeremy’s Razors, a business that advertises itself as a “woke-free” shaving solution for manly men:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/opinion/online-advertising-privacy-data-surveillance-consumer-quality.html

Jeremy’s Razors spends a fucking fortune on ads. According to Facebook’s Ad Library, the company spent $800,000 on FB ads in March, targeting fathers of school-age kids who like Hershey’s, ultimate fighting, hunting or Johnny Cash:

https://pluralistic.net/jeremys-targeting

Anti-woke razors are an objectively, hilariously stupid idea, but that’s not the point here. The point is that Jeremy’s has to spend $800K/month to reach its customers, which means that it either has to accept $800K less in profits, or make it up by charging more and/or skimping on quality.

Targeted advertising is incredibly expensive, and incredibly lucrative — for the ad-tech platforms that sit between creative workers and media companies on one side, and audiences on the other. In order to target ads, ad-tech companies have to collect deep, nonconsensual dossiers on every internet user, full of personal, sensitive and potentially compromising information.

The switch to targeted ads was part of the enshittification cycle, whereby companies like Facebook and Google lured in end-users by offering high-quality services — Facebook showed you the things the people you asked to hear from posted, and Google returned the best search results it could find.

Eventually, those users became locked in. Once all our friends were on Facebook, we held each other hostage, each unable to leave because the others were there. Google used its access to the capital markets to snuff out any rival search companies, spending tens of billions every year to be the default on Apple devices, for example.

Once we were locked in, the tech giants made life worse for us in order to make life better for media companies and advertisers. Facebook violated its promise to be the privacy-centric alternative to Myspace, where our data would never be harvested; it switched on mass surveillance and created cheap, accurate ad-targeting:

https://lawcat.berkeley.edu/record/1128876?ln=en

Google fulfilled the prophecy in its founding technical document, the Pagerank paper: “advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” They, too, offered cheap, highly targeted ads:

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Facebook and Google weren’t just kind to advertisers — they also gave media companies and creative workers a great deal, funneling vast quantities of traffic to both. Facebook did this by cramming media content into the feeds of people who hadn’t asked to see it, displacing the friends’ posts they had asked to see. Google did it by upranking media posts in search results.

Then we came to the final stage of the enshittification cycle: having hooked both end-users and business customers, Facebook and Google withdrew the surpluses from both groups and handed them to their own shareholders. Advertising costs went up. The share of ad income paid to media companies went down. Users got more ads in their feeds and search results.

Facebook and Google illegally colluded to rig the ad-market with a program called Jedi Blue that let the companies steal from both advertisers and media companies:

https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/11/google-meta-jedi-blue-eu-uk-antitrust-probes/

Apple blocked Facebook’s surveillance on its mobile devices, but increased its own surveillance of Iphone and Ipad users in order to target ads to them, even when those users explicitly opted out of spying:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Today, we live in the enshittification end-times, red of tooth and claw, where media companies’ revenues are dwindling and advertisers’ costs are soaring, and the tech giants are raking in hundreds of billions, firing hundreds of thousands of workers, and pissing away tens of billions on stock buybacks:

https://doctorow.medium.com/mass-tech-worker-layoffs-and-the-soft-landing-1ddbb442e608

As Angwin points out, in the era before behavioral advertising, Jeremy’s might have bought an ad in Deer & Deer Hunting or another magazine that caters to he-man types who don’t want woke razors; the same is true for all products and publications. Before mass, non-consensual surveillance, ads were based on content and context, not on the reader’s prior behavior.

There’s no reason that ads today couldn’t return to that regime. Contextual ads operate without surveillance, using the same “real-time bidding” mechanism to place ads based on the content of the article and some basic parameters about the user (rough location based on IP address, time of day, device type):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/05/behavioral-v-contextual/#contextual-ads

Context ads perform about as well as behavioral ads — but they have a radically different power-structure. No media company will ever know as much about a given user as an ad-tech giant practicing dragnet surveillance and buying purchase, location and finance data from data-brokers. But no ad-tech giant knows as much about the context and content of an article as the media company that published it.

Context ads are, by definition, centered on the media company or creative worker whose work they appear alongside of. They are much harder for tech giants to enshittify, because enshittification requires lock-in and it’s hard to lock in a publication who knows better than anyone what they’re publishing and what it means.

We should ban surveillance advertising. Period. Companies should not be allowed to collect our data without our meaningful opt-in consent, and if that was the standard, there would be no data-collection:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/22/myob/#adtech-considered-harmful

Remember when Apple created an opt out button for tracking, more than 94 percent of users clicked it (the people who clicked “yes” to “can Facebook spy on you?” were either Facebook employees, or confused):

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/02/facebook-says-apple-ios-privacy-change-will-cost-10-billion-this-year.html

Ad-targeting enables a host of evils, like paid political disinformation. It also leads to more expensive, lower-quality goods. “A Raw Deal For Consumers,” Sumit Sharma’s new Consumer Reports paper, catalogs the many other costs imposed on Americans due to the lack of tech regulation:

https://advocacy.consumerreports.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/A-Raw-Deal-for-US-Consumers_March-2023.pdf

Sharma describes the benefits that Europeans will shortly enjoy thanks to the EU’s Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act, from lower prices to more privacy to more choice, from cloud gaming on mobile devices to competing app stores.

However, both the EU and the US — as well as Canada and Australia — have focused their news industry legislating on misguided “link taxes,” where tech giants are required to pay license fees to link to and excerpt the news. This is an approach grounded in the mistaken idea that tech giants are stealing media companies’ content — when really, tech giants are stealing their money:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/18/news-isnt-secret/#bid-shading

Creating a new pseudocopyright to control who can discuss the news is a terrible idea, one that will make the media companies beholden to the tech giants at a time when we desperately need deep, critical reporting on the tech sector. In Canada, where Bill C-18 is the latest link tax proposal in the running to become law, we’re already seeing that conflict of interest come into play.

As Jesse Brown and Paula Simons — a veteran reporter turned senator — discuss on the latest Canadaland podcast, the Toronto Star’s sharp and well-reported critical series on the tech giants died a swift and unexplained death immediately after the Star began receiving license fees for tech users’ links and excerpts from its reporting:

https://www.canadaland.com/paula-simons-bill-c-18/

Meanwhile, in Australia, the proposed “news bargaining code” stampeded the tech giants into agreeing to enter into “voluntary” negotiations with the media companies, allowing Rupert Murdoch’s Newscorp to claim the lion’s share of the money, and then conduct layoffs across its newsrooms.

While in France, the link tax depends on publishers integrating with Google Showcase, a product that makes Google more money from news content and makes news publishers more dependent on Google:

https://www.politico.eu/article/french-competition-authority-greenlights-google-pledges-over-paying-news-publishers/

A link tax only pays for so long as the tech giants remain dominant and continue to extract the massive profits that make them capable of paying the tax. But legislative action to fix the ad-tech markets, like Senator Mike Lee’s ad-tech breakup bill (cosponsored by both Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren!) would shift power to publishers, and with it, money:

https://www.lee.senate.gov/2023/3/the-america-act

With ad-tech intermediaries scooping up 50% or more of every advertising dollar, there is plenty of potential to save news without the need for a link tax. If unrigging the ad-tech market drops the platforms’ share of advertising dollars to a more reasonable 10%, then the advertisers and publishers could split the remainder, with advertisers spending 20% less and publishers netting 20% more.

Passing a federal privacy law would end surveillance advertising at the stroke of a pen, shifting the market to context ads that let publishers, not platforms, call the shots. As an added bonus, the law would stop Tiktok from spying on Americans, and also end Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft’s spying to boot:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/30/tik-tok-tow/#good-politics-for-electoral-victories

Mandating competition in app stores — as the Europeans are poised to do — would kill Google and Apple’s 30% “app store tax” — the percentage they rake off of every transaction from every app on Android and Ios. Drop that down to the 2–5% that the credit cards charge, and every media outlet’s revenue-per-subscriber would jump by 25%.

Add to that an end-to-end rule for tech giants requiring them to deliver updates from willing receivers to willing senders, so every newsletter you subscribed to would stay out of your spam folder and every post by every media company or creator you followed would show up in your feed:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

That would make it impossible for tech giants to use the sleazy enshittification gambit of forcing creative workers and media companies to pay to “boost” their content (or pay $8/month for a blue tick) just to get it in front of the people who asked to see it:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

The point of enshittification is that it’s bad for everyone except the shareholders of tech monopolists. Jeremy’s Razors are bad, winning a 2.7 star rating out of five:

https://www.facebook.com/JeremysRazors/reviews

The company charges more for these substandard razors, and you are more likely to find out about them, because of targeted, behavioral ads. These ads starve media companies and creative workers and make social media and search results terrible.

A link tax is predicated on the idea that we need Big Tech to stay big, and to dribble a few crumbs for media companies, compromising their ability to report on their deep-pocketed beneficiaries, in a way that advantages the biggest media companies and leaves small, local and independent press in the cold.

By contrast, a privacy law, ad-tech breakups, app-store competition and end-to-end delivery would shatter the power of Big Tech and shift power to users, creative workers and media companies. These are solutions that don’t just keep working if Big Tech goes away — they actually hasten that demise! What’s more, they work just as well for big companies as they do for independents.

Whether you’re the New York Times or you’re an ex-Times reporter who’s quit your job and now crowdfunds to cover your local school board and town council meetings, shifting control and the share of income is will benefit you, whether or not Big Tech is still in the picture.

Have you ever wanted to say thank you for these posts? Here’s how you can: I’m kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

Image: freeimageslive.co.uk (modified) http://www.freeimageslive.co.uk/free_stock_image/using-mobile-phone-jpg

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

[Image ID: A man's hand holds a mobile phone. Its screen displays an Instagram ad. The ad has been replaced with a slice of a vintage comic book 'small ads' page.]

#pluralistic #ad-tech #ads #surveillance ads #commercial surveillance #behavioral ads #contextual ads #link taxes #platform economics #enshittification #instagram #julia angwin #end to end

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absurdthirst · 2 years ago

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Cracking the Case {Tim Rockford x F!Reader}

Rating: Explicit

Word Count: 3k

Warnings: Flirting, mentions of crime scene photos, misuse of handcuffs, bondage, rough sex, vaginal sex, unprotected sex, cream pie

Comments: Staying late with your boss, Detective Tim Rockford, turns into some sexy times at his desk, making him crack the case while he's buried inside you.

A/N: Did we write a fic about a damn Merge Mansion commercial? Yes we did. Do we have any regrets? Not a damn one! 🤡🤡🤡 Based off how sexy that damn stupid game commercial is and this NSFW GIF.

Co-written with @storiesofthefandomlovers

**Follow @absurdthirst-writes and turn on notifications to stay up to date on all new fics.

|| MasterList || Tim Rockford MasterList ||

Click Keep Reading only if you have read the Rating and Warnings and understand the warnings may not be complete to avoid listing spoilers. As AO3 says 'creator chooses not to use warnings'. You also agree that you're the right age to be consuming anything here.

He’s been at his desk all day, gun holster still on his shoulders and you bite your lip, eying the cups lined up on his desk. “Tim.” You say and he barely tears his eyes away from the photos he’s been studying on his desk. “Tim.” You repeat, knowing he will be there all night if left to his own devices.

“Yes?” He asks, reluctantly tearing his eyes away from the photo of the fatal wound to look into your concerned eyes.

“You need to eat.” You huff, knowing you could use something too but your boss has spent three days studying the evidence, sleeping in the office and maybe managing to drag himself back to his apartment for a quick shower. “I’ll get you something.” You stand up, making your way out of the police department to head down to the 24 hour diner you frequent when his case keeps you both tethered to work.

Tossing his pen down, Tim rocks back in his chair and sighs, closing his eyes as he presses the pads of his fingers to them. Staring at the crime scene photos for so long that he feels like they are blurring together. He’s missing something, he can feel it. It’s right in front of him but he just seem can’t find it. It’s times like these that he longs for the days where a bottle of bourbon is in the bottom cabinet of his desk drawer and a pack of Marlboro Reds sit right next to his hand. He’s given that up, trying to be the ‘new image’ of the police force but it’s damn hard when you’re trying to solve a case like this. The chair creaks as he rocks back, finally aware of the growling in his stomach that you’ve insisted on taking care of for him. He’d be lost without you.

You return with the food, a burger and fries for Tim, knowing he will be annoyed if you get him something healthier and you just want him to eat something and not just chain smoke until the light bulb goes off. He’s got his face in his hands and you set the take out bag down. “Betty says hello.” You tease, knowing he is aware of the older waitress having a crush on the ‘hunky police detective’. “She even threw in a slice of apple pie for you.”

Tim snorts and shakes his head, reaching for the bag. “Someday soon I’m gonna have to go back in there and flirt with her a bit.” He tells you, knowing that the woman is probably ten years too old for him, but he shoots you a grin. “Keep the pie slices rollin’.” The mouthwatering scent of the hot burger makes him groan as he opens the styrofoam contain and he looks at you. “You not get anything for yourself? Or you plannin’ on going home?” He wouldn’t blame you if you did leave, it’s far past the hours that you were expected to answer the phones, the Desk Sergeant already taking over for the night. You aren’t a police officer, but as the department’s secretary, you were a damn vital part of keeping this place running.

He takes a bite of the burger and you hold up your own bag, “figured I’d get something to eat before I head home. Keep you company before you retreat into your mind again.” You tease and sit down on the other side of his desk, gathering up the photos and keeping them in order so he can concentrate on his food. “I know you want to solve this case but punishing yourself by not eating and sleeping won’t get you any closer to solving this.” You warn him, having watched him and the others try to be superhuman and it always leads to mistakes. “You should go home, eat, shower, get laid. Will help you take your mind off of the case and you’ll come in with a fresh perspective.”

Tim scoffs as he picks up a fry and bites into it. “Gotta go out to get laid unless I call up some of the working girls.” He jokes. “And the captain would have my ass if I got busted by vice like Johnson did a few months ago.” Tim was a bachelor, probably always would be one after his fiancée jilted him a few months before the wedding years ago. Claiming that he worked too much and didn’t spend enough time with her. It was probably true, so he hadn’t really tried after that, figuring it just wasn’t in the cards for him.

“You could easily go out and get laid. You’re a handsome guy. Smart, funny. Just flash the handcuffs and say you know how to use them.” You home and bite into your own sandwich, watching him chew with satisfaction that he’s eating. “Too bad you’re always in this damn office. You’d be popular at the bar down the street from me. Lot of girls like a cop with handcuffs.”

His brow arches up at your comment, wondering briefly if you were one of those girls before he tries to push the thought away. You are off limits. Plenty of detectives had tried it with you only to be shot down and he enjoys the rapport you have, not willing to risk it. “Lots of girls, huh?” He asks, taking another bite of his burger. “Too bad I’m chained to my desk.”

You chuckle, “some women would like that.” You joke and continue eating. The silence is comforting, both of you enjoying a hard earned meal after a long day of trying to solve this case. You watch him as he eats, mustache getting a little wild after concentrating on this case and his hair all over the place yet he’s still the most handsome man you’ve ever seen. His dark eyes meet yours and you smile, setting your sandwich down. “You know…I’m one of those girls…who like a man with handcuffs.”

Tim’s brow shoots up and for a moment he’s speechless. Clearing his throat for a moment and nearly choking on his own spit. “I- you are?” His cock twitches in his pants as he imagines putting his cuffs on you. Bending you over and pressing you up against this desk as you moan softly.

You bite your lip, enjoying the clueless look on his face like you haven’t been subtly flirting with him for God knows how long. The lines on his forehead become more pronounced and you decide to take the risk. You can’t keep imagining him between your thighs every night while you rub your clit. This is either going to be the best or worst decision of your life. You push your sandwich aside and stand up, walking around the desk until you’re beside him, and you look into those dark eyes, wide with shock, while you slowly pull your skirt up and over your hips to expose your panties. “Yes. I am.” You say softly, voice taking on a seductive lilt.

“Shit.” The way his eyes shift between your exposed panties and your face would be comical if he wasn’t trying to make sure you aren’t teasing him. His mouth runs dry and Tim quickly stands, abandoning his meal to press close to you. “Are you- fuck, are you sure?” He demands, needing to hear you say the words.

You chuckle nervously, reaching up tentatively to wrap your arms around his neck so you can press closer to him. “Yes baby. I am sure. I want you to fuck me. Always have. Since the day I started working here.” You confess, keeping your eyes on his.

Tim hisses, unable to believe this is happening and he lunges forward to press his lips to yours. Blindly striking out behind you at his desk to clear a space for you to sit while he frantically slides his tongue into your mouth. Needy and desperate for you, it’s been so long since he’s touched a woman and he’s often thought of you with his hand around his cock in the shower.

You moan into his mouth, pulling him even closer as his hands slide down to squeeze your ass. You can feel the pent up need inside of him, similar to your own, and you whimper into his mouth while his tongue slides against yours. “Fuck Tim.” You pant, tilting your head when he kisses down your neck and presses you up against his desk so you can feel his hardening cock.

“Yeah?” He groans against your flesh and sucks at your pulse. His hands sliding down your thighs, squeezing them and then he presses two fingers against your clothed clit. “You want me to use my cuffs on you?” He asks as he rubs the damp fabric. “Or just turn you around and fuck you?”

“Oh God. Cuffs. Please use the cuffs.” You beg, having imagined it too many times. “Please baby. I- I just need you to touch me.” You reach down to squeeze him through his dress pants, wanting to make him moan.

His hands reluctantly pull away, fumbling behind his back to pull his cuffs out of the small pouch he has on his belt. Grabbing your wrist to slap the cold steel around it as he pushes your arm behind your back. “Jesus Christ baby, you drive me insane.” He groans, eager to give you what you want.

You gasp at the cold metal encircling your wrists and you love the way he bends you over his desk once you are cuffed up. “Tim.” You whine when he grinds against you, making your cunt clench around nothing. “Please baby. I need you to fuck me.” You beg, aching for him after so long of wondering what it would be like.

Chuckling, Tim kisses you again, “I’m going to baby, I promise.” His fingers find the edge of your panties and he starts to strip them down your thighs. Dropping them at your feet on top of your heels. “Step out of them and turn around. Spread your legs.” He orders roughly.

You struggle but manage to kick the panties off of your shoes, letting them land wherever, and you spin around, spreading your legs for the handsome detective. “Fuck me. Please.” You aren’t above begging, wanting your dreams to come true.

There’s so much he would do to you if he wasn’t in his office. Surrounded by the case details and photos, sure that someone could walk in. That makes it even thrilling, even though the lights are off outside and most everyone else has gone home. He reaches out and slaps your ass as he unbuckles his belt with one hand. “Fuck, your gagging for it, aren’t you? Bet you're soaking wet, eager for my cock.”

God, hearing him speak like that, husky and deep, has you dripping. “Ye-yes Detective. I- I want your cock. Please. I need you.” You pant, not above begging at this point. You feel his cock push against your ass cheek and you gasp, unable to believe how big he feels. “Fuck, Tim.” You whine, grinding back against him, fingers flexing behind your back.

He decides that he’s not going to spit in his hand, wanting it to sting a bit as he stretches you out. Needing a good fuck to smooth his rough edges and maybe help him focus on the case. Taking his cock in hand, he nudges along your slit, feeling how wet you are. “Dirty fucking girl, you’re soaked.” He groans. “Let’s see how well you take my cock.” He nestles the head against your entrance and snaps his hips forward, pinning you to the desk as he drives his cock deep.

You collapse forward, head coming down to rest near the take out bag and your mouth falls open into a moan as he pushes deep inside of you. He’s thick, stretching you out, and your nails dig into your palms, unable to believe how good he feels already. “Oh fuck.” You choke, eyes squeezed shut as his hands grip your hips.

Once he’s buried to the hilt, it’s like a switch has been flipped. Clenching his jaw, Tim draws his hips back to start a frantic, devastating pace. Nearly immediately breathless from how hard he is pounding into you, groaning and grunting as he feels your soaked walls clench around him.

“Shit! Shit!” You cry out, breath knocked out of you from his harsh pace, making you moan his name, and you can’t do anything but let him fuck you, use your body for his own pleasure. “Baby. Oh fuck, Tim. Yes. Yes!” You moan.

“Quiet.” He hisses, not slowing down. “Can-can’t let everyone hear how- how much of a dirty girl you are.” He groans, closing his eyes and enjoying the squelch of your cunt as he drills into you. Slippery and hot, perfect for him. “Fuck, baby. It’s- it’s like heaven.” He groans, opening his eyes and his gaze falls on the strewn photos on his desk.

You don’t know he’s eying the photos on his desk as he pounds into you. You love how his hands come to grip your handcuffed wrists, using you as leverage to push harder and deeper. “So good.” You whimper, “so fucking good, sir.” You are used to addressing him as sir or detective and that slips into your dirty little fantasies.

“Shit.” Tim’s eyes widen and his pace stutters for a moment and the pieces click together. “That’s it.” He groans, gripping your hips tighter and pushing into you faster as he realizes he’s just solved the case. “Fuck that’s it!”

You don’t realize he’s just solved the case, you think he’s close to cumming and you’re a little disappointed that you aren’t going to cum but it’s still been nice to have him inside of you. “I’m on birth control. You can cum inside of me.” You sigh, closing your eyes and waiting for the warmth of his seed to fill you up.

Tim growls, flattening himself against your back and slides his hand around your hip to find your clit. “Fucking hell,” he moans into your ear. “Gonna- fuck, gonna fill you up. So fucking perfect.” He pants. “Helped me solve the case, fucking solved it buried in your cunt.” He presses two fingers to your clit and rubs frantically, wanting you to cum on his cock.

Your eyes open in shock and you grin, glad he’s solved the case. “Gl-glad I could help.” You chuckle breathlessly before you moan when his fingers rub your clit. Hard and fast as he pushes deep inside of you. “Oh fuck.” You pant, loving the way he kisses along your neck. “Shit. Tim. I’m gonna - I’m gonna cum.” You whine, walls fluttering around his cock and he pushes towards your orgasm. You cry out a few thrusts later, clamping down on his length and soaking him as your mouth opens in a silent scream.

He feels it. The hot, wet gush of your cunt right before you tighten so much that he moans. The grip on his cock almost makes him unable to move as he grinds deep. He’s right behind you, poised on the edge and burying his cock deep, moaning your name as he fills you with hot spurts of his seed. Painting your walls as he chants your name breathlessly.

You pant, relaxing on his desk as your body buzzes with the aftermath of your orgasm. You feel giddy and you smile against the surface of his desk as he leans over you, catching his breath. “I was not expecting that to happen today.” You chuckle, knees wobbly and you’re grateful you’re on his desk.

Tim huffs in agreement, pulling out of you gently so he can watch your cunt flutter and try to push out his cum. “Didn’t expect to solve the case while fucking you.” He jokes, caressing your hip before he grabs the photos that had caught his eye.

“Glad I could help. You wanna finish your dinner and then you can call it in?” You suggest, looking over your shoulder at him. He nods and you watch him eye the photo that has helped him solve the case. “Could you uncuff me first, babe?” You joke, wiggling your fingers.

“Right. Shit.” Tim hisses, immediately dropping the photos and pulling up his pants that have dropped to mid thigh so he can pull his keys out. “Sorry.” He huffs, quickly unlocking the cuffs and taking them off of you, gently massaging your wrists for a second before he lets go of you and steps to the side.

You groan softly as you stand up straight, grabbing the napkins from the diner to clean yourself up before his cum drips onto the floor. Once you’re cleaned up as much as possible, you shove the napkins into the empty take out bag and find your panties to put them on, adjusting your skirt. “Glad you solved the case.” You kiss his cheek and shift to step away from his desk.

Tim stares at the pictures in amazement, unable to believe that he had missed this. It’s so obvious now. He shoves a hand through his hair and mumbles, “thanks,” as he thinks about the way to present this to the DA. You shuffle off to the side and it jars him out of his thinking. “Hey-“ he clears his throat. “You wanna get a drink?” He asks, suddenly awkward even if he had just railed you over his desk. “I mean, like a date?”

You offer him a soft smile, stepping closer so you can kiss his cheek. “Yeah. I’d like that.” You say and step back. “Go solve the case and be the best detective on the force and then we can go get that drink.” You promise, reaching down to squeeze his hand.

Tim smiles at you, nodding quickly. “Give me ten minutes and then we’ll talk about what we can do in the interrogation room over a drink.” He winks and quickly buttons up his pants so he can grab the phone to call the DA and get an arrest warrant issued. He managed to solve the case after all, all thanks to you. Maybe he needed to fuck you during every case from now on, just to make sure justice is served.

#pedro pascal #merge mansion #tim rockford #tim rockford x reader #tim rockford x you #tim rockford smut #tim rockford x f!reader #tim rockford imagine #tim rockford fanfiction #tim rockford fanfic #tim rockford merge mansion #did we write a fic based on a game commercial? yes we did #no shame #detective tim rockford can slap cuffs on me anytime

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beardedmrbean · 5 months ago

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Submitted by @thejdog2000

WASHINGTON (AP) — A judge on Monday ruled that Google’s ubiquitous search engine has been illegally exploiting its dominance to squash competition and stifle innovation, a seismic decision that could shake up the internet and hobble one of the world’s best-known companies.

The highly anticipated decision issued by U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta comes nearly a year after the start of a trial pitting the U.S. Justice Department against Google in the country’s biggest antitrust showdown in a quarter century.

After reviewing reams of evidence that included testimony from top executives at Google, Microsoft and Apple during last year’s 10-week trial, Mehta issued his potentially market-shifting decision three months after the two sides presented their closing arguments in early May.

“After having carefully considered and weighed the witness testimony and evidence, the court reaches the following conclusion: Google is a monopolist, and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly,” Mehta wrote in his 277-page ruling. He said Google’s dominance in the search market is evidence of its monopoly.

Google “enjoys an 89.2% share of the market for general search services, which increases to 94.9% on mobile devices,” the ruling said.

It represents a major setback for Google and its parent, Alphabet Inc., which had steadfastly argued that its popularity stemmed from consumers’ overwhelming desire to use a search engine so good at what it does that it has become synonymous with looking things up online. Google’s search engine processes an estimated 8.5 billion queries per day worldwide, nearly doubling its daily volume from 12 years ago, according to a recent study released by the investment firm BOND.

Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, said the company intends to appeal Mehta’s findings.

“This decision recognizes that Google offers the best search engine, but concludes that we shouldn’t be allowed to make it easily available,” Walker said.

For now, the decision vindicates antitrust regulators at the Justice Department, which filed its lawsuit nearly four years ago while Donald Trump was still president, and has been escalating it efforts to rein in Big Tech’s power during President Joe Biden’s administration.

“This victory against Google is an historic win for the American people,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland. “No company — no matter how large or influential — is above the law. The Justice Department will continue to vigorously enforce our antitrust laws.”

The case depicted Google as a technological bully that methodically has thwarted competition to protect a search engine that has become the centerpiece of a digital advertising machine that generated nearly $240 billion in revenue last year. Justice Department lawyers argued that Google’s monopoly enabled it to charge advertisers artificially high prices while also enjoying the luxury of not having to invest more time and money into improving the quality of its search engine — a lax approach that hurt consumers.

Mehta’s ruling focused on the billions of dollars Google spends every year to install its search engine as the default option on new cellphones and tech gadgets. In 2021 alone, Google spent more than $26 billion to lock in those default agreements, Mehta said in his ruling.

Google ridiculed those allegations, noting that consumers have historically changed search engines when they become disillusioned with the results they were getting. For instance, Yahoo was the most popular search engine during the 1990s before Google came along.

Mehta said the evidence at trial showed the importance of the default settings. He noted that Microsoft’s Bing search engine has 80% share of the search market on the Microsoft Edge browser. The judge said that shows other search engines can be successful if Google is not locked in as the predetermined default option.

Still, Mehta credited the quality of Google’s product as an important part of its dominance, as well, saying flatly that “Google is widely recognized as the best (general search engine) available in the United States.” _____________

Google “enjoys an 89.2% share of the market for general search services, which increases to 94.9% on mobile devices,” the ruling said.

Anyone that's old enough to remember the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit should remember it was in part because IE was included with windows and that was a no no for allowing competition.

Alphabet Inc may well be getting a taste of this now with google's dominance and all the chromium nonsense.

Fingers crossed, Fed's RICO/AntiTrust division has been busy lately

The Consumer Choice Center, a lobbying group that has fought other attempts to rein in businesses, decried Mehta’s decision as a step in the wrong direction. “The United States is drifting toward the anti-tech posture of the European Union, a part of the world that makes almost nothing and penalizes successful American companies for their popularity,” said Yael Ossowski, the center’s deputy director.

Mehta’s conclusion that Google has been running an illegal monopoly sets up another legal phase to determine what sorts of changes or penalties should be imposed to reverse the damage done and restore a more competitive landscape. He scheduled a Sept. 6 hearing to begin setting the stage for the next phase.

The potential outcome could result in a wide-ranging order requiring Google to dismantle some of the pillars of its internet empire, or preventing it from paying to ensure its search engine automatically answers queries on the iPhone and other devices. Or, the judge could conclude only modest changes are required to level the playing field.

“Google’s loss in its search antitrust trial could be a huge deal — depending on the remedy,” said Emarketer senior analyst Evelyn Mitchell-Wolf.

Regardless, she added, a drawn-out appeals process will delay any immediate effects for both consumers and advertisers.

The appeals process could take as long as five years, predicted George Hay, a law professor at Cornell University who was the chief economist for the Justice Department’s antitrust division for most of the 1970s. That lengthy process will enable Google to fend off the likelihood of Mehta banning default search agreements, Hay said, but it probably won’t shield the company from class-action lawsuits citing the judge’s findings that advertisers were gouged with monopolistic pricing.

If there is a significant shakeup, it could turn out to be a coup for Microsoft, whose own power was undermined during the late 1990s when the Justice Department targeted the software maker in an antitrust lawsuit accusing it of abusing the dominance of its Windows operating system on personal computers to lock out competition.

That Microsoft case mirrored the one brought against Google in several ways and now the result could also echo similarly. Just as Microsoft’s bruising antitrust battle created distractions and obstacles that opened up more opportunities for Google after its 1998 inception, the decision against Google could be a boon for Microsoft, which already has a market value of more than $3 trillion. At one time, Alphabet was worth more than Microsoft, but now trails its rival, with a market value of about $2 trillion.

If Mehta decides to limit or ban Google’s default search deals, it could squeeze Apple’s profits, too. Although parts of his decision were redacted to protect confidential business information, Mehta noted that Google paid Apple an estimated $20 billion in 2022, doubling from 2020. The judge also noted Apple has periodically considered building its own search technology, but backed off that after a 2018 analysis estimated the company would lose more than $12 billion in revenue during the first five years after a break-up with Google.

Google’s payments have helped Apple’s steadily growing services division, which generated $85 billion in revenue during the company’s last fiscal year. Apple didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The Justice Department’s antitrust division has recently taken on some of the biggest companies in the world. It sued Apple in March and in May announced a sweeping lawsuit against Ticketmaster and its owner, Live Nation Entertainment. Antitrust enforcers have also opened investigations into the roles Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI have played in the artificial intelligence boom.

The Biden administration has won some big cases, including blocking mergers of some of the world’s biggest publishers as well as JetBlue Airways and Spirit Airlines. It’s also had some notable setbacks, including in the sugar and healthcare industries.

Google faces several other legal threats both in the U.S. and abroad. In September, a federal trial is scheduled to begin in Virginia over the Justice Department’s allegations that Google’s advertising technology constitutes an illegal monopoly.

#nunyas news #submission #thejdog2000

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notquitequelled · 8 months ago

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nothing's wrong-- i'm just a STEM student...

[i rarely see stem rep-- so here’s PART TWO! (find part one here) the extended edition of ‘stoners in stem’ highlighting the parts of this life that i find myself loving ;p

Thinking of doing sectionals (Physics, Environmental Studies, Mechanics, Entomology, etc.), so if there are any suggestions you'd like to highlight, plz tag or comment !!]

TAG YOURSELF !! I LOVE SEEING WHAT YALL GET UP TO !!

slightly concerned glances being shared between even the worst of acquaintances when your mentor drops some crazy lore surrounding how they entered their field(s)

good god. the apple-cider vinegar and dish soap gnat traps. honey alternatives decidedly never cross anyone's mind (nor the threshold of the lab for that matter)

walking the fine line between the Ridiculous and the Logical during data analysis like the two aren't twin kings of ruin

noncommital shrugs when asked anything about your preferred diet or eating habits

writing exclusively with pen, or exclusively with pencil. feeling borderline disgusted having to use the other when you forget your own

'Why do you care?' 'Why don't you??'

Every documentary you watch absolutely changing your life and challenging your worldview

Either hanging onto your textbooks like a lifeline or forgetting about them as they gather dust under your bed. maybe you never bought them at all-- pirated PDFs littering your desktop

anything in jars being considered decor (snakes, regurgitated bones, praying mantis egg cases)

seeing the slant of fences, trees, and lamp posts-- thinking of all the wind and weather that's passed along the same path you have

TREEHUGGER !!! HA HA

the clean quiet that hangs over the linoleum early in the morning; the warmth is not so subtle now that you've rolled up your sleeves.

teaching everyone around you how to bypass PAY FOR ARTICLES because knowledge should always be F[ree]INED [inspect, gear, disable java]

having to just sit by n watch while someone pointedly ignores your input, and a totally avoidable incident (that could have totally been avoided) is not, in fact, avoided

dealing with the consequences of that incident for the rest of the experiment/project

blank stare, lips in a placatingly firm line as you nod along with the stern talking-to you're being given. their words going in one ear and out the other because you're already thinking through another way under admin's nose

whaaaaat ? how'd those locally indigenous species just pop up everywhere overnight, ha ha ? wow nature is crazyyy

digging through public records for one reason, only to uncover an entirely different can of worms about the institution you frequent

digging in the literal dirt and uncovering literal worms lol amirite guys

'Please remember that this is just a prototype and that i'm it's in a very fragile state right now.'

going crazy trying to figure out what a specific testing company uses in their chemical compounds, because good fucking god how are you supposed to cite the evidence if you can't even label what it is?

a disastrous experiment being abandoned like Chernobyl once determined beyond salvation-- everyone curious to see how it'll develop and fester when left on its own

'life imitates art,' you think, as you finally recognize one of your unnecessarily complicated formulas being represented in your daily life

often being so bad at the thing you love that you can't do anything about it but laugh

staring for so long at something during a lecture that white begins to leech into your vision. you should probably blink a few times so people don't begin to suspect you're a reptile (even more than they already do)

'Don't.. don't look at me like that...' [speaking to a(n) (INSERT NAME OF LITTLE CRITTER HERE) you had to gently move onto a little scale to collect data]

honing in on where your talents in your field lie; the disappointment in finding your limits that turns to indifference when you remember you're still phenomenal at a million other things you enjoy

'i want to study you like a bug.'

thinly concealed irritation masked by a patient smile and a small 'mhm' when someone tries to explain your life's purpose TO you (ten dollars says they're wrong about it, too)

'and you want me to run this... on a full moon?' 'don't start with that shit again.'

yer disgust is lookin' a lot like morbid curiosity these days...

a lot of your scientific conclusions being discerned by common sense ('Please just use your cognitive functions, you guys...')

a clean earth sciences lab floor.. my white whale...

the small (increasingly large) pile of recyclable material that's waiting to be torn apart or filled with soil and plants; it topples over when people walk past, but no one can bring themselves to throw any away

'all this only cost me like... $270. which is crazy given that these're the real fuckin' deal with solid steel reinforcements.' 'man...this shit is so gonna blow down.'

leaning into the obscure, instead of away from it out of habit; seeing its effect in your daily life and work

all the plastic utensils in the dining area being stolen for diagrams, leaving behind only the reusable metalware. this is unexpectedly admirable of the engineers, if only to those who care about the inadvertent environmentalism

taking things apart to see how they work-- having very little planned on how to put it back together

'I don't know what you want me to do about that, you created it.' 'Not on purpose!'

downloading photomath during testing season. your doubt being palpable over your (in)ability to solve simple equations

carrying hand lotion everywhere you go because of how often your work has you washing your hands; colleagues and peers holding their hands out like beggars in a Mel Brooks film ('lotion... dollop of lotion for the poor D:')

borrowing chemical-grade goggles from the lab before going out to protest; supervisors giving you dubious thumbs ups while they 'accidentally' leave the key to the goggle sanitation station right by the cabinet..

'Now that you've poured your blood, sweat, tears, and other secretions into this project-- decide if you want to take it home to maintain, or have it eradicated.'

utilizing the public library, but having to double-check the internet before citing anything from the books you pour over because your city is more concerned with the way the building looks than the content it supplies

'The Martian,' both the book and the movie ... Mark Watney you will always be famous,,

'Why are you taking so many difficult classes at once?' 'My entire degree is difficult classes.'

carrying a small journal everywhere in an attempt to organize your thoughts, tasks, and reminders (you've never looked back on a single you've written, but you like to think it at least helps in the moment)

being torn between the scientific evidence that supports getting eight hours of sleep and your own hubris. you can stay up it's fine. it'll be fine.

you're not fine but at least the lab counters feel so nice against the side of your face

WHAT THE FUCK IS EVEN A KILOGRAM 🦅🦅🦅‼??!!!!!

having no idea where your degree will take you, giving everyone who asks a different vague answer

hands being littered with cuts and burns; not being able to stop yourself from touching even at the worst of times

geeking out over carbon sensors and ammonia regulators your supervisor managed to convince the department to splurge on (nothing provided by them will enter your lab for another three semesters)

being one of the most prepared people ever when it comes to disaster prep; this includes zombies

'this was not.. our intended result... someone get the shovel.'

pettiness infiltrating your daily life in the form of utilizing your talents; coding programs and drawing up diagrams and running tests just to prove someone wrong (or just to fuck with them)

studying with your liberal arts friends; both of you staring at your respective incomprehensible lines of symbols and words that neither of you have the brainpower to comprehend. most of the lights are off and the library closes in ten minutes, but you know the night staff and they've learned to keep their distance until absolutely necessary.

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ladystarksneedle · 1 year ago

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Helaena loves strawberries.

When she was younger she liked strolling through the King's gardens with a small wicker basket in hand, to collect strawberries and find a new insect to study. Ever since her mother had found her closely examining a strawberry at dinner she'd arranged for the gardeners to find seeds and plant new strawberry trees just for her. It wasn't like she remembered why she had been so focussed on that particular fruit that evening, just that she'd gotten lost in her thoughts and tuned out of the conversation.

The strawberry at that time, had been a welcome distraction. It was inviting in a way similar to some of the insects she had seen. The little red pitted fruit with a tuft of tiny leaves on top was scrumptious and pretty to look at. It reminded her of a ladybird 🐞 in a way. She had enjoyed counting all the little pits on it before popping it into her mouth and thought that'd be the last of it. Her mother had made sure that wasn't the case.

Alicent had been very attentive to her all her childhood, with all the hovering waning as she grew older. The added responsibilities had taken a toll on her and lessened the attention she could give each of her children. When both of them were younger though, all the attention she recieved came across as overbearing. Despite lacking the ability to adapt to how others perceived the way she expressed her love and change accordingly, she knew her mother always had the best of intentions.

However, sometimes she just wanted to be left alone. For her family to understand there was nothing wrong with her often times preferring solitude and meager company to all the loud teas and promenades held at court.

She couldn't remain upset for long though and was in fact very grateful for all the strawberry trees planted for her and the multitude of pink dresses she received.

Aegon and Aemond provided a welcome distraction when each of them wanted to escape court and she enjoyed their company individually. Aemond never pushed her to talk. He would be content with spending their time together in silence, walking through the gardens, sometimes picking a fruit here and there and listening to her describe things. He was attentive and his company was calming. Aegon in contrast was a riot. He was almost always drunk, but he made her laugh. He would try and juggle the fruits he collected, squish them and try to dirty her skirts, chase after her at times or sometimes just lay down with her under one of the trees while she arranged all the strawberries she'd collected in a manner similar to Dreamfyre's scales. He'd purposely mess with the pattern to irritate her or add his own accessories to it.

Her favourite person however was her grandfather. When Otto Hightower came to court Helaena hadn't given it much thought. The addition of a new member to their family didn't strike her as important. She assumed he'd be just as busy with his duties as Hand as father was with his model of Old Valyria. He'd proven her delightfully wrong. Otto surprisingly took a special interest in her. He'd willingly seek out her company, call upon her in the afternoons to chat and was genuinely interested in her "weird pursuits" as Aegon liked to call them. He seemed to like her for her and with him she sometimes understood what it was like to have a father. Perhaps Rhaenyra felt that way with Viserys. It was truly a wonderful thing. When Otto found out about her love for strawberries he'd have the servants cook up desserts incorporating them, whenever there was cause for celebration. He'd deny it vehemently but she knew it was him.

When the children were born she thought they'd take to strawberries just as she had. Both of them proved her wrong. They preferred apples instead and now she'd often find herself strolling the gardens, wicker basket in one hand, with the other holding Jaehaera's as they went about picking apples. Aegon would be close by on good days, playing dragon rider with Jaehaerys and trying to squish his little cheeks.

These red fruits somehow had a way of bringing out the best in all of them. It was a shame green was their colour. Strawberry pink or Sunfyre pink if she was to convince Aegon, would suit them far better.

#fruit posts #helaena imagine #helaena targaryen #strawberries #hotd imagine #helaena the dreamer #house of the dragon #aegon ii x helaena #aegon ii targaryen #jaehaerys targaryen #jaehaera targaryen #otto hightower #helaegon #headcanon #show dynamics #zae's fics #helaena fics

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mariacallous · 4 months ago

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About three years ago, some of Google’s security engineers came to company attorneys with a gigantic mess.

The security team had discovered that Google unwittingly was enabling the spread of malicious software known as Glupteba. The malware had corrupted more than 1 million Windows computers, turning them into vehicles to mine cryptocurrency and spy on users. By hijacking Google accounts, purchasing Google ads to lure in users, and misusing Google cloud tools, the hackers behind the operation were on their way to infecting even more computers.

Tech giants such as Google long have had a playbook for destroying botnets like Glupteba. They call up fellow companies and US authorities and together coordinate a massive takedown operation. Sometimes, the cops file criminal charges. But this time around, Google’s legal team recommended an approach that the company hadn’t pursued in years: Sue the hackers for money.

The eventual lawsuit against two Russian men and a dozen unnamed individuals allegedly behind Glupteba would be the first of a run of at least eight cases that Google has filed against various hackers and scammers, adding to a sporadic few filings in the past. The tactic, which Google calls affirmative litigation, is meant to scare off would-be fraudsters and generate public awareness about scams. Now, for the first time, Google is opening up about this strategy.

Leaders of Google’s security and legal teams tell WIRED they believe going after people in court has paid off. Google hasn’t yet lost a case; it has collected almost all of the more than $2 million that it has won through the legal process, and forced hundreds of companies or websites to shut down. The awards are trivial to Google and its parent Alphabet, a $2 trillion company, but can be devastating for the defendants.

“We’re disrupting bad actors and deterring future activity, because it’s clear that the consequences and the costs are high,” says Chester Day, lead of the three-person “litigation advance” team at Google that’s focused on taking people to court. Google, he adds, is “making it clear that we’re willing to invest our resources into taking action to protect our users.”

Google blog posts and similar content about the lawsuits and the underlying scams have drawn more than 1 billion views, according to the company. Google representatives say that the awareness increases vigilance among consumers and shrinks the pool of vulnerable targets. “Educating people about how these crimes work may be the best thing we can do to stop the crime,” says Harold Chun, director of Google’s security legal team.

Several Big Tech companies have pursued affirmative litigation, though not necessarily under that name and with varying strategies. Microsoft has filed more than two dozen lawsuits since 2008 with a focus on securing court permission to dismantle botnets and other hacking tools. Amazon has been a prolific complainant since 2018, filing at least 42 cases over counterfeit products, 38 for reviews fraud, three for copyright abuse, and, recently, two for bogus product returns. Amazon has been filing so many counterfeit cases, in fact, that the federal court in western Washington assigned three magistrate judges to focus on them.

Since 2019, Meta has filed at least seven counterfeiting or data theft cases, with settlements or default judgments in four so far, including one in which it won nearly $300,000 in damages. Like Meta, Apple has sued Israeli spyware developer NSO Group for alleged hacking. (NSO is fighting the lawsuits. Trials are scheduled for next year.)

Some attorneys who’ve studied how the private sector uses litigation to enforce the law are skeptical about the payoff for the plaintiffs. David Noll, a Rutgers University law professor and author of a forthcoming book on state-supported private enforcement, Vigilante Nation, says it’s difficult to imagine that companies could bring the volume of cases needed to significantly stop abuse. “The fact that there is a small chance you might be named in a suit isn’t really going to deter you,” he says.

Noll believes the big risk is that Google and other tech companies could be burdening the court system with cases that ultimately secure some favorable headlines but do less to make the internet safer than the companies could achieve through investing in better antifraud measures.

Still, of the six outside legal experts who spoke to WIRED, all of them say that overall Google deserves credit for complementing the work of underfunded government agencies that are struggling to rein in online abuse. At an estimated hundreds of thousands of dollars per case, it’s a low-risk endeavor for the tech giant, former prosecutors say.

“Reliable and regular enforcement when folks step outside the law brings us closer to a society where less of us are harmed,” says Kathleen Morris, resident scholar of law at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies. “This is healthy and robust collaboration on law enforcement by the public and private sectors.”

Google’s general counsel, Halimah DeLaine Prado, tells WIRED she wants to send a message to other companies that the corporate legal department can do more than be the team that says “no” to wild ideas. “Legal can be a proactive protector,” she says.

Marketing Scams

DeLaine Prado says that from its earliest days, Google has considered pursuing litigation against people abusing its platforms and intellectual property. But the first case she and other leaders within Google recall filing was in 2015. Google accused Local Lighthouse, a California marketing company, of placing robocalls to dupe small businesses into paying to improve their ranking in search results. Google alleged trademark infringement, unfair competition, and false advertising. As part of a settlement, Lighthouse stopped the problematic calls.

Since then, Google has filed complaints against five similar allegedly scammy marketers, with three of them ending in settlements so far. A Florida business and its owners agreed to pay Google $850,000, and a Los Angeles man who allegedly posted 14,000 fake reviews on Google Maps agreed to stop. Terms of the third deal, with an Illinois company, were not disclosed in court files, but Google spokesperson José Castañeda says it involved a seven-figure payment to Google.

Castañeda says Google has donated all the money it has collected to recipients such as the Better Business Bureau Institute, the National Consumers League, Partnership to End Addiction, Cybercrime Support Network, and various US chambers of commerce.

Another genre of cases has targeted individuals submitting false copyright complaints to Google to get content removed from the company’s services. A man in Omaha, Nebraska, whom Google accused of falsely claiming ownership of YouTube videos to extort money from their real owners, agreed to pay $25,000 to Google. Two individuals in Vietnam sued by Google never responded—a common issue.

In 2022, Google won default judgment against an individual in Cameroon who never responded to charges that he was using Gmail to scam people into paying for fake puppies, including a $700 basset hound. After the lawsuit, complaints about the scammer dried up, according to Google.

But legal experts say the most fascinating cases of Google’s affirmative litigation are four that it filed against alleged computer hackers. The suits emerged after months of investigation into Glupteba.

Security engineers at Google realized that eradicating Glupteba through the typical approach of taking down associated servers would be difficult. The hackers behind it had designed a backup system involving a blockchain that enabled Glupteba to resurrect itself and keep pilfering away.

That’s in part why Google’s attorneys suggested suing. Chun, the security legal director, had pursued cases against botnets as a federal prosecutor. “I thought this would be something good to do from a civil angle for a company as well,” he says. “Law enforcement agencies have limits on what they can do. And Google has a large voice and the litigation capacity.”

Chun and other attorneys cautioned their bosses that the hackers might use the lawsuit to reverse engineer Google’s investigation methods and make Glupteba more evasive and resilient. But ultimately, DeLaine Prado, who has final say over lawsuits, signed off. Chun says his former colleagues from the government applauded the complaint.

Google sued Dmitry Starovikov and Alexander Filippov, alleging that they were the Russia-based masterminds behind Glupteba after linking websites associated with the virus to Google accounts in their name. The search giant accused the duo (and unknown co-conspirators) of violating the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. The lawsuit also alleged a trademark law violation for hiding Glupteba in a tool that claimed to download videos from YouTube.

Google argued that it had suffered substantial harm, having never received payment for ads it had sold to the hackers, who allegedly were using fraudulent credit cards. Users also had their experiences with Google services degraded, putting them at risk and impairing the value of the company’s brand, according to the lawsuit.

In court papers, Starovikov and Filippov stated they learned of the lawsuit only through friends and then decided to hire a New York attorney, Igor Litvak, to fight on their behalf. The defendants initially offered innocent explanations for their software related to Glupteba and said that their projects had not targeted the US market. At one point, they countersued Google for $10 million, and at another, they allegedly demanded $1 million each to hand over the keys to shut down the botnet. They eventually denied the allegations against them.

Following an ordeal over whether the defendants could obtain Russian passports, sit for depositions in Europe, and turn over work files, Google’s attorneys and Litvak traded accusations of lying. In 2022, US district judge Denise Cote sided with Google. She found in a 48-page ruling that the defendants “intentionally withheld information” and “misrepresented their willingness and ability” to disclose it to “avoid liability and further profit” from Glupteba. “The record here is sufficient to find a willful attempt to defraud the Court,” Cote wrote.

Cote sanctioned Litvak, and he agreed to pay Google $250,000 in total through 2027 to settle. The jurist also ordered Starovikov and Filippov to pay nearly $526,000 combined to cover Google’s attorneys fees. Castañeda says Google has received payment from all three.

Litvak tells WIRED that he still disagrees with the judge's findings and that Russia’s strained relationship with the US may have weighed on whom the judge trusted. “It’s telling that after I filed a motion to reconsider, pointing out serious issues with the court’s decision, the court went back on its original decision and referred [the] case to mediation, which ended with … me not having to admit to doing anything wrong,” he says in an email.

Google’s Castañeda says the case achieved the intended effect: The Russian hackers stopped misusing Google services and shut down their marketplace for stolen logins, while the number of Glupteba-infected computers fell 78 percent.

Not every case delivers measurable results. Defendants in Google’s other three hacking cases haven’t responded to the accusations. That led to Google last year winning default judgment against three individuals in Pakistan accused of infecting more than 672,000 computers by masquerading malware as downloads of Google’s Chrome browser. Unopposed victories are also expected in the remaining cases, including one in which overseas app developers allegedly stole money through bogus investment apps and are being sued for violating YouTube Community Guidelines.

Royal Hansen, Google’s vice president for privacy, safety, and security engineering, says lawsuits that don’t result in defendants paying up or agreeing to stop the alleged misuse still can make alleged perpetrators’ lives more difficult. Google uses the rulings as evidence to persuade businesses such as banks and cloud providers to cut off the defendants. Other hackers might not want to work with them knowing they have been outed. Defendants also could be more cautious about crossing international borders and becoming newly subject to scrutiny from local authorities. “That’s a win as well,” Hansen says.

More to Come

These days, Google’s small litigation advance team meets about twice a week with other units across the company to discuss potential lawsuits. They weigh whether a case could set a helpful precedent to give extra teeth to Google’s policies or draw awareness to an emerging threat.

Team leader Day says that as Google has honed its process, filing cases has become more affordable. That should lead to more lawsuits each year, including some for the first time potentially filed outside the US or representing specific users who have been harmed, he says.

The tech giants' ever-sprawling empires leave no shortage of novel cases to pursue. Google’s sibling company Waymo recently adopted the affirmative litigation approach and sued two people who allegedly smashed and slashed its self-driving taxis. Microsoft, meanwhile, is weighing cases against people using generative AI technology for malicious or fraudulent purposes, says Steven Masada, assistant general counsel of the company’s Digital Crimes Unit.

The questions remain whether the increasing cadence of litigation has left cybercriminals any bit deterred and whether a broader range of internet companies will go on the legal offense.

Erin Bernstein, who runs the California office of Bradley Bernstein Sands, a law firm that helps governments pursue civil lawsuits, says she recently pitched a handful of companies across industries on doing their own affirmative litigation. Though none have accepted her offer, she’s optimistic. “It will be a growing area,” Bernstein says.

But Google’s DeLaine Prado hopes affirmative litigation eventually slows. “In a perfect world, this work would disappear over time if it’s successful,” she says. “I actually want to make sure that our success kind of makes us almost obsolete, at least as it relates to this type of work.”

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saintsenara · 1 year ago

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this piece was written for @ladiesofhpfest monthly minis, focusing on andromeda tonks.

grief is a theme which has been prominent in my reading and writing lately, and one aspect of grief which i am particularly drawn to at the minute is the fact that grief can often make the grieving quite unpleasant. the rage of grief, its vindictiveness and petty cruelty, are subjects which i think this fandom often shies away from. after all, nobody likes to think of their faves being horrible in their sorrow.

but i think andromeda makes a good case study for this feeling. i'm always struck in deathly hallows by how there's such a potent undercurrent of anger and disapproval in the way she deals with harry and hagrid. i like the description of her looking haughty - above and beyond the visual comparison it draws between her and bellatrix - and i like her complete lack of interest in doing anything other than talk about tonks and her fear for her.

i've written a lot about how i think someone in andromeda's position would understand the risk which tonks has taken on by joining the order (i'll die on the hill, written about in several of the pieces i did for the fest this summer, that she is aware that bellatrix has convinced voldemort to leave her and ted alone, which then becomes forfeit). and so here i'm thinking about just how furious she'd be when her fear and rage and warnings about that risk were proven to be completely justified - set around dirge without music by edna st. vincent millay. because andromeda does not approve. and she is not resigned.

Spring did not amble into summer that year, as it usually did.

It did not drift with mellow ease from April’s pale into May’s gold, lying idly on the grass in Richmond Park with the cracked-sugar coating on mini eggs on its fingers. It did not wake up one morning and put all its jumpers into storage, then fish them out again three days later when there was still a chill in the morning air. It did not spoon mint sauce onto its Easter lamb and watch as the tendrils of the broad beans curled themselves around their frame.

Death was squatting in her house, disarraying the furniture and stretching the sleeves of her cardigans, a winter’s dirge in his horrible voice and a sepulchral damp trailing in after him whenever he opened the door.

And although she had prided herself for years on her skill as a hostess, she was growing furious with her unwanted guest.

May was a month of rain and of rage.

For all the others - the other mothers in the club she had not asked to join, whose company she loathed, whose losses she refused to comprehend - it seemed that May was a month of silence.

She could picture them, sitting mutely by empty beds, the ephemera of childhood clutched in their white-knuckled hands, as if it will help clear the fog. She could see them searching through the gloom for the glittering past; the memories of summer’s haze which parents cast unthinkingly away, believing that there will never be a time when they will have to beg death to let them remember the way a seven-year-old face looked on a particular May morning.

She could picture them, sitting mutely by the fresh-turned earth of newly-dug graves, spring’s white flowers - apple blossom and yarrow; baby’s breath for their unbreathing babies - laid before headstones slick with the unseasonable squall. She could see them letting the rain mingle with the tears on faces rubbed raw, until the one cannot be distinguished from the other in the drops falling to the earth.

But she could not sit. She could not search or cry.

She could only spit; and snarl and scream until her teeth clashed through the dry and splitting skin of her lower lip and blood pooled in her mouth.

While death laughed at her.

They had never been able to work out where Nymphadora’s talent - the clay suppleness of tendons and bones, the shape-shifting malleability of skin and marrow - had come from.

Ted had been a solid man, substantial in the way that bookshelves are: never rickety; never uneven; smelling of wood polish and leather. He contained a hundred thousand little treasures; he was a source of knowledge, a place of solace on rainy days; a best friend in the aftermath of a lonely childhood.

And she herself was solid, in the way that music is: the tempo can be varied but the notes remain the same. One sister can strike out on her own, but there is a refrain which follows her, the same funeral dirge which lilts in the air after her sisters, letting the careful listener know that these three women are one and the same. No matter what one was pretending.

Nymphadora had none of her father’s solidity. She was an opal: gaudy and colour-changing and brilliant, but with a softness beneath it all. She was fragmentary and fractured. She had wanted her jokes to be laughed at. She had wanted to be taken seriously.

She had wanted to be loved, in all her contradictory, flesh-and-blood glory.

She lay now beside her lukewarm lover in the earth.

She did not speak to her daughter when she visited the graveyard, its pathways washed with rain, a yew sagging against the church’s ancient walls. She did not speak to Ted either, though he mouldered next to his daughter. She did not leave flowers leaning on their headstones. She clenched her fists until her nails pierced the dry and splitting skin of her palms, and blood dripped over her wedding ring to the ground.

She was too angry at them both; at how they had clearly been in cahoots to turn themselves into food for the worms, and leave her pouring tea for death and keeping the radiators blasting. This is how it had always been - Ted’s gentleness turning into permissiveness when it came to Nymphadora throwing herself from the tops of trees or telling old ladies who reprimanded her on her knicker-baring miniskirts to go swivel, and she was forced to become the strict one, the one who disapproved of burping and pot noodles and joining the Aurors.

Neither of them had ever listened, adventure twinkling in their identical eyes and schemes whirring in their swashbuckling minds. They thought her silly - nervous and elegant and a lover of order. In their unkinder moments, they thought her rigid, icy, cruel. She could still picture Nymphadora at the breakfast table - sixteen and sulking over being told off for overindulging at a party and being sick all over the hydrangeas - and how it had felt to know her eyes were raking over her mother’s heart-shaped face for the fragments of Narcissa and Bellatrix that a quiet life in a Muggle suburb could not erase.

But look at that. She was right and they were both dead. And she was furious.

She did not speak to her husband when she returned to the house, where death was laying on the sofa instead of babysitting. There were crumbs on the coffee table, the gingery shards of a whole biscuit now snapped and softening. Like Ted - with his hair the colour of saffron cake and his eyes like spring water - would be in the damp of May’s earth.

As a child, her after-dinner habit had been bridge - a constant torture since Bella would never pay attention long enough for them to have a really good game. As an adult, it was coffee and chocolate liqueurs on the sofa with Ted.

As a widow, it appeared to be screaming.

The morning dawned as grey as all its cousins; May was a month of rain and of rage. Death clattered around the kitchen, leaving eggshells on the floor and teabags staining the worksurface with their tannic drool. The disorder made her skin itch.

She looked at herself in the mirror, her face prickled and pink from a shower which had scalded her. The heat was a comrade; the water was boiled up to a flesh-burning point, her blood was hot enough to eat her marrow, turning her from the inside out into mulch. Somehow it all evened out.

Ted and Nymphadora were competing over who could decompose the quickest, laying in the graveyard and giving thanks for all the damp. It would putrify them all the quicker. Still, how shocked they would be when victory was snatched from them before their sightless eyes. If there was a prize for shattering first, the person they’d left behind would win.

Her day was one of half-drunk coffees and constant movement. She could not sit, there was no way of relaxing with a magazine on the sofa when death was leaving so many crumbs. There was no way of staying in the house when there were so many fragments lurking on shelves and in wardrobes. Ted’s jumpers curled up like newborn kittens in a drawer; his mismatched socks were lined up like limp orphans in the laundry basket.

A hairbrush, entangled with bright pink strands, lay on the stairs. She had told Nymphadora to take it up with her the last time she went to bed. Her daughter hadn’t listened.

She was so angry at her.

#asenora fics #andromeda tonks #fragments #ladies of hp fest #monthly minis

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joandfriedrich · 9 months ago

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My Trip to Concord: Part Two

Location 2: Orchard House

We went up the path that lead to the church, and there was a table for guests to sign in with their info and whatever message they’d like to leave. I wrote something like “Best birthday ever for the biggest Little Women fan.” Beside it was a small garden and while it didn’t have any flowers, it was nice to imagine what could have been, and it being the cutest garden.

The tour started in the church, and I was able to get these photos.

Apologizes that the cabinet picture isn’t the greatest, but it was a picture of what appears to be Joan of Arc, and my friend wondered if perhaps Abigail had painted that too. While we waited, we watched this documentary piece (we did miss part of the beginning because we ran a little late at the cemetery) where an actress played LMA and gave a small tour of the house. Something worth noting, and it will be particularly sweet to a certain demographic, when the fictional LMA was showing the pictures from the house, she referred Thoreau as a “very, very, very special friend”. It made me smile like an idiot.

When it finished, our guide told us that this was the school of Philosophy, where Bronson was the superintendent. The bench by the tree was the bench Bronson often sat at. Then moving into the house, we started in the kitchen and I snuck this picture in before being told that we were not allowed any pictures. If you want a good idea of how the interior looks, the 1994 film did a phenomenal job with the design, the colors are a bit different, but the structure is pretty much the same.

This was where the well was, and it was protected by plexiglass. It’s interesting, because in October I got to see Edgar Allan Poe’s house in Baltimore, and Orchard house is so much bigger than that, and it really did feel as cozy and inviting as you’d imagine. From the kitchen to the dining room, it had a picture of LMA over the mantel by the stairs, one that was done after her illness and by the same painter who did Abraham Lincoln. The china in the cabinet was the family china, belonging to her mother, which is why it has “May” engraved as it was her maiden name.

The only bedrooms we saw were the parents, which had a small offshoot of Anna’s twin boys’ room, Abigail and, of course, Louisa. The rooms were all very good size, though Abigail's was smaller than the other two, but I get it, she was the youngest, and if remembering correctly, she moved out/was in Europe at an early age, and didn't need the space. What was so cool as seeing her artwork all around her room, protected by plexiglass, and a copy of her painting La Négresse, was featured in her room.

Louisa's room was my favorite, not just because it's Louisa, but because it had the coziest feel, was sunny, and had such a great history there. Our guide shared that Louisa stayed in this room primarily when she was sick during the war, and Abigail would keep her company, and while she lamented she couldn't get Louisa flowers (as they were pricey), she painted flowers in her room, and it's still there, and very beautiful. It's a black background, with calla lilies and some red flower I am not sure of (you can see a part of it if you look at Abigail's wiki page.).

Something to note, at various places around the house, there were small baskets of fake apples, and my mom asked me "what's with the apples", and I said, "well, it is called orchard house." And then a few minutes later, the guide said that there used to be apple trees that grew nearby and Bronson was known to give people apples even if they didn't ask for it. His study was pretty cool, saw a pocket watch holder that worked as well as a clock. On the shelf, the people of the museum filled it with different versions of LMA's works from all over the world, both in style and in language.

Off from there was Abigail's small art studio, which had a dollhouse like case where different scenes from Little Women are played out. And they discovered underneath the wallpaper and whatnot, outlines of Abigail's artwork, profiles of people that had come to visit, and the museum had protected it with plexiglass, and on that highlighted the profiles.

At the end, we were in the store and there were so many awesome things there that I could have wasted my money there, but I settled on a few things.

Starting at the top and going clockwise, a magnet with Louisa on it with the quote "Nothing is impossible to a determined woman". Next is a small book called "The Language of Flowers" which is, as the cover says, flowers and their meanings". Next is "Merry Christmas and Other Christmas Stories" written by LMA. "Orchard House: Home of Little Women" is a Emmy winning documentary, and was the one that played in the church, and next to it is the Katharine Hepburn Little Women (they had the 33, 94, 19 versions, but I was surprised they didn't have the 17 or even the 49 film, though that is apparently a tough find). Above her, is little kids book called "Little Women: A Playtime Primer", and it's going to be a gift for my nephew. Above that is an ornament of Orchard house with an engraving of LMA, and in the center is a tote bag.

I also got a candle that's called Pickled Limes, and holy crap it smells amazing! A sweet limey scent, which reminded me of @thegamineingrey post of how they were like candy back in the day, and I totally get it. Also, bonus inside, an umbrella charm which was what really sealed the deal, if not for the scent.

Here are pics of the outside of Orchard House, many of which were taken by my mom, since I was too busy just admiring the place.

Suffice to say, it is a beautiful house, full of a rich history and, just as the book, still feels relevant and like going home. I am glad we were able to make the trip out to see this amazing house.

#little women #louisa may alcott #henry thoreau #henry david thoreau #ralph waldo emerson #meg march #jo march #beth march #amy march

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ahti-the-janitor · 15 days ago

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I am a Canadian that is very interested in Finland and Finnish culture. Would you be willing to explain what you mean when you say you're not happy with where your country is headed?

Love the Finnish shitposting!

Hi!! Of course, it's no problem! And if you're interested in anything else and wanna ask something else, feel free to DM me or send more asks and I'll answer the best I can! And I'm glad you're enjoying the Finnish shitposting haha!

This will be a long post, so I'm very sorry haha. And sorry for the somewhat late reply.

So, my country. In Europe in general we have been seeing the rise of the far-right and I find it concerning, and the same is unfortunately true in Finland. Our goverment/parliament is more on the right than it has been in years. The biggest party in our Parliament is a center-right Kokoomus which basically is a party for wealthy people, only cares about money, and wants to make things easier for rich people. The second largest party is Perussuomalaiset (PS)... a party that is very far right-wing, conservative party. They are a party with extremely racist, anti-immigrant and anti-LGBTQ ideals. For example, a member of their party is our finance minister. She has made comments on wanting to beat up immigrant children (she used racial slurs to describe them) and wanting to shoot immigrants on the train. Along with many other things. She initially refused to apologize for the comments, but eventually did. But she has not changed and her being a Perussuomalaiset member is a testament to that. Upholding racism is the core part of their ideals, so it is not a "one bad apple ruins the bunch" case.

And she is not the only one. One recent example is from the 6th, our Independence Day. A member of the Parliament (a Perussuomalaiset member), Teemu Keskisarja (who has had numerous other controversies as well) took part and gave a speech in a march. It is a far-right, nationalist (they are fascists and neo-nazis, let's be real. Even if some claim otherwise) torch march 612, held on Indepence Day. Riikka Purra defended him.

There are so many horrid people in charge of our country. They are also NOT keeping the promises they gave when running for parliament. They made promises they wouldn't make cuts to certain things yet they have.

Finland has been a welfare state that takes care of its people but that is being torn apart.

There have been cuts made to our healthcare. There is a new system set up that will bring a lot of people trouble and make it harder to get access to healthcare faster. Wealthy people can get faster treatment since they have money to go to private clinics. There are cuts made to other parts welfare protection and education. Finland used to take care of people who had trouble, now we are going into another direction. Some might call it Americanization. There are decisions being made that benefit the wealthy while the poor are becoming poorer and more disadvantaged. Disabled people are facing cuts too, and other marginalized groups as well.

Yet Finland is supporting fur farming and big companies monetarily. They are making cuts to the funding of the field of culture despite it employing more people than the fur industry. Museums are being shut down. Very little value is put on culture and other things that people don't see immediate monetary gain from. Finland has had one of the best education in the world for a long time but it has been going worse.

Finnish well-being in general is in decline. Mental health issues are a huge problem and getting treatment is hard, at least from what I have experienced and seen around me.

There are also big problems with gendered violence. A recent study showed that every 4th man under 35 think women can deserve the violence she faces. Of every man it is every 5th who believes so. Of course this is not a recent issue but those numbers are harrowing and proved just how bad it is. There has been quite a lot of violence lately -- especially violence amidst of young people is on the rise. We had a school shooting this year where the shooter was only 12 years old. Other threats have been made in schools.Far-right movements are on the rise too.

There are honestly SO many things and this is only scratching the surface. I could write a whole book on this. I might have forgotten something really important too since there are a lot of things. Also, if things are said in a vague way or not worded well, my apologies! Sometimes explaining things like this in depth in English is a bit tough haha.

I also acknowledge that I am still in a privileged position and things are way worse in many countries. But Finland has been so proud of taking care of people who need it, of our level of education, of things like that, only for that to be ripped apart. I love this country and it is terrible to see the foundation of it being torn apart and what makes me proud being destroyed. I know it has not been perfect in the past either but things are going downhill VERY rapidly.

Extremely long story short: the welfare state system is being torn apart. Far-right parties are in power. Promises are being broken and more and more people are struggling.

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serendertothesquad · 2 months ago

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Seren's Studies: Odd Squad UK -- "Should Odd Acquaintance Be Forgot" Episode Followup, Part 3

Man, we're already on to Part 3. I haven't even finished Part 1 of the goddamn episode. I've got 60 total screencaps already.

Hey, I warned you I could amass over 100 in one followup. RIP unlimited Tumblr photo limits.

Blending both episode parts here, so the credits won't be included in this part. With that said, let's go below the break to find out how it all ends.

(A post-editing note: I was informed that Leonie is, in fact, a girl, and not a boy like I thought. I'm keeping the LGBTQ+ theory because we've already gotten gay triangle villain and they could extend that to child villains too, but keep in mind that Leonie is a girl and not a boy. That's my bad.)

Putting aside the fact that Captain O's soft snoring should not be heard from this distance...

...

No, actually, that was the only thing I had for this section.

Looking at this made my back and hips go eeeeeeeeeeeeeeee and it's not even the good kind of eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee it's the "I just walked five hours without sitting" kind of eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

Hi, I'm Seren, I'm in my mid-20s and I'm old as fuck. Get off my lawn.

Komugi Inukai's influence once again lives on in an American-Canadian property that has hopped continents.

Bigger question, though: why...why's it a pentagon? Is that a window? Is that a precinct symbol? WHY THE FUCK IS THAT THERE??????????????

EVIL BBC WORLD NEWS IS STILL KICKING???????????? AHAHAHAHAHAHA ARE YOU FUCKIN' SERIOUS?!?!?!?!?!

I mean, if you look at it from a certain angle, it can be a reference to how news companies can do immoral things and still be kicking. In this case, try to knock down a pseudo-government organization, get pwned by one of said organization's leaders, and you'll still have a newscast! FUCK CONSEQUENCES WHAT ARE CONSEQUE- *explodes in a nuclear manner*

The worst oddness in...hold on, this oddness has been contained for half a fucking millennium?

I just...Jesus Christ, this is so unbelievably stupid. World Turned Odd had something going with Odd Todd creating oddness instead of solving it. Having containment units be opened to release oddness is just downright dumb. It's like half-assing your job by shoving oddness in a container and then going back and saying "whoop well I solved the case". But you didn't. You slapped a Dollar Tree bandage on it. Temporary fix.

See, another reason why this whole line of motive logic is stupid: the blame is on you guys just as much as it is on Ozzie.

The man couldn't handle the pressure from a few bad apples and quit, because he most likely didn't get enough training from the previous Director, if any. So he had to ride the wave and then get faced with a small but powerful tsunami.

You guys were allegedly "smart" but couldn't tell that the manual was backwards and didn't bring it up to Ozzie. You took it like the Bible and followed it to the letter and stumbled into creating oddness instead of striving for normalcy. That, and you let your numerical biases get in the way of solving oddness instead of overcoming them, because whoever taught you at the Academy failed at their jobs and/or was severely unqualified.

Not that Tasha will admit to it, of course. But addressing all of these problems would make the finale seem so much better than it currently...ehhh...well, I can't say "than it currently is", because to me, it's not top-tier. It's decent. But you get what I'm saying, surely.

Hey, at least Oxandra got better at the evil laugh thing. Props to her.

Okay, I'm starting to realize that these are the containment units.

So with that said, why is there one on what looks like a top floor of HQ, on display where people can see it? Makes no sense other than for advertising, "look at what we've done" purpo- oh God that's what that is isn't it. FUCKING HELL-

Oddness is invading his workplace and he's fucking worried about food. God bless him. My kind of kiddo.

AAAAAAAHAHAHAHA WHAT???? THEY TRANSPORTED HER TO THE OFFICE...WHY?????????

Oh...that's not even stupid. That's downright hilarious. I can't explain it, but I'm crying and wheezing at how they up and decided to move her from the bench to her chair. All they need is to tie strings to her arms and operate her as a puppet! Of corpse she's alive!

This is gonna lead to him becoming a Director again, isn't he.

Even Orpita becoming the new Big-O-by-function made more sense than this, and that was just plain obvious. This isn't as obvious, but at the same time, I can kinda see where this is going.

I was going to make a comment on Onom's skewed priorities here, but then I noticed the Jesus cross up above his head.

"Okay, I'll take charge. But only until Captain O wakes up."

Beautiful! You got 9 minutes. Chop chop.

Orwell seems to forget that Captain O was a seafarer whose title actually meant something, and Ozzie was not a seafarer in any capacity.

There's also a reason why titles like "Mr. O", "Captain O", "Ms. O", etc. are just that: titles. They are not names. They are titles.

Again, this is a matter that will be expanded on in a future Seren's Study.

Ohhhhh so iss' like th'...th' pienado container...

*long looooooong maaaaaaaaan sigh* My soul hurts. Don't bring a legend of an episode into this. You have no right to desecrate it for your own gain, TASHA.

See, at least with pies, it was understandable that they were bullets because it was understandable that Odd Todd was performing what is essentially attempted mass murder but with pies.

The Terrible Three don't have that same motive, and thus, this isn't a shooting at all. So this paper airplane, while causing massive damage if it hits Ozzie, does not mean the dramatic "HE'S GONNA FUCKIN' DIE FROM A HEAD WOUND" that Tasha thinks it does.

THEY BROUGHT THE LASER BUTTERFLIES BACK FROM "THREE PORTALS DOWN"?????? BE THE FUCK FOR REAL AND TELL ME WHY THEY AREN'T IN THEIR PROPER DIMENSION. TELL ME THAT, TASHA. TELL ME THAT, WRITERS. EXPLAIN YOUR SORRY ASSES.

His middle name is "Gadgets"? Huh, I always thought it was "The".

(Didn't think I'd have to dig in my brain for that reference.)

"New agents" and it's just children from off the streets.

Because fuck the Academy, right? Fuck it! I'm so sorry for asking-

been here less than a year

already knows a damn good chunk of the kids in this playground

I'm sorry, but this walks a very fine line between "convoluted" and "well, it actually makes sense". How does Orli know all these kids beyond just "I made a few friends when I moved here"? Did she just go to the playground on her day off and meet them? The regulars?

Once again, the Academy is always an option, and realistically there is nothing wrong with reusing a shot from "Oscar Strikes Back" and then showing a building they could use as an Investigation building...but they don't. They decide to go this route instead. And suddenly, my theory of "what if they brought back the 13 living legends?" seems sane. Impossible, but sane.

This entire scene just tells me that, if Orli wanted to, she could lead one hell of a cult. Ozzie leads a precinct, she leads a cult devoted to Odd Squad and to him.

"We need you to become Odd Squad agents and help save the town."

That's not how this works...that's not how ANY OF THIS FUCKING WORKS.

Are we just fucking throwing away lore at this point? Across 10 years? Did they even try? Do they even care? Are they just trying to get a passing grade for a weekly paycheck? TF is this, retail? Fast food? Where you do the bare minimum and still get paid?

Y'know, do you guys remember when I said I'm tired of this show as a whole? I may be tired of it, but I still care about it. I can recite lore and infodump on you like no one's business. I still write stories about it. I still talk about it with friends.

This is what happens when you're tired of the show and don't care, but the network still drags you back down into hell after you just crawled your way out of it. And that's despite what the news articles want you to believe.

We are witnessing the absolute potential pinnacle of franchise rot.

Okay, first of all, the fact that this girl uses the "we" worse than the Fresh Prince does.

Second of all, the fact that these kids are absolutely not concerned about dying whatsoever.

Both of these things are capital sins.

What's also a capital sin is calling these kids "new agents" when they are not employees of Odd Squad. It's like if I walked into Target and called myself a cashier when I don't work there.

OH MY GOD SHE IS A VILLAIN!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAH HOLY FUCKING S H I T I CALLED IT?!?!?!?!?!?! BRO I DIDN'T EVEN M E A N THAT I THOUGHT IT WAS JUST A NAME THEY GAVE HER!!!!!!!

Oh God...ohhhhh...I got fuckin' blindsided, holy shit. If there's a second season/fifth season, I need an episode dedicated to this villainess right here.

NO ORLI NO!!!! NO DON'T TELL THE VILLAINESS YOUR PLAN!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO-

You geddit???

'Cause...'cause they're the department colors????

Are you laffin'?

ARE YA LAFFIN' YE-

She doesn't even address any kid by fucking name. And okay, fine, maybe it's because she doesn't know this girl, but still...it's a little demeaning.

Is...is that Plant Room a fixture of Odd Squad??? It's just a greenhouse labeled Plant Room? That's like naming a weed shop 420!

(On to Part 4!)

#seren's studies #odd squad #odd squad uk #odd squad pbs kids

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bicsbec · 3 months ago

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Natural Melodies

Chapter 1: don't tell me not to worry (ao3 link)

Eda had promises to keep. Hell was over and once the terror dissipated, all Eda could do was bundle up her kids in a tight hug. She didn't let them go for a long while.

The Isles progressively stopped being the hollow carcass of the Collector's playground. Witches and demons resettled into the Titan's familiar bones, everyone where they should be—or in some cases, used to be.

Raine drifting back to their cottage in the Knee made Eda restless. She wanted to march up and knock down their door, drag them back down, hold them close. But she also knew Raine needed time. Time to settle into reality, come to terms with what they went through, what they didn't do, what was out of their hands.

Eda didn't hold any of it against them, but she was sure it weighed on them anyway. But Eda could wait. What was a little more time?

And life was busy enough as it was.

Eda settled into her bones, too, arm missing, curse ever persistent.

Sure would've been handy if it could regrow limbs.

Eda snorted at her own joke as she juggled through the set up of her stand. The economy in Bonesborough was slowly picking up, which meant suckers to swindle. It was a comfortable routine, familiar. It brought a sense of normalcy to the market floor, almost making business boom.

She'd sort through garbage, keep the shinnies for herself, and bag the rest over to the market.

The waves of customers were the predictable ebbs of the old days. Fussy mornings, slow noons, and bustling afternoons. As busy as they were, the afternoons were Eda’s favorite part of the day. Her kids and company got out of school to hover around the stand, bringing wandering eyes with their presence (and being free child labor). But most of all, Eda got to hear Luz talk, it never really mattered what it was about, Luz would talk and Eda had stopped taking that for granted a long time ago.

"We still don't have class class," Luz was saying this time. She'd arrived with only Bossy Boots, Hunter and his posse having Flyer Derby practice. Boots was mesmerized by the spinning star pinched between Luz's fingers, a fidget whatever; Luz was mesmerized by Boots as she talked.

They were sickly sweet to watch. But she supposed she'd been that way once, too.

"The preschoolers are still hunting in packs—like, they go home and everything, they just come to school feral," Luz continued. "And Willow is still trying to figure out how to humanely kill her orchids, but—"

"No class," Eda finished.

"Yeah. Mostly clean up. I don't think the cafeteria will ever smell the same, though."

Eda laughed. "And how's the fella?"

Luz brightened. "Still stubborn," she giggled, pulling out the egg out of her bag. "I'll get through to ya, buddy."

Boots smiled at that. "You are something else," she said, endeared. Luz's determination was more than admirable. It was truly a wonder why her palisman hadn't hatched yet.

Luz blushed at her tone. "Y'know, when I said I wanted to earn my staff the hard way, I never thought it'd be this hard."

"Maybe they're testing if you meant it," Eda nudged her encouragingly. "Now let's pack up and head home. I want to be in my slippers and have a glass of apple blood in my hand."

"Yes, ma'am," Luz and Boots chorused; Luz, playfully and Boots more seriously. Boots elbowed Luz then.

"Oh, and I forgot to ask," Luz said with a start. "Ami— we wanted to know if I could go over to Amity's for a study date later tonight."

"And study what? You just told me you didn't have class."

Boots got bright pink.

"My palisman?"

Eda snorted. "Sure, yeah. Alright, fine, go be in love and all that mess," Eda ruffled her hair, curls longer than they used to be.

It was a relief to hear Luz sound more like herself. The first few weeks there was a lingering sadness in her eyes. It didn't take a genius to figure out that Luz had run herself into the ground trying to find a way back to the Boiling Isles. That she dove in head first the moment she could. That a sense of guilt hung around her, clung to her even as she got her friends back home. Some of that sadness still lingered, but it was easily overshadowed by her tenacity and sunny disposition. Settling back into familiar bones.

The door to the Owl House swung open as Eda and her two shadows hauled in the market goods. The house was mostly back to its normal self, only a few furnishings having been replaced.

"Luz!" King rushed to hug her leg and crawl up her shoulder. "I missed you! I'm going insane in this house, and not in the good way."

"What am I? Stale bread?" Eda protested, stuffing the goods in their rightful closet.

"You're the one who left me here in the first place. Hooty and Aunt Lilith are insufferable. It's diabolical."

"You balance them out," Eda said, scooping him up and tickling his belly. He started rolling in her arms, laughing and pushing her hand away. It was difficult to not drop him with all his squirming and her inability to hold him properly.

"Weh! Wait, s-stop. PLEASE." King squirmed too hard and dropped to the floor.

"Oops. Sorry, kiddo."

He crawled back up Luz's shoulder, this time hiding from Eda. She smiled.

Truth was, she didn't want King out on the market floor. People were weird about him being a Titan. They either wanted to kiss his feet or chop them off. She'd rather have her son alive for the time being.

The house rumbled and from upstairs Hooty's voice came screeching down. "HUNTER'S HOME, HOOT."

"Hooty! Inside voice!"

"TOWER ROOM."

"LILY, MAKE HIM LISTEN!" Eda called. She heard a faint voice and something similar to Hootsifer, which was good enough for her. "Alright, I'll go check on him. You kids start dinner."

"But we have the study date," Luz reminded her.

"And I'm left with your aunt and two growing boys. Help and you can head out."

"Okay…" Luz grumbled, but it was mostly for show. They mostly bickered for the novelty of it, how mundane it was; there was an unspoken satisfaction that came from that familiarity.

The study in the tower had never been tidy, but the corner that Hunter had taken up was neater than most of the house in general. Eda supposed it was some remnants of his scout training.

"Hey, kid," Eda knocked on the door frame, stepping inside. "Watcha working on?"

From her spot in the room, Eda could see little blocks of wood scattered on the surface of the otherwise neat desk, clippings and sawdust littering the perimeter. Perched on his shoulder was a patched up Flapjack, Hunter's handiwork having sealed his fractured wood. The little red cardinal was supervising its witch's work, chirping in soft approval. Leather gloves on, Hunter was making crude little figures with the old chisel she'd given him, sharp thunks heard softly from across the room.

"Just practicing, Miss Eda."

She made her way across the room and inspected the rough figures.

"Want a crack at the real deal?"

"Wait, really?"

"Yeah. All you gotta do is put bevel to bark, like my old man used to say."

Hunter's eyes lit up, excitement creeping its way into his eyes.

"Yeah, okay."

"Just put bevel to bark, pumpkin," her father said soothingly. "The rest will follow."

"As long as I follow the grain," Eda finished.

Her dad smiled, eyes bright. "Precisely."

He took a block of palistrom wood and placed it in one of her hands and a gouge in the other. "Go ahead."

She'd practiced on red pine wood for days, she could almost carve the shape in her sleep. Eda could feel the difference between grains immediately, adjusting the angle of the bevel accordingly. She guided the gouge over the surface, creating the initial contours of the palisman.

Dell mostly gave her pointers or gentle reminders. This was her project, his hand would only point, not steer.

The form of an owl slowly made itself clearer, becoming smoother and more defined the more she worked on it. Sandpaper smoothed out the remaining irregularities over the palisman's surface.

The dad took it to give it a final wash, turning it over in his hands appreciatively.

"That's a proper owl."

Eda beamed, something soft fluttering in her chest. Her father toweled off the wood and handed it back to her. "You know what to do."

Hunter's hands were steady, meticulous. Eda smirked at his extremely proper posture, bevel away from his body, keeping the gouge aligned with the grain of the wood, fingers tucked away from the gouge's path.

Chips slowly peeled away to reveal a creature Hunter called a wolf. Eda thought it bore some resemblance to King. She took it from his hands for a final wash, which proved harder now that it had a more detailed surface.

As Hunter toweled it off, she said, "That's a proper palisman, kid."

Eda watched him cradle the wolf in his hands, watched him turn it over in his hands in silent awe.

Flapjack walked down his arm, inspecting the petrified figure in his hand. He made a faint chirp and Hunter smiled.

"Thanks, Flap."

The cardinal didn't chirp as much as he used to, but Eda had a sneaking suspicion that the pair still understood each other.

Eda's eyes stung, her heart warm at the sight of a brand new palisman, at the sight of the Clawthorne legacy taking flight right in front of her eyes. The Clawthornes had always been wild witches, learned in the natural ways of magic, wielding a wonderfully loud melange of power.

Eda was immensely proud of Hunter, of his natural curiosity, of his determination to learn wild magic, to bring new magic into the Isles.

"You give wild witches a good name, kiddo," Eda said earnestly.

Hunter beamed, like he'd just received the highest praise in the world. "Thank you, Miss Eda."

Eda gave him a reassuring pat on the shoulder, almost a side hug. She was getting better at the whole motherly-displays-of-affection thing. Hunter sat upright, like he'd suddenly remembered something.

"Oh, Titan," he said excitedly. "I have to show Luz!"

"She might be on her way to Amity's."

"Got it!" He stood and grabbed his staff, Flapjack already anticipating his needs. In a glitching yellow flash, Hunter was off, racing after his sister.

Life was good at the Owl House. Her kids were safe, happy, alive . She couldn't ask for more.

Okay, she could ask for one more thing.

It was curled up in her nest that the thought trickled in most persistently, scrolling through Penstagram. Blight and his newest monstrosity, Gilbert and his home projects, Bossy Boots and Luz, and Raine. Their posts hardly ever contained them, but Eda knew from the scenery of the sunset or the assortment of neatly placed instruments that it was their post.

Eda hardly resisted clicking on their profile every time they crossed her screen. Her heart stuttered stupidly in her chest when she saw their picture. Their lively smile, eyes bright and focused, the age lines on their face served as proof of how much they tended to laugh. Her Raine. Her Raine that hadn't been hers in over twenty years. That had reignited something in her heart a couple of years ago. That kept slipping away when they were just within reach.

Eda cycled through these thoughts most nights, as infuriating as it was becoming. Nauseating, really. She tossed her scroll out of her nest and curled herself comfortably among the soft twigs and thin branches. Sleep came slowly and densely.

Mornings were once a circus; now, Eda didn't really have a word for the proper disaster mornings were, especially on days when Lily stayed over.

King was loud and animated if he'd woken up before Eda, which was usually the case; he was too bright for her grouchy state after just waking up. Lily had her obnoxious morning rituals which she'd tragically kept well into adulthood; Eda hadn't missed them. Luz and Hunter had picked up a nasty habit in the Human Realm of arguing throughout the whole morning.

Mornings were loud, far too loud for Eda to be any kind of polite.

That was why she entered her kitchen with extreme aversion. Her children were scattered around the space, each suspicious of interrupting the eerie quiet of this morning. King was walking on the table and launching himself out through the window. Luz and Hunter seemed half asleep still, their clumsy movements making their dishes clatter as they gathered their breakfast, glowering; if Eda was careful enough, she could get her coffee and avoid their impending fight.

The floor vibrated slightly, the short peace in the house about to be destroyed. Eda braced, already irritated.

"RAINE’S HOME," Hooty squawked, the loudest sound on the Isles as far as Eda was concerned.

Eda marched to the living room, temper hardly contained.

"Hooty! How many times have I told you—"

The door swung open and the rest died in her throat. Hooty's words sunk in. Raine was standing at the entrance, fist raised, like they'd been knocking.

"Raine. You're h—" home "here."

They gave her a half smile. "Apparently, I hated the cold on the Knee, too."

Eda felt herself smile. Apparently my parents always hated the cold on the Knee.

"Come on in."

Raine stepped through the threshold and all Eda could think was that a piece had fallen into place, something calm and ecstatic washing over her. It was a perfect morning.

"It's literature , Hunter!" Luz shouted from the kitchen.

"It's degeneracy!" Hunter shouted back, something clattering like he'd pounded the table.

"Is everything okay in there?" Raine asked with a smirk, looking past over to the kitchen.

Eda shrugged. "I dunno. Kids, y'know?"

"Yes, I can hear."

"It's a disservice to O'Bailey's character!"

" It's not that deep. "

"I'm calling Gus."

"I'll just call Mamá."

"Mamá would agree with me!"

"I was gonna get myself some coffee. You want some?"

"Only if you can survive going in there."

Eda winked and waved them into the kitchen.

"Alright, ya weirdos, that's enough. We've got company. Behave."

"Hey, Raine," Luz switched easily to a more civil tone.

Hunter straightened in his chair comically. "Coven Head Whispers." The tips of his ears were pink.

"Not anymore," Raine smiled kindly.

"Right. Sorry."

"Don't you have school or something?" Eda asked as she pulled out two mugs.

"Grudgby semi finals," Luz said. "The season started up again almost immediately. Bump is flying us over to Glandus to watch."

"I've got practice with the team," Hunter piped in. "Professor Hermonculus booked up our competition schedule."

"Hexside always did drop everything for its athletes," Raine said with a lilt of humor in their voice.

"Came with its perks," Eda shrugged.

"I'll say."

Eda shook her head with a smirk, pouring the hot liquid into the mugs.

"You need help over there?"

Raine was asking, but they were already picking up the mugs. Eda felt her face warm at the sudden proximity.

Owlbert peaked his head out of Eda’s hair and hooted at the sight of Raine. He took off, flying circles around their head. Raine chuckled, making Eda’s heart squeeze.

"Hello, Owlbert. Long time no see."

Eda tore herself away from the scene for a moment, turning to Luz.

"Luz, why don't you take King to the game. Sneak him in your bag or something. He's starting to climb the walls and it's tearing the wallpaper."

"Sure, no problem," she said easily. "Why haven't you been taking him to the market, though?"

"Yeah!" King's voice came, his head popping up from the kitchen window.

Eda huffed. Raine gave her a curious glance.

"It's filled with crooks."

"You're a crook," King countered.

"Fair. There's a new dress-code?"

"Ha! I'm not falling for your tricks! The market square would never make people wear clothes."

" Fine , I don't know how people will react to you. Last time, they almost ran over the stand to get to ya."

"I thought you were just more popular now."

"They were trying to cook you."

"Oh. Well, that's unsettling."

"Well, I think that settles it," Luz said, standing from the table. "Come on, we'd better head out if Hunter doesn’t want to be late for practice."

King jumped through the window, climbing into Luz's bag, his little feet kicking until he settled inside. Hunter cleared the table and Luz and him shifted into the part of the day where they got along just fine. Time in the Human Realm made them weirder than they already were.

"Have a good day," Eda called after them.

"Bye, Eda. Bye, Raine," Luz waved.

"Weh!"

"You, too," Hunter called as he opened the door for Luz.

And they were off.

"Empty nest," Raine commented.

"Yeah," Eda chuckled, looking over to them. Raine stood with a half smile, their glasses steamed over from the mugs in their hands and Owlbert was perched on their shoulder happily. It would've been the perfect sight if that snapshot of domesticity were real and not just painfully circumstantial.

Even so, Eda smiled back.

"Wanna talk?"

"I'd love to," Raine said easily.

Eda could've talked with Raine for hours. It was easy. They talked about schemes and the last RATS concert they'd caught, about their parents' pestering and living together, about what felt good during sex and what could've been better, about the steeping times of teas and ' No, Eda, you can't just boil the shit out of it. '

There were some things they didn't talk about, like Eda’s curse, a lingering shadow that hung over them whenever Eda got squirmy, being clever with her words, twisting and weaving until the subject was almost naturally dropped.

But talking was something they could do, usually. They could laugh and it was easy, mostly.

Until it wasn't.

Eda’s stomach was a nervous pit. She felt the few sips of coffee she'd had swirling around her insides, threatening to come up. She hadn't felt that kind of anxiety in years . It felt silly to be sitting at her dining table with the nervous energy of a teenager that didn't know how to act around their crush. It was ridiculous. She should've felt like an adult that didn't know how to act around their crush.

Talking used to be easy. So why did it feel like she couldn't get her mouth to work properly?

Raine seemed at ease at the table, amused by Owlbert as he sat up and down on their shoulder, playing with the weight of their earring on his little head.

"Some things never change," they chuckled. Their hands played with the mug, shifting the handle from one side to another. Idle fidgeting. Eda felt like sprinting out the window.

"So, um," Eda worked her mouth around actual words, "cold up there, huh?"

Raine snorted. "Yes, very. The stiff joints in the mornings were getting harder to ignore."

"And how are you doing?" Eda would've honest to Titan twiddled her thumbs; instead, she rapped her fingers against the table. She wanted to smack herself.

"Better, I think. A change of scenery will definitely do me some good. Stiff joints are a little too close to, well, that , for comfort," they cleared their throat. "Being down here will help. Familiar faces and all that. Check in on the kids, y'know." They waved a hand, like it explained everything away.

"Well, it's good that you're taking care of yourself," Eda said rather lamely. It was taking all of her self control not to blurt out something even stupider like, 'Move in with me.'

Raine was looking out the window, enjoying how the sunbeam cast on the table warmed their hands. They seemed to be indulging in the moment, like they weren't sure the next time they'd be next to Eda in her kitchen. Something quiet and desperate in Eda wanted that next time to be every day that followed for as long as Raine would tolerate her.

Raine smiled. "Yes, no need to worry."

"Raine Whispers, don’t tell me not to worry," the words left Eda without permission. But they were true. Eda lost sleep worrying about Raine, about how they were coping after they'd been the Collector's plaything.

Eda had stood by helplessly, watching Raine suspended in a stiff posture, blank eyes and permanent smile plastered on their face. She'd talk to them endlessly, easy enough when she knew she didn't have to hear their answers, their rejection. She'd visit them constantly, hoping naively that that alone would've been enough to free them, that every confession that she'd uttered was a step closer to having her Raine back, that her love would be enough .

It hadn't mattered that she'd only received silence, it hadn't mattered that Hooty could talk back to Lilith, it hadn't mattered that it had destroyed Eda’s heart in contorted and painful ways. She'd still visit. Still worried. Until their eyes cleared and they took their first real breath in nearly a year, Eda worried.

Raine’s hand reached out, covering her fidgeting fingers. It was warm and rough, the fingertips hardened by years of playing their violin. It was suffocatingly familiar. It felt like drowning in honey.

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean—" Their thumb circled gently over the back of her hand. "I mean I'm here now. For good. I don’t want to go back."

"To the Knee?"

"To the Knee. To being alone. To being cold," they looked up, searching her face. "I'm tired of—"

"Chasing?" Eda would never admit how desperately hopeful she sounded.

" Yes. " Raine took Eda hand in both of theirs, their palms fitting together and tugging at Eda’s heartstrings. "I'm tired of being silent, too. Of pretending I didn’t hear your every plea, of wishing it had been a nightmare." Eda's stomach sank . Their grip tightened on her hand. "It was torture, Eda. I wanted to scream, to fight you, to tell you you were wrong, reassure you that it was impossible for me to not love you. Because of course I love you. I've never stopped loving you, Eda."

"Raine…"

"Yes, Eda?"

"Move in with me."

< prologue | chapter 2 >

#natural melodies #the owl house #toh #eda clawthorne #raine whispers #fanfiction #writing #ao3fic #bicsbec

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apcseo · 4 months ago

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Brand Extension Strategies: Unlocking New Market Opportunities

Understanding Brand Extension

Brand extension is a marketing strategy where a company uses its existing brand name to launch a new product or enter a new market.

The goal of brand extension is to leverage the existing brand equity and customer loyalty to drive sales and increase market share.

By extending the brand into new markets, companies can capitalize on the trust and recognition they have already established with their target audience.

Understanding the key principles and considerations of brand extension is crucial for successful implementation.

Benefits of Brand Extension Strategies

Brand extension strategies offer several benefits for businesses:

- Increased brand awareness: Brand extension allows companies to reach new audiences and increase their brand visibility.

- Cost savings: Launching a new product under an existing brand can be more cost-effective compared to creating a new brand from scratch.

- Customer loyalty: By leveraging the existing brand equity, companies can tap into the trust and loyalty of their current customer base.

- Competitive advantage: Brand extension can help companies differentiate themselves from competitors and gain a competitive edge in the market.

These benefits make brand extension an attractive strategy for companies looking to expand their reach and grow their business.

Types of Brand Extension

There are different types of brand extension strategies that companies can consider:

- Product extension: This involves introducing a new product in a category that is related to the existing product line.

- Line extension: This refers to adding new variants or flavors to an existing product line.

- Category extension: This involves entering a new product category that is different from the company's existing offerings.

- Co-branding: This is a strategy where two or more brands collaborate to create a new product or service.

Choosing the right type of brand extension depends on factors such as market research, target audience, and the company's overall brand positioning.

Implementing Successful Brand Extensions

To successfully implement brand extensions, companies should follow these key steps:

- Conduct market research: Understand the market dynamics, customer preferences, and competition to identify potential opportunities for brand extension.

- Maintain brand consistency: Ensure that the new product aligns with the existing brand's values, positioning, and messaging to maintain brand integrity.

- Communicate the brand extension: Develop a clear and compelling communication strategy to introduce the new product to the target audience and build awareness.

- Monitor and adapt: Continuously monitor the performance of the brand extension and make necessary adjustments based on customer feedback and market trends.

By following these steps, companies can increase the chances of a successful brand extension and maximize the potential for growth.

Case Studies of Successful Brand Extensions

Several companies have achieved success with brand extensions. Here are a few examples:

- Apple: The tech giant extended its brand from computers to a wide range of consumer electronics, including smartphones, tablets, and wearables.

- Coca-Cola: The beverage company successfully extended its brand into different flavors and variants, as well as non-carbonated beverages.

- Nike: Known for its athletic footwear, Nike expanded its brand into apparel, accessories, and fitness equipment.

These case studies demonstrate the effectiveness of brand extension strategies in diversifying product offerings and reaching new markets.

By learning from these examples, companies can gain insights and inspiration for their own brand extension efforts.

Apppl Combine a 360-degree advertising agency in Delhi assist in brand extension strategies by conducting thorough market research to identify potential expansion opportunities. Developing strategic plans tailored to the brand's strengths, target audience, and market trends. Utilizing innovative marketing techniques, agencies facilitate the seamless integration of the brand into new markets, ensuring consistency and relevance. By leveraging existing brand equity, they enhance credibility and consumer trust in the new ventures. We also provide ongoing support, monitoring performance metrics and adapting strategies to optimize results. Through collaboration and expertise, agencies enable brands to effectively expand into new markets while maximizing growth opportunities.

This post was originally published on: Apppl Combine

#brand extension #market opportunities #business growth #product extension #line extension #category extension #co-branding #brand equity #customer loyalty #apppl combine #Advertising Agency In Delhi

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hedgesquare · 8 months ago

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Empowering Innovation: How Intellectual Property Rights Services Drive Business Success

In today's competitive business landscape, innovation is key to driving growth and staying ahead of the curve. Intellectual property (IP) plays a crucial role in protecting and monetizing innovative ideas, products, and processes. Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) services are instrumental in safeguarding these assets and ensuring that businesses can reap the full benefits of their innovations. This article explores how IPR services empower innovation and drive business success.

What is Intellectual Property Rights

Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) refer to legal rights that protect creations of the mind, such as inventions, literary and artistic works, designs, symbols, names, and images used in commerce. These rights enable creators and innovators to control the use of their creations and reap financial rewards from their investment in innovation.

The Role of IPR Services in Business Success

1. Protection of Innovations

IPR services help businesses protect their innovations through patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets. By securing these rights, businesses can prevent competitors from copying or using their ideas without permission, thereby safeguarding their competitive advantage.

2. Monetization of Intellectual Property

IPR services assist businesses in monetizing their intellectual property by licensing or selling their rights to third parties. This can be a significant source of revenue for businesses, allowing them to capitalize on their innovations and expand their market reach.

3. Risk Management

IPR services help businesses manage the risks associated with intellectual property infringement. By conducting thorough IP audits and clearance searches, businesses can identify and mitigate potential risks before they escalate into costly legal disputes.

4. Enhancing Market Value

IPR services enhance the market value of businesses by establishing a strong intellectual property portfolio. A robust IP portfolio not only attracts investors and partners but also increases the valuation of the business in the eyes of potential buyers.

5. Fostering Innovation Culture

IPR services play a crucial role in fostering a culture of innovation within organizations. By rewarding employees for their innovative ideas and providing them with the necessary legal protection, businesses can encourage creativity and drive continuous improvement.

Case Studies: How IPR Services Drive Business Success

1. Pharmaceutical Industry

In the pharmaceutical industry, patents are essential for protecting new drugs and treatments. Pharmaceutical companies invest heavily in research and development (R&D) to bring new drugs to market. IPR services help these companies secure patents for their innovations, allowing them to recoup their R&D costs and generate profits.

2. Technology Sector

In the technology sector, patents are crucial for protecting new technologies and inventions. Companies like Apple, Google, and Microsoft rely on patents to protect their innovative products and services. IPR services help these companies navigate the complex patent landscape and defend their intellectual property against infringement.

3. Entertainment Industry

In the entertainment industry, copyrights are essential for protecting artistic works such as music, films, and books. Copyright infringement is a significant concern for artists and creators, and IPR services play a vital role in protecting their rights and ensuring fair compensation for their work.

Conclusion Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) services are instrumental in empowering innovation and driving business success. By protecting and monetizing intellectual property, IPR services enable businesses to leverage their innovations for competitive advantage and financial gain. As businesses continue to innovate and expand into new markets, the role of IPR services will only become more critical. Embracing IPR services as a strategic business tool is essential for businesses seeking to thrive in today's innovation-driven economy. Contact Us for more Information.

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