#google site for student

[ace-with--a-mace]

hate it when teachers use the "im the teacher and you're the student" argument so much

[tidemoonchild]

Earth-616 verse:

I finally sat down and tried to write Maggie's Earth-616 verse, with the little knowledge I've got about the comics and ofc with the help of my beloved Muffins. I tried to write this in a way that she kinda was part during some of the main events but without changing much about the canon except the fact that, well... she was there too... She was mostly a background character who was there and helped out here and there but that's kinda it. I explain it that this was due to Hank wanting to keep her away from everything and the little she did was her kinda disobeying him and doing it anyway. I also tried to write it, that most of her story kinda happened “off page” like meeting her father and trying to find her way back to her time etc. As I continue to read the comics this will get updated... eventually... maybe For this verse I also kept Maggie's mother unknown.

Born sometime in the future as the daughter of Hank McCoy, Maggie was abducted by an organization called HADES, when she was just a young child. Years later after multiple obstacles, she finally managed to find her way back home to her family. After an attack Maggie then ended up in the past after she lost control over her powers. Not able to return to her timeline, she took on her alias Mara Moon to hide her true identity.

Living on the streets for a while, she then met the younger version of her father, who offered his help to the young girl, not knowing that this was his own daughter. She was brought to live with him and the Avengers until they would figure out what to do with her, when it was finally revealed who she really was.

In an attempt to return to her own time, with the help of her father, Maggie managed to jump into the future but not into her own. Still stuck in the past she looked for her father, who had joined the X-Men again, and became a student of Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters. With the help of her father Hank, Charles Xavier and the other X-Men, she kept trying to learn to control her abilities and to find a way back to her time. During this time she kept jumping back and forth in time but never managed to reach her own.

After another failed attempt she landed days before the events of House of M that ended with the M-Day. Now facing bigger problems her attempts to get back to her time got less till they stopped completely for a while. Sometime after the events of M-Day, Maggie picked up where she had left and was able to make another jump, this time landing in a time where Xavier's School was destroyed and mutantkind lived in Utopia.

Not knowing where her father was, or where else to go, she also went to Utopia. When her father returned from his arrest by H.A.M.M.E.R. she moved in with him again until Maggie was recruited by Scott to protect Utopia from the several attacks. Against the will of her father, who wanted to keep his daughter out of fights, she left to help anyway, as she saw this as her duty.

Furious over this Hank took her back home with him, before she was able to really fight alongside the others. One day Logan decided to open a new school and asked Hank to join him to which he agreed. They moved into the Jean Grey School for Higher Learning, where she became a student once again.

Much later she found herself on Krakoa, the living island for mutants. Still living with her father, she had to watch him turning and changing into a man she no longer recognized. Where at first he was only much more stricter and careful he started to turn cold and ruthless. Not able to reach him or talk sense into him, Maggie began to distance herself more and more from him. At one point Maggie ran away, unable to watch her father continue to turn into something she couldn't support but was also unable to fight against.

After Hank was reborn and left Krakoa with Simon, they went to look for her. Not knowing, that it was the old Hank and the father she loved, Maggie tried to flee but was stopped by Simon. He explained everything to her and while at first reluctant, she then agreed to return with Hank and Simon and to live with them.

[wordsmusicandstories]

Happy Birthday, Google🥂

Today Google celebrates its 25th birthday with a special doodle. To wish it a happy birthday, I’d like to repost this old article: On 4 September 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google, when they were students at Stanford University in California.They had first met in the summer of 1995, when Page was visiting Stanford University for a tour of its campus and Brin, who was a second-year…

[tieflingkisser]

anti-doxing resources for activists

via Twitter (please rt if you are active there!)

Edited to add:

[someone-you-do-not-know]

Okay, I know we're on the "piracy is good actually" site, but The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson AND MOST OTHER CLASSICS are not works you need to pirate. You can read them completely legally for free at Gutenberg. Most of these are in English, but sometimes they even have translations if you don't feel quite up to par. If what you're looking for isn't there, you can also look for it on the Internet Archive, that place we talk about quite often. They also have a lot of hard to get books and research materials. Finally, if you're looking for scholarly articles I recommend Google Scholar – if you search for something, a PDF link will often be embedded or it might give you a Google Books result. Even some HTML results are perfectly clickable articles you can read for free.

Piracy is fun and all, but please use the actual free resources that are available first and foremost, because they are there to be used, and they need the support.

“if he be mr. hyde, i shall be mr. seek” is such a funny line i can’t believe robert louis stevenson actually wrote that in the actual original dr. jekyll and mr. hyde in the actual year of 1885

[batboyblog]

Things the Biden-Harris Administration Did This Week #30

August 2-9 2024

The Department of Interior announced the largest investment since 1979 in outdoor recreation and conservation projects. The $325 million will go to support State, territorial, DC, and tribal governments in buying new land for parks and outdoor recreation sites. It also supports expansion and refurbishment of existing sites.

The EPA announced that Birmingham Alabama will get $171 million to update and replace its water system. The city of Birmingham is 70% black and like many black majority cities as struggled with aging water systems and lead pipes causing dangerous drinking water conditions. This investment is part of the Biden-Harris administrations plan to replace all of the nation's lead pipes.

The Department of Energy announced $2.2 billion in investments in the national power grid to help boost resiliency in the face of extreme weather. The projects will add 13 gigawatts of capacity, support 5,000 new jobs and upgrade 1,000 miles of transmission. Major projects will cut power outages in the west, drive down energy prices in New England, add off shore wind, and enable the development of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s wind resources.

The Justice Department won its massive anti-trust case against Google. A federal judge ruled that Google was an illegal monopoly. The DOJ has an ongoing antitrust suit against Apple, while the Federal Trade Commission is suing Facebook and Amazon for their monopolist practices

The US Government announced $3.9 billion in direct aid to Ukraine. The money will help the Government of Ukraine make up for massive budget short falls caused by the war with Russia. It'll help pay the salaries of teachers, emergency workers, and other public employees, as well helping displaced persons, low-income families and people with disabilities.

The Department of Energy announced $190 million to improve air quality and energy upgrades in K-12 schools. The grants to 320 schools across 25 states will impact 123,000 students, 94% of these schools service student bodies where over half the students qualify for free and reduced lunch. In the face of climate change more schools have been forced to close for extreme heat. These grants will help schools with everything from air filtration, to AC, to more robust energy systems, to replacing lighting.

USAID announced $424 million in additional humanitarian aid to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Due to ongoing conflict and food insecurity, 25 million Congolese are in need of humanitarian aid. This year alone the US has sent close to a billion dollars in aid to the DRC, making it the single largest donor to the crisis.

The Senate approved President Biden's appointment of Stacey Neumann of Maine, Meredith Vacca of New York, and Joseph Saporito Jr. of Pennsylvania to life time federal Judgeships. This brings the total of judges appointed by President Biden to 205. President Biden is the first President who's judicial nominations have not been majority white men, Judge Vacca is the first Asian American to serve in her district court. President Biden has also focused on former public defenders, like Judge Saporito, and former labor lawyers like Judge Neumann, as well as civil rights lawyers.

[ruyakasunshine]

F1 drivers rated on how likely they are to know what ao3 is

note : this is just for entertainment. I will also use this to make a general reminder not to get anything fanfic/rpf related outside of sites such as tumblr, ao3, or wattpad. Enjoy!

This is just the current grid, because if I had to do it with every driver that raced this season, I'd get a surprisingly high amount of drivers to talk about.

20. Fernando

Grandpa. Need I to say more?

19. Checo

In a recent GQ Sport interview, he revealed that he didn't even have social media on his phone. I'd be surprised to hear he has any ao3 tab open up there.

18. K-mag

I don't feel like I need to explain this one. But I also believe that if Haas got him to read a chapter of a wattpad fanfic out loud where he has to replace Y/N with his own name after every penalty point he gets, he would have stopped causing so much ruckus. Or he might even cause more, who knows what goes on inside his mind.

17. Nico Hulk

Hear me out, he doesn't know what a fanfic is, but if he were more popular with the writer, he'd read the shit out of those.

16. Valterri

I could pay actual money to hear him read a 'kidnapped by one direction' self insert story out loud. If there is any Sauber intern lurking here, please consider. Wattpad as a sponsor would bring you a lot of money, think about it. I promise you will see a rise in your fandom if the name of the team was "wattpad kick sauber". I would buy merch. You need the money the way the constructors are going. Think about it.

15. Lance

I don't know too much about him, but I will assume he doesn't spend too much time on social media, or googling himself with all the hate he gets. But maybe if he were to read a strollonso fanfic, we might get to see him have actual expressions on his face. Granted, that would be a look of horror, but I will take what I can.

14. Carlos

I think he might combust if he read any ABO fanfic. I might want to see that.

13. Max

He is too busy sim racing to care. Good for him, I wish I could say the same about myself but alas I am too busy reading the same fanfic for the 23th time.

12. Yuki

I believe if you pronounced the term "Y/N" next to him he might assume that's a car brand. Or, like, hello in a foreign language. Again, good for him.

11. Zhou

Hear me out, fanfics seem to be quite popular in China, and he has a sister, there is no way he hasn't heard of the existences of it. I don't think he has read any though, which is for the better.

10. Franco

Our dear Franquito hasn't been on the grid for long enough to discover the amazing word that fanfics have to offer, but let me tell you that if he hasn't found out stuff yet, he'll find some soon enough. Let the writers have time to write a little bit more about him, and soon we'll get an instagram live of him reacting to those.

9. Liam

I think he is young enough to have googled himself (he had to find something to do since he's been a reserve driver since like the year 2010), but he also hasn't been a permanent member, so he might not have enough material to accidentally stumble upon.

8. Esteban

He googles himself. He knows there are fanfics. And he fucking likes that. If there is a rise of pierresteban fics on ao3 after Brazil 2024, he will be the first one to know let me tell you that much.

7. Lewis

Okay you might be wondering why this senior citizen is up here, and the answer is simple : he is too famous not to know. Like COME ON. He's been here since 2007 (which is longer than some people who'll see this post have been alive for— that's a scary thought for another day), he has been in famous and televised rivalry, and he has to live with the existence of the quote "everything but a lover" about nico and him.

There is no way he hasn't READ a fucking brocedes fanfic. If he is willing, I will teach him how to use ao3 so he can look-up some "fix-it" fics. He might use some inspiration, and who is better for that than tired college students writing about their sad ass in between lectures?

6. George

He seems like the type to lurk a lot around the internet, so the chances of him finding the link to a fic on the third page of google isn't impossible to me.

If you find any comment of someone correcting your spelling, you know who did it.

5. Pierre

He probably googles his name too often not to have stumbled upon a "Reader x Pierre Gasly" wattpad fanfic. sigh.

4. Alex

Alex, I know that you are the second most likely to have tumblr (right after george who actually has an account). The chances of you knowing what a "lemon" is is way too high for my liking.

3. Charles

The C in Charles stands for Chronically Online. My boy was known for liking tweets about himself, and we know that fans talk about fanfics on twitter. He clicked on a link of a lestappen or sebchal fanfic at least once out of curiosity let me tell you this much.

2. Lando

Too chronically online not to have read fanfics about himself. I just know he typed in "lando norris fanfiction" straight in google at least once. Jail.

1. Oscar

Here me out : his sister is a K-pop fan. If you believe that she never yapped about a fanfic she read to her brother, you are strongly unfamiliar with sibling relationships. But the chances of him not listening to her are also very high, so maybe he shouldn't be so high up my list. But oh well.

He is also good at hiding his game, but he is as online as Charles (you thought you were sneaky but we caught you clicking on that link of Max playing air-hocket dear Osc.)

For my own mental health though, I will assume he hasn't read about his own self yet.

[zephyrchama]

Hello!!! I love your writing and hcs its so fun and silly!!!! I hope I'm not bothering you and if it's ok do you do headcanon lists? I want to hear more of your hcs if its ok

Hi! You're not a bother at all, I have so many asks I want to respond to but they're never a bother and I seriously think about every single one!

(I overthink asks way too much and then get worried that too much time has passed but I still want to answer them hhh. I also hoard praise like a dragon. I will get to my ask backlog, I've already written a bunch of stuff for them.)

I've seen that list style before, I don't think I've ever tried it? Have I? 🤔 Let's give it a shot with some headcanons. (hold on how do I make a bulleted list on this site) (I need to google it)

Lucifer

He probably greatly enjoys when Asmo does his nails, because that means he can't pick up a pen and is forced to rest for a bit.

I like to think he gets his gloves from the same shop as Barbatos.

I have these gray/transparent hairs in my bangs that are currently not too noticeable (my hair is naturally dark), but they sparkle in the sunlight kind of like hair tinsel. I like to think Lucifer (and maybe Mammon and Belphegor?) have hair like this sprinkled throughout their heads, and that it sparkles like starlight in the HoL's candlelight.

Mammon

He'd probably iron his money. I don't know if the Devildom has bills in their currency or if it's purely coin-based, but if there are bills I feel like Mammon would take the crumpled up ones and iron them crisp again.

I bet he tried to take a bath full of coins just to see what it was like one time and got in trouble for scratching up the sides of the tub.

He goes gambling so often, he's probably good at telling when someone's bluffing. He calls lesser demons out all the time for bluffing to his face and it's incredibly intimidating.

Leviathan

Being one of the Seven Rulers, he's probably just as famous as his brothers and is recognized in public way more than he realizes, but he isn't approached often because he's so famous and powerful. I like the idea of a gap in how he perceives himself (an unconfident shut-in loser) vs how the public perceives him (a strong and mysterious demon within the prince's inner circle).

His tail is long. I made it irl, in-game it's gotta be over 10 feet. I imagine when he's relaxed at home it just splays out however, but anywhere else he keeps it coiled close to his body. Hitting people with the tail would be unbearably awkwardly, he doesn't want to take up a lot of space, and it's probably comforting to keep it close. He could subtly rub his own back with it when he's feeling anxious?

Satan

He knows a guy for everything. He's got a crop rotation guy. He's got an ear piercing guy. He's got ten cursed book guys. If you need something, Satan always knows a guy. Though, he prefers to be self-sufficient. I think of him as a very charismatic person who's great with other people, yet a big introvert.

He's so good at curses that I feel like he sometimes might accidentally put a low level curse on someone, without really intending to. It just happens on rare occasion, especially when he's mad. Someone looks at him funny and is cursed to spend the next three days sneezing every ten minutes.

Similarly, he's the one who uses magic most casually. His room appears the most 'magical' of the brothers, he probably has a very efficient way of incorporating his magic into daily life. (Nowhere near Solomon's extent, but moreso than the other brothers.)

Asmodeus

He probably sings a lot, just for fun, because Ayme-san is such a good singer. You'd often hear Asmo's voice humming or singing when he's home and in a good mood (or bored). He has an easier time memorizing school subjects when he puts it to music.

I bet students at RAD search his seat after school for stray hairs, and then sell those hairs to witches for love potions. It really upsets him but after getting them to stop for a few weeks, someone will inevitably start doing it again.

Beelzebub

Beel probably has one of the fastest reflexes out of anybody. They all have fast reflexes, but I like to think he'd be at least a few milliseconds faster than some of his brothers when physically reacting to things.

I don't think he likes being alone with his thoughts, which is why he's always eating or working out or spending time with his brothers. He might start overthinking things and getting lost in a maze of dark thoughts, so he works hard to keep those thoughts at bay. He has a lot going through his head but is a guy of few words.

Belphegor

I bet he knows so much gossip. RAD students probably have loose lips around him thinking he's asleep, but even if he is sleeping, he hears them and picks up on rumors. He doesn't care at all. He won't go around spreading things more. But it could become intel stored in the back of his mind.

He probably doesn't like to brush his hair - he prefers to have it brushed by someone else - but I don't think he'd allow Asmo to do it often. Asmodeus might get carried away and start giving Belphie high-maintenance hairstyles that are a pain to keep up, so he refuses hair help from Asmo on most occasions.

I was going to write the other characters but this is getting long and I realized it's not quite bullet point-y so it might not be what you wanted. ;u; Hope that's ok, thanks for the ask!

[trubbishrubbish]

I just watched this old trailer of Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair and I found some neat oddities in it.

This trailer was uploaded to YouTube on July 12th, 2012. Two weeks before the release date, July 26th 2012.

First off, the trailer shows the first class trial. What's notable is that the Ultimate Imposter is still alive and present at it.

I google translated a few lines from the trial in the video and the ones I did were identical to what was said in the final game. So I believe that the first trial in this trailer is largely the same as in the final game, only difference is that they swapped Imposter's death portrait with his actual sprite so to not spoiler that he is the victim.

Next, several CGs from the final game are seen in this trailer but only for a few frames. I'll show off the most interesting ones.

This CG from Chapter 1. It shows Mikan eating sausages. In the final version of the game, this CG was edited so Mikan isn't eating anything.

Funnily enough, this isn't the first time a CG of the party was edited to not have someone eat food. This CG with Hiyoko in it shows her with a drink but an older version of this same CG shows Hiyoko holding a plate of food.

Remnants of this CG is still in the final game. Maybe they were included in by accident by someone on the dev team not paying close enough attention to which CGs they need to insert.

This old CG is seen in the credits.

And in this truth bullet for the party food.

The reason why these edits are made is becuase in the trial, it's said that only Peko and Akane have eaten the food. If any other character is seen eating food in the CGs, that would make a plothole.

This does show that during the development of DR2, the CGs were competed first before the trials were fully completed, since the CGs had to be edited in order to fit one of the debate topics for the trial.

Next up, the trailer shows an old version of the Jabberwock Island Guidebook for a single frame.

And then later on in the trailer, there are several frames showing off end game stuff. Stuff that would be massive spoilers if you had context for them.

Like the Ultimate Imposter's Student Profile.

Neo World Program and The Tragedy of Hope's Peak Manga.

And this CG of the survivors entering the Graduation Exam Site.

This last one is special as this CG isn't even in the final game but the assets for this CG are still included in the files.

I tried my best to recreate this CG using the files. It's not 100% accurate but it's very close.

And finally, the trailer shows a few frames of the Pre-Class Trial Portraits. There's no cropping applied to the character portraits so they overlap one another.

I will compare the trailer screenshots with images of the trial portraits from this 4gamer article.

And that's it. Pretty cool stuff.

[uglycryinglawyer]

heyyy tumblr,

class of 2024 law student here. no offense but you know things are bad when i take it to tumblr. law school really does something to your psyche and i hate to say it but despite this whole movement on social media to be more transparent, i don't believe anyone will be completely honest about their experience when their words can be traced back to them. being believable as 100% genuine & honest while being anything less than to followers that cling to every syllable of yours does more damage than good imo.

ill start this page with some honesty that i would label as a 6/10 on the "how embarrassed would i be if someone from my post-grad job were to see this" scale i just made up.

my first semester i felt like the smartest version of myself i had ever been because i got 1 online award from a fake company (seriously what business does this "computer-assisted legal education" company have hosting awards for schools around the country & why are they receiving our grades to begin with) for having the highest grade in my class. mind you, this company/award is not at ALL affiliated with my school, its literally made up. but its something that is made PUBLIC (as in if you knew my name you could google me and this stupid award shows up), and so many schools still acknowledge it to, idk, create further divisions between students that i guess the whole system of making everyones grades 100% based on their finals and curved (not in a good way) doesn't do enough for?

now here i am, having finished my 6th semester & walked the commencement stage a few days ago ugly crying over a grade because i might have just lost my honors status. when in actuality .... ~ kim, there are people that are dying ~ why does any of this matter?? this is what 6 semesters of slowly having your confidence in your own intelligence chipped away at does to a person.

its not over yet though - bar prep starts last week :). actually it starts on may 20th officially, but no ones being honest about the fact that they really started studying the day after their finals ended, if not earlier.

so i've decided to document my experience for you all here. with bar prep & my foray into big law (you know this field was meant for babies because that's what we unsarcastically call a career at a top law firm) on the horizon, & 6 semesters of pure chaos behind me, i have a lot to say!

im not sure who this is going to reach because, again no offense tumblr, but i doubt this site has the reach it once did. maybe this will just end up being a time capsule for myself, which i would love. or maybe this will help 1 person cope, which i would love even more.

regardless, if you read this far, thank you & tttys. going to throw some random hashtags in now don't mind me.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This is your brain on fraud apologetics

In 1998, two Stanford students published a paper in Computer Networks entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

https://research.google/pubs/pub334/

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

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

The co-authors were Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin, and the “large-scale hypertextual web search-engine” they were describing was their new project, which they called “Google.” They were 100% correct — prescient, even!

On Wednesday night, a friend came over to watch some TV with us. We ordered out. We got scammed. We searched for a great local Thai place we like called Kiin and clicked a sponsored link for a Wix site called “Kiinthaila.com.” We should have clicked the third link down (kiinthaiburbank.com).

We got scammed. The Wix site was a lookalike for Kiin Thai, which marked up their prices by 15% and relayed the order to our local, mom-and-pop, one-branch restaurant. The restaurant knew it, too — they called us and told us they were canceling the order, and said we could still come get our food, but we’d have to call Amex to reverse the charge.

As it turned out, the scammers double-billed us for our order. I called Amex, who advised us to call back in a couple days when the charge posted to cancel it — in other words, they were treating it as a regular customer dispute, and not a systemic, widespread fraud (there’s no way this scammer is just doing this for one restaurant).

In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor hassle, but boy, it’s haunting to watch the quarter-century old prophecy of Brin and Page coming true. Search Google for carpenters, plumbers, gas-stations, locksmiths, concert tickets, entry visas, jobs at the US Post Office or (not making this up) tech support for Google products, and the top result will be a paid ad for a scam. Sometimes it’s several of the top ads.

This kind of “intermediation” business is actually revered in business-schools. As Douglas Rushkoff has written, the modern business wisdom reveres “going meta” — not doing anything useful, but rather, creating a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who want to pay for those things, and squatting there, collecting rent:

https://rushkoff.medium.com/going-meta-d42c6a09225e

It’s the ultimate passive income/rise and grind side-hustle: It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to discover a whole festering nest of creeps on Tiktok talking about how they pay Mechanical Turks to produce these lookalike sites at scale.

This mindset is so pervasive that people running companies with billions in revenue and massive hoards of venture capital run exactly the same scam. During lockdown, companies like Doordash, Grubhub and Uber Eats stood up predatory lookalike websites for local restaurants, without their consent, and played monster-in-the-middle, tricking diners into ordering through them:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/19/we-are-beautiful/#man-in-the-middle

These delivery app companies were playing a classic enshittification game: first they directed surpluses to customers to lock them in (heavily discounting food), then they directed surplus to restaurants (preferential search results, free delivery, low commissions) — then, having locked in both consumers and producers, they harvested the surplus for themselves.

Today, delivery apps charge massive premiums to both eaters and restaurants, load up every order with junk fees, and clone the most successful restaurants out of ghost kitchens — shipping containers in parking lots crammed with low-waged workers cranking out orders for 15 different fake “virtual restaurants”:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/01/autophagic-buckeyes/#subsidized-autophagia

Delivery apps speedran the enshittification cycle, but Google took a slower path to get there. The company has locked in billions of users (e.g. by paying billions to be the default search on Safari and Firefox and using legal bullying to block third party Android device-makers from pre-installing browsers other than Chrome). For years, it’s been leveraging our lock-in to prey on small businesses, getting them to set up Google Business Profiles.

These profiles are supposed to help Google distinguish between real sellers and scammers. But Kiin Thai has a Google Business Profile, and searching for “kiin thai burbank” brings up a “Knowledge Panel” with the correct website address — on a page that is headed with a link to a scam website for the same business. Google, in other words, has everything it needs to flag lookalike sites and confirm them with their registered owners. It would cost Google money to do this — engineer-time to build and maintain the system, content moderator time to manually check flagged listings, and lost ad-revenue from scammers — but letting the scams flourish makes Google money, at the expense of Google users and Google business customers.

Now, Google has an answer for this: they tell merchants who are being impersonated by ad-buying scammers that all they need to do is outbid them for the top ad-spot. This is a common approach — Amazon has a $31b/year “ad business” that’s mostly its own platform sellers bidding against each other to show you fake results for your query. The first five screens of Amazon search results are 50% ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is “going meta,” so naturally, Meta is doing it too: Facebook and Instagram have announced a $12/month “verification” badge that will let you report impersonation and tweak the algorithm to make it more likely that the posts you make are shown to the people who explicitly asked to see them:

https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/2/21/23609375/meta-verified-twitter-blue-checkmark-badge-instagram-facebook

The corollary of this, of course, is that if you don’t pay, they won’t police your impersonators, and they won’t show your posts to the people who asked to see them. This is pure enshittification — the surplus from users and business customers is harvested for the benefit of the platform owners:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

The idea that merchants should master the platforms as a means of keeping us safe from their impersonators is a hollow joke. For one thing, the rules change all the time, as the platforms endlessly twiddle the knobs that determine what gets shown to whom:

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

And they refuse to tell anyone what the rules are, because if they told you what the rules were, you’d be able to bypass them. Content moderation is the only infosec domain where “security through obscurity” doesn’t get laughed out of the room:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

Worse: the one thing the platforms do hunt down and exterminate with extreme prejudice is anything that users or business-customers use to twiddle back — add-ons and plugins and jailbreaks that override their poor choices with better ones:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store

As I was submitting complaints about the fake Kiin scam-site (and Amex’s handling of my fraud call) to the FTC, the California Attorney General, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and Wix, I wrote a little Twitter thread about what a gross scam this is:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1628948906657878016

The thread got more than two million reads and got picked up by Hacker News and other sites. While most of the responses evinced solidarity and frustration and recounted similar incidents in other domains, a significant plurality of the replies were scam apologetics — messages from people who wanted to explain why this wasn’t a problem after all.

The most common of these was victim-blaming: “you should have used an adblocker” or “never click the sponsored link.” Of course, I do use an ad-blocker — but this order was placed with a mobile browser, after an absentminded query into the Google search-box permanently placed on the home screen, which opens results in Chrome (where I don’t have an ad-blocker, so I can see material behind an ad-blocker-blocker), not Firefox (which does have an ad-blocker).

Now, I also have a PiHole on my home LAN, which blocks most ads even in a default browser — but earlier this day, I’d been on a public wifi network that was erroneously blocking a website (the always excellent superpunch.net) so I’d turned my wifi off, which meant the connection came over my phone’s 5G connection, bypassing the PiHole:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/28/shut-yer-pi-hole/

“Don’t click a sponsored link�� — well, the irony here is that if you habitually use a browser with an ad-blocker, and you backstop it with a PiHole, you never see sponsored links, so it’s easy to miss the tiny “Sponsored” notification beside the search result. That goes double if you’re relaxing with a dinner guest on the sofa and ordering dinner while chatting.

There’s a name for this kind of security failure: the Swiss Cheese Model. We all have multiple defenses (in my case: foreknowledge of Google’s ad-scam problem, an ad-blocker in my browser, LAN-wide ad sinkholing). We also have multiple vulnerabilities (in my case: forgetting I was on 5G, being distracted by conversation, using a mobile device with a permanent insecure search bar on the homescreen, and being so accustomed to ad-blocked results that I got out of the habit of checking whether a result was an ad).

If you think you aren’t vulnerable to scams, you’re wrong — and your confidence in your invulnerability actually increases your risk. This isn’t the first time I’ve been scammed, and it won’t be the last — and every time, it’s been a Swiss Cheese failure, where all the holes in all my defenses lined up for a brief instant and left me vulnerable:

https://locusmag.com/2010/05/cory-doctorow-persistence-pays-parasites/

Other apologetics: “just call the restaurant rather than using its website.” Look, I know the people who say this don’t think I have a time-machine I can use to travel back to the 1980s and retrieve a Yellow Pages, but it’s hard not to snark at them, just the same. Scammers don’t just set up fake websites for your local businesses — they staff them with fake call-centers, too. The same search that takes you to a fake website will also take you to a fake phone number.

Finally, there’s “What do you expect Google to do? They can’t possibly detect this kind of scam.” But they can. Indeed, they are better situated to discover these scams than anyone else, because they have their business profiles, with verified contact information for the merchants being impersonated. When they get an ad that seems to be for the same business but to a different website, they could interrupt the ad process to confirm it with their verified contact info.

Instead, they choose to avoid the expense, and pocket the ad revenue. If a company promises to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” I think we have the right to demand these kinds of basic countermeasures:

https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/

The same goes for Amex: when a merchant is scamming customers, they shouldn’t treat complaints as “chargebacks” — they should treat them as reports of a crime in progress. Amex has the bird’s eye view of their transaction flow and when a customer reports a scam, they can backtrack it to see if the same scammer is doing this with other merchants — but the credit card companies make money by not chasing down fraud:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosalindadams/mastercard-visa-fraud

Wix also has platform-scale analytics that they could use to detect and interdict this kind of fraud — when a scammer creates a hundred lookalike websites for restaurants and uses Wix’s merchant services to process payments for them, that could trigger human review — but it didn’t.

Where do all of these apologetics come from? Why are people so eager to leap to the defense of scammers and their adtech and fintech enablers? Why is there such an impulse to victim-blame?

I think it’s fear: in their hearts, people — especially techies — know that they, too, are vulnerable to these ripoffs, but they don’t want to admit it. They want to convince themselves that the person who got scammed made an easily avoidable mistake, and that they themselves will never make a similar mistake.

This is doubly true for readerships on tech-heavy forums like Twitter or (especially) Hacker News. These readers know just how many vulnerabilities there are — how many holes are in their Swiss cheese — and they are also overexposed to rise-and-grind/passive income rhetoric.

This produces a powerful cognitive dissonance: “If all the ‘entrepreneurs’ I worship are just laying traps for the unwary, and if I am sometimes unwary, then I’m cheering on the authors of my future enduring misery.” The only way to resolve this dissonance — short of re-evaluating your view of platform capitalism or questioning your own immunity to scams — is to blame the victim.

The median Hacker News reader has to somehow resolve the tension between “just install an adblocker” and “Chrome’s extension sandbox is a dumpster fire and it’s basically impossible to know whether any add-on you install can steal every keystroke and all your other data”:

https://mattfrisbie.substack.com/p/spy-chrome-extension

In my Twitter thread, I called this “the worst of all possible timelines.” Everything we do is mediated by gigantic, surveillant monopolists that spy on us comprehensively from asshole to appetite — but none of them, not a 20th century payment giant nor a 21st century search giant — can bestir itself to use that data to keep us safe from scams.

Next Thu (Mar 2) I'll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who's-who of European and US trustbusters. It's livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free:

https://www.brusselsconference.com/registration

On Fri (Mar 3), I'll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival:

https://elevate.at/diskurs/programm/event/e23doctorow/

[Image ID: A modified version of Hieronymus Bosch's painting 'The Conjurer,' which depicts a scam artist playing a shell-game for a group of gawking rubes. The image has been modified so that the scam artist's table has a Google logo and the pea he is triumphantly holding aloft bears the 'Sponsored' wordmark that appears alongside Google search results.]

[chase-prairie]

Americans! Want something productive to do instead of doomscrolling? Help out folks of color by adding to the Sundown Town Map:

I just spent a couple hours researching and writing about towns near me and where I grew up, which FOR SURE were sundown towns and still have demographic disparities. The site allows you to submit information for them to add, which I presume is vetted and edited first before posting publicly.

You know your local area best, and with a bit of Googling and some time, you can add your knowledge to help people passing through the area!

Many comments I've seen are like "Grandpa always said that...." "I remember when my Black classmates had to...." "A recent news article says that...." etc. It doesnt have to be a big essay!

[the-artist-grimm]

✨COMMISSIONS ARE OPEN!!!!✨

Student loans are gonna start being due for me soon, so I'd really appreciate the help!

Thus summon me to draw your characters!!!! You can either reach out via the Google Form in my Carrd that also has a more detailed TOS, or if it's your preference, I'm also over on VGen!!! VGen is also where you can easily see other examples all neatly organized regardless of if you use the site or not!

General Rules/Terms!

✅Will Draw:

Humans/Humanoids

Semi-Anthros

Ocs

Ships

Mild Gore

Mild Suggestive/NSFW

❌Won't Draw

Explicit NSFW

Mechas

Vulgar/Offensive Content

Important

TOS Can be found in both the given Carrd and on the VGen listings for each commission type

As the artist I retain the rights to post my work. However in the case that the art is a gift or for a stream debut please inform me beforehand and I will hold off on posting till after.

I reserve the right to reject any commission. Payment is done via Paypal, see Carrd or Vgen for full TOS and more examples.

If you have any questions feel free to message! Reblogs are appreciated! And if you don't wanna commission but wanna leave a tip? Stop by my Kofi tip jar!

[staticvn]

the foxes : random headcanons (because i need to let it all out somewhere)

• Renee & Matt are both huge fans of atla and the pjo series. Dan likes it as well but not as much as they do. They also tried to convince Allison to watch it with them and despite saying it’s “not her thing” she really likes it.

• Renee keeps her own garden. Mostly plants and flowers though. She tries for some veggies as well but they never grow right

• At some point, Andrew would stop smoking completely. The withdrawals are crazy and he’s cranky as hell through the whole thing but yeah.

• Renee would definitely love visiting churches and cathedrals in different countries. Not only cuz she’s religious but also because she loves the architecture and art a lot.

• also also Renee would keep the coolest looking patterned stuff. Fox shaped & cat paw carved ceramic mugs, knitted sweaters with a lot of patchworks and so on.

• Renee taught Neil ASL. For no particular reason just that it’s a good thing to know. After that she also tried teaching some of the other foxes but mostly just the basics.

• Kind of surprise to everyone, Aaron would be really good at chess. Neil and Matt on the other hand… very much not. He sometimes has chess matches with Kevin but Kev always loses which genuinely drives him mad.

• Aaron knows latin- not just the medical terms that med students have to know but like the language. So you bet that whenever someone gets him angry he starts to yap at them in latin just to make a point of some sort.

• Andrew would like those old/retro gameboys

• Andrew always beats everyone in mario kart with Nicky often being either close second or complete last - no in between.

• Nicky is the #1 pancake maker. He was kind of awful at it at first but after many many tries he perfected it for the twins

• Kev is also the #1 cook in healthy but completely flavourless prison-looking meals (though it is not his fault. i blame the nest.)

• if the foxes would ever have escape room night best believe Neil would be the first to figure it out and in record time as well.

• Kevin is a mosquito magnet and won’t stop complaining about it…like ever. (had to google synonym for bitching btw)

• to fight off the “eboy Andrew” allegations im fighting back with “absolute loser Andrew” where he wears too big sweaters, reading glasses, has crooked teeth, and searches through different cryptid or internet mysteries- related sites for too long (…projecting but still)

• Neil hates coffee. his favorite tea is peppermint or earl grey.

• the monsters watch cartoons in the morning if they don’t have classes i said what i said

• Neil definitely got into photography (or sketching or both) at some point. there is just something so symbolic about that i just can’t wire up my brain rn to figure out why.

• Kevin listens to podcasts instead of music while working out because he is simply that type. sigh

ok im done

[octuscle]

Catalan internship

Michael was overjoyed. He would never have dreamed that he would be accepted as an intern at the renowned architecture firm in Barcelona. Normally, world-class offices only accepted seniors as interns. And Michael was a sophomore. And he barely spoke a word of Spanish. To be honest, he had lied a bit on his CV. But the internship didn't start for another three months. Until then, he would learn Spanish and learn so much that it wouldn't even be noticeable that he had only just started his studies.

When he was on the plane to Barcelona three months later, Michael didn't speak a word of Spanish and had gained a lot of experience in frat house parties over the past few weeks. The internship was going to be a debacle… And indeed, he didn't understand a word on his first day. And even if he had spoken the language, he would have had no idea what they wanted him to do. Michael cursed the decision to apply for this position. He was only happy when he was finally in the office. He googled "Spanish now". A list of language schools and language apps came up… Boring stuff… That didn't help him now either… And then, already on page 2, came "Become Spanish in just a few moments". Chronivac… Never heard of it… "In-app purchases possible." Never mind, Michael had his dad's credit card….

"Spanish architecture student in his final year". That was all the effort Michael put into his prompt. That was enough work for today. Michael spent the rest of the day looking for trendy bars for tonight.

Miguel wasn't overly punctual when he came into the office the next day. Why the hell didn't he understand anyone here? The language sounded like a gibberish of Spanish, French and a few more languages. Fortunately, everyone here actually understood Spanish. And for a reason Miguel couldn't quite explain to himself, Miguel spoke fluent English. This made it easier to flirt with the other interns from Germany, Poland and the USA. Unfortunately, Miguel quickly realized that everyone else here was far superior to him professionally. Despite his advanced studies, Miguel was a complete layman compared to his colleagues when it came to creativity, structural engineering and building technology.

"A young Spanish architect". And "Enter".

Miguel hated his small apartment in the suburb of Barcelona. He designed the most beautiful houses, the most spectacular skyscrapers. And he lived in this shoebox. Okay, to be fair, Miguel didn't actually design anything. Miguel drew staircases. Staircases for the most beautiful houses, the most spectacular skyscrapers. Buildings that someone else in the office had designed. One of the big bosses who were in the limelight, who were celebrated in the press. The stars of the Catalan architecture scene. Miguel could puke. In itself, he could have been satisfied. He wasn't earning too badly. He was a good-looking man. But he spent ten to twelve hours a day in the office. He had never seen one of his construction sites. He left his home at 06:00, he came home at 19:00 or not until 20:00. Sport? Going out? Meeting friends? He was already happy if he managed to finish a ready meal in the microwave. Didn't he have this app? He felt like he had last used it years ago. "One of the big boys in the office," he wrote. Tomorrow he wanted to be one of the bosses.

As a Spaniard, Miguel was used to having to earn respect. The cursed Catalans always thought they were better than everyone else. That was one of the reasons why Miguel almost lived in the gym. Sleep, gym, office, gym, sleep, gym… Getting his muscles to burn was more important to him than being successful here in the office. And with the muscles, success somehow came automatically. In meetings, he was always looked at when a question was open. Miguel knew that he wasn't actually the most talented architect in the office. But thanks to his impressive physique, he had managed to carve out a reasonably decent career. He earned good money, he had a summer house in Mallorca, he fucked the interns. And he was sometimes allowed to suck off one of the gods, the bosses of the office. No more. No less. His career had come to a natural end. He was just 42 years old. Damn it, it had to go on somehow. But as a Spaniard in Catalonia? Not a chance! He searched for this app… What was it called again? Chronivac. What should he enter as a prompt…? "My own master. And Catalan"

Miquel got up at 05:00 and immediately started lifting weights in his carpentry workshop. As a self-employed man, he didn't have a minute to lose. His apprentice and his two fellow carpenters arrived between 06:00 and 06:30. Most of his neighbors could set the clock so that the circular saw would start howling at 06:30. This did not necessarily make Miquel and his workshop popular. But his father and grandfather had already built cupboards and tables here for the neighborhood. The family had made a small fortune. And Miquel was a celebrity in his neighborhood. They called him "the Catalonian Arnold". And indeed, he was not much less imposing than his great role model. When customers came to his workshop, he always went out of his way to flex his muscles. Many of his customers attached great importance to him personally installing the furniture. And it was not uncommon for customers to have the air conditioning turned off. No matter. As a rule, he worked bare-chested whenever possible anyway.

Miquel was a good craftsman and not a bad self-promoter. But as a businessman, he was a failure. His accounts were constantly empty, the demands of social security and the tax authorities constantly hovered over him like a sword of Damocles. How he would love to simply chisel iron and work with wood. His two passions. In fact, he felt like an accountant. He wrote "Be free" in this strange app.

It had been a few years since Miquel had sold his workshop and the house in Barcelona. He had never been back since. But he had heard that Japanese-Chilean tapas were served where he had once assembled cabinets. Although he had received an indecent amount of money for the property by his own admission, he would be able to eat there for maybe a year and then he would be broke. But the last thing he dreamed of was eating Japanese-Chilean tapas in Barcelona.

He no longer worked for money in the village where he had bought an abandoned carpenter's workshop. He worked when he felt like it. Or when someone asked him to. Of course, after just a few hours, his muscular body made him a household name. But first and foremost, the few remaining inhabitants were happy that there was a carpenter in the village again. And what a carpenter. Good with the plane. And good with the tail. Miquel had nailed everything there was to nail in the village. His cock was in a jockstrap encrusted with cum and precum. He stank of sweat and musk. If it bothered anyone, Miquel would press their face into his armpit. Either he was rid of the annoying troublemaker afterwards. Or he had a new victim to fuck. Everything was actually perfect… But something was missing.

Miquel hadn't had a cell phone for years. Anyone who wanted to reach him could reach him. He wasn't a hermit. He had internet in the former sheepfold that he converted into his last home. His supposed last home. Who would know that?

He still remembered the moment when he switched off his last phone for the last time. He had used Chronivac for the last time shortly before that. "A contented man in his prime". Damn, that was him.

[rigelmejo]

On a lighter note. If you're a language learner browsing forums and sites, some fairly chill ones to check out:

Chinese-Forums.com: there are a lot of good study suggestions on here, and people who have shared their progress and stuff they did to study X skills. Even if you are not studying Chinese, a lot of their discussions can apply to learning other languages. And if you've ever been on some japanese learner forums where people tended to attack more over "study MY way, not X way," this forum has much less of that. So I've found the ideas shared on here have also been useful for applying to how I study other languages. Some great tips on reading here.

forum.language-learners.org: this site may be easier to find posts for, if you go to a web search site (google, duckduckgo, searx.space) and search this site's name as well as the question you have. So for example "language-learners.org how to improve reading skill" or "language-learners.org listening reading method." This forum has posts by many language learners, who share experiences with study methods, progress they've made, language challenges and study methods and how they went progress wise. It's very useful for looking up study methods and how they've worked/not worked for people, and seeing people's progress they share. The forum seems a bit less ready to attack others compared to some subreddits on reddit.

reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish: Dreaming Spanish is a youtube channel and website that teaches Spanish through pure comprehensible input designed lessons (and the creator designed the lessons for Automatic Language Growth, but people use DS in a variety ways including as practice to supplement explicit study so the community is somewhat open to people studying DS in ways besides purely comprehensible-input). The subreddit is more focused on pure ALG method, so no looking words up and no trying to translate in your head and no explicit vocabulary and grammar study, because that's how DS instructs students to study using it. But their study suggestions still work very well with other study methods, so if you are a learner doing a lot of explicit study like anki flashcards and textbooks, the Spanish resources suggested on DS subreddit are still useful for practicing listening to Spanish or reading Spanish. It's also cool to see people share their progress doing an ALG method, and a lot of people on DS subreddit share how they're doing, what they've done so far, progress during different stages. I did a lot of digging a while back, to try and see if any learners who did the ALG method shared WHEN they spoke, and how they improved their speaking over time. And also, when they found content made for native speakers understandable. DS subreddit has a lot of learners sharing that stuff - when they started speaking, how they're practicing it, how it's improved over time, when they could understand X content and how well they could understand it and how it's improving.

Heavenly Path Notion Site: excellent resource for finding recommendations of content to read/listen to in Chinese. I think their ranking of difficulty on their website is incredibly useful, and matches well to my own experiences. Their recommendations for how to start learning to read Chinese are also super solid, from mentioning Pleco and graded reader options to suggesting when to transition to materials for native speakers around (1000-2000 words learned/HSK 4) and which materials to start with (their Newcomer recommendations are way easier than the novels I started trying to read with). MoonIvy has posted recommendations on Heavenly Path, and shared their progress on reddit and other forums as well, and their journey and progress learning is something I'm hoping to follow along after lol. They're a great example of progress through reading Chinese. There's other people involved in Heavenly Path who also made amazing progress, someone shared they read SaYe within a few months of starting to learn Chinese, then increased novel difficulty from there! If you are learning to Chinese and wish to eventually read webnovels, I highly encourage you to check out this site and start working on reading as soon as possible. Their guide on reading has a place to start for anyone (beginner graded reader suggestions even if you only know 300 words like Mandarin Companion, and up), and if you follow that guide I do think it's entirely reasonable you will be reading a novel for kids by the end of the year (like TuTu DaWang) and a webnovel by an author you love in 2 years (or sooner, if you read a lot or aren't an absolute beginner... after all, I read some of a Priest novel within 1 year, and some people who referenced Heavenly Path's recommendations read bl webnovels Within the first year of studying). Reading that novel you love in Chinese is not an unobtainable goal, it's something you can do in 1-2 years. Please check out Heavenly Path's recommendations for a path to achieving that, with reading material that may not feel as hard as if you randomly selected novels.