#merchant account features

[ritiknegi12-blog]

Credit Card Payment Processing

Credit card processing is a vital aspect of modern commerce, shaping the way businesses accept payments. This blog explores the key features to look for in credit card payment solutions in 2025, including global support, advanced security, flexible payment options, and real-time analytics. Read the whole blog to know more.

[sbcdh]

On the morning of August 19th 1966, the merchant marine vessel Pelican unloaded its cargo into the port of Los Angeles. Recently declassified information about the Pelican’s ship manifest confirms that the ship was carrying experimental materials for a nascent project Clover. Of the 425 drums of material, only 424 were accounted for. 

While government officials have not confirmed exactly what was in the lost barrel, its contents are believed to be approximately 55 gallons of an experimental substance similar to LSD. 

To anyone with a passing interest in the 1970’s music scene, this will not come as news. Tall tales of a lost ship full of experimental drugs were as common as disco, though the stories have been exaggerated. The most common form of the story features a drunk crane operator loading a shipping crate onto the wrong train, though in reality it was only a single barrel that went unaccounted for. The more outlandish forms of the legend include everything from a daring heist by a crew of rocker-pirates to shadowy government entities vanishing the entire ship for their own nefarious purposes. 

The reality was a simple logistical mixup, a mistake that can be tracked back to a simple addition error on an inventory sheet, an ordinary yet deeply embarrassing mistake on part of the government. Additionally, The information that revealed the lost barrel came alongside a report detailing project clovers lost asset tracking protocol. Protocol that reads as comically naive in hindsight, with guidelines including “monitoring local jazz bars” or keeping an eye out for “feminist thought.” With the benefit of retrospective, it is no surprise that agents were not able to track the barrel. 

Declassification of the Pelican’s manifest prompted an unexpected crossover with another niche legend of the 1970s Los Angeles music scene: the disappearance of the Knights of Altonia. 

Even today, many consider the Knights of Altonia to be a myth, but scant references to their existence can be found. According to a review from a 1977 issue of Jam! Magazine, the Knights of Altonia were a “D-List psychedelic glam metal outfit with more style than skill, known more for their disappearance than their music.” Though a 1997 retrospective from Tempo calls them “A band too ahead of their time to be properly appreciated” noting their flamboyant stage costuming and its significant influence on the aesthetics of the genre. 

To the frustration of music historians seeking to separate fact from fiction, the band featured an elaborate mythology, with each member claiming to be a “Wizard-Knight of the Mystic Tower” who traveled from their world to ours “on a journey through the Nine Realms to find the secret stone.” This has been the source of innumerable urban legends around the band. A common joke among hobbyist historians at the time claimed that the Knights did not vanish, but simply “returned to the Nine Realms.” Information on the band is so muddled that many music historians doubt their existence entirely. In fact, the only confirmed, physical evidence of the band’s existence is a photograph at the bottom of the Jam! Review, it features:

Lead singer and guitarist Donald Hawkins as his stage persona “Zozimos the Wise.” He sports a mane of dreadlocks, and a classic blue wizard hat and robe decorated with yellow stars.The robe is worn open to reveal Donald’s bare chest, along with velvet short-shorts and a pair of thigh-high leather boots. The article states that the glittery bright purple guitar in his hands was named “Excelsior.”

Rhythm guitarist Jon Todachine as “Wan the Witch King.” He wears a deerskin jacket, also open at the front, decorated with what appear to be crow feathers and small animal bones. The theme of bones continues to his belt buckle, which features an as-of-yet unidentified animal skull. This figure is presumed to be Jon, although it should be noted that the broad hat he wears features a curtain of beads that obscures his face. 

Bassist Riley Knox as “Chulainn the Horned.” He wears a full deer skull, along with a lit candle that appears to be slowly melting down over the mask. Most of his upper body is obscured by what appears to be a cloak of leaves. Beneath the cloak he appears to be wearing a pair of Nike Blazers. 

Drummer Marcus Wilson as “Magnus Fire-Weaver.” He wears a viking helmet over intricately braided red hair, a chain-maille loincloth, a pair of medieval bracers on his wrists, and nothing else. 

Most notably, a speaker on stage left is placed upon a large steel drum identical to the ones used by project clover. 

Study is ongoing. 

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The cod-Marxism of personalized pricing

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

The social function of the economics profession is to explain, over and over again, that your boss is actually right and that you don't really want the things you want, and you're secretly happy to be abused by the system. If that wasn't true, why would your "choose" commercial surveillance, abusive workplaces and other depredations?

In other words, economics is the "look what you made me do" stick that capitalism uses to beat us with. We wouldn't spy on you, rip you off or steal your wages if you didn't choose to use the internet, shop with monopolists, or work for a shitty giant company. The technical name for this ideology is "public choice theory":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Of all the terrible things that economists say we all secretly love, one of the worst is "price discrimination." This is the idea that different customers get charged different amounts based on the merchant's estimation of their ability to pay. Economists insist that this is "efficient" and makes us all better off. After all, the marginal cost of filling the last empty seat on the plane is negligible, so why not sell that seat for peanuts to a flier who doesn't mind the uncertainty of knowing whether they'll get a seat at all? That way, the airline gets extra profits, and they split those profits with their customers by lowering prices for everyone. What's not to like?

Plenty, as it turns out. With only four giant airlines who've carved up the country so they rarely compete on most routes, why would an airline use their extra profits to lower prices, rather than, say, increasing their dividends and executive bonuses?

For decades, the airline industry was the standard-bearer for price discrimination. It was basically impossible to know how much a plane ticket would cost before booking it. But even so, airlines were stuck with comparatively crude heuristics to adjust their prices, like raising the price of a ticket that didn't include a Saturday stay, on the assumption that this was a business flyer whose employer was footing the bill:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/07/drip-drip-drip/#drip-off

With digitization and mass commercial surveillance, we've gone from pricing based on context (e.g. are you buying your ticket well in advance, or at the last minute?) to pricing based on spying. Digital back-ends allow vendors to ingest massive troves of commercial surveillance data from the unregulated data-broker industry to calculate how desperate you are, and how much money you have. Then, digital front-ends – like websites and apps – allow vendors to adjust prices in realtime based on that data, repricing goods for every buyer.

As digital front-ends move into the real world (say, with digital e-ink shelf-tags in grocery stores), vendors can use surveillance data to reprice goods for ever-larger groups of customers and types of merchandise. Grocers with e-ink shelf tags reprice their goods thousands of times, every day:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

Here's where an economist will tell you that actually, your boss is right. Many groceries are perishable, after all, and e-ink shelf tags allow grocers to reprice their goods every minute or two, so yesterday's lettuce can be discounted every fifteen minutes through the day. Some customers will happily accept a lettuce that's a little gross and liztruss if it means a discount. Those customers get a discount, the lettuce isn't thrown out at the end of the day, and everyone wins, right?

Well, sure, if. If the grocer isn't part of a heavily consolidated industry where competition is a distant memory and where grocers routinely collude to fix prices. If the grocer doesn't have to worry about competitors, why would they use e-ink tags to lower prices, rather than to gouge on prices when demand surges, or based on time of day (e.g. making frozen pizzas 10% more expensive from 6-8PM)?

And unfortunately, groceries are one of the most consolidated sectors in the modern world. What's more, grocers keep getting busted for colluding to fix prices and rip off shoppers:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/loblaw-bread-price-settlement-1.7274820

Surveillance pricing is especially pernicious when it comes to apps, which allow vendors to reprice goods based not just on commercially available data, but also on data collected by your pocket distraction rectangle, which you carry everywhere, do everything with, and make privy to all your secrets. Worse, since apps are a closed platform, app makers can invoke IP law to criminalize anyone who reverse-engineers them to figure out how they're ripping you off. Removing the encryption from an app is a potential felony punishable by a five-year prison sentence and a $500k fine (an app is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to install a privacy blocker on it):

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/15/private-law/#thirty-percent-vig

Large vendors love to sell you shit via their apps. With an app, a merchant can undetectably change its prices every few seconds, based on its estimation of your desperation. Uber pioneered this when they tweaked the app to raise the price of a taxi journey for customers whose batteries were almost dead. Today, everyone's getting in on the act. McDonald's has invested in a company called Plexure that pitches merchants on the use case of raising the cost of your normal breakfast burrito by a dollar on the day you get paid:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/05/your-price-named/#privacy-first-again

Surveillance pricing isn't just a matter of ripping off customers, it's also a way to rip off workers. Gig work platforms use surveillance pricing to titrate their wage offers based on data they buy from data brokers and scoop up with their apps. Veena Dubal calls this "algorithmic wage discrimination":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Take nurses: increasingly, American hospitals are firing their waged nurses and replacing them with gig nurses who are booked in via an app. There's plenty of ways that these apps abuse nurses, but the most ghastly is in how they price nurses' wages. These apps buy nurses' financial data from data-brokers so they can offer lower wages to nurses with lots of credit card debt, on the grounds that crushing debt makes nurses desperate enough to accept a lower wage:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/18/loose-flapping-ends/#luigi-has-a-point

This week, the excellent Lately podcast has an episode on price discrimination, in which cohost Vass Bednar valiantly tries to give economists their due by presenting the strongest possible case for charging different prices to different customers:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/podcasts/lately/article-the-end-of-the-fixed-price/

Bednar really tries, but – as she later agrees – this just isn't a very good argument. In fact, the only way charging different prices to different customers – or offering different wages to different workers – makes sense is if you're living in a socialist utopia.

After all, a core tenet of Marxism is "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." In a just society, people who need more get more, and people who have less, pay less:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_ability,_to_each_according_to_his_needs

Price discrimination, then, is a Bizarro-world flavor of cod-Marxism. Rather than having a democratically accountable state that sets wages and prices based on need and ability, price discrimination gives this authority to large firms with pricing power, no regulatory constraints, and unlimited access to surveillance data. You couldn't ask for a neater example of the maxim that "What matters isn't what technology does. What matters is who it does it for; and who it does it to."

Neoclassical economists say that all of this can be taken care of by the self-correcting nature of markets. Just give consumers and workers "perfect information" about all the offers being made for their labor or their business, and things will sort themselves out. In the idealized models of perfectly spherical cows of uniform density moving about on a frictionless surface, this does work out very well:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/03/all-models-are-wrong/#some-are-useful

But while large companies can buy the most intimate information imaginable about your life and finances, IP law lets them capture the state and use it to shut down any attempts you make to discover how they operate. When an app called Para offered Doordash workers the ability to preview the total wage offered for a job before they accepted it, Doordash threatened them with eye-watering legal penalties, then threw dozens of full-time engineers at them, changing the app several times per day to shut out Para:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/07/hr-4193/#boss-app

And when an Austrian hacker called Mario Zechner built a tool to scrape online grocery store prices – discovering clear evidence of price-fixing conspiracies in the process – he was attacked by the grocery cartel for violating their "IP rights":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

This is Wilhoit's Law in action:

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_M._Wilhoit#Wilhoit's_law

Of course, there wouldn't be any surveillance pricing without surveillance. When it comes to consumer privacy, America is a no-man's land. The last time Congress passed a new consumer privacy law was in 1988, when they enacted the Video Privacy Protection Act, which bans video-store clerks from revealing which VHS cassettes you take home. Congress has not addressed a single consumer privacy threat since Die Hard was still playing in theaters.

Corporate bullies adore a regulatory vacuum. The sleazy data-broker industry that has festered and thrived in the absence of a modern federal consumer privacy law is absolutely shameless. For example, every time an app shows you an ad, your location is revealed to dozens of data-brokers who pretend to be bidding for the right to show you an ad. They store these location data-points and combine them with other data about you, which they sell to anyone with a credit card, including stalkers, corporate spies, foreign governments, and anyone hoping to reprice their offerings on the basis of your desperation:

https://www.404media.co/candy-crush-tinder-myfitnesspal-see-the-thousands-of-apps-hijacked-to-spy-on-your-location/

Under Biden, the outgoing FTC did incredible work to fill this gap, using its authority under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act (which outlaws "unfair and deceptive" practices) to plug some of the worst gaps in consumer privacy law:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy

And Biden's CFPB promulgated a rule that basically bans data brokers:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/10/getting-things-done/#deliverism

But now the burden of enforcing these rules falls to Trump's FTC, whose new chairman has vowed to end the former FTC's "war on business." What America desperately needs is a new privacy law, one that has a private right of action (so that individuals and activist groups can sue without waiting for a public enforcer to take up their causes) and no "pre-emption" (so that states can pass even stronger privacy laws):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/federal-preemption-state-privacy-law-hurts-everyone

How will we get that law? Through a coalition. After all, surveillance pricing is just one of the many horrors that Americans have to put up with thanks to America's privacy law gap. The "privacy first" theory goes like this: if you're worried about social media's impact on teens, or women, or old people, you should start by demanding a privacy law. If you're worried about deepfake porn, you should start by demanding a privacy law. If you're worried about algorithmic discrimination in hiring, lending, or housing, you should start by demanding a privacy law. If you're worried about surveillance pricing, you should start by demanding a privacy law. Privacy law won't entirely solve all these problems, but none of them would be nearly as bad if Congress would just get off its ass and catch up with the privacy threats of the 21st century. What's more, the coalition of everyone who's worried about all the harms that arise from commercial surveillance is so large and powerful that we can get Congress to act:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

Economists, meanwhile, will line up to say that this is all unnecessary. After all, you "sold" your privacy when you clicked "I agree" or walked under a sign warning you that facial recognition was in use in this store. The market has figured out what you value privacy at, and it turns out, that value is nothing. Any kind of privacy law is just a paternalistic incursion on your "freedom to contract" and decide to sell your personal information. It is "market distorting."

In other words, your boss is right.

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

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

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/11/socialism-for-the-wealthy/#rugged-individualism-for-the-poor

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

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

--

Ser Amantio di Nicolao (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Safeway_supermarket_interior,_Fairfax_County,_Virginia.jpg

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

[velaris-fic-repository]

What the Tide Brings In (Part 4)

Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five

Loading and unloading ship cargo turned out to be a fantastic way to reacclimatize yourself and your healed body after the accident. You made dock friends fast and before you knew it, you knew the name of every ship brat and which mother to threaten to report to when the kids poked around with something they weren’t supposed to.

You wouldn’t of course, it was just fun to scare ‘em a little. Cute kids, all of them. You’d tell them some of your pirate stories whenever they asked. If you embellished here and there that’s fine, it’s what a pirate story was for.

You placed the final crate onto the stationary ship, before returning to the merchant it belonged to on the dock.

“That everything?”

“I believe so,” he said, taking a quick glance at the manifest in his hands. Once certain everything had been accounted for, he returned his gaze to you. “You know, if you were so inclined, we could always use another hand out there on this voyage. It wouldn’t be long, just sailing over to Boreala and back. It would only be a few days, and you’ve been so helpful.”

Dread and shame found a way to get their hooks into you. It had only been a month. You weren’t ready yet, and a very large portion of you hated yourself for it.

Still, you said, “I appreciate the offer, but I’m still settling in here. Maybe ask Evander.”

The merchant frowned but nodded, “thank you dear, maybe next time.”

“Maybe next time, fair winds and safe sailing to you,” and you walked off. The crew gathered and untied from their moorings shortly after as you watched.

A small wisp of wind flitted between your fingers, a neglected power wishing to be used. Smiling faintly, you wove your hands around each other as a small ball of wind gathered between them.

It wasn’t a particularly unique power amongst Summer Court residents, especially those who grew up amongst the ropes and wood of sailing vessels, but it was yours. The sea breeze, if you asked nicely, would come to your aid in small doses. It was incredibly useful when your means of transportation relied on heavy sheets of cloth. The real stunning power from your part of Summer was dominion over water, and in case recent events weren’t enough to go on, the ocean may call to you, but it didn’t have to listen to you in return.

Once you’d gathered the amount of wind you wanted, you pushed your hands outward, sending the wind in the direction the ship had been heading. Your wind caught in the sails, giving the vessel a nice boost further out into the harbor. You could make out some of the crew glancing back your way, so you smiled, sending a coy wave back at them. You got some waves back as you felt a presence on your left.

“Full of surprises, aren’t you?” Azriel said.

You felt through the threads in your chest, nothing on the other side. Not yet. Why did you even bother checking?

“You have no idea,” is how you answered him.

“How long have you been able to pull the wind like that?” he asked.

“It’s a little embarrassing where I come from, I was a late bloomer,” you admitted. You pulled a small amount of air to you, dancing it through your fingers absently.

“So was I.”

You stopped. Turned.

“You?”

Azriel flexed his wings, “I didn’t fly until I was eleven.”

He hadn’t told you everything about Illyrian culture or his childhood. You made a few guesses, but never told him or pushed for more information. It was easy, being around you, he found.

“Well, I couldn’t touch the wind until I was twelve. Looks like you won.”

Azriel hummed, watching the water with you in your customary comfortable quiet.

“You’re not gonna gloat?” you asked, humor in your voice.

His neutral expression, despite its fight to stay in place, cracked a little. Veins of amusement showed themselves on his features as he looked at you. “Do you want me to?”

“I always appreciate a challenge,” you said.

“Then why did you let me win?”

You blinked then recovered, honestly saying, “I thought you’d earned it.” You nudged him with your elbow, smiling, a second after, “but don’t expect a repeat, got it?”

He laughed with you, “got it.”

The stars and moon were out over Velaris as the activity in the harbor continued to pass you both by. Azriel offered you his arm.

“Walk you home?”

“Sure.”

He brought you back to the little apartment he’d helped you find. It wasn’t the prettiest or biggest by any stretch of the imagination. It felt more like a large closet some days, but when your list of belongings started and ended with the clothes on your back, you didn’t need much. You’d spent most of your three centuries of life sleeping in a hammock in smaller quarters. The apartment itself was the adjustment, not the size of it. You’d found sleep difficult without the bobbing of the waves beneath you.

The one window the apartment had though had a clear view of the harbor, and you loved it.

You unlocked the door, “you can come in if you want.”

Azriel offered to help move you in when you’d started in the place originally, but when faced with a smart mouthed comment from you about ‘what exactly did he think he would need to help move’ he realized it was sort of a foolish offer. He’d never actually been inside.

Luckily for you and the golden threaded secret you kept, you didn’t have much in the way of offer-able food. Also luckily for you, Azriel seemed more interested in looking around your space than expecting you to be a host.

In the brief weeks you’ve lived here, you’ve amassed a handful of belongings. The apartment was pre-furnished and not very well, so he did not spare lingering glances on those pieces. The bookcase however, had a few things nestled into it. Small pieces of artwork of various mediums, all in one way or another inspired by the sea. Wood carvings of a shark and a few fish. A small watercolor of the sea at night. A tiny model sailing ship and assorted shells.

Reminders, a shadow whispered curiously by his ear, guessing.

There were a few small books stacked haphazardly in the bookcase too. Seemingly placed wherever it was you deemed to place it with no attempt at reordering them. A short novel or two. A poetry collection seemingly of nautical nature, and what looked like from the spine, a binding of sheet music for sea shanties.

Azriel prided himself on his deductive skills. Even without his shadows, he excelled at reading people. Someone’s place of residence can tell just as much about them as their body language and the pitch of their voice. On habit, he turned his eye to your space.

Disorder in the placement of all these objects. Spontaneity, duh. Bursts of activity. Out of house a lot. Working extra shifts?

Common thread between the pieces. Pride. Longing. Reassertion of personal history. Joy in small amounts.

Pristine state of objects. New, but also cared for. Reverence. Pride, again.

Azriel smiled faintly.

“Find any evidence of treachery or treason yet?” you called from the kitchenette.

Azriel quickly realized you had been watching him. Of course you were, this was a small space and he was about the only thing in it. The words you said were accusatory but your tone and wry smile suggested teasing. More than that, he knew, he knew you. You’d found another way to poke fun at him, and as always, he was unbothered. Liked it even, if your eyes glistened like that.

He locked down that thought as quickly as he could, not that he was terribly successful.

You had two glasses laid out on the little half counter that separated your ‘kitchen’ from the rest of the apartment, each with a small splash of whiskey in it.

“Took the liberty of pouring you some,” you said, your skin unfortunately itching at the thought of just how different this moment would be had it been food, “just a little something. I have to at least pretend like I’m a good host right?”

Azriel chuckled, accepting the glass from the other side of the half wall.

“Nice place you’ve got here,” he said.

“Thanks,” you answered, sarcastically, “a friend of mine helped me find it.”

Azriel huffed a little laugh again, the two of you falling into comfortable silence as you sipped your glasses.

Azriel eventually finished his and set it down, mulling over a thought. Finally, he voiced it. “I saw you with that merchant today. It seemed like a great opportunity to get out on the water again.” He waited for you, when you didn’t respond, pouring yourself another glass, he continued, softly, “why didn’t you take it?”

You took a gulp of your whiskey and scanned his features. He recognized the look on your face, he’d seen it before when he first met you. Looking for a way out.

He stayed firm. Soft and open, but present and by no means going anywhere. You didn’t have to tell him, but his look let you know that he would ask again - maybe not now, but definitely later.

You sighed, downed the rest of your glass in one pull and set it down.

“Because I can’t and I hate it.”

He remained silent, waiting for you.

“I can’t,” you said again, voice and hands shaking.

Azriel reached forward, grabbing your hands in his, rubbing his thumb over one pair of your knuckles. Your hands were not scarred like his, but they bore countless calluses and divots from centuries of handling ropes and wood. You’d seen his hands before, holding your own up to prove his weren’t so bad. He did not fear holding your hands now.

“Tell me how sailing felt before” he prompted.

How were you supposed to do that?

It must have been written on your face because Azriel said, “I know it might be hard. Just try.”

Try. You could do that.

“It was… everything.” A soothing thumb stroked your knuckle, encouragement.

“It was adventure and sunlight and joy. The kind of feeling where your heart just lifts in your chest and you feel… free. The sea spray splashing at your face, the wind whipping around you. I’ve never felt as strong as I do with my boots sturdily planted on the deck of a ship.”

You’re lost in it for a moment, before a stroke across your knuckle pulled you back. Lacking for what else to say, you asked him, “what’s flying like for you?”

He met your eyes, “the same. I’ve never felt more powerful and free than when I’m in the air.”

You let your gaze drop, frustrated with yourself, “and I’ve lost it.”

Azriel reached up with one hand, still brushing your knuckle with the other, and cupped your face by the cheek.

“No you haven’t.”

“I can’t even think about going sailing without a pit of dread forming in my stomach,” you frowned.

“You’ve been through something awful,” he asserted, “of course the last thing you’d want to do is open yourself up to that danger again. When… When I was first learning how to fly, I fell. Bad. Every time I thought about trying again, I felt like I would be sick. I didn’t try again for weeks, resigned that I would never do it. I would never fly. My wings were useless and… and so was I.”

Your chest ached but he pushed forward, “That was until two bastards more stubborn than me all but forced me back up there. It was slow. It took time. But eventually, I wasn’t scared anymore. Not in a paralyzing way like I’d been before. I respected the dangers of the action. The risks I subjected myself to every time I did it. I learned to trust my wings, I learned to trust myself, and I was free again.”

You exhaled a shaky breath.

“You can be too,” he said, “I’ll help you trust the sea again if you’d like to try.”

Tears pricked your eyes but you blinked them away.

“Try. I can do that.”

Series Taglist: @rcarbo1 @shylahstarzz @tele86 @bubybubsters @willowpains @breemitch15 @96jnie @polli05927 @starsidesigh

[defsiarte]

PayPal has updated their TOS to give your account data to merchants

Like many other companies. They've suddenly added some feature to give advertisers your data and automatically opted all active accounts in.

Turn it off here!!

source/more info

[aaknopf]

Rufino Tamayo’s painting “El Hombre,” the inspiration for this poem, shows a man both grounded powerfully into the earth and reaching up to the heavens. Here the novelist and poet Sandra Cisneros gives a close account of several struggling hombres, situating them compassionately in the broader context of Mexico-U. S. relations.

El Hombre

          After Tamayo

On the eve of International Women’s Day In a field on the road to Celaya They find her body. The deaf-mute girl who Walked her dog in Parque Juárez.

No one tried, blamed, named. The town knows:

It’s her father’s debts. This is how they pay Un hombre who can’t pay.

Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

In small print, in the back Pages of today’s paper, I read this small news:

Un Hombre Purépecha Lifted from His Purépecha Village.

Daily the Purépechas demand his return. Daily el hombre does not return.

He is only one of the many “lifted.”

When you are native in your native land To whom do you demand? Who listens?

Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

The bird merchant at the Tuesday mercado, Six cages of cenzontles strapped on his back, Shoves a mesh shopping bag so close To my face, I have to step back to see. A flutter of frightened canaries. In the eyes of el hombre, The same urgency, the same fear.

Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

The gringo Alan tells me the story Of the pig who thought he was a dog. Solovino he was called, Because he came alone.

How each day Alan drove Along the road to Dolores, The dogs would run from The squatter’s shack and give chase, The pig who thought he was a dog Trotting behind them.

Until one day the pig isn’t there. The dogs disappear too. One by one by one.

Alan shrugs. When un hombre is hungry, There is no one to blame.

Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

The “Religion” section of Our Guanajuato newspaper Features an article on St. Francis, Un hombre of austerity, as A model for all to live in poverty.

This in a country where almost every Hombre, mujer y niño is already On the path to sainthood.

Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

How it happened was like this. One night Rosana catches un hombre Breaking into her grocery store, The son of a neighbor.

Her shouts wake the barrio. They’re able to hold the thief Until the police arrive.

Rosana is there to bear witness At the court proceedings. And to Witness the court set him free.

She gathers her pain in a handkerchief, Goes home and calls the boy’s mother.

Rosana and the mother of the thief. Each Woman lets loose a sea of grief.

When she tells me this story, The sea is still there in Rosana’s eyes.

Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

Carlos and Raúl, the silver-tongued Poets of Chicano, Illinois, have never Been to the country of their ancestry, Though they’re silver-haired hombres.

When I invite them south, they refuse. They’re afraid of bad hombres.

No one has told them The ones who buy drugs and Sell arms to los bad hombres Are U.S. citizens.

Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

The blind harmonica player, Un hombre who plays “Camino de Guanajuato” In front of Banco Santander, Clutches his baseball cap of small coins Whenever he hears someone running too close.

No vale nada la vida, la vida no vale nada. Life’s worth nothing, nothing is what life’s worth.

Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

Un hombre tells me: You don’t even have to learn Spanish to live here. Amado the San Miguel realtor. You can train your staff to do what you need, And you don’t have to pay them much either.

Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

Dallas, 1953. A seer named Stanley Marcus Purchases a mural by Rufino Tamayo To reinforce friendship between Texas and Mexico.

This in a time in history When Texas still posts Signs on restaurants: “No dogs or Mexicans.”

The painting is of un hombre Anchored to the earth Reaching for the heavens, A balance of earth and sky, North and south, yours and mine. Because the universe is About interconnection.

Tamayo calls this painting, Man Excelling Himself.

Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

Message from Mexico to The United States of America: When we are safe, you are safe. When you are safe, we are safe. Tell this to your politicians.

Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

There is a Mexican saying, Hablando se entiende la gente. Talking to one another We understand one another.

I would add: And listening We understand even better.

Mándanos luz. Send us all light. Mándanos luz. Send us all light. Mándanos luz. Send us all light.

More on this book and author:

Learn more about Woman Without Shame by Sandra Cisneros.

Browse our special Everyman's Library edition of The House on Mango Street and other books by Sandra Cisneros; you can follow her @officialsandracisneros on Instagram and @sandracisnerosauthor on Facebook.

On April 12, Sandra Cisneros will appear on two panels at the San Antonio Books Festival.

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

[pawborough]

Beta Expectations and Our Development Goals

Hi everyone! This document serves as an outline for starting expectations when beginning Closed Beta. 

Things to remember as we move into Closed Beta are: 

Cursing is allowed! We’ve dialed back our filters quite a bit, but absolutely no innuendo or sexual content. Details are outlined in our TOS.

In this beginning, the application feels closer to the Alpha state than it does the full game. It is in a mid-development limbo, which is why we are stressing that it is the Closed Beta state. Our biggest milestones have been backend technical foundations that have taken significant time. If the game were a cake, we have finished baking the base, which is what we’re starting the testing for. We’ll be making aggressive updates throughout the next few months of the test, which will introduce the “frosting,” and advance general playability. We plan to roll out new mechanics every month. You will find a list below of what these goals are.

Temper your starting expectations, but get excited for how much we’re going to continuously develop and update!

We will not be moving into Open Beta until we feel the game is close to done. Think of Closed Beta as phase 1, and Open Beta as phase 2.

Things will break the moment you try them. This is normal and expected. Always report!

Because of this, things won’t be very fun yet. But as we roll out improvements and new things, users will get to give live feedback on what they want to see and how things feel.

Early Access will be less smooth than full Closed Beta as we detect the kinks of letting more people in en masse. It’s the nature of early launching. Brace yourselves!

In the same vein, several aspects are temporary. Topher takes the place of icons in the queue, and compromises we’ve made for early economic simulation (example: a placeholder merchant to simulate the Processing mechanic) will be barren. NPCs are sketches, UI colors may be temporary, and UI banners are sketches.

Any and all prices of items or features are temporary or subject to change. Things like the price of kit rolling or accessory items will be tooled.

All updates and communications with testers will be posted publicly instead of through email. Eventually, we’ll use the site forums, but not until we can guarantee no more content wipes, and we’ve developed the sticky system on the User Dashboard.

Everything in this test, minus your username, password, account ID, and purchases is temporary. Your account content will be erased at some point in time, and when it is your Kickstarter and Alpha reward codes will be re-activated for use.

If anything is broken about your code, please report! We’ll fix it!

Any premium purchases you make will be restored upon wipes, and exist in this state as a means to support us moreso than to stimulate longterm collecting. By purchasing any currency, you’re helping us develop! But please do not feel pressured!

Bundles will be added come the full Closed Beta.

Pelt submissions are open for user testing, but you’ll have to re-submit upon any wipes.

When you complete registration (entering your DOB and confirming agreement to the TOS), your founder and follower IDs will be reserved, so you can take your time going over the details.

These starting cats will be wiped completely, and when Open Beta begins, follower and founder IDs will be totally up for grabs again upon first-come first-serve login and confirmation.

We’ll be around to grind for the next two weeks. Then, in two weeks, there will be a bit of a lull as our developers take a breather and regroup, and we’ll be back in March. We’re making this plan known so it doesn’t look like an abandonment or nervous silence. We’re simply planning rest and pacing ahead of time!

We’ll be sending out periodic surveys to get honest criticism and check how the economy is feeling.

The first survey is ready and waiting for your input! This survey focuses specifically on the economy, and can be filled out once per day. Please do not feel pressured to do so every day, but we encourage you to respond as many times as possible. Your input is immeasurably valuable for the fine-tuning of our economy, and guaranteeing the long-term enjoyability of the site. Please find the survey here.

With over 700 items on this site, we may have missed necessary data entry for some as we learn the ins and outs of our own program. Always report and we’ll fix it!

Some accessories are in the re-coloring queue, and if so will have their recolors seeded into the economy as we finish them.

It’s a marathon, not a sprint. We’re ready to hit the ground running, but it will be a long journey. We’re excited to embark on it together!

Here is a list of things available from the get-go (hopefully useable, if not they will be!):

Cooking and Crafting

Daily Duties

Flea Market and Merchants 

Breeding

Dress up and general cat customization

Beta retirement (bare bones)

Cat relationships and cross-cat gift giving

Archetype discovery (we are adding new ones as you play!)

Forum posting and custom board creation (image hosting!)

Cat profile CSS boxes

User profile CSS boxes

Storage and stash functionality for item organization

Bank functionality for currency storage

User customization settings (icon selection, pronoun and slogan editing, Borough swapping, username swapping)

Crest application

Beta guild play (basic errands)

Multiplayer guilds

Incense and metamorphic functionality

Pelt submissions (the refined pelt rules are a work in progress, because for this chaotic testing phase we’d like everyone to go nuts and have some fun! The only steadfast rules are no gore, copyrighted materials, religious iconography, or sexual content!)

Friend requests and adding friends

Premium shop (intended for user support, benefits are bare for at least the next week or so while we focus on user bug reports)

Now without further ado… here is what we’ll be working on in the coming months, in order of general priority! Open Beta will not happen until we finish this list.

Replacing frontend assets with final renders.

Updating item cards to reflect dynamic button displays depending on the page in which the card is being viewed.

User report system for all user-ran content.

Wardrobe functionality; full sandbox dress up available to any visitor.

Infrastructure for sharing sandbox creations in comments and forum posts; text language like :catID: to paste an image link of a cat.

User to user DM functionality.

User to user private trading.

Item database and lore encyclopedia.

Processing functionality + dye system. For now, recolors are seeded in a temporary merchant.

Visual faunapedia record for fauna studying (including unlockable lore.)

Adding a slew of archetypes. Dedicated archetype collection page with user featured display.

Sitewide search functionality of all user content.

Aesthetic updates to comments + addition of comments onto cat pages.

Splitting the Undercoat into two patterns: Dilute (dynamically lightened) and Standard.

Adding a white patch selector into the creator and founder designer.

Dashboard refinement + forum news widget and stickies.

Splitting cooking and crafting to bring back Winnipeg and keep the mechanics more organized.

Farming.

Much of it has been started already, and we’ll continue to share our progress. We plan to stay in Closed Beta likely over the summer, but it will be as long as these developments take.

And then we will move into Open Beta! Where we can focus on the following:

User notebook entries (blog posts.)

Forum board updates to better accommodate posting

Sitewide tagging and filtering.

Cross-account breeding.

Dedicated Guild refinement and updates.

Achievement system.

Referral system.

Team features like a team hoard, team notes, and shared scenes.

Refinement of any feature feedback we get :) 

And from there… it’s full launch, baby! 

Again, a marathon, not a sprint. This list may seem long and arduous, but we’ll continue visual content updates (patterns, breeds, etc.) throughout the length of development.

Let’s get crackin’, catfolk!

[nyxianwayfarer]

The Merchant Queen and The Hound AU

Hello, all! Major apologies for the lack of activity on my blog as of late! Work has been stupid hectic, and I've got to deal with a dumbass coworker on top of it all... 🙄

Anyway, if you checked on some of the last things I reblogged here, you'll probably remember these screenshots featuring Du Ruo. You all should already know that I'm a sucker for a pretty face, and Aisno definitely has those type of women in spades! 😂 Thus, I present you all with another new AU idea, starring one of my favorite Eastian women!

Ah, and I'm tagging @risilence specifically because you mentioned you might be interested in this. 👀

Disclaimer: This is NOT an actual fic yet. This is more of an outline that I'm presenting to gauge interest.

Pairing: Du Ruo x Fem!Reader (Fem!Chief)

Rating: M

Content Tags: Mostly angst and implied dubcon (although that's based more around Reader and previous clients rather than anything involving Du Ruo)

Setting: Since this is an AU, this fic is going to deviate heavily from canon. Sinners still exist, but they serve more as living accessories to the wealthy. Organizations like the MBCC act like... upscale boutiques when it comes to presenting their rich clientele with said accessories to either buy or rent.

The number of Sinners a person has can often be indicative of their affluence, but the rank of said Sinner can also be taken into account in that regard. For example, a person having a single S-rank Sinner would be seen as having more power than someone else with several A-rank Sinners in their entourage.

Hound Reader/Chief:

You are a S-rank Sinner.

Your code name at one point was The Hound due to the fact that you could locate and subdue enemies for the MBCC.

If you're paying attention to the pairing/tags, then you'll notice that I have Chief mentioned just because the power that Reader has is similar. They can be used interchangeably, but like all my fics, you're never specifically mentioned by name though. You can either imagine the Chief or yourself in the role.

Reader can "shackle" other Sinners in a sense with her power, but it's tied to her singing, which paralyzes her foes for the MBCC to either add to their "inventory" if they're Sinners or be imprisoned by the FAC.

Due to the nature of your abilities, you were seen as too valuable to the MBCC to ever sell.

Instead, they loaned you out to the clients that could afford your exceedingly high rental price. Your job was mainly for protection/security.

However, because these rich clientele were already paying so much for you, they felt entitled to more than just your power, and by the MBCC's decree, you weren't allowed to say no...

This type of treatment eventually led you into growing jaded with your purpose in life at least until you meet one particular client...

Du Ruo:

She is a high-ranking Ambassador from far Eastia, sent by her clan to negotiate a formal trade agreement between them and the West.

Du Ruo is also considered to be one of the people next in line to rule as the leader of a rich, mercantile city. It isn't strictly a hereditary role; rather it's a title given to someone who can best see to the needs of the people and help the city prosper.

The other candidates for this role see that goal in different ways though, which is mostly through violence. They're weapons merchants whereas Du Ruo specializes in Eastian medical goods and supplies.

Both your paths cross when Du Ruo rents you while she's in DisCity on business.

Truthfully, you didn't expect much from Du Ruo when the MBCC informed you of your latest contract. As far as you were concerned, a client was the same as any other, regardless of where they were from. Thus, you resigned yourself to your normal routine when it came to such contracts: protect the client but also make yourself as unobtrusive as possible so as to not to draw any unwanted attention from them.

However, despite your best efforts, Du Ruo seemed to always want your attention but not in any way you had ever expected.

While she was every bit as polite and diplomatic as one would believe any dignitary to be, she had a playful side as well. She'd lean down towards you to whisper an amusing comment or two regarding a fellow diplomat. The first time it happened was enough to startle a smile onto your face despite your best efforts, and she took it as a victory to repeat whenever she could.

She always seemed to want your opinion in everything as well, preferring it over that of someone more high-ranking than your position. Du Ruo cited she wanted an unbiased observation even though your opinions of certain establishments had only been gathered from the few clients who'd been willing to treat you there.

Du Ruo only smiled at you, remarking, "Then that allows me ample opportunity to gift you with new memories of those places."

For the weeks that Du Ruo was in the city, she would spoil you with anything that caught your eye for more than a second. Each time, you always expected that she would want something sexual in return for her generosity just as all your past clients had, but the most Du Ruo would do was gently tuck your hair beyond your ear or chastely press a kiss to the back of your hand.

She was a gentlewoman in every aspect when it came to you.

It left you all confused but incredibly touched, and after some time, you couldn't help yourself from daydreaming that you were just two ordinary people getting to know one another rather than a Sinner and her client.

Unfortunately, your daydream was shattered when one of Du Ruo's rivals attempted to assassinate her.

You were all taken by surprise at the group that had surrounded you all, and Du Ruo's regular bodyguards were quickly subdued. Faced with the idea that she was in danger, however, your instincts kicked in immediately, and all you had to do was sing a few notes to paralyze your attackers long enough for you to dispatch them with your weapons.

All the while, you could feel Du Ruo's gaze burning into the back of your skull. Although she had been aware of your power when you were first assigned to her, this was perhaps the first time you had ever demonstrated it to her.

You weren't a normal person like you wished to be.

You were a Sinner.

A living weapon.

And so far beneath Du Ruo to ever be a worthy suitor to her.

You don't bat an eye when squad cars full of MBCC personnel come to collect you in the aftermath—not even when you can hear Du Ruo calling for you over the chaos.

You don't say a word over the debriefing of the situation nor when you're later confined to your cell. Your latest mission was deemed a failure by the higher-ups over the fact that you allowed the enemy to get far too close to your client—nevermind the fact that Du Ruo's own team hadn't sensed the danger until it was far too late.

You're punished for your failure, but you feel nothing from the pain, save for the heartache over a woman who you'll likely never see again. You selfishly guard the memory of ivory hair and gentle, sage green eyes in the depths of your soul, allowing them to warm you during those lonely nights in your cold cell.

Life goes on like it always has.

Until it doesn't.

You get another contract, where you're specifically requested by Du Ruo.

It turns she's been in DisCity for months because it was far too volatile for her to return home due to her rivals plotting against her. She's been hiding out in the outskirts of WhiteSands in an attempt to throw them off her trail, but she's requesting a high-risk extraction from the region until she's able to get back to Eastia and ease the turmoil that's taken it over by storm.

Or at least that's what Du Ruo's plan was.

In reality, her ruse for remaining out in the WhiteSands was a simple ploy. She was trying to find a way to free you from the MBCC's endless abuse and manipulation. Du Ruo couldn't stand the thought of you being nothing than an accessory—and little more than a toy at worst—by those in power.

Of course, nothing is ever that easy.

Her rivals have allies in high places, and the entire situation nearly gets turned on its head when more assassins come out of the woodwork. Your activate your powers just like last time, but you're taken by surprise when some of them have earbuds to cancel out your ability, having learned from the last incident.

The assassins nearly make a successful attempt on Du Ruo's life, but you throw yourself into the line of fire instead and die to keep her safe.

Or at least you would have died were it not for Du Ruo's own Sinner ability of resurrection.

You wake with your head atop her lap in the middle of a private plane that's taking you both back to Eastia. She's relieved to see you awake. Even with her power, you were unconscious for so long...

Seeing how confused you are though, she reveals that the MBCC believes you to be dead, likely caught in the explosive battle that rocked WhiteSands. She was able to smuggle you out of the city thanks to her own connections within it.

"And... what do you wish to do with me now?" you can't help but ask.

Du Ruo smiles as she always does, but you can see the tinge of sadness within it. "That isn't for me to decide. You were denied choice long before I ever met you, so I want you to have it now. I will never keep anyone unwilling to be within my company, so wherever you choose to go, I will accept it."

Because Du Ruo loves you.

She fell for you in those quiet moments together with you, and you found that you cared for her long before you ever knew she was also a fellow Sinner.

And that begins the adventure of you and Du Ruo trying to navigate love and political duties amidst a lot of pushback by her rivals and the MBCC likely trying to get you back since they figured out you weren't dead. 😅

It should go without saying that this fic idea is meant to be a slow burn. There will be some spicy moments between you and Du Ruo as the romance starts to heat up, but for the most part? It's fluff.

If there's interest in this, I'll go ahead and add it onto the list of WIPs. If not, I'll go back to my usual smut I guess. 😂

[the-reader-insert-gazette]

The Bitterest Medicine - F!Reader x Baizhu

Featured Column - Genshin Impact

Love unspoken is love lost, and Baizhu learns this too late.

✒️ Word Count: 475

The scent of herbs and freshly ground medicine filled the air as Baizhu carefully wrapped a bundle of dried lotus stems, his movements methodical, precise. The familiar ritual should have been soothing, but his hands felt unsteady today. His thoughts wandered, distracted by the soft hum of conversation outside Bubu Pharmacy’s entrance.

[Name]'s laughter.

It was different now. Lighter. Unburdened.

Baizhu closed his eyes briefly, inhaling deeply before exhaling through his nose. He knew why.

She wasn't his anymore.

Not that she ever had been.

The realization sat like a stone in his chest, a weight he hadn't accounted for. It was foolish—unwise, even—to have let himself believe she would remain by his side forever. But [Name] had always been a restless force, tethered to nothing and no one. Not even to Liyue, despite the way she had made it her home in recent years.

And yet, there had been moments. Fleeting, delicate things, like the press of her fingertips against his wrist when she had assisted in preparing tonics, or the way her sharp wit softened into something warmer in his presence. Moments where he had entertained the thought that maybe—maybe—she had lingered for him.

But he had waited too long.

And now, outside the pharmacy, she stood beside someone else.

Her fingers brushed against the arm of a man Baizhu recognized—a traveling merchant, one who had always carried a fondness for her conversation. He spoke in low, teasing tones, and [Name] responded in kind, her voice touched with that mischievous lilt Baizhu knew so well.

He watched as she leaned into him slightly, the way her eyes shone when she looked at him.

Not once had she ever looked at Baizhu like that.

"You're staring again," Changsheng’s voice coiled around his thoughts, sharp as ever. "It's unbecoming, doctor."

Baizhu let out a quiet sigh, rubbing the bridge of his nose. "It is none of my concern," he murmured, though the words felt hollow.

"Oh? Then why do you look like a man who has just swallowed bitter medicine?" The snake's amusement was merciless, though laced with something almost sympathetic.

Baizhu said nothing.

Because what could he say? That he had spent too long convincing himself that [Name]’s presence in his life was fleeting? That he had ignored the subtle shifts in his own heart, assuming there would always be more time?

That he had been wrong?

A sharp ring of laughter rang through the air, and Baizhu glanced up instinctively. [Name]'s smile was radiant, her eyes crinkled at the corners, utterly at ease beside the merchant.

Baizhu pressed his lips together.

One step too late.

He turned away before she could catch him watching.

"Come, Changsheng," he said quietly, gathering his satchel. "We have work to do."

And if his hands trembled slightly as he walked away, well—no one was there to notice.

Editors Note: Another failed one-shot turned drabble cause boy did I struggle writing for Baizhu guys. With a sprinkle of angst... yeah, I'm going through some times people.

[babycharmander]

TW ANTISEMITISM. THERE WILL BE DEPICTIONS OF ANTISEMITIC ARTWORK AND TEXT IN THIS POST.

Okay so, this is not the kind of post I normally make, ever, nor a sort of post I ever wanted to make. But this is an incredibly important issue that goes beyond fandom stuff, and I've talked with a few other people about it to confirm that it is something concerning.

I want to start by saying that I am not Jewish, but I know that you should never let antisemitism get its foot in the door. (If anyone who reads this is Jewish and needs to correct me on anything, please do so immediately.)

This was posted to the tags yesterday:

[ID: A screenshot of a post from @/liu4ka. The caption at the top reads "well he looks at me / and i look at him / and then he smiles" in very small, stylized text. The image below is artwork of Otto, facing right, with his eyes squinted and his mouth in a skewed, toothy grin, with his hands held up in a strange way. /end ID]

This picture looks perfectly fine at first glance... but the thing is, that caption you see there was not the original caption. I managed to get a screenshot of it before it was changed, and the original caption was this:

[ID: A screenshot of the original caption of the above post, which reads "well he looks at me / and i look at him / and then he smiles like sly jew" /end ID]

That's... a weird way to describe a smile. I'd wondered if this was referencing something, and apparently the first two lines are lyrics from a Weird Al song, but the third line is definitely not. That was making alarm bells ring in my mind, along with the pose Otto was in (which I'll explain in a moment).

Still, I wanted to give this user the benefit of a doubt, because it's entirely possible to unknowingly say something that sounds Bad. So I looked at their other account on VK (which is a Russian website that is, as I understand it, similar to Facebook--they have the same name there and post some of the same art). It didn't take me long before I found... this (photo taken with the google translate app). (I hate sharing this, but I need to show proof here):

[ID: A photo of a computer screen taken from the Google Translate app. It features a character facing right, with their eyes narrowed and with a toothy grin on their face and their hands clasped in a specific way in reference to the "happy merchant" Nazi meme. The caption reads "SCARY JEWISH MUSIC PLAYS." /end ID]

It's not in the screenshot here, but the post this was in also had a song linked with it whose title directly referenced the "happy merchant" meme.

If you're not familiar with that meme, please look it up, as I'm NOT comfortable putting that image on my blog. But it's an image people should be familiar with because it is VERY FREQUENTLY referenced by white supremacists and nazis, and that's what's being referenced here.

Obviously not every single piece of art with a character giving a sly look is going to be a reference to that meme, but CONTEXT is important. The Otto image isn't posed exactly like the meme--the hands are not the same--but alongside the original caption AND given the other art this same artist has drawn, I don't think there's any room for doubt here.

What also doesn't help the case is that there was misinformation going around that Otto was canonically Jewish, so I don't think any of this is coincidental.

I feel awful writing this stuff up. I never wanted to make a post like this, but this was a case where I felt like I should not remain quiet. Once again, this is something that goes beyond fandom. Antisemitism is not something you ever, EVER want let through the door, ANYWHERE. I do not want it in this community, and you shouldn't either.

If any member of the Jewish community wants to correct me on anything or add to this, please do so.

Thank you.

[scotianostra]

Patrick Colquhoun was born born in Dumbarton, on March 14th 1745.

Colquhoun was sent to the new world and served an apprenticeship as a sixteen-year-old in Virginia in North America. Likely working in a tobacco store.during the American Revolution he was part of the Government militia, in what was a Glasgow regiment to contribute to the government’s war effort. This part of history is being explored at the moment in the hit show Outlander.

On his return to Glasgow he became one of the city’s famous/imfamous ‘Tobacco Lords’. He had multiple commercial interests and was also a co-partner in the Glasgow-West India firm, Colquhoun & Ritchie, that traded with Jamaica and Antigua. As such, his wealth was derived from transatlantic slavery and its commerce, perhaps this is why he is not as well known in his native Scotland, we have a habit of brushing over the shame in the abhorrent trade of human beings.

In 1782 he built Kelvingrove House - in what is now Kelvingrove Park - as his residence. Colquhoun was Lord Provost of Glasgow, 1782-1784 and founder and the first Chairman of Britain’s oldest Chamber of Commerce in Glasgow in 1783. He was an honorary graduate of the University and the Colquhoun Lectureship in Business History is named for him. He moved to London in 1789 where he became a magistrate and published pamphlets on policing and other social issues of the day.

It is due to his work in London and those writings on policing he is credited with being the founder of the first regular investigative police force in England, The Thames Valley Police the first regular professional police force in London. Organised to reduce the thefts that plagued the world’s largest port and financed by merchants, the force was directed by Patrick Colquhoun and consisted of a permanent staff of 80 men and an on-call staff of more than 1,000. Two features of the marine police were unique. First, it used visible, preventive patrols; second, officers were salaried rather than stipendiary, and they were prohibited from taking fees. The venture was a complete success, and reports of crimes dropped appreciably. (In 1800 the government passed a bill making the marine police a publicly financed organisation.) This was a decades before Robert Peel established the Metropolitan Police, and it has to also be noted around the turn of the 18th City of Glasgow Police was established.

Colquhoun’s treatises on police also inspired the foundation of police in Dublin (Ireland), Sydney (Australia), and New York (USA).

He has also been criticised for his violent oppression “wholly in the service of an industrialist and property-holding class in the earliest incarnation of socio-economic warfare in the Atlantic economy.” He “organised political surveillance by spies and snitches of those opposing slavery. In addition to his Virginia cotton interests he owned shares in Jamaican sugar plantations.” So by many accounts a nasty piece of work.

Colquhoun has been called ‘the Father of Glasgow’ because of his role in promoting Glasgow’s trade and manufacturing during the late 1700s. In fact, he referred to himself in this way when drawing up his will in 1817.

We have a name for such people in Scotland, and it really fits this guy- Baw Heid.

[mangledmang0]

Nebula’s Culture Headcanons bc they’re my absolute favoritest favorite ever

—First—CONTEXT: Nebula was born on a planet not too far from Earth, but far enough that scientists haven’t yet located it (still figuring out a name for it). They were raised by scientists who dabbled in dangerous territory, and ended up having a meeting with the astrals. Nebula’s parents thought they could talk their way out of it, no one knew they were dealing with star power-no one had to know, either- but little did they know, Nebula was also interested in the star power. At only 7 years old, they snuck into their parent’s lab and got too close to their experiment… leading to a very bad burn, and the absorption of a small bit of power… Long story short, the astrals let Nebula’s parents live, but told them they had 2 options: The astrals killed Nebula, or Nebula went to space and transitioned into a celestial being. 

-The planet’s civilization is very keen on sticking to tradition when it comes to architecture and construction: using nets as walkways, building near waterfalls and rivers, primarily using wood for their homes, ect.

-The environment is very similar to Pandora’s from Avatar; luminescent leaves, ginormous trees, flowers that retract from touch, ect.

-Homes for civilians usually rest on the ground floor of forests, but also go up into the trees, plains, mountains, or even inside ravines.

-The water has a tangy aftertaste to it.

-Nebula mentioned that they had a resting spot in today’s episode, that spot is their old house, filled with things they found on different planets.

-The planet (due to some complications with the sun(can be viewed below) is pretty much wiped clean of Nebula’s species. The only people who’ve really survived were the people located in ravines and caves.

-The world’s climate experiences similar weather conditions to Earth, just a bit more extreme. Due to the rain feeling like hail all on its own, the leaves and flowers of the world are very strong (some require at least 10 minutes just to rip one leaf/petal off). Instead of snow/hail, the planet experiences something more like icicles falling from the sky. This results in colder regions to be desolate, and lots of traveling merchants to take longer routes just to avoid them.

-The people on the planet, despite avoiding the harsh weather as much as possible, still have the wings on the side of their heads so they can block the precipitation from hitting their face. (I personally like the wings as a feature on Nebula, and i wanted to give it a reason to be there)

-Speaking of: SN’s (temporary name for Nebula’s people) have stronger bones, especially their skulls, but still use head covers+other items to protect themselves from the weather

-Kingdoms aren’t a common thing. There were a few throughout history, but most got shut down fairly quickly. When Nebula went to space, there was only one kingdom standing. and even then, it was more of a democratic system than anything.

-Some castles still stand (albeit most are crumbling a bit), and usually stay abandoned as people pretend they aren’t there (a lot of them aren’t even marked on maps half the time). Though, some are historic sights that people can go and visit.

-SN’s have gods. They believe that the gods are curious of what their mother (the planet) has created, and spy on the people by taking the form of ordinary things (plants, animals, stars, sea rocks, the breeze, raindrops)

-The above is believed by the SN’s because there are multiple accounts of:

Animals that are supposed to die way before the SN’s end up outliving multiple generations, are outlandishly smart, and have a habit of just vanishing in a blink.

Plants staying in the same spot for hundreds of years while showing zero signs of decay or reproduction.

Breezes blowing open doors or windows after prayers from the SN’s.

Rocks stubbornly returning to a river bank or onto the sandy shores of a beach, even if it’s thrown out so far from the land you thought it was lost forever.

-The Sun is slowly dying, and it’s taking the world with it.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Too big to care

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.

Today, Google has a 90% search market-share. They got it the hard way: they cheated. Google spends tens of billions of dollars on payola in order to ensure that they are the default search engine behind every search box you encounter on every device, every service and every website:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

Not coincidentally, Google's search is getting progressively, monotonically worse. It is a cesspool of botshit, spam, scams, and nonsense. Important resources that I never bothered to bookmark because I could find them with a quick Google search no longer show up in the first ten screens of results:

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

Even after all that payola, Google is still absurdly profitable. They have so much money, they were able to do a $80 billion stock buyback. Just a few months later, Google fired 12,000 skilled technical workers. Essentially, Google is saying that they don't need to spend money on quality, because we're all locked into using Google search. It's cheaper to buy the default search box everywhere in the world than it is to make a product that is so good that even if we tried another search engine, we'd still prefer Google.

This is enshittification. Google is shifting value away from end users (searchers) and business customers (advertisers, publishers and merchants) to itself:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith

And here's the thing: there are search engines out there that are so good that if you just try them, you'll get that same feeling you got the first time you tried Google.

When I was in Tucson last month on my book-tour for my new novel The Bezzle, I crashed with my pals Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden. I've know them since I was a teenager (Patrick is my editor).

We were sitting in his living room on our laptops – just like old times! – and Patrick asked me if I'd tried Kagi, a new search-engine.

Teresa chimed in, extolling the advanced search features, the "lenses" that surfaced specific kinds of resources on the web.

I hadn't even heard of Kagi, but the Nielsen Haydens are among the most effective researchers I know – both in their professional editorial lives and in their many obsessive hobbies. If it was good enough for them…

I tried it. It was magic.

No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again.

That was before I started playing with Kagi's lenses and other bells and whistles, which elevated the search experience from "magic" to sorcerous.

The catch is that Kagi costs money – after 100 queries, they want you to cough up $10/month ($14 for a couple or $20 for a family with up to six accounts, and some kid-specific features):

https://kagi.com/settings?p=billing_plan&plan=family

I immediately bought a family plan. I've been using it for a month. I've basically stopped using Google search altogether.

Kagi just let me get a lot more done, and I assumed that they were some kind of wildly capitalized startup that was running their own crawl and and their own data-centers. But this morning, I read Jason Koebler's 404 Media report on his own experiences using it:

https://www.404media.co/friendship-ended-with-google-now-kagi-is-my-best-friend/

Koebler's piece contained a key detail that I'd somehow missed:

When you search on Kagi, the service makes a series of “anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek, and Brave,” as well as a handful of other specialized search engines, Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, etc. Kagi then combines this with its own web index and news index (for news searches) to build the results pages that you see. So, essentially, you are getting some mix of Google search results combined with results from other indexes.

In other words: Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-end to Google.

The implications of this are stunning. It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug. Google prefers those results to Kagi, because Google makes more money out of shit than they would out of delivering a good product:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24117976/best-printer-2024-home-use-office-use-labels-school-homework

No wonder Google spends a whole-ass Twitter every year to make sure you never try a rival search engine. Bottom line: they ran the numbers and figured out their most profitable course of action is to enshittify their flagship product and bribe their "competitors" like Apple and Samsung so that you never try another search engine and have another one of those magic moments that sent all those Jeeves-askin' Yahooers to Google a quarter-century ago.

One of my favorite TV comedy bits is Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator; Tomlin would do these pitches for the Bell System and end every ad with "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company":

https://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76aphonecompany.phtml

Speaking of TV comedy: this week saw FTC chair Lina Khan appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It was amazing:

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

The coverage of Khan's appearance has focused on Stewart's revelation that when he was doing a show on Apple TV, the company prohibited him from interviewing her (presumably because of her hostility to tech monopolies):

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/apple-got-caught-censoring-its-own

But for me, the big moment came when Khan described tech monopolists as "too big to care."

What a phrase!

Since the subprime crisis, we're all familiar with businesses being "too big to fail" and "too big to jail." But "too big to care?" Oof, that got me right in the feels.

Because that's what it feels like to use enshittified Google. That's what it feels like to discover that Kagi – the good search engine – is mostly Google with the weights adjusted to serve users, not shareholders.

Google used to care. They cared because they were worried about competitors and regulators. They cared because their workers made them care:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/4/18295933/google-cancels-ai-ethics-board

Google doesn't care anymore. They don't have to. They're the search company.

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

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

[marwyn]

What is the symbolism with both Dany and Rhaenyra giving birth to children with dragon like features?

One of my takeaways from F&B was that “blood of the dragon” probably isn’t a metaphor:

The Valyrians were more than dragonlords. They practiced blood magic and other dark arts as well, delving deep into the earth for secrets best left buried and twisting the flesh of beasts and men to fashion monstrous and unnatural chimeras. (F&B, Jaehaerys and Alysanne—Their Triumphs and Tragedies)

In other words, I think the Targs and the forty-something other dragonlord families (or simply Valyrians in general) likely originated from a gene splicing procedure which created humans who have some dragon DNA. This would account for magical phenomena like the dragon dreams, the slightly better heat tolerance compared to most humans, the slightly better immunity compared to most humans (which seems to increase when a dragonlord is bonded to a dragon), and of course the affinity for dragons themselves.

In my opinion this is supported by the fact that maesters tend to downplay magic (with a few notable exceptions, looking at my url) and attribute as much as they can to natural causes, as is the case for Maester Yandel, in-world writer of The World of Ice & Fire, but even he admits that the latter is insufficient to explain the extent of the Valyrians’ connection to dragons. Compare his description of them to that of the Crannogmen:

The great beauty of the Valyrians—with their hair of palest silver or gold and eyes in shades of purple not found amongst any other peoples of the world—is well-known, and often held up as proof that the Valyrians are not entirely of the same blood as other men. Yet there are maesters who point out that, by careful breeding of animals, one can achieve a desirable result, and that populations in isolation can often show quite remarkable variations from what might be regarded as common. This may be a likelier answer to the mystery of the Valyrian origins although it does not explain the affinity with dragons that those with the blood of Valyria clearly had. (The World of Ice & Fire, Ancient History: The Rise of Valyria)

Last (and some might say the least) of the peoples of the North are the swamp-dwellers of the Neck, known as crannogmen for the floating islands on which they raise their halls and hovels. A small, sly people (some say they are small in stature because they intermarried with the children of the forest, but more likely it results from inadequate nourishment, for grains do not flourish amidst the fens and swamps and salt marshes of the Neck, and the crannogmen subsist largely upon a diet of fish, frogs, and lizards), they are quite secretive, preferring to keep to themselves. South of the Neck, the riverfolk whose lands adjoin their own say that the crannogmen breathe water, have webbed hands and feet like frogs, and use poisons on their frog spears and their arrows. That last, it must be said, is true enough; many a merchant has brought rare herbs and plants with many queer properties to the Citadel, for the maesters seek such things out to better understand their properties and their value. But of the rest, there is no truth to it: crannogmen are men, albeit smaller than most, even if they live in a fashion unique in the Seven Kingdoms. (The World of Ice & Fire, The North: The Crannogmen of the Neck)

I do think it’s quite likely that the Crannogmen’s ancestors intermarried with the CotF, and there are some passages which lead me to think that ALL humans with the ability to skinchange have distant CotF ancestry. The Targaryens having some dragon DNA could explain why a few of their stillborn infants have been born with dragon-like features, but there are some other factors. In Dany’s case her son was killed in the womb with blood magic which perhaps interfered with that which already existed, although I would note that she never sees his body and thus we have to rely on Mirri Maz Duur’s (spiteful) account of his appearance, and in Rhaenyra’s case the in-world writer of F&B seems to harbor some doubts that her stillborn daughter really did have a “scaled tail”:

She cursed the child inside her too, Mushroom tells us, clawing at her swollen belly as Maester Gerardys and her midwife tried to restrain her and shouting, “Monster, monster, get out, get out, GET OUT!” When the babe at last came forth, she proved indeed a monster: a stillborn girl, twisted and malformed, with a hole in her chest where her heart should have been, and a stubby, scaled tail. Or so Mushroom describes her. The dwarf tells us that it was he who carried the little thing to the yard for burning. (F&B, The Dying of the Dragons—The Blacks and the Greens)

I’ve seen the pictures of the prosthetic baby made for HOTD and it does look like she has dragon features so the show at least has decided to canonize that, even though there’s much less of a clear cause than in Dany’s case. I suppose my view is that even if it’s not true in book canon symbolically it does relate to the more literal meaning of “blood of the dragon.”

[mariacallous]

Within hours of Luigi Mangione being charged with the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson on Monday, online stores were flooded with T-shirts, hoodies, mugs, stickers, and other merchandise praising the alleged shooter and featuring phrases like: “In this house, Luigi Mangione is a hero. End of story.”

On Etsy, WIRED found almost 100 listings featuring products with Mangione’s name or image. These include a tote bag featuring pictures of the alleged shooter alongside the phrase “Mama, I’m in love with a criminal” and PDF copies of a mocked-up cover of Time magazine featuring Mangione as Person of the Year and the tagline “Healthcare revolutionary, leading the charge to transform global health.”

These sellers are trying to cash in on the internet’s peculiar fascination with Mangione, whose good looks and privileged background have garnered him fans despite him being accused of a high-profile murder in broad daylight. The fascination with Mangione is a worrying trend, researchers say, that shows behavior that used to be confined to the fringes of the internet becoming mainstream.

Much of the merchandise is being sold by print-on-demand websites, which allow anyone to design and sell a range of products. On one such site, called My Porch Prints, one seller is offering a mug featuring a heart-shaped image of a topless Mangione alongside the words “I love my boyfriend.” A number of print-on-demand merchants are selling a stylized version of the Luigi character from Nintendo's Mario video games holding a gun and wearing a green hoodie. Another hoodie available on multiple online stores, including one called Chill Guy, features an image of Mangione surrounded by love hearts.

There are also multiple different T-shirts and hoodies being sold on sites like Nobele T-Shirt, featuring designs with the phrase “Free Luigi” on them, while many others use the phrase “Deny, Defend, Depose,” the words Mangione allegedly inscribed on some ammunition.

Finally, a T-shirt featuring the McDonald’s logo with the word Mangione superimposed on it is also being sold online by custom gift shop ModParty, referring to the fact Mangione was captured after staff at the fast food restaurant in Altoona, Pennsylvania, identified him and called the police.

Etsy, My Porch Prints, Chill Guy, Noble T-Shirts, and ModParty did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

This unusual situation meant that as internet sleuths worked to discover as much information about Mangione as possible, platforms such as YouTube and Instagram were working to shut down his accounts. X initially shut down Mangione’s account, but after CEO Elon Musk said he was "looking into it" the account was restored.

Google was also forced to remove reviews of the McDonald’s where Mangione was identified on Monday, after Mangione supporters review-bombed it with negative comments and one-star reviews.

Before his identity was revealed on Monday, his online supporters, primarily on TikTok, Bluesky, and X, had created an entire fictionalized version of the shooter as a left-wing revolutionary hero who was standing up for the millions of Americans whose lives have been impacted negatively by interactions with the health care system.

Videos glorifying the killer flooded TikTok, while one person decided to get a tattoo of the alleged shooter’s face. In Washington Square Park in New York City, a look-alike competition was held on Saturday.

Indeed, “Deny, Defend, Depose,” which is widely viewed as a pointed critique of the health insurance industry in America, has become a rallying cry online in recent days as the focus moved away from the shooting itself and onto the shooter and his motives.

However, the fictionalized version of the shooter that was created online does not match reality. Mangione, who allegedly had a handwritten manifesto admitting to the killing in his possession when arrested, is a software engineer from a privileged background. He also follows popular right-wing influencers, such as Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan, and Jordan Peterson—though he has also criticized some of the arguments put forward by these figures.

During a brief court appearance on Monday night, the police did not outline a motive for the shooting, but based on Mangione’s online posts and reading lists, it appears that the pain from an injury suffered while surfing could have played a significant part in his motivation.

Despite Mangione not fitting the idealized hero that many online created in the time between the shooting and his arrest, the alleged shooter’s fans have continued to post fan fiction about him.

On Archive of Our Own, a repository of fan fiction, half a dozen pieces of prose about Mangione were posted in the hours after he was identified. In one piece entitled “McGuire Road Designated Dispersed Campsite,” an author with the username basedIdiot imagines Mangione and another man on a road trip trying to escape from New York. “‘Oh, am I not your beloved?’ Luigi Mangione mockingly fainted into the other man’s arms,” the author wrote.

In another, an anonymous author imagines Mangione in Texas where he is planning to assassinate Tesla, SpaceX, and X CEO Elon Musk, inscribing the bullets he was going to use to kill the billionaire. “For Musk, he’s kept it simple. X. X. And lastly, X. Mocking goodbye kisses,” the author wrote. “But also a reference to one spoilt, psychotic rich brat’s latest 44-billion-dollar toy to break.”

Another imagines the suspect as the author’s lover while at the University of Pennsylvania, where Mangione studied engineering. “Luigi Mangione turns to you,” writes an author with the username Princesscockdestroyer, who claims she’s writing this fan fiction during her final exams. “He mouths ‘I love you’ then takes off down the street. As you watch him disappear from you, from your life, from any promise of a future together, you can’t help but finally realize that you love him too.”

One of the posts imagines Mangione hooking up with a K-pop star in a motel in Ohio while on the run.

On TikTok, videos with images of Mangione’s smiling face, featuring the Britney Spears song “Criminal,” are also racking up tens of thousands of views, while hundreds of videos with the hashtag TeamLuigi have been posted on TikTok in the hours after Mangione was arrested.

A report published last week by the Network Contagion Research Institute called the phenomenon of online accounts glorifying the shooter as a “cause for concern,” pointing out that it mimics the type of response typically seen on fringe platforms like 4chan and 8chan in the wake of mass shootings.

“While this phenomenon was once largely confined to niche online subcultures, we are now witnessing similar dynamics emerging on mainstream platforms, amplifying the risk of further escalation,” the report’s authors wrote.

[beardedmrbean]

The website run by Ye, which had been selling shirts featuring a swastika, was offline Tuesday morning after the ecommerce platform it uses said the site had violated its rules.

Shopify said in a statement to NBC News: "All merchants are responsible for following the rules of our platform. This merchant did not engage in authentic commerce practices and violated our terms so we removed them from Shopify."

The site redirected to a notice that said "this store is not available" Tuesday morning.

Shopify is a widely used ecommerce platform that a range of websites and businesses use to sell goods. The company did not say which of its rules the site had violated, but its terms of service state that it will act "to restrict products or activities that we deem unsafe, inappropriate, or offensive."

Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, used a Super Bowl commercial Sunday night to boost traffic to his website, which over the weekend began selling white T-shirts featuring a black swastika, the symbol of Nazi Germany and a widely recognized symbol of antisemitic hatred.

Ye has in recent days been posting antisemitic message on X, including claims that he is a Nazi, although his account was deactivated Monday.

NBC News asked Ye's spokesperson for reaction to the decision by Shopify, but had not received a response at the time of publication.

In a statement Monday, spokesperson Milo Yiannopoulos said: "Ye is an intergenerational artist and icon who continues to redefine the limits of creativity and free expression. He has deactivated his X account for the time being."

One of the most feted and successful figures in hop-hip, Ye had built up a fashion brand, Yeezy, which began as a collaboration with Adidas — but the German sportswear giant cut ties with him in 2022 over his antisemitic remarks.

Cloudflare, the company that provides hosting for the website, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.