#personal hoard

[genderdenied]

; *sobs in pronouns* /pos

; ( in no particular order !! )

★

; neos !! :D

; star / stars / starself

; shx / hxr / hxrs / hxrself

; xrn / xrn / xrnx / xrnxself

; cie / cier / ciers / cierself

; xam / xams / xamself

; ze / zem / zims / zimself

; watt / watts / wattself

; sol / sols / solself

; numb / numbs / numbself

; moth / moths / mothself

; rot / rots / rotself

; purr / purrs/ purrself

; raccoon / raccoons / raccoonself

; fizz / fizzes / fizzself

; wy / wyrm / wyrms / wyrmself

; pop / pops / popself

; ix / ixs / ixself

; .exe/.exes /.exeself

; pix / pixel / pixels / pixelself

; whirr / whirr / whirrself

; emojis !! >:]

; 🦝 / 🦝self

; 🎸 / 🎸self

; 🌙 / 🌙self

; 🪐 / 🪐self

; 📀 / 📀self

; 👾 / 👾self

[jeeaark]

For a while, Greygold had some apprehensions for how they'd handle their new appetite, but you know what? Omeluum was onto something with the whole 'Devouring The Enemies Of Who You Care About' dietary plan.

Favored enemy now has new meaning to Greygold. Their orcish heritage would be proud.

Unlike DnD's warding bond spell, nothing is more sexier than BG3's warding bond having no ranged limitations. Maybe Greygold is tightrope-walking the star-crossed lovers tragedy. Maybe Greygold likes a challenge.

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

joking aside, I love this site. I have learned so much from this site. I have received so much love and support from this site, and I hope to be here for years to come (especially now that we accidentally won Least Worst Social Media Platform, despite our very best efforts)

that being said, taking a break was really helpful for me mentally. it made me realize how much pressure I was putting on myself to keep people entertained so they would like me. I'm talking like, 'rereading & editing a single dumb shitpost a dozen times a day' levels of overthinking.

So yeah: I love it here, I plan to keep making people (and myself) laugh, but going forward I'm going to be putting less pressure on myself to be as entertaining/active as i used to aim for. Less "I choked on my gogurt" levels of humor, more "sensible chuckle." (sometimes I may even indulge in a joke that purposefully fails to resonate with the audience! it will be quite a mischievous little treat for me 🤭.)

anyways please be patient if my posts lack a certain pizzazz going forward. the pizzazz is out of stock. no there is none in the back room. the pizzazz is on back order ok. no I'm not paying for expedited shipping. our supplier is experiencing a shortage. pizzazz is a controlled substance, do you have no understanding of the paperwork involved? piss off with your piddling pizzazz

TLDR if you think my posts were mediocre before just u wait sweetheart you ain't seen nothing yet. (they are going to get worse. what I'm saying is they are going to get even more underwhelming. i feel good about this.)

[puppetmaster13u]

Prompt 209

Now Jason was planning on, well, a lot of things, when he came back to Gotham. He had a lot of plans, several of which had to do with the old man and even more that had to do with cleaning up Crime Alley, making it safer and all that. 

What he was not planning on was to find some sort of lab in the basement of where he was planning on setting up a safehouse. Nor was he planning on finding several literal children in cages inside said lab. Oh and Lazarus Waters- but children! With muzzles! Being experimented on!

Now he’d like to say he had a plan in what happened next, but if he’s honest everything had gone Green and he didn’t remember what happened next, only that he’s back home with said children and covered in blood. Oh and everything smells of smoke. 

… And apparently there’s more of these things dotted around Crime Alley with the rest of these kids, er, siblings? Family? Fright does mean family? Okay kids, he’s not turning into Bruce but you can stay here while he deals with this… however long that takes. 

He better not be turning into Bruce he swears-

[silvermoon424]

Fellow neurodivergent ppl, do you ever get shocked at how fucking autistic you are

[basket-of-radiants]

And before you ask, no, spren do not qualify as dependents.

[howgalling]

my sun haven farmer!! she hasn't got a name, they call her The Farmer.

she's been haunting the local landscape like a sad oily wraith for decades and is dipping her toes into socialising by leaving gifts she figured out the villagers would like (via stalking). she is trying her best! they know she is not a threat (to them)

[extraaa-30]

at the pitch meeting for the job episode:

someone: we need to establish continuity with the s1 biblical scenes, some kind of callback

neil and/or douglas mackinnon, about to be the funniest people alive: oh, haven't you heard...?

[chubbychiquita]

How does it feel to compare how much more you eat than someone who is smaller, in the sense they are small and eat so little compared to your gigantic feasts?

tbh it feels sort of powerful, like i am amassing infinite calories to thrive through the harsh winter and everyone else will perish

[nemurian]

@bigboobyhalo Your sacrifices have been accepted by the great Dapper. I'm so sorry but I don't think you'll be getting them back anytime soon. Or ever.

[draggysden]

I'm gonna be a busy dork all week starting soon, so here's a real early christmas pic for ya'll !

[violent138]

Sorry very random, but Americans legitimately have such fun idioms (I researched them once my partner had to teach me what "beating a dead horse" meant). And some of the funniest I found:

"Your John Hancock" 😶

don't let the inmates run the asylum 

Monday morning quarterback 

hair of the dog that bit you (gross)

bats in the belfry

Disco nap

[magpod-confessions]

i really like the established fanon designs for tma characters, but i want to see more diverse designs! why have we somehow agreed on one specific design, when it's an audio based media and the characters just have vague descriptions?

and i've seen people calling fan artists fatphobic for depicting martin as muscular or broad instead of fat, and islamophobic for not drawing basira with a hijab (newsflash: not all muslims wear hijab!!)

anyway yeah this has been my rant and fan artists, please draw the characters however you like, you don't have to follow a certain protocol (hehe)

.

[the-woman-upstairs]

Many reasons why I love Hoffman but one thing that tops the list is him sending Strahm to a Saw trap equivalent of a “Do you like me? Check Yes or No” note.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

An interoperability rule for your money

This is the final weekend to back the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, The Lost Cause. These kickstarters are how I pay my bills, which lets me publish my free essays nearly every day. If you enjoy my work, please consider backing!

"If you don't like it, why don't you take your business elsewhere?" It's the motto of the corporate apologist, someone so Hayek-pilled that they see every purchase as a ballot cast in the only election that matters – the one where you vote with your wallet.

Voting with your wallet is a pretty undignified way to go through life. For one thing, the people with the thickest wallets get the most votes, and for another, no matter who you vote for in that election, the Monopoly Party always wins, because that's the part of the thick-wallet set.

Contrary to the just-so fantasies of Milton-Friedman-poisoned bootlickers, there are plenty of reasons that one might stick with a business that one dislikes – even one that actively harms you.

The biggest reason for staying with a bad company is if they've figured out a way to punish you for leaving. Businesses are keenly attuned to ways to impose switching costs on disloyal customers. "Switching costs" are all the things you have to give up when you take your business elsewhere.

Businesses love high switching costs – think of your gym forcing you to pay to cancel your subscription or Apple turning off your groupchat checkmark when you switch to Android. The more it costs you to move to a rival vendor, the worse your existing vendor can treat you without worrying about losing your business.

Capitalists genuinely hate capitalism. As the FBI informant Peter Thiel says, "competition is for losers." The ideal 21st century "market" is something like Amazon, a platform that gets 45-51 cents out of every dollar earned by its sellers. Sure, those sellers all compete with one another, but no matter who wins, Amazon gets a cut:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Think of how Facebook keeps users glued to its platform by making the price of leaving cutting of contact with your friends, family, communities and customers. Facebook tells its customers – advertisers – that people who hate the platform stick around because Facebook is so good at manipulating its users (this is a good sales pitch for a company that sells ads!). But there's a far simpler explanation for peoples' continued willingness to let Mark Zuckerberg spy on them: they hate Zuck, but they love their friends, so they stay:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/08/facebooks-secret-war-switching-costs

One of the most important ways that regulators can help the public is by reducing switching costs. The easier it is for you to leave a company, the more likely it is they'll treat you well, and if they don't, you can walk away from them. That's just what the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau wants to do with its new Personal Financial Data Rights rule:

https://www.consumerfinance.gov/about-us/newsroom/cfpb-proposes-rule-to-jumpstart-competition-and-accelerate-shift-to-open-banking/

The new rule is aimed at banks, some of the rottenest businesses around. Remember when Wells Fargo ripped off millions of its customers by ordering its tellers to open fake accounts in their name, firing and blacklisting tellers who refused to break the law?

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/10/07/497084491/episode-728-the-wells-fargo-hustle

While there are alternatives to banks – local credit unions are great – a lot of us end up with a bank by default and then struggle to switch, even though the banks give us progressively worse service, collectively rip us off for billions in junk fees, and even defraud us. But because the banks keep our data locked up, it can be hard to shop for better alternatives. And if we do go elsewhere, we're stuck with hours of tedious clerical work to replicate all our account data, payees, digital wallets, etc.

That's where the new CFPB order comes in: the Bureau will force banks to "share data at the person’s direction with other companies offering better products." So if you tell your bank to give your data to a competitor – or a comparison shopping site – it will have to do so…or else.

Banks often claim that they block account migration and comparison shopping sites because they want to protect their customers from ripoff artists. There are certainly plenty of ripoff artists (notwithstanding that some of them run banks). But banks have an irreconcilable conflict of interest here: they might want to stop (other) con-artists from robbing you, but they also want to make leaving as painful as possible.

Instead of letting shareholder-accountable bank execs in back rooms decide what the people you share your financial data are allowed to do with it, the CFPB is shouldering that responsibility, shifting those deliberations to the public activities of a democratically accountable agency. Under the new rule, the businesses you connect to your account data will be "prohibited from misusing or wrongfully monetizing the sensitive personal financial data."

This is an approach that my EFF colleague Bennett Cyphers and I first laid our in our 2021 paper, "Privacy Without Monopoly," where we describe how and why we should shift determinations about who is and isn't allowed to get your data from giant, monopolistic tech companies to democratic institutions, based on privacy law, not corporate whim:

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

The new CFPB rule is aimed squarely at reducing switching costs. As CFPB Director Rohit Chopra says, "Today, we are proposing a rule to give consumers the power to walk away from bad service and choose the financial institutions that offer the best products and prices."

The rule bans banks from charging their customers junk fees to access their data, and bans businesses you give that data to from "collecting, using, or retaining data to advance their own commercial interests through actions like targeted or behavioral advertising." It also guarantees you the unrestricted right to revoke access to your data.

The rule is intended to replace the current state-of-the-art for data sharing, which is giving your banking password to third parties who go and scrape that data on your behalf. This is a tactic that comparison sites and financial dashboards have used since 2006, when Mint pioneered it:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/12/mint-late-stage-adversarial-interoperability-demonstrates-what-we-had-and-what-we

A lot's happened since 2006. It's past time for American bank customers to have the right to access and share their data, so they can leave rotten banks and go to better ones.

The new rule is made possible by Section 1033 of the Consumer Financial Protection Act, which was passed in 2010. Chopra is one of the many Biden administrative appointees who have acquainted themselves with all the powers they already have, and then used those powers to help the American people:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/18/administrative-competence/#i-know-stuff

It's pretty wild that the first digital interoperability mandate is going to come from the CFPB, but it's also really cool. As Tim Wu demonstrated in 2021 when he wrote Biden's Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy, the administrative agencies have sweeping, grossly underutilized powers that can make a huge difference to everyday Americans' lives:

https://www.eff.org/de/deeplinks/2021/08/party-its-1979-og-antitrust-back-baby

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/2023/10/21/let-my-dollars-go/#personal-financial-data-rights

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

Image: Steve Morgan (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._National_Bank_Building_-_Portland,_Oregon.jpg

Stefan Kühn (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abrissbirne.jpg

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

 - 

Rhys A. (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/rhysasplundh/5201859761/in/photostream/

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

[turtleplushi]

Borb day