#purified david

[ssyoi]

⚠️cw: blood + bruises

Purified

[juliwuzhere]

I wish they had explored the brainwashing plot more in camp camp before the show ended 😪

[irn-bru]

torn between being annoyed that ahsoka's story was completely changed in totj when it was infinitely cooler in the ahsoka novel, and finding it funny that ekj took a massive L lmao

[talltalestogo]

Withered

The dying flower, /

withered with its ending, /

purifies our beauty.

.

.

#withered #flower #dying #ending #purifies #beauty #haiku #poem #poetry #haiga #photo #oldnorthknoxville #davidebooker #august #tuesday #082024 #2024

[mostlysignssomeportents]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The same thing happened to the venerable Money magazine:

https://moneygroup.pr/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It cheated.

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

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

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

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

[auspicioustidings]

The Eyes of God

Summary: You are a researcher separated from your group and hypothermic in the mountains. It would be better you had died than be taken into the remote Monastery nearby.

Words: 1.7k

CW: Catholic horror, non-con (for context there is oral sex that is very much unwanted, starts with reader unconscious so somnophilia), exploitation, non-con medical procedure, mentions of cannibalism.

He sends out his command to the earth; his word runs swiftly. He gives snow like wool; he scatters frost like ashes. He hurls down his crystals of ice like crumbs; who can stand before his cold? Psalm 147:15-17

--

The blizzard had come without warning to steal away all of your senses. There was no sight but for the white in front of you, no sound but for the howling cold, no smell but that of ice, no taste but your own dry fear on your tongue and no feeling at all. How long had it been since you had been separated from your group? Seconds, days?

You knew the signs of hypothermia, had trained for the harsh conditions of this unexplored mountain, but your memories of it all scattered to the corners of your feebled mind as you shuffled slowly and aimlessly forward. Every step was a fight against an impossible foe, God like it it's strength. There was something in the white, a glow. You needed to reach it, you needed to reach it more than you needed oxygen.

Everything is too hot, you are burning.

--

Your nakedness shall be uncovered, and your disgrace shall be seen. I will take vengeance, and I will spare no one. Isaiah 47:3

--

"What have you brought before the eyes of God?" Alejandro asked of the man holding a naked figure tight to his chest.

"Wis hunting Father, as ye had asked" Soap replied, "found this woman naked in the snow."

Soap had found you as you started to tear at your clothes. He had watched. The temptations of the flesh had come unbidden to him, blood thickening his cock as your pale flesh met the deathly cold skin to air. It was kindness in the Lord's name to save you; at the Monastery they could cleanse you of this sin, of your whoredom. Make you clean so you could meet your end in a state of Grace. That was what he had told himself as he held you tight to his body, thinking if he could make you one flesh to save you from this cold he would.

"You've brought us something sinful Brother" Rudy said, emerging from the shadows and gazing hatefully at your nakedness.

"He has been righteous no Rudolfo? Something sinful is ripe for purification of the flesh and soul" Alejandro said, coming closer to run a hand up your arm and delighting in the coldness of your skin. A challenge from above he thought, sent to them on the brink of death to bring back and make whole.

"Of course Alejandro. Leave her here then, that we may make her well first."

Soap did not want to leave you with them. He knew that the Fathers could be cruel to sinners, they were so very cruel to him. He knew it was to serve a greater purpose. The unworthy and sinful must endure mortification of the flesh. But you were so soft and delicate in his arms, so decidedly feminine in comparison to everyone here. Did Adam feel like this when he willingly ate the sin offered by Eve?

"By one man's disobedience the many were made sinners. Is this pride Brother? Alejandro, perhaps we should call upon Ghost, ensure this is not able to spread as a sickness."

Soap felt the holy fear of God then. He loved Ghost as David had loved Jonathan, the covenant between them unselfish and everlasting. He felt at his most tested when he was called to watch him be purified. The last time Soap had disobeyed, the Fathers had hung Ghost on a hook and in the end taken a rib as God had taken Adam's rib. Only Ghost had not been deeply asleep as Adam had. His anguish had been loud and still tormented Soap even now after the place had been closed up with flesh.

He looked down at you, your eyes slowly blinking now that there was heat infusing into your skin. Perhaps this is what the Fathers had done with that rib, created another test for him. He laid you gently, reverently, on the alter.

"There now, it is not pride Rudolfo, merely care. By one man's obedience the many will be made righteous. You may go Soap, go to Ghost and pray."

Soap bowed his head in thanks before leaving. Ghost would be preparing his catch by now, no doubt he would have followed orders exactly and hunted down your group properly unlike him in his weakness for you. The Fathers had been diligent in teaching Ghost Genesis 9:2-3 after all.

--

So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great things. How great a forest is set ablaze by such a small fire. James 3:5

--

The first thing you felt was pain, followed swiftly by panic. You blinked rapidly then slowly, willing your brain to connect properly to your optic nerve and process where you were.

Staring at the ceiling. You felt your body on a hard surface, you were laying down. There was an unbearable pain in your chest and as you tipped your head forward to look you started to whine on each of your quick exhales, terrified. There was a tube piercing into your flesh, liquid flowing through it. The pain was dull and throbbing. You were completely naked, your skin illuminated and glowing from the hundreds of candles surrounding the alter you were laid on.

And then the true horror of it, two men dressed in the garb of priests, lapping languidly between your legs.

The third feeling was the perverse pleasure that came from their tongues on you. The animalistic sounds of wet lapping against slick folds. Your body did not feel like your own, your movements sluggish and heavy against your commands. It was like looking through a kaleidoscope and trying to see the original image, a sickly feeling of futility. Still, you stubbornly willed your panic to aid you and focused on lifting a hand to push away the men.

One of them lifted his head, chin dripping with you. In your delirium you swore his eyes were fully black, his teeth sharp and oozing ichor. Perhaps in any other scenario he would be handsome, a young man looking at you from between your legs. But not this one, not in the scenario where your hand finally reached his head to give a weak and pathetic push. Not in the scenario where he grabbed your wrist and twisted so hard it made you forget the pain in your chest.

"And if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off" he said, his voice ricocheting off of your skull and echoing there. It was too loud, too quiet, too soft, too rough. "Is that you yearn for? For me to relief you of your sin?"

You cried then, knowing deep inside you from his smooth grin that he would cut pieces off of you and consider it holy.

You are in a nightmare and you cannot wake up.

The hand dropped away to your side, terrified into submission. He went back to his task and now that you were conscious the rough texture against your clit made you want to throw up. You hated that it distracted from everything, that it felt good. Perhaps it was because the two of them were so close to one another in their efforts, but it felt like something wet and forked against you.

Maybe you could see salvation if you looked around, something to focus on other than the twisted flesh of your body and the twisted pleasure given by those pressed against it. Instead your eyes only landed on figures in the shadows.

Two men. One older and one younger. Looking on with something between horror and eroticism. The younger of them set his eyes to the ground when you caught them and sobbed out for some sort of help. The other took him by the scruff of the neck, pressing a forehead to his and mumbling something about Peter 5:8. After a moment they both returned to watching in silence. You could see it in them, the same fear you felt. The fear of something judging and all powerful bearing down.

It was as if the men lapping at you knew of your fear, as if they took pleasure in those who feared them. Their clever tongues were all at once precise and messy, forcing your body to ascend to a peak your mind found repulsive.

You came like it was written in scripture that you must; inevitable, horrific and erotic all the same.

"There now, warmed by the light of the Lord" came a voice. You felt your eyes move to the source against your will, seeing the second man now and feeling a primal fear at his face, blacked out with a golden painted skull catching the light. Below his chin was smudged obscenely.

He reached up and for a moment you thought he might caress you gently. In your state, you felt greed for such a gesture. The noise that left you was inhuman as he pulled the tube from your chest.

"Brother Price, fix up our guest and take her to her cell won't you?"

Price did as he was told, Gaz in tow. He wondered what name they would give a thing like you. You would be quick to learn the ways of this place he thought, not like him or the others. It had taken so much to redeem them into something that might see the Grace of the Almighty one day. He did not want that for you. He knew with certainty that Gaz did not either, the man had nearly went into a state of sin watching you. Price knew better than to feel anything like Pride, but at the very least he was pleased that he had been able to stop him from going to you for comfort.

It was such a wicked thought, but in his heart he felt it would have been better for you had Soap taken you for meat rather than for saving. It was a difficult and painful thing, being saved by the Fathers here.

--

Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Peter 5:8

But the one who endures to the end will be saved. Matthew 24:13

[bee-snail]

I had a vision

(redeemed) Daniel, David and Gwen !!! they are siblings, your honor

- Daniel's albino and David is ginger — absolute win in genetics right there

- cuddles forever (they didn't know how much they loved cuddling until they found each other, man. They didn't really have opportunities to do so before that because David grew up with Campbell (who's not exactly the cuddly type) and Gwen (who is absolutely not the cuddly type), and Daniel grew up in the damn Church of Xemüg)

- blankets are for the WEAK (and for Gwen) (she's strong but she needs the blanket) (honestly she'd end up hogging it in her sleep even if she didn't really need it)

- Gwen is very grumpy if awakened too early, and Daniel takes about an hour or two to fully wake up, regardless of whether he woke up early or late. David however wakes when the sun does and he's always immediately wide awake

- they have cute pajamas

- Daniel takes the longest to fall asleep and he finds himself strangely soothed by David's sleep talk. It's like a spoken, odd little lullaby

- both twins get bad nightmares from time to time. Somehow they always get them on the same night, even if they're far apart. twin telepathy or something.

- David plays with Daniel's hair when they're cuddling (so soft and silky!)

- David also plays with Gwen's hair when she's within reach (so curly and bouncy!!)

also this is very badly drawn. However I do think he'd grow his hair out because it lets him do more things to his own looks. He spent his entire life purified and the years after that were spent learning how Society truly works, how feelings are a part of you, and what he's actually like. Mentally, he was like seven years younger than David thanks to a life of purification, man.

He had to take time to explore himself, his looks, his hobbies, his sexuality, his gender; his true personality

It took him a while before he could genuinely pinpoint what "happiness" was, but now he definitely feels it. He loves his family (they love him too)

[thejournallo]

Explain the basic: The Tools

and here we are again with some basics!

Disclaimer: All the information I have is from books and reviews I did on each topic that I'm going to talk about in this series of "Explain the Basics." I invite you to have multiple sources of knowledge when it comes to learning witchcraft and non-witchcraft. At the end, you will find the books from which I gained information.

Today we are going to talk about the many tools that a witch can use and the variety of functions that they have. (You are not forced to have any of this tool in a specific way; anything you have in handy can become THAT tool; don't waste your money, honey!)

The clothes and accessories: there is no specific dress code what so ever when you practice witchcraft, but it can come to your own advantage when you use your own closet as a tool, even just for fun. I specifically use colors and accessories to present myself in a certain way, or simply because I give those clothes an important role. (ex: I wear yellow when I want to feel adventurous; I have a perfume that I use when I want to make new friends; and I use a choker to feel powerful and confident.)

The book of shadows and/or the grimoire: The book of shadow and the grimoire are often seen as the same thing because they have something in common. The book of shadow is more wiccan, and the grimoire is more for everyone outside of the religion itself. They are both used to write personal practices, rituals, information that can be used, etc., but the grimoire is more of a book already written. You can write your own grimoire, just as you can write your own book of shadows, and they both are good.

Altar bowl: It is not a fundamental object for your altar, but it can be used to make mixtures or squash some ingredients that you may need in a certain way. This is an object that is easily replaceable by a container big and deep enough to contain the ingredients (like crystals, erbs, salt, water, ashes, etc.).

Candles: When it comes to spells and rituals, the color of the candles matters just as much as the candle's durability. Some spells will require a short-term candle, and others will require an hour-long candle. MAKE SURE THE LIGHTED CANDLE IS AS FAR AWAY FROM ANY INFLAMABLE MATERIAL, LIQUID, OR GAS AS POSSIBLE.

Crystals: They hold power and energy that are crucial for witchcraft. Every crystal has a different meaning and effect. For a crystal to start functioning, you have to give it a purpose. Do this by meditating with the crystal, setting your purpose, and connecting it with it. Every crystal has different care and ways of clensing, but this is a discussion for another "explain the basics".

Incense: It is often used as a way to purify objects or environments that may be polluded by bad energy or feelings, even to purify our mind and body. There are two types of incense: fuel and non-fuel. We all know the fuel type of incense, which is the one in a cone or a stick. and the non-fuel type of incense must be lit only by a carbon disc placed on a heat-proof plate; generally,  we can find it in dust, a smudge stick, or a bundle of dried herbs.

Witches broom: is used to clean up the sacred space and wander off evil or residual energy from any spell or ritual.

wands and athame: an instrument used to channel and direct the energy. I know it sounds like Harry Potter shit, but it is used this way. The athame and the planchette are used in the same ways. The athame is a witch's knife and was used to cut herbs, etc.; the planchette is the little thing we found on the Ouija board that lets us see which letter is used. (Do not use the Ouija board as a game; it is no game.) be careful. 

books for informations: [ambrosia hawthorn-the book of spells] [davide marrè-conoscere la wicca]

As always, I will love to hear your thoughts! and if you have any questions, I will be more than happy to answer them! If you liked it, leave a comment or reblog (that is always appreciated!). and have a wonderful day or night!

[sleepy-roo]

.:Purified:.

Just the bois purified. Idk why but I’ve always headcanoned Purified David owning an axe as a weapon. I mean, it makes sense. Also, David did have an axe in A Camp Camp Christmas, or Whatever.

Reupload from Insta. Originally posted June 2, 2020.

[googledetective]

what I would buy each drdt character for christmas:

Arturo Giles - a toothbrush so he can use his toothpaste hair to brush his teeth

Charles Cuevas - illegally purchased uranium

Rose Lacroix - one of those super duper all inclusive cheap art sets for kids so she can really test her forgery skills

J Rosales - a Walkman and all of my favorite albums on CD so she can be exposed to my elite taste in music while still being cool

Min Jeung - a lizard

Hu Jing - I would get her bass guitar lessons only to benefit me bc then I would make her teach me how to play the bass guitar, and she’d probably be good at it bc she is already stellar at the zither

Ace Markey - idk I just would get him an air purifier cause I think he would need it

Levi Fontana - pink high heels

Teruko Tawaki - a night at a nice hotel, and I’ll order her room service too so she could relax

Arei Nageishi - I’d get her a scene kid’s dream worth of Hello Kitty clothes, accessories, stickers, decorations- anything and everything Hello Kitty

Whit Young - a girlfriend

Eden Tobisa - also, a girlfriend

Nico Hakobyan - I’d get them a weighted robe/blanket and this specific blanket I have that says “meowy catmas” on it and it’s like the best thing ever

Xander Matthews - a pirate eyepatch and a pirate costume as well as a Santa costume cause I think he’d make a great Mall Santa for kids to give their wishes to

David Chiem - happy pills or crack or just atp an alcohol dependency

Veronika Grebenischikova - I’d get her hot chocolate bombs but the plot twist is they’re actually bombs and in water they explode and don’t actually make you hot chocolate. that or a gun and she can play Russian Roulette :)

[querelleofbros]

The David Nelson story is largely unprintable, not because of anything David has done but because of what men would like to do with him. Fortunately, there is no need to tell the story with words... In white tights in THE BIG CIRCUS (1959), David Nelson's body is more starkly erotic than one that is "stark naked." The dazzling white of his costume erases all human imperfections and distractions, such as body hairs, blemishes, scars, pores, and so on, and purifies and idealizes his body while still displaying its exact form...

Characteristically, THE TIMES schedule ignored David's tempting body and did not even include his name in its listing; hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who have no other source of information than THE TIMES were thus unaware of the opportunity to see perhaps the greatest exhibition of a perfect male body in action ever recorded on film...

Comprehensive though the images of David's white-clad body may be, they only arouse questions--questions which someone on the crew of THE BIG CIRCUS could answer, and I hope will answer in a Letter to the Editor. Did David have his own private dressing room for this picture? When he changed into his circus tights, where did he leave his street clothes? Did he wear Jockey shorts? Where did he toss his shorts when he pulled them off? Were they ever stolen from his dressing room? Did he bring his own trapeze costume from his act with the adorable Del and Babs, or did the studio supply them? Did the wardrobe departments do fittings and alterations on his tights? Did he wear anything under his tights to, as it were, "catch the drip?" Did he wear anything to hold back his dick and nuts, which did not form a satisfying bulge in his costume, or was he simply, like so many men, not well hung? Where did he toss his tights after a day's shooting? Were they picked up by the studio laundry? Did collectors ever steal, or try to buy, his used tights? If David owned them himself and took them home with him, did he launder them himself? Did he examine them before laundering them? If so, in what sense? Where did he buy them? Where did he try them on? What did he think of his appearance in the mirror? Did he get a hard-on while dressing? Did his dick leak or drip when he thought of romance? Did anyone in the crew whistle when he walked onto the set in his tights? How, in such a complex costume, did he go about taking a leak, or taking a shit, during the day's shooting? Did anyone from the Fox wardrobe department ever sell his used tights? Laundered or unlaundered? I assume the wardrobe people were hip enough to know that the tights would be worth a goodly sum unlaundered. 

-- BOYD MCDONALD, 1985

[mental-health-and-jesus]

8-14-2024 | Heart Dive ❤️ Day 125 | Psalms 1: 2: 15: 22: 23: 24: 47: 68:

Book I Psalms 1-41 The Two Paths

‘But his delight is in the Law of the Lord, and on His law he meditates day and night. He is like a tree planted by streams of water, yielding its fruit in season, whose leaf does not wither, and who prospers in all he does.’ Psalms‬ ‭1‬:‭2‬-‭3‬

“God will make it happen whenever it’s supposed to happen” ~ ❤️

The Triumphant Messiah

‘Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling.’ ‭‭Psalms‬ ‭2‬:‭11‬

“Submit to Him that is going to bring that Abundant Life” ~ ❤️

Who May Dwell on Your Holy Mountains?

A Psalm of David.

‘He who walks with integrity and practices righteousness, who speaks the truth from his heart, who has no slander on his tongue, who does no harm to his neighbor, who casts no scorn on his friend, who despises the vile but honors those who fear the Lord, who does not revise a costly oath,’ Psalms‬ ‭15‬:‭2‬-‭4‬

“So whenever we speak truth it’s got to be covered with Love” ~ ❤️

The Psalm of the Cross

For the choirmaster. To the tune of “The Doe of the Dawn.” A Psalm of David.

‘In You our fathers trusted; they trusted and You delivered them. They cried out to You and were set free; they trusted in You and were not disappointed.’ Psalms‬ ‭22‬:‭4‬-‭5‬

“He let go all of His power all of His glory so that He could be become a Man for us.” ~ ❤️

The LORD Is My Shepherd

A Psalm of David.

‘He restores my soul; He guides me in the paths of righteousness for the sake of His name.’ Psalms‬ ‭23‬:‭3‬

“He leads us to repentance, He purifies us He gives us a new beginning, gives us a new name.” ~ ❤️

The Earth Is the LORD’s

A Psalm of David.

‘The earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof, the world and all who dwell therein. For He has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the waters.’ ‭‭Psalms‬ ‭24‬:‭1‬-‭2‬

“Not only does creation belong to God but everything within it.” ~ ❤️

Clap Your Hands, All You People

For the choirmaster. To the Psalm of song of Korah.

‘He chooses our inheritance for us, the pride of Jacob, whom He loves. Selah’ ‭‭Psalms‬ ‭47‬:‭4‬

“Why was I Chosen by God.” ~ ❤️

God’s Enemies Are Scattered

For the choirmaster. A Psalm of David. A song.

‘O God, when You went out before Your people, when You marched through the wasteland, Selah’ Psalms‬ ‭68‬:‭7‬

“Think about all of the things that He did, why He did it, how He did it.” ~ ❤️

[talltalestogo]

“Withered”

Withered The dying flower, / withered with its ending, / purifies our beauty. . . #withered #flower #dying #ending #purifies #beauty #haiku #poem #poetry #haiga #photo #oldnorthknoxville #davidebooker #august #tuesday #082024 #2024

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google reneged on the monopolistic bargain

I'm on tour with my new novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT in SALT LAKE CITY (Feb 21, Weller Book Works) and TOMORROW in SAN DIEGO (Feb 22, Mysterious Galaxy). After that, it's LA, Seattle, Portland, Phoenix and more!

A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google – which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed magic – suddenly turned into a pile of shit.

Google's search results are terrible. The top of the page is dominated by spam, scams, and ads. A surprising number of those ads are scams. Sometimes, these are high-stakes scams played out by well-resourced adversaries who stand to make a fortune by tricking Google:

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/phone-numbers-airlines-listed-google-directed-scammers-rcna94766

But often these scams are perpetrated by petty grifters who are making a couple bucks at this. These aren't hyper-resourced, sophisticated attackers. They're the SEO equivalent of script kiddies, and they're running circles around Google:

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

Google search is empirically worsening. The SEO industry spends every hour that god sends trying to figure out how to sleaze their way to the top of the search results, and even if Google defeats 99% of these attempts, the 1% that squeak through end up dominating the results page for any consequential query:

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

Google insists that this isn't true, and if it is true, it's not their fault because the bad guys out there are so numerous, dedicated and inventive that Google can't help but be overwhelmed by them:

https://searchengineland.com/is-google-search-getting-worse-389658

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Google has long maintained that its scale is the only thing that keeps us safe from the scammers and spammers who would otherwise overwhelm any lesser-resourced defender. That's why it was so imperative that they pursue such aggressive growth, buying up hundreds of companies and integrating their products with search so that every mobile device, every ad, every video, every website, had one of Google's tendrils in it.

This is the argument that Google's defenders have put forward in their messaging on the long-overdue antitrust case against Google, where we learned that Google is spending $26b/year to make sure you never try another search engine:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-10-27/google-paid-26-3-billion-to-be-default-search-engine-in-2021

Google, we were told, had achieved such intense scale that the normal laws of commercial and technological physics no longer applied. Take security: it's an iron law that "there is no security in obscurity." A system that is only secure when its adversaries don't understand how it works is not a secure system. As Bruce Schneier says, "anyone can design a security system that they themselves can't break. That doesn't mean it works – just that it works for people stupider than them."

And yet, Google operates one of the world's most consequential security system – The Algorithm (TM) – in total secrecy. We're not allowed to know how Google's ranking system works, what its criteria are, or even when it changes: "If we told you that, the spammers would win."

Well, they kept it a secret, and the spammers won anyway.

A viral post by Housefresh – who review air purifiers – describes how Google's algorithmic failures, which send the worst sites to the top of the heap, have made it impossible for high-quality review sites to compete:

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

You've doubtless encountered these bad review sites. Search for "Best ______ 2024" and the results are a series of near-identical lists, strewn with Amazon affiliate links. Google has endlessly tinkered with its guidelines and algorithmic weights for review sites, and none of it has made a difference. For example, when Google instituted a policy that reviewers should "discuss the benefits and drawbacks of something, based on your own original research," sites that had previously regurgitated the same lists of the same top ten Amazon bestsellers "peppered their pages with references to a ‘rigorous testing process,’ their ‘lab team,’ subject matter experts ‘they collaborated with,’ and complicated methodologies that seem impressive at a cursory look."

But these grandiose claims – like the 67 air purifiers supposedly tested in Better Homes and Gardens's Des Moines lab – result in zero in-depth reviews and no published data. Moreover, these claims to rigorous testing materialized within a few days of Google changing its search ranking and said that high rankings would be reserved for sites that did testing.

Most damning of all is how the Better Homes and Gardens top air purifiers perform in comparison to the – extensively documented – tests performed by Housefresh: "plagued by high-priced and underperforming units, Amazon bestsellers with dubious origins (that also underperform), and even subpar devices from companies that market their products with phrases like ‘the Tesla of air purifiers.’"

One of the top ranked items on BH&G comes from Molekule, a company that filed for bankruptcy after being sued for false advertising. The model BH&G chose was ranked "the worst air purifier tested" by Wirecutter and "not living up to the hype" by Consumer Reports. Either BH&G's rigorous testing process is a fiction that they infused their site with in response to a Google policy change, or BH&G absolutely sucks at rigorous testing.

BH&G's competitors commit the same sins – literally, the exact same sins. Real Simple's reviews list the same photographer and the photos seem to have been taken in the same place. They also list the same person as their "expert." Real Simple has the same corporate parent as BH&G: Dotdash Meredith. As Housefresh shows, there's a lot of Dotdash Meredith review photos that seem to have been taken in the same place, by the same person.

But the competitors of these magazines are no better. Buzzfeed lists 22 air purifiers, including that crapgadget from Molekule. Their "methodology" is to include screenshots of Amazon reviews.

A lot of the top ranked sites for air purifiers are once-great magazines that have been bought and enshittified by private equity giants, like Popular Science, which began as a magazine in 1872 and became a shambling zombie in 2023, after its PE owners North Equity LLC decided its googlejuice was worth more than its integrity and turned it into a metastatic chumbox of shitty affiliate-link SEO-bait. As Housefresh points out, the marketing team that runs PopSci makes a lot of hay out of the 150 years of trust that went into the magazine, but the actual reviews are thin anaecdotes, unbacked by even the pretense of empiricism (oh, and they loooove Molekule).

Some of the biggest, most powerful, most trusted publications in the world have a side-hustle in quietly producing SEO-friendly "10 Best ___________ of 2024" lists: Rolling Stone, Forbes, US News and Report, CNN, New York Magazine, CNN, CNET, Tom's Guide, and more.

Google literally has one job: to detect this kind of thing and crush it. The deal we made with Google was, "You monopolize search and use your monopoly rents to ensure that we never, ever try another search engine. In return, you will somehow distinguish between low-effort, useless nonsense and good information. You promised us that if you got to be the unelected, permanent overlord of all information access, you would 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.'"

They broke the deal.

Companies like CNET used to do real, rigorous product reviews. As Housefresh points out, CNET once bought an entire smart home and used it to test products. Then Red Ventures bought CNET and bet that they could sell the house, switch to vibes-based reviewing, and that Google wouldn't even notice. They were right.

https://www.cnet.com/home/smart-home/welcome-to-the-cnet-smart-home/

Google downranks sites that spend money and time on reviews like Housefresh and GearLab, and crams botshittened content mills like BH&G into our eyeballs instead.

In 1558, Thomas Gresham coined (ahem) Gresham's Law: "Bad money drives out good." When counterfeit money circulates in the economy, anyone who gets a dodgy coin spends it as quickly as they can, because the longer you hold it, the greater the likelihood that someone will detect the fraud and the coin will become worthless. Run this system long enough and all the money in circulation is funny money.

An internet run by Google has its own Gresham's Law: bad sites drive out good. It's not just that BH&G can "test" products at a fraction of the cost of Housefresh – through the simple expedient of doing inadequate tests or no tests at all – so they can put a lot more content up that Housefresh. But that alone wouldn't let them drive Housefresh off the front page of Google's search results. For that, BH&G has to mobilize some of their savings from the no test/bad test lab to do real rigorous science: science in defeating Google's security-through-obscurity system, which lets them command the front page despite publishing worse-than-useless nonsense.

Google has lost the spam wars. In response to the plague of botshit clogging Google search results, the company has invested in…making more botshit:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Last year, Google did a $70b stock buyback. They also laid off 12,000 staffers (whose salaries could have been funded for 27 years by that stock buyback). They just laid off thousands more employees.

That wasn't the deal. The deal was that Google would get a monopoly, and they would spend their monopoly rents to be so good that you could just click "I'm feeling lucky" and be teleported to the very best response to your query. A company that can't figure out the difference between a scam like Better Homes and Gardens and a rigorous review site like Housefresh should be pouring every spare dime it brings in into fixing this problem. Not buying default search status on every platform so that we never try another search engine: they should be fixing their shit.

When Google admits that it's losing the war to these kack-handed spam-farmers, that's frustrating. When they light $26b/year on fire making sure you don't ever get to try anything else, that's very frustrating. When they vaporize seventy billion dollars on financial engineering and shoot one in ten engineers, that's outrageous.

Google's scale has transcended the laws of business physics: they can sell an ever-degrading product and command an ever-greater share of our economy, even as their incompetence dooms any decent, honest venture to obscurity while providing fertile ground – and endless temptation – for scammers.

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/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

[deadbydangit]

As I was about to write something else, I noticed two bunnies hopping along in my backyard and it gave me an idea for something else. Please enjoy!

When the Reader brings home an animal.

Deathslinger, Nightmare, Spirit, Trickster, Ghostface

Deathslinger

He would've been perfectly content just drinking in the bar with just you.

And it had been that way for a long time.

Till you came back one day hiding something in your shirt.

"Okay. I'll bite. What is it?"

He thought you were hiding a gift or something.

He wasn't expecting you to pull out a kitten.

"No."

No matter how much you plead and cry.

No, don't give him those puppy dog eyes.

No, you can't-

Ugh, he can stay the night.

Okay, only till he finds a good home.

Well... He's your cat now.

You walked in on him one day, speaking to someone.

"Alright Fluffy. Now I may be the man around here, but if I'm not around you gotta promise to protect them. Ya' here?"

The cat was on the bar table next to him, lapping up a bowl of water.

Talking to the kitty like they were old friends.

He doesn't really do the baby talk thing.

"I trust you. I know you love them as much as I do. So we have to work together."

Don't tell Caleb you saw that.

He'll totally deny it.

But if his little Fluffy catches a rat, he's going to put that cat on a pedestal.

He's super proud of his cat.

"Look at that Darlin'. We won't be having any pest problems."

Nightmare

No, stop. Stop right there.

You're trying to sneak something in. He can tell.

Empty your pockets....

Both of them!

A frog?

Where did you get a frog?

Whatever, no, you can't keep it.

No, don't look at him like that. The answer is no.

No. Seriously.

Augh! Fine! But he wants nothing to do with the damned thing.

It's your pet. Not his. He won't be taking care of it.

You started noticing books on frog care around the house.

"It's not good to give them water that hasn't been purified."

"You aren't feeding him enough."

"You can't touch them like that."

So much for it being all your pet.

He's basically taking over.

It's like he's taking the frog as his own child.

It's pretty cute to walk in and see Freddy having full conversations with the frog.

"So yeah, trials were pretty good today. That David asshole really got what was coming to him."

Don't remind him of the time when he didn't want the little critter.

Because he will firmly deny it.

Spirit

It's a toss up over who would be the first to bring an animal home.

You don't even have to try and sneak it in.

Is that a puppy?

And Rin is all over the dog.

Kisses, hugs, plans on what you'll need to get, and all the possible names!

She is a huge softy for animals, especially fluffy ones.

"Oh! Let's keep her!"

She's the type to bring any animal home and ask to keep them.

And the baby talk this girl can do.

"Who's my wittle pumpkin? Who's the cutest wittle baby ever? It's you! Mommy woves you. Yes she does."

She won't even care if you're in the room to witness this.

Hell, join her in spoiling the puppy.

And outfits, she has so many outfits for the dog.

You have no idea where they even came from.

You will never see that pup without something on.

Hair bows, bandanas, hats, sometimes even little shirts or dresses.

She will find matching clothes for the three of you.

Don't think this dog won't be the most spoiled thing ever.

Trickster

Are you hiding something from him?

You are!

What's this? You've been hiding a bunny in your closet?!

He doesn't really care that you've been hiding it.

He's upset that it might receive more attention than him.

Ji-Woon is the super jealous type.

So jealous that he'll be glaring at this rabbit whenever you're carrying it.

Whenever you say you're about to go feed your bunny or play with them, Ji-Woon refuses to let you go.

You should pay more attention to him.

You should only pay attention to him.

Isn't he enough?

He'll come around though.

If the bunny makes you that happy, then he'll tolerate it.

Just make sure to give both of them lots of attention.

Ghostface

He actually was the one to bring the animal in.

"Hey babe, check out what I found!"

That's a snake.

That... Is that safe?

"Don't worry. He's super chill, see?"

He will shove that snake in your face.

He seems to have really tamed this animal.

You're going to be the one taking care of the snake.

It's name is Hisses, apparently.

"Yeah, like kisses, but he hisses. So it's Hisses. Get it."

Being terrible at naming things aside.

Danny is really happy.

The way he shows off his darling snake.

"Hey Sally! Look!"

He really enjoys showing people who are or potentially are afraid of snakes.

That power he gets over them.

It's going to get him into a significant amount of trouble.

But he's just so happy, and who are you to take that happiness away from him.

[tintagel-or-cockleshells]

beekeeper AU 👀

omg this is INSPIRED

Alex gets an obsession with those beekeeper videos on TikTok and his birthday's coming up, so he gets a 'beekeep for a day!' experience voucher. He Googles the place as soon as he gets it, and sends a text to Nora that starts with 'oh no he's hot'

David gets a little Beagle Beekeeper uniform. Mainly it's a face shield and little puppy shoes. He hates wearing them.

When Bea starting selling these experience days, Henry expected, like, Waldorf school groups. Not homesteaders, or cottagecore lesbians, or work colleagues doing teambuilding. And he definitely didn't expect a man whose eyelashes practically brush the mesh on the beekeeping helmet.

Alex is not a natural. He keeps upsetting the queen. After the third 'dive-bombing bee' incident Henry sends him to the gift shop, and Alex trudges off in high dudgeon.

Henry intends to make it up to Alex by giving him something expensive after the tour, but Alex has left by the time it comes to the afternoon portion of the tour (which includes uncapping honeycomb, spinning out the honey, and purifying beeswax). Henry personally sends an email asking Alex to come back for another tour. Just one on one this time.