#pyramid stage
Explore tagged Tumblr posts
Text
Michael Ebenezer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Jr
#Michael Ebenezer Kwadjo Omari Owuo Jr.#stormzy#British rapper#Stormzy songs#stormzy 2024#UK underground music#youtuber star#british youtubers#Wicked Skengman#Stiff Chocolate#Heavy Is the Head#Dreamers Disease#Grime#radio 1#WickedSkengMan 4#GSAP 24.02#Gang Signs & Prayer#2019 Glastonbury Festival#Pyramid Stage#Watch Dogs: Legion#Mel Made Me Do It#Toxic Trait#Grenfell Tower fire#Brit Awards#2019 UK general election#Gospel of Luke#This Is What I Mean#Noughts + Crosses#hot celebs#Christmas number one
3 notes
·
View notes
Text
youtube
#keane#keane band#hopes and fears 20#hopes and fears#glasto2024#glastonbury 2024#glastonbury pyramid stage#pyramid stage#tom chaplin#tim rice-oxley#jesse quin#richard hughes#Youtube
1 note
·
View note
Text
Dua Lipa - you absolute legend! 😍
0 notes
Text
She was absolutely on fire this evening at Glastonbury. Off the scale 🔥 😍
DUA LIPA performing at the Glastonbury Festival (June 28, 2024)
479 notes
·
View notes
Text
Sympathy for the spammer
Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.
In any scam, any con, any hustle, the big winners are the people who supply the scammers – not the scammers themselves. The kids selling dope on the corner are making less than minimum wage, while the respectable crime-bosses who own the labs clean up. Desperate "retail investors" who buy shitcoins from Superbowl ads get skinned, while the MBA bros who issue the coins make millions (in real dollars, not crypto).
It's ever been thus. The California gold rush was a con, and nearly everyone who went west went broke. Famously, the only reliable way to cash out on the gold rush was to sell "picks and shovels" to the credulous, doomed and desperate. That's how Leland Stanford made his fortune, which he funneled into eugenics programs (and founding a university):
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo-alto/9780316592031/
That means that the people who try to con you are almost always getting conned themselves. Think of Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) scams. My forthcoming novel The Bezzle opens with a baroque and improbable fast-food Ponzi in the town of Avalon on the island of Catalina, founded by the chicle monopolist William Wrigley Jr:
http://thebezzle.org
Wrigley found fast food declasse and banned it from the island, a rule that persists to this day. In The Bezzle, the forensic detective Martin Hench uncovers The Fry Guys, an MLM that flash-freezes contraband burgers and fries smuggled on-island from the mainland and sells them to islanders though an "affiliate marketing" scheme that is really about recruiting other affiliate markets to sell under you. As with every MLM, the value of the burgers and fries sold is dwarfed by the gigantic edifice of finance fraud built around it, with "points" being bought and sold for real cash, which is snaffled up and sucked out of the island by a greedy mainlander who is behind the scheme.
A "bezzle" is John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." In every scam, there's a period where everyone feels richer – but only the scammers are actually cleaning up. The wealth of the marks is illusory, but the longer the scammer can preserve the illusion, the more real money the marks will pump into the system.
MLMs are particularly ugly, because they target people who are shut out of economic opportunity – women, people of color, working people. These people necessarily rely on social ties for survival, looking after each others' kids, loaning each other money they can't afford, sharing what little they have when others have nothing.
It's this social cohesion that MLMs weaponize. Crypto "entrepreneurs" are encouraged to suck in their friends and family by telling them that they're "building Black wealth." Working women are exhorted to suck in their bffs by appealing to their sisterhood and the chance for "women to lift each other up."
The "sales people" trying to get you to buy crypto or leggings or supplements are engaged in predatory conduct that will make you financially and socially worse off, wrecking their communities' finances and shattering the mutual aid survival networks they rely on. But they're not getting rich on this – they're also being scammed:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4686468
This really hit home for me in the mid-2000s, when I was still editing Boing Boing. We had a submission form where our readers could submit links for us to look at for inclusion on the blog, and it was overwhelmed by spam. We'd add all kinds of antispam to it, and still, we'd get floods of hundreds or even thousands of spam submissions to it.
One night, I was lying in my bed in London and watching these spams roll in. They were all for small businesses in the rustbelt, handyman services, lawn-care, odd jobs, that kind of thing. They were 10 million miles from the kind of thing we'd ever post about on Boing Boing. They were coming in so thickly that I literally couldn't finish downloading my email – the POP session was dropping before I could get all the mail in the spool. I had to ssh into my mail server and delete them by hand. It was maddening.
Frustrated and furious, I started calling the phone numbers associated with these small businesses, demanding an explanation. I assumed that they'd hired some kind of sleazy marketing service and I wanted to know who it was so I could give them a piece of my mind.
But what I discovered when I got through was much weirder. These people had all been laid off from factories that were shuttering due to globalization. As part of their termination packages, their bosses had offered them "retraining" via "courses" in founding their own businesses.
The "courses" were the precursors to the current era's rise-and-grind hustle-culture scams (again, the only people getting rich from that stuff are the people selling the courses – the "students" finish the course poorer). They promised these laid-off workers, who'd given their lives to their former employers before being discarded, that they just needed to pull themselves up by their own boostraps:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/10/declaration-of-interdependence/#solidarity-forever
After all, we had the internet now! There were so many new opportunities to be your own boss! The course came with a dreadful build-your-own-website service, complete with an overpriced domain sales portal, and a single form for submitting your new business to "thousands of search engines."
This was nearly 20 years ago, but even then, there was really only one search engine that mattered: Google. The "thousands of search engines" the scammers promised to submit these desperate peoples' websites to were just submission forms for directories, indexes, blogs, and mailing lists. The number of directories, indexes, blogs and mailing lists that would publish their submissions was either "zero" or "nearly zero." There was certainly no possibility that anyone at Boing Boing would ever press the wrong key and accidentally write a 500-word blog post about a leaf-raking service in a collapsing deindustrialized exurb in Kentucky or Ohio.
The people who were drowning me in spam weren't the scammers – they were the scammees.
But that's only half the story. Years later, I discovered how our submission form was getting included in this get-rich-quick's mass-submission system. It was a MLM! Coders in the former Soviet Union were getting work via darknet websites that promised them relative pittances for every submission form they reverse-engineered and submitted. The smart coders didn't crack the forms directly – they recruited other, less business-savvy coders to do that for them, and then often as not, ripped them off.
The scam economy runs on this kind of indirection, where scammees are turned into scammers, who flood useful and productive and nice spaces with useless dross that doesn't even make them any money. Take the submission queue at Clarkesworld, the great online science fiction magazine, which famously had to close after it was flooded with thousands of junk submission "written" by LLMs:
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence
There was a zero percent chance that Neil Clarke would accidentally accept one of these submissions. They were uniformly terrible. The people submitting these "stories" weren't frustrated sf writers who'd discovered a "life hack" that let them turn out more brilliant prose at scale.
They were scammers who'd been scammed into thinking that AIs were the key to a life of passive income, a 4-Hour Work-Week powered by an AI-based self-licking ice-cream cone:
https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/995c8a778ede17d2d7cff393e5203157
This is absolutely classic passive-income brainworms thinking. "I have a bot that can turn out plausible sentences. I will locate places where sentences can be exchanged for money, aim my bot at it, sit back, and count my winnings." It's MBA logic on meth: find a thing people pay for, then, without bothering to understand why they pay for that thing, find a way to generate something like it at scale and bombard them with it.
Con artists start by conning themselves, with the idea that "you can't con an honest man." But the factor that predicts whether someone is connable isn't their honesty – it's their desperation. The kid selling drugs on the corner, the mom desperately DMing her high-school friends to sell them leggings, the cousin who insists that you get in on their shitcoin – they're all doing it because the system is rigged against them, and getting worse every day.
These people reason – correctly – that all the people getting really rich are scamming. If Amazon can make $38b/year selling "ads" that push worse products that cost more to the top of their search results, why should the mere fact that an "opportunity" is obviously predatory and fraudulent disqualify it?
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/29/aethelred-the-unready/#not-one-penny-for-tribute
The quest for passive income is really the quest for a "greater fool," the economist's term for the person who relieves you of the useless crap you just overpaid for. It rots the mind, atomizes communities, shatters solidarity and breeds cynicism:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security
The rise and rise of botshit cannot be separated from this phenomenon. The botshit in our search-results, our social media feeds, and our in-boxes isn't making money for the enshittifiers who send it – rather, they are being hustled by someone who's selling them the "picks and shovels" for the AI gold rush:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy
That's the true cost of all the automation-driven unemployment criti-hype: while we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no
The manic "entrepreneurs" who've been stampeded into panic by the (correct) perception that the economy is a game of musical chairs where the number of chairs is decreasing at breakneck speed are easy marks for the Leland Stanfords of AI, who are creating generational wealth for themselves by promising that their bots will automate away all the tedious work that goes into creating value. Expect a lot more Amazon Marketplace products called "I'm sorry, I cannot fulfil this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy":
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036156/openai-policy-amazon-ai-listings
No one's going to buy these products, but the AI picks-and-shovels people will still reap a fortune from the attempt. And because history repeats itself, these newly minted billionaires are continuing Leland Stanford's love affair with eugenics:
https://www.truthdig.com/dig-series/eugenics/
The fact that AI spam doesn't pay is important to the fortunes of AI companies. Most high-value AI applications are very risk-intolerant (self-driving cars, radiology analysis, etc). An AI tool might help a human perform these tasks more accurately – by warning them of things that they've missed – but that's not how AI will turn a profit. There's no market for AI that makes your workers cost more but makes them better at their jobs:
https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/
Plenty of people think that spam might be the elusive high-value, low-risk AI application. But that's just not true. The point of AI spam is to get clicks from people who are looking for better content. It's SEO. No one reads 2000 words of algorithm-pleasing LLM garbage over an omelette recipe and then subscribes to that site's feed.
And the omelette recipe generates pennies for the spammer that posted it. They are doing massive volume in order to make those pennies into dollars. You don't make money by posting one spam. If every spammer had to pay the actual recovery costs (energy, chillers, capital amortization, wages) for their query, every AI spam would lose (lots of) money.
Hustle culture and passive income are about turning other peoples' dollars into your dimes. It is a negative-sum activity, a net drain on society. Behind every seemingly successful "passive income" is a con artist who's getting rich by promising – but not delivering – that elusive passive income, and then blaming the victims for not hustling hard enough:
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/12/blueprint-trouble
I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.
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/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week
Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
#pluralistic#late-stage capitalism#end-stage capitalism#feudalism#rentierism#blueprint for wealth#predation#clarkesworld#kindle#kindle unlimited program#kup#pyramid schemes#mlms#multilevel marketing#amway#spam#form spam#enshittification#ai#llms#large language models#chatbots#ucm#seo#search engine optimization#dark seo#passive income#passive income brainworms
825 notes
·
View notes
Text
Carter, why are you going through the airport with a bird?
#Sadie is the kite#Kite is a bird#carter kane#sadie kane#kane chronicles#riordanverse#fan art#art#Red pyramid#poor boi just going through 50 stages of panic right now#Give Sadie a minute to unbird herself
74 notes
·
View notes
Text
More gravity falls art and some Alien stage art hehehe
#art#beginner artist#bill cipher#gravity falls#traditional art#gravity falls bill#pyramid steve#grunkle stan#stanley pines#fiddleford mcgucket#memory gun#alien stage mizi#alien stage
46 notes
·
View notes
Text
i put them in silent hill d(-_^)
notes + non grainy vers under cut
maybe one day i'll make a continuation with the surviving (for now) characters but this is just for the dead ones 🤗 (its more or less just the plot of silent hill 2....)
#alien stage#alnst#sua#till#ivan#myart#i like silent hill as an allegory for hell (temporary jewish hell) like yay one last place to hash out your fucking issues before ur dead#the real ivan isnt here he already went to yaoi heaven#guy with no problems clearly#if i could draw fucked up silent hill monsters i would turn nigeh into one. a la abstract daddy#i think it would be funny for till to just be fighting straight up pyramid head tho#the angel version of sua being a monster would be sick too...like she just pops out of the mirror smiling#takes up all ur shotgun shells..mhm#also since james is very....unbothered i do wanna clarify till would be fucked UP in silent hill#like ivan/maria would just unnerve him so bad. i think hed almost attack him a few times when startled#oh hyun woo is also there btw. hes like laura. i didnt feel like learning to draw him tho sorry
10 notes
·
View notes
Text
finally finished the remake 😞 23 hours because i’m a coward
#୨ ꨄ︎ ྀི babbling ୧#i got the leave ending…i wanted the mary one though#so i’m definitely replaying idc#i guess i did heal a lot?? but i looked at all the other requirements and the way i played didn’t really match to the leave ending idk#i think i messed up on the apple part too#i put in a ripe one instead of the rotten because i didn’t even know there was a rotten one until i watched someone play through it#and i was scared i’d get the maria ending (also want it but after)#in a puddle of tears either way oh my god the letter made me bawl just like in the og#the double pyramid head fight was sooo cool and the maria one too THE THREE STAGES YEAHH#the basement part with the mandarin was scary though#was there a way to get the hospital recording between james and the doctor? or is it just not in the remake#maybe i missed it
5 notes
·
View notes
Text
tomchaplin: Just a dork dreaming of playing the @ glastofest Pyramid stage someday soon.
[27.06.24].
#keane#hopes and fears#hopes and fears tour#keane band#hopes and fears:glastonbury#instagram#tom chaplin#keane festivals#glastonbury#they will play tomorrow at the pyramid stage
3 notes
·
View notes
Note
Theres a bird inside your ribcage..... I keep trying to forget...
WELL I DREW A LINE IIIINNN THE SAAANND
WITH THESE WORTHLESS FUCKING HAAAANNDS
I DREW A LINE IIINNNN THE SAAANND
YOU WASHED IT AWAY AGAAAIIIIIINNNNNN
#ahh thank you for the ask!!!!#i fucking love this song so much#i need to listen to the entirety of sister cities again#<- said like a completely normal person who didn't do the exact same thing last night#anyway. this song absolutely FUCKS live and i can't believe they didn't play it live at sad summer fest#yet another reason we need another headlining show where they go on stage and play every single album front to back for like ten hours#this would immediately fix me and then make me so much worse afterwards bc then I'd be chasing the high of that show for the rest of my life#so maybe it's better that it doesn't exist#pyramids of salt#the wonder years#sister cities#ask#lyrics#:3
2 notes
·
View notes
Text
instagram story: Sept 3, 2023
#cats oasis of the seas#cats oasis 14#cats rccl 14#source: charlotte reavey#angelical choir pyramid#stage cats
6 notes
·
View notes
Text
I just remembered I had a dream not too long ago that I was at an Emilie Autumn show but it was interactive and there were lots of like tunnels and long hallways you went through.
#i should start keeping a dream journal#theyre super detailed right when i wake up sometimes but then i forget later lol#it was like in a theatre or building not like the warped tour experience thing#i also had another dream recently that i was on a production stage for a movie and there were replicas of temples and pyramids and building#from all ancient world eras idk. and there was a like balcony i had to walk across covered in honey and i kept#falling in the honey and it was annoying lol
6 notes
·
View notes
Text
R.E.M. Live from the Pyramid Stage, Glastonbury Festival, June 25, 1999 2024 Craft ——————————————————————— Tracks: 01. Lotus 02. What’s the Frequency, Kenneth? 03. So Fast, So Numb 04. The Apologist 05. Fall on Me 06. Daysleeper 07. The Wake-up Bomb 08. The One I Love 09. Sweetness Follows 10. At My Most Beautiful 11. Losing My Religion 12. Everybody Hurts 13. Walk Unafraid 14. Star 15. Finest Worksong 16. Man on the Moon 17. Why Not Smile 18. Crush with Eyeliner 19. Tongue 20. Cuyahoga 21. It’s the End of the World as We Know It (and I Feel Fine) ———————————————————————
Bill Berry
Peter Buck
Mike Mills
Michael Stipe
* Long Live Rock Archive
#REM#R.E.M.#Bill Berry#Peter Buck#Mike Mills#Michael Stipe#Live from the Pyramid Stage#Live from the Pyramid Stage Glastonbury Festival 1999#Live#Alternative#2024
1 note
·
View note
Text
Moncember day 1, the "sword-tail lizards". They're based on an old design without further evolution line, so I'm still feeling out how many stages these guys should get. The original design stood on its tail, but that would definitely impede their ability to use said tail as a sword, so... Definitely need to play around with their design more.
#dark art#moncember#balance-wise these probably need to have at least one more evo stage to them so I need to rework the evolved form anyway#I like the Basic form tho. little lizard guy. spikes should probably be more pyramid-shaped than flat but I left it kinda ambiguous
0 notes
Text
Fortune 500 company
#Fortune 500 company#fortune 500#company#pyramid scheme#byo#picnic#ausgov#politas#auspol#tasgov#taspol#australia#fuck neoliberals#neoliberal capitalism#anthony albanese#albanese government#exploitation#exploitative#eat the rich#eat the fucking rich#class war#fucking grifters#grifters gonna grift#right wing grifters#grifters#grifter#late stage capitalism#fuck capitalism#washington capitals#capitalist hell
0 notes