#release order automation

[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

[caio-cc]

Smart Dot

Smart Dot is the next generation of Lin-Z. Use it to control your lights, play music, play trivia, order delivery, set thermostat and more! The Smart Dot learns as your interact with it. Just make sure it learns right.

All the features of original Lin-z have been kept and new ones added to make the smart home device more complete.

It's available in 5 different colors...

Price $189

In addition to turning on all lights in the house, smart dot offers new functions. It is now possible to adjust the color and intensity of the lights and make them to turn on/off automatically when there is a sim in the room.

Turn On Lights (Room/All)

Turn Off Lights (Room/All) 

Automate Lights (Room/All)

Set Color and Intensity (Room/All)

New services are available to call in your home device. 

Maid

Repair

Gardening

Nanny

Fire Department

Eco Inspector (The Sims 4: Eco Lifestyle)

In Base Game Lin-z, the function to buy pizza it's not working. Using Smart Dot this is fixed and with new feautures: 

Can choose pizza flavors now

Order Grocery Delivery (The Sims 4: Cottage Living)

Order others food delivery

A easy way to buy items, only ask to your Lin-z device what you want. Your sim can buy all items available in base game computer.

Books

Medicine

Seeds

Upgrade Parts

Holiday Crackers

It's now possible to set thermostat using your smart device. This option is only available to those who have ( The Sims 4: Seasons expansion pack).

All languages are included in this package, but a few words and phrases was translated using "google translate". If you find some wrong translation, please tell me to correct.

This mod can conflict with anything that modify the phone_pickServiceToHire_Deliveries tuning.

This new device works in the same way as the original Lin-z, but with more features. So if you don't have enough friendship with (Lin-z), he might not obey your order.

To unlock (Set Wakeup Routine) and (Ask About Secret) you will need have friendship with Lin-z.

🔗 Consider entering my pinterest folder to give your suggestion for the next set/collections.

📌 Share with me your prints using my content on tumblr and instagram.

📌 Wanna report a issue? Don´t hesitate to DM me

📌 Public Release December 31th

DOWNLOAD (Free on Patreon)

Check my social media (Linktree)

Terms of Use

[bucketofminnow]

Minecraft's 15th Anniversary Update — "Combat Adventures & Tinkering"

First off, Armadillo won the mob vote. Penguin came in with the least amount of votes, but we're told "not to feel too bad for the penguin. Remember, our little frog friends didn't win the vote either, but they still managed to hop their way into the game." Maybe there's hope yet?

Last year, the Minecraft team only showed part of the Tales and Trails update at Minecraft Live, and then continued to announce new features throughout the development process. They'll be doing the same thing with this next update, as last time they "collaborated with the community, and saw a lot of excitement in the community throughout the development process". The features shown today will be released in snapshots soon.

There's the new "crafter", which functions like a crafting table, except that you can automate crafting with it via redstone. With toggleable slots so that a hopper can feed it materials in the right order, you can make automatic crafting systems.

"After 15 years of Minecraft, it's time to test your skills in some new trials." They're adding a new, multi-room structure called Trial Chambers, which comes with new blocks, a new mob, and a new style of combat. This structure is procedurally generated, and every iteration of it should be unique and feel like you're really "finding a new chamber".

The Trial Chambers will come with a variety of new blocks. Mostly copper, but also stone(?) blocks with "geometric designs". I saw copper doors and trapdoors in the livestream, and new carved/patterned blocks, grates, and a "copper bulb"—a light source block that emits less light the more oxidized it is.

Trial Chambers will have Trial Spawners, a new variant of spawner that adapts based on the amount of players that join the fight. You can tell what mobs it will spawn based on what blocks are around it; i.e ice = strays. It spawns an unlimited amount of mobs compared to a regular spawner, and gives loot such as emeralds and diamonds when all mobs are defeated. Smoke will come out of the top of the spawner indicating that it's on a cooldown, so you can come back later and do it all over again.

The Trial Chambers' new mob is The Breeze, a "playful hostile mob that jumps around and uses wind to provide a combat encounter unlike any other in Minecraft". Its attack, Wind Charge, "doesn't deal any damage when it bursts and blows things away, but it does deal damage if it collides directly with something"—so it works similarly to the Shulker's attack. Wind Charge also interacts with certain blocks such as trapdoors and levers, allowing it to trigger contraptions around the room to make combat more interesting and difficult.

[queen-ofsunflowers]

With the release of Natlan, I'm finally happy to say that I think I have every main cast member for the Winx AU paired up with a pixie that I believe works well with them and their personalities. As the list goes (sans Aether, for a couple of reasons) in order of when they bonded:

Collei, Fairy of Forests and Yaoyao, Pixie of Blessings

Bennett, Fairy of Fortune and Sigewinne, Pixie of Medicine

Kaedehara Kazuha, Fairy of Sound and Kachina, Pixie of Resileince

Lynette, Fairy of Shadows and Klee, Pixie of Explosions

Lumine, Fairy of Night and Keeper of the Lunar Drive and Paimon, Pixie of Guidance

Barbara, Fairy of Song and Diona, Pixie of Mixology

Keqing, Fairy of Weather and Qiqi, Pixie of Rebirth

Kamisato Ayaka, Fairy of Snow and Sayu, Pixie of Disguise

Bonus:

Kaveh, Fairy of Architecture and Mehrak, Pixie of Automation

Navia, Fairy of Roses and Silver, Pixie of Loyalty (Her father's bonded pixie was Melus, who continues to look after Navia in place of her deceased father.)

[nevadancitizen]

-> CH. 13: THE JOYS OF SOVIET TECHNOLOGIES

synopsis: you celebrate the release of kollektiv 2.0, and meet a kind stranger and an american danseur that both seem really familiar.

word count: 1.9k

ships: Connor/Reader, Hank Anderson & Reader

notes: the long wait is over!!!! the research essay has been slain and i have time to write again :)

HoFS taglist: @catladyhere , @foggy0trees0 , @princessofenkanomiya , @n30n-f43 , @igna4400 (if you'd like to be added to the taglist, just ask!)

HEAD OF FALSE SECURITY MASTERLIST

The bright sun above fills you with a pleasant warmth, but the plentiful trees that line the canal provide a wealth of shade. Automated paddle boats cut through the water at a languid pace, giving the couples inside plenty of time to talk and a semblance of privacy.

People are friendlier now than at any other time of the year – you’re all attending a festival, so it makes sense. They smile and shake your hand and greet you with a happy “Is it not an amazing day, comrade?” 

The booths you walk past are showing off the new weapons they’ve developed and their upgrades (you’ve never seen a Kalashnikov in person before!), THOUGHT devices and their benefits, and a myriad of other advanced technologies only now being revealed to the public. But the bells and whistles are to be expected – today is a celebration of Facility 3826, after all.

The date is June 12th, 1955. And it’s a wonderful day to be a citizen of the glorious Soviet Union.

As you walk by, machines continue their routines. VOV-A6 Techs work on foot to deliver crates (you’d almost mistake them for humans if not for the mark on the middle of their backs and the unfeeling, unmoving mask they have for a face). MTU-7 Bumblebees move cargo crates through the sky, the sound of their blades beating against the wind sending a soft hum through the air. TER-A1 Tereshkovas guide tourists through the city, their feet barely scraping the concrete as they move. 

“Good day, comrade!” Someone’s voice cuts you from your thoughts. It’s a facility representative – a man dressed in a white labcoat, a crisp black tie, and a THOUGHT device (a module placed on the temple with wires that float off the browbone to reach over to the opposite temple). “Come closer! I’m here to help.”

“Hello, comrade,” you say. You look over at the booth he’s standing by. It’s a short silver pole, no taller than him, with a circular tray floating around it, rotating slowly. It has little different colored modules on it, each floating above their designated coupling. 

“Would you like a THOUGHT device?” He asks. “It’s high time you got one!”

“No, thank you.” You hold up a hand. “I’m just browsing for now.”

“Why restrict yourself to browsing when you can get your own personalized device this very instant?” The man asks. “I can help you pick out the right unit. It can even match your eye color!”

He picks up one and holds it close to your face, as if gauging it. “Ah, yes! A violet gooseberry model would suit you well.” He takes the module away and looks you over. “You… are polymerized, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” you say. “But… I thought those devices weren’t going to come online until next Monday.”

“That’s right, comrade. But some people like to get it early, like a pre-order.” He tosses the module on the tray, and it magnetizes back to its coupling. “At the moment, the device functions as a personal telephone set and headlight, but it also allows the user to get used to wearing it on their head.”

“Well…” You look over the modules on the rotating tray. “It’s free, right?”

“Absolutely!” The man says, a smile on his worn face. “Allow me to connect you.”

He gestures to the booth, telling you to take your pick. You look over your options before picking out one that’s a crisp cerulean blue – you don’t know why, but the color seems nice to you. Like it reminds you of something, or someone. You pick it up even as the device tries to stay magnetized to its coupling. You turn it over in your hand before pressing it to your temple. It sticks, and wires come out to reach over to your other temple, like a half-crown or half-halo. 

The man presses a finger to his THOUGHT device. After a few moments, a confused look crosses his face. 

“Khm, that’s odd…” he says. “It seems I can’t access your biometric data. Maybe there’s some sort of malfunction…? I’m so sorry.”

You take off the module and return it to its place on the tray. “Ah, don’t sweat it. I don’t wear a lot of jewelry, anyway. Thanks for telling me about it, though.”

“Of course, comrade,” the man says. “Again, I do apologize. Have a good day!”

“You too.” You turn to walk, but stop yourself. “Actually, sir – I have a question, if you don’t mind.”

“Yes?” He says. 

“It’s about…” You gesture vaguely around. “The people. They’re all speaking English. I don’t mind, since I can speak it. But I would expect at least some Russian.”

“Oh, yes!” The man laughs. “Facility 3826 is promoting the learning of English, just in case anyone sees anything of American origin. This is so if anyone sees or hears English, they’d be able to discern whether or not it’s a threat to the goodness of our Union. The festival is a good time to practice for people that are still learning.”

“That makes sense,” you hum. “Thank you.”

You continue walking down the street. It would’ve been nice to have a transportable telephone, but it’s not like you’re in dire need of one. You can figure that out later. 

There’s a small crowd gathered around a RAF-9 Engineer juggling various things it’s taken from the crowd: pochette-style purses, children’s toys, cigarette cartons. You stop at the edge of the group and watch as it throws the items up and catches them with pinpoint accuracy. 

There’s a hand on your shoulder. “Hey, kid.”

You turn and see a man. He’s late forties, early fifties at most. His hair brushes past his ears in an untamed, grey mop and his beard matches it. His face is worn, but his gap-toothed smile is kind.

“I’m sorry, comrade.” You smile politely. “But I… don’t recognize you. You’re probably mistaking me for someone else.”

“Oh, shit,” he says, removing his hand from your shoulder. “You look like someone I know. My bad.”

“Well, I’m sure your friend is around here somewhere!” You try. “They may be at one of the cheburek or bliny stands. There’s a really good one selling bliny just down that way.”

The stranger checks over his shoulder, where you were pointing, then looks back to you. “I’m not from around here. You mind showing me the way?”

You check your pocket watch and mentally count the time until Dmitry Sechenov’s grand speech. You’re not crunched for time yet, and it would do you good to have something to tide you over until you could eat a real meal.

“Yeah, sure.” You start walking, and the stranger matches your pace.

“The stand has a few fillings,” you say, both to fill dead air and to make the silence less awkward. “Fruit preservatives – cherries, apples, plums, berries – meat, honey, or just plain with butter and salt.”

“What’s your recommendation?” The now-somewhat-familiar stranger asks. 

“Well, in the spring, they’d have imported lemon preservatives,” you say. “But it’s summer, so that well’s dried up. I’d just go with the cherries. Sweet or bitter, it doesn’t really matter to me.”

“You’re just makin’ me hungry,” the stranger mumbles with a smile.

You laugh. “That’s the idea, no?”

After another minute of walking, the stand comes into view. Two men are operating the stand, and the soft scent of batter on the griddle beckons you closer. A radio is playing.

“Look at the menu,” you tell the familiar-stranger. “Take your pick. It’s cheap, so I’ll pay.”

You look around while he looks at the menu. There’s other people, obviously, and some on the canal are pointing at a man in an automated paddleboat. You barely hear whispers of “It’s comrade Major Nechayev!”

You turn your eyes away. Nechayev doesn’t really interest you. From what you’ve heard, he’s just some military dog leftover from the Red Army. What does interest you is the crowd across the canal. 

They’re gathered around some sort of stage that must’ve been assembled temporarily for the festival, like an American carnival. You watch for a few moments, but can’t glimpse what’s happening on stage. 

The stranger pulls you out of your thoughts. “Hey, what’re they talkin’ about on the radio?”

You turn back to him. “Huh?”

He points at the radio that’s playing on the bliny stand. It’s playing a jingle: “For the greatest advancements in cosmetic enhancements, there’s only one man you should be trusting your glam with!”

You listen a little longer and catch a name – Doctor Steinman – and roll your eyes. “It’s that underwater city off the coast of Iceland. The one that uses the same technologies as the ones invented to create the Neptune complex here.”

The stranger nudges you. “Why’re you rollin’ your eyes?”

“The city won’t last,” you say. “They say that it’s a city where the great won’t be brought down by the small. And all those immigrants go to Rapture thinking they’ll survive the fire of American-based industry. But they forget that, even in utopia, someone has to scrub the toilets.”

“Yeah, that’s a factor most forget,” the stranger says. 

“Eh, what else do you expect from capitalists?” You shrug. “Let’s just order. What do you want?”

The stranger looks back at the menu. “Uh… a bliny with… apple preserves.”

You quickly order your bliny and his and fork over the rubles, then look across the canal. The performance is still going. 

“Listen, khm,” you say to the stranger without looking away from the stage. “Can you watch our order? I want to see what’s happening across the canal.”

“Uh… yeah, sure,” the stranger says. 

You thank him quickly and hurry over the bridge to get to the other side of the waterway. You slowly make your way through the crowd – not to the front, but just enough so you can see…

A danseur? (Or a ‘ballerino’ in other countries, you suppose.) He’s wearing a form-fitting black shirt and a matching pair of tights. His pointe shoes are a soft pink, just a few shades off his skin tone. A THOUGHT device crowns his head – the same cerulean blue model you were looking at earlier. 

As he moves, he matches the music perfectly. It’s like he was born to extract the flow and rhythm from music and express it in dance. His feet don’t break their arch and don’t falter, even for a split second. 

Then, he turns. On his front, over his left breast, is a small American flag. 

Your eyebrows crease. You lean over and quietly ask a nearby woman, “He’s from America?”

“It was made in America,” she whispers back. “It’s an android, comrade.”

The danseur turns his head as his arm swoops up to point his fingertips to the sky. His soft, brown eyes lock with yours with you and you feel… you don’t know what you feel. It’s something physical, on your back. Maybe someone bumped into you? But the crowd isn’t moving. 

You take a step backwards as he continues staring at you, stock-still. You take another, then look behind you. The crowd is gone.

“Какого хуя?” You mumble. 

You look back up at the danseur. He’s moved a little closer, his feet just barely stepping off the stage. He comes closer, his movements still fluid and graceful, like he’s still dancing.

“Officer?” He asks softly. 

“What?” You say. 

His hand comes to your face, his fingertips just barely brushing across your jawline. His lips start to form a word, but –

-> CH 13: GOOD, HONEST SNAKE OIL – IF THERE IS SUCH A THING!

synopsis: after you and arthur swing by the sheriff's office, you go on a run to hunt a bounty and meet a man who seems really familiar.

word count: 1.3k

ships: CH: “mister kamski? the officer is stable, and is responding well to the reintegration system.”

notes: EK: “make sure they go through each as quickly as possible, chloe. i need to see if they can get back on their feet.”

HoTS taglist: @catladyhere , @foggy0trees0 , @princessofenkanomiya , @n30n-f43 , @igna4400 (if you'd like to be added to the taglist, just ask!)

HOUSE OF TRUE SECURITY MASTERLIST

“I got it.” A voice pulls you to look over at the entrance to the Valentine’s Sheriff’s Office. It’s Arthur Morgan, holding up a folded-up wanted poster. 

You lean down from your horse (a beautiful Dutch Warmblood named Bronya) and reach out to Arthur as he approaches. “Give this to me.”

Arthur hands over the poster, and you unfold it. It’s for one mister Benedict Allbright – needed alive, for a reward of fifty dollars.

“He needs to be living?” You say. “This is unlike you.”

Arthur mounts his horse, a Tenessee Walker named Marie. He clicks his tongue and presses his legs together against Marie’s flank once, and she starts trotting. You and Bronya follow. 

“Was the only one there,” Arthur says as you pull up beside him. “They says he’s been poisonin’ folks with some ‘miracle cure’ from here to Annesburg. Says he killed more ‘n Landon Ricketts without even pullin’ a trigger.”

“Troubling,” you say. “He is dangerous?”

Arthur looks over at you. “Would I bring you along if he was?”

“He cannot be more trouble than Angel Island,” you say. 

And everything comes rushing back. The Wild West is being tamed. A robbery in Blackwater went wrong, and you and the rest of the Van der Linde gang were forced to flee east – the exact opposite of where you wanted to go. And you’re only in this mess because of the officials operating Angel Island. They somehow messed up your papers, and you couldn’t get the work you were promised. You were forced to steal, lie and sometimes even kill to get your way. 

The date is June 12th, 1899. And it’s a normal day as a somewhat-citizen of the United States of America.

“Where is this… Allbright?” You ask. 

“Fellers down at the Sheriff’s said he was holed up in some gorge north a’ here,” Arthur says. 

“Ah! I know what you speak of,” you say, squeezing Bronya’s sides with your claves. She breaks into a canter. “Follow!”

“Now, you can’t just –!” Arthur makes an exasperated sound, then matches your speed. “At least give me a warnin’!”

You laugh, the sound full of warmth. The ground beneath the horses’ hooves turns from the mud of Valentine into the drier dirt of the outer town limits. 

A few minutes later, you pull off the well-trodden trail and into the knee-high grasses. You lead Arthur through the sparse trees that make up the edges of Cumberland Forest.

“How come you know these parts so well?” Arthur asks, breaking the somewhat-silence.

“I have a good head,” you say. “After riding through this place once, I know it, um… I know it like…” You grumble, frustrated. You know what you’re trying to say, but just… can’t articulate it right. You’re tempted to just say it in Russian, but Arthur wouldn’t understand, and you would risk any passerby potentially becoming hostile. (Shouldn’t you speak better English than this? You remember speaking better English than this…)

“What’re you tryna say?” Arthur asks. He’s used to this.

You take one of your hands away from the reins and hold it up. “Something to do with hands. I know it like… like my hands know it?”

“Like the back of my hand,” Arthur corrects. 

“That!” You chime, re-taking the reins in hand. “I know it like the back of my hand.”

You hear the sound of water running along a riverbed and perk up. “We are close.”

Marie follows Bronya as you guide her up a slope into a small alcove carved into a mountain. It’s a thin slope – on one side is the mountain, and on the other is a twenty-meter drop into a river. The alcove is housing a man – supposedly Benedict Allbright – and his horse.

You turn back to Arthur and jerk your head towards Allbright. He’s always been the more intimidating of you two, so you’re letting him lead this one. 

Arthur grunts and dismounts his horse before walking by Bronya, towards Allbright. “Oh, what we got here?”

He continues walking forward until he comes to a stop just before Allbright’s bedroll and campfire. “Are you Benedict Allbright?”

Allbright stands, backing away from Arthur a bit. “N-no, sir.”

“You kinda look like him,” Arthur says. “And we was told he’d be up here.”

“No, uh,” Allbright says. “Not me, sir.”

“It’s because…” Arthur sighs, and looks out of the alcove, down at the river. “I wanna buy some medicine. And, I heard… I heard good things.”

The corner of your mouth twitches up. Arthur could rival Hosea with his tact for semantics, even if he adamantly denies it. 

“I’ll pay – in gold – i-if you can help me find him. It’s just…” Arthur glances over at you, then the ground, like it pains him to look at you. “My brother’s child over there is real sick. Russiatitus, they was callin’ it. Rare disease. We tried all them medicines they said to try, but… nothin’s workin’.”

“Oh!” Allbright looks over at you through his spectacles and smiles. “Well… if it’s for the ill, I’d be more than happy to help!”

He turns and walks over to his bags, picking out a small bottle filled with a viscous, dark yellow liquid. “I’m a healer, y’know? A medical man.”

Allbright turns back and hands it to Arthur. “Finest medicine in the state.”

Arthur pretends to be wowed, then tosses the bottle off the edge of the alcove and into the river. Before Allbright has time to react, he’s drawn his revolver. So have you. You spur Bronya to walk forward, past Allbright’s horse and partially into his camp.

“Game’s over, mister.” Arthur angles himself so that he’s blocking the only other exit. “Put your hands up – we’re takin’ you in.”

“Takin’ me in?” Allbright repeats, like it’s the most ridiculous thing he’s ever heard. He puts his hands up. “What for?”

“Apparently that stuff you’re pushin’ is killin’ folk, n’ there’s a price on your head,” Arthur says. “I don’t know, it ain’t my business.”

“C’mon, partner, that’s crap. I’m a healer! I-I’ve got an aura… I speak to spirits! I’m a scientist!” Allbright insists. “Folks get real angry for no good reason, and this… this is a mistake.” He looks over at you. “S-surely you can talk some sense into him?”

“Hm…” You twitch your nose and shrug, not lowering your gun. “No.”

“Keep your hands up, buddy.” Arthur reaches forward carefully, taking Allbright’s gun from its holster and tossing it into the river. “They only want you for questionin’.”

“I – I have to insist that this is a mistake,” Allbright says. 

“Don’t be a fool,” Arthur says, corralling him towards the edge of the alcove. 

You look down at the river, then notice… a man. He’s looking up at you from where he stands in the riverbed, his pants soaked up to the knee. And – shit, from where he’s standing, he can clearly see you and Arthur pointing your guns at Allbright.

“Arthur,” you say without looking away from the man. “A man is watching. Maybe he is thinking we are robbing.”

“Go get ‘im,” Arthur says. “I got this handled.”

You click your tongue and tug on Bronya’s reins. She turns and starts walking down the slope to the river. 

The man doesn’t run as you approach him, despite your saddlebag holsters both holding rifles. Instead, he’s just… staring, with soft, brown eyes. 

He seems… familiar. Really familiar. Then again, Angel Island is on the west coast, and you’re pretty far from there, so you’ve seen a lot of people while in America. But… the bright blue stain on his temple seems so familiar. God, you swear you know him. Where is he from?

“You are watching me and my friend?” You ask, jerking your head towards the alcove. “The man is a bounty. He has been killing people from here and eastward, poisoning them with a… tonic. We do not rob for joy. We hunt bounties.”

The man walks forward, almost stumbling on the stones of the riverbed. “Officer?”

You rack your brain for that word, but come up with nothing. “I – I do not know the meaning of this English word… officer.”

He swallows thickly, then takes a breath. His lips start to form a word, but –

-> CH. 13: LET’S TALK HOMECOMING (THE MILITARY OPERATION, NOT PROM)

synopsis: you wake up on a helicopter, fresh from being saved, and meet a pilot that seems really familiar.

word count: ~900

ships: CH: “they were relatively unresponsive to that one. shall i introduce one that is less familiar?”

notes: EK: “yes. it should still be american, but... mixed with soviet suffering.”

ToFS taglist: @catladyhere , @foggy0trees0 , @princessofenkanomiya , @n30n-f43 , @igna4400 (if you'd like to be added to the taglist, just ask!)

THREAT OF FALSE SECURITY MASTERLIST

“Wake up,” a voice mumbles. A hand grasps your shoulder and shakes you. “C’mon, commie…”

You open your eyes and see a man that’s familiar, but not. Like you’ve known him your whole life but only really registered his existence just now. He’s wearing a half-balaclava with a skull pattern and a beanie, and the skin around his ice-blue eyes is smeared with black greasepaint. 

“What the hell is happening?” You manage through gritted teeth. You shift and try to sit up from the bench of the helicopter you’re in, but he pushes you back down. 

“You got the bright idea to follow the twin brats to find Elias,” he says. “Into a goddamn burning house, no less. Jackass.”

You groan and close your eyes, bringing a fist to your forehead. “Keegan, don’t. Not right now.” His name slips from your lips before you even realize it. (So you do know this man, and probably the rest of the people on this helicopter… odd.)

In a fashion that seems familiar, it all comes back to you in a tidal wave of information. The energy deserts of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the rest of the major oil producers dried up a decade ago, sending the world into a panic. The entirety of South America united under the banner of the Federation of the Americas and the guide of General Diego Almagro, both willingly and unwillingly. General Almagro was assassinated in 2015, but his presence was still felt as the Federation took over Panama, then Costa Rica, then Nicaragua, working their way up to Mexico and, the other night, Dallas, Texas. 

You are a part of the Ghosts: a spec ops team set on beating back the Federation, even if it is a losing battle. 

The date is June 12th, 2027. And it’s a godawful day to be a citizen of the burning remains of the United States of America.

Hesh (one of the ‘twin brats,’ even though Logan is two years younger) pulls Keegan away and shoves him up against the wall of the helicopter. “You need to get this bird back on the ground. We’re not going anywhere!”

Keegan pushes him back easily, then adds, “Calm down, kid.”

“Hey!” Merrick body-slams Hesh into the wall. (He’s never been known for his gentleness.) “We just saved your asses!”

“We didn’t need your help!” Hesh snaps. 

Merrick takes hold of the collar of Hesh’s tac vest. Keegan taps your legs, and you sit up, pulling your legs up to your chest. Good thing you did – Merrick shoves Hesh down on the bench a moment later. 

“The hell you didn’t,” Merrick spits, towering over Hesh.

Elias shoves Merrick away with a, “Stow it! All of you.” (His voice is slightly muffled through his full-face balaclava, but it carries authority all the same.)

There’s a lot of light violence happening in the cabin of this helicopter, but you suppose that’s to be expected when the military comes around.

Hesh stands, facing Elias. “We have to go back! Our dad’s down there, and we’re not leaving without him!”

Logan stands too, signing at Elias. His words are angry, and his face is drawn into something like a snarl. He’s signing fast, but you manage to pick up something about him kicking everyone’s ass and tacking on a “TRUE BIZ” at the end, meaning that he’s not joking.

“That’s real admirable of you, Hesh, and I’m sure you can, Logan,” Elias says, sitting them both back down. “But your father’s not there anymore.”

He takes off his mask, revealing himself. 

“Dad?” Hesh says. “This whole time you were one of them? You’re a Ghost?!”

You look up and exchange glances with Keegan. Neither of you were really ones for surprise plot-twists or epic reveals. From what you can see, his expression looks bored and his eyebrows are drawn together a little, like a silent, ‘Can you believe this shit?’

You get up and Keegan automatically holds onto your shoulder, just in case you were to fall. You walk closer to the open cockpit, keeping a hand on the wall for the same reason. 

“What even happened?” You ask once you and Keegan were an acceptable distance away from the commotion. 

Keegan lets go of your shoulder and leans against the back of the pilot’s seat, crossing his arms. “Burning houses tend to collapse, dumbass. You got a roof tile right to the face.”

You rub your cheek and lean back against the wall adjacent to the cockpit. “Somehow that doesn’t shock me.”

The helicopter jolts a little bit and your head snaps over to the cockpit. From where you’re standing, you can see the co-pilot. He’s facing forward, but you can see the sparse freckles that dot his face and the tuft of brown hair that escapes the gel that slicks back the rest of his hair. The headset he’s wearing has a bright blue circle painted on the earcup – it must be a sign of his squad, or whatever pilots are a part of.

Your eyebrows furrow. He seems familiar, somehow. But not like how Keegan was familiar, and not like Merrick, Hesh, Logan, or Elias. He’s… you don’t know how to describe it.

The helicopter jolts again, and a hanging carabiner knocks the back of your head. Keegan huffs out a laugh when you whimper a small “ow.”

The co-pilot looks over his shoulder and back at you. You meet his soft, brown eyes. 

“Officer?” He says softly, his hands still on the yoke of the helicopter.

“Try Sergeant,” Keegan corrects. 

He glances at Keegan, then back to you, his eyebrows furrowing. His lips start to form a word, but – 

-> CH. 13: THE SMALLEST CHURCH IN SAINT-SAËNS

synopsis: come to the church.

word count: 1.2k

ships: don’t listen to them.

notes: you’re with us now. we’ll take care of you.

ToFS taglist: just come to the church. please.

TALES OF FALSE SERENITY MASTERLIST

You hear waves crash on the coast before you’re even fully aware that you’re on a beach. A church stands before you, sea-worn and rotted. A banner, yellowed with age, hangs above the entrance, reading: Holy Church of the Amnesiac (formerly the Dolorian Church of Humanity). 

You walk up the stairs to the entrance, the rotted wood barely holding your weight. When you reach the door, you raise your fist and knock. 

A few moments later, someone answers the door. The person who answers is covered head-to-toe in police riot armor with a duster jacket on top. Their headgear resembles a reinforced gasmask with dark green lenses, and the words FORGIVE ME MAMA are messily carved into their helmet.

They look you over, then take your hand. 

You don’t know why, but you follow them inside. The inside is somewhat dilapidated, but still nice. The pews have been pushed aside to create a common space and the floor is littered with rugs and blankets and a few sparse pillows. People are scattered about, laying on the pews or sitting on the floor. 

A few of them perk up at the sight of you, but the person corrals you to the front of the church, where a figure is sitting. Their silhouette is stark against the light shining through the stained glass window behind them, which depicts a woman holding up two fingers with her right hand and cupping a breast with the other. The windows that would have been her lungs are punched out, leaving sunlight shining through.

“Come, friend.” They wave you over. “Sit with me.”

You look at the person who escorted you to the front of the church, and they nod, then turn away and leave you.

You ease down and sit with the person, tucking a leg under you. You look over at them – they’re dressed in all black, a cloth mask covering the bottom half of their face and their clothes covering the rest of their body. Their knee-length jacket flutters in the slight wind of the smashed-through windows.

“What is…” You gesture around. “This? This church.”

“This is the Church of the Amnesiac,” they say. “And I am the Hunter of Vilebloods. You need not tell me your name – I have been awaiting your arrival, as has the rest of the church.”

“Who are you?” You ask. “I mean, I know your name, but… what is the purpose of this church? Because from what I can tell, it’s not worship.”

The Hunter takes a breath and sighs. “We do not know. We are simply wanderers that have found our way here. This is not our home. We are all… bereft of memory. Something has cursed us, and I know that you have happened upon this curse, too.”

“What do you mean?” You ask. “I – I have memories.”

“Think back.” The Hunter looks into your eyes. “Think back to when you were but a child. Can you?”

“Of course I can,” you say. 

“Then tell me,” the Hunter says. “Recount your first memory.”

You look away and think back. “I… visited the Exhibit of National Economy Achievements when I was a child. I must have been… five, or six. There were machines there, both modern and vintage. It was a beautiful place that showcased the highest of Soviet achievements.”

The Hunter hums in response. “Your next memory?”

“When my father gave me a Makarov pistol,” you say. “He gifted it to me when I was ten years old. He never let me fire it, but it was still important to me. I had a hell of a time getting it over to the States when I immigrated.”

The Hunter tilts their head. “I… do not quite know what a Makarov pistol is, or where the States are, but please. Continue.”

“And then, my next memory is… when I was sixteen.” Your eyebrows furrow as you remember. “There was an accident, and I lost both of my legs. Luckily, I was able to be quickly fitted with prosthetics that mixed existing technology with neuropolymer. I was able to move my legs, but unable to really… feel them.” You sigh. “Now I have different ones, as I wasn’t done growing at sixteen. That, and the technology has improved.”

The Hunter shifts how they’re sitting so that they’re closer. “That is your next memory? There is… nothing in between?”

“N… no?” You say, unsure. “Is there supposed to be?”

“Typically, yes,” the Hunter says. “There is a menagerie of memories for one to look back on. Family, friends, parties and religion… but are you admitting that there is nothing?”

“Well, it…” You think for a moment, then admit in a small voice, “Yeah. I don’t remember anything until I emigrated from Chelomey.”

You feel something push against your leg – something solid and furry. You look over and see an orange cat with a little backpack rubbing against your leg, then sniffing at your shoes. He looks up at you and meows softly, as if noticing your sudden spike in stress.

“Hello,” you say softly. You reach out a hand and rub your fingers together, making a soft sound. The cat sniffs at your fingers before pushing his face against your hand, purrs starting to rumble in his tiny kitty chest.

“Who is this?” You ask, starting to gently scratch at the cat. 

“That is Stray,” the Hunter says. “He does not have memories, just like the rest of us.”

“But I do have memories,” you insist. 

“I apologize. I misspoke. He has… gaps in memory, just like the rest of us.” The Hunter looks over your shoulder and around the church. “Just like the Courier, the Tarnished, and everyone else here.”

You sigh, looking at the Hunter. “So what happens now? I died, so… is this all the afterlife has to offer? The Holy Church of the Amnesiac and a cat?”

The Hunter returns their eyes to you. “Oh, you did not die. You simply just… left your body behind.”

“What?” You snap, and Stray bolts. “What do you mean?”

“Did you really think that this is all dying has to offer?” The Hunter asks. “A church and a cat and a few sad wanderers?”

“I…” You trail off. “Maybe! The philosophy I read about isn’t about death and what comes after. It’s the philosophy of man and his nature.”

“Man and his nature,” the Hunter echoes. “What a fickle thing one’s nature is. And I can see your very nature being unraveled before me in this very moment.”

“I don’t…” You groan and bring a hand to your forehead. There’s a sinking feeling in your stomach. “I don’t know what to make of this. This is all just – it’s too much.”

“You will emerge victorious. And if not, you will return to the church, and we will send you on your way again,” the Hunter says. 

They reach out and draw you closer, holding you against their side with an arm around your shoulder. They lean down and whisper in your ear, “It has been an honor, but we really must say good-bye. Now go, cleanse the tarnished streets of your homeworld. And may the good blood guide your way.”

-> CH. 13: WAKE UP & SMELL THE ASHES

synopsis: you wake up and kamski explains everything.

word count: 1.7k

ships: Connor/Reader, Hank Anderson & Reader

notes: the long wait is over!!!! the research essay has been slain and i have time to write again :)

HoFS taglist: @catladyhere , @foggy0trees0 , @princessofenkanomiya , @n30n-f43 , @igna4400 (if you'd like to be added to the taglist, just ask!)

HEAD OF FALSE SECURITY MASTERLIST

“Officer?” A soft, melodic voice calls. “Officer, can you hear me?”

You groan and turn on your side, away from the light that’s burning into your eyelids. “Huh…?”

“Officer, you need to wake up,” the voice continues. 

You open your eyes slowly and look up, only to lock eyes with… Chloe. What is Chloe doing here?

“You’re awake.” Chloe smiles and cups your jaw. “I will alert Mister Kamski right away.”

She looks away as her LED flickers, as do her eyes. After a moment, she looks back down at you and takes her hand away. You lay on your back, close your eyes, and wait.

A few minutes later, Kamski enters the room. You sit up, then immediately regret it when a stabbing pain shoots through your head. 

You screw your eyes shut and cover your eyes with a hand. You grind out, “Kamski, what the fuck am I doing here?”

“Lay back down,” Kamski says. You feel Chloe put a hand on your shoulder, and she guides you back down. The pain subsides enough for you to open your eyes again. 

Kamski takes a seat by your bedside and leans forward, his elbows on his knees. You look over. 

“Again, what the fuck am I doing here?” You say. “I… I died. I remember dying.”

“You did,” Kamski says, as if it was a completely normal thing to say. 

“Then how the hell am I alive?” You hiss. 

Kamski leans back in the chair and crosses his leg over his knee. “Do you remember your childhood?”

“Snippets,” you snap. “I just had this conversation. Now tell me how I’m alive after being shot in the goddamn head!”

“It’s simple,” Kamski says. (It’s not.) “You were never alive to begin with.”

You shoot up from the bed. “Чего?!” Again, Chloe pushes you back down.

“You know philosophy. Do you know Chariton Zakharov?” Kamski says, not pausing to give you a chance to answer. “Of course you do. You’ve read The Life, Death, Neuropolymer-Induced Transformation, and Secondary Death of Chariton Radeonovich Zakharov. In one of his letters, he wrote, ‘The radiance of pure reason, and it alone, can illuminate the path of humanity. Because a human being is not a body. It’s a way of thinking.’ I wanted to prove that.”

“I don’t really care to talk about philosophy right now!” You snap. 

Kamski holds up a hand. “Just wait. The sooner you understand this, the sooner you’ll get to see that android. What was its name again? Connor?”

“Connor!” You echo. “He’s here?! Take me to him – now!”

“Listen to me first,” he says. You grit your teeth and do your best to settle as he continues. “I wanted to create something that no one had created before. Obviously, I already did this with androids. But I wanted to go further.”

You nod, telling him to continue. You really want to get this over with. 

“So I thought, what about an android that thinks of itself as a human?” Kamski lets out a scoff-laugh. “Ridiculous, right?”

“If it’s ridiculous, I have no doubt that you probably did it,” you say. “Where is this android-human? Show me it so I can go.”

Kamski reaches under the chair and pulls out a mirror, then hands it to you. You take it and look at it. Sure enough, it’s a reflection of yourself, looking just as confused as you feel. 

“I don’t… understand,” you say, looking up at Kamski.

He taps the surface of the mirror. “You’re looking at it.”

You look at the mirror again. There’s nothing human-looking behind you – just a reflection of yourself in bed.

Kamski leans closer and whispers, “It’s you, Officer.”

“What an absurd idea.” You look at him. “Surely you’re joking, yes?”

“I’m not.” He leans back in his chair. “You’re the first android that was fully tricked into thinking that it’s human. You’ve been living this delusion for eleven years, ever since you thought you emigrated from Chelomey.”

“Again, this is idiotic!” You snap. 

“You only remember core components of your childhood,” Kamski says. “The Exhibit of National Economy Achievements. Your pistol. The accident.”

“I…” You sigh. “Yes, but –”

“Your parents didn’t traumatize you,” he says, tilting his head down and looking at you through his eyelashes. “That was what you were gonna say, right? That people with childhood trauma have gaps in memory and don’t remember a lot of their childhood.”

The words you had prepared die on your tongue. You look away. “Then who am I? Tell me, if you know so much about me.”

“Do you want me to tell you the truth?” He asks. “Or to recount the lie you’re used to living?”

“The truth,” you say before you can change your mind.

“There was a baby born in Chelomey with the same name as yours. Same birthday, same birth year. It was stillborn – didn’t even have a chance to take its first breath,” Kamski says. “That was where I got your birth name and birthday. Tensions between America and the USSR were already tense back then, so it was easy to fake documents. Your birth certificate, your passport, affidavits of income and support, your permanent residency card. You won the Green Card Lottery during a low-emigration year. You thought you got lucky, but you didn’t. I fabricated everything.”

There’s a sinking, swirling feeling in your stomach. You don’t really… know what to feel. You feel numb, somehow? But also like you’re ready to explode – to ask Kamski what the fuck he’s going on about, to tell him that he sounds like a raving lunatic, to tell him that you don’t believe a word he says. 

And yet… you do. It… it makes sense, somehow. Why would America let a nondescript Soviet such as yourself in? And into cybersecurity, no less.

“It’s obvious until it isn’t, isn’t it?” Kamski says. 

“M… my legs,” you say. “Why did you take my legs?”

“You needed to have some excuse for how you felt,” he says. “You didn’t have aches in them, nor did you experience any real pain. Right?”

“Yes,” you say. “Just phantom pain. But…” You sigh. “How am I able to feel? Not touch, but emotions. I thought correctly-functioning androids weren’t supposed to feel emotions.”

Kamski furrows his eyebrows. “You never did find a ‘patient zero’ for deviancy, did you?”

“No,” you say. “All we know is that it started in Detroit, and spread… across the country…”

A horrible feeling overcomes you. You were patient zero, weren’t you? You were the first to break your programming, to feel emotion and to feel pain – even if it was only imagined. And you probably infected Connor, too, didn’t you? You are the reason for his pain and suffering and all the turmoil he’s going through. You’re the root cause for the pain and suffering and turmoil everyone’s going through. 

“You are the free radical. The outlier,” Kamski verbalizes your thoughts. “You were the spark of chaos that was required to start the revolution.”

“I didn’t want to start the revolution,” you say. Your voice is softer and more shaky than you’d like it to be. There’s a burning in the back of your throat. “I just… I just wanted to solve the case that was assigned to me.”

“But you did.” Kamski stands, then starts walking towards the exit, as does Chloe. “You are the deviant android that infected others. The others you infected started a revolution. There are no two ways about it.”

“I want to go home,” you manage.

“Chloe,” he says. “Get Connor.”

There’s a door opening, then rushed footsteps as someone comes to your bedside. You look over. It’s Connor. His LED is stuck on red. 

“Officer?” He says. His soft, brown eyes search yours, lingering on the hot tears that swell at your waterline. Your bottom lip trembles. 

Connor immediately sweeps you into a hug – one unlike the one you’d shared back at the station. This one is firm, bordering on desperate as he clutches at the back of your shirt. He rests his forehead in the crook of your shoulder and lets out a shuddering exhale.

“Officer,” he says softly. “Officer, I’m so sorry.”

“What?” You say. “What do you have to be sorry for?”

“I didn’t do a good enough job of protecting you,” he says. “You got shot. I… I failed my mission. And I don’t have anyone to blame but myself.”

You exhale shakily and lean your head against Connor’s. His hair tickles the side of your nose. Tears slip from your eyes, and there’s a lump in your throat that makes it hard to talk. “Don’t be. We were… we were both being stupid.”

“The revolution is still going,” Connor says. “Markus has instructed me to wake up the thousands of androids housed at the CyberLife assembly plant. I want you to come with me.”

“What?” You pull back and meet his eyes. “But that would be a suicide mission.”

“They’ll let us in,” he says, his voice full of conviction. “I’m an RK800, and you’re an android. We can act like we’re there for an emergency meeting.”

“You knew?” You snap. “You knew all along?”

“No!” Connor says, clutching you tighter. “Chloe told me. It explained everything. I couldn’t believe it at first, but… the evidence was too convincing, and it aligned with everything I had already learned about you.”

“Right,” you say. “Right. Obviously. I’m just…” You furrow your eyebrows and screw your eyes shut. “Everything’s a lot right now. And it seems like everything bad that’s happening in the world is happening to me.”

He draws you back into the hug, rubbing up and down your back. You rest your head in the crook of his shoulder, and you’re overwhelmed by a smell you only now recognize as Connor’s – clean, leather, and a hint of something else.

After a few minutes, you sigh and squeeze around his middle. “Okay. I’m ready to go.”

“Are you sure?” He whispers.

“Yeah,” you mumble back. “Let’s go before I realize how stupid this is.”

[worldruins]

Meet the Remnant, my "slugcat" oc. Because I have no sense of moderation, it has an entire campaign loosely mocked up in my head- I don't have the modding ability or time to make anything of it but I enjoy thinking about it! The two iterators on the sheet are the central npcs of the campaign.

Remnant is larger, more aquatic, and faster on all fours than a slugcat. It struggles to use the same tools, carries items in its mouth, and can eat batnip and bubble weed. And, though it doesn’t know it, it is one of the last four of its kind left.

More about the campaign below VVV

BONUS: Remnant obviously resembles a slugcat, and they are sort of a slugcat ancestor! The genomes of the pipe slugs slugcats evolved from had remnant DNA as well as the simple tool-worm base that ancients used for many creatures. The blueprints were present in the modified organisms, and over several generations and mutations began to express themselves once more. Anyway…

To start, the Remnant is living with their family in an idyllic natural landscape much like survivor and monk at the beginning of their campaigns. The incident kickstarting their journey would be them wandering off from their kin and- gameplay starts here- getting lured off by something interesting, before the wall closes quickly behind them and the player realizes they have been trapped. They find themselves in a crate lined with wet plant matter, which gets shaken and turned around for a bit before settling down. It continues with a gentler rattling and remnant is clearly being taken somewhere, but the game acts like you're in a den and, once you've eaten the food set out for you in there, you sleep.

You are woken when the train carrying you crashes. You are able to escape and wind up in a light drizzle. Numerous overseers, some purple and others seafoam green, follow you around. The artificial, dilapidated surroundings are alien to the remnant.

During the first cycle an overseer will direct you to the nearest den, but you don’t have a rain timer until the first time you hibernate. You’ve never experienced rain like this before, after all.

The fact is that the remnant and their family are primal fauna, from the old world before bioengineering and iterators. They have spent their whole lives in a carefully controlled environment, maintained at first by ancients and then the systems the ancients left behind. The mass ascension happened, and nobody really knew what to do with these creatures- depending on the species, animals in captivity were generally released to fend for themselves or set for years of being maintained by machines scheduled in advanced, automated to care for them.

Remnant is taken when the iterator Ink Stained Palms orders a specimen of one relatively hardy species to study and potentially have the rest delivered to their regions. Something goes wrong- their delivery is sabotaged by their semi-active former senior, Calls To Stony Skies. And out Remnant goes into an alien land, with each of the two rival iterators trying to lure or force it to go to them.

This generally takes the form of projections like Iggy uses to get the slugcats to Moon, though it’s two different kinds of overseer guiding you in opposite directions at the same time. There may also be introduced environmental hazards- some of the chases in Little Nightmares come to mind- to corral you toward wherever the iterator causing it wants you to go.

ISP was the one who was getting the remnant delivered to her facility. They’re a bioengineer interested in long-term ecosystem restoration. It’s come to believe there’s a natural ‘balance’ to the world that could, in time, let living things leave the cycle of their own accord if it was realigned properly.

CTSS is in a condition not unlike spearmaster moon, though his decline has been steadier and over a longer period of time. They’ve been replaced by another iterator as group senior, and derailed your journey in the hopes of using a rare animal as collateral to get ISP’s help. Watching the remnant’s struggle to survive, however, he ends up very attached to it and can’t bring himself to kill it as he originally planned to.

Though they might want to, CTSS can’t save the remnant from a more insidious fate. The air, the soil, the water itself is toxic to you, whose kind has lived countless generations shielded from the heavy metal byproducts of industry and the artificial metabolisms of those great boxes in the sky. Ascension is an option, but so is going to ISP, whose body itself possesses a complex with artificial environments much like the one you began in. It can’t protect the remnant fully, but it can offer them a longer life. There are multiple endings to the campaign, based on the order you visit the iterators in.

If you read all this thank you so much and feel free to send questions!! About my little guys.

[lightwithinthedarknessu]

Kingdom Hearts Missing Link Beta News Roundup

Kingdom Hearts Missing Link’s beta test has begun in Japan! Square Enix has announced that no videos or images of gameplay should be released by testers. However they are free to share their thoughts! This article will be updated as new impressions and thoughts roll in. 

The official KHDR_PR Twitter account has begun to release images of the game and missions for players. First up is a graphic detailing how players can use the touchscreen for movement and how the GPS system works.  

There are two gameplay modes: Pad mode and GPS mode

Your character can move alongside you as you walk. 

You can also move characters with the virtual track-pad. 

*edit* Movement AP can be obtained in walk mode. 

In Pad Mode you gain AP in battles

Battles can be automated in "hands-free mode" 

AP is required for battles, obtaining treasure boxes, etc.

The team has also shared initial missions for beta testers to complete during the testing period. Much like KHUX, currency in the games is stated to be jewels. New mission content for testers will be released daily until the beta closes. For today, players are challenged to make to lvl 20 for free jewels. 

Mission Translations

1/13 7:00~ Grab your smartphone and get started traveling! 

1/14 7:00 ~ Area Boss Quest Released 

 1/17 7:00 ~ Raid Boss Quest Release

Impressions

Lucky beta testers who were selected via lottery are beginning to share their initial thoughts on the gameplay as well. Many of these impressions are posted on Twitter. Please do check out the #KHML tag and thank them for sharing! You can follow updates as they come live here. 

Graphics and gameplay are smooth and crisp, comparable to graphics on the Nintendo Switch. 

For beta, there is currently no controller support. Character customization is extremely detailed. Facial features, clothing, and accessories are available to choose from, including make-up. Your character does different poses as you’re customizing them. 

Story quests are seen to exist but are locked within the beta. 

You can collect materials to upgrade your keyblade. 

Changing your keyblade also changes your fighting style. Two keyblades are available, one ranged (shooting magic-like abilities) and one more up close for attacking. 

Heartless spawns are impacted by the weather. 

If you walk up to building you can jump/get onto it.

UI can be moved and changed to be more transparent and moves based on how you’re playing (horizontal or vertical)

On the pause menu you can leave the battle and return to the main map.

There are places to heal your character as you move around.

You can still move around normally in the game without GPS

Tutorial was in vertical mode but gameplay switched to horizontal. 

Many of the GPS features are similar to Dragon Quest Walk.

If you walk up to a building you can jump/get onto it. UI can be moved and changed to be more transparent and moves based on how you’re playing (horizontal or vertical) 

 On the pause menu you can leave the battle and return to the main map.

There are two keyblades to use and you can switch between them. First is Fortune Gear and second is Light Order. The names will probably change with official translations. 

 New Avatar pieces can be bought with jewels much like KHUX. 

 New Dearly beloved is beautiful

MP can be used up quickly in auto battle if you aren’t careful. 

 Raid battles are back! There seems to be an option for a friend feature in the future. No news yet on if you can take on a boss with friends like in KHUX. 

 It’s very important to finish the tutorial

There is a cooldown time for skills and abilities unlock as you level your keyblade. The appearance also changes as you level it up. 

 There two types of areas mentioned that you can explore. The town and the field. In town apparently, you can talk to one person for missions.

Gatcha system is back and 3* seems to be the highest rarity to get right now for the chess-like pieces, as seen in the trailer. 

 Treasure chests in the shop are a great use for jewels and net you various rewards. Helpful in leveling up. The shop seems very similar to KHUX.

There is an opening movie, but it is a short story scene instead of CG. This was confirmed by Aitaikimochi.  There is a beautiful new stained glass in the opening. Implied there is a Dive to the heart like in KHUX. Skuld may be in the stained glass, but this is unconfirmed. 

GPS is needed for certain features such as gaining activity tokens. In GPS mode you gain access to an Activity gauge. By filling it up through motion and fitness steps you can earn Activity coins for prizes.

Dodge roll and a charge attack can be completed with the touchscreen/a flick of of your finger. 

AP is a bit difficult to obtain in the beta. Hopefully this will change in the final version. 

Battery consumption is lower depending on the model, the mode you’re playing (GPS or trackpad mode) and how you use your phone while in GPS mode, (setting to power save mode, locking the screen etc.) 

Certain chests require tickets to open them. If you run out you can purchase them in the shop. Normal chests include materials to upgrade your pieces. Some treasure chests are easier to open than others. “Gorgeous” treasure chests include 3* pieces. 

The field and town BGM are new and sounds calm/gentle with a lighthearted tone.

[novankenn]

the Nephokinetic

(Users can utilize vapor in combat, whether it be releasing waves of mist to disorientate their opponents or conceal themselves in order to land sneak attacks, or using vapor to create weapons or having it accompany the user's own attacks.)

RPV was a man down. Jaune Arc their former leader having vanished one night, for no discernable reason, at least to them. So after missing the 40th Vytal Festival due to being a member short, the trio moved into their second year... proving their ability to cope and move forward, despite their disadvantage.

/==/

Pyrrha, Ren and Nora disembarked the bullhead. The small village they were sent to inspect, had no landing pad so the vehicle had to land in a nearby prepared area. Behind them Professor Peach stepped off. It was a second year supervised inspection mission.

The goal of the exercise was to teach the students how to see the strengths and weaknesses in a settlement or hamlet's defensive structures. To help them in those times they were dispatched to protect a settlement how to best utilize the resources at hand.

Their approved site was Fort Vale. A heavily fortified community was situated near the coast to the east of Vale proper, however for some reason while on route the destination was changed to their current location. A small unnamed village of maybe a dozen families or so, protected by a stout wooden palisade, and a few automated sentry turrets.

Peach knew at one glance the place was a death trap. Any serious Bandit or Grimm assault and the place would fold like a house of cards. Yet Peach was also aware of the side objective. There was someone of interest to Ozpin in the area... and she and her charges were the closet available team. Even if team RPV was a member short.

The trio of students lead by Professor Peach closed upon the sturdy-looking main gate. Showing her ID she and her charges were quickly allowed entry. Once past the gate Peach turned to face RPV.

"Now. I want you all to wander about. Take you time. We'll meet back at the gate in a hour." Peach let her eyes glid over the three young adults. "Pay close attention, and when we get back together I want to know from each of you what is good about these defenses... and what is bad. Any questions?"

Ren raised his hand.

"Mr Ren?"

"I thought we were supposed to be inspecting Fort Vale? Is there a reason for..." Ren didn't finish but looked around. The statement was however made.

"It was changed mid-route." Professor Peach informed the trio. "But the assignment is still the same and what you see and deduce here is applicable in other places. Any further questions?"

Pyrrha and Nora remained silent.

"Very well get to it. I'm going to have a chat with whomever is in charge of this place."

It took a little prodding and about twenty minutes but soon Peach found herself leaning against the counter of the General Store, speaking to the proprietor, who just happened to also be the woman in charge of the small settlement.

"So what brings Beacon out here?" the woman named Brittany Birch. "Should I be telling people to start packing?"

"No. It's an inspection exercise, and in fact I was going to ask you if there was a reason for us to actually be here instead of Fort Vale?"

"Well I can tell you we've not put in a call in for Huntsmen." Brittany replied, "No real need once the young fella showed up."

"Young fellow?"

"Yeah, young guy, was just wandering the road. Arrive about three weeks ago. Good thing too..."

"Why?"

"Had a small grimm incursion happen a couple days later." Brittany relayed, "Bad for us too. Pushed our defenses all most to the bring..."

"How big of a group?"

"One or two dozen." Brittany replied, "Nothing a larger settlement couldn't handle, but as you can see... we're still just scraping by."

"Well I assume you made it through... you're still here, obviously."

"Well it was because of the kid." Brittany informed Peach, "Without him we would have been over run."

"Was he that strong a fighter? Up to two dozen grimm is still a task to handle by one person." Peach commented, "Or did he have a strong semblance?"

"Well I'll say this... It was something else."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't really know how to explain it... but the kid used the grimm's own bodies against each other..."

"That makes no sense. Did he control a grimm and make it attack the others?"

"No... you know how a grimm evaporate after dying?"

"Yes."

"Somehow he manipulated that... used it against the pack. I mean it was seriously disturbing... the more grimm that went down, the more powerful and plentiful his attacks and defenses were..."

Peach stood there in silence, her lips pressed together. What the head-woman was speaking off... was impossible. Someone capable of using the essence of grimm as a weapon? There had to be more to it.

"Is this... individual still in the community?" Peach inquired. "I would like to speak with them... if I could."

"He should be. For all his help I put him up at my house. He's got a room in the attic. Private, warm and safe."

The incessant and rapid ringing of an bell sounded in the distance.

[nyronus]

What is dwarf fortress

Dwarf Fortress is a colony management sim. It is, in fact, the grand daddy of the genre. Rimworld and Prison Architect are based off of it. So is Minecraft albeit in a very different way. It is famous for many things, but most of those are derived from two key factors; the complexity, number, and depth of the simulated systems and the jank of their implementation and interactions. Dwarves will experience trauma, ruminate on it, develop PTSD and then depression, then make a masterpiece carving of themselves killing another dwarf because their plans to kill that dwarf are what's on their mind at the time. Then they'll kill that dwarf. The game has simulated fluid dynamics that can cause engineering projects to realistically backfire but also allows for perpetual motion machines. Cats are a killer of forts not because they are deadly, but because unlike other animals they adopt owners rather than the other way around, breed quickly clogging up the game's performance, and then if you butcher them to save your CPU Dwarves will break down into civilization ending sectarian violence over the trauma of everyone losing their pets at once. Demons will take control of neighboring civilizations, posing as gods, visit your tavern, kill everyone inside not via malice but because they are literally made of fire, and then one of your Dwarves will tell them about a priceless artifact inside the fort, and the demon will leave and send an army to steal it, and the army will know where all your traps are because the demon memorized them on his visit.

The reason I added it as a caption to the vampire image was because vampires are a thing in game and players are routinely prone to weaponizing their particular quirks. Vampires infiltrate your fort, posing as a migrant, and feed on your citizens. They never age, eat, drink, or sleep. This leads players to walling captured vampires into boxes and making them do things like keep records of everything in your fort, operate levers that control the defense systems of the fort like floodgates or bridges, or validate work orders to automate industry. Most galaxy brained, though, are the players who trap a vampire in an isolated wing of the fort, draft them into the military, and have them spend eternity walking a patrol route that operates a fully functional Turing machine made from pressure plate traps.

It is a wild game with a passionate fanbase filled to the brim with outlandish stories and amazingly creative if ghoulish solutions to problems. If you wanna go in dry it just got an updated release on Steam that has a UI that isn't basically operated via terminal, or if you wanna just observe some of the madness, look up "Boatmurdered" or watch Kruggsmash's videos.

[mariacallous]

Today, X released the company’s first transparency report since Elon Musk bought the company, formerly Twitter, in 2022.

Before Musk’s takeover, Twitter would release transparency reports every six months.These largely covered the same ground as the new X report, giving specific numbers for takedowns, government requests for information, and content removals, as well as data about which content was reported and, in some cases, removed for violating policies. The last transparency report available from Twitter covered the second half of 2021 and was 50 pages long. (X’s is a shorter 15 pages, but requests from governments are also listed elsewhere on the company’s website and have been consistently updated to remain in compliance with various government orders.)

Comparing the 2021 report to the current X transparency report is a bit difficult, as the way the company measures different things has changed. For instance, in 2021, 11.6 million accounts were reported. Of this 11.6 million, 4.3 million were “actioned” and 1.3 million were suspended. According to the new X report, there were over 224 million reports, of both accounts and pieces of individual content, but the result was 5.2 million accounts being suspended.

While some numbers remain seemingly consistent across the reports—reports of abuse and harassment are, somewhat predictably, high—in other areas, there’s a stark difference. For instance, in the 2021 report, accounts reported for hateful content accounted for nearly half of all reports, and 1 million of the 4.3 million accounts actioned. (The reports used to be interactive on the website; the current PDF no longer allows users to flip through the data for more granular breakdowns.) In the new X report, the company says it has taken action on only 2,361 accounts for posting hateful content.

But this may be due to the fact that X’s policies have changed since it was Twitter, which Theodora Skeadas, a former member of Twitter’s public policy team who helped put together its Moderation Research Consortium, says might change the way the numbers look in a transparency report. For instance, last year the company changed its policies on hate speech, which previously covered misgendering and deadnaming, and rolled back its rules around Covid-19 misinformation in November of 2022.

“As certain policies have been modified, some content is no longer violative. So if you're looking at changes in the quality of experience, that might be hard to capture in a transparency report,” she says.

X has also lost users since Musk’s takeover, further complicating what the new reality of the platform might look like. “If you account for changing usage, is it a lower number?” she asks.

After taking over the company in October of 2022, Musk fired the majority of the company’s trust and safety staff as well as its policy staff, the people who make the platform’s rules and ensure they’re enforced. Under Musk, the company also began charging for its API, making it harder for researchers and nonprofits to access X data to see what was really going on on the platform. This may also account for changes between the two reports.

“They might have enforced a certain amount of content. But if a capacity has changed, the numbers might be understating the severity of impact because of reduced capacity for manual review,” says Skeadas. And while the report indicates that many of the takedowns are algorithmic, she notes that with fewer staff, “automated systems might not be audited as regularly as they should.” This, says Skeadas, is particularly important for “human rights defenders, journalists, women, protected demographics, race, ethnic, religious, minority groups. Those are the cases that generally receive special attention by public policy teams and teams that were ensuring safe spaces on the platform.”

Part of Musk’s philosophy for the company was one of “free speech absolutism,” reinstating accounts that had been banned for spreading misinformation and hate speech. Over the summer, Musk refused to remove accounts that the Brazilian government said had spread misinformation about the security of the country’s elections, causing the platform to be suspended in Brazil for several weeks. Interestingly, Turkey was the country with the most content removal requests, with nearly 10,000 for the first part of 2024, 60 percent of which X complied with. Brazil did not make the top five list of countries with removal requests.

Earlier this month, with two months to go until the US elections, X posted a handful of trust and safety job openings, but it's likely that the team is still much smaller than it was at Twitter.

“Transparency is at the core of what we do at X,” says company spokesperson Michael Abboud. “As an entirely new company, we took time to rethink how best to transparently share data related to the enforcement of the policies that keep our community safe. Now, on the heels of the immense progress we have made, we are excited to share the work we do each and every day.”

When asked if the transparency reports are part of complying with the European Union’s Digital Services Act, Abboud tells WIRED that it is not. “This is,” he says, “part of our desire to be extremely transparent.”

[ecrivainsolitaire]

Open Art Guild – Testing the boundaries of collective IP ownership

Experimental release: Dr. T’chem’s Office (authorised for personal and commercial use)

I’ll try to keep this brief (you can read the full thesis statement here) but as we all know, intellectual property law is broken. It’s being exploited from every side and art workers are more vulnerable than ever to automation, copyright theft and myriad other unforeseeable forms of theft from the proletariat. We as a collective need to come together and work towards the creation of a better future.

The Open Art Guild is my proposal for the first of many steps towards a far away but necessary goal: the eradication of intellectual property as it pertains to the arts. It’s based on the open source standard and the creative commons, and the goal is for us to start creating a future where we stop thinking of artworks as private property to hoard, and start sharing the responsibilities and the benefits of their creation with the collective. And as I am proposing the idea, I should give the first step.

Which is why I am announcing the release of my short story series, Dr. T’chem’s Office, into the Open Art Guild license. This is an episodic HFY comedy series about the office hours of a sleazy yet well intentioned xenoanthropologist in charge of human integration into the crew of a spaceship, who happens to find them fascinating. You can read the first few instalments here:

| Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 |

The basics of the license go as follows: I’m giving any artist permission to use the assets of my artwork (in this case, settings, characters, plot lines and other unique concepts) both for personal use and for commercial use, provided they commit to crediting the original artist, giving away 30% of any profit back to the hands of the collective in the breakdown the guidelines specify, and giving the same license to any works they create derivative from this series. Any artist can join the Guild by remixing existing artworks in its database or voluntarily submitting their own works. For the time being this prototype model will have to rely on the honour system, but I have outlined the basic guidelines for a platform dedicated to facilitating the Guild’s business and income redistribution.

The purpose of this experiment is to test whether this system is financially viable, what modifications it needs, and how to enforce it. It’s also a way to study what the community thinks of this model. To summarise the implications, here are the pros and cons as I see them.

Pros:

- All fan art, spin-offs, third-party merchandise and other forms of adaptation become automatically authorised and monetisable, provided both the original artist and the remixer are active members of the Guild.

- All adaptations are automatically non-exclusive and must give away the same rights as the original, diminishing the incentive for massive corporations to try and scam an artist out of their intellectual property.

- It effectively unionises freelance artists of all fields to balance out negotiations with non Guild entities.

- It encourages artists to continue their output in order to reap the benefits of the Guild, by using the redistribution system as an incentive, instead of the current status quo where artists are actively fighting market forces all by themselves in order to make enough time and resources to work on their craft.

- It provides a safety net where everyone is invested in the continuous welfare of everyone else, giving a sense of class solidarity and facilitating donations and shared resources.

- It motivates artists to invest in each other, as the growth of one means the growth of the whole Guild.

- Eventually, if the project succeeds and the proposed platform comes to exist, it would effectively create a universal basic income for all Guild members, as well as a self sustained legal fund to protect their assets from IP theft by non Guild entities.

- It will give you complete control over whether your art can be used for AI dataset training, on an opt-in, post-by-post basis, so you don’t have to wonder who might be stealing it. If the platform is created, all works whose creators have not authorised to be used for this will have data scrambling features to make sure thieves can’t use them.

Cons:

- It will require all Guild members to permanently renounce to 30% of their profit, in order to build up the funds and distribution system.

- It will have to be built entirely on trust of the collective, at least until a platform can be established, which may take weeks or may take decades depending on lots of unpredictable factors.

- Leaving the Guild will require all artworks shared with the collective to become Creative Commons; once you renounce your right to monopoly of your IP, it’s permanent, no way to go back. This is necessary in order to prevent asset flippers and other forms of IP scabs to join the Guild, extract other people’s assets and then scram.

- Due to banking regulations entirely out of our hands, some artists will have participating in the redistribution. If the platform ever becomes a reality, one of its main goals will be to remedy this immediately.

This proposal requires a high cost, but it provides an invaluable reward. If the system works, it will empower all artists to profit from their work and protect it as a collective. If it doesn’t, all that will have happened is that you will have created a lot of Creative Commons art, which financially isn’t ideal, but artistically is extremely commendable. Even in the worst case scenario, corporations will not be able to hold your art hostage with exclusivity deals. To me, the benefits vastly outweigh the costs, but I do want to emphasise: there will be costs. This is an effort to subvert the entire way art has been monetised since the 1700s. It will require a lot of work, a lot of people, and a lot of time, to make it work. But I believe it can work. If you believe it too, you are welcome to join the Open Art Guild.

Please do read the guidelines for the Guild and the guidelines for the platform before you start creating, and give me whatever feedback you have. If it’s good, if it’s lacking, if I’m overstepping legal boundaries, if you can find loopholes, anything. I tried to make it airtight but I’m not a legal expert. This is not my project, it is a project for the proletariat. Everyone should have a say on what they’re signing on for. And regardless of what you think, share it with all artists you can. This will only work if as many people as possible participate.

Doctor T’chem’s Office’s license

This work has been released under the Open Art Guild license, and has been approved for reuse and adaptation under the following conditions:

For personal, educational and archival use, provided any derivative works also fall under a publicly open license, to all Guild members and non members.

For commercial use, provided redistribution guidelines of the Guild be followed, to all active Guild members.

For commercial use to non Guild members, provided any derivative works also fall under a publicly open license, with the explicit approval of the artist and proper redistribution of profit following the guidelines of the Guild.

For non commercial dataset training of open source generative art technologies, provided the explicit consent of the artist, proper credit and redistribution of profit in its entirety to the Guild.

Shall this work be appropriated by non Guild members without proper authorisation, credit and redistribution of profit, the non Guild entity waives their right to intellectual property over any derivative works, copyrights, trademarks or patents of any sort and cedes it to the Creative Commons, under the 4.0 license, irrevocably and unconditionally, in perpetuity, throughout time and space in the known multiverse. The Guild reserves the right to withhold trade relations with any known infractors for the duration its members deem appropriate, including the reversal of any currently standing contracts and agreements.

[orienteddreamerrr]

You Release Dagan From That Bacta Tank!

(Follows the dialogue of Dagan being released by Cal! Only, it’s you!)

(I had altered it just a little!)

(KINDA LONG!)

Rating: PG for…a little bit of action, angst and fluff!

(Dagan Gera X Fem Reader)

Coming upon the Forest Array tower, you make your way inside, finding everything was in ruin and in disarray. You step on this lift as it automatically starts to go up to the top. Once the lift stops, you discover that it’s a rehabilitation wing as you go up to this automated door, with it opening in your presence. You make your way over to this terminal, using your expert slicing skills to slice open the big door. As you enter the room, you find a cylindrical case in front of you as you take out this compact turner key. Activating it, the cylindrical case flaps open up to reveal a Bacta tank with a man floating inside. You slowly walk up to the tank, getting a closer look. Who knows how long he’s been here! You place a hand on the tank glass, using your Force power to enter his subconscious mind. Some memories played through of him exploring this planet called Tanalorr, along with this woman named Santari Khri. You then came upon this memory, seeing the sky go dark with eerie orbs of light shining in the atmosphere. You felt like you were actually there, witnessing the whole event as you look to that Santari woman rush inside the temple to get help. You looked back to the sky as you noticed everything started getting darker. But that’s when you heard a voice spoke beside you. “You’re not here…”, You look over, seeing the man was looking at you. How does he see you? How’d he notice you? “You’re not supposed to be here…”, he continued. You can’t help but feel a pull of some kind as you slowly walk up to him, moving your hand towards him, seeing he was moving his hand to yours as well. You then heard him say, “Release me. Please!”,

The memory starts to fade as your vision comes back to normal. You open your eyes to see your own hand still on the glass tank but see the man had his hand on the tank too. You quickly look up, seeing he was wide awake and looking dead at you. You can feel your heart start to race, thinking, “OH MY GODS! I just woke up a dead guy!”, You look over to see a control panel had just popped up off to the side. You wonder if those were the controls for the Bacta tank. You go over, not knowing which buttons to press as you only press these two buttons. The top of the console opens up to reveal a beautifully designed lightsaber hilt. You quickly grab it as you watch the Bacta tank start to go down, seeing the fluid inside start to drain away and close down. The man collapses to the floor, struggling to breathe for a second. After he took a good breath, he was able to take the breathing mask off, being able to breathe more better. “Who are you? I saw you!”, he spoke out, taking a stern glance at you. You were hesitant to speak but you were able to say, “My name is Y/N…and I mean no harm…”, You see him only look back to the floor as he acknowledges your name. “What’s yours?”, You add, feeling the tension that’s surrounding you. “I’m…Dagan Gera…”, You felt a wave of shock over your body as he says his name. Dagan Gera? The name was awfully familiar to you. You sigh slightly as you sit yourself near him but not too close, as you glance over his lightsaber in your hands. “Well…Dagan…a lot of things have happened…I can only name a few...the Order has disappeared…all the Jedi are either displaced or have turned into Inquisitors. And…I’m on this mission to seek out if there are any still around…and it seems like you’re one of them!”, You say those words as you see Dagan was looking at you. He sat back onto his knees, soaking in the information you just told him. He then looks over to you again, his eyebrows furrowing. “You’re not a Jedi yourself, I assume?”, You could only shake your head as you gesture his lightsaber hilt in your hand.

“If you want me to, I can help you…help you catch up to speed on certain things…”, Dagan looks to his hilt in your hand before he slowly stands to his feet. Once he was, he reaches out to take his lightsaber from you, igniting it, with the blade glowing a golden yellow. “Yes. I am back…”, he then retracted his blade, clipping it to his black under-pants as he held out his hand. It took you a minute to realize that he was helping you up from the floor. You slowly extend your hand to his, instantly taking hold as you feel yourself get pulled up from the floor. After pulling away, he takes his hilt back into his hand as he mentioned, “The Order is gone…I must return to Tanalorr…”, he limps over to the console that still stands, placing his hilt onto it. Now you remember! Tanalorr! The planet you saw in his memory. “Do you think you can tell me what happened there? I saw it in your memory…”, You notice Dagan using his Force power to open his hilt, revealing his golden colored Kyber Crystal inside. “We were invaded…I held them at bay as long as I could but…there were too many…”, You start to feel guilt swell inside you as Dagan continued. “The battle was…horrific…still we weren’t beaten…not yet…”, You walk just an inch towards him, getting intrigued by what he’s saying. “Not until the Jedi Council gave the order to abandon Tanalorr and then refuse to counter-attack…”, You felt confused into why the Council did that. “Wait…so, they gave up? Just like that?”, “Yes…it was my discovery! My home and they just expected me to throw it away!”, You watch as he starts to bleed his crystal red. You could tell he was getting angry by the second as you go up to place your hand on his armless shoulder. “Dagan…we can work this out…please! Just trust me!”, You tried reasoning with him, but it wasn’t working. “I refused to obey and was betrayed by the one I trusted most!”, “WAIT!”, Without warning, Dagan turns around to face you with his bled-out crystal floating in his hand. He sent out a powerful shockwave with it that sent you tumbling across the room.

You groan in pain as you slowly sit up on your arm, patting on yourself to see that you didn’t have any weapons on you. You were defenseless. You watch as Dagan’s lightsaber and Kyber crystal levitate in his hand as he pieces the saber back together and igniting it, revealing his new blade color: a dark mix of red and orange. Basically, almost a Sith color! You quickly realize Dagan coming over to you, trying to lay a strike on you with his blade. You roll over in time to avoid his stab, as he attempted this multiple times, with each time of you avoiding his blade. Just as you stood to your feet, Dagan Force pushes you across the room with his missing arm, making your back hit hard against the wall. You could only squeeze your eyes shut as Dagan stalks over to you, aiming the end of his blade near your face. You could literally feel the heat come off of it! But in an instant, you popped open your eyes to see him move his blade away from you. He probably noticed that you didn’t have any weapons on you. And that you don’t look like somebody who can fight. You look up, seeing his face morph into regret as he retracted his blade, clipping it to his underpants as he extended his hand to you. “I’m sorry…”, he whispers, with a hint of sincerity. You gave him a small side eyed look as you take his hand, feeling his strength as he pulls you to your feet quickly pulling his hand away.

You lightly dust yourself off as you look squarely at him. “Do you still want me to help you? My offer is still on the table…”, He comes closer to you, grabbing a hold on your hand again. “Yes, I do—maybe I might help you with something in return…”, You could feel a sense of satisfaction swell inside you at what he said as you smile to him. “Well, I guess it’s your lucky day then!”, Dagan, for the first time, smiles back at you. Maybe he won’t be such a bad person! Especially when you’re around. Out of nowhere, these huge doors of the room open up to reveal a transporter ship hovering in the air, with spy droids flying around. Dagan releases your hand as he looked to notice saying, “Ah, Rayvis! I should’ve known you would honor your oath…”, You look to see a tall Gen’dai species waving towards you both. That must be him. You see Dagan look over to you, extending his hand to you once more. “You can join me if you want…there’s room for one more…”, You stared at his hand, wondering why you should take it. But that voice inside your head was telling you to for some reason. Without more thinking, you instantly grab it, feeling him squeeze in reaction as he led you over to the ship. Once on it, you fly across the terrain of Koboh to this unknown observatory base, where you start the process of helping Dagan regain his bearings. In your mind, you knew this was wrong, but all you wanted was to help the Jedi. At least for those who are left. But all you knew was that Dagan was going to be a real handful. You just hoped you have the patience and time!

The End!

Tell me what you think! I would love to know! AND YES I'M BACK BABY!😆😍

[lexical-lushes]

[Shivers] so, o-one of my facet-stories is about horny mech pilots.

a world where, generations ago, leading world governments decided to "fix" population growth and overpopulation by releasing a retrovirus agent that rewired humans to have a heat cycle. by the time anyone not in on the plan realized what was being done, it was too late.

sexual interest is dampened for most of the year - every three months, girls go into heat for a week or two and release pheromones that, a-ah, stimulate people around them.

(there are, of course, medications that can be taken to suppress heat cycles. or trigger them early, although those are something really only the upper class has regular access to.)

of course, the whole "solution" was just a self-serving bid to hold onto power in a world of ecological collapse and ongoing destructive climate change. states and major corporations colluded and consolidated their power as vast portions of the world suffered desertification and equatorial "dead zones" spread. populations were relocated into increasingly centralized and strictly controlled urban zones, which grew into vast arkocities supported by sprawling hydroponics facilities.

resource wars broke out, as well as increasingly hostile corporate takeovers. the arkocities built fortifications, expanding their existing lockdown procedures for civil unrest and extreme weather events.

the weapon of choice in the growing conflicts became mechanized walkers and automated vehicles. furthermore, the arms race to improve upon these technologies eventually led to a cutting-edge advancement in mech warfare: direct neural interlocks.

instead of a pilot relying on manual controls and the machine's automatic reflex systems, select candidates were screened for appropriate neurological and psychological profiles before being implanted with a cybernetic interface allowing them to "plug in" to a mech's combat computer. the "pilot", really more of a neural processor or "bioCPU", then synchronizes with the mech's own systems and acts as a rapid processing system capable of intuitively analyzing combat situations and "steering" the mech.

a good neural processor needs to be highly aggressive while also capable of surrendering enough control to the mech's systems that synchronization can be achieved.

s-so...

it turns out that an orphan girl named Amelia gets high marks during a round of corporate-sponsored health checkups and psychological screening.

she's shy, with little self-confidence. extremely vulnerable to peer pressure. deathly afraid of being unlikable or abandoned.

but she's driven, too, fueled by all that fear and bottled-up resentment.

she gets selected as a candidate. she scores well. she survives the cybernetic augmentation process. when they finally plug her into a mech, she gets the highest score of anyone in the program - she gives herself over completely to the machine, straining to do exactly what it wants. KILL. KILL. KILL. ELIMINATE THE TARGET.

the more she gives herself over and unbottles that deep well of pain inside her, the more she's free, the more the reward hooks work their way into her until she's a frothing, snarling, pent-up mess of a girl by the time they pull her out of the cockpit.

(and oh, how she's embarrassed by that.)

...luckily, she has someone to help her work out all that stress, someone that understands and adores her for the monstrous, violent thing she becomes in a combat situation.

after all, neural processors often can't be trusted to interpret orders during the heat of combat. you need someone a little more detached from the situation for that. so... you pair the "pilot" up with a navigator and comms operator. they feed select tactical data to the pilot, point them in the right direction, and keep one hand hovering over the emergency override and disengage switch if the pilot ever gets out of hand and needs a yank on their leash.

so it's j-just me and my RIO, strapped into a heavily armed missile with an instinct to kill called Sierra One, tearing apart less agile and responsive mechs at command's behest~

[mayakern]

Is there still the option to hold an order for shipping? I really want to grab a wrap shirt when they release next week, but the skirt I also want is in stock in my size right now, and I don't want to risk it selling out before the shirts come.

you would need to email in to ask! we had to stop doing the automated hold/combine my order thing because it was gunking up a lot of stuff behind the scenes. people would ask us to hold inventory for them for MONTHS and wouldn’t answer our multiple emails sent their way and then get pissed at us when we canceled their order. it was too much extra work to also get yelled at for.

plus, those options were only really there as a stop gap when all of our restocks were quite small because we had to thoroughly quality check every skirt before listing it because our old manu’s defect rate was so abysmal. now restocks can be much larger so it takes longer for things to sell out.

[dericbindel]

Alright, I gotta type this up because its eating at my brain in a bad way and needs release.

I am not categorically against the concept of generative AI. I don't think there's a way to define art that excludes it while not also excluding stuff that is firmly art. I think that in its current form, it is fundamentally exploitative and causing a lot of harm to workers in very precarious industries. In order for me to actually support it, two major shifts would have to happen.

The models must exclusively be opt-in by the artists*, who can dictate what material can or cannot be used more specifically. (There can be a nuanced discussion on the usage of material by deceased artists and material in the public domain). (In cases of corporate ownership of existing works, I think all artists involved in creating assets should still have to collectively agree for material to be used).

Artists should actually see the benefits of automation, receiving healthcare and UBI seperate from work, so that they are not so beholden to being involved in such mercenary industries and make compromises just to exist.

*I am including all forms of art and artist here, from illustrators to modellers to voice actors and programmers.

I think these would go a massive way to tackling the economic ramifications of the "move fast, break things" attitude these genAI companies have, while avoiding making the copyright and IP systems that currently exist even more nightmarishly awful.

Relatedly, I don't really vibe with discussions of art that seem to fetishize the process of creating it. As someone who does work with a variety of forms of art and mediums, that has never really sat well with me. It feels like a rehashing of the "true art is made from suffering" bullshit, and I don't much care for it! Art for me is a puzzle that I am solving. Figuring out how to accomplish what I want and executing on that is how I interface with it.

(I am aware that a lot of this is pie in the sky type stuff, but its what would be needed for me to be fine with it existing under capitalism. There's a slightly different discussion to be had about outside it).

[cindylouwho-2]

RECENT ECOMMERCE NEWS (INCLUDING ETSY), LATE JULY 2024

Things have been hectic so this is a long one update - all the Etsy and other ecommerce news from the past month, broken down for your convenience!

Next week could be a big Etsy news week, with the 2nd quarter report being released, and the mature items ban kicking in. I'm also working on analysis of the new Creativity Standards, but we may not have more substantial information on those until Etsy makes another move. Right now the categories are a mess, but that could change.

A reminder that you can receive more timely updates plus exclusive content - including live chats with me on select topics such as Etsy's new Creativity Standards - by supporting my Patreon: patreon.com/CindyLouWho2

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES 

The European Union is considering making packages valued under 150 euros subject to customs duties when entering the EU. This is widely seen as a way to reduce Shein and Temu orders. 

The Etsy Creativity Standards announced on July 9th have a lot going on; here is my short summary so far. [post by me on Patreon] While I would not worry too much about this just yet, I expect them to be more important in the near future.  Etsy adding "Made by", "Handpicked by" to every listing is currently full of errors, but more disturbingly, even when a seller points out these errors with arguments from the written policy, Etsy Support is sometimes insisting that the designations are correct. For example, original paintings are lumped in with AI designs and digital downloads. [Post by me on LinkedIn] 

Amazon is imposing new rules regarding on-time delivery rates (OTDR); sellers that do not meet the standard of 90% on time delivery will not be able to continue selling. Businesses are exempted if they use the following tools: Shipping Settings Automation, Automated handling time, and Amazon Buy Shipping. Amazon is allowing only 5 days after shipment for products to arrive within the US. You can read the announcement and vigorous forum discussion here, and EcommerceBytes did a summary of the changes and some complaints.

ETSY NEWS 

As Etsy's widespread ban on many adult-themed products is about to take effect on Monday, I considered why Etsy felt the need to take far more drastic steps than Amazon & eBay has in the same markets. [post by me on Tumblr] The upcoming ban started by getting media attention from Mashable, and quickly escalated to the New York Times [not a gift link; soft paywall]. Etsy is still not commenting on why they are doing this. From the NYT article: "Even before the ban, it was getting harder to run his business, Mr. Goldstein said. So, he thought, “Why don’t we just make our own marketplace?” This year, he started the website Spicerack as an independent alternative to Etsy. The online boutique already has about 75 sellers, which are vetted to make sure they’re not “dropshippers” or simultaneously listing products on e-commerce behemoths like AliExpress or Amazon. Mr. Goldstein said that Spicerack is in the process of adding about 100 more sellers, half of whom signed up when the Etsy ban was announced." From the BBC: “In many countries there is pressure on platforms, sometimes backed by new legislation, to do more to prevent under-18s from encountering explicit content, and to remove illegal or "harmful" content from their platforms. Payment processors are also increasingly wary of working with platforms that enable sex based commerce....those concerns could be addressed by more clearly labelling and separating adult product listings..." The Guardian interviewed a few sellers who are affected.

While Etsy previously stated that the new shop set-up fee would be $15 USD, they quietly changed that, to whatever they feel like charging. [post by me on Patreon]

In case you missed it, the new listing form seems to be triggering Etsy Ads campaigns to start without the seller’s knowledge. [post by me on LinkedIn] Since my post, there are still more reports of this happening, and even more. 

I regret to inform you that Etsy’s Search Analytics are going to disappear after August 14 [post by me on LinkedIn], per a banner on the page.

Canadian sellers will have to pay a 1.15% “Regulatory Operating Fee” on all of their sales income (including shipping and gift wrap) starting August 15. This is likely due to a new law taxing large ecommerce platforms 3% of their Canadian income, which came into effect June 28. The tax applies retroactively back to the beginning of 2022, so Etsy is likely overcharging us to cover those earlier amounts. 

Sellers having difficulties with the domestic pricing tool not working correctly may want to try these tips from an Etsy forum thread: Set the domestic price to the global price amount, save, and then go back in and change the domestic price to your preferred amount, then save again. This apparently works for both new and existing listings, but there are 3 drawbacks: 1) it is time-consuming, 2) it needs to be done any time a listing is changed/edited (including renewals), and 3) it doesn’t seem to work for France. (I don’t ship to France so I cannot test the last point.) Remember, if you have a sale go through for the wrong price, contact Etsy and demand to be compensated the difference. 

Still don’t believe that Etsy is serious about shipping on time? See this Reddit thread by a seller who ignored a 30-day warning, so all of their items were removed from search. From this screenshot, it appears their average order value was fairly high, but that doesn’t mean Etsy will tolerate late shipping from shops with cheaper items, so beware. 

Etsy is testing filtering out digital items from search results unless the terms match a digital item search. See Etsy forum threads here and also here. 

A new academic study calls out Etsy and other online marketplaces for allowing illegally-killed bats to be sold on their sites. “We refute any assertion that the online bat trade is ethical. Again, statements that bats were captive-bred are absurd—bat farms are nonexistent—and it would be impossible for suppliers to find bats that have died naturally in the kind of condition and numbers needed to supply an ornamental trade. These bats were hunted.” The New York Times has also now covered this story [soft paywall]. 

The virtual seller education event Etsy Up is scheduled for September 10. You can register here, but there is no program yet. Usually this event has almost nothing worthwhile for experienced shops, and Etsy generally uses it to push their paid services and integrations along with basic info. 

Etsy is looking for sellers to join their Advocacy program and “share your story”. Beware that sometimes Etsy’s “advocacy” is as much for Etsy as for its sellers, so they are looking for stories that fit Etsy’s own goals. 

The Etsy Design Awards have opened; the final date for submissions is August 8. 

Etsy’s second quarter results for 2024 will be released July 31.

ECOMMERCE NEWS (minus social media)

General

Shein and Temu are facing investigations under the EU’s Digital Services Act. “In a press release, the EU said it’s asking Shein and Temu for more information about measures they’ve taken to meet DSA obligations related to what’s known as “Notice and Action” mechanisms, which should allow users to notify the marketplaces of illegal products.It has also requested info related to the design of their online interfaces, which the pan-EU law mandates must not deceive or manipulate users, such as via so-called “dark patterns”.” Temu is also being sued by Arkansas for having an invasive app that is accused of harvesting data without user permissions. “According to the complaint, Temu is allegedly obscuring its unauthorized access to data through misleading terms of use and privacy policies that do not alert users to the full scope of data that the app can potentially collect. That includes not telling users about tracking granular locations for no defined purpose and collecting "even biometric information such as users’ fingerprints."

Amazon

Amazon now has an AI shopping “assistant” on its US app, called Rufus. “Customers can ask questions about products, comparisons and buying considerations. The AI can provide suggestions for specific tasks or projects.” As per usual with AI, “tests show Rufus doesn’t always provide accurate information.” A review from Marketplace Pulse notes that “Amazon’s AI assistant fails to help shoppers find the best product among the millions in the catalog. It transforms broad questions like “What are the best cycling gloves for winter?” into a few links to product searches — the same searches a shopper could have typed themselves. It refuses to make product recommendations, show specific products, or suggest from the thousands of options. It can’t directly answer the question, “What are the cheapest batteries for my TV remote?”

Any sellers who had items removed for being plants or seeds when they actually aren’t should follow the instructions linked to here to get the situation resolved. An Amazon employee warned sellers: “Please do not acknowledge the violations as these will result in the deactivation of your listings.” Affected businesses should instead appeal the flags.  

Amazon is planning a discount drop shipping from China section, widely seen to be competition to Temu and Shein. However, “[i]t is not clear if these shipments will be made using a U.S. trade provision that exempts individual packages worth less than $800 from U.S. customs duties.”

The European Commission has asked Amazon for more information on “recommender systems, ads transparency provisions and risk assessment measures.” 

Only 1% of US Amazon sellers also offer their items outside of North America. “Due to its proximity to the U.S., Canada has more successful sellers from the U.S. than Canada.” If you have a unique product, this could be an opportunity.  Amazon returns are creating huge workloads for UPS stores and other retailers that accept them. “Amazon “makes up about one-tenth of our profits, but it takes up about 90 percent of the working day,” said Jeremy Walker, a store associate who worked at a UPS Store near Dallas that received between 300 and 600 returns per day.”

Depop

After trying it out in the UK, Depop is removing selling fees for the United States, starting July 15. Payment processing fees still apply. “[B]buyers will now be charged a "marketplace fee" of up to 5% plus a fixed amount up to $1.”

An interview with Depop CEO Kruti Patel Goyal reveals they plan “to bring Depop to a bigger and broader audience over time.” 

eBay

eBay is slowly rolling out changes to the Active Listings page. 

eBay sellers can now get cash advance loans through Liberis, the balance of which gets paid as a percentage of the seller's sales. 

New sellers in the UK might see “automated feedback” on some of their orders, to "help [users] buy and sell with confidence". It will say "This seller successfully completed an order", and is removed once the actual buyer leaves feedback. 

Michaels MakerPlace

Abby Glassenberg reviews Michaels’ MakerPlace popups inside their retail stores. Results seem mixed.

Shopify

A few hundred thousand Shopify users may have had their names, addresses and other data put up for sale on July 3 after a breach. Shopify denies it had any security issues and claims the data came from a third-party app. There was a known data breach at Evolve Bank and Trust in June; that institution is a supporting partner for Shopify Balance. It does appear that Shopify is notifying the affected individuals.

Walmart Walmart is adding pre-owned collectibles to its marketplace. “Eligible categories include Toys (Figures, Dolls, Trains, Plushies, Games, LEGO, Funko, Diecast Cars & Hot Wheels); Media & Music (Movies, Vinyl, Music, SteelBooks, Musical Instruments & Entertainment Replicas); Trading Cards; Comic Books & Books; Sports Memorabilia; and Coins.”

All Other Marketplaces

Indiegogo is opening an ecommerce website for items created through crowdfunding campaigns on the platform, called IndieShop. 

Etsy-owned Reverb now has an “outlet” page, where businesses can sell off their overstock, seconds and out-of-date models for 20% off and free shipping. Most products sold through the main portion of Reverb are used, not new, so this competes with regular sellers. 

Not sure if selling on Faire is right for your business? Here’s a handmade-focussed review of the wholesale site.

Payment Processing

Klarna is now available through Adobe Commerce (previously Magento). 

Shipping

USPS rates for labels on most platforms went up July 1, ahead of the previously-announced July 14th increases. Ina Steiner re-posted the numbers from eBay and Pirate Ship. 

USPS released the addresses and other data of logged-in Informed Delivery users to Meta, LinkedIn and Snap. The company claims it didn’t know the data transfer was happening. 

The free USPS Priority medium shipping tubes are no longer being made, but you can still order existing stock. 

Royal Mail’s Tracked 28 & 48 are now available at post offices. 

UPS’s holiday surcharge rates for the US have been released; the lower surcharges start September 29th.

Shippo has new Canada Post rates from now until January, and the Tracked Packet rates to everywhere but the United States are cheaper than Etsy’s (which are based on Level 4 of Solutions for Small Business). Remember that Shippo makes you pay for a higher tier of service if you use over 30 labels per month.