ecostrip

[fieryvoid-scout]

I have noooo money

Sorrgy

[void-tiger]

Well, my pcp isn’t ready to give up, which is great, ‘cause I am, but sadly Can’t with how much my symptoms seriously hamper my daily function in ways people just. Really take for granted.

[sundial-bee-scribbles]

Yeah like what’s the point of even having anon features if they can’t use your website?????? Like on certain blogs I can’t even view them without being blocked????? I don’t understand????

And I can’t talk to people if they don’t have a submission box which is awkward because not many people have a submission box that I can see! -🌟

══════════════════ 

well the blog thing is most likely that some people have set it to not be visible outside the tumblr dashboard; some people just don’t want their blog viewable to anyone outside of tumblr and there’s a number of reasons why that could be, it’s their own personal decision

the submission/ask box thing can sometimes be a case i know of new users forgetting to turn it on, but sometimes too its deliberately turned off (or limited, like anons being turned off and only other users can ask qs) for, again, a number of different reasons (︶︿︶)

[happeehippie]

instagram j.b.

summary: follow along with joe and his WIFE evie as they go through his football career.

*face claim is yasmin quintana*

series masterlist.

liked by bengals, joeyb_9, and 983,729 others…

evie: honeymoon avenue.

view all 4,738 comments…

user: i love you guys together!

> evie: 💗💗

user: am i the only one that doesn’t like her?

> millyg: it’s the jealousy in you.

> user: i don’t see how anyone can’t like her, she’s so nice!

user: yikes

joeyb_9: no complaints, probably the best avenue out there.

> evie: thanks for your input, i totally agree.

> millyg: gtfo you guys 🤣

joeyb_9

liked by evie, lahjay10_, and 902,519 others

joeyb_9: we will send a post card.

view all 5,739 comments…

user: nooooo that’s two times in a row he’s posted ev

> user: they are literally married now, she’s not going anywhere.

user: in his *husband* era

user: i can’t stomach this

millyg: still mad i got left at home.

> user: i don’t like them together, im not jealous or anything something just feels off.

> user: i think that means your jealous.

evie: the views were 10/10

> joeyb_9: i was only looking at you.

> lahjay10_: 🧀🧀🧀

evie

liked by joeyb_9, millyg, and 810,826 others

evie: some small things…🤍

view all 3,738 comments…

user: i’m SO single

user: she doesn’t have to rub it in

user: NOT THE PRETTY GIRL. ladies he is everything..

user: if he wanted to he would

millyg: not joes failed cursive attempt

> evie: it wasn’t TERRIBLE 🤣

user: being with joe burrow is this girls whole personality

joeyb_9: the prettiest pretty girl.

> evie: 😭💗

user: so when are we expecting the divorce?

user: take notes fellas

user: joe and ev being so taylor coded makes me sick

> evie: swifties are superior, even if jb likes to pretend he isn’t one.

joeyb_9

liked by obj, evie, and 1,785,002 others

joeyb_9: had the basketball versus football convo too many times

view all 2,372 comments…

user: low key forgot you weren’t just some guy from cincinnati

> evie: THE guy from cincinnati

obj: Da boyyyyyyyy

user: tough. basketball tho

> evie: wrong answer. 😭

user: Joey B is A list now

evie: it was so nice of you to take photos with a few fans today.

> joeyb_9: 😎

> user: ev is coming for those opps

user: not him hanging with obj

user: such a weeb

evie

liked by millyg, joeyb_9, and 1,037,927 others

evie: went to something called a white party?

view all 2,801 comments…

user: you win

user: he actually took you with him?

> evie: i actually got invited to come with him.

> user: standing on business.

user: YOU MISSED TAYLOR FOR THIS?????

> evie: marriage is about sacrifice.

joeyb_9: 🥵🥵🥵

user: this is everything

user: that joe pic is my new background thanks

> evie: charity work is my passion.

user: i keep coming back to look at this post

user: second pic sent me into cardiac arrest.

> evie: you should’ve seen it in person.

joeyb_9

liked by bengals, lahjay10_, and 710,991 others

joeyb_9: “It’s time to go mobile.”

view all 3,729 comments…

user: YESSIR

lahjay10_: My step brother

> evie: hell yeah

user: do you want my mobile phone number

> evie: he doesn’t have a mobile phone.

> user: you are so funny mrs. burrow. 🤣💀

> user: why are you always so rude?

> user: she isn’t rude, but she’s always going to let us know that’s her man. don’t play like you wouldn’t do the same thing if random girls were coming at your bf with this kind of shit.

> user: i agree, she isn’t being rude but she’s never really let people show blatant disrespect for their relationship. even when they were in college.

tylerboyd: levels

> evie: BIG LEVELS

evie: you’re so hot. there is said it.

joeyb_9: 🪞

user: return of shiesty

user: YEAH BABYYYY

evie

liked by bengals, lahjay10_, and 810,003 others

evie: volume 4. 🤍🧡🖤

view all 2,761 comments…

user: you’re special

user: do you ever get sick of having to pretend to be interested in football?

> evie: never pretending.

user: he needs a tall blonde that has a brain.

> evie: my masters in marketing is offended.

user: i’m so excited to see the team smash it this year!

joeyb_9: very big fan of this.

> evie: your sunnies really tie it together.

> user: not you sharing sunnies. 😭

user: i love ev truly, but im also jealous of her.

> evie: i’m not sure what to say here. 🤣💗

joeyb_9

liked by evie, bengals, and 789,524 others

joeyb_9: Mask off.

view all 2,751 comments…

user: clothes off

> evie: the clothes will stay on. (for now) 🤪

user: Burrow is back!

user: solid W

evie: put the mask back on, i can’t think straight.

> joeyb_9: keep it on all night?

> user: i wish i could unsee this

> user: joe. please. this has to stop.

user: i’ll never quit you.

evie’s instagram stories:

a/n: hiiii. i’m going to finish this series up in the next post so i can work on some of the other requests i have. if you guys are interested in me continuing it once the new season starts let me know and i’ll see what i can do. thanks for all the love on this, you guys rock. and as always im taking request so if you have an idea i’d love to hear it.

[urbancripple]

To able‐bodied people, wheelchair users have a certain mystique. They’re constantly asking us about how our bodies do or don’t work, whether we can have sex, why we haven't just killed ourselves yet. But despite their intrusive questioning, there is one area that ableds seem to be absolutely certain about: the existence of ultra‐convenient readily‐available accessibility modifications and mobility aids.

As wheelchair users, how many times have we been told to “put some chains on that thing!” As we struggle through the snow? How often is it suggested that we get a hand‐bike so that we can cycle to work like our coworkers? If I had a nickel for every time someone suggested I attach some tried‐and‐true motor to my chair, I’d have enough money to pay someone to invent it.

People are constantly sending me links to articles and videos to supposed life‐changing mobility aids that can climb stairs or move over rough terrain. They tell me that things can’t be that difficult with a constant stream of new, convenient doo‐dads being put out in the world. Hell, when discussing how difficult it is to find a single‐story home in Seattle (existing or custom), the suggestion was made that I simply build a multi‐story home but also put an elevator in.

Here’s the thing though: has anyone, wheelchair‐user or otherwise, actually seen any of these so‐called solutions in person? The stair‐climbing wheelchair? The magical snow tires? The super fast motor? I haven’t. As for the elevators and hand bikes, I can count the number I’ve seen on one hand and I’d need way more fingers and toes to show you the price tag.

Despite their near non‐existence or insurmountable financial cost, people keep telling me I just need to “get me one of those…” and continue to cast my existence and the problems that come with it in a mythical light.

An elevator for your house starts at around six‐thousand dollars. If you want one that doesn’t look like the rickety stair‐lift at your local Eagle’s Club, it’ll cost you upwards of sixty‐thousand.

The price of an average, entry‐level bike is four‐hundred bucks. If you want an accessible hand bike, you’re going to start around a grand.

Custom wheelchair tires can vary anywhere from two to five thousand, often times costing more than the chair they’re attached to.

That stair climbing chair? Eleven grand. Want something that’s a little more “every day”? That’ll cost you seventeen grand. Just need a motor for your day chair? Six grand and it weighs fifteen pounds.

Now, some folks might be thinking “sure, it’s expensive now, but the price will come down as technology improves and more people buy these devices”. But with an employment rate of roughly 7 percent (before COVID) and rules governing the amount of money disabled people on SSI can have in the bank (no more than two-thousand dollars), most wheelchair users can’t even save up to buy one of these devices. And no, insurance won’t cover any it.

A lack of accessibility is not something we can just “tech” our way out of and disabled people should not expected to purchase access to a world that everyone else gets for free. Talking about mobility aids you’ve never used or seen when someone is trying to explain to you the barriers they face in their day to day life due to a lack of accessibility isn’t helpful, it’s dismissive. Quit doing it.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Tiktok's enshittification

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results.

This was a hell of a good deal for Amazon’s customers. Lots of us piled in, and lots of brick-and-mortar retailers withered and died, making it hard to go elsewhere. Amazon sold us ebooks and audiobooks that were permanently locked to its platform with DRM, so that every dollar we spent on media was a dollar we’d have to give up if we deleted Amazon and its apps. And Amazon sold us Prime, getting us to pre-pay for a year’s worth of shipping. Prime customers start their shopping on Amazon, and 90% of the time, they don’t search anywhere else.

That tempted in lots of business customers — Marketplace sellers who turned Amazon into the “everything store” it had promised from the beginning. As these sellers piled in, Amazon shifted to subsidizing suppliers. Kindle and Audible creators got generous packages. Marketplace sellers reached huge audiences and Amazon took low commissions from them.

This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon.

That’s when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon’s shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company’s $31b “advertising” program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search.

Searching Amazon doesn’t produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon’s “Most Favored Nation” requirement sellers means that they can’t sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.

Search Amazon for “cat beds” and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn’t charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for “cat bed” are 50% ads.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

This is why — as Cat Valente wrote in her magesterial pre-Christmas essay — platforms like Prodigy transformed themselves overnight, from a place where you went for social connection to a place where you were expected to “stop talking to each other and start buying things”:

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

This shell-game with surpluses is what happened to Facebook. First, Facebook was good to you: it showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook, it became effectively impossible to leave, because you’d have to convince all of them to leave too, and agree on where to go. You may love your friends, but half the time you can’t agree on what movie to see and where to go for dinner. Forget it.

Then, it started to cram your feed full of posts from accounts you didn’t follow. At first, it was media companies, who Facebook preferentially crammed down its users’ throats so that they would click on articles and send traffic to newspapers, magazines and blogs.

Then, once those publications were dependent on Facebook for their traffic, it dialed down their traffic. First, it choked off traffic to publications that used Facebook to run excerpts with links to their own sites, as a way of driving publications into supplying fulltext feeds inside Facebook’s walled garden.

This made publications truly dependent on Facebook — their readers no longer visited the publications’ websites, they just tuned into them on Facebook. The publications were hostage to those readers, who were hostage to each other. Facebook stopped showing readers the articles publications ran, tuning The Algorithm to suppress posts from publications unless they paid to “boost” their articles to the readers who had explicitly subscribed to them and asked Facebook to put them in their feeds.

Now, Facebook started to cram more ads into the feed, mixing payola from people you wanted to hear from with payola from strangers who wanted to commandeer your eyeballs. It gave those advertisers a great deal, charging a pittance to target their ads based on the dossiers of nonconsensually harvested personal data they’d stolen from you.

Sellers became dependent on Facebook, too, unable to carry on business without access to those targeted pitches. That was Facebook’s cue to jack up ad prices, stop worrying so much about ad fraud, and to collude with Google to rig the ad market through an illegal program called Jedi Blue:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

Today, Facebook is terminally enshittified, a terrible place to be whether you’re a user, a media company, or an advertiser. It’s a company that deliberately demolished a huge fraction of the publishers it relied on, defrauding them into a “pivot to video” based on false claims of the popularity of video among Facebook users. Companies threw billions into the pivot, but the viewers never materialized, and media outlets folded in droves:

https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-pivot-metrics-false.html

But Facebook has a new pitch. It claims to be called Meta, and it has demanded that we live out the rest of our days as legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-poly cartoon characters.

It has promised companies that make apps for this metaverse that it won’t rug them the way it did the publishers on the old Facebook. It remains to be seen whether they’ll get any takers. As Mark Zuckerberg once candidly confessed to a peer, marvelling at all of his fellow Harvard students who sent their personal information to his new website “TheFacebook”:

> I don’t know why.

> They “trust me”

> Dumb fucks.

https://doctorow.medium.com/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video-adbe09319038

Once you understand the enshittification pattern, a lot of the platform mysteries solve themselves. Think of the SEO market, or the whole energetic world of online creators who spend endless hours engaged in useless platform Kremlinology, hoping to locate the algorithmic tripwires, which, if crossed, doom the creative works they pour their money, time and energy into:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/11/coercion-v-cooperation/#the-machine-is-listening

Working for the platform can be like working for a boss who takes money out of every paycheck for all the rules you broke, but who won’t tell you what those rules are because if he told you that, then you’d figure out how to break those rules without him noticing and docking your pay. Content moderation is the only domain where security through obscurity is considered a best practice:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

The situation is so dire that organizations like Tracking Exposed have enlisted an human army of volunteers and a robot army of headless browsers to try to unwind the logic behind the arbitrary machine judgments of The Algorithm, both to give users the option to tune the recommendations they receive, and to help creators avoid the wage theft that comes from being shadow banned:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/tracking-exposed-demanding-gods-explain-themselves

But what if there is no underlying logic? Or, more to the point, what if the logic shifts based on the platform’s priorities? If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you’ll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he’d carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers — as a convincer in a “Big Store” con, a way to rope in other suckers who’ll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.

Which brings me to Tiktok. Tiktok is many different things, including “a free Adobe Premiere for teenagers that live on their phones.”

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-fragments-of-media-you-consume

But what made it such a success early on was the power of its recommendation system. From the start, Tiktok was really, really good at recommending things to its users. Eerily good:

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1093882880

By making good-faith recommendations of things it thought its users would like, Tiktok built a mass audience, larger than many thought possible, given the death grip of its competitors, like Youtube and Instagram. Now that Tiktok has the audience, it is consolidating its gains and seeking to lure away the media companies and creators who are still stubbornly attached to Youtube and Insta.

Yesterday, Forbes’s Emily Baker-White broke a fantastic story about how that actually works inside of Bytedance, Tiktok’s parent company, citing multiple internal sources, revealing the existence of a “heating tool” that Tiktok employees use push videos from select accounts into millions of viewers’ feeds:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

These videos go into Tiktok users’ ForYou feeds, which Tiktok misleadingly describes as being populated by videos “ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app.” In reality, For You is only sometimes composed of videos that Tiktok thinks will add value to your experience — the rest of the time, it’s full of videos that Tiktok has inserted in order to make creators think that Tiktok is a great place to reach an audience.

“Sources told Forbes that TikTok has often used heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them into partnerships by inflating their videos’ view count. This suggests that heating has potentially benefitted some influencers and brands — those with whom TikTok has sought business relationships — at the expense of others with whom it has not.”

In other words, Tiktok is handing out giant teddy bears.

But Tiktok is not in the business of giving away giant teddy bears. Tiktok, for all that its origins are in the quasi-capitalist Chinese economy, is just another paperclip-maximizing artificial colony organism that treats human beings as inconvenient gut flora. Tiktok is only going to funnel free attention to the people it wants to entrap until they are entrapped, then it will withdraw that attention and begin to monetize it.

“Monetize” is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an “Attention Economy.” You can’t use attention as a medium of exchange. You can’t use it as a store of value. You can’t use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with “fiat” currency in exchange for it. You have to “monetize” it — that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

In the case of cryptos, the main monetization strategy was deception-based. Exchanges and “projects” handed out a bunch of giant teddy-bears, creating an army of true-believer Judas goats who convinced their peers to hand the carny their money and try to get some balls into the peach-basket themselves.

But deception only produces so much “liquidity provision.” Eventually, you run out of suckers. To get lots of people to try the ball-toss, you need coercion, not persuasion. Think of how US companies ended the defined benefits pension that guaranteed you a dignified retirement, replacing it with market-based 401(k) pensions that forced you to gamble your savings in a rigged casino, making you the sucker at the table, ripe for the picking:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

Early crypto liquidity came from ransomware. The existence of a pool of desperate, panicked companies and individuals whose data had been stolen by criminals created a baseline of crypto liquidity because they could only get their data back by trading real money for fake crypto money.

The next phase of crypto coercion was Web3: converting the web into a series of tollbooths that you could only pass through by trading real money for fake crypto money. The internet is a must-have, not a nice-to-have, a prerequisite for full participation in employment, education, family life, health, politics, civics, even romance. By holding all those things to ransom behind crypto tollbooths, the hodlers hoped to convert their tokens to real money:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

For Tiktok, handing out free teddy-bears by “heating” the videos posted by skeptical performers and media companies is a way to convert them to true believers, getting them to push all their chips into the middle of the table, abandoning their efforts to build audiences on other platforms (it helps that Tiktok’s format is distinctive, making it hard to repurpose videos for Tiktok to circulate on rival platforms).

Once those performers and media companies are hooked, the next phase will begin: Tiktok will withdraw the “heating” that sticks their videos in front of people who never heard of them and haven’t asked to see their videos. Tiktok is performing a delicate dance here: there’s only so much enshittification they can visit upon their users’ feeds, and Tiktok has lots of other performers they want to give giant teddy-bears to.

Tiktok won’t just starve performers of the “free” attention by depreferencing them in the algorithm, it will actively punish them by failing to deliver their videos to the users who subscribed to them. After all, every time Tiktok shows you a video you asked to see, it loses a chance to show you a video it wants you to see, because your attention is a giant teddy-bear it can give away to a performer it is wooing.

This is just what Twitter has done as part of its march to enshittification: thanks to its “monetization” changes, the majority of people who follow you will never see the things you post. I have ~500k followers on Twitter and my threads used to routinely get hundreds of thousands or even millions of reads. Today, it’s hundreds, perhaps thousands.

I just handed Twitter $8 for Twitter Blue, because the company has strongly implied that it will only show the things I post to the people who asked to see them if I pay ransom money. This is the latest battle in one of the internet’s longest-simmering wars: the fight over end-to-end:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

In the beginning, there were Bellheads and Netheads. The Bellheads worked for big telcos, and they believed that all the value of the network rightly belonged to the carrier. If someone invented a new feature — say, Caller ID — it should only be rolled out in a way that allows the carrier to charge you every month for its use. This is Software-As-a-Service, Ma Bell style.

The Netheads, by contrast, believed that value should move to the edges of the network — spread out, pluralized. In theory, Compuserve could have “monetized” its own version of Caller ID by making you pay $2.99 extra to see the “From:” line on email before you opened the message — charging you to know who was speaking before you started listening — but they didn’t.

The Netheads wanted to build diverse networks with lots of offers, lots of competition, and easy, low-cost switching between competitors (thanks to interoperability). Some wanted this because they believed that the net would someday be woven into the world, and they didn’t want to live in a world of rent-seeking landlords. Others were true believers in market competition as a source of innovation. Some believed both things. Either way, they saw the risk of network capture, the drive to monetization through trickery and coercion, and they wanted to head it off.

They conceived of the end-to-end principle: the idea that networks should be designed so that willing speakers’ messages would be delivered to willing listeners’ end-points as quickly and reliably as they could be. That is, irrespective of whether a network operator could make money by sending you the data it wanted to receive, its duty would be to provide you with the data you wanted to see.

The end-to-end principle is dead at the service level today. Useful idiots on the right were tricked into thinking that the risk of Twitter mismanagement was “woke shadowbanning,” whereby the things you said wouldn’t reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter’s deep state didn’t like your opinions. The real risk, of course, is that the things you say won’t reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter can make more money by enshittifying their feeds and charging you ransom for the privilege to be included in them.

As I said at the start of this essay, enshittification exerts a nearly irresistible gravity on platform capitalism. It’s just too easy to turn the enshittification dial up to eleven. Twitter was able to fire the majority of its skilled staff and still crank the dial all the way over, even with a skeleton crew of desperate, demoralized H1B workers who are shackled to Twitter’s sinking ship by the threat of deportation.

The temptation to enshittify is magnified by the blocks on interoperability: when Twitter bans interoperable clients, nerfs its APIs, and periodically terrorizes its users by suspending them for including their Mastodon handles in their bios, it makes it harder to leave Twitter, and thus increases the amount of enshittification users can be force-fed without risking their departure.

Twitter is not going to be a “protocol.” I’ll bet you a testicle¹ that projects like Bluesky will find no meaningful purchase on the platform, because if Bluesky were implemented and Twitter users could order their feeds for minimal enshittification and leave the service without sacrificing their social networks, it would kill the majority of Twitter’s “monetization” strategies.

¹Not one of mine.

An enshittification strategy only succeeds if it is pursued in measured amounts. Even the most locked-in user eventually reaches a breaking-point and walks away, or gets pushed. The villagers of Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof tolerated the cossacks' violent raids and pogroms for years, until they were finally forced to flee to Krakow, New York and Chicago:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

For enshittification-addled companies, that balance is hard to strike. Individual product managers, executives, and activist shareholders all give preference to quick returns at the cost of sustainability, and are in a race to see who can eat their seed-corn first. Enshittification has only lasted for as long as it has because the internet has devolved into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”:

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

With the market sewn up by a group of cozy monopolists, better alternatives don’t pop up and lure us away, and if they do, the monopolists just buy them out and integrate them into your enshittification strategies, like when Mark Zuckerberg noticed a mass exodus of Facebook users who were switching to Instagram, and so he bought Instagram. As Zuck says, “It is better to buy than to compete.”

This is the hidden dynamic behind the rise and fall of Amazon Smile, the program whereby Amazon gave a small amount of money to charities of your choice when you shopped there, but only if you used Amazon’s own search tool to locate the products you purchased. This provided an incentive for Amazon customers to use its own increasingly enshittified search, which it could cram full of products from sellers who coughed up payola, as well as its own lookalike products. The alternative was to use Google, whose search tool would send you directly to the product you were looking for, and then charge Amazon a commission for sending you to it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/comment/j4znb8y/

The demise of Amazon Smile coincides with the increasing enshittification of Google Search, the only successful product the company managed to build in-house. All its other successes were bought from other companies: video, docs, cloud, ads, mobile; while its own products are either flops like Google Video, clones (Gmail is a Hotmail clone), or adapted from other companies’ products, like Chrome.

Google Search was based on principles set out in founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s landmark 1998 paper, “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/361/

Even with that foundational understanding of enshittification, Google has been unable to resist its siren song. Today’s Google results are an increasingly useless morass of self-preferencing links to its own products, ads for products that aren’t good enough to float to the top of the list on its own, and parasitic SEO junk piggybacking on the former.

Enshittification kills. Google just laid off 12,000 employees, and the company is in a full-blown “panic” over the rise of “AI” chatbots, and is making a full-court press for an AI-driven search tool — that is, a tool that won’t show you what you ask for, but rather, what it thinks you should see:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/20/23563851/google-search-ai-chatbot-demo-chatgpt

Now, it’s possible to imagine that such a tool will produce good recommendations, like Tiktok’s pre-enshittified algorithm did. But it’s hard to see how Google will be able to design a non-enshittified chatbot front-end to search, given the strong incentives for product managers, executives, and shareholders to enshittify results to the precise threshold at which users are nearly pissed off enough to leave, but not quite.

Even if it manages the trick, this-almost-but-not-quite-unusuable equilibrium is fragile. Any exogenous shock — a new competitor like Tiktok that penetrates the anticompetitive “moats and walls” of Big Tech, a privacy scandal, a worker uprising — can send it into wild oscillations:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/watch-the-surpluses/#exogenous-shocks

Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That’s fine, actually. We don’t need eternal rulers of the internet. It’s okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn’t be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms. Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to users when these firms reach their expiry date: enshrining rights like end-to-end would mean that no matter how autocannibalistic a zombie platform became, willing speakers and willing listeners would still connect with each other:

https://doctorow.medium.com/end-to-end-d6046dca366f

And policymakers should focus on freedom of exit — the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought, and preserving the data you created:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

The Netheads were right: technological self-determination is at odds with the natural imperatives of tech businesses. They make more money when they take away our freedom — our freedom to speak, to leave, to connect.

For many years, even Tiktok’s critics grudgingly admitted that no matter how surveillant and creepy it was, it was really good at guessing what you wanted to see. But Tiktok couldn’t resist the temptation to show you the things it wants you to see, rather than what you want to see. The enshittification has begun, and now it is unlikely to stop.

It's too late to save Tiktok. Now that it has been infected by enshittifcation, the only thing left is to kill it with fire.

[Image ID: Hansel and Gretel in front of the witch's candy house. Hansel and Gretel have been replaced with line-drawings of influencers, taking selfies of themselves with the candy house. In front of the candy house stands a portly man in a business suit; his head is a sack of money with a dollar-sign on it. He wears a crooked witch's hat. The cottage has the Tiktok logo on it.]

[cleolinda]

Weekend links, June 9, 2024

My posts

MY ABELIAS HAVE POWDERY MILDEW. We have now acquired a fungicide and sprayed down everything in a six-foot radius of Patient Zero, a crape myrtle that had “mysteriously” not grown much foliage back this year. Thrilling, I know.

If you want to know what post-exertion malaise is, it’s me cleaning for an hour and then being laid out for three days. Coincidentally, I had someone else’s post about chronic fatigue and taking constant breaks in my queue. To round it off, here’s an old post of mine about giving yourself and your fatigue the same grace you’d give other people’s.

Side note, I have realized that mobile now cuts off my profile bio to 

She/her. Classy dame, sparkle consultant, vampire

New followers, I have some very disappointing news for you. 

Reblogs of interest

Pride Month: Spotlight on activist/drag queen Marsha P. Johnson

Related: I think the Pride Moth should become the next Tumblr Animal Mascot.

Great Uncles Angelo and Bill, a love story

The Hot Vintage Lady to Rule Them All: Eartha Kitt. 

Hozier Watch 2024: Here’s “Too Sweet” on--I nearly said “The Colbert Report” and I kind of wish it was. 

Dante inventing the circles of hell: It’s the “Thank you king I am commissioning fan art of you” that always sends me.

The flowered houses of Zalipie, Poland

I have had to get a few crowns because I grind my teeth, and I am very excited about the idea of this tooth regeneration therapy, which my dental insurance won’t cover either. 

Come for the five things food banks want most (money), and stay for the tale of the chaos penny drive.

“One of the most dangerous things we tend to do is treat insights as rules”

Translating Sappho is more complex than you might think

The more you know: a breakdown of the differences between “Rromani,” “Romany,” “Ro[u]manian,” and ethnic slurs in Dracula

Vampire Therapist, available to wishlist on Steam

1000 Books You May Have Actually Read: The implied “you” here is “U.S. readers,” I think. I hit 200 (”better than 86% of users on this list”) because I have read a lot of Shakespeare, “I’m Bella Swan and my hobbies are English class” books, and Stephen King. If you have read YA of the last 20 years, James Patterson, or Colleen Hoover, you will blow past me. 

Video

“The Golden Sandwich, made 95% out of aid package contents, 5% with love and resilience 🍉🚨” 

Hey, so, Adobe is forcing you to agree to let them go through all your shit. Adobe responds, and I don’t believe them. 

Philadelphia Flyers mascot Gritty raising the Progress Pride flag

A guy playing piano and the cat who loves him

“cut to me, playing my horror instrument at 4 am” Okay, but now imagine a hellhound nestled up lovingly against the player of this instrument. 

A roan, a rider, a pride flag, and no tack

The sacred texts

The duality of bun

“Poob has it for you” is probably too new to be a sacred text, but I’m investing

“why are you microwaving carbonated drinks” is not the shocking part

Personal tags of the week

Dune, for some reason, bunnying, and tumblr therapy, a tag that will just body you over and over. 

[strawberryybird]

ok fuck it. in honour of fire emblem: free real estate timeskip day, have some disability headcanons.

edelgard with crutches. thats it thats the post. done.

but also i absolutely think edelgard can have some mobility aids as a treat specifically for me, mobility aid user and edelgard enthusiast. i think the double-cresting she has going on means she has some level of chronic fatigue. use crutches babygirl <33 you know what? She can use a wheelchair, too. And a cane. All the mobility aids for my girl.

lysithea too, for that matter. I'm very fond of lysithea being the default recipient of Hilda's embellishment and decorating. I think Lys has trouble with her joints and uses braces, wraps, and ergonomic designs of things. Whatever motif Hilda has designed this month, Lys will give a test run.

Lys and her dislocating joints creating new spell-casting techniques by force of need and love of her craft.

Hilda's love for jewellery and decorating leading to her interest in the exact intersection of utility and design. Anything to stop people from having to put in so much effort to do things. That's atrocious. Use this, for Seiros' sake.

Magic users with Magic!Psoriasis in their joint extremities. Hands, feet, kneecaps, neck. Anywhere, really. Magic causing immune system reactions my beloved headcanon.

Claude takes out a new tangle from a new pocket in every class. where did he get them. why does he have this many. how did he get a new tangle in the span of the last 6 minutes. claude what the hell.

Marianne & Bernie having enthusiastic sign language chats in the tea gardens. Byleth makes sure to teach them every swear they've ever learned.

If Byleth has to step outside for a bit of air when they realise they're missing another memory from Before, no one makes a big deal. The world will keep moving with them, says Ignatz, who can't bear loud noises anymore.

Dorothea unabashedly handing in her essays on dyed paper, because the pink means the letters stop sliding around. Bernie made her a little quilted pouch for her green-lensed glasses.

Ferdinand making Edie nearly weep with laughter as he matches her pace on the stairs, threatening to have them all demolished for domestic terror and regicide.

Annette and Constance inventing the dicta-quill, creating ye-olde speech-to-text. Annie sends one personally to Lorenz, who lost his left forearm in the final battle. She gets 3 pages of effusive praise and thanks back. Their correspondence gets so long, that the post service starts charging their letters as parcels.

[haveyoureadthisfanfic]

Fun fact. Sending Quotev fics is the bane of my existence. You can't copy text from the site, getting a link is hell, and the interface isn't super friendly on browser or mobile if we are being honest. Idk if the quality of the user interface has gone down since I last used it, or if I've just been pampered and spoiled by ao3 and have become weak. Perhaps soon I will be culled from fandom for I am old and decrepit (23).

Oh my god wait I remember now!! It drove me crazy that you couldn’t copy text from there! Like I promise it’s nothing nefarious I just need this text T-T

[diy-fire-water-pups]

@paw-patrol-mighty-asks

Alright let's go! This will be a totally OOC post (for those who don't know, it means "Out Of Character", it's a post made entirely by the mod of the blog instead of the characters in it).

I decided to do better than just asking people to go interact with your blog: As an ancient Tumblr dweller, experienced in running roleplays and askblogs, why don't I give some tips for everyone who's starting a new askblog or wants to start one?

1- Prepare your blog for your future followers!

You want people to look at your askblog and be interested. You want them to look at it and be like "Oh that's so cool, I'm gonna follow them and send some asks!" So, for that to happen, you gotta first make your blog look attractive! Pick colors that match your muse(s), maybe a nice looking theme too - while the Tumblr app doesn't show themes, Browser/desktop mode will show a blog theme if you install one. First you'll want to go to your blog settings to activate this:

Now for example, this is what this blog looks like on the Tumblr app (on my phone and on my laptop in dashboard view), on a mobile browser (my Samsung tablet) and on a desktop browser. I'll change this browser/desktop theme in the near future because I don't like the three columns thing making the posts too squeezed in, but let's just go with it for now:

There is a wide variety of free themes (by Tumblr and by other bloggers who create themes and offer them for other users) to install in your blog and customize to make it look unique, attractive and matching with your muse! It's very easy to install a theme, but you can only do so through a browser/desktop. The mobile app doesn't work with this, but it's important to set up your app view as well in the customize blog options on your app, since your blog will look different in each different viewing option XD No sense customizing one look and leaving the other unattended!

2- Choose your fighter(s)!

Select your muse or muses. Get some information about them. Some people will look at your blog and have no idea who are these characters, so why not make a nice short introduction? You can make an intro about them in a pinned post on top of your blog, or a more elaborated "About" page like this:

This will make things easier to catch the attention of people from outside your fandom too! Some roleplayers who are semi or very selective will only interact with other blogs whose muses have an about page, so they can know each others' muses.

3- Set up your rules!

Make a post to pin on top of your blog welcoming people and inviting them to interact. You'll also use this post to set up some rules for interaction (trust me, without rules things can/WILL go downhill really quickly). You can list down what people can and cannot do when sending asks, according to your muses and to yourself. For example, running an askblog with underage muses will demand for no NSFW content or asks. If your muse feels extremely uncomfortable with something in particular, you can add that to the rules for people to avoid touching the subject - same goes if YOU feel uncomfortable with something too. The idea is to keep your muse as true to the canon character as possible, so your followers will feel the magic of actually interacting with that character (think of this as if you're cosplaying at a con, but it's all online!), unless you're going to use your headcanons or if you're working with an AU, but you need to take your own well being into consideration as well!

And now, last but not least, the most controversial tip ever...

4- Send yourself (as anon) the first asks for your characters to answer!

"Wait, WHAT THE HELL, LARY?" you may ask me, "But isn't that CHEATING????"

No, it isn't! Let's see why.

So this is the situation: You just finished creating and preparing your blog, it's BRAND NEW. There's NOTHING in it when you start. It may have a nice theme already, it may look good, you got all pages for your muses prepared, you got the rules for interaction, everything is ready. BUT...

Without posts in it, more importantly, without PROPERLY TAGGED posts, your blog is as good as INVISIBLE.

You need posts with relevant tags, so your blog will show up on Tumblr search. No, it doesn't work for reblogged posts. When you post something, the tags you add to this post are the way for people to find your post (and your blog) when they're using Tumblr search engine. When you reblog a post from someone else, the tags you'll add will serve only for organizing your blog's archive and for the search WITHIN your blog, they will not make that post appear on the general Tumblr search.

This is why I always add certain tags to every ask the pups answer, let's take a look at one of them, shall we?

Here you find:

1- The username of the blogger who sent the ask. 2- A tag for the fandom. 3- A tag identifying this post has something that's not necessarily canon to the original media. 4- Tags with the names of the characters that show up or are mentioned in this post. 5- Tags of the fandom and the characters, because that's how people look for posts about them in the Tumblr search.

If you go on Tumblr search right now, input "Paw Patrol Headcanons", do the search and filter for "latest" instead of "top", you'll see A HELLA LONG RESULTS LIST of posts made by this blog and by my personal Paw Patrol blog (self-indulgent-paw-patrol). Heh, I wasn't joking when I said I'm currently feeding this fandom because trying to get other people to create content here is like beating a dead horse. This happens because I'm always tagging my headcanons and they'll show up in search results so my blog will appear for the people in the fandom.

This is how you get your blog to show up for people. Using the relevant tags for people to see your blog's posts in the results when they're looking up for something related to it.

SO YOU'LL WANT POSTS IN YOUR BLOG, PROPERLY TAGGED, FOR IT TO SHOW UP FOR MORE PEOPLE

That's where enters the "send yourself the first anon asks for your characters to answer" part. By sending some asks yourself, you'll get the chance to start fleshing out your muses, testing how you'll make things work, and have some content in your blog to show up in the search results for the fandom. People will come take a look at your blog, see what you got there, and decide if they'll give a follow, a like, maybe a reblog and ask stuff. If they find an empty blog, it's more likely they won't be interested in interacting.

You can also reblog an ask meme/game like this one, or this one. You can find these kind of ask game posts on Tumblr search too, or follow blogs like @rpsourcedmemes which focus on gathering these kinds of posts for people to find more easily and reblog to get some interaction with your muses! Sometimes people want to interact with your characters but they just don't know what to ask them, so these posts help with suggestions for that!

I think that's it for now. I hope you and other people will find this post useful to help starting your askblogs. It goes for canon characters AND for original characters too - just askblogs in general! Make them look attractive and interesting, get your muses ready, set up your rules, get some well tagged posts in it and you're off to a good start!

[gay-jesus-probably]

SO. I THINK TUMBLR HAS A NEW UPDATE ON MOBILE. BCAUSE WHILE I WAS SCROLLING. APPARENTLY I TOUCHED THE SCREEN FOR TOO LONG. SO IT FREAKED OUT THEN GAVE ME A POPUP INFORMING ME THAT IT HAD JUST SENT THAT RANDOM POST TO A RANDOM USER, WITH LOVE, FROM ME SPECIFICALLY.

WHY.

Fucking hell. I slammed an undo button at top speed but dear lord that is NOT a thing i want to happen. Accidentally sending things to random people is literally the number one way to ensure my social anxiety explodes any time i so much as look at an app again. Good lord.

[egelantier]

rimworld, the addiction

i promised a post about rimworld somewhere an entirety away, and even if i did, by now i was playing it exclusively, a bit every day, for something like half a year, so i think it deserves some kind of an entry in my journal either way.

preface: usually when i describe games here, i put in some kind of a note how this or that game is very casual user friendly (because i am a casual user), and you can play it if you never played stuff, and so on. rimworld is not quite that game. it’s very much a gamer’s game, in a sense that its UI looks like an unholy cross of “hello, world!” programming and an excel spreadsheet, it’s incredibly counterintuitive, it takes from ten to twenty minutes to load on the average (and the loading screen looks like it crashed meantime), and it wants you to suffer. if you play any amount of time, you’re going to inevitably end up with hundred to two hundred mods, and to make the game move with all those mods you’ll have to follow the easily-accessible tutorials with advice like “install this handy Python program” and “Select "BC7 Texconv compressor" on the middle bottom.” and the complexity of the game’s inner system makes its own tutorial - well - it will tell you that you colony needs a freezer for food to outlive the winter, but you will have to intuit by yourself that to make this freezer you’ll have to build a double-walled room of just the right side, put in two air conditioner users set one degree celsius apart from each other to minimize the power load, don’t forget to build double-door airlocks to account for the temperature spikes when the door opens and adjust it by the variety in your biome’s climate. and don’t even get me started on killboxes! this is to say, you’re going to be watching youtube and reading guides. a lot.

(OKAY it’s not THAT bad and you mostly need to be able to know where the mod folder is and how to follow detailed instructions. but by the standards by today’s, increasingly mobile and under-the-hood gaming, it’s practically NASA. even minecraft is more user-friendly in comparison.)

and yet like i said: hordes of rabid fans, literally months of addictive playing, thousands of mods, active scene. why? and what the hell is it? let’s see.

rimworld as a setting is a procedurally generated world in a galaxy far, far away (that takes its setting inspiration from firefly, star wars, a bit of dune, and a general space opera vibe), with diverse climate biomes (from ice sheets to arid deserts, from temperate forests to tropical swamps), inhabited by a variety of friendly and unfriendly flora and fauna and a multitude of friendly and very unfriendly tribes, factions, empire remnants and such. they send each other (and you) raids and trade caravans, and overall just try to survive.

“you" is an unspecified entity (some speculate that you might be an orbital AI, but it doesn’t quite matter) in charge of a group of your “pawns,“ aka colonists - little blobby humanoid representations of either baseline or gene-modified humans that, in a variety of scenarios, find themselves on the unhospitable surface of rimworld either literally butt-naked or with a scant handful of resources, and have to survive and build their way up from a hovel and a campfire to the ultratech spacefaring colony. pawns have their own backstories, traits, needs and health condition; they form relationships, meet their relatives, get together, make up, break up, marry, divorce, make children, mourn their lost people, keep pets, suffer from mental breaks and so on. you can give them direct orders in some occasions, like the battle, but for most of the time you’re going to give them priorities based on their skillset, and watch them do their things on their own, which is alternately fun, touching and infuriating.

your colony’s experience in rimworld is governed by one of the (canonically) three “storytellers,” aka AIs, who’re in charge of sending you various events - enemy raids, wanderers joining in, solar eclipses, manhunting packs of rabid enemies, crop blights, weather anomalies and so on. each storyteller has several levels of intensity, from ‘peaceful’ (it’ll keep weather events and random angry animal attacks, but cut out everything related to hostile pawns, like raiders) to ‘death is inevitable,’ and also has their own style: phoebe just wants you to have a good time, cassandra provides a linear progression of difficulty and alternates ‘bad’ and ‘good’ challenges, and randy just doesn’t give a fuck and WILL get your colony attacked by mechanoids, manhunting yorkshire terriers and pig-human raiders on the same day your favorite melee fighter died and all the electricity cut out, just for the hell of it.

the intended (loosely) gameplay is to randomise your colonists, pick up a storyteller on a medium difficulty, set the game to ‘only save on exit, permadeath’ setting and let your colony tell its own history by surviving as much as it can, mourning its losses and celebrating its wins, and eventually succumbing to the entrophy (or, less likely, achieving one of the win conditions - building a spaceship and getting off the planet, decoding an ancienty mystery to join up with a techmegabrain, hitching a ride with the imperial ship after gladhanding the emperor and his escort in style for a set amount of days, etc.). but the beauty of rimworld is that between the granular difficulty settings and mods you’re able - and welcome - to finetune your experience to the exact specific level of challenge and/or chill you want. don’t care for the fighting at all and just want to build your colony and select the right shade of the carpets? put it on peaceful. don’t mind raiders but fuck those guys who airpod in the middle of your base or breach your walls? the turtle mod is your friend. raiders are fine, but you want to dig your way into the mountain without being afraid of giant insect infestations? turn those assholes off. want to min-max your experience and fight literal horders of enemies every ten minutes? either max out the difficulty or install one of the thousand of mods like combat extended or whatever, that add difficulties and mechanics.

and meanwhile the game - that looks deceptively simple on the outside, build this, harvest this - is stuffed with overcomplicated intersection of various systems creating weird outcomes. it’s a bit minecraft and a bit dwarf fortress and a bit sims and emergent gateways all the way. your little pawns follow the tenets of their ideoligions, get upset over seeing corpses or eating mushrooms, go into berserk rages after eating without a table one too many times, make friends, celebrate the defeat of their rivals and get attached to random squirrels. they can interact with other inhabitants of rimworlds by trading and diplomacy, or indulge in raiding, piracy, enslavement, ritualized murder, forced conversions, cannibalism or non-consensual organ and gene harvesting. a starved pawn on a frozen ice will eat somebody’s body and feel bad about it… unless they come from a society of cannibals, in which case it would be fine and dandy, but they might be upset about eating their human meat in an untidy room, you know? some precepts require the colonists to worship blindness; some of them make people hate the sight of the sun, and some require worshipping every tree and never kill an animal. it’s all, to put it simply, complicated.

and then, of course, mods. the game is created to be as mod-friendly as possible, and so there are literal thousands of them, and they reflect the multifaceted insanity of the world in the most hilarious ways. the most-downloaded mod overall is called wall lights and allows you, well, to put lamps on the wall. the other popular one is called “war crimes,” and you can probably infer its purpose from the title. there are mods that prettify, fully change or customise the chunky UI; mods that clean up or straight up rewrite the graphics; mods that make your little blobby guys look anime and sexy (it’s hilarious); mods that turn rimworld into warhammer 40k, or star wars, or mass effect, or lord of the rim, or a lovecraftian nightmare, or some combination thereof. my favorite of the moment is the collection centered around medieval overhaul, a clever and beautiful bundle that turns the gritty space opera into the fully realized medieval town builder - with smithies and bakeries and castle walls and knight plumages. it takes some time to cobble together a collection that works (and then make sure it all hangs together, and learn to use rimsql, and figure out what the hell defs are and why your log is giving you errors, and change the order of mods a thousand times, and make sure you did not accidentally turn your squirrels into unstoppable death machines while trying to add some prettier capes to your tailor bill), but on practice it means that pretty much every person playing will have their own unique copy of the game, vastly different from what somebody next to them is playing.

like i said above, the intended gameplay is the triumph and misery of playing through as is; but i’m having one of the shittiest years of my entire life, and so almost every day i would load it up and watch the progress of my little medieval towns from one lost person in the wood trying to figure out how to spin flax into thread into little blooming towns, with nothing to distract me. there’s something of bird-watching or flower-pressing to this experience: you set up the conditions and you set up your priorities (or install ‘free will’ and then tear your hair out over your pawns avoiding research and cleaning their floor while winter is looming ahead and they need to figure out how to make parkas) and then you watch how it all unfolds, and you can sprinkle in a bit of a challenge, or you can just watch them grow and mix up and change and misbehave and be silly and transform, and transform, and transform. it more or less saved my sanity. it’s a very specific kind of experience - i built a monastery with a winery and an apothecary’s dark corner in one map, and a small mountain hideaway for a runaway princess in another, and a rough-and-tumble tundra city in third, and so on - and i saw people building unstoppable war machines instead, or trying to survive specific unfair scenarios, or roleplaying, or multiplayering, or minmaxing with spreadsheets and calculators, or all of the above - and god, is it good. is it so goddamn good.

so! whether you want to play it or have ran away screaming by this time, i hope you enjoyed this silly writeup. and if you do want to start playing, don’t hesitate to ask me stuff! or like share my list of mods and so on.

[mack-timelines]

Phantom's Arcade au - (renamed arcade au)

(post not friendly for mobile users)

Welcome to the info drop UvU (unfinished artwork lol) Its order has been flipped due to the info being long and some people just want the au info in general, so for those who really want to read it efficiently: Phantom Funhouse Main 3 Background info Story Progression

For those who won't read the long thing, here's netflix type summary ig:

Sam, Max and Darla were normally enjoying the arcade the boys worked at until…Darla starts to wonder the mystery behind the ghostly arcade machine. As they dig deeper into Phantom's Funhouse, what will they find? will they ever be the same?

STORY PROGRESSION

Geek became very curious about the Phantom Arcade machine and started an investigation into it. She asks Sam and Max to help her with it, at first, they kept denying her because of the fearing of losing their job. Max also got curious too, so Sam didn’t have a choice but to agree. It started out with them hearing a bit of information about it, to getting too actual play the game at the right time and then Halloween is where they got to play it. They found it remarkable and the most fun they ever had. None of them have ever heard of the game and that’s where it all made it sense. Yeah, arcades where very popular back then, but why would this amusement arcade be THIS popular. They all wanted to know more, they’ve tried searching the game, any game similar to its format or appeal but nothing. Geek began to suspect the boss is hiding something or there is some evil motive to this addictive game. Sam and Max said they’ll start snooping around for her (mostly Max tho, small fast lol-). Max accidentally slept at work and was stuck in the mall, so he called Sam to come get him. They both got stuck there lol. At the same time, they were trying to figure out a way out, Phantom was there. They stayed hidden to not get in trouble. Phantom was chatting with Daniel about stuff they’ve never heard before, they were confused asf they started to think they’re from a different planet. Phantom told Daniel that he’ll see him at home then went into his office. As they saw him walked off, a bright light came from the office and the boys couldn’t hear Phantom anymore. Sam went to check inside, and he was gone. Both were so freaking confused and left as fast as they could out of the mall (Daniel was their way out lol). The next time they saw Geek they were frantically trying to tell her everything they see the other night; she was also confused.

When the boys had their break, them and Geek rushed to question Daniel. Daniel wasn’t budging even when they threaten to send the deranged lagomorph on him. Max was accusing him and his dad to be aliens, Dan couldn’t help but laugh, and Max was about to jump this man. Sam stopped him and asked where does him and his father live, Daniel told them freely, but he slipped up. After they search the address and no result was found, he was either lying but he said it which such confidence they began to start questioning what was really going on in that arcade. With more snooping they finally caught Phantom in the act of time travelling back home. Max busted in the room like HA WE CAUGHT YOU PUNK, Sam and Geek facepalming themselves-. It startled Phantom which caused him to press something he shouldn’t have in the elevator. It was off its safe procedure which prevents from causing a similar explosion which killed Phantom. Phantom shouted at them to get out, he couldn’t stop the explosion. Geek heard him over the electricity and sparks going on and told the boys they should get out of here. They were already on that lol-. They couldn’t make it all the way out, so the explosion got them. Daniel heard it and was trying to play it off as a little problem with electricity and made everyone get out of the arcade. Once they woke up, they were phantoms themselves. Sam was panicking, Geek panicking in silence wondering how the hell does this work and it took a while for Max to realize. When he did, he panicked a bit then was like this is cool. They all thought they were dead, but Daniel explained to them that they’re not. (They basically became Danny phantom pfft-). They couldn’t go home looking like horror movie ghost so when Phantom returned, he taught them how to turn back.

Phantom made a deal with them if they kept this a secret, he would teach them everything on how to live life as a phantom now. As much as Max would spill so much, they all agreed to the deal. In the end, Sam and Max worked at the Arcade until Phantom taught them everything. Geek had to move; she had all the training though; then everyone went their separate ways.

(the universe plays out with how they are now, expect Darla is an adult working with Mama Bosco and Sam & Max dealt with cases easier due to their Phantom powers~.)

MAIN 3 BACKGROUND INFO

Darla met the boys was because of Sam. So how geek met them is like, Sam was fixing one of the arcade machines and Darla noticed it and came up to him to say he’s doing something wrong. He doesn’t like kids trying to be smarter than him or a smart a$$. So, Sam was not having it with listening to a kid, so like he jokingly made geek do it herself and she fixed it no problem. Sam was a bit speechless and had to admit she was smart. He asked for her name, and everything pretty much went great after that. She also made one of the games there. Sam asked her to come again so he can introduce her to Max and boom friendship lol-. Max and Darla clicked due to their love for novels and a videogame they both love (respectfully for different reasons lol). Sam and Darla with smart banter, her and Max with childish/literacy banter.

Sam accidentally fell for Max with how affectionate he is. Max is obviously to this, and Sam doesn’t really want him to know anyway because he’s his childhood best friend. Unfortunately, it’s kind of useless due to his unexplained hatred for Max’s favourite game. Max has a crush on the main character/character you play in the game Dogman Adventures (made up game lol). It basically a buff, shirt-less, gun-shotting German shepherd and boy oh boy how Sam is jealous pfft-. Darla noticed and now teases Sam about it which he hates but he can’t hurt a kid on the job.

The nickname Geek is pretty self-explanatory. Sam only calls Darla Geek or The Geek while Max calls her by her actual name and The Geek as a form of teasing.

They can only hangout at the mall and arcade because no mother is leaving their young daughter alone with older teenage boys. No matter how “harmless” they are (lol) or smart how Geek is, her mother isn’t ok with it. Their personality is kind of the same ig lol

Nerd Sam, very talkative, will mostly be seen with a cap (sam and hats bro) he has a little sister (cartoon show ref), optimistic, hardworking only chaos driven because of Max, DND player def and tries to make max not get fired.

"Badboy" Max, talkative, cocky to taller younger kids, can be seen with heart glasses any color, doesnt mind working there but cant take it seriously, loves dogman with a passion pfft- and loves Fantasy novels.

The Geek Darla, doesnt talk as much as the boys or cant get a chance to-, Basically the 😒 face lol- seems more cheerier because of the boys, very intelligent high vocabulary, loves tech has pouch with little gadgets she's made and loves mystery novels.

PHANTOM FUNHOUSE

Phantom Funhouse is the amusement arcade where Sam and Max works at, with the afternoon shift because they’re still in school. From 3:45-6:00pm on Wednesdays to Fridays they come to work. It's in a mall, near the boys’ school, they gotta rush home to get ready lol.

Phantom or G. Navarro is the owner and boss of Phantoms Funhouse and is the whole mystery behind the place. Phantom died while experiencing with time travel in the future, but due to the blast he became a phantom or semi-permeable-. The reason he started an arcade in the past/80s-90s was for nostalgia and to give the kids a new experience with games. He missed the old days and he always loved arcades. He hired the boys because they seem very social, Sam’s smartness and kids around kids seemed sensible right. He time travels with something simliar to the Elevator from the games (Remember the mariachi band?). His son Daniel is basically the boss because his dad only shows up when it’s phantom arcade time lol-. He is not a ghost like his father.

There’s a phantom arcade machine which is the place attention grabber or sales point. An arcade game from the future. It’s there but it’s not real, well not yet. Phantom only puts it out at random times of the year or in VIP for Halloween. When you play it, you’re not allowed to give details on the game, just tell your experience, time playing and loving it. This makes people more curious and excited for a chance to play it, so they keep coming back.

[zelamorre]

Finally got my 1k booping badge. No auto-clicker, done mostly on mobile because my desktop is still borked to hell and back and will only occasionally let me send boops.

Boop still looks like a word. User names, not so much. I have lost track of the many people I booped while scrolling through the boop tag.

My old lady neck hurts.

My thumbs hurt.

But I have the crazy cat lady collection complete, and that's what matters!.

(You can continue to boop me to fill up your meters if you like.)

[greengale2000]

Every Site should have Organizable Bookmarks

My PC's bookmarks are hell of unorganized and it's hard to find anything there (especially Twitter & Tumblr Posts that don't have titles; because instead of a title or a code, you get the artist's name followed by most of the text in the post {Because, y'know, that'll DEFINITELY tell me which post I'm looking at}), so I greatly appreciated a good "Bookmarks" function so I can find posts on PC and on Mobile. The problem: Nobody makes a good Bookmarking function. The only site that does so far is Itaku.ee, and that's because it's an art site and they keep it organized in different galleries. Alternatively, Twitter and Mastodon have a single bookmarks feed that gets really full really fast (and Twitter's can't even be taken out or else they get permanently removed), and Cohost and Tumblr just straight-up don't HAVE a Bookmarks feature. If I want to bookmark a post on any of these sites, I either have to use my PC's bookmark function, or send these to myself via DMs (either in-site or on Discord). I just WISH that more sites allowed users to bookmark posts for later, and organize them into proper folders to they don't get mixed up and don't get lost in a sea of other posts you bookmark.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

We should ban TikTok('s surveillance)

With the RESTRICT Act, Congress is proposing to continue Trump’s war on Tiktok, enacting a US ban on the Chinese-owned service. How will they do this? Congress isn’t clear. In practice, banning stuff on the internet is hard, especially if you don’t have a national firewall:

https://doctorow.medium.com/theyre-still-trying-to-ban-cryptography-33aa668dc602

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/30/tik-tok-tow/#good-politics-for-electoral-victories

My guess is that they’re thinking of ordering the mobile duopoly of Google and Apple to nuke the Tiktok app from their app stores. That’s how they do it in China, after all: when China wanted to ban VPNs and other privacy tools, they just ordered Apple to remove them from the App Store, and Apple rolled over:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/11/foreseeable-consequences/#airdropped

That’s the completely foreseeable consequence of arrogating the power to decide which software every mobile user on earth is entitled to use — as Google and Apple have done. Once you put that gun on the mantelpiece in Act I, you damn betcha that some strong-man backed by a powerful state is going to come along and shoot it by Act III.

The same goes for commercial surveillance: once you collect massive, nonconsensual dossiers on every technology user alive, you don’t get to act surprised when cops and spies show up and order your company to serve as deputies for a massive, off-the-books warrantless surveillance project.

Hell, a cynic might even say that commercial surveillance companies are betting on this. The surveillance public-private partnership is a vicious cycle: corporations let cops and spies plunder our data; then the cops and spies lobby against privacy laws that would prevent these corporations from spying on us:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/25/nationalize-moderna/#hun-sen

Which makes the RESTRICT Act an especially foolish project. If the Chinese state wants to procure data on Americans, it need not convince us to install Tiktok. It can simply plunk down a credit card with any of the many unregulated data-brokers who feed the American tech giants the dossiers that the NSA and local cops rely on.

Every American tech giant is at least as bad for privacy as Tiktok is — yes, even Apple. Sure, Apple lets its users block Facebook spying with a single tap — but even if you opt out of “tracking,” Apple still secretly gathers exactly the same kinds of data as Facebook, and uses it to power its own ad product:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

There is no such thing as a privacy-respecting tech giant. Long before Apple plastered our cities with lying billboards proclaiming its reverence for privacy, Microsoft positioned itself as the non-spying alternative to Google, which would be great, except Microsoft spies on hundreds of millions of people and sells the data:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/25/the-peoples-amazon/#clippys-revenge

Tech’s surveillance addiction means that Tiktok’s own alternative to the RESTRICT Act is also unbelievably stupid. The company has proposed to put itself under Oracle’s supervision, letting Oracle host its data and audit its code. You know, Oracle, the company that built the Great Firewall of China 1.0:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/01/selling-china-surveillance

We should not trust Tiktok any more than we trust Apple, Facebook, Google or Microsoft. Tiktok lied about whether it was sending data to China before:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/emilybakerwhite/tiktok-tapes-us-user-data-china-bytedance-access

And even if it keeps its promise not to send user data to China, that promise is meaningless — it can still send the vectors and models it creates with that data to China — these being far more useful for things like disinformation campaigns and population-scale inferences than the mere logs from your Tiktok sessions.

There are so many potentially harmful ways to process commercial surveillance data that trying to enumerate all the things that a corporation is allowed to do with the data it extracts from us is a fool’s errand. Instead, we should ban companies from spying on us, whether they are Chinese or American.

Corporations are remorseless, paperclip-maximizing colony organisms that perceive us as inconvenient gut-flora, and they lack any executive function (as do their “executives”), and they cannot self-regulate. To keep corporations from harming us, we must make it illegal for them to enact harm, and punish them when they break the law:

https://doctorow.medium.com/small-government-fd5870a9462e

After all, the problem with Tiktok isn’t the delightful videos or the fact that it’s teaching a generation of children to be expert sound- and video-editors. The problem with Tiktok is that it spies on us. Just like the problem with Facebook isn’t that it lets us communicate with our friends, and the problem with Google isn’t that it operates a search engine.

Now, these companies will tell you that the two can’t be separated, that a bearded prophet came down off a mountain with two stone tablets, intoning, “Larry, Sergey, thou shalt stop rotating thine logfiles and, lo, thou wilt data-mine them for actionable market intelligence.” But it’s nonsense. Google ran for years without surveillance. Facebook billed itself as the privacy-forward alternative to Myspace and promised never to spy on us:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3247362

The inevitabilist narrative that says that corporations must violate our rights in order to make the products we love is unadulterated Mr Gotcha nonsense: “Yet you participate in society. Curious. I am very intelligent”:

https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Of course, corporations push this narrative all the time, which is why American Big Tech has been quietly supporting a ban on Tiktok, which (coincidentally) has managed to gain a foothold in the otherwise impregnable, decaying, enshittified oligarchy that US companies have created.

They have conspicuously failed to call for any kind of working solution, like a federal privacy law that would ban commercial surveillance, and extend a “private right of action,” so people could sue tech giants and data-brokers who violated the law, without having to convince a regulator, DA or Attorney General to bestir themselves:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/you-should-have-right-sue-companies-violate-your-privacy

Instead, the tech giants have the incredible gall to characterize themselves as the defenders of our privacy — at least, so long as the Chinese government is the adversary, and so long as its privacy violations come via an app, and not buy handing a credit card to the data-brokers that are the soil bacteria that keeps Big Tech’s ecosystem circulating. In the upside-down land of Big Tech lobbying, privacy is a benefit of monopoly — not something we have to smash monopolies to attain:

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

Not everyone in Congress is onboard with the RESTRICT Act. AOC has come out for a federal privacy law that applies to all companies, rather than a ban on an app that tens of millions of young Americans love:

https://www.businessinsider.com/aoc-first-tiktok-congress-ban-without-being-clued-in-2023-3

You know who agrees with AOC? Rand Paul. Yes, that absolute piece of shit. Paul told his caucusmates in the GOP that banning an app that millions of young American voters love is bad electoral politics. This fact is so obvious that even Rand fucking Paul can understand it:

https://gizmodo.com/rand-paul-opposes-tiktok-ban-warns-republicans-1850278167

Paul is absolutely right to call a Tiktok ban a “national strategy to permanently lose elections for a generation.” The Democrats should listen to him, because the GOP won’t. As between the two parties, the GOP is far more in thrall to the Chamber of Commerce and the rest of the business lobby. They are never going to back a policy that’s as good for the people and as bad for big business as a federal privacy law.

The Democrats have the opportunity to position themselves as “the party that wants to keep Tiktok but force it to stop being creepy, along with all the other tech companies,” while the GOP positions itself as “the party of angry technophobes who want to make sure that any fun you have is closely monitored by Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pinchai and Tim Cook and their pale imitations of the things you love about Tiktok.”

That’s not just good electoral politics — it’s good policy. Young voters aren’t going to turn out to the polls for performative Cold War 2.0 nonsense, but they will be pissed as hell at whoever takes away their Tiktok.

And if you do care about Cold War 2.0, then you should be banning surveillance, not Tiktok; the Chinese government has plenty of US dollars at its disposal to spend in America’s freewheeling, unregulated data markets — as do criminals, petty and organized, and every other nation-state adversary of the USA.

The RESTRICT Act is a garbage law straight out of the Clinton era, a kind of King Canute decree that goes so far as to potentially prohibit the use of VPNs to circumvent its provisions. America doesn’t need a Great Firewall to keep itself safe from tech spying — it needs a privacy law.

Have you ever wanted to say thank you for these posts? Here’s how you can: I’m kickstarting the audiobook for my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

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

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

[Image ID: A modified vintage editorial cartoon. Uncle Sam peeks out over a 'frowning battlement' whose cannon-slots are filled with telescopes from which peer the red glaring eyes of HAL 9000 from '2001: A Space Odyssey.' Topping the battlements in a row are Uncle Sam and three business-suited figures with dollar-sign-bags for heads. The three dollar-bag men have corporate logos on their breasts: Facebook, Google, Apple. Standing on the strand below the battlements, peering up, is a forlorn figure with a Tiktok logo for a head. The fortress wall bears the words 'RESTRICT Act.']