#shit review

[hell0mega]

people are drawing Steamboat Willie Mickey doing all this crazy shit and whatnot, but you could always do that. you can do that now, with current Mickey, just fine. it's fanart and it's legally protected. hell you could take Disney-drawn Mickey and put a caption about unions or whatever on it and it would still be protected under free speech and sometimes even parody law.

what is special about public domain is that you can SELL him. you could take a screenshot and sell it on a tshirt. you can use him to advertise your plumbing business. people have already uploaded and monetized the original film.

you could always have Mickey say what you want, but now you can profit off it.

[hesbuckcompton-baby]

people who don't study history will simply never understand the joy of reading historian beef. there's nothing like it

[itmightrain]

- Paris Hilton

[bowtiepastabitch]

Good Omens Ao3 wrapped is here! It's a bit of a long post but it goes quick:)

Drumroll please!!!

Shoutout to @feiandart for all her work on this piece!

But of course, there's more! It's been a long year for the fandom, and we all processed a lot of feelings about things. Here's how we coped:

Reminder that as a reader, your comments often mean the world to writers! Fandom is a community first and foremost<3

You can click here for a more in depth explanation of the math and the raw data! This assessment is pulled by hand from the Good Omens (TV) fandom category on Archive of Our Own.

Image credits: Unsplash free images for the art and Canva stock images. Image credits in order where available:

Photo by Cassi Josh on Unsplash

Photo by Codioful (Formerly Gradienta) on Unsplash

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

Photo by Geordanna Cordero on Unsplash

Photo by Tim Arterbury on Unsplash

Photo by Ahmad Dirini on Unsplash

Photo by Maria Orlova on Unsplash

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

Photo by MontyLov on Unsplash

Average adult reading rate as cited is 240 wpm found on ScienceDirect.

Please reblog rather than repost, but you're welcome to share to other platforms as long as you credit me!

[rambyol]

How queer! A Piltovian Pressed Powder Palette?

HeadCanon: Silco had Marcus smuggle this across the border because the Leader of Zaun cannot be seen purchasing Piltovian merchandise.

Also can we appreciate the COVERAGE of that pressed powder. Look at the contrast between the upper and lower part of his scarred side in the second image. You ever wonder if he had to trial and error his way through different foundations, concealers, and powders until he landed on what worked for him.

On the topic of Powders…

Remember how Vander suggested to Felicia that he liked the name ‘Violet’. Well since the flashback with Felicia sort of muddled the story and the character dynamics between Vander, Silco, Vi, and Jinx, I’m going to take the liberty of making the assumption that Silco absolutely could’ve suggested the term ‘Powder’. Bear with me here because I know it’s been joked about in the fandom and yet…

We know young Silco wore makeup:

E.g. Eyeliner + Eyeshadow

So I think it’s plausible. I see a scenario where Felicia points out how Silco isn’t wearing his eyeliner/eyeshadow in that scene

and he responds with something along the lines of;

‘Ah I’ve been meaning to get some new powder. Haven’t found one I’m fond of yet.’

And the rest is history.

[wiltkingart]

Asche and Vindt from Ocean's Blood by Thelma Mantey

[queenbread]

I'd like everyone to know glassdoor has a page for the SCP foundation

this very official website to help see employment and stuff has this, and honestly, it might be my favorite thing ever, here are some of my favorite reviews on it

[toneelspeelster]

heartstopper’s secret weapon is hugs by david opie (x)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Brave Little Toaster

Picks and Shovels is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton.

The AI bubble is the new crypto bubble: you can tell because the same people are behind it, and they're doing the same thing with AI as they did with crypto – trying desperately to find a use case to cram it into, despite the yawning indifference and outright hostility of the users:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

This week on the excellent Trashfuture podcast, the regulars – joined by 404 Media's Jason Koebler – have a hilarious – as in, I was wheezing with laughter! – riff on this year's CES, where companies are demoing home appliances with LLMs built in:

https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-hgi6c-179b908

Why would you need a chatbot in your dishwasher? As it turns out, there's a credulous, Poe's-law-grade Forbes article that lays out the (incredibly stupid) case for this (incredibly stupid) idea:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2024/03/29/generative-ai-is-coming-to-your-home-appliances/

As the Trashfuturians mapped out this new apex of the AI hype cycle, I found myself thinking of a short story I wrote 15 years ago, satirizing the "Internet of Things" hype we were mired in. It's called "The Brave Little Toaster", and it was published in MIT Tech Review's TRSF anthology in 2011:

http://bestsf.net/trsf-the-best-new-science-fiction-technology-review-2011/

The story was meant to poke fun at the preposterous IoT hype of the day, and I recall thinking that creating a world of talking appliance was the height of Philip K Dickist absurdism. Little did I dream that a decade and a half later, the story would be even more relevant, thanks to AI pump-and-dumpers who sweatily jammed chatbots into kitchen appliances.

So I figured I'd republish The Brave Little Toaster; it's been reprinted here and there since (there's a high school English textbook that included it, along with a bunch of pretty fun exercises for students), and I podcasted it back in the day:

https://ia803103.us.archive.org/35/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_212/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_212_Brave_Little_Toaster.mp3

A word about the title of this story. It should sound familiar – I nicked it from a brilliant story by Tom Disch that was made into a very weird cartoon:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8C_JaT8Lvg

My story is one of several I wrote by stealing the titles of other stories and riffing on them; they were very successful, winning several awards, getting widely translated and reprinted, and so on:

https://locusmag.com/2012/05/cory-doctorow-a-prose-by-any-other-name/

All right, on to the story!

One day, Mister Toussaint came home to find an extra 300 euros' worth of groceries on his doorstep. So he called up Miz Rousseau, the grocer, and said, "Why have you sent me all this food? My fridge is already full of delicious things. I don't need this stuff and besides, I can't pay for it."

But Miz Rousseau told him that he had ordered the food. His refrigerator had sent in the list, and she had the signed order to prove it.

Furious, Mister Toussaint confronted his refrigerator. It was mysteriously empty, even though it had been full that morning. Or rather, it was almost empty: there was a single pouch of energy drink sitting on a shelf in the back. He'd gotten it from an enthusiastically smiling young woman on the metro platform the day before. She'd been giving them to everyone.

"Why did you throw away all my food?" he demanded. The refrigerator hummed smugly at him.

"It was spoiled," it said.

#

But the food hadn't been spoiled. Mister Toussaint pored over his refrigerator's diagnostics and logfiles, and soon enough, he had the answer. It was the energy beverage, of course.

"Row, row, row your boat," it sang. "Gently down the stream. Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, I'm offgassing ethelyne." Mister Toussaint sniffed the pouch suspiciously.

"No you're not," he said. The label said that the drink was called LOONY GOONY and it promised ONE TRILLION TIMES MORE POWERFUL THAN ESPRESSO!!!!!ONE11! Mister Toussaint began to suspect that the pouch was some kind of stupid Internet of Things prank. He hated those.

He chucked the pouch in the rubbish can and put his new groceries away.

#

The next day, Mister Toussaint came home and discovered that the overflowing rubbish was still sitting in its little bag under the sink. The can had not cycled it through the trapdoor to the chute that ran to the big collection-point at ground level, 104 storeys below.

"Why haven't you emptied yourself?" he demanded. The trashcan told him that toxic substances had to be manually sorted. "What toxic substances?"

So he took out everything in the bin, one piece at a time. You've probably guessed what the trouble was.

"Excuse me if I'm chattery, I do not mean to nattery, but I'm a mercury battery!" LOONY GOONY's singing voice really got on Mister Toussaint's nerves.

"No you're not," Mister Toussaint said.

#

Mister Toussaint tried the microwave. Even the cleverest squeezy-pouch couldn't survive a good nuking. But the microwave wouldn't switch on. "I'm no drink and I'm no meal," LOONY GOONY sang. "I'm a ferrous lump of steel!"

The dishwasher wouldn't wash it ("I don't mean to annoy or chafe, but I'm simply not dishwasher safe!"). The toilet wouldn't flush it ("I don't belong in the bog, because down there I'm sure to clog!"). The windows wouldn't retract their safety screen to let it drop, but that wasn't much of a surprise.

"I hate you," Mister Toussaint said to LOONY GOONY, and he stuck it in his coat pocket. He'd throw it out in a trash-can on the way to work.

#

They arrested Mister Toussaint at the 678th Street station. They were waiting for him on the platform, and they cuffed him just as soon as he stepped off the train. The entire station had been evacuated and the police wore full biohazard containment gear. They'd even shrinkwrapped their machine-guns.

"You'd better wear a breather and you'd better wear a hat, I'm a vial of terrible deadly hazmat," LOONY GOONY sang.

When they released Mister Toussaint the next day, they made him take LOONY GOONY home with him. There were lots more people with LOONY GOONYs to process.

#

Mister Toussaint paid the rush-rush fee that the storage depot charged to send over his container. They forklifted it out of the giant warehouse under the desert and zipped it straight to the cargo-bay in Mister Toussaint's building. He put on old, stupid clothes and clipped some lights to his glasses and started sorting.

Most of the things in container were stupid. He'd been throwing away stupid stuff all his life, because the smart stuff was just so much easier. But then his grandpa had died and they'd cleaned out his little room at the pensioner's ward and he'd just shoved it all in the container and sent it out the desert.

From time to time, he'd thought of the eight cubic meters of stupidity he'd inherited and sighed a put-upon sigh. He'd loved Grandpa, but he wished the old man had used some of the ample spare time from the tail end of his life to replace his junk with stuff that could more gracefully reintegrate with the materials stream.

How inconsiderate!

#

The house chattered enthusiastically at the toaster when he plugged it in, but the toaster said nothing back. It couldn't. It was stupid. Its bread-slots were crusted over with carbon residue and it dribbled crumbs from the ill-fitting tray beneath it. It had been designed and built by cavemen who hadn't ever considered the advantages of networked environments.

It was stupid, but it was brave. It would do anything Mister Toussaint asked it to do.

"It's getting hot and sticky and I'm not playing any games, you'd better get me out before I burst into flames!" LOONY GOONY sang loudly, but the toaster ignored it.

"I don't mean to endanger your abode, but if you don't let me out, I'm going to explode!" The smart appliances chattered nervously at one another, but the brave little toaster said nothing as Mister Toussaint depressed its lever again.

"You'd better get out and save your ass, before I start leaking poison gas!" LOONY GOONY's voice was panicky. Mister Toussaint smiled and depressed the lever.

Just as he did, he thought to check in with the flat's diagnostics. Just in time, too! Its quorum-sensors were redlining as it listened in on the appliances' consternation. Mister Toussaint unplugged the fridge and the microwave and the dishwasher.

The cooker and trash-can were hard-wired, but they didn't represent a quorum.

#

The fire department took away the melted toaster and used their axes to knock huge, vindictive holes in Mister Toussaint's walls. "Just looking for embers," they claimed. But he knew that they were pissed off because there was simply no good excuse for sticking a pouch of independently powered computation and sensors and transmitters into an antique toaster and pushing down the lever until oily, toxic smoke filled the whole 104th floor.

Mister Toussaint's neighbors weren't happy about it either.

But Mister Toussaint didn't mind. It had all been worth it, just to hear LOONY GOONY beg and weep for its life as its edges curled up and blackened.

He argued mightily, but the firefighters refused to let him keep the toaster.

#

If you enjoyed that and would like to read more of my fiction, may I suggest that you pre-order my next novel as a print book, ebook or audiobook, via the Kickstarter I launched yesterday?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/picks-and-shovels-marty-hench-at-the-dawn-of-enshittification?ref=created_projects

Check out my Kickstarter to pre-order copies of my next novel, Picks and Shovels!

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/2025/01/08/sirius-cybernetics-corporation/#chatterbox

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

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

[dammjamboy]

BETTER CALL SAUL!

[whynotzoidbergdotorg]

Always fun knowing there’s all kinds of traumatizing stuff hidden just out of view in kid’s games.

[4rachn1d]

Screaming crying and throwing up about the fact that Megatronus Prime's legacy of being the greatest prime ever will forever be smeared by the Actions of D-16, and how Megatronus would be deeply ashamed to be assimilated with an extremist group

[tvheadfalls]

been wanting to play around w pokemon ocs and remembered i could repurpose bailey. im imagining nettle just finishing the main campaign of a region while bailey was off basically doing the professor oak dex challenge. bailey where have you been. i havent seen you in weeks.

[originalartblog]

Tumblr Year in Review (knockoff edition because they didn't do it this year and I still want to track my stuff)

I posted 251 times in 2023

That's 141 more posts than 2022!

My Top Posts in 2023:

#5

4610 notes - Posted February 2, 2023

#4

4885 notes - Posted March 18, 2023

#3

5254 notes - Posted November 12, 2023

#2

5895 notes - Posted August 5, 2023

My #1 post of 2023

6338 notes - Posted September 22, 2023

top posts found through jetblackcode

[marley-manson]

Hawkeye not being emotionally repressed as a person, but still being emotionally repressed because he's in a situation that causes him to feel impossibly intense emotions that can't be fully expressed without ruining his or others' lives.

Because to really express his true feelings he'd have to scream until his voice gave out, desert, kill a general, etc. Constantly feeling like he's barely holding himself back, keeping himself from exploding through the relatively minor shows of rebellion and antagonism towards people like Frank, and his humour. "Joking is the only way I can open my mouth without screaming."

Hawkeye's breakdown in GFA is a fitting cap for his character for many reasons, and I think this is also one of them. It just makes narrative sense, as someone who does need to express his feelings and who is trapped in a war zone, that at some point he had to fully snap and drive a jeep through a wall.

[unpretty]

the last time we had to move i was so fucking sick of dealing with physical objects that i just gave away my entire cd collection i'd been hauling around since high school, aside from the david bowie sound and vision collection. i decided it would be fine because i had all my CDs ripped to mp3 anyway as well as having them backed up to google music using the library upload that was basically their core feature at the time.

lol. lmao.