#since like 2020 bro like

[a-ikuoliver]

god please i’m not your strongest soldier stop doing this shit

[miss-cigarettes]

̣̥☆·͙̥‧•̥̩̥ HAPPY NEW YEAR MY DEAR FRIENDS!! (人Wз눈)～♡ ੈ✩‧₊˚

[06strawberrylemonade28]

guyyyysss i might start watching the outer banks???? 'cuz the summer vibes are there and the ships are lowk cute like lowk i was a hater 4 years ago but then i saw some jjxkie content (and this always happens to me -- like i get into a ship BEFORE i get into the actual content?? it's weird). but i may start watching it-- fear not i will continue writing JELSA ONCE I GET A STUPID BREAK. and i neeeed to keep consuming everything @therentyoupay has ever written of course. (on frosted sea glass rn and its so good) but i also recently got a job and im in school full time. bUT BASICALLY. outer banks. might be worth a watch.

[midnightmoodlet-art]

You know, revisiting red wine after a year of not doing so made me think... I've tacked on so many headcanons over that character and his group that at that point they're like 80% headcanons, since the original media barely gave anything to work with except crappy yaoi bait for a mid ship..... I'm just considering deadass just putting everything into ocs and make my own stories with them instead of using them as hc crutches

[lovemeafterhrs]

idk if ur takin requests girl but i’m fr begging for any kuroo content like ur suna smoke fic i will pay good good dalla for that

my requests are currently closed but you’ve inspired me so i whipped up a little somethin’ just for you :P

“kuroo.. what the fuck.” you guffaw, making direct eye contact with the googly eyes attached to your roommate’s new six foot bong.

“got it on a sale, you like it?”

“i mean, yeah. but i’m not sure it’s the most practical.” you shrug, taking a closer look at the pools of color trapped inside the glass. “the eyes are a nice touch.”

“right? please tell me you have your grinder.”

“fuck. i’ll call kenma.” you frown, reaching for your phone in hopes of getting ahold of the grumpy blonde that’s currently in possession of the only thing you’re lacking.

after approximately seven calls between the two of you, kenma arrives at the apartment looking like he just crawled out of the trenches of hell.

the first thing that catches his eye is the comically large water pipe, standing tall above everyone in the room besides the rooster-headed man. soulless plastic eyeballs glare at him forebodingly as he takes a few steps towards the couch.

“you losers woke me up after my twelve hour shift for this?”

“well, yeah.” kuroo grins as he reaches for the sealed container.

“you still have my grinder.” you add, tone playful as you wrap your arm around kenma’s shoulders. he hands it over to you with a sigh, letting you lead him towards the couch.

“you left it at my house.” his reply earns an offended gasp from you, pretending his words aren’t completely true as you watch kuroo plop ice cubes down the neck of the bong.

both you and kenma have to stand on top of the couch cushions to even reach the mouthpiece, and each hit is a duel effort as the other lights the bowl from the floor.

kuroo finds it to be far too comical, until he tries to take a hit and it nearly fucking kills him. it doesn’t help that you’re kneeled on the floor in front of him, eyes glazed over as you watch him cough and die.

tetsurou learns far too quickly that his new purchase is more for decoration than practicality, and after a couple rounds around the circle he’s back to rolling joints at the kitchen table.

across from him, kenma’s barely paying attention to his friend’s babbling. he’s far more content silently playing video games on his switch while he waits for you to finally make something to eat, but he supposes it would be kinder to listen for once.

you however, have chosen to tune them out for the time being as you brown strips of chicken on the stovetop.

“it’s a waste of money.” you tune back in just in time to catch kozume’s snide remark, followed shortly by a loud, offended huff.

“it is not! fuck this, i’m trying it again.” just like that, kuroo’s jumping from his seat to prove him wrong. you hear the soft patter of kenma’s footsteps as he follows his friend to the living room, and you focus back in on the task at hand.

your moment of peace does not last for very long.

preparations for dinner are abruptly halted when you hear a loud crash followed by the sound of glass hitting the floor.

a loud screech fills your ears, and you turn the corner to find tetsurou hunched over in front of the remains of his shiny new piece. bong water coats the knees of his pants as he mourns, looking like a kicked puppy as he sniffles from the floor.

“dumbass.” kenma huffs, bowl piece still loaded in his hands as he shakes his head at his best friend.

[superm4ks]

fren is it over for us???😭😭😭😭 i cant witness max being a flop again im so serious i feel feral i need him to win every race ever

Nooo baby not at all be calm. SC and the stars aligned for Lando today. rb20 wasnt the best car on track either not on any compound. That shit wid the cone was goofy from Max but he was never overtaken on track or fleeced or anything without the safety car he sinks his teeth into it no doubt in my mind. It wasn't a surprise either not really. Car had been slipping in and out of its usual window both for Max and Checo all weekend. Max had no business starting p1 today Mclaren and Lando were just doing extreme levels of sandbagging. Ill say tho, to debut these type of changes on a sprint weekend in Miami and immediately fine tune them to a winning level is kinda scary and impressive. Personally I will wait to c what the Horrors ((Ferrari upgrades)) have in store in Imola before making any predictions

[kruxton]

everytime i see a '[character] is whipped' tag i automatically go "ABANG NI BUCIN" and then i get mad at myself

[kelbunny]

Can things just stop breaking and falling apart please. I just want people to see my art and analysies.

I'm tired, I hate this, and I want to break something.

[spaciebabie]

What's the storyline for your ocs?

nerdy straight A middle school student katherine quin and her pals realize that their government sucks ass and b/c they are impassioned naive youth, entangle themselves in a state of affairs that will stay w/them for the rest of their lives

more under the cut b/c i wrote a lot more than i thought i would kasfjksdfjksfj (i have big feelings abt this story)

i (officially) made the story when i was 14! all the characters are based off me and my experience 2 some extent (especially katherine i mean i made her bi, biracial, gave her a mole, made her like indie games etc). originally the story was going 2 have a happy ending, but as ive grown i have more of an appreciation for....well endings that are not so happy. im thinking i change it. it would make sense w/what happens in it anyway (the story of revolution is not as happy and triumphant as 11 year old me imagined when i first acted this out w/my brother. honestly like ive changed the story entirely 2 be my own but i still gotta thank my bro cuz the orig storyline that inspired it when we played legos 2gether was a conjoined effort and i borrowed many of the characters)! as im drafting it now, the story is not particularly happy lol

the story tells a sort of generational loop that katherine goes thru? if that makes sense? i wont go too much in depth b/c spoilers but its a story of history repeating itself again and again and the endless loops pain and suffering cause and how people are scared/too comfortable/too angry to change the cycle. i think that katherine being a history nerd in the midst of watching history unfold again before her very eyes grants her a certain point of view other characters dont have (except a few who have lived experiences). although this awareness will come later in the story when she's older

it will also touch on something young folks feel 2day where ppl frequently ask, "why is this happening today? havent we progressed?" and katherine will ponder that herself (although the situations that happen in the story are strictly to the story ajsfsjfd i cant talk abt and link real life tragedies it would be too much for me). and i think that as she gets older in the story and gains knowledge and wisdom from what she goes thru, she'll hafta bear this horrifying knowledge that the sands of time dont just erode the past, but the present and future as well.

i was not expecting 2 write this much KJSFKJSDJFKSJDF

anyway! i care this story a lot. its like my childhood and has grown with me as ive aged. im really compelled to make it the best it can be and i get a lot of imposter syndrome b/c i know the ideas i have and the story itself as a whole is good, but im worried my execution will fall flat. idk its kept me from moving forward w/it or talking abt it for years.

tldr; two can basically be summed up by this image:

are things going 2 get better? can they get better? questions i think about as i write and think thru this story.

[trencri]

Garvey's 26th anniversary is coming up in November -- I wonder if they'll remember him and do anything for it this year.

[allegedly-human-uwu]

Idk between hunter’s dedication to cocaine and prostitutes, frank going wild on grindr and the presidential dog on a mission to bite every single cop it mostly seems like the bidens know how to fucking party. good for them

The most important thing to know about the Biden Family is that it’s full of nasty little thotties

[zaltesker]

oomf got banned like twice and is just now refollowing me but like. scrolling through their shit it's just like "that one oomf who lowkey problematic but you still keep em around jus to see how they mind work" yk

like i prolly SHOULD but also i feel like i'm just falling into a future controversy if i follow back likee... its been a while bro wtf have u been up to

[aryomengrande]

finally figured out how to torrent on ipad...now i can watch promising young woman whenever i want to

[hobisexually]

x

[phantomrose96]

If anyone wants to know why every tech company in the world right now is clamoring for AI like drowned rats scrabbling to board a ship, I decided to make a post to explain what's happening.

(Disclaimer to start: I'm a software engineer who's been employed full time since 2018. I am not a historian nor an overconfident Youtube essayist, so this post is my working knowledge of what I see around me and the logical bridges between pieces.)

Okay anyway. The explanation starts further back than what's going on now. I'm gonna start with the year 2000. The Dot Com Bubble just spectacularly burst. The model of "we get the users first, we learn how to profit off them later" went out in a no-money-having bang (remember this, it will be relevant later). A lot of money was lost. A lot of people ended up out of a job. A lot of startup companies went under. Investors left with a sour taste in their mouth and, in general, investment in the internet stayed pretty cooled for that decade. This was, in my opinion, very good for the internet as it was an era not suffocating under the grip of mega-corporation oligarchs and was, instead, filled with Club Penguin and I Can Haz Cheezburger websites.

Then around the 2010-2012 years, a few things happened. Interest rates got low, and then lower. Facebook got huge. The iPhone took off. And suddenly there was a huge new potential market of internet users and phone-havers, and the cheap money was available to start backing new tech startup companies trying to hop on this opportunity. Companies like Uber, Netflix, and Amazon either started in this time, or hit their ramp-up in these years by shifting focus to the internet and apps.

Now, every start-up tech company dreaming of being the next big thing has one thing in common: they need to start off by getting themselves massively in debt. Because before you can turn a profit you need to first spend money on employees and spend money on equipment and spend money on data centers and spend money on advertising and spend money on scale and and and

But also, everyone wants to be on the ship for The Next Big Thing that takes off to the moon.

So there is a mutual interest between new tech companies, and venture capitalists who are willing to invest $$$ into said new tech companies. Because if the venture capitalists can identify a prize pig and get in early, that money could come back to them 100-fold or 1,000-fold. In fact it hardly matters if they invest in 10 or 20 total bust projects along the way to find that unicorn.

But also, becoming profitable takes time. And that might mean being in debt for a long long time before that rocket ship takes off to make everyone onboard a gazzilionaire.

But luckily, for tech startup bros and venture capitalists, being in debt in the 2010's was cheap, and it only got cheaper between 2010 and 2020. If people could secure loans for ~3% or 4% annual interest, well then a $100,000 loan only really costs $3,000 of interest a year to keep afloat. And if inflation is higher than that or at least similar, you're still beating the system.

So from 2010 through early 2022, times were good for tech companies. Startups could take off with massive growth, showing massive potential for something, and venture capitalists would throw infinite money at them in the hopes of pegging just one winner who will take off. And supporting the struggling investments or the long-haulers remained pretty cheap to keep funding.

You hear constantly about "Such and such app has 10-bazillion users gained over the last 10 years and has never once been profitable", yet the thing keeps chugging along because the investors backing it aren't stressed about the immediate future, and are still banking on that "eventually" when it learns how to really monetize its users and turn that profit.

The pandemic in 2020 took a magnifying-glass-in-the-sun effect to this, as EVERYTHING was forcibly turned online which pumped a ton of money and workers into tech investment. Simultaneously, money got really REALLY cheap, bottoming out with historic lows for interest rates.

Then the tide changed with the massive inflation that struck late 2021. Because this all-gas no-brakes state of things was also contributing to off-the-rails inflation (along with your standard-fare greedflation and price gouging, given the extremely convenient excuses of pandemic hardships and supply chain issues). The federal reserve whipped out interest rate hikes to try to curb this huge inflation, which is like a fire extinguisher dousing and suffocating your really-cool, actively-on-fire party where everyone else is burning but you're in the pool. And then they did this more, and then more. And the financial climate followed suit. And suddenly money was not cheap anymore, and new loans became expensive, because loans that used to compound at 2% a year are now compounding at 7 or 8% which, in the language of compounding, is a HUGE difference. A $100,000 loan at a 2% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, accrues to $121,899. A $100,000 loan at an 8% interest rate, if not repaid a single cent in 10 years, more than doubles to $215,892.

Now it is scary and risky to throw money at "could eventually be profitable" tech companies. Now investors are watching companies burn through their current funding and, when the companies come back asking for more, investors are tightening their coin purses instead. The bill is coming due. The free money is drying up and companies are under compounding pressure to produce a profit for their waiting investors who are now done waiting.

You get enshittification. You get quality going down and price going up. You get "now that you're a captive audience here, we're forcing ads or we're forcing subscriptions on you." Don't get me wrong, the plan was ALWAYS to monetize the users. It's just that it's come earlier than expected, with way more feet-to-the-fire than these companies were expecting. ESPECIALLY with Wall Street as the other factor in funding (public) companies, where Wall Street exhibits roughly the same temperament as a baby screaming crying upset that it's soiled its own diaper (maybe that's too mean a comparison to babies), and now companies are being put through the wringer for anything LESS than infinite growth that Wall Street demands of them.

Internal to the tech industry, you get MASSIVE wide-spread layoffs. You get an industry that used to be easy to land multiple job offers shriveling up and leaving recent graduates in a desperately awful situation where no company is hiring and the market is flooded with laid-off workers trying to get back on their feet.

Because those coin-purse-clutching investors DO love virtue-signaling efforts from companies that say "See! We're not being frivolous with your money! We only spend on the essentials." And this is true even for MASSIVE, PROFITABLE companies, because those companies' value is based on the Rich Person Feeling Graph (their stock) rather than the literal profit money. A company making a genuine gazillion dollars a year still tears through layoffs and freezes hiring and removes the free batteries from the printer room (totally not speaking from experience, surely) because the investors LOVE when you cut costs and take away employee perks. The "beer on tap, ping pong table in the common area" era of tech is drying up. And we're still unionless.

Never mind that last part.

And then in early 2023, AI (more specifically, Chat-GPT which is OpenAI's Large Language Model creation) tears its way into the tech scene with a meteor's amount of momentum. Here's Microsoft's prize pig, which it invested heavily in and is galivanting around the pig-show with, to the desperate jealousy and rapture of every other tech company and investor wishing it had that pig. And for the first time since the interest rate hikes, investors have dollar signs in their eyes, both venture capital and Wall Street alike. They're willing to restart the hose of money (even with the new risk) because this feels big enough for them to take the risk.

Now all these companies, who were in varying stages of sweating as their bill came due, or wringing their hands as their stock prices tanked, see a single glorious gold-plated rocket up out of here, the likes of which haven't been seen since the free money days. It's their ticket to buy time, and buy investors, and say "see THIS is what will wring money forth, finally, we promise, just let us show you."

To be clear, AI is NOT profitable yet. It's a money-sink. Perhaps a money-black-hole. But everyone in the space is so wowed by it that there is a wide-spread and powerful conviction that it will become profitable and earn its keep. (Let's be real, half of that profit "potential" is the promise of automating away jobs of pesky employees who peskily cost money.) It's a tech-space industrial revolution that will automate away skilled jobs, and getting in on the ground floor is the absolute best thing you can do to get your pie slice's worth.

It's the thing that will win investors back. It's the thing that will get the investment money coming in again (or, get it second-hand if the company can be the PROVIDER of something needed for AI, which other companies with venture-back will pay handsomely for). It's the thing companies are terrified of missing out on, lest it leave them utterly irrelevant in a future where not having AI-integration is like not having a mobile phone app for your company or not having a website.

So I guess to reiterate on my earlier point:

Drowned rats. Swimming to the one ship in sight.

[nyancrimew]

let my bro out for fucks sake

definitely weird to see someone ive known since like 2020 be sentenced to life in hospital prison, but i guess it's to be expected with the work i do