#tax dollars overseas

[meekamaye]

This Inflation is Killing Me

I live on social security only, $2000 a month. Try to make that stretch these days. My groceries have gone up about 30%, natural gas is up, so is electricity and gas for my car. Plus, talk about the price of prescription drugs and its enough to make you ill. Health insurance, house insurance and drug insurance goes up more each year. I am not sure what world the politicians are living in but it…

[silvermoon424]

I was just made aware of this petition for Kamala Harris to agree to back a ceasefire and arms embargo regarding the Israel/Palestine conflict. The petition has already reached its goal for signatures, but more can't hurt!

[walks-the-ages]

Just for the record, there's a big post going around claiming that 20 million votes weren't counted in the election, and that has been debunked multiple times, and had zero evidence or sources to begin with other than someone on twitter claiming it out of thin air.

Kamala Harris has already publicly conceded her run.

Joe Biden just gave his own speech today at the White House, announcing that Trump won the election.

"Denying the results of the election (blue version, so it's Good This TIme)" is not something that is going to help anyone, least of all the people who are getting their hopes up that things can change, only to sink to even deeper despair come January when the handover happens.

Trump won. This is not something that can be magically "fixed" by "finding 20 million votes".

Trump won, and we need to accept, and absorb that reality to move forward.

You should have been preparing for this possibility as soon as Trump announced he was running again.

He had a 50-50 chance of becoming President, and now we are indeed in this "worst timeline" of a second Trump Presidency.

You need to stop denying this fact, work on accepting it, and make your plans to build a support network before things hit the fan.

Do not wait for January 6th, 2025 to accept the fact that Trump won the election.

Do not spend the next two months in denial.

If you think the world is going to go up in literal hellfire or nuclear apocalypse if Trump becomes President, then start prepping for that scenario now if you genuinely believe it:

Learn to grow your own food.

Learn to forage wild food safely.

Learn to live off the grid.

Learn to collect your own water.

Learn first aid.

Get a firearm license and learn how to use it properly.

If you truly believe the world is going to end and the apocalypse is gonna happen to America, then act like it and prep for it.

Otherwise, stop spreading fearmongering, stop doom posting, remember that America did not dissolve into a fallout-style lawless wasteland the last time Trump was President, take a deep breath, and start telling yourself the world is not going to end.

Join local neighborhood Facebook groups and start engaging with your neighbors and local community.

Start making friends and connections at the local level.

Join local political initiatives.

Join or start a community garden.

Don't trap yourself in denial, hoping the some miracle will happen and magically make it so Harris actually won the election.

The world is not going to end.

Do something that gets you out there and actively building a better future, one small step at a time.

[halogalopaghost]

I can't believe sick time isn't a legally required benefit, or at least protected unpaid sick leave. Like, it should be illegal to force ppl to work when they're sick whether you're guilt tripping them or threatening their job.

Because who's most likely to work when sick? Ppl who need the job. Who need it? The underpaid. What do the underpaid usually lack? Good or any health insurance. Health insurance which is for profit! So companies benefit from the labor of the unwell, insurance benefits from scamming the unwell who get worse, and the unwell are likely spreading it to other disadvantaged folks in the process. Meanwhile I'm sure if Jeff Bezos so much as sneezes he calls his personal healthcare provider for a fucking house call. I'm really angry that my coworker gave me COVID and my boss wanted me to also work with it, can you tell?

The rich get richer.

[ragingbullmode]

all the posts crying about how trump is in the whitehouse again Solely because kamala is a black woman are so fucking annnoying. really seeing where ppls hearts & energy are 🚬🗿

[boyapologist]

I'm rebloging all of the swiftie fund raisings for palestine on swiftie heritage by the way. I have little to no active followers in here so I just think it's more effective to reblog there, where I know for a fact every one who follows me has been active in at least the past 8 months

[lisdmon]

.

[lunaticalis]

who is the motherfucker in the logistics that decided it's a good idea to fucking send my parcel to the other city first before sending it to the destination city. I PUT THE DESTINATION CITY THERE FOR A REASON. SO I DONT HAVE TO PAY STUPID TAX. BY SENDING IT TO THE OTHER CITY IT INCURED TAX ON ME YOU STUPID ;#(@;#(#! ARE YOU SERIOUS

[apricitystudies]

crimes of the elite: a deep dive

voted on here. (other editions) bold = favourite

corporate harms

behind the smiles at amazon

the long, dark shadow of bhopal (bhopal gas disaster)

how lobbying blocked european safety checks for dangerous medical implants

7-eleven revealed

who controls the world's food supply?

the true cost of tuna: marine observers dying at sea

how a big pharma company stalled a potentially lifesaving vaccine in pursuit of bigger profits

24 years after, some victims not compensated and still can't live normal lives (pfizer's nigeria vaccine trials)

the corporate crime of the century

uber broke laws, duped police and secretly lobbied governments, leak reveals (the uber files)

the baby killer (nestle infant formula scandal)

2 paths of bayer drug in 80's: riskier one steered overseas (hiv-risk contaminated blood product scandal)

global banks defy u.s. crackdowns by serving oligarchs, criminals and terrorists (fincen files)

the ultra-rich

eliminalia: a reputation laundromat for criminals

the fall of the god of cars (international fugitive carlos ghosn)

a u.s. billionaire took over a tropical island pension fund. then hundreds of millions of dollars allegedly went missing (cyprus confidential)

how the wealthiest avoid income tax (the irs files)

the haves and the have-yachts

madoff and his models (madoff ponzi scheme)

the imposter (blockchain terminal fraud)

the ultra-rich: (allegedly) stolen antiquities

crime of the centuries

stolen treasure traders

a hunt for cambodia's looted heritage leads to top museums (pandora papers)

an art crime for the ages

[sugiwa]

The AIPAC, one of the leading zionist lobbying groups in Washington, has held tax-exempt status in the US since 1968. I don't think it's fair that the average American, many of whom are vehemently against the genocide of the Palestinians, have their tax dollars taken to fund Israeli war crimes while the AIPAC pays nothing in federal taxes. They are so committed to defending their colonization project overseas, but aren't willing to send their tax dollars to pay for it? Anyway, it'd be really great, if we all collectively filed a tax complaint with the IRS to remove their non-profit status: https://www.irs.gov/charities-non-profits/irs-complaint-process-tax-exempt-organizations

There are a number of reasons that a non-profit may be in-violation of tax law, but of all of them, it would send a loud and clear message if we all used the following:

Income/Assets are being used to support illegal or terrorist activities

The best way to force a ceasefire is to make sure they never stop hearing about it and nothing will hurt more than their pockets.

[reikunrei]

feeling incredibly averse to posting this but i'm just gonna drop my kofi link here in case anyone wants to help me get out of my increasingly shitty situation living with my parents

more info below ig

after having given my parents nearly $100k over the last four years, i'd love to be able to actually leave. my future job situation is still up in the air (i've submitted for about a dozen positions and the only one i've heard back from and interviewed for hasn't gotten back to me yet), and i haven't been able to build up any savings because, again, i was (and still am) helping my family afford rent and bills, and probably the taxes my parents are behind on, but if i think about that, i'll get too angry. no joke, i've given my family, at the bare minimum, 85% of my income over the last 4 years. the rest of it has gone toward medical stuff and, now, my car

at this point, with the combo of my mom refusing to lower her standards and my dad's seeming refusal to hunt for a new full time job, i don't see how they won't continue to bleed me dry. my dad even has a bad habit of taking money out of my old savings account that he's a joint owner on or whatever from when i got it set up when i was 16, even when i stopped actively putting money in it, so now any time it gets its automated $1 transfer from my checking account, he'll just take that $1 without consulting me. i'm not exaggerating, even if it has $1-2 in it, it'll be gone within a week

i've even put off starting on testosterone because of this. i wanted to start it like 3 years ago, but kept putting it off because of money issues and wanting to save as much as possible. i got really close to actually starting it this year, but because of how messy everything is, i put it off again bc having one more thing on my plate, especially when my parents are already weird about me being trans, was not something i wanted to deal with

not to mention, we're still currently not living under a lease in our house that we're, as far as i'm aware, still tens of thousands of dollars behind in rent on (again, my dad refuses to disclose our financial position honestly with any of us) and it's developed many, many issues bc the landlord, even before we were behind on rent, is shit and refuses to actually fix anything. and my dad loves to just ignore things unless we beg him to do something

i'd love to be on my own (in the, much more affordable, midwest) by the end of summer. i by no means want to rely on donations and i have other avenues i'm working with to make money (i still have my current full time job, but i'm going through my old belongings and selling a lot online), but i'll take any help i can get atp because i'm truly at my wits end. i'd start doing art commissions again if i could, but doing that from 2020-2022, partially on top of my full time job, absolutely wrecked my right hand and i'm still in enough pain that i can't make it a regular activity

idk how much else there is to say. there's more i could say but... i don't really wanna air all my dirty laundry here. i'm miserable in so many ways and it's just become increasingly clear that my dad expects me to constantly cover his ass. my younger brother gives money too, but he manages to go on big cross-country and overseas trips with friends, so i think i've been stuck with the burden of giving the most money. there's so many more things going on in the world rn and everyone is stretched thin so i don't expect much, or anything, but. idk. might as well throw it out there, right?

i’ve also since taken down the gfm i set up last year when we got our first eviction notice bc, while we still need the money, i don’t feel right keeping it up for multiple reasons, including “i don’t want to give any of that money to my family” and it feels too… serious to keep it up when i could just throw out my kofi instead

i just want to make sure i have some sort of safety net to catch me if i move before anything job-wise is finalized. i need to be able to afford a place to live for at least a month so i can job-search while physically being in the area i wanna move to, which would ultimately make it easier for me to find a job at all. i'm working on being more firm with giving less money so i can actually have the means to move and be safe and comfortable, but... that never lasts long in this house

anyway. that's it, i guess. thanks for reading

[hellskitchenswhore]

EDIT: Like genuinely I want to know how you authors think Matt would feel about all this. I genuinely do not know how Matt would react to this. I don’t know how he’d feel about so many things, how he’d cope with it. But at least he has an outlet, a way to go blow off steam about the injustice in his world. At least he can feel a little like he’s doing something about it (even if most of his feeling is guilt that he’s not doing enough).

How would he cope with a reader who’s so in grief over it all?

——————————————————————

I am begging you. This is a plea, this is a cry for help.

I need a very special writer (or writers) to write about Matt comforting a reader who is losing their goddamn mind over the political state of this country.

Because

little girls are being forced to birth their rapists babies in Texas (literally hundreds of thousands of rape-related births have been forced to happen since the overturning of roe v wade, and now we won’t even get decent statistics because the newly appointed head of that committee is the Queen Bee of all forced-birth psychopaths)

Women in Idaho are bleeding out in front of doctors who aren’t allowed to touch them for the sake of mis-implanted fetuses that have long since died and gone necrotic, killing the women for literally no reason at all

Mass shootings are happening right next door and they’re so commonplace you don’t even hear about them on the local news anymore

PFAS are in every single fucking thing and somehow toxic chemicals are now a “democrat issue”

Boeing is just flat out killing their whistleblowers who are desperately trying to warn the public

Our two options for buying bananas are “corporate-funded militia murdering already horrifyingly impoverished women and children” and “the literal overthrowing of the sovereign state of Hawaii”

The federal government has sent twice as many tax dollars as would be required to provide universal healthcare (which we supposedly couldn’t possibly afford) to an overseas nation where our congressmen have also gone to proudly sign their names on the bombs destined for more innocent civilians

We’re watching the US-funded massacre of millions on live-stream, held hostage by corporations and our own government who control the water, the food supply, the housing, and are supported by a police force that indiscriminately kills those who protest against it

And there is laundry to do and a genocide to stop and the world hates women and

HOW DO WE LIVE LIKE THIS?

[fairuzfan]

Ok you vote for Biden. Let's say he wins. Then what. What makes you so confident he won't do the same things Trump will do. What makes you think he's such a proponent for humanity that he will protect you. Just cuz you had the good fortune of living in America? You think he cares about you because you're American? Of course he supports genocide overseas like you can excuse that but he DEFINITELY won't let it happen here. Like for sure he won't. Like totally 10000% will not let it happen. Because he loves and cares for you. Because he's a man of reason who only makes reasonable decisions, that's why he gave 14 billion dollars of weapons to an entity committing genocide. That's why he willingly invests your tax money in killing people overseas. He's doing this because he really super cares about you, an American. That's why you're struggling to feed your family and paying rent is a constant stressor on your life. Like he's doing all this because he CARES about trans people and gay people. For sure. Like 100%. He will definitely protect you when it comes down to it. Don't worry. Just vote for him and show the world you approve of his actions by giving him your support. That definitely won't embolden him to do whatever the fuck he wants.

[weird-an]

It's Saturday and Steve just wants to get home. Every first Saturday of the month Steve has an appointment. To see his dad. The prison's visitor's center is white painted cement and squeaky chairs, but the conversation is way more uncomfortable.

He's listening to his dad's never-ending rant about the downfall of America and his stiff neck. Because, you know, pillow in prison aren't very comfortable.

The last ten minutes of the tirade are usually reserved for his dad telling him that he's wasting his life and that he's better not driving the company against the wall, like this ship hasn't sailed when a few million dollars got found on accounts overseas.

Steve leaves the prison with shaking hands and the same feeling that he got when he received a bunch of rejection letters for colleges he didn't even want to go to in the first place.

He doesn't get in his car. Leans against the door of the BMW and groans.

"You want a smoke? Looks like you need one." A guy around Steve's age holds out a pack of Marlboro Reds.

Steve stares at it for a second, somewhere between surprised and confused, then takes it.

"I'm tryin' to quit," he mumbles, but lets the guy light his cigarette with a silver zippo.

"Same here, amigo." The man grins at him. White teeth shining. He's got a blond mullet, red shirt unbuttoned so far that Steve can see a hint of his abs.

"I'm Steve."

Steve inhales the smoke. Has Dustin's voice in his ear, reminding him that smoking can kill him.

"Billy," Billy says, with a wink like they are at a bar and he's trying to buy Steve a drink.

"Did you visit someone, too?" he asks, more out of politeness and maybe also a little because he's curious.

"My old man." Billy blows smoke in the direction of the prison.

"Me too." Steve murmurs. It's some form of camaraderie, he guesses. It feels like it. He knew on a rational level that other people's fathers are in prison, but he never talked to anyone.

"He's in for tax fraud."

It's not a secret. It has been in the papers. The whole world knows about it. Arthur Harrington, Harrington's Steel Works, a dirty office affair - not only with his secretary.

Billy's intense gaze wanders to Steve's Burberry shirt. "Guessed so."

"And yours?"

Billy seems to think about his question.

"Physical assault," he says quietly.

Steve doesn't know what to say. It's obviously not the same. He can't read the expression on Billy's face, his furrowed brow when he sucks on his cigarette again.

"Dads suck," Steve says lamely.

"Amen to that." Billy laughs, a bitter, sharp sound. "I'm goin' to get so wasted tonight."

"Do you need company?" Steve asks. A beer sounds great. Forgetting sounds even better - and they've got something in common. Maybe that says more about Steve's loneliness than about Billy. But still.

"No." Billy's smile is wide. His red tongue traces the frontline of his teeth. Like he's really hungry. "But I don't mind it."

[mostlysignssomeportents]

A link-clump demands a linkdump

Cometh the weekend, cometh the linkdump. My daily-ish newsletter includes a section called "Hey look at this," with three short links per day, but sometimes those links get backed up and I need to clean house. Here's the eight previous installments:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

The country code top level domain (ccTLD) for the Caribbean island nation of Anguilla is .ai, and that's turned into millions of dollars worth of royalties as "entrepreneurs" scramble to sprinkle some buzzword-compliant AI stuff on their businesses in the most superficial way possible:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/08/ai-fever-turns-anguillas-ai-domain-into-a-digital-gold-mine/

All told, .ai domain royalties will account for about ten percent of the country's GDP.

It's actually kind of nice to see Anguilla finding some internet money at long last. Back in the 1990s, when I was a freelance web developer, I got hired to work on the investor website for a publicly traded internet casino based in Anguilla that was a scammy disaster in every conceivable way. The company had been conceived of by people who inherited a modestly successful chain of print-shops and decided to diversify by buying a dormant penny mining stock and relaunching it as an online casino.

But of course, online casinos were illegal nearly everywhere. Not in Anguilla – or at least, that's what the founders told us – which is why they located their servers there, despite the lack of broadband or, indeed, reliable electricity at their data-center. At a certain point, the whole thing started to whiff of a stock swindle, a pump-and-dump where they'd sell off shares in that ex-mining stock to people who knew even less about the internet than they did and skedaddle. I got out, and lost track of them, and a search for their names and business today turns up nothing so I assume that it flamed out before it could ruin any retail investors' lives.

Anguilla is a British Overseas Territory, one of those former British colonies that was drained and then given "independence" by paternalistic imperial administrators half a world away. The country's main industries are tourism and "finance" – which is to say, it's a pearl in the globe-spanning necklace of tax- and corporate-crime-havens the UK established around the world so its most vicious criminals – the hereditary aristocracy – can continue to use Britain's roads and exploit its educated workforce without paying any taxes.

This is the "finance curse," and there are tiny, struggling nations all around the world that live under it. Nick Shaxson dubbed them "Treasure Islands" in his outstanding book of the same name:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780230341722/treasureislands

I can't imagine that the AI bubble will last forever – anything that can't go on forever eventually stops – and when it does, those .ai domain royalties will dry up. But until then, I salute Anguilla, which has at last found the internet riches that I played a small part in bringing to it in the previous century.

The AI bubble is indeed overdue for a popping, but while the market remains gripped by irrational exuberance, there's lots of weird stuff happening around the edges. Take Inject My PDF, which embeds repeating blocks of invisible text into your resume:

https://kai-greshake.de/posts/inject-my-pdf/

The text is tuned to make resume-sorting Large Language Models identify you as the ideal candidate for the job. It'll even trick the summarizer function into spitting out text that does not appear in any human-readable form on your CV.

Embedding weird stuff into resumes is a hacker tradition. I first encountered it at the Chaos Communications Congress in 2012, when Ang Cui used it as an example in his stellar "Print Me If You Dare" talk:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njVv7J2azY8

Cui figured out that one way to update the software of a printer was to embed an invisible Postscript instruction in a document that basically said, "everything after this is a firmware update." Then he came up with 100 lines of perl that he hid in documents with names like cv.pdf that would flash the printer when they ran, causing it to probe your LAN for vulnerable PCs and take them over, opening a reverse-shell to his command-and-control server in the cloud. Compromised printers would then refuse to apply future updates from their owners, but would pretend to install them and even update their version numbers to give verisimilitude to the ruse. The only way to exorcise these haunted printers was to send 'em to the landfill. Good times!

Printers are still a dumpster fire, and it's not solely about the intrinsic difficulty of computer security. After all, printer manufacturers have devoted enormous resources to hardening their products against their owners, making it progressively harder to use third-party ink. They're super perverse about it, too – they send "security updates" to your printer that update the printer's security against you – run these updates and your printer downgrades itself by refusing to use the ink you chose for it:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

It's a reminder that what a monopolist thinks of as "security" isn't what you think of as security. Oftentimes, their security is antithetical to your security. That was the case with Web Environment Integrity, a plan by Google to make your phone rat you out to advertisers' servers, revealing any adblocking modifications you might have installed so that ad-serving companies could refuse to talk to you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/02/self-incrimination/#wei-bai-bai

WEI is now dead, thanks to a lot of hueing and crying by people like us:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/02/google_abandons_web_environment_integrity/

But the dream of securing Google against its own users lives on. Youtube has embarked on an aggressive campaign of refusing to show videos to people running ad-blockers, triggering an arms-race of ad-blocker-blockers and ad-blocker-blocker-blockers:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/where-will-the-ad-versus-ad-blocker-arms-race-end/

The folks behind Ublock Origin are racing to keep up with Google's engineers' countermeasures, and there's a single-serving website called "Is uBlock Origin updated to the last Anti-Adblocker YouTube script?" that will give you a realtime, one-word status update:

https://drhyperion451.github.io/does-uBO-bypass-yt/

One in four web users has an ad-blocker, a stat that Doc Searls pithily summarizes as "the biggest boycott in world history":

https://doc.searls.com/2015/09/28/beyond-ad-blocking-the-biggest-boycott-in-human-history/

Zero app users have ad-blockers. That's not because ad-blocking an app is harder than ad-blocking the web – it's because reverse-engineering an app triggers liability under IP laws like Section 1201 of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, which can put you away for 5 years for a first offense. That's what I mean when I say that "IP is anything that lets a company control its customers, critics or competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

I predicted that apps would open up all kinds of opportunities for abusive, monopolistic conduct back in 2010, and I'm experiencing a mix of sadness and smugness (I assume there's a German word for this emotion) at being so thoroughly vindicated by history:

https://memex.craphound.com/2010/04/01/why-i-wont-buy-an-ipad-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/

The more control a company can exert over its customers, the worse it will be tempted to treat them. These systems of control shift the balance of power within companies, making it harder for internal factions that defend product quality and customer interests to win against the enshittifiers:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

The result has been a Great Enshittening, with platforms of all description shifting value from their customers and users to their shareholders, making everything palpably worse. The only bright side is that this has created the political will to do something about it, sparking a wave of bold, muscular antitrust action all over the world.

The Google antitrust case is certainly the most important corporate lawsuit of the century (so far), but Judge Amit Mehta's deference to Google's demands for secrecy has kept the case out of the headlines. I mean, Sam Bankman-Fried is a psychopathic thief, but even so, his trial does not deserve its vastly greater prominence, though, if you haven't heard yet, he's been convicted and will face decades in prison after he exhausts his appeals:

https://newsletter.mollywhite.net/p/sam-bankman-fried-guilty-on-all-charges

The secrecy around Google's trial has relaxed somewhat, and the trickle of revelations emerging from the cracks in the courthouse are fascinating. For the first time, we're able to get a concrete sense of which queries are the most lucrative for Google:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/1/23941766/google-antitrust-trial-search-queries-ad-money

The list comes from 2018, but it's still wild. As David Pierce writes in The Verge, the top twenty includes three iPhone-related terms, five insurance queries, and the rest are overshadowed by searches for customer service info for monopolistic services like Xfinity, Uber and Hulu.

All-in-all, we're living through a hell of a moment for piercing the corporate veil. Maybe it's the problem of maintaining secrecy within large companies, or maybe the the rampant mistreatment of even senior executives has led to more leaks and whistleblowing. Either way, we all owe a debt of gratitude to the anonymous leaker who revealed the unbelievable pettiness of former HBO president of programming Casey Bloys, who ordered his underlings to create an army of sock-puppet Twitter accounts to harass TV and movie critics who panned HBO's shows:

https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-features/hbo-casey-bloys-secret-twitter-trolls-tv-critics-leaked-texts-lawsuit-the-idol-1234867722/

These trolling attempts were pathetic, even by the standards of thick-fingered corporate execs. Like, accusing critics who panned the shitty-ass Perry Mason reboot of disrespecting veterans because the fictional Mason's back-story had him storming the beach on D-Day.

The pushback against corporate bullying is everywhere, and of course, the vanguard is the labor movement. Did you hear that the UAW won their strike against the auto-makers, scoring raises for all workers based on the increases in the companies' CEO pay? The UAW isn't done, either! Their incredible new leader, Shawn Fain, has called for a general strike in 2028:

https://www.404media.co/uaw-calls-on-workers-to-line-up-massive-general-strike-for-2028-to-defeat-billionaire-class/

The massive victory for unionized auto-workers has thrown a spotlight on the terrible working conditions and pay for workers at Tesla, a criminal company that has no compunctions about violating labor law to prevent its workers from exercising their legal rights. Over in Sweden, union workers are teaching Tesla a lesson. After the company tried its illegal union-busting playbook on Tesla service centers, the unionized dock-workers issued an ultimatum: respect your workers or face a blockade at Sweden's ports that would block any Tesla from being unloaded into the EU's fifth largest Tesla market:

https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-sweden-strike/

Of course, the real solution to Teslas – and every other kind of car – is to redesign our cities for public transit, walking and cycling, making cars the exception for deliveries, accessibility and other necessities. Transitioning to EVs will make a big dent in the climate emergency, but it won't make our streets any safer – and they keep getting deadlier.

Last summer, my dear old pal Ted Kulczycky got in touch with me to tell me that Talking Heads were going to be all present in public for the first time since the band's breakup, as part of the debut of the newly remastered print of Stop Making Sense, the greatest concert movie of all time. Even better, the show would be in Toronto, my hometown, where Ted and I went to high-school together, at TIFF.

Ted is the only person I know who is more obsessed with Talking Heads than I am, and he started working on tickets for the show while I starting pricing plane tickets. And then, the unthinkable happened: Ted's wife, Serah, got in touch to say that Ted had been run over by a car while getting off of a streetcar, that he was severely injured, and would require multiple surgeries.

But this was Ted, so of course he was still planning to see the show. And he did, getting a day-pass from the hospital and showing up looking like someone from a Kids In The Hall sketch who'd been made up to look like someone who'd been run over by a car:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53182440282/

In his Globe and Mail article about Ted's experience, Brad Wheeler describes how the whole hospital rallied around Ted to make it possible for him to get to the movie:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/music/article-how-a-talking-heads-superfan-found-healing-with-the-concert-film-stop/

He also mentions that Ted is working on a book and podcast about Stop Making Sense. I visited Ted in the hospital the day after the gig and we talked about the book and it sounds amazing. Also? The movie was incredible. See it in Imax.

That heartwarming tale of healing through big suits is a pretty good place to wrap up this linkdump, but I want to call your attention to just one more thing before I go: Robin Sloan's Snarkmarket piece about blogging and "stock and flow":

https://snarkmarket.com/2010/4890/

Sloan makes the excellent case that for writers, having a "flow" of short, quick posts builds the audience for a "stock" of longer, more synthetic pieces like books. This has certainly been my experience, but I think it's only part of the story – there are good, non-mercenary reasons for writers to do a lot of "flow." As I wrote in my 2021 essay, "The Memex Method," turning your commonplace book into a database – AKA "blogging" – makes you write better notes to yourself because you know others will see them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/

This, in turn, creates a supersaturated, subconscious solution of fragments that are just waiting to nucleate and crystallize into full-blown novels and nonfiction books and other "stock." That's how I came out of lockdown with nine new books. The next one is The Lost Cause, a hopepunk science fiction novel about the climate whose early fans include Naomi Klein, Rebecca Solnit, Bill McKibben and Kim Stanley Robinson. It's out on November 14:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

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/2023/11/05/variegated/#nein

[profoundbondfanfic]

Forget the Sky

Forget the Sky by LoversAntiquities Rating: Teen  Word Count: 26k

After years of bum luck on lottery scratch offs in almost every state in the nation, Dean strikes it rich on a ticket and comes into the possession of fifteen thousand dollars—after taxes. After finishing a near-fruitless hunt with Castiel at his side, and with decades worth of exhaustion in his bones, together they come up with a plan—throw a dart at a map pinned to their motel wall, and fly to the first place it lands. Only, Dean never anticipated that traveling to Japan would involve staying so close to Castiel at all hours on unsure footing, and thousands of miles from Sam and his home, everything from simple touches to sideways glances, it all comes to a head in the middle of the night—How is he supposed to enjoy his vacation when he's sleeping next to the love of his life?

Wouldn’t we all agree that both Dean and Cas deserve a nice vacation?

Well, if you’re nodding your head along just now, I would highly recommend clicking on this fic and diving right in!

Because after winning a good amount of money Cas proposes that a trip to somewhere overseas would be just the thing they need and naturally Dean can’t say no to his angel. So after letting fate choose, they find themselves traveling to Japan and instead of monster hunting their lives suddenly consist of battling fear of flying, being proper tourists, getting to know the unfamiliar culture, sharing rooms and beds and stories and (at least on Dean’s side) doing a whole lot of pining. 

But maybe Cas was right after all and this is exactly what they needed … 

This story is certainly beautiful from start to finish! It’s an absolute delight to watch Dean and Cas grow closer and talk about more intimate things, opening up to one another in manners they haven’t before. 

Furthermore, it is rather refreshing to see a change of scenery and experience Dean reacting to a completely different setting from what he is used to. I myself have actually never been to Japan before either, but the way the author describes it all makes me almost jump onto the next plane and see it for real 😆 Dean surely is in awe of it all and Cas is more than excited to show him everything.

So yes, if you’re in the mood for a gorgeous and soft fic, you’re most definitely at the right address!