#team monopoly

[poke-muns]

Pokemon antag team ideas

Spite

group of trainers who didn’t have the money/connections/opportunities MCs & their buddies have, most clearly talked about in not having a professor just hand them a strong, rare-species starter that’s easy to care for from the get-go.

They can’t develop the opportunities since their opponents have better (in battling context) starters from the start so always lose, their Pokemon don’t gain xp & they lose money.

Spice themed names? Purely because I want the leader to be called Sal. Then protag or professor can be something to do with sugar… MCs Beatrice & Cane?

Relative deprivation kinda story maybe? They have pokémon that they love and love them but don’t see it because they’re envious of others and want what they have (all of leader’s Pokemon or at least their starter knows max. Return)

Like to think they’d get to have an equal end? I don’t know how to phrase it. But they learn to appreciate what they got while the professors/government/league system/whatever change their policy. An actual game with this wouldn’t have Spite wholly win, they’ve gotta learn something too, but I want them to win.

Since the Arven & Az stuffs allude to a pokémon dying, you can use it here? Partner fainted while poisoned, couldn’t afford to travel to a place with a center or buy potions or etc. Not attached to this for someone in the team though, just a thought.

Monopoly

Take advantage of battling as a way to make money.

Would they realise making everyone else broke either means no one battles anymore or societal expectations change so battling can keep happening regardless of money? Who knows.

If boss wants the legendary it’s because it’s a fucking legendary, it’s strong, they’ll win so many battles with it guys

Paragon

Want to make the perfect Pokemon. No weaknesses, super effective to all, resists as much as possible.

If boss wants the legendary they plan to use it to make their perfect pokémon either by altering it’s biology, splicing it with something else, using it’s power to strengthen something else, or something else. (Paramon? Works nicer if there’s a parasitic element since then it feels less cheap than just paragon but mon)

Hell they could make the box legendary? Maybe? If they prioritise no weakness or full effective they get a different one.

[sun-stricken]

Things that have [probably] happened at a Team Sleepover

so many games. so many.

they cant play monopoly unsupervised until they learn how to be grownups

“fuck communism, im gonna take everything youre worth and then some”

“if someone doesnt bail me out right fucking now consider yourselves on my hit list”

“how the FUCK ARE YOU SO RICH??” “idk what to tell you, i just decided not to be poor” “can we jump someone in this game?” “now hOLD ON—”

charades is also banned because of the screaming matches

They love two truths and a lie tho, they will pull out the most absurd things abt themselves. usually the most mundane one is the lie

“okok, ive been arrested exactly one time, im wanted dead or alive in two countries, and i was the primary suspect in two armed robbery cases.” “okay, first of all—“ “what the fuck” “please tell me we’re playing two lies and one truth”

also uno!

Natsu: Please, Lucy, after everything we’ve been through together. You can’t do this. 
Lucy: I’m sorry Natsu. 
Natsu: I’m begging you. Don’t do it. 
Lucy: It has to be done. 
Natsu: 
Lucy: 
Natsu: 
Lucy: *Places +4* Uno.

Reading wikihow pages in suspenseful tones is a staple activity

it takes them hours to figure out where and what to eat

every time any of them pass the thermostat they have to mess with it

Usually they take place at either Lucy or Grays apartments, and they cause numerous noise complaints

Gray likes to leave like its a one night stand if its not at his place, no note, just up and leaves before anyone wakes up

they went to Natsus once, but they ended up walking to Grays bc they wouldnt stop critiquing everything

something always ends up being broken, be it a door, a vase, a cup, or a window, there will be something

alcohol was supposed to be banned at these sleepovers but somehow it always makes an appearance

Gray, drinking wine while getting a manicure from Lucy: I don’t know, they just don’t seem interested...

Lucy: Did you try talking to them?

Gray:

Gray: Try what?

There’s probably been a couple visits from police bc a neighbor though a domestic dispute was happening, this is the real reason charades was banned

Late night talks but they always end up with someone having an existential crisis

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kickstarting the Red Team Blues audiobook, which Amazon won't sell (read by Wil Wheaton!)

Red Team Blues is my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller; it’s a major title for my publishers Tor Books and Head of Zeus, and it’s swept the trade press with starred reviews all ‘round. Despite all that, Audible will not sell the audiobook. In fact, Audible won’t sell any of my audiobooks. Instead, I have to independently produce them and sell them through Kickstarter:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell

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/2023/03/21/anti-finance-finance-thriller/#marty-hench

Audible is Amazon’s monopoly audiobook platform. It has a death-grip on the audiobook market, commanding more than 90% of genre audiobook sales, and every single one of those audiobooks is sold with Amazon’s DRM on it. That means that you can’t break up with Amazon without throwing away those audiobooks. Under the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, I can’t give you a tool to convert my own copyrighted audiobooks to a non-Amazon format. Doing so is a felony carrying a five year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine for an act that in no way infringes anyone’s copyright! Indeed, merely infringing copyright is much less illegal than removing Amazon’s mandatory DRM from my own books!

I’ve got amazing publishers who support my crusade against DRM, but they’re not charities. If they can’t sell my audiobooks on the platform that represents 90% of the market, they’re not going to make audio editions at all. Instead, I make my own audiobooks, using brilliant voice actors like Amber Benson and @neil-gaiman​, and I sell them everywhere except Audible.

Doing this isn’t cheap: I’m paying for an incredible studio (Skyboat Media), a world-class director (Gabrielle de Cuir), top-notch sound editing and mastering, and, of course, killer narrators. And while indie audiobook platforms like Libro.fm and downpour.com are amazing, the brutal fees extracted by Apple and Google on app sales means that users have to jump through a thousand hoops to shop with indie stores. Most audiobook listeners don’t even know that these stores exist: if a title isn’t available on Audible, they assume no audiobook exists.

That’s where Kickstarter comes in: twice now, I’ve crowdfunded presales of my audiobooks through KS, and these campaigns were astoundingly successful, smashing records and selling thousands of audiobooks. These campaigns didn’t just pay my bills (especially during lockdown, when our household income plunged), but they also showed other authors that it was possible to evade Amazon’s monopoly chokepoint and sell books that aren’t sticky-traps for Audible’s walled garden/prison:

https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/columns-and-blogs/cory-doctorow/article/90282-we-wrote-a-book-about-why-audible-won-t-sell-our-book-and-snuck-it-onto-audible.html

And today, I’m launching the Kickstarter for Red Team Blues, and even by the standards of my previous efforts, I think this one’s gonna be incredible.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell

For starters, there’s the narrator: @wilwheaton​, whose work on my previous books is outstanding, hands-down my favorite (don’t tell my other narrators! They’re great too!):

https://wilwheaton.net/

Beyond Wil’s narration, there’s the subject matter. The hero of Red Team Blues is a hard-charging forensic accountant who’s untangled every Silicon Valley finance scam since he fell in love with spreadsheets as as a MIT freshman, dropped out, got his CPA ticket, and moved west. Now, at the age of 67, Marty Hench is ready to retire, but a dear old friend — a legendary cryptographer — drags him back for one last job — locating the stolen keys to the backdoor he foolishly hid in a cryptocurrency that’s worth more than a billion dollars.

That’s the starting gun for a “grabby next-Tuesday thriller” that sees Marty in between three-letter agencies and international crime syndicates, all of whom view digital technology as a carrier medium for scams, violence and predation. Marty’s final adventure involves dodgy banks, crooked crypto, and complicit officials in a fallen paradise where computers’ libertory promise has been sucked dry by billionaire vampires.

It’s a pretty contemporary story, in other words.

I wrote this one before SVB, before Sam Bankman0Fried and FTX — just like I wrote Little Brother before Snowden’s revelations. It’s not that I’m prescient — fortune-telling is a fatalist’s delusion — it’s that these phenomena are just the most spectacular, most recent examples in a long string of ghastly and increasingly dire scandals.

Red Team Blues blasted out of my fingertips in six weeks flat, during lockdown, when technology was simultaneously a lifeline, connecting us to one another during our enforced isolation; and a tool of predatory control, as bossware turned our “work from home” into “live at work.”

The last time I wrote a book that quickly, it was Little Brother, and, as with Little Brother, Red Team Blues is a way of working out my own anxieties and hopes for technology on the page, in story.

These books tap into a nerve. I knew I had something special in my hands when, the night after I finished the first draft, I rolled over at 2AM to find my wife sitting up in bed, reading.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I had to find out how it ended,” she answered.

The next day, my editor sent me a four-line email:

That. Was. A! Fucking! Ride! Whoa!

Within a week, he’d bought Red Team Blues…and two sequels. I finished writing the second of these on Monday, and all three are coming out in the next 22 months. It’s gonna be a wild ride.

Kickstarter backers can get the usual goodies: DRM-free audiobooks and ebooks, hardcovers (including signed and personalized copies), and three very special, very limited-run goodies.

First, there’s naming rights for characters in the sequels — I’m selling three of these; they’re a form of cheap (or at least, reasonably priced) literary immortality for you or a loved one. The sequels are a lot of fun — they go in reverse chronology, and the next one is The Bezzle, out in Feb 2024, a book about prison-tech scams, crooked LA County Sheriff’s Deputy gangs, and real-estate scumbags turned techbros.

The third book is Picks and Shovels (Jan 2025), and it’s Marty’s first adventure after he comes west to San Francisco and ends up working for the bad guys, an affinity scam PC company called “Three Wise Men” that’s run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest and an orthodox rabbi who fleece their faithful with proprietary, underpowered computers and peripherals, and front for some very bad, very violent money-men.

Next, there’s three Marty Hench short story commissions: the Hench stories are machines for turning opaque finance scams into technothrillers. While finance bros use MEGO (“my eyes glaze over”) as a weapon to bore their marks into submission, I use the same performative complexity as the engines of taut detective stories. Commissioning a Hench story lets you turn your favorite MEGO scam into a science fiction story, which I’ll then shop to fiction websites (every story I’ve written for the past 20 years has sold, though in the event that one of these doesn’t, I’ll put it up under a CC license).

Finally, there’s a super-ultra-limited deluxe hardcover edition — and I do mean limited, just four copies! These leather-bound editions have Will Staehle’s fantastic graphic motif embossed in their covers, and the type design legend John D Berry is laying out the pages so that there’s space for a hidden cavity. Nestled in that cavity is a hand-bound early draft edition of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues. The binding is being done by the fantastic book-artist John DeMerritt. Each copy’s endpapers will feature a custom cryptographic puzzle created especially for it by the cryptographer Bruce Schneier.

I often hear from readers who want to thank me for the work I do, from the free podcast I’ve put out since 2006 to the free, CC BY columns I’ve written for Pluralistic for the past three years. There is no better way to thank me than to back this Kickstarter and encourage your friends to do the same:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell

Preselling a ton of audiobooks, ebooks, and print books is a huge boost to the book on its launch — incomparable, really. Invaluable.

What’s more, helping me find a viable way to produce popular, widely heard audiobooks without submitting to Amazon’s DRM lock-in sets an example for other creators and publishers: we have a hell of a collective action problem to solve, but if we could coordinate a response to Audible demanding the right to decide whether our work should have their DRM, it would force Audible to treat all of us — creators, publishers and listeners — more fairly.

I’ll be heading out on tour to the US, Canada, the UK and Germany once the book is out. I’m really looking forward to as many backers in person as I can! Thank you for your support over these many long years — and for your support on this Kickstarter.

Today (Mar 22), I’m doing a remote talk for the Institute for the Future’s “Changing the Register” series.

[Image ID: A graphic showing a phone playing the Red Team Blues audiobok, along with a quote from Booklist, 'Jam-packed with cutting-edge ideas about cybersecurity and crypto. Another winner from an sf wizard.']

[lazycranberrydoodles]

woe mundane monopoly headcanons be upon ye

follow for more of modern au hua cheng’s outfits

[insomnya777]

they're filming the next life series like right now. like Right Now. they're making alliances that are gonna change our brain chemistry entirely!!!!! they're doing things that are going to make us go INSANE!!!! they're talking right now. they're interacting. they're playing the game. maybe someone's died already. maybe there's a full-fledged server war going on. we don't know. we won't know until friday and that is KILLING me

[maximura]

[rhaenin-time]

[goldensunset]

wait wait wait i’ve got it. ‘evil’ pokémon team but it’s just an entire union of nurse joys on strike. they’re tired of working literally 24/7 and getting paid what i can only assume is pennies from the government agency that runs the pokécenter program and they’ve finally snapped. in this game you gotta heal and revive your mons yourself, ya bum. bonus points if pokémart employees are on strike too and you literally only have access to stray potions and stuff you happen to find in the grass. combination of creating a fun gameplay challenge and educating children about the importance and rights of the working class

[souenkun]

Pokemon monopoly johto edition at my house, 7 pm sharp today!!!! 🗣🗣🗣

[fence-time]

FENCE HI

I love your ZITS art of like any of them separate or together it makes me giggle and kick my feet and smile and twirl my hair

YOUR ART IN GENERAL IS STUNNING BTW I LOVE IT SM :)c

AGH! COOL MUTUAL WITH AWESOME ART THAT I’M TOO NERVOUS TO TALK TO-

Hi! :D ahagsgshshag!! Thank you sooo much :O

Throws this at you and runs away

[mcytegg]

mapicc please disband mawn. please. please. i want the Guardians to start on trying to ban people. ive never seen someone try to farm another player off the server yet— wemmbu doesnt count bc he had like 3 hearts.

[pastelchaos12]

Old thing I drew back in December

Pure chaos

[grudgegolem]

Someone's cannibalizing the TF2 Monopoly game to sell à la carte and I'm looking at all the pieces and this one just

[sandxhanitizer]

Not a meme like I usually post but take lookie;

It's already a very cool looking board with it being a bird's-eye view of all the classes, but look where the card-reserved spots. If you put said cards in said spots, Pyro is not just in the ground, he's being crushed by the cards. This is an amazing design

(Best quality picture I could find with the cards on him)

[m0ose-idiot]

So someone said to me "Hey, the Geelong Show is coming up, you should enter your lil crochet Ghosts!" and I was like, yeah I really should, and guess what

Heeeee! 🥳🎉👻❤️

[iamafanofcartoons]

AliAvian does a 2-part RWBY fancomic of Team CFVY playing Monopoly

www.twitter.com/AliAvian/status/1387095667345088513 www.twitter.com/AliAvian/status/1684302916482367489