#the Nessie files

[nsfwitchy2]

One of those jelly bean jar games but instead you guess how many babies are in there-

[randomfoggytiger]

(Taken from this video.)

[let-me-bee-gay]

nessie is real and a lesbian and no one can convince me otherwise

she's in a long distance open relationship with bigfoot, who's a bicon and also dating mothman

she's also, of course, dating every single kelpie, love that for her

nessie met bigfoot while visiting her cousin, champ

trust me, i'm scottish 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿

@wearewatcher

[max-headroomfiles]

YOU. GUYS. GHDDJFJFDJEKFKGHDJDKFGJFJEKDKKDJFJFKEDLDJDJFKD,DMDJFVJDISKEMDMCFHRGUDEOLWSXLOXDJGJMDCKCIHCFJDDKJDDHCIDKDJ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! NO WORDS JUST FJSISIWMMFODIOSJMSWKLDODSJSKLSOSKSKSWMWMSKISJDKSKXOSSKSKSKKSJHDJESKOAOSOLLWKWKSOEWIKWPSOSJDLSKDJJDJWLSPSOWKDEKDKDKDJSSWLSPSSD!!!!!!! very excited for the new season for Mystery Files :]

[stilesisbiles]

new season of Mystery Files looks great

[grenly]

*cue X Files theme*

I believe in Team Aliens this Splatfest!

[apricot-the-apricat]

Lanternlight Kingdom Map

This isn't 1:1, one house on the map might be like 10 in the actual kingdom

zoom in for better quality

I made a map of the kingdom in Inkarnate a while back, but never got around to finishing it until earlier today so here! It's more focused on the layout of the kingdom more than anything, obviously a kingdom with like 20.000 residents is gonna have more than like ~250 houses.

Just beyond the edges of the map (on the land side) is a small forest with a lake in the middle, and then a big flower field/plains biome-lookin thing that extends as far as the eye can see. And further beyond that is the neighboring kingdom's land.

[splat-of-all-trades]

IVE WAITED SO LONG FOR THIS

Possibly unpopular opinion but I think they should have done Ghosts instead of Nessie—- NOTHING AGAINST HER I LOVE HER, but Ghosts would widen the audience for the possible team and is more international. I’d still pick aliens, but GHOSTS, MAAAN

[freckled-paints]

A loch ness monster to go with my baby mothman!!

[danascullysjournal]

“Mulder, what did you put in the crock pot, exactly…”

- irritated Dana Scully

3174. Crock Ness Monster

https://cryptidcreations.com/store/

https://patreon.com/piperdraws

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Look below to see the old version of this piece: 

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[nsfwitchy2]

WE HAVE CONFIRMED FOUR 🎉🎉🎉🎉

Also sorry I tried to get a video of their lil squeaks but of course everybody is excited, so everybody joined me for the video and made it a bit noisier than I wanted XD

[toomanyplanets]

1, 4, 46 :)

1. who is/are your comfort character(s)?

As far as characters I just like seeing around me, I'd have to say Kirby and Link. But if it was overall throughout my life, for sure Snoopy

4. which cryptid being do you believe in?

I feel like Nessie is real, like water is always a little scary and unknown and some form of Nessie is actually lurking around.

46. favorite holiday film?

All the Rankin & Bass stop motion ones, but probably The Year Without Santa Claus the most.

weirder asks

[steviesays]

‘‘twas just an alligator 💔

[max-headroomfiles]

also! will say, that I like the theory of champ either being a prehistoric sea creature or a descent of one. though it may be unlikely I just like that thought also, Champ seems like a nice cryptid I could be friends with him

[hanspolo]

it's raining. you're on the couch under a blanket. the x-files is on. mulder, wearing a tie from the clearance bin, quixotically explains how bigfoot and nessy are entirely misunderstood. scully, exasperated, one eye half closed, launches into a rebuttal. she knows he already knows what she thinks but it's the dance they do. he asks what she thinks of nowheresville new york this time of year. she tells him he can't be serious. he informs her that their flight leaves in an hour. thinly-veiled eye fucking masquerading as indignant outrage. he's insane and she'll follow him anywhere. she's infuriating and she makes him whole. they're turned on. you're turned on. the rain continues.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How Google’s trial secrecy lets it control the coverage

I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

"Corporate crime" is practically an oxymoron in America. While it's true that the single most consequential and profligate theft in America is wage theft, its mechanisms are so obscure and, well, dull that it's easy to sell us on the false impression that the real problem is shoplifting:

https://newrepublic.com/post/175343/wage-theft-versus-shoplifting-crime

Corporate crime is often hidden behind Dana Clare's Shield Of Boringness, cloaked in euphemisms like "risk and compliance" or that old favorite, "white collar crime":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/07/solar-panel-for-a-sex-machine/#a-single-proposition

And corporate crime has a kind of performative complexity. The crimes come to us wreathed in specialized jargon and technical terminology that make them hard to discern. Which is wild, because corporate crimes occur on a scale that other crimes – even those committed by organized crime – can't hope to match:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/12/no-criminals-no-crimes/#get-out-of-jail-free-card

But anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. After decades of official tolerance (and even encouragement), corporate criminals are finally in the crosshairs of federal enforcers. Take National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo's ruling in Cemex: when a company takes an illegal action to affect the outcome of a union election, the consequence is now automatic recognition of the union:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

That's a huge deal. Before, a boss could fire union organizers and intimidate workers, scuttle the union election, and then, months or years later, pay a fine and some back-wages…and the union would be smashed.

The scale of corporate crime is directly proportional to the scale of corporations themselves. Big companies aren't (necessarily) led by worse people, but even small sins committed by the very largest companies can affect millions of lives.

That's why antitrust is so key to fighting corporate crime. To make corporate crimes less harmful, we must keep companies from attaining harmful scale. Big companies aren't just too big to fail and too big to jail – they're also too big for peaceful coexistence with a society of laws.

The revival of antitrust enforcement is such a breath of fresh air, but it's also fighting headwinds. For one thing, there's 40 years of bad precedent from the nightmare years of pro-monopoly Reaganomics to overturn:

https://pluralistic.net/ApexPredator

It's not just precedents in the outcomes of trials, either. Trial procedure has also been remade to favor corporations, with judges helping companies stack the deck in their own favor. The biggest factor here is secrecy: blocking recording devices from courts, refusing to livestream the proceedings, allowing accused corporate criminals to clear the courtroom when their executives take the stand, and redacting or suppressing the exhibits:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-09-27-redacted-case-against-amazon/

When a corporation can hide evidence and testimony from the public and the press, it gains broad latitude to dispute critics, including government enforcers, based on evidence that no one is allowed to see, or, in many cases, even describe. Take Project Nessie, the program that the FTC claims Amazon used to compel third-party sellers to hike prices across many categories of goods:

https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/amazon-used-secret-project-nessie-algorithm-to-raise-prices-6c593706

Amazon told the press that the FTC has "grossly mischaracterize[d]" Project Nessie. The DoJ disagrees, but it can't say why, because the Project Nessie files it based its accusations on have been redacted, at Amazon's insistence. Rather than rebutting Amazon's claim, FTC spokesman Douglas Farrar could only say "We once again call on Amazon to move swiftly to remove the redactions and allow the American public to see the full scope of what we allege are their illegal monopolistic practices."

It's quite a devastating gambit: when critics and prosecutors make specific allegations about corporate crimes, the corporation gets to tell journalists, "No, that's wrong, but you're not allowed to see the reason we say it's wrong."

It's a way to work the refs, to get journalists – or their editors – to wreathe bold claims in endless hedging language, or to avoid reporting on the most shocking allegations altogether. This, in turn, keeps corporate trials out of the public eye, which reassures judges that they can defer to further corporate demands for opacity without facing an outcry.

That's a tactic that serves Google well. When the company was dragged into court by the DoJ Antitrust Division, it demanded – and received – a veil of secrecy that is especially ironic given the company's promise "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful":

https://usvgoogle.org/trial-update-9-22

While this veil has parted somewhat, it is still intact enough to allow the company to work the refs and kill disfavorable reporting from the trial. Last week, Megan Gray – ex-FTC, ex-DuckDuckGo – published an editorial in Wired reporting on her impression of an explosive moment in the Google trial:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

According to Gray, Google had run a program to mess with the "semantic matching" on queries, silently appending terms to users' searches that caused them to return more ads – and worse results. This generated more revenue for Google, at the expense of advertisers who got billed to serve ads that didn't even match user queries.

Google forcefully disputed this claim:

https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1709726778170786297

They contacted Gray's editors at Wired, but declined to release all the exhibits and testimony that Gray used to form her conclusions about Google's conduct; instead, they provided a subset of the relevant materials, which cast doubt on Gray's accusations.

Wired removed Gray's piece, with an unsigned notice that "WIRED editorial leadership has determined that the story does not meet our editorial standards. It has been removed":

https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/

But Gray stands by her piece. She admits that she might have gotten some of the fine details wrong, but that these were not material to the overall point of her story, that Google manipulated search queries to serve more ads at the expense of the quality of the results:

https://twitter.com/megangrA/status/1711035354134794529

She says that the piece could and should have been amended to reflect these fine-grained corrections, but that in the absence of a full record of the testimony and exhibits, it was impossible for her to prove to her editors that her piece was substantively correct.

I reviewed the limited evidence that Google permitted to be released and I find her defense compelling. Perhaps you don't. But the only way we can factually resolve this dispute is for Google to release the materials that they claim will exonerate them. And they won't, though this is fully within their power.

I've seen this playbook before. During the early months of the pandemic, a billionaire who owned a notorious cyberwarfare company used UK libel threats to erase this fact from the internet – including my own reporting – on the grounds that the underlying research made small, non-material errors in characterizing a hellishly complex financial Rube Goldberg machine that was, in my opinion, deliberately designed to confuse investigators.

Like the corporate crimes revealed in the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers, the gambit is complicated, but it's not sophisticated:

Make everything as complicated as possible;

Make everything as secret as possible;

Dismiss any accusations by claiming errors in the account of the deliberately complex arrangements, which can't be rectified because the relevant materials are a secret.

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/2023/10/09/working-the-refs/#but-id-have-to-kill-you

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

Image: Jason Rosenberg (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/underpants/12069086054/

CC BY https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

--

Japanexperterna.se (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanexperterna/15251188384/

CC BY-SA 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/