#vulture book
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lascitasdelashoras · 5 months ago
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Roberta Sparrow - The philosophy of timer travel
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vultures-and-scavengers · 4 months ago
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13 year old cullen was all "im gonna learn how to wield a sword and im gonna protect people and im gonna wear cool armor and join the templars" and then cut to 30 year old cullen and he's like. "yep. another day of doing paperwork until 9pm. glory to andraste, i guess."
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jq37 · 9 months ago
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Knowing your chaotic dumbass friends so well that you feel confident in ordering a special vulture dimension set and custom graphic for an episode that has exactly zero to do with vultures is a love language unto itself.
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notesandteacupstains · 5 months ago
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a sunny day in my half-decorated home
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zooophagous · 2 months ago
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The little fawn found her way to the shelf at last.
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grotesque-grimoire · 10 months ago
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Looking for active witch blogs that post:
🕯 Altars
☠ Baneful Magic (curses, hexes, jinxes, etc.)
💸 Budget / Poverty / Struggle / DIY / Upcycling Witchcraft
📖 Magical Books (pics of grimoire pages, flip-throughs, book recs/reviews, etc.)
💲 Money, Business, & Prosperity Witchcraft
💀 Necromancy, Death Witchcraft, and/or Cthonic/Death Deities (also funerary stuff, medical examination, etc., love that stuff)
🌿 Practical & Responsible Herbalism (gardening, cultivating, harvesting, foraging, herbal remedies, recipes, salves, ointments, etc. but no anti-science, anti-medicine, anti-allopathy shit)
📝 Sigils (free to use, preferably)
👻 Spirit Work (esp. animal spirits, dryads, egregores, genus loci, gorgons, & mermaids)
🥄 Spoon-Conscious Witchcraft (for those who are disabled, exhaust easy, etc.)
✨ Things relating to: Santa Muerte, Artemis, Serket/Selqet
🦴 Vulture Culture (responsible)
Reblog or send me an ask if you think your blog might suit my taste. Disclaimer: not Wiccan, not Pagan, not Heathen; just a witch who's curse-positive, eclectic, & agnostic.
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ahoymultiships · 9 months ago
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"You seem to know what you're talking about, so have an offer l'd like you to consider," Ally starts. "Through my own current program, I'm eligible to sign up ten other recruiters under what's called a multi-level model."
Cracking up brb
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saranilssonbooks · 25 days ago
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Hast seen the white crow?!
Sorry, just had to.
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versacethotty · 2 months ago
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"meg should play starfire in a live action teen titans 😍" oh no she shouldn't
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candlelitcorners · 4 months ago
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skull of the oppossum I cleaned up this summer. likes to read.
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strangebiology · 11 months ago
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Some places I travelled for the book! Most were this year.
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vultures-and-scavengers · 3 months ago
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i wish we could get a conversation between cullen and the iron bull regarding them leaving everything they've known for the inquisition. obviously the qun and the templars are different, but they're both people walking away from a very restrictive system centered on religion and now trying to figure out who they are without that system that they have killed and done terrible things in the name of.
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shadyufo · 10 months ago
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Time for a HUGE Etsy shop update!
Just listed a bunch of neat oddities including some unique animal skulls and bones, horse hooves, megalodon teeth, an emu egg, hide scraps, hag stones, and some rad antiques too! There's an old blood-letting knife aka fleam, a nearly 100 year old book about police dogs, some fun spooky old press photos, and lots more.
Stop by and check it all out HERE!
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thegreenwolf · 12 days ago
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Just your periodic reminder that I've written a whole slew of books on nature-based Paganism and Vulture Culture, plus I created the Tarot of Bones deck! I have plenty of everything in stock; you can find them all at http://www.thegreenwolf.com/books (drop me a line at lupa(dot)greenwolf(at)gmail(dot)com if you have any issues ordering.) Thank you!
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artworkmartins · 5 months ago
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COMMISSION vulture redesign
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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago
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Private equity plunderers want to buy Simon & Schuster
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Going to Defcon this weekend? I'm giving a keynote, "An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification and Throw it Into Reverse," on Saturday at 12:30pm, followed by a book signing at the No Starch Press booth at 2:30pm!
https://info.defcon.org/event/?id=50826
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Last November, publishing got some excellent news: the planned merger of Penguin Random House (the largest publisher in the history of human civilization) with its immediate competitor Simon & Schuster would not be permitted, thanks to the DOJ's deftly argued case against the deal:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/07/random-penguins/#if-you-wanted-to-get-there-i-wouldnt-start-from-here
When I was a baby writer, there were dozens of large NY publishers. Today, there are five - and it was almost four. A publishing sector with five giant companies is bad news for writers (as Stephen King said at the trial, the idea that PRH and S&S would bid against each other for books was as absurd as the idea that he and his wife would bid against each other for their next family home).
But it's also bad news for publishing workers, a historically exploited and undervalued workforce whose labor conditions have only declined as the number of employers in the sector dwindled, leading to mass resignations:
https://lithub.com/unlivable-and-untenable-molly-mcghee-on-the-punishing-life-of-junior-publishing-employees/
It should go without saying that workers in sectors with few employers get worse deals from their bosses (see, e.g., the writers' strike and actors' strike). And yup, right on time, PRH, a wildly profitable publisher, fired a bunch of its most senior (and therefore hardest to push around) workers:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/18/books/penguin-random-house-layoffs-buyouts.html
But publishing's contraction into a five-company cartel didn't occur in a vacuum. It was a normal response to monopolization elsewhere in its supply chain. First it was bookselling collapsing into two major chains. Then it was distribution going from 300 companies to three. Today, it's Amazon, a monopolist with unlimited access to the capital markets and a track record of treating publishers "the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/31/seize-the-means-of-computation/#the-internet-con
Monopolies are like Pringles (owned by the consumer packaged goods monopolist Procter & Gamble): you can't have just one. As soon as you get a monopoly in one part of the supply chain, every other part of that chain has to monopolize in self-defense.
Think of healthcare. Consolidation in pharma lead to price-gouging, where hospitals were suddenly paying 1,000% more for routine drugs. Hospitals formed regional monopolies and boycotted pharma companies unless they lowered their prices - and then turned around and screwed insurers, jacking up the price of care. Health insurers gobbled each other up in an orgy of mergers and fought the hospitals.
Now the health care system is composed of a series of gigantic, abusive monopolists - pharma, hospitals, medical equipment, pharmacy benefit managers, insurers - and they all conspire to wreck the lives of only two parts of the system who can't fight back: patients and health care workers. Patients pay more for worse care, and medical workers get paid less for worse working conditions.
So while there was no question that a PRH takeover of Simon & Schuster would be bad for writers and readers, it was also clear that S&S - and indeed, all of the Big Five publishers - would be under pressure from the monopolies in their own supply chain. What's more, it was clear that S&S couldn't remain tethered to Paramount, its current owner.
Last week, Paramount announced that it was going to flip S&S to KKR, one of the world's most notorious private equity companies. KKR has a long, long track record of ghastly behavior, and its portfolio currently includes other publishing industry firms, including one rotten monopolist, raising similar concerns to the ones that scuttled the PRH takeover last year:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/07/books/booksupdate/paramount-simon-and-schuster-kkr-sale.html
Let's review a little of KKR's track record, shall we? Most spectacularly, they are known for buying and destroying Toys R Us in a deal that saw them extract $200m from the company, leaving it bankrupt, with lifetime employees getting $0 in severance even as its executives paid themselves tens of millions in "performance bonuses":
https://memex.craphound.com/2018/06/03/private-equity-bosses-took-200m-out-of-toys-r-us-and-crashed-the-company-lifetime-employees-got-0-in-severance/
The pillaging of Toys R Us isn't the worst thing KKR did, but it was the most brazen. KKR lit a beloved national chain on fire and then walked away, hands in pockets, whistling. They didn't even bother to clear their former employees' sensitive personnel records out of the unlocked filing cabinets before they scarpered:
https://memex.craphound.com/2018/09/23/exploring-the-ruins-of-a-toys-r-us-discovering-a-trove-of-sensitive-employee-data/
But as flashy as the Toys R Us caper was, it wasn't the worst. Private equity funds specialize in buying up businesses, loading them with debts, paying themselves, and then leaving them to collapse. They're sometimes called vulture capitalists, but they're really vampire capitalists:
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2022/05/private-equity-buyout-kkr-houdaille/
Given a choice, PE companies don't want to prey on sick businesses - they preferentially drain off value from thriving ones, preferably ones that we must use, which is why PE - and KKR in particular - loves to buy health care companies.
Heard of the "surprise billing epidemic"? That's where you go to a hospital that's covered by your insurer, only to discover - after the fact - that the emergency room is operated by a separate, PE-backed company that charges you thousands for junk fees. KKR and Blackstone invented this scam, then funneled millions into fighting the No Surprises Act, which more-or-less killed it:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/21/all-in-it-together/#doctor-patient-unity
KKR took one of the nation's largest healthcare providers, Envision, hostage to surprise billing, making it dependent on these fraudulent payments. When Congress finally acted to end this scam, KKR was able to take to the nation's editorial pages and damn Congress for recklessly endangering all the patients who relied on it:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/14/unhealthy-finances/#steins-law
Like any smart vampire, KKR doesn't drain its victim in one go. They find all kinds of ways to stretch out the blood supply. During the pandemic, KKR was front of the line to get massive bailouts for its health-care holdings, even as it fired health-care workers, increasing the workload and decreasing the pay of the survivors of its indiscriminate cuts:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/11/socialized-losses/#socialized-losses
It's not just emergency rooms. KKR bought and looted homes for people with disabilities, slashed wages, cut staff, and then feigned surprise at the deaths, abuse and misery that followed:
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/kendalltaggart/kkr-brightspring-disability-private-equity-abuse
Workers' wages went down to $8/hour, and they were given 36 hour shifts, and then KKR threatened to have any worker who walked off the job criminally charged with patient abandonment:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/02/plunderers/#farben
For KKR, people with disabilities and patients make great victims - disempowered and atomized, unable to fight back. No surprise, then, that so many of KKR's scams target poor people - another group that struggles to get justice when wronged. KKR took over Dollar General in 2007 and embarked on a nationwide expansion campaign, using abusive preferential distributor contracts and targeting community-owned grocers to trap poor people into buying the most heavily processed, least nutritious, most profitable food available:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes
94.5% of the Paycheck Protection Program - designed to help small businesses keep their workers payrolled during lockdown - went to giant businesses, fraudulently siphoned off by companies like Longview Power, 40% owned by KKR:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/20/great-danes/#ppp
KKR also helped engineer a loophole in the Trump tax cuts, convincing Justin Muzinich to carve out taxes for C-Corporations, which let KKR save billions in taxes:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/06/02/broken-windows/#Justin-Muzinich
KKR sinks its fangs in every part of the economy, thanks to the vast fortunes it amassed from its investors, ripped off from its customers, and fraudulently obtained from the public purse. After the pandemic, KKR scooped up hundreds of companies at firesale prices:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/30/medtronic-stole-your-ventilator/#blackstone-kkr
Ironically, the investors in KKR funds are also its victims - especially giant public pension funds, whom KKR has systematically defrauded for years:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/22/stimpank/#kentucky
And now KKR has come for Simon & Schuster. The buyout was trumpeted to the press as a done deal, but it's far from a fait accompli. Before the deal can close, the FTC will have to bless it. That blessing is far from a foregone conclusion. KKR also owns Overdrive, the monopoly supplier of e-lending software to libraries.
Overdrive has a host of predatory practices, loathed by both libraries and publishers (indeed, much of the publishing sector's outrage at library e-lending is really displaced anger at Overdrive). There's a plausible case that the merger of one of the Big Five publishers with the e-lending monopoly will present competition issues every bit as deal-breaking as the PRH/S&S merger posed.
(Image: Sefa Tekin/Pexels, modified)
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I’m kickstarting the audiobook for “The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation,” a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and bring back the old, good internet. It’s a DRM-free book, which means Audible won’t carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:
http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org
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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/2023/08/08/vampire-capitalism/#kkr
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