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#Desperate Malcolm
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𝔗𝔥𝔢 𝔊𝔥𝔬𝔰𝔱, 𝔉𝔞𝔱𝔢 𝔪𝔞𝔤𝔞𝔷𝔦𝔫𝔢, 𝔉𝔞𝔩𝔩 յգկՑ. 𝔠𝔬𝔳𝔢𝔯 𝔞𝔯𝔱 𝔟𝔶 𝔐𝔞𝔩𝔠𝔬𝔩𝔪 𝔖𝔪𝔦𝔱𝔥 (𝔄𝔪𝔢𝔯𝔦𝔠𝔞𝔫, յգյշ-յգճճ).
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papasmistakeria · 2 years
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TNG episode where the senior crew reenacts Archer's era in a Hamilton-style historical rap musical adaptation
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afieldinengland · 3 months
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you will notice, of course, that a running theme in my myriad fascinations is the telling of a lie. machiavelli, spin doctors, confidence tricksters, manipulators of varying severity, communally and privately practiced dishonesties. not sure why it fascinates me so much, but it is everywhere. and, naturally, this is inseparable from other running interests, e.g. the bloody pursuit of power and men who eat each other’s faces off
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brightmalcolm · 5 months
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Watched the Last Weekend and I have gone back and forth on this since the episode aired. Like part of me feels like Martin wanted to force Malcolm's hand/wanted to get him to stab him to prove "we're the same."
I think Martin is capable of killing his son but the scenario was also kind of a win-win for him; either he stabs Malcolm and gets to escape and go free, or Malcolm defends himself and he gets to use his possible last words to manipulate his son one more time. Even in death (?) Martin will always be in control, he will always be this presence in his sons life.
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catboyrichardkarinsky · 6 months
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literally though if any of you have a cute little link to Falsettos 2007 benefit concert with Malcolm Gets as Marvin and find yourself wondering what to do with it
I'm right here. you could message me.
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vigilskeep · 1 year
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What do you think Malcolm's spec was? Obviously, it's a little blood magic, but what else?
force magic would be my guess, for sure! it’s described as being popular in kirkwall so i imagine it as a gallows specialty. and bethy picks it up whether she goes to the gallows or not; i always pictured that being her inheritance from him
otherwise he canonically had a gift for fire (according to world of thedas) so “showy elementalist” is generally the style i imagine. by all accounts well-trained in the circle so i would expect a good grounding in arcane as well. anything else is up for debate; i personally don’t characterise him as having much in the way of creation or entropy but that’s more my preference for mage hawke or bethany to pick those up from anders and merrill
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bizarre ways people try to work around seeing black (and other non-white) people in their current fav show with a white protagonist:
taking things that have happened to sydney in the show and attributing it to a non-black oc character on a roleplay blog
supposed outpouring of adoration for marcus with no meta, fic, or gifs about him
taking things sydney has said that have overarching narrative significance and not attributing it to her but to a vague "they"
being upset that carmen does something kind, gracious, and respectful to marcus
no acknowledgement/curiosity/mention of how close tina is to the berzatto family
distancing sydney as far as possible from carmen
the complete lack of knowledge of black hair that's apparent, which is weird to me since black women have been so loud about it for the past like 10+ years
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curiosi-tea-writes · 2 years
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I'm almost done with the semester and am looking forward to writing some fanfiction! Send me some fluffy promps / a ship to do some one-shots once I finally have the time! 👉🏻👈🏻 I just really miss writing and am excited to finally get to again.
I will do just about any ship (including xreader fics) with the exception of illegal age gap ships but but here are the fandoms I'm confident I could write for:
Marvel
Star Wars
Prodigal Son
Jurassic Park
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captainsolocide · 2 years
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anyone have any tuckerreed fic recs your boi is on the hunt
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commander-chaoss · 2 years
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i say that Malcolm's upbringing is a huge part of how he grew up to be largely amoral and thats true but I cannot stress enough that his parents were awesome actually and I'd love to meet them
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Sympathy for the spammer
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Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.
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In any scam, any con, any hustle, the big winners are the people who supply the scammers – not the scammers themselves. The kids selling dope on the corner are making less than minimum wage, while the respectable crime-bosses who own the labs clean up. Desperate "retail investors" who buy shitcoins from Superbowl ads get skinned, while the MBA bros who issue the coins make millions (in real dollars, not crypto).
It's ever been thus. The California gold rush was a con, and nearly everyone who went west went broke. Famously, the only reliable way to cash out on the gold rush was to sell "picks and shovels" to the credulous, doomed and desperate. That's how Leland Stanford made his fortune, which he funneled into eugenics programs (and founding a university):
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo-alto/9780316592031/
That means that the people who try to con you are almost always getting conned themselves. Think of Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) scams. My forthcoming novel The Bezzle opens with a baroque and improbable fast-food Ponzi in the town of Avalon on the island of Catalina, founded by the chicle monopolist William Wrigley Jr:
http://thebezzle.org
Wrigley found fast food declasse and banned it from the island, a rule that persists to this day. In The Bezzle, the forensic detective Martin Hench uncovers The Fry Guys, an MLM that flash-freezes contraband burgers and fries smuggled on-island from the mainland and sells them to islanders though an "affiliate marketing" scheme that is really about recruiting other affiliate markets to sell under you. As with every MLM, the value of the burgers and fries sold is dwarfed by the gigantic edifice of finance fraud built around it, with "points" being bought and sold for real cash, which is snaffled up and sucked out of the island by a greedy mainlander who is behind the scheme.
A "bezzle" is John Kenneth Galbraith's term for "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." In every scam, there's a period where everyone feels richer – but only the scammers are actually cleaning up. The wealth of the marks is illusory, but the longer the scammer can preserve the illusion, the more real money the marks will pump into the system.
MLMs are particularly ugly, because they target people who are shut out of economic opportunity – women, people of color, working people. These people necessarily rely on social ties for survival, looking after each others' kids, loaning each other money they can't afford, sharing what little they have when others have nothing.
It's this social cohesion that MLMs weaponize. Crypto "entrepreneurs" are encouraged to suck in their friends and family by telling them that they're "building Black wealth." Working women are exhorted to suck in their bffs by appealing to their sisterhood and the chance for "women to lift each other up."
The "sales people" trying to get you to buy crypto or leggings or supplements are engaged in predatory conduct that will make you financially and socially worse off, wrecking their communities' finances and shattering the mutual aid survival networks they rely on. But they're not getting rich on this – they're also being scammed:
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4686468
This really hit home for me in the mid-2000s, when I was still editing Boing Boing. We had a submission form where our readers could submit links for us to look at for inclusion on the blog, and it was overwhelmed by spam. We'd add all kinds of antispam to it, and still, we'd get floods of hundreds or even thousands of spam submissions to it.
One night, I was lying in my bed in London and watching these spams roll in. They were all for small businesses in the rustbelt, handyman services, lawn-care, odd jobs, that kind of thing. They were 10 million miles from the kind of thing we'd ever post about on Boing Boing. They were coming in so thickly that I literally couldn't finish downloading my email – the POP session was dropping before I could get all the mail in the spool. I had to ssh into my mail server and delete them by hand. It was maddening.
Frustrated and furious, I started calling the phone numbers associated with these small businesses, demanding an explanation. I assumed that they'd hired some kind of sleazy marketing service and I wanted to know who it was so I could give them a piece of my mind.
But what I discovered when I got through was much weirder. These people had all been laid off from factories that were shuttering due to globalization. As part of their termination packages, their bosses had offered them "retraining" via "courses" in founding their own businesses.
The "courses" were the precursors to the current era's rise-and-grind hustle-culture scams (again, the only people getting rich from that stuff are the people selling the courses – the "students" finish the course poorer). They promised these laid-off workers, who'd given their lives to their former employers before being discarded, that they just needed to pull themselves up by their own boostraps:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/10/declaration-of-interdependence/#solidarity-forever
After all, we had the internet now! There were so many new opportunities to be your own boss! The course came with a dreadful build-your-own-website service, complete with an overpriced domain sales portal, and a single form for submitting your new business to "thousands of search engines."
This was nearly 20 years ago, but even then, there was really only one search engine that mattered: Google. The "thousands of search engines" the scammers promised to submit these desperate peoples' websites to were just submission forms for directories, indexes, blogs, and mailing lists. The number of directories, indexes, blogs and mailing lists that would publish their submissions was either "zero" or "nearly zero." There was certainly no possibility that anyone at Boing Boing would ever press the wrong key and accidentally write a 500-word blog post about a leaf-raking service in a collapsing deindustrialized exurb in Kentucky or Ohio.
The people who were drowning me in spam weren't the scammers – they were the scammees.
But that's only half the story. Years later, I discovered how our submission form was getting included in this get-rich-quick's mass-submission system. It was a MLM! Coders in the former Soviet Union were getting work via darknet websites that promised them relative pittances for every submission form they reverse-engineered and submitted. The smart coders didn't crack the forms directly – they recruited other, less business-savvy coders to do that for them, and then often as not, ripped them off.
The scam economy runs on this kind of indirection, where scammees are turned into scammers, who flood useful and productive and nice spaces with useless dross that doesn't even make them any money. Take the submission queue at Clarkesworld, the great online science fiction magazine, which famously had to close after it was flooded with thousands of junk submission "written" by LLMs:
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence
There was a zero percent chance that Neil Clarke would accidentally accept one of these submissions. They were uniformly terrible. The people submitting these "stories" weren't frustrated sf writers who'd discovered a "life hack" that let them turn out more brilliant prose at scale.
They were scammers who'd been scammed into thinking that AIs were the key to a life of passive income, a 4-Hour Work-Week powered by an AI-based self-licking ice-cream cone:
https://pod.link/1651876897/episode/995c8a778ede17d2d7cff393e5203157
This is absolutely classic passive-income brainworms thinking. "I have a bot that can turn out plausible sentences. I will locate places where sentences can be exchanged for money, aim my bot at it, sit back, and count my winnings." It's MBA logic on meth: find a thing people pay for, then, without bothering to understand why they pay for that thing, find a way to generate something like it at scale and bombard them with it.
Con artists start by conning themselves, with the idea that "you can't con an honest man." But the factor that predicts whether someone is connable isn't their honesty – it's their desperation. The kid selling drugs on the corner, the mom desperately DMing her high-school friends to sell them leggings, the cousin who insists that you get in on their shitcoin – they're all doing it because the system is rigged against them, and getting worse every day.
These people reason – correctly – that all the people getting really rich are scamming. If Amazon can make $38b/year selling "ads" that push worse products that cost more to the top of their search results, why should the mere fact that an "opportunity" is obviously predatory and fraudulent disqualify it?
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/29/aethelred-the-unready/#not-one-penny-for-tribute
The quest for passive income is really the quest for a "greater fool," the economist's term for the person who relieves you of the useless crap you just overpaid for. It rots the mind, atomizes communities, shatters solidarity and breeds cynicism:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security
The rise and rise of botshit cannot be separated from this phenomenon. The botshit in our search-results, our social media feeds, and our in-boxes isn't making money for the enshittifiers who send it – rather, they are being hustled by someone who's selling them the "picks and shovels" for the AI gold rush:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy
That's the true cost of all the automation-driven unemployment criti-hype: while we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/11/robots-stole-my-jerb/#computer-says-no
The manic "entrepreneurs" who've been stampeded into panic by the (correct) perception that the economy is a game of musical chairs where the number of chairs is decreasing at breakneck speed are easy marks for the Leland Stanfords of AI, who are creating generational wealth for themselves by promising that their bots will automate away all the tedious work that goes into creating value. Expect a lot more Amazon Marketplace products called "I'm sorry, I cannot fulfil this request as it goes against OpenAI use policy":
https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036156/openai-policy-amazon-ai-listings
No one's going to buy these products, but the AI picks-and-shovels people will still reap a fortune from the attempt. And because history repeats itself, these newly minted billionaires are continuing Leland Stanford's love affair with eugenics:
https://www.truthdig.com/dig-series/eugenics/
The fact that AI spam doesn't pay is important to the fortunes of AI companies. Most high-value AI applications are very risk-intolerant (self-driving cars, radiology analysis, etc). An AI tool might help a human perform these tasks more accurately – by warning them of things that they've missed – but that's not how AI will turn a profit. There's no market for AI that makes your workers cost more but makes them better at their jobs:
https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/
Plenty of people think that spam might be the elusive high-value, low-risk AI application. But that's just not true. The point of AI spam is to get clicks from people who are looking for better content. It's SEO. No one reads 2000 words of algorithm-pleasing LLM garbage over an omelette recipe and then subscribes to that site's feed.
And the omelette recipe generates pennies for the spammer that posted it. They are doing massive volume in order to make those pennies into dollars. You don't make money by posting one spam. If every spammer had to pay the actual recovery costs (energy, chillers, capital amortization, wages) for their query, every AI spam would lose (lots of) money.
Hustle culture and passive income are about turning other peoples' dollars into your dimes. It is a negative-sum activity, a net drain on society. Behind every seemingly successful "passive income" is a con artist who's getting rich by promising – but not delivering – that elusive passive income, and then blaming the victims for not hustling hard enough:
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2023/12/blueprint-trouble
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I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.
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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/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week
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Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
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papasmistakeria · 10 months
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They’d really add Boimler and Mariner (two characters from WAY in the future) in SNW and still refuse to have an Enterprise episode
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afieldinengland · 3 months
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malcolmmm. thinking of his lovely home with no one to fill it and the lovely meals he cooks and eats alone
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I want to hug Doogood's tail
Did Ray send this? >:3
Honestly, same. I want to hug Doogood in general.
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vigilskeep · 8 months
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i’m not enjoying force magic as much as i thought i would :( admittedly i’ve only taken one spell but i’m not finding it useful in comparison to my regular stuff. it’s just that amara has so many big damage AoEs that all this relatively harmless stuff is basically a waste of mana. i might respec to spirit healer?
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