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#This is why we can't have nice things.
loaflovesdoodling · 3 months
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I have come to inform you all that anonymous asks will be turned off for a while until an ongoing situation is resolved. I hope you all understand and have a great day.
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fuckmatpat · 2 years
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godamnit i decided to do the "in space with markiplier" thing and this is a thing in part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiOu6cv6Cy4
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GOD. PAIN. SPACE THEORY??????? 😐
we can never escape him (/j) this sucks
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This makes me so sad and also I'm trying to remember if any of the Discworld books dealt with late stage capitalism
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katthekonqueror · 1 year
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They came to install a second soda machine today.
Somehow the other one caught fire during this process?
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omgpeachsnapple · 2 months
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Knock that shit off, you fucking creepy weirdos.
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feykrorovaan · 1 year
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*sips tea with Hermaeus Mora and watches the salties and *new* complaints start pouring in.*
Delicious. ☕
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cleolinda · 10 months
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The #RedditBlackout hashtag started trending on Twitter after the blackout began, with more than 4,238 tweets associated with the term as of Monday. Reddit was trending with more than 112,000 searches on the social media platform. Twitter users as early as 9 a.m. noticed that Reddit was experiencing technical issues. [...] Although the website resumed functioning almost two hours after the early reports of an outage, a coalition of Reddit moderators and users continue to engage in a standoff with the company Monday and Tuesday. More than 7,808 unique subreddits planned to participate in the blackout starting Monday, with the largest being r/funny, a community with more than 40 million users, according to an index by r/ModCoor. Around 7,260 subreddits are private as of Monday afternoon, according to a real-time stream of the protest on Twitch.
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bluberryfields · 7 months
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This is what happens when you're raised by TV and trained in literary analysis
Beyond the crushing heartbreak of that finale, one thing in particular has stuck with me when I look at it in the context of S2 as a whole.
He lays out their relationship, "We're a team, a group. A group of the two of us. And we've spent our existence pretending that we aren't."
He then turns his head away and says, "I mean, the last few years, not really."
He pauses here, facing the interior of the bookshop. Really looks it up and down.
Turns back, "And I would like to spend" before choking on his words and looks toward the window. He can't finish saying something like "And I would like to spend eternity with you" because that's too much, too fast, for both of them.
But it's that "last few years" bit that has firmly lodged itself in my very broken brain.
According to Gaiman, it's been "a few years" since the end of Season 1. Armageddon has been averted. Heaven and Hell have reluctantly retreated. Crowley and Aziraphale have been effectively cut loose from their "sides," leaving them to form their own side.
So at the start of Season 2, we get a glimpse of the “fragile existence” they have carved out for themselves. To me, the biggest difference that we see is how they exist together in front of others. Going to the coffee shop, the pub, and the other shops along the street that Aziraphale has lived on for over 200 years. And don’t forget how they act in front of Nina, Maggie, and sweet, dim Muriel.
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At the coffee shop, Aziraphale stammers a bit when Nina asks who Crowley is, but he still seems to have affection in his voice when he says, "We go back a long time."
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Compared to Shakespearian "He's not my friend! We've never met before. We don't know each other!" panic, this is an incredible difference.
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Of course, each time, Crowley is cool and cheeky and does nothing to indicate that they aren't a pair. Though, of course, he does deny it when Nina asks about Aziraphale being his side piece. “He’s not my bit on the side! He’s far too pure of heart to be anyone’s bit on the side.” And refers to him as an “Angel [swallows]I know.”
When they go the pub, Crowley's joy at doing something together in public that they do not normally do is super cute, including his cheeky order for Aziraphale's sherry. Then, when bringing the drinks over to the socially trapped Aziraphale, he greets Mr. Brown with a truly adorable, "Hello" and a signature DT smile. Then upon hearing how “excited” Mr. Fell is to host the meeting, he looks down and says, “Oh? You astonish me.” while Aziraphale sips his sherry and squirms.
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We also watch as Crowley follows Aziraphale as he goes to each shop and talks to the owners about the meeting/secret ball. In theory, Crowley has no reason to tag along, and he certainly doesn’t help sway anyone who doesn’t want to/can’t go. He goofs around at the magic shop. He splays out on the bench, chin on hand, looking for all the world a husband waiting for his wife to pick out a dress at the department store. They are so married it’s ridiculous.
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Finally, their behavior in front of Muriel while inside their sanctuary. Crowley sits on the arm of Aziraphale’s chair, somehow looking supremely comfortable on the old-fashioned furniture. He folds up those gloriously long limbs and presses himself as close as possible.
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He smiles and plays along with Aziraphale’s coaching of Muriel in her disguise. Calls him Angel and asks to speak in private. And at the end, during the awful wait while Aziraphale talks with The Metatron, Crowley cleans up the shop and tells Muriel that he and Aziraphale will need some “us” time after all this. No beating around the bush. 
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Without oversight, they can be openly together and happy. But Heaven just can’t let that happen. 
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clementine221b · 1 month
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gregory house.
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cinamun · 2 months
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Big decisions | Next
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Take my hand (we'll make it, I swear)
It's always different in the stories, Eddie thinks. When the heroes in the stories realize they're in love, it always comes as this big revelation. The sunlight will glisten off the fair lady's hair, or her eyes will sparkle like the stars in the sky and the hero will suddenly realize that he is in love. 
It wasn't like that for him. No dramatic moment, no sudden epiphany. It just sort of … snuck up on him over the past year, and when he noticed, it was too late. He had fallen, completely and irredeemably.
Then again, he is no hero. And Steve is most certainly not a fair lady.
(Read the rest on Hype's blog!) 🌸
Drawn for the @steddieholidaydrabbles, day 3 prompt Mutual Pining.
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hainethehero · 27 days
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Let me be CLEAR.
HATING ON FANFICTION WILL NEVER BE VALID.
It is a labour of love. IT IS NOT FOR YOU. MOST OF THE TIMES, THE AUTHOR WRITES IT FOR THEMSELVES OR FOR THEIR MUTUALS. IT'S NOT A MONETIZED SERVICE THEREFORE YOU HAVE NO GROUNDS TO HATE ON THE STORY OR THE AUTHOR.
Can you critique it? Sure. Can you offer new perspectives about the storyline or characters? Sure.
BUT YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO GET ON SOCMED LIKE IG AND TIKTOK AND CRITICISE AN AUTHOR FOR A FANFIC YOU DIDNT LIKE. THATS PEAK ENTITLEMENT AND YOU DONT DESERVE ANY OF IT. FANFIC AUTHORS OWE YOU NOTHING.
As it concerns the recent Ao3 issue with people binding and SELLING (monetizing work that's not theirs/copyright) fanfics, IT IS ILLEGAL.
STOP MONETIZING FANFIC! ITS NOT YOURS! THE CHARACTERS & UNIVERSE DO NOT BELONG TO YOU. THEY BELONG TO WHATEVER FRANCHISE/COMPANY WHICH HAS THE RIGHTS TO THEM!
Y'ALL WILL NOT RUIN AO3 FOR ME.
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How a billionaire’s mediocre pump-and-dump “book” became a “bestseller”
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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/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho
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I was on a book tour the day my editor called me and told me, "From now on, your middle name is 'Cory.'"
"That's weird. Why?"
"Because from now on, your first name is 'New York Times Bestselling Author.'"
That was how I found out I'd hit the NYT list for the first time. It was a huge moment – just as it has been each subsequent time it's happened. First, because of how it warmed my little ego, but second, and more importantly, because of how it affected my book and all the books afterwards.
Once your book is a Times bestseller, every bookseller in America orders enough copies to fill a front-facing display on a new release shelf or a stack on a bestseller table. They order more copies of your backlist. Foreign rights buyers at Frankfurt crowd around your international agents to bid on your book. Movie studios come calling. It's a huge deal.
My books became Times bestsellers the old-fashioned way: people bought and read them and told their friends, who bought and read them. Booksellers who enjoyed them wrote "shelf-talkers" – short reviews – and displayed them alongside the book.
That "From now on your first name is 'New York Times Bestselling Author' gag is a tradition. When @wilwheaton's memoir Still Just A Geek hit the Times list, I texted the joke to him and he texted back to say @jscalzi had already sent him the same joke (and of course, Scalzi and I have the same editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden):
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/still-just-a-geek-wil-wheaton
But not everyone earns that first name the same way. Some people cheat.
Famously, the Church of Scientology was caught buying truckloads of L Ron Hubbard books (published by Scientology's own publishing arm) from booksellers, returning them to their warehouse, then shipping them back to the booksellers when they re-ordered the sold out titles. The tip-off came when booksellers opened cases of books and found that they already bore the store's own price-stickers:
https://www.latimes.com/local/la-scientology062890-story.html
The reason Scientology was willing to go to such great lengths wasn't merely that readers used "NYT Bestseller* to choose which books to buy. Far more important was the signal that this sent to the entire book trade, from reviewers to librarians to booksellers, who made important decisions about how many copies of the books to stock, whether to display them spine- or face out, and whether to return unsold stock or leave it on the shelf.
Publishers go to great lengths to send these messages to the trade: sending out fancy advance review copies in elaborate packaging, taking out ads in the trade magazines, featuring titles in their catalogs and sending their sales-force out to impress the publisher's enthusiasm on their accounts.
Even the advance can be a way to signal the trade: when a publisher announces that it just acquired a book for an eyebrow-raising sum, it's not trumpeting the size of its capital reserves – it's telling the trade that this book is a Big Deal that they should pay attention to.
(Of all the signals, this one may be the weakest, even if it's the most expensive for publishers to send. Take the $1.25m advance that Rupert Murdoch's Harpercollins paid to Sarah Palin for her unreadable memoir, Going Rogue. As with so many of the outsized sums Murdoch's press and papers pay to right wing politicians, the figure didn't represent a bet on the commercial prospects of the book – which tanked – but rather, a legal way to launder massive cash transfers from the far-right billionaire to a generation of politicians who now owe him some rather expensive favors.)
All of which brings me to the New York Times bestselling book Read Write Own by the billionaire VC New York Times Bestselling Author Chris Dixon. Dixon is a partner at A16Z, the venture capitalists who pumped billions into failed, scammy, cryptocurrency companies that tricked normies into converting their perfectly cromulent "fiat" money into shitcoins, allowing the investors to turn a massive profit and exit before the companies collapsed or imploded.
Read Write Own (subtitle: "Building the Next Era of the Internet") is a monumentally unconvincing hymn to the blockchain. As Molly White writes in her scathing review, the book is full of undisclosed conflicts of interest, with Dixon touting companies he has a direct personal stake in:
https://www.citationneeded.news/review-read-write-own-by-chris-dixon/
But this book's defects go beyond this kind of sleazy pump-and-dump behavior. It's also just bad. The arguments it makes for the blockchain as a way of escaping the problems of an enshittified, monopolized internet are bad arguments. White dissects each of these arguments very skillfully, and I urge you to read her review for a full list, but I'll reproduce one here to give you a taste:
After three chapters in which Dixon provides a (rather revisionistd) history of the web to date, explains the mechanics of blockchains, and goes over the types of things one might theoretically be able to do with a blockchain, we are left with "Part Four: Here and Now", then the final "Part Five: What's Next". The name of Part Four suggests that he will perhaps lay out a list of blockchain projects that are currently successfully solving real problems.
This may be why Part Four is precisely four and a half pages long. And rather than name any successful projects, Dixon instead spends his few pages excoriating the "casino" projects that he says have given crypto a bad rap,e prompting regulatory scrutiny that is making "ethical entrepreneurs … afraid to build products" in the United States.f
As White says, this is just not a good book. It doesn't contain anything to excite people who are already blockchain-poisoned crypto cultists – and it also lacks anything that will convince normies who never let Matt Damon or Spike Lee convince them to trade dollars for magic beans. It's one of those books that manages to be both paper and a paperweight.
And yet…it's a New York Times Bestseller. How did this come to pass? Here's a hint: remember how the Scientologists got L Ron Hubbard 20 consecutive #1 Bestsellers?
As Jordan Pearson writes for Motherboard, Read Write Own earned its place on the Times list because of a series of massive bulk orders from firms linked to A16Z and Dixon, which ordered between dozens and thousands of copies and gave them away to employees or just randos on Twitter:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7emkx/chris-dixon-a16z-read-write-own-nyt-bestseller
The Times recognizes this in a backhanded way, by marking Read Write Own on the list with a "dagger" (†) that indicates the shenanigans (the same dagger appeared alongside the listing for Donald Trump Jr's Triggered after the RNC spent a metric scientologyload of money – $100k – buying up cases of it):
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/books/donald-trump-jr-triggered-sales.html
There's a case for the Times not automatically ignoring bulk orders. Since 2020, I've run Kickstarters where I've pre-sold my books on behalf of my publisher, working with bookstores like Book Soup and wholesalers like Porchlight Books to backers when they go on sale. I signed and personalized 500+ books at Vroman's yesterday for backers who pre-ordered my next novel, The Bezzle:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53531243480/
But there's a world of difference between pre-orders that hundreds or thousands of readers place that are aggregated into a single bulk order, and books that are bought by CEOs to give away to people who may not have any interest in them. For the book trade – librarians, reviewers, booksellers – the former indicates broad interest that justifies their attention. The latter just tells you that a handful of deep-pocketed manipulators want you to think there's broad interest.
I'm certain that Dixon – like me – feels a bit of pride at having "earned" a new first name. But Dixon – like me – gets something far more tangible than a bit of egoboo out of making the Times list. For me, a place on the Times list is a way to get booksellers and librarians excited about sharing my book with readers.
For Dixon, the stakes are much higher. Remember that cryptocurrency is a faith-based initiative whose mechanism is: "convince normies that shitcoins will be worth more tomorrow than they are today, and then trade them the shitcoins that cost you nothing to create for dollars that they worked hard to earn."
In other words, crypto is a bezzle, defined by John Kenneth Galbraith as "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."
So long as shitcoins haven't fallen to zero, the bag-holders who've traded their "fiat" for funny money can live in the bezzle, convinced that their "investments" will recover and turn a profit. More importantly, keeping the bezzle alive preserves the possibility of luring in more normies who can infuse the system with fresh dollars to use as convincers that keep the bag-holders to keep holding that bag, rather than bailing and precipitating the zeroing out of the whole scam.
The relatively small sums that Dixon and his affiliated plutocrats spent to flood your podcasts with ads for this pointless 300-page Ponzi ad are a bargain, as are the sums they spent buying up cases of the book to give away or just stash in a storeroom. If only a few hundred retirees are convinced to convert their savings to crypto, the resulting flush of cash will make the line go up, allowing whales like Dixon and A16Z to cash out, or make more leveraged bets, or both. Crypto is a system with very few good trades, but spending chump change to earn a spot on the Times list (dagger or no) is a no-brainer.
After all, the kinds of people who buy crypto are, famously, the kinds of people who think books are stupid ("I would never read a book" -S Bankman-Fried):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/29/sam-bankman-fried-reading-effective-altruism/
There's precious little likelihood that anyone will be convinced to go long on crypto thanks to the words in this book. But the Times list has enough prestige to lure more suckers into the casino: "I'm not going to read this thing, but if it's on the list, that means other people must have read it and think it's convincing."
We are living through a golden age of scams, and crypto, which has elevated caveat emptor to a moral virtue ("not your wallet, not your coins"), is a scammer's paradise. Stein's Law tells us that "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop," but the purpose of a bezzle isn't to keep the scam going forever – just until the scammer can cash out and blow town. The longer the bezzle goes on for, the richer the scammer gets.
Not for nothing, my next novel – which comes out on Feb 20 – is called The Bezzle. It stars Marty Hench, my hard-driving, two-fisted, high-tech forensic accountant, who finds himself unwinding a whole menagerie of scams, from a hamburger-based Ponzi scheme to rampant music royalty theft to a vast prison-tech scam that uses prisoners as the ultimate captive audience:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle
Patrick Nielsen Hayden – the same editor who gave me my new first name – once told me that "publishing is the act of connecting a text with an audience." Everything a publisher does – editing, printing, warehousing, distributing – can be separated from publishing. The thing a publisher does that makes them a publisher – not a printer or a warehouser or an editing shop – is connecting books and audiences.
Seen in this light, publishing is a subset of the hard problem of advertising, religion, politics and every other endeavor that consists in part of convincing people to try out a new idea:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/04/self-publishing/
This may be the golden age of scams, but it's the dark age of publishing. Consolidation in distribution has gutted the power of the sales force to convince booksellers to stock books that the publisher believes in. Consolidation in publishing – especially Amazon, which is both a publisher and the largest retailer in the country – has stacked the deck against books looking for readers and vice-versa (Goodreads, a service founded for that purpose, is now just another tentacle on the Amazon shoggoth). The rapid enshittification of social media has clobbered the one semi-reliable channel publicists and authors had to reach readers directly.
I wrote nine books during lockdown (I write as displacement activity for anxiety) which has given me a chance to see publishing in the way that few authors can: through a sequence of rapid engagements with the system as a whole, as I publish between one and three books per year for multiple, consecutive years. From that vantagepoint, I can tell you that it's grim and getting grimmer. The slots that books that connected with readers once occupied are now increasingly occupied by the equivalent of the botshit that fills the first eight screens of your Google search results: book-shaped objects that have gamed their way to the top of the list.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy
I don't know what to do about this, but I have one piece of advice: if you read a book you love, tell other people about it. Tell them face-to-face. In your groupchat. On social media. Even on Goodreads. Every book is a lottery ticket, but the bezzlers are buying their tickets by the case: every time you tell someone about a book you loved (and even better, why you loved it), you buy a writer another ticket.
Meanwhile, I've got to go get ready for my book tour. I'm coming to LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Calgary, Phoenix, Portland, Providence, Boston, New York City, Toronto, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Tucson, Chicago, Buffalo, as well as Torino and Tartu (details soon!).
If you want to get a taste of The Bezzle, here's an excerpt:
https://www.torforgeblog.com/2023/11/20/excerpt-reveal-the-bezzle-by-cory-doctorow/
And here's the audiobook, read by New York Times Bestselling Author Wil Wheaton:
https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_459/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_459_-_The_Bezzle_Read_By_Wil_Wheaton.mp3
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nattikay · 1 year
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when u remember that Lo’ak is only a year younger than Neteyam and Kiri...like wow, they really speedran those first three didn’t they
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lomltaylor · 1 month
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lexy styles
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seeing sonic twitter rag on metal sonic's design from prime and calling it character assassination while sonic tumblr is absolutely loving it to pieces and are excited to see him in action really shows how each platform caters certain mindsets
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