#internet site ranks | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mostlysignssomeportents · 12 days

Text

Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (May 3) in CALGARY, then TOMORROW (May 4) in VANCOUVER, then onto Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Even Google admits – grudgingly – that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

It's nice that Google has finally stopped gaslighting the rest of us with claims that its search was still the same bedrock utility that so many of us relied upon as a key piece of internet infrastructure. This not only feels wildly wrong, it is empirically, provably false:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

Not only that, but we know why Google search sucks. Memos released as part of the DOJ's antitrust case against Google reveal that the company deliberately chose to worsen search quality to increase the number of queries you'd have to make (and the number of ads you'd have to see) to find a decent result:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Google's antitrust case turns on the idea that the company bought its way to dominance, spending the some of the billions it extracted from advertisers and publishers to buy the default position on every platform, so that no one ever tried another search engine, which meant that no one would invest in another search engine, either.

Google's tacit defense is that its monopoly billions only incidentally fund these kind of anticompetitive deals. Mostly, Google says, it uses its billions to build the greatest search engine, ad platform, mobile OS, etc that the public could dream of. Only a company as big as Google (says Google) can afford to fund the R&D and security to keep its platform useful for the rest of us.

That's the "monopolistic bargain" – let the monopolist become a dictator, and they will be a benevolent dictator. Shriven of "wasteful competition," the monopolist can split their profits with the public by funding public goods and the public interest.

Google has clearly reneged on that bargain. A company experiencing the dramatic security failures and declining quality should be pouring everything it has to righting the ship. Instead, Google repeatedly blew tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks while doing mass layoffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Those layoffs have now reached the company's "core" teams, even as its core services continue to decay:

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

(Google's antitrust trial was shrouded in secrecy, thanks to the judge's deference to the company's insistence on confidentiality. The case is moving along though, and warrants your continued attention:)

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-2-trillion-secret-trial-against

Google wormed its way into so many corners of our lives that its enshittification keeps erupting in odd places, like ordering takeout food:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Back in February, Housefresh – a rigorous review site for home air purifiers – published a viral, damning account of how Google had allowed itself to be overrun by spammers who purport to provide reviews of air purifiers, but who do little to no testing and often employ AI chatbots to write automated garbage:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

In the months since, Housefresh's Gisele Navarro has continued to fight for the survival of her high-quality air purifier review site, and has received many tips from insiders at the spam-farms and Google, all of which she recounts in a followup essay:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

One of the worst offenders in spam wars is Dotdash Meredith, a content-farm that "publishes" multiple websites that recycle parts of each others' content in order to climb to the top search slots for lucrative product review spots, which can be monetized via affiliate links.

A Dotdash Meredith insider told Navarro that the company uses a tactic called "keyword swarming" to push high-quality independent sites off the top of Google and replace them with its own garbage reviews. When Dotdash Meredith finds an independent site that occupies the top results for a lucrative Google result, they "swarm a smaller site’s foothold on one or two articles by essentially publishing 10 articles [on the topic] and beefing up [Dotdash Meredith sites’] authority."

Dotdash Meredith has keyword swarmed a large number of topics. from air purifiers to slow cookers to posture correctors for back-pain:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/keyword-swarming-dotdash.jpg

The company isn't shy about this. Its own shareholder communications boast about it. What's more, it has competition.

Take Forbes, an actual news-site, which has a whole shadow-empire of web-pages reviewing products for puppies, dogs, kittens and cats, all of which link to high affiliate-fee-generating pet insurance products. These reviews are not good, but they are treasured by Google's algorithm, which views them as a part of Forbes's legitimate news-publishing operation and lets them draft on Forbes's authority.

This side-hustle for Forbes comes at a cost for the rest of us, though. The reviewers who actually put in the hard work to figure out which pet products are worth your money (and which ones are bad, defective or dangerous) are crowded off the front page of Google and eventually disappear, leaving behind nothing but semi-automated SEO garbage from Forbes:

https://twitter.com/ichbinGisele/status/1642481590524583936

There's a name for this: "site reputation abuse." That's when a site perverts its current – or past – practice of publishing high-quality materials to trick Google into giving the site a high ranking. Think of how Deadspin's private equity grifter owners turned it into a site full of casino affiliate spam:

https://www.404media.co/who-owns-deadspin-now-lineup-publishing/

The same thing happened to the venerable Money magazine:

https://moneygroup.pr/

Money is one of the many sites whose air purifier reviews Google gives preference to, despite the fact that they do no testing. According to Google, Money is also a reliable source of information on reprogramming your garage-door opener, buying a paint-sprayer, etc:

https://money.com/best-paint-sprayer/

All of this is made ten million times worse by AI, which can spray out superficially plausible botshit in superhuman quantities, letting spammers produce thousands of variations on their shitty reviews, flooding the zone with bullshit in classic Steve Bannon style:

https://escapecollective.com/commerce-content-is-breaking-product-reviews/

As Gizmodo, Sports Illustrated and USA Today have learned the hard way, AI can't write factual news pieces. But it can pump out bullshit written for the express purpose of drafting on the good work human journalists have done and tricking Google – the search engine 90% of us rely on – into upranking bullshit at the expense of high-quality information.

A variety of AI service bureaux have popped up to provide AI botshit as a service to news brands. While Navarro doesn't say so, I'm willing to bet that for news bosses, outsourcing your botshit scams to a third party is considered an excellent way of avoiding your journalists' wrath. The biggest botshit-as-a-service company is ASR Group (which also uses the alias Advon Commerce).

Advon claims that its botshit is, in fact, written by humans. But Advon's employees' Linkedin profiles tell a different story, boasting of their mastery of AI tools in the industrial-scale production of botshit:

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg

Now, none of this is particularly sophisticated. It doesn't take much discernment to spot when a site is engaged in "site reputation abuse." Presumably, the 12,000 googlers the company fired last year could have been employed to check the top review keyword results manually every couple of days and permaban any site caught cheating this way.

Instead, Google is has announced a change in policy: starting May 5, the company will downrank any site caught engaged in site reputation abuse. However, the company takes a very narrow view of site reputation abuse, limiting punishments to sites that employ third parties to generate or uprank their botshit. Companies that produce their botshit in-house are seemingly not covered by this policy.

As Navarro writes, some sites – like Forbes – have prepared for May 5 by blocking their botshit sections from Google's crawler. This can't be their permanent strategy, though – either they'll have to kill the section or bring it in-house to comply with Google's rules. Bringing things in house isn't that hard: US News and World Report is advertising for an SEO editor who will publish 70-80 posts per month, doubtless each one a masterpiece of high-quality, carefully researched material of great value to Google's users:

https://twitter.com/dannyashton/status/1777408051357585425

As Navarro points out, Google is palpably reluctant to target the largest, best-funded spammers. Its March 2024 update kicked many garbage AI sites out of the index – but only small bottom-feeders, not large, once-respected publications that have been colonized by private equity spam-farmers.

All of this comes at a price, and it's only incidentally paid by legitimate sites like Housefresh. The real price is borne by all of us, who are funneled by the 90%-market-share search engine into "review" sites that push low quality, high-price products. Housefresh's top budget air purifier costs $79. That's hundreds of dollars cheaper than the "budget" pick at other sites, who largely perform no original research.

Google search has a problem. AI botshit is dominating Google's search results, and it's not just in product reviews. Searches for infrastructure code samples are dominated by botshit code generated by Pulumi AI, whose chatbot hallucinates nonexistence AWS features:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/01/pulumi_ai_pollution_of_search/

This is hugely consequential: when these "hallucinations" slip through into production code, they create huge vulnerabilities for widespread malicious exploitation:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/28/ai_bots_hallucinate_software_packages/

We've put all our eggs in Google's basket, and Google's dropped the basket – but it doesn't matter because they can spend $20b/year bribing Apple to make sure no one ever tries a rival search engine on Ios or Safari:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-payments-apple-reached-20-220947331.html

Google's response – laying off core developers, outsourcing to low-waged territories with weak labor protections and spending billions on stock buybacks – presents a picture of a company that is too big to care:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Google promised us a quid-pro-quo: let them be the single, authoritative portal ("organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful"), and they will earn that spot by being the best search there is:

https://www.ft.com/content/b9eb3180-2a6e-41eb-91fe-2ab5942d4150

But – like the spammers at the top of its search result pages – Google didn't earn its spot at the center of our digital lives.

It cheated.

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/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Image: freezelight (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spam_wall_-_Flickr_-_freezelight.jpg

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

842 notes · View notes

kingkatsuki · 1 year

Text

— pampered

Just had this silly little thing in my head about going to get manicures with Bakugou.

Warnings: none, fluff.

Pairing: Bakugou Katsuki x f!reader.

Bakugou takes care of you.

And as much the media try to portray Dynamight in a less than favourable light, or cast aspersions on him unfairly. No one could deny the amount of love that he held for you.

Fans on internet were your biggest champions, photographs going viral for the way Pro-Hero Dynamight softened the moment he laid eyes on you, or the way he spoke about you during interviews as though you hung the moon and the stars in the sky to protect him from the darkness. Interviewers getting barely two word answers from him until they began to ask about you. Paparazzi pictures of you both together, holding the door open for you or carrying your handbag.

Making the big, mean, gruff Dynamight more human— shushing the critics, and unknowingly boosting his hero ranking.

And you’re lucky enough to be the one that gets to experience it behind closed doors too.

There are certain little things— tokens of his affection, that Bakugou enjoys doing for you. Things like making sure there’s a warm bath waiting for you when you get home from a long, rough day at work. Bringing home your favourite pastries from the bakery you like whenever his patrol route passes it by, sometimes even going out of his way to make it there although he’d never admit it to you. Making sure your AirPods are fully charged before your commute because he knows you always forget to charge them. And paying for you to get your nails done in whatever you can find the time.

His only request for this, as always, is to pick what colour that you get every time you visit. His lips curl into a smirk whenever you send him a photograph of the finished product, or even better— when they’re wrapped around his cock.

But Bakugou’s never once offered to come to the nail salon with you, often dropping you at the door with a kiss and his shiny metal card in hand as he finds something else to do for the time that it takes. Dutifully picking you up when you’re done and taking you home.

So you’re surprised when you find your boyfriend sitting beside you in one of the plush leather chairs as a nail tech files away at one of his hands. This time he’s seated beside you as you show him the selection of colour options in front of you, instead of the usual pictures on your phone. Completely off guard when he pulls out a picture of one of his agency logos on his phone, showing it to the woman doing your nails for her to try and replicate the black base paired with the signature orange cross across his chest.

“I wasn’t even going to get my nails done for another two weeks, you literally just paid for these.” You smiled as she continued to remove the old gel from your nails, soaking them as it gave you time to spin in your chair to watch your boyfriend.

“Yeah, but I wanted you to come with me.” He shrugged, swapping hands when the tech requested.

“So— What do you think?”

“Shits boring,” He scoffed, before his gruff features softened, “But I like doing it with you.”

“Maybe you can come with me more often then,” You grinned, “We can make it like date night.”

“Nah, I think I’ll leave it to you, sweetheart.”

“Imagine if the paps could see you now.” You laughed at the thought.

Picturing headlines splashed across all the daily gossip tabloids and news sites like Dynamight — soft hands for a soft heart, Pro-Hero Dynamight protects the hands that protect the city, What really lies beneath the gloves?

“They’d have a fuckin’ field day.”

“We should get matching colours, really give them something to talk about.”

“Piss off—” He sneered, although there was no real malice to his tone.

Bakugou’s manicure and hand massage was done far before your nails were complete, as he waited patiently beside you, a hand gripping your upper thigh as he watched the tech draw the intricate design onto your nails.

“They’re so perfect,” You gleamed as you held them up for him to see, the orange accented with streaks of glitter that made them sparkle as he opened the door for you to leave the salon.

“Now everyone will know that you’re mine.” He

“Like they don’t already.” You laughed as Bakugou opened the passenger door for you, leaning over it to steal a kiss as you took a seat inside.

“Yeah, but now everyone will.”

You’d wondered why Bakugou had been so eager to come with you to get your nails done, especially with the choice in design. Until the man you were in love with bent down on one knee in front of you, pulling out a shiny ring concealed in a black box from his pocket as you said yes.

Smirking in the background of one of your pictures as you held your hand up into the air, the ring now sitting pride of place on your hand while your nails shone in the evening light. Pictures that were certain to go viral by morning—

“I just wanted everything to be perfect like you.”

#bakugou x reader #bakugou fluff #soft bakugou

913 notes · View notes

aewinty · 16 days

Text

When we meet again (pt. 1)

Paige Bueckers x reader

Ever since you were a child, basketball was like second nature to you. At a young age, you were intrigued with the sport; whether it was the actual activity or your parents’ praise when you scored the winning goal.

And so, your parents were thrilled when you asked to enroll in an academy dedicated to the sport. But really, it was inevitable for you to excel as your parents were prominent figures in the activity during their pastime. Since then, outlets named you as the young child prodigy from the powerhouse couple of basketball.

The thought of living up to their expectations stimulated you to do even better than before. As a young child, you embraced the constant attention you received, striving to be the apple of the internet’s eye. And it worked. Your family dominated several headlines with consistency.

Although others on your basketball team saw the sport as something they did in their spare time, you didn’t. The sport was your worth, your dedication; one could even say that it was your entire existence. And honestly, they wouldn’t be that far from your actual thoughts.

The year of 2018 would be the first time you ever saw Paige Bueckers. She was one of your teammates on the 2018 USA Basketball Youth Olympic Games, a year older than you. You could see the root she stemmed from and the dedication was apparent. The both of you grew closer as a result of the shared interest. It wasn’t only on the court that you guys hung out, rather it was every second of your day; whether it would be a simple walk to practice or sharing snacks after basketball drills.

You treasured the friendship you had with Paige. She pushed you to do better and in return, you guided her when she needed help. Throughout the Olympic Games, the both of you maintained the strong friendship you had.

You couldn’t say the same once you returned to high school, though. While Paige attended a school near home, you went to a high school that specializes in athleticism. As a result, the relationship that you once shared became strained. Both you and Paige attempted to re-strengthen the already frayed bond, but it just didn’t help.

And if it wasn’t bad enough, your parent’s once gentle approach turned to slightly malicious criticism.

“You can do it” turned into “Why can’t you just do it?”

“Good job” became “They almost stole your ball. That can’t happen next time.”

And “let’s go celebrate and get Ice Cream” evolved to “hurry up and practice for your next game.”

The constant pressure you received from your parents got to your head, building an extra wall between you and Paige’s bond. Your parents saw Paige as a distraction towards you, like a little tick in your head that you couldn’t just flick away. They demanded you to leave her, which you followed without question. Your parents knew best for you - of course.

Paige’s calls went unanswered and her texts were left delivered. Even when you responded with a scarce reply, it was always dry or one word giving a random excuse on why you couldn’t talk to her.

Throughout your highschool career, you consistently dominated the court, outranking your peers each game. Your parents constantly pushed you to do better and you followed suit, soaking in their criticism. And by the end of highschool, ESPN ranked you first of your class.

By the time college decisions rolled around, you already knew where you were going to go. Committing to UConn was an easy choice. Following the legacy of your parents was an easy choice. However, as your basketball career grew, so did the media’s attention of you. Constant headlines of your highschool performance took over sports sites and the thudding pressure began to build up.

Y/N L/N commits to the University of Connecticut

The young star, Y/N L/N recently shared that she chooses to attend UConn, following her parents, Y/M/N and Y/D/N. Not only has L/N’s parents’ career skyrocketed during their time at UConn, but it fueled their draft to the NBA and WNBA, creating their powerhouse family! As the 2021-2022 year quickly approaches, fans are left to speculate: Will Y/N be able to continue her parent’s reputation?

Y/N L/N responds to the debate on her college decision

During a conference, it was revealed that Y/N L/N committed to UConn for two reasons. The first is that her parents decided it was a good opportunity to continue their legacy. The second, is that L/N simply believes that the college will provide her with a more professional playing experience. When asked about the current UConn basketball team, Y/N L/N responds “I haven’t looked at the current team’s roster, but I believe that I will be able to adapt to their playing style quickly.”

Y/N L/N and Paige Bueckers reunite following Y/N L/N’s commit to UConn

For over a year, debate of which college Y/N L/N will choose following her highschool basketball career have spread, only further fueled by her increasing statistics. Now that L/N revealed that she committed to UConn, there seems to be revived excitement over the former Team USA duo, Y/N L/N and Paige Bueckers. For those who don’t know, Paige Bueckers, a current UConn women's basketball athlete, played basketball in Team USA, alongside rising star, Y/N L/N. The coincidence that the pair will reunite in UConn seems to have sparked netizen’s excitement.

Iloveaespa - Their connection during the Team USA games was ON TOP. I can’t wait to see how their connection has grown since then at UConn!

-> Poopypaigebueckers - I saw in another article that Y/N hasn’t looked at the UConn wbb roster yet?? Does she even know LOL

-> KKArnoldissoamazing - I don’t think they’ve even talked since Team USA lol I haven’t seen any of their interactions since then and bc of the distance between their schools, it’s probably unlikely that they have crossed paths since?

Cwbbnews - Can’t wait to see them together on court again! #paigebueckers #Y/NL/N

———

Paige kept an earbud in her ear as she followed her teammates out the locker room. Her teammates discussed the new freshmen who were joining the team, although Paige paid them no mind.

“Yea I heard there apparently was another girl who ranked first of her class like Paige.” Nika said, nudging Paige in the process.

Paige crinkled her nose, laughing at the brunette. “We all know I’ll be better”. She joked.

Nika strugged, pushing the door leading to the court. “Really? I saw some of her games and she’s really good, maybe better than you even.”

“What’s her name? Maybe I’ve played against her before?” Paige asked, trailing closely behind Nika.

When she entered the room, Paige’s eyes snapped to the only motion on the court, heart thudding as she watched you shoot the basketball.

“I think her name was Y/N L/N.”

Swish

The basketball fell through the net, bouncing on the floor as you turned around at the sound of your name.

———

A/n: Part 2 soon (hopefully but probably not until after all my exams)

#paige bueckers #paige bueckers x reader #uconn wbb #paige bueckers x oc #uconn women’s basketball #uconn huskies #nika muhl #nika mühl #fem!reader #hi guys it’s been 2803 years

311 notes · View notes

susiephone · 7 months

Text

Or, a crash course in checking your sources. Because we've all seen some absolutely bullshit stuff spread around the internet, and Tumblr definitely isn't immune to it.

It can be hard to sort out the fact from the rumor from the propaganda when a story is actively developing, especially one that is fast-moving and has a lot of voices coming in from all sides, but it is vitally important that you check your sources before spreading a claim.

It's easier to verify or disprove a claim about something that's purported to have happened in the past, so, admittedly, checking stuff that's purported to be happening now is a messy, confusing process. All the more reason to err on the side of caution.

I am not a journalist or professional researcher or historian or anything like that, so this is all coming from a layman who does their best to be informed. If I get anything wrong, or anyone more qualified has something they want to add, please let me know in the notes.

Why should I check my sources?

Because you should care whether you're spreading propaganda or not.

Because sometimes in the heat of the moment, when emotions are running high, it's easy to be misled.

Because every time you spread misinformation to help your own cause, even - or especially! - if that cause is righteous, it becomes a ding on your credibility, and the credibility of your cause.

Because when you don't, a journalist loses their wings. Probably. Fact-check me on that.

How do I know when to check my sources?

If you don't recognize the source, check it.

If you hear a claim and think, "Wow, that is so cartoonishly evil," or, "That's so absurd I'd think it was far fetched if it was in a movie," or, "It's weird no mainstream outlets are reporting on this," check it.

Now, a claim sounding too bizarre or evil to be real doesn't always mean it isn't--I mean, half of what I hear about George Santos sounds like an SNL sketch and it always ends up true. But check it.

If the claim sounds like something a Nazi would want you to believe, check it.

If a claim is only being spread by one or two small sources, check it.

How do I check my sources?

The following sites are great resources for fact-checking.

PolitiFact. Ranks claims on a truth-o-meter and provides context for what's true, mostly true, kinda true, and made-up.

Media Bias/Fact Check: Publishes lists of fact checks from other credible sources, and ranks media outlets on their bias and trustworthiness.

Climate Feedback: Verifies claims about science, especially climate change.

Lead Stories: Verifies claims as they develop, especially stuff spreading on social media.

Here is a list of sources Media Bias/Fact Check considers to be the least biased.

What are some red flags to search for? / What are some questions I should ask myself?

Does the claim only come from a handful of small sources?

Do all those sources only cite each other?

It bears repeating: does this claim sound especially sensational or over-the-top? I know it sounds basic, but when you're furious at somebody (be it a person or a government or a system), it can be easy to believe every horrible thing you hear about them. But just because someone is awful doesn't mean every rumor about them doing awful things is true, and you still have a responsibility to keep your criticism accurate.

Who provides funding to the source? Do they work off of grants, reader donations and subscriptions, government backing, private donors? Do they not disclose their funding at all?

Has the source been caught spreading false info before? How long ago was this? Did they issue a correction in a timely manner? Was the journalist who spread the false claim fired or otherwise reprimanded? Does it seem like it was a mistake, or was there an agenda at play? Has the source taken steps to reestablish credibility?

Who benefits from me believing this?

Okay, I did all my fact-checking, and I'm really not sure if this claim is true or not.

Then don't share it.

If more information comes out and it turns out to be true, then go ahead.

But if there's doubt, don't share it.

Okay, sure, but the claim sounds like it could be true, and-

"Could be true" and "is true" are not the same.

Fine, but the person or government it's talking about has already done so many awful things, even if this specific rumor isn't true-

DON'T. SHARE. IT.

I am going to come to your house and bite you.

Further information.

How to fact-check like a pro.

The Psychology of Fact-Checking.

What is fact-checking?

Misinformation (YouTube video)

And there we go! If anyone has anything to add, go ahead, but I will be monitoring the comments and will be blocking any nonsense.

There's enough misinformation spread by bad actors in our current media landscape. Please don't make their job any easier.

#politics #journalism

145 notes · View notes

scotianostra · 3 months

Text

On March 1st 2006 the English language version of Wikipedia reached its one millionth article, Jordanhill railway station in the West End of Glasgow.

Wikipedia or "Wiki" for short is a free online encyclopaedia that aims to allow anyone to edit articles. It is the largest and most popular general reference work on the Internet and it is usually where I start my research for the majority of my posts here, it is ranked among the ten most popular websites. The site is owned by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordanhill_railway_station...

#scotland #scottish #history #wikipedia #glasgow

55 notes · View notes

astraltrickster · 3 months

Text

I want to make one thing very clear here:

There is absolutely no mistake that Hammer-Car Matt is transmisogynistic as fuck.

I do not want us to erase the fact that he is also racist, ableist (recall the "oh, the flashing ads are dangerous? pay for ad-free then lmao" incident), otherwise queerphobic, and generally just a self-righteous "I'm-not-a-bigot-BUUUUUUUT-" brand bruh moment in human form.

And I really do not want us to think of this FULLY as a Tumblr/Matt Problem, nor to pin it on lower-ranking staff members (a lot of them fucking hate him lmao). Remember, this started with a mass harassment/report-brigading campaign, which happen...a lot, sometimes to the most random innocuous posts imaginable (shoutout to that video of a Halloween skeleton on a ceiling fan that's now permanently blocked from public view as "sexually explicit" for SOME reason). All social media sees a lot of this problem, because the common aspects of the system for moderation are pretty damned exploitable and how to overhaul it to be less so is a bit of an open problem -

And most major and even semi-major social media sites are run by similar if not worse human embodiments of a wet fart who just don't care enough to do it - which I can only assume is part of why, at least by my observation over the years, he's gone from "out of touch but at least better than anyone who's run this place since before the Yahoo takeover" to all but changing his name to Barbra Streisand and moving to Malibu for how much deeper he insists on digging himself by doubling down on his bigotry.

In short: Fuck Matt, call him out for ALL of his bigotries, support your local transfems, your local POC bloggers, your local disabled bloggers, your other local "unpalatable" queers, and ESPECIALLY people who are all of the above, not only because it's a good thing to do but also because we're a lot stronger together,

And let's rebuild the small internet so we can stop being at the whims of rich bigoted petulant manchildren who are terrified of the Looney Toons.

#tumblr wank #internet culture #serious tag

71 notes · View notes

siffrin-enthusiast · 4 months

Text

// intro post

[Image ID: A GIF of the In Stars and Time party, created by insertdisc5. End ID.]

hello and welcome to our little corner of the internet!!

more information (including about the music) is below the cut but the tldr is that i'm a happily taken 18 year old, auDHD disabled transmasculine host of a traumagenic DID system currently fixated on in stars and time, ultrakill, and coding. collectively we go by kuiper and he/they pronouns :)

my asks & dms are always open! feel free to draw me an anon picture (checked weekly) or check out the submissions thread!

while you're here, consider donating to palestine to request a commission from a lovely talented in stars and time artist!! check it out at @isatforpalestine!

if you're trying to get the playlist to work, you need to go to your site settings, allow audio, refresh the page, and then play it. It will update itself as you navigate through the entire blog so there aren't any pauses/cutoffs! the good news is once you figure out how to do it, it'll work until you clear all of your site cookies!

interests

there's..a lot!! in stars and time, coding, rain world, deltarune, slay the princess, pokemon, hollow knight, psychology (my college major!), fnaf, inscryption, generation loss, hades, celeste, ultrakill, warrior cats, oneshot, hunger games, moon knight (pirating it), night in the woods, and a good thirty more that i'm forgetting.

tagging system

i do my best to keep it simple because i'm too lazy to do a cool one for convenience! interests are tagged with the name of said interest (#in stars and time), and if they're somewhat newly-out, they get a "spoilers" thrown on the end of it (#in stars and time spoilers). if there's something i post about that you don't want to see, i highly encourage you to block its tag! i won't know or be offended! :)

i’ll tag anything that i think is a common thing to be tagged like death/blood, and i do it in the format of #tw death. if this isn’t the right format or anyone wants me to tag other things that i didn’t think of, just let me know!

there's also a few special tags of my own! asks are tagged with #kuiper important posts for the important stuff (like this intro post), #kuiper favorite posts for my favorites/things i return to frequently, #kuiper asks, posts where i ramble about whatever is #kuiper rambling, posts about my dissociation/system are tagged #kuiper system posting, and posts about my disabilities are tagged with #kuiper disability moment! i also write fic and while i tag them with #kuiper fics, i post most of them over at my fic sideblog!

if there's ever anything that you need tagged, please let me know!!

requests

i'm getting pretty into making stuff so..if anyone ever wants me to try my hand at something, please feel free to ask! this is pretty informal until i set more things up! edits, pfps, icons, stimboards, userboxes, ask games, fic/drabbles, coding, i'm willing to give it an honest shot!! feel free to ask!

any and all requests will be tagged with #kuiper requests!

contact

the best way to contact me here is my dms/asks because my notifications are a. little overrun!!

don't like tumblr? don't worry! i have too many other sites! ranked from most to least used:

neocities

cohost

spacehey

dni

i use the block button liberally, as should you! it's freeing!

basic DNI criteria!

people who don't believe in freeing palestine/zionists

entirely nsfw or untagged nsfw accounts.

entirely ed/sh or untagged ed/sh accounts. i understand if you're struggling with it, but if it is your entire blog, no.

syscourse. post whatever you want on your blog, just don't bring it to mine (asking my opinion, tagging me in things).

blank blogs. i will think you're a bot.

people who are still giving j.k. rowling money. shoo!!!

radfems, terfs, radqueers, transableds, proshippers, stuff like that.

anyone not on that list is more than welcome here!!

credits

theme and the lil cat popup by glenthemes

music player, playlist

the lovely dividers

in stars and time & gif by insertdisc5

siffrin looping gif

#kuiper important post #pinned intro #intro post

63 notes · View notes

lyomeii · 8 months

Text

WIRELESS -> chapter three

» chapter three; team evaluation

» SYNOPSIS: a little of chaos for [l.name] and friends :)

» NOTICES:

↳ short, because I wanted to release the chapter. the next one is going to be large, I promise.

↳ choi wongil isn’t part of the group, because I say so.

IN A CALM AND NICE neighborhood, the local family’s store is closed for today for special reasons. The owners, a lovely couple, decided to not open (despite being Friday which is always full of clients) and to spend the day at home with their beloved son, all three anxious to see the Music Bomb of this week.

“[name]!” mother is already sitting next to father, the popcorn inside a large bowl. “It’s almost starting!”

“I’m coming!” you took a seat on the floor, resting your back against the couch as father quickly messes your hair. “Dad!”

The old man laughed, “Stay calm, kid.” like he is the one with the hair all messed up. “You should be smiling, aren’t you happy to show up at tv?”

“I’m nervous, actually…”

“Don’t worry, your mother and I know you are going to be amazing on the screen.”

Those words aren’t enough to calm down, still you smile at him as the program begins. The two hosts are talking about the return of the infamous Idol Inc. and how the shareholders will be taking an important place this season, being able to choose the members, the number of members that will debut, and even the group’s name.

“They are actually apologizing.” both father and mother are quite surprised by the words coming from the representative of Idol Inc. “It’s so unexpected. Right, my dear?”

“Yes, mother.” you agreed with her. “Let's see what they have for this time…”

As the program ended, you decided to clean the dishes as mother and father went to bed to rest for the night. Having them working so much in the recent weeks means so much for you, they are the ones supporting your dreams, so the bare minimum is helping them around the house and the family’s shop.

Thinking about them always brings you memories, especially those that involve them watching you perform in front of the tv once you were just a little boy. Mother recorded all of those little shows, sometimes even rewatching with Father when they don’t have anything else to do and of course, it’s a little embarrassing seeing how much tuneless you were back then.

With the dishes finally clean and back to their rightful places at the cabinets, you settled down at the couch to check the internet since you are quite curious to see how the public is reacting to the program and if the netizens are saying that about you. Despite ranking gold like many others, which is a great thing, there is a chance that some of the viewers might hate you for no reason. It happens a lot and could it happen to you, the thought only already gives you chill.

“Stay calm, [name].” you took a deep breath before opening a forum. “The worse case scenario is that people barely remember your existence...”

With the phone in hands, you switch between the many forums available in the most popular site in recent times. Most of them are discussing those who ranked platinum, every single of them having personal photos that make them easier to be noticeable to the public. You can’t deny, there is a small envy inside your heart seeing them, yet seeing Moondae and Chungwoo in their best make you happy for them. One day, you will reach them and stand up next to both.

After navigating through the most popular sites, you found a small thread with hundreds like and some reblogs that contains some brief information about those who didn’t rank platinum, but did rank gold, meaning you might be included in that one or at least you hope so.

GOLDEN GRADE BOYS THAT STOLEN THE SPOTLIGHT (and my heart)

The title being self explanatory, made you open it rapidly to check the thread made by the user and of course, it didn’t disappoint you. Alongside many familiar faces of Ahyeon, Sejin B, there is you. A clear screenshot of you in the Idol Inc. uniform while posing with some other contestants of the same rank and a small clip of you performing on the first day at the studio. And all of the comments in the post are so positive, complimenting both your looks and vocals, saying they are more than willing to buy your stocks.

You can’t deny, it brings you a calm sensation seeing how some people are willingly to support your journey at the program, but it’s a little worrying too. A great number of viewers, who barely know anything about you other than what the camera shows, are going to buy your stocks without thinking much of it…Why do you feel guilty of it instead of happiness? Those people are truly angels, you won’t ever forget that. Next week, you will do your best to thank every single one of them!

“Alright, let’s start the formation of the first of the first team evaluation!” the remaining contestants all pay attention to the host who is on the stage alongside a small box next to him. “Before that, all participants please come forward in order of rank and pick a ball from the box.”

After a few days of doing nothing but resting, you are finally back to the studio alongside the others and there are already things to do in order to stay on the program. And it’s quite nice to see the familiar faces of fellow participants.

“[L.Name].” Sejin B calls you from behind, his large stature and energetic personality manage to bring a smile from your lips. “It’s just me or Moondae looks brighter?”

Brighter? Your eyes move towards Moondae to realize that something is indeed different about him. It’s like there are sparkles all over the black haired man that seems to attract your full attention to him only, what did he make to look like this? It’s probably his skincare routine and you are definitely going to ask him about it later.

“Now that you said it, I can see that something is different about him.” you whisper back to brunet who nodded. “But are you sure of it? I mean, Ahyeon is standing next to him.”

He muffled his mouth to prevent the laugh to be heard, but his body shakes a little because of that as Sejin B places one of his hands on your shoulder. Did you say something funny? On another hand, Moondae stares at the two of you with his classical monotonous face.

“Did I say something wrong?” tilting your head, a small smile grows on your face in order to gain an answer from him. “Moondae?”

The dark haired man just stares at you, despite the noticeable displeasure in his face, he sighs off and smiles at you. “It’s okay. You just said what is inside your head.” with the host calling his name, he walked to the stage to grab a small ball and once Moondae made his way back to the group, it’s your turn.

In the stage, you smile to be the host before putting your hand inside the box for a few seconds and then, a ball with a number is on your hand now. Resulting in the host smiling directly at you.

“[L.NAME] [NAME]’S NUMBER IS NUMBER THREE!”

Your heart starts beating faster with the host’s words. Is this number a good thing? It’s a lower one compared to Moondae’s Twelve, yet there is something off about it and the big smile on the host’s face is a way to confirm your suspicions as he starts to speak up to the contestants. A performance in a group.

Choosing between the few agencies and performing a hit song of the group’s belonging to them sounds a good deal, right? In theory, yes. But knowing that someone from a high rank can easily take you out of the agency you choose or the possibility of someone else creating discord in the group is making you already think of the song you will have to perform. That’s why you choose to join Leti, where familiar faces make their way to meet up with you again, but also new faces.

“Hello, [L.Name]!” two golden ranks introduced themself as both approached you with big smiles on their faces, Ha Iljun and Keon Heesung. They are way more energetic and smiley compared to Moondae who joined the team, now the two are a great contrast to the brunet’s stoic personality. And they keep ‘bothering’ him til Lee Sejin A enters the team, making both gold suddenly quiet. Then, Sein Ahyeon (number 33), Ryu Jeongwoo (number 59) and Lee Sejin B (number 62) enter the group, finally closing the Leti group.

“NOW THE AGENCIES ARE DIVIDED INTO TEAM A AND TEAM B, ACCORDING TO THE SHUFFLE RESULT!”

One of the screens shows everyone the agency separated into two different groups of seven, and you are part of team A along with the others. Iljun and Heesung are celebrating being in the same group while you watch your new teammates talking steps closer, including Sejin A who is now standing next to you and everyone else is just a little curious of how comfortable he is around your presence, an unexpected scene for the other members.

“So who is going to choose the song?” you asked, hoping one of the members would step in front of the monitor to be the responsible one to do it. You can’t deny you are a little too nervous to do it, what if you choose a bad song? Or one that no one knows? You would be hated.

“Don’t fear, [L.Name]!” IlJun stepped forward and pressed the monitor’s screen. “I will choose a good song for us!”

He didn’t choose a good one.

@lyomeii stuff || don’t repost

#debut or die x reader #manhwa x reader #manhwa x male reader #x male reader #x male y/n #male reader #yandere platonic x reader #platonic x male reader #debut or die imagine #debut or die x male reader #park moondae #seon ahyeon #keun sejin #bae sejin

64 notes · View notes

rhyselinn · 10 months

Text

In Defense of Toby Fox’s Halloween Hack

Twitter is all in a tizzy about the Halloween Hack as of late. The apparent reason for this is because the Halloween Hack uses a word commonly used as a homophobic slur, not taking into account that the hack was created in 2008 (when the internet was a different place) and that 2008 was 14+ years ago (and people are known to grow and change over this time). There appears to be some amount of discussion over whether Toby Fox should be “cancelled” for this.

I’ve seen a fair bit of banter from both sides on this, but what I haven’t seen people on the internet talk about is the CONTEXT of the game in which this word is used. And while I don’t spend a lot of time talking about HH due to Toby’s stated embarrassment when people draw attention to it, if the internet’s gonna go dig up old drama for some reason, then by golly, I’m going to go dig up my old love for this game.

So if you want to come take a wild ride through some internet history and literary analysis, then go buckle your seatbelt and click the Readmore.

(content warning: discussion of homophobic slurs)

A quick bit about me: I am an adult on the internet, and I fall into the original Halloween Hack (hereafter abbreviated as HH)’s target demographic: teenagers who existed on Starmen.net, an Earthbound fan website, in 2008. I am also a current admin for Starmen.net, which puts me in a good position to comment on the history and culture of the site as a whole, and how that ties into the reception of HH.

Starmen.net has a long and rich tradition of events called Funfests, in which the site staff run a combination art/writing/music/etc contest for the site members, usually coalescing around a theme such as “Earthbound”, or sometimes “Winter” or “Halloween”. These events offer prizes such as forum avatar/rank privileges, and historically they sometimes even offered physical prizes. The 2008 Halloween funfest had an entire website made for it, which you can view here. Toby Fox submitted HH to this 2008 Halloween Funfest under the internet handle Radiation.

This is the context of HH: a passion project made by a teenager for a fan website full of other teenagers/twenty-somethings. If you go to a high school science fair, you could rightfully lambast every project for being undeserving of a Nobel Prize, but that’s not why we host high school science fairs OR Starmen.net Funfests. These events are an opportunity for teens to show what they are capable of and receive commendation from both their peers and a panel of judges selected specifically for this age demographic and venue.

For perspective, here’s what one of the hosts of the 2008 Funfest had to say about HH:

“Radiation nearly outclassed himself with this effort of skill labour and love. What a lot of fun. Despite getting repeatedly killed in the sewers this was one thoroughly enjoyabe hack. I Think I’ll go and play it again!”

HH won an award in the 2008 funfest-- a #1 in the “Most Effort” category. For some perspective, few people on Starmen.net go to the lengths of creating an entire game for a Funfest (and HH has a playtime of roughly 5-6 hours!). Of those who do, most of the resulting games are consistent with the output you would expect from a teenage userbase, since it’s not fair to expect teenagers to produce professional-quality work. That said, I can say with confidence that HH is a standout in the areas of both effort and quality.

Another thing that needs to be said of HH is that it is not a standalone game made in today’s modern game engines-- it is a hack of a preexisting game. Earthbound's codebase is notoriously complicated, and a lot of the tools that modern Earthbound hackers use to make their jobs easier (eg Coilsnake, Ebmused) didn’t exist in 2008. Toby had to do a lot of manual coding grunt-work to make HH, up to and including manually typing hexadecimal values into his computer in order to compose Megalovania. (Source: Toby wrote a really in-depth post about the process he used to make HH way back when, which I’m referring to here, but it’s unfortunately been deleted since then.)

I can imagine a hypothetical objection at this point: “ok but high effort homophobia is still homophobia”. In this post, I am also going to argue that Toby’s usage of this word can be considered artistic merit when taken in context, but you’ll have to bear with me for a bit while I explain that context. I’ll also talk about some of the cool and neat things this game does along the way because I think they’re worth talking about.

HH is, at its core, a derivative fan work of the video game Earthbound. And while I love Earthbound deeply, I also recognize that it’s a cult classic that not everyone has played. So while I encourage people to play the game I love deeply, I’ll also sum up a few relevant plot beats here so folks can understand the source material HH draws from:

--Ness, a thirteen year-old boy, meets a creature named Buzz Buzz from ten years in the future who tells him that an alien named Giygas has destroyed the world (direct quote: “All is devastation”). As such, Ness and his friends must save the world.

--One of Ness’s friends is a shy boy named Jeff with a penchant for shooting bottle rockets at enemies

--Jeff’s dad is an odd character named Dr. Andonuts. Dr. Andonuts is a reclusive scientist who lives in a snowy region called Winters who sent his son off to boarding school at a very young age. Andonuts’s lab includes no other signs of life, certainly not any indications of a wife/Jeff’s mother. Andonuts ends his conversation with Jeff by saying “Let’s get together in another ten years or so.”

--Towards the end of the game, Dr. Andonuts uses a device he created called a Phase Distorter to send Ness and his friends to the venue for the final battle. This is very clearly telegraphed as a one-way trip, as the kids’ brains are described in text as needing to be transplanted into robots to get there, but the kids go along with it anyway because the world is at stake.

--The kids go on to fight the final boss in a spectacle that words can’t do justice to here. All I’ll say is that after a long-fought battle, in the grace of an unexplained Deus Ex Machina, the souls of the four kids are impossibly returned to their bodies so they can enjoy their happy ending.

These are all canonical events that happen in the base game of Earthbound. Earthbound’s sequel, Mother 3, was released in 2006, two years prior to HH, although the English fan translation wasn’t released until around the time of the 2008 funfest, interestingly enough. Mother 3 does develop Dr. Andonuts’s canonical character somewhat, but I won’t discuss it in further detail here other than to say it mostly re-emphasizes his odd, solitary nature and his overly cavalier attitude towards his science experiments.

It’s also worth noting that in an oddball game like Earthbound, there are a lot of weird and funny idiosyncrasies to theorize on. There are pencil-shaped statues that block your way, which need to be removed with a device called a “pencil eraser.” Ness and his friends fight robots, aliens, and Krakens, but they also fight handbag-wielding ladies and walking mushrooms. Dr. Andonuts’s character oddities, while strange, fit nicely into the evenly distributed mesh of oddities that comprise Earthbound’s world.

Derivative works, particularly fan works, exist in conversation with the source material. They answer questions posed by the source, interpolate details left out of the original, and otherwise build on the world of the original in a collaborative way. This conversation sometimes happens in a one-on-one manner, between fan and original creator, but it also happens in conjunction with the fan community as a whole. When a theory takes traction, it will begin to appear in more and more fan works, growing in popularity and notoriety until it is “accepted” as the most common interpretation of canon’s strange idiosyncrasies. Newer or more fringe theories are less likely to be taken as a “default” interpretation, but they are more likely to be taken as “fresh” or “interesting” until/unless they, too, begin to gain traction.

HH exists in a few conversations: one with the source material, one with the fan community of Starmen.net (and the broader Earthbound community as a whole, although there was much more overlap between the two back in 2008), and one with Starmen.net’s Funfest culture. In order for HH to be well received by the Funfest judges, it would need to be aware of the community sensibilities as well as push the boundaries of the fan conversation with Earthbound as a whole-- a careful balancing act of being both interesting but also recognizable.

So, the fundamental fan question that HH tries to answer is “why is Dr. Andonuts LIKE THAT?”

This is an absolutely fair question, and Toby was certainly not the first to ask it, although his answer in the form of HH is one of the most high profile now.

HH is set in the world of Earthbound a few months after the final boss fight in autumn, but one where Ness and his friends did not magically return after their one-way trip to the final boss. Word has it that Dr. Andonuts has turned evil and must be defeated. On its surface, this is standard fare for a throwaway plot for a Funfest submission, but the magic of HH is that it does not treat this premise as a throwaway plot. It sets out to earnestly discuss why this happened by delving into Andonuts’s psyche.

Coming back to the idea of derivative works existing in conversation with the source material and interpolating unexplained details: Earthbound does not explain why Dr. Andonuts lives in solitude, nor does it give any hint as to the identity of Jeff’s mother. It also gives no indication as to why Andonuts didn’t seem to have bonded well with his son other than the handwavey explanation that Andonuts is just “like that”. HH initially poses the question of “why did Andonuts turn evil”, but leaves the reader to puzzle that out while battling monsters in Earthbound’s RPG engine.

At first, Toby offers a partial explanation: in HH, Dr. Andonuts is portrayed as feeling immense guilt at having sent his son into what he perceived as a death trap. (quote from the game: “The world is dead, and I’ve become senile with guilt and rage.” He also says stuff like “what’s the point in living without them”.) As such, he turned evil and created zombies to storm the world of Winters, causing a surge in refugees and desperate survivors. This is why the main character was sent to kill him.

(image transcription: a picture of a menu with the text “What do you do!?” followed with a single option: “Kill him”)

But in order to see the depth of this explanation, the true answer to the question “why is Dr. Andonuts LIKE THIS”, the player must hit “B” to cancel out of a menu at the correct moment, something Earthbound players tend to learn by habit from closing the equipment menu so many times, but never used as a plot-relevant mechanic in the base game. HH takes this subconscious muscle memory and turns it into a mechanic gating off half the game if you don’t “spare” the enemy, a precursor to the “spare” mechanic that would debut seven years later in Undertale.

When the player does this, they enter Dr. Andonuts’s “Magicant,” a dream-construct representing his inner psyche, with his hopes and dreams and fears all laid bare. The main character is tasked with finding Dr. Andonuts’s lost Courage. In the base game, Ness enters his own Magicant, so this feels familiar to a veteran player, but it also gives Toby the chance to more closely examine Dr. Andonuts’s character than he otherwise might be able to do.

Over the course of the rest of the game in Dr. Andonuts’s Magicant, the player continues to control the main character, a bounty hunter named Varik, but the NPCs in the game often mistakenly treat Varik as Andonuts. The dialogue we see from these NPCs reflects memories from Andonuts’s own life. We see a lot more characters try to make connections with Dr. Andonuts (”hey don’t you want to play baseball instead of doing math?”), but these are apparently rebuffed througout Andonuts’s life. One NPC guarding the entrance to the path leading to this lost Courage advises “Be careful. Be yourself.” We see memories of Dr. Andonuts’s presumed wife/Jeff’s mom, who is an OC Toby created for this work to answer the questions posed by canon.

Varik is tasked with fighting three “demons” behind three doors, where each demon is said to be stronger than the next. Since this segment takes place inside Andonuts’s mind, these are unsubtly implied to be Andonuts’s inner demons. The second and third doors represent Andonuts’s relationship with his son and his guilt over getting people killed; the first door is relevant to this post, so I’ll talk about it in more detail.

Inside the first door, Varik sees Andonuts’s memories of something called “Remember Me,” who despite being faced in a battle, is friendly and affectionate and causes no damage apart from being “hard to think about.” This enemy has a stock overworld sprite of a male NPC from the base game.

(image transcript: a smiling purple sprite in an Earthbound-style battle. The text box says “The Remember Me? was a little hard to think about again”)

At the end of this map, we see a cutscene in which it’s implied that Dr. Andonuts felt disconnected from his wife, perceiving her as an incessant insect. She says things like “Lately, you’ve been acting kind of... disinterested in me. Is there something wrong with me?” She asks if Dr. Andonuts has been hiding something from her, which triggers the following battle:

(image description: an Earthbound-esque battle against three enemies, each a sprite depicting a closeup of a man’s muscular body: a bicep, a chest, and a swimsuit-clothed groin area)

All three of these enemies are named NO. The music that plays in the background is deliberately unsettling, and their battle moves consist mostly of “flexing in a masculine way”, “slapping their buddies in a masculine fashion”, and “being hard to think about again”. After three turns, these enemies deliver a series of un-dodgeable moves that kill the player before it’s possible to defeat them, ending the game. The only way to proceed in the game is to select the Flee option in the menu.

To summarize the themes being presented here, Dr. Andonuts is gay and repressed his homosexuality to try to preserve his relationship with his wife due to his lack of courage. From a game design and literary merit standpoint, this NO battle is actually a really poignant way of portraying Andonuts’s mindset and all of the fears that kept him in the closet, portraying men’s bodies as an enemy that he must fight, or in failing to do so, must run from. Remember that Earthbound takes place in 199X-- none of the 1990′s were known for being especially tolerant of gay men, nor was 2008 when Toby made this hack; 2008 was the same year that California passed a bill intended to ban gay marriage. In another since-deleted web page, Toby said that one of his motivations for creating HH was “the lack of non-stereotypical, major homosexual characters in media”. With that in mind, this is a surprisingly sensitive portrayal of the pains of repressing one’s sexuality, especially from a teenager.

Toby also portrays some complexity in Andonuts’s relationship with his son Jeff, making the case that Andonuts helped Jeff in his fight against Giygas as a way of living vicariously through him to feel like less of a monster. From this standpoint, it’s easy to see that Andonuts’s abrasive language might be a defense mechanism for his own self esteem issues, calling others monsters to deflect from the fact he sees HIMSELF as a monster.

(image transcription: a screenshot of the main character fighting Andonuts from the end of the game. The text in the textbox from Andonuts says “you idiots. look at your decaying, frostbitten bodies”)

(and just as a side note, I think the reminiscence of this dialogue to Flowey’s dialogue in Undertale is funny and interesting)

Dr. Andonuts says the following: "If I can't live with myself, why should anybody else? Ergo, nobody will live. Then, everybody will understand all the pain I went through. When everyone understands me... They'll cherish me so." This isn’t the expression of a healthy mind, but it is a portrayal of someone who’s experiencing some serious pain. I’d also argue that it’s a nuanced and sympathetic portrayal of a character who is clearly in a crisis.

Another Andonuts quote: “you’re going to kill me, because that’s what a hero does. he has to kill that monster, right? even in this form, i am shaking with fear. i don’t want to die. leave me alone”

The second-to-last fight in the game is against an enemy called Id. In Freudian psychology, the Id is the representation of one’s most base desires, in contrast to the Superego who restrains a person from operating on these desires. The game up until this point does a good job at portraying Dr. Andonuts’s Superego-centric repression strategies, so getting to see his underlying base desires directly is a novel development. The enemy Id consistently reiterates a desire to be left alone and for the main character to not kill it. At the end, it apologizes for not being much of a fight. Only then does Varik fight Dr. Andonuts proper, and without the Id, all that’s left is the Superego-fueled repression, labeled in-game as “hatred”.

Andonuts’s villain monologue starts as such: “I know what this feeling is. It’s hatred for the person who came so far just to destroy an old man. My mind is gone. All that is left is pure hatred.

YOU SEE THIS BURNING, BLOODY UNIVERSE. YOU SEE THIS ULTIMATE, UNLIMITED POWER? Varik. I HAVE FUCKING HAD IT WITH YOUR SHIT. you little fuckers are going to have your bodies ripped in half. i’ll shove your asses so far down your throats that when you crap, you’ll sing fucking beethoven.”

This monologue is the precursor to the infamous line:

(image transcript: a screenshot from the final battle, in which Andonuts says the words “tl;dr: eat shit, faggots”)

As established earlier, this is a line uttered by a gay character who is in a tremendous amount of pain, which would make it an act of slur reclamation. We could argue about whether Toby Fox is in a position to justify this usage, but I refuse to have that conversation because I don’t think real life queer people should have to out themselves in order to justify the art they make. Whether Toby Fox is actually queer or not is, I would argue, immaterial to the story he’s trying to tell here, which is nuanced in a way that a homophobe would be unlikely to write.

We can also have the conversation of whether this word choice is a good decision or not-- and there are, I would argue, a lot of parts of this game that a storyteller with more experience and maturity would have handled better. There are some parts that come across heavy-handed and needlessly edgy, and there are parts that could have been handled with more grace. We can discuss whether “bury our gays” stories were stale by 2008, or whether stories of queer pain had fallen out of vogue for stories of queer joy. But again, this is a work made by a 16-year old, and being needlessly critical of a fangame made by a teenager for a community of predominantly teenagers feels needlessly meanspirited. Just because the game has been unforeseeably thrust into the public light like this doesn’t mean we need to eviscerate it from a 2023 lens. It’s not fair to Toby Fox, neither the original 16-year old creator nor the adult celebrity today.

So I’m not going to do that. What I am going to say is that a queer reading of this work would indicate that this word usage may very well have been a decision made with artistic intent, and a death-of-the-author reading of this work might indicate that this word has artistic merit anyways. If a gay character sees gayness as bad and uses a slur associated with gayness to demean his opponent, that does fundamentally say something about this character, and in this case it reinforces the existing themes that Toby had put in place. I wouldn’t recommend people in 2023 take this approach in storytelling lightly, but I can see and appreciate the spirit in which the game and this word choice appear to have been made.

In the end, Varik does defeat Dr. Andonuts and kill him.

(image transcript: Varik standing above the machine containing Dr. Andonuts’s dead body, not depicted onscreen. The text box reads “You feel a little like this situation could have been avoided.”)

This is one of the last text boxes of the game, and I think it’s a good ending note for this work-- saying that queer lives do NOT need to go this way, that we do not need to bury our gays, that this genuine pain that Dr. Andonuts experienced is not an inevitability.

In conclusion, I do love Halloween Hack for what it is, imperfections and all. It was very clearly a labor of love made by a very earnest and well-meaning teen, and a lot of the things that would later go on to make Undertale so popular are present in their nascent forms here. HH has some genuinely interesting things to say about Earthbound, from both a plot and a character standpoint, and it’s clearly a good-faith attempt at grappling with queer and psychological subject matter. If people on the internet were to engage sincerely with it rather than judging it (and its creator) based on one out-of-context screenshot, I think they might find a diamond-in-the-rough that still manages to be an absolute gem of a fangame.

#earthbound #halloween hack #undertale #toby fox #tw slurs

69 notes · View notes

titleknown · 1 year

Text

So, while we're all trying to fight one of the other terrible "think of the children" bills trying to ram its way through Congress, KOSA, we should also be talking about The EARN IT Act.

Long story short, it's basically yet another surveilance bill using a "protect the children" bill, as a hideous meat-suit, putting restrictions on sites that'll make them even more vicious towards NSFW content, creating a climate where using a VPN might be a crime, and they'll be creating a federal committee to decide how best to spy on us!

Long story long, well, the Linktree is right here.

Beyond the stuff in the Linktree, I urge you to directly contact your congresspeoples and tell them to kill this bill, especially if they're on the Judiciary Committee, which is currently marking up this bill.

The members of the committee are:

Dick Durbin, Illinois, Chairman

Dianne Feinstein, California

Sheldon Whitehouse, Rhode Island

Amy Klobuchar, Minnesota

Chris Coons, Delaware

Richard Blumenthal, Connecticut

Mazie Hirono, Hawaii

Cory Booker, New Jersey

Alex Padilla, California

Jon Ossoff, Georgia

Peter Welch, Vermont

Lindsey Graham, South Carolina, Ranking Member (Ugh)

Chuck Grassley, Iowa

John Cornyn, Texas

Mike Lee, Utah

Ted Cruz, Texas (Double-ugh)

Josh Hawley, Missouri

Tom Cotton, Arkansas

John Kennedy, Louisiana

Thom Tillis, North Carolina

Marsha Blackburn, Tennessee (she cosponsored the bill, so probably not)

So yeah, do what you can, even if it's just boosting this terrible, terrible danger we need to thwart.

And, I will add, as with my previous KOSA poster, this poster is officially, for the sake of spreading it, under a CC0 license.

Feel free to spread it, remix it, add links to the bottom, edit it to be about the other bad internet bills they’re pushing, use it as a meme format, do what you will but for gods’ sake get the word out!

...And yes, for the record I was thinking of the Judas Priest song when I came up with the tagline for this one.

#internet freedom #earn it act #politics #internet #american politics #censorship #spying #signal boost

2K notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 6 days

Text

AI is a WMD

I'm in TARTU, ESTONIA! AI, copyright and creative workers' labor rights (TOMORROW, May 10, 8AM: Science Fiction Research Association talk, Institute of Foreign Languages and Cultures building, Lossi 3, lobby). A talk for hackers on seizing the means of computation (TOMORROW, May 10, 3PM, University of Tartu Delta Centre, Narva 18, room 1037).

Fun fact: "The Tragedy Of the Commons" is a hoax created by the white nationalist Garrett Hardin to justify stealing land from colonized people and moving it from collective ownership, "rescuing" it from the inevitable tragedy by putting it in the hands of a private owner, who will care for it properly, thanks to "rational self-interest":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

Get that? If control over a key resource is diffused among the people who rely on it, then (Garrett claims) those people will all behave like selfish assholes, overusing and undermaintaining the commons. It's only when we let someone own that commons and charge rent for its use that (Hardin says) we will get sound management.

By that logic, Google should be the internet's most competent and reliable manager. After all, the company used its access to the capital markets to buy control over the internet, spending billions every year to make sure that you never try a search-engine other than its own, thus guaranteeing it a 90% market share:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Google seems to think it's got the problem of deciding what we see on the internet licked. Otherwise, why would the company flush $80b down the toilet with a giant stock-buyback, and then do multiple waves of mass layoffs, from last year's 12,000 person bloodbath to this year's deep cuts to the company's "core teams"?

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

And yet, Google is overrun with scams and spam, which find their way to the very top of the first page of its search results:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The entire internet is shaped by Google's decisions about what shows up on that first page of listings. When Google decided to prioritize shopping site results over informative discussions and other possible matches, the entire internet shifted its focus to producing affiliate-link-strewn "reviews" that would show up on Google's front door:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

This was catnip to the kind of sociopath who a) owns a hedge-fund and b) hates journalists for being pain-in-the-ass, stick-in-the-mud sticklers for "truth" and "facts" and other impediments to the care and maintenance of a functional reality-distortion field. These dickheads started buying up beloved news sites and converting them to spam-farms, filled with garbage "reviews" and other Google-pleasing, affiliate-fee-generating nonsense.

(These news-sites were vulnerable to acquisition in large part thanks to Google, whose dominance of ad-tech lets it cream 51 cents off every ad dollar and whose mobile OS monopoly lets it steal 30 cents off every in-app subscriber dollar):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

Now, the spam on these sites didn't write itself. Much to the chagrin of the tech/finance bros who bought up Sports Illustrated and other venerable news sites, they still needed to pay actual human writers to produce plausible word-salads. This was a waste of money that could be better spent on reverse-engineering Google's ranking algorithm and getting pride-of-place on search results pages:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

That's where AI comes in. Spicy autocomplete absolutely can't replace journalists. The planet-destroying, next-word-guessing programs from Openai and its competitors are incorrigible liars that require so much "supervision" that they cost more than they save in a newsroom:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/29/what-part-of-no/#dont-you-understand

But while a chatbot can't produce truthful and informative articles, it can produce bullshit – at unimaginable scale. Chatbots are the workers that hedge-fund wreckers dream of: tireless, uncomplaining, compliant and obedient producers of nonsense on demand.

That's why the capital class is so insatiably horny for chatbots. Chatbots aren't going to write Hollywood movies, but studio bosses hyperventilated at the prospect of a "writer" that would accept your brilliant idea and diligently turned it into a movie. You prompt an LLM in exactly the same way a studio exec gives writers notes. The difference is that the LLM won't roll its eyes and make sarcastic remarks about your brainwaves like "ET, but starring a dog, with a love plot in the second act and a big car-chase at the end":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

Similarly, chatbots are a dream come true for a hedge fundie who ends up running a beloved news site, only to have to fight with their own writers to get the profitable nonsense produced at a scale and velocity that will guarantee a high Google ranking and millions in "passive income" from affiliate links.

One of the premier profitable nonsense companies is Advon, which helped usher in an era in which sites from Forbes to Money to USA Today create semi-secret "review" sites that are stuffed full of badly researched top-ten lists for products from air purifiers to cat beds:

https://housefresh.com/how-google-decimated-housefresh/

Advon swears that it only uses living humans to produce nonsense, and not AI. This isn't just wildly implausible, it's also belied by easily uncovered evidence, like its own employees' Linkedin profiles, which boast of using AI to create "content":

https://housefresh.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Advon-AI-LinkedIn.jpg

It's not true. Advon uses AI to produce its nonsense, at scale. In an excellent, deeply reported piece for Futurism, Maggie Harrison Dupré brings proof that Advon replaced its miserable human nonsense-writers with tireless chatbots:

https://futurism.com/advon-ai-content

Dupré describes how Advon's ability to create botshit at scale contributed to the enshittification of clients from Yoga Journal to the LA Times, "Us Weekly" to the Miami Herald.

All of this is very timely, because this is the week that Google finally bestirred itself to commence downranking publishers who engage in "site reputation abuse" – creating these SEO-stuffed fake reviews with the help of third parties like Advon:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

(Google's policy only forbids site reputation abuse with the help of third parties; if these publishers take their nonsense production in-house, Google may allow them to continue to dominate its search listings):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

There's a reason so many people believed Hardin's racist "Tragedy of the Commons" hoax. We have an intuitive understanding that commons are fragile. All it takes is one monster to start shitting in the well where the rest of us get our drinking water and we're all poisoned.

The financial markets love these monsters. Mark Zuckerberg's key insight was that he could make billions by assembling vast dossiers of compromising, sensitive personal information on half the world's population without their consent, but only if he kept his costs down by failing to safeguard that data and the systems for exploiting it. He's like a guy who figures out that if he accumulates enough oily rags, he can extract so much low-grade oil from them that he can grow rich, but only if he doesn't waste money on fire-suppression:

https://locusmag.com/2018/07/cory-doctorow-zucks-empire-of-oily-rags/

Now Zuckerberg and the wealthy, powerful monsters who seized control over our commons are getting a comeuppance. The weak countermeasures they created to maintain the minimum levels of quality to keep their platforms as viable, going concerns are being overwhelmed by AI. This was a totally foreseeable outcome: the history of the internet is a story of bad actors who upended the assumptions built into our security systems by automating their attacks, transforming an assault that wouldn't be economically viable into a global, high-speed crime wave:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/24/automation-is-magic/

But it is possible for a community to maintain a commons. This is something Hardin could have discovered by studying actual commons, instead of inventing imaginary histories in which commons turned tragic. As it happens, someone else did exactly that: Nobel Laureate Elinor Ostrom:

https://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons/

Ostrom described how commons can be wisely managed, over very long timescales, by communities that self-governed. Part of her work concerns how users of a commons must have the ability to exclude bad actors from their shared resources.

When that breaks down, commons can fail – because there's always someone who thinks it's fine to shit in the well rather than walk 100 yards to the outhouse.

Enshittification is the process by which control over the internet moved from self-governance by members of the commons to acts of wanton destruction committed by despicable, greedy assholes who shit in the well over and over again.

It's not just the spammers who take advantage of Google's lazy incompetence, either. Take "copyleft trolls," who post images using outdated Creative Commons licenses that allow them to terminate the CC license if a user makes minor errors in attributing the images they use:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/24/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator/

The first copyleft trolls were individuals, but these days, the racket is dominated by a company called Pixsy, which pretends to be a "rights protection" agency that helps photographers track down copyright infringers. In reality, the company is committed to helping copyleft trolls entrap innocent Creative Commons users into paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars to use images that are licensed for free use. Just as Advon upends the economics of spam and deception through automation, Pixsy has figured out how to send legal threats at scale, robolawyering demand letters that aren't signed by lawyers; the company refuses to say whether any lawyer ever reviews these threats:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/13/an-open-letter-to-pixsy-ceo-kain-jones-who-keeps-sending-me-legal-threats/

This is shitting in the well, at scale. It's an online WMD, designed to wipe out the commons. Creative Commons has allowed millions of creators to produce a commons with billions of works in it, and Pixsy exploits a minor error in the early versions of CC licenses to indiscriminately manufacture legal land-mines, wantonly blowing off innocent commons-users' legs and laughing all the way to the bank:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/02/commafuckers-versus-the-commons/

We can have an online commons, but only if it's run by and for its users. Google has shown us that any "benevolent dictator" who amasses power in the name of defending the open internet will eventually grow too big to care, and will allow our commons to be demolished by well-shitters:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

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/2024/05/09/shitting-in-the-well/#advon

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Catherine Poh Huay Tan (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/68166820@N08/49729911222/

Laia Balagueró (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/lbalaguero/6551235503/

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

294 notes · View notes