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necrolog1st · 16 hours ago

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SFW HEADCANONS WITH TILL

btw: sfw, gn!reader(sometimes he/him, it's a translation error), bad english, open ending,

fandom: ALIEN STAGE

Till was, is and will be a rebel.

He almost never parted with bruises and abrasions. Causal, sharp-tongued, but no one appreciated his straightforwardness in Anakt Garden. For his honesty, he most often got hit with a bright fist.

"Cattle!" they shouted after him.

Sometimes he himself was looking for a fight, sometimes he was just annoying someone. What difference does it make - he got used to it long ago, but he could not cope with his emotions. On the outside, Till is a bright, daring spot, disturbing the licked idyll. And on the inside - he is warm, gentle and vulnerable. It's just that few people noticed it. Most considered him a fool. Or, even worse, an uncontrollable Godzilla who tramples everything in sight. One minute he's grumbling, banging his forehead against the cold wall, and the next he's humming, eyes sparkling with enthusiasm, mumbling, writing, pencil in his teeth like a captain's cigar.

This could go on forever. It seemed like another skirmish, right on schedule. From Till's own point of view, he was just lying innocently on the lawn, spinning in the sun's rays, as if he were starring in an advertisement for a happy future. But then someone showed up again with their "funny" and completely unfair comments. He himself was already having a hard time believing it, but here he is - defeated again (although, of course, he will never admit it) - lying on his back with a bruise on his forehead, arms and legs spread out in the shape of a star. Furiously going over in his head every "soft word" he would like to throw in the face of this idiot. Kicking his legs, as if this is how he can throw off the insult. In a fit of anger, he bites his lip. He tears the grass around him - at least he needs to take out his anger on something. Every feeling towards the offender flares up anew, especially after the latter, leaving, even smirked when Till shouted after him about the second round, in which he would definitely win. In a fit of anger, Till closed his eyes. Still, he was alone here. Or at least he thought so.

"Are you... okay?" The voice sounded as if from nowhere - quiet, uncertain, almost a whisper, and sincere concern was clearly heard in it. Till shuddered. His body froze in some strange, uncomfortable pose, and his eyes opened wide ... but he did not turn around. His brain was having a hard time digesting the information: someone saw. Someone heard. Someone dared to ask. Rage, like a flash, flooded the remains of common sense. The words spoken with care immediately turned into mockery in his head. He thought he heard laughter behind the scenes, a hint of denunciation, pity through clenched teeth. He grimaced as if he was sour, and without thinking, he threw out the first thing that came to mind. - What difference does it make to you?! Are you going to go knock on these aliens, or do you want to have a laugh, right?! Huh?!

The voice came out prickly, ringing - like broken glass. It ripped through the silence, touched the air. You recoiled. You took a half-step back - instinctively, as if from a blow. Your shoulders clenched, and your hands rose halfway, showing a peace sign that there was no meanness in your palms.

- N-no... I wasn't going to tell anyone anything, really. You just look, well, worried, or something... - you began to speak, stumbling and choosing your words, as if you were walking on thin ice.

But you could tell by the look on Till's face that it hadn't worked.

"Are you saying I'm crazy?!" He blurted it out as if he was waiting for an excuse. The words rushed out of him like bees from a broken hive. It seemed like even the kindest phrases hurt him more than someone's fist.

"No, you're completely healthy, I'm sure." You quickly objected, your voice getting a little louder, but still shaking. And, yes, he really did look a little unstable right now. But you pushed those thoughts aside. He wasn't "crazy." He was... just different. Special. Before he could cling to what he'd said again, you quickly added, almost in one breath:

"It's just... you have a bruise. I thought maybe I should go see a nurse. Or I could help you cover it up with makeup so the aliens wouldn't complain." The words sounded uncertain, but... honest. Without shouting, without pathos, without gestures to the chest. Just as it is. From somewhere inside. And there was something important in this. Till froze, as if he did not immediately understand that they were not being rude to him, not teaching him, not pitying him. He slowly, as if not trusting his own eyes, began to study you with his gaze - from your knees, clinging to the folds of fabric, to your face. You were still fiddling with the hem of your white shirt, as if this somehow helped ease the situation. And even though everything was squeezing in your chest, you just stood there. You did not hide. You did not leave. You were not nervous, just stunned by the strangeness of the situation.

Something inside Till trembled. Instead of the usual irritation and anger ... it was quiet. Not deathly silence - but the kind after a strong thunderstorm, when the air is still trembling, but you can breathe calmly.

Calm? Perhaps, even strange if you think about it. It was ridiculous, absurd for him — and yet true. He simply looked at you for about a minute. Silent. And you — tried not to show your trembling fingers and did not look away.

“If you want… then fine,” Till muttered, still a little surprised. You smiled — quietly, kindly, the way you smile when you don’t want to frighten the moment. You held out your hand. Till took it — carefully, as if he was afraid thatShe'll disappear. Warm. Real. He stood up, even swayed a little, but didn't let go. He caught himself thinking that he didn't want to let her go, but quickly pushed the thoughts out of his head.

You could say that's where it all started.

After that incident, you carefully helped Till - not pushy, not intrusive, but with such light care. As promised, you carefully "borrowed" the necessary anti-bruise products from the office. (Although Till fiercely insisted that this was theft, and you were simply too soft to admit it.) You applied the tenth layer of foundation, trying to hide his forehead, as if it were a top-level secret. He grumbled, and every time he jerked his head, when you tried to fix his bangs to hide the mark from the blow. But you did not take into account one nuance: Till was still Till. And after just a couple of hours, at the most inopportune moment, he got caught in front of the teacher. Then he listened to an hour-long lecture about his recklessness for two hours - he sat there with the look of a martyr, boredly staring at the ceiling and not listening to a word.

And then he found you. Himself.

He sat down next to him, as if that was how it should be, and began to vividly describe what an "unfair nonsense" it was and how everyone around him did not understand anything. He himself did not know why he came to you. He said that you started it all, so now he had to endure it. But for the first time - for real - he felt that he was being listened to. Not pretending. Not interrupting. Not wincing. You not only nodded attentively, you asked questions, agreed somewhere, argued somewhere, but without mockery, without pressure. Without the desire to "fix". Sometimes it seemed to him that you were too soft, especially when you again climbed to look at his bruise.

- Are you completely nuts, huh? - he grumbled, grimacing as if you had poured iodine into his soul. - Just a little more and you'll be recorded in the medical record.

But you didn't flinch. You weren't embarrassed. You just chuckled and continued examining. And Till - even if he didn't admit it to himself - suddenly realized: you simply cared. You weren't trying to change him. You were just there. And it was 'damn warm'.

Since then, you have become an integral part of his noisy, harsh, but in their own way bright everyday life. It would seem that not much has changed - Till was still a "teenage ulcer", hot-tempered, caustic, always with a splinter on his tongue. But next to you, he became a little... softer. As if your softness was seeping inside. A little warmer. Only he himself, of course, did not suspect it. Your communication became something like a familiar ritual. You helped him stay out of fights — as much as possible. Sometimes you caught him by the sleeve, holding him back half a step from the next "idiot who is to blame himself!" Sometimes you stood in front of the teachers, covering his back, trying to justify him, you did not have the courage to lie, but understanding your soft, almost modest nature, this was enough for him. It rarely worked. But Till never admitted that he enjoyed it.

Quietly, in his own way, he felt - no matter what he did, no matter what he blurted out, there was at least one person who would not turn away. Will try to understand. To convey to others, if he himself - could not.

And most importantly - at the end of the day, a conversation always awaited him. The two of you, under an artificial tree. Where he could talk out, down to the smallest detail, to the funny, to the offensive. Between you, it seemed, there was nothing. But in fact - there was everything.

Thirteen strange notes that were in notebooks between topics. Two quick glances on the run, when you were out of breath and he ran regardless. An infinite amount of understanding without words. Ten complete misunderstandings with words. Five false notes in one line of his song. A couple of treats in his lunch from you. A piece of chocolate, thrown into the palm of his hand without explanation. The phrase: "How are you?" - at the moment when it is most needed.

And all this - quietly, without loud confessions, without the words "friendship" or "important". But this was exactly what made up your common everything.

Once during lunch, Till was sitting at the table with Mizi and Sua. Each of them was chatting about their own, interrupting, laughing, quarreling - in their own way, but somehow warmly. You were also part of this small, strange company, but you went somewhere - either for a tray, or for something else. The conversation somehow turned to you. And then Till seemed to have completely forgotten that sometimes it’s better to filter your words.

“He’s... well, too soft. Too much. Always covering for me. Even when I didn’t ask!” he began with his usual harshness, but the more he spoke, the more... strangely excited he sounded.

“And why do you have to pat me on the head every time I succeed? Even in front of everyone! It’s... it’s weird. And anyway, I don’t care! At all. Let him stop already.”

He sat with a stony face, as if trying to convince himself that it was true, quietly stirring his lunch, not noticing how everything had turned into an inedible mush.

And the whole company in response... strangely fell silent. They began to whisper. Someone smiled faintly. Mizi glanced at him as if she knew more about him than he did.

“Hey, what are you whispering about?! "Till barked, glancing at everyone in turn. Sua - the silent, almost invisible one, whom he, frankly, did not particularly like - suddenly exhaled slowly andkoino said:

— When will it dawn on you…

Mizi giggled, leaning back on Sua’s shoulder, casting a glance at him as if she knew the whole plot in advance. And Till realized that they weren’t laughing at him. They were simply seeing something that he himself couldn’t name. Something that was important.

And he…

He simply didn’t know how to talk about it. He didn’t know how to do it any other way. Then he began to furiously persuade them to tell him what they were laughing at, but everyone remained silent. He simply didn’t know how to talk about it. He didn’t know how to do it any other way.

In response to his friends’ silence, he began to seethe out of habit:

— So what?! What are you laughing at? Tell me already, you’ve had enough!

But everyone looked at each other and remained silent, as if by agreement. When you returned, the first thing that caught my eye was Till’s plate. The food had turned into some kind of mess, with which, it seemed, he had started a fight. You wordlessly pushed your tray towards him, silently sharing.

He snorted:

“You shouldn’t have...”

But he ate so fast, as if he hadn’t eaten for a week. You smiled quietly, even wiping his cheek with a napkin a couple of times. He twitched, looked away, grumbled, but didn’t move away. An omnivore, what can I say.

Meanwhile, his eyes sought out his friends’ glances again and again. And every time he caught them, he rolled his eyes in irritation.

After Sua’s words, he caught himself looking at you more and more often. Not because he liked you. Just... to understand what she meant then. He quickly drove those thoughts away. There was no point in thinking about some scraps said with the look of an old wise turtle.

Over time, you both grew up a little. The bonds became stronger. You learned to understand yourselves - and each other - better. You both stretched out, and life became full of everything: worries, opportunities, incomprehensible conversations and, it would seem, nothing special. But not for Till. He himself did not notice how he began to look at you differently. You were still the same "brat", as he joked, "a peacemaker with hearts instead of brains", but now something clicked in his head with every touch. Each of your "brush the crumb off the shoulder" turned into a tiny panic for him. His cheeks flared, his eyebrows flew up, and he stuttered:

- Hey! Well... you! Stop it! Right now!

You laughed, did not back down. He grumbled. Averted his eyes. But did not move away. Between all your conversations, there were still no hints, no confessions. But under each word, something new seemed to vibrate. Unsure, real.

Since then, he had been banging his head against the wall more and more often - not literally, of course (although sometimes literally) - every time he started getting nervous around you again. He didn't understand what had changed in you. More precisely... he understood, but he didn't want to admit it. Why did he look like a fool with overheated thoughts next to you now? Why did he want your gaze, your approval, and - the most shameful thing - your touch? And the strangest thing: nothing had changed between you. Not your intonation, not your jokes, not your desire to protect him from another displeasure from the aliens about his antics. Only he had changed. Now, when you looked at him - especially with that soft gaze, in which warm confidence could be read - he could suddenly blurt out something idiotic inappropriate, emphasize your clumsiness, or, on the contrary, say that you were too neat. Sometimes he still allowed himself to be soft. In moments when he thought that you did not notice. He could straighten your strand of hair, as if by accident. He also often drew you. He wanted to capture every moment. Write something for you, give you your favorite treat at dinner.. Say in a whisper:

— I just don’t want anyone to touch you.

And a minute later, suddenly pull away and snort:

— It’s not caring, it’s just... you’re weak, that’s all.

He wanted to be closer, and at the same time — he didn’t let anyone near. He understood all this. But he denied it with all his might. He became a thorn. Almost a hedgehog with nails instead of needles. Every time you started to fool around, when you laughed together, he immediately joked back with irritation:

— I don’t care at all! Don’t interfere! — But his voice broke. He was angry. Not at you — at himself.

It became almost impossible to touch him. He immediately turned away. He could get up and leave, pretend to have heard a call from far away, or suddenly remember that he had "important things to do."

And if you asked what was wrong with him, he would throw out some awkward:

- Nothing! Just don't piss me off!

When others asked what happened, you threw up your hands. You thought that it was just part of his character, that he was just... Special, not in a bad way. You downloaded from that old communication that had been between you. However, he missed you even more. He was angry. Not at you. At himself. For behaving like this. In Anakt Garden, they did not teach how to properly show love, how to show affection.

One night, lying in bed, he tossed and turned for a long time, tangling his legs in the duvet cover, burying himself in the pillow, turning from side to side. A storm raged inside - all that which he could not put on the shelves. And at some point – between two breaths – he finally confessed. Not to you. To himself. Maybe this was more than just friendship. More than being your best friend. Maybe… this was it. Now the big question remained:Is it worth it? Will you accept his feelings?

- Tomorrow. I confess. That's right, - he thought, clenching his fists under the blanket. His face took on a determined expression, his heart filled with hope. But all these hopes crumbled to dust the next morning.

Shaking. Blushing. Trembling. Repeating. In a circle. You were walking along the river. It was his initiative - he had been inviting you for a walk since the morning. All morning he had been rehearsing the text:

"Something in the world changed when I saw you. You are the brightest star, and I am your companion. I want to love you, talk to you, touch you, feel every facet of your soul. My heart is beating wildly. I hope you will hear."

He knew these words by heart. To the last point. But he did not take yesterday's courage with him. He inhaled. Clenched his fists. Looked at you. Everything - now or never.

— Something in the world… Something… The weather! Yeah! I wonder what the weather is like now! It seems hot to me! — he blurted out with a catastrophic expression on his face. If anyone had seen it, they would have definitely said that he was a coward. He knew it himself. You blinked in surprise.

— I don’t think the weather is changing. This is Anakt Garden after all… — you bowed your head slightly. — Maybe you have a fever? A fever is a bad sign.

You were both silent for a second. He was hopeless, and you were even worse. He shook his head, ran his hand over his face, as if he wanted to wipe away the embarrassment.

— I’m not sick, — he muttered. — You’re just… hot. Oh. I mean, you’re… warm. Well, like a person. — He coughed, hiding his face in his hands. You quietly laughed, covering your lips with your hand.

— Damn it! — he cursed, — stop it! I'm trying...

You looked at him more closely.

"What are you trying to do?" you said, slightly surprised.

He froze for a moment, met your gaze... and stepped back again.

"Forget it."

And you didn't insist. You just continued walking next to him. In silence. And then you suddenly gently touched his hand. Softly, as if by accident. And you didn't take it away. He looked down. At your fingers. At the way they touched his skin. And suddenly he didn't pull away. And then, later - when you were sitting under a tree, as usual - he gently nudged you with his shoulder and said:

"If I ever say something stupid... really stupid... don't send me away, okay?"

You smiled.

"Don't even think about it. Till, no matter what you do, no matter what stupid thing you say, I will always be there. - You wrote a scene that makes your heart stop. These words hit you straight in the soul. He looked down, his eyes fell on the floor. He smiled - awkwardly, almost tenderly, as best he could. Then, as if it meant nothing, he casually leaned back on your shoulder. Silence. Not a word from you.

He froze. His heart sank into his heels. Maybe you don’t like it? Maybe you find him disgusting. Then your warm palm ruffled his hair. Softly, Calmly, Without words. But so homely.

As if it happened every day, although it did.

Since then, he decided - it’s better to keep his feelings to himself for now. He didn’t want to lose this warmth. He didn’t want to look into your eyes and see disgust there. He took a step back, just in case, Even two, just so as not to step on a rake, not to lose your warm hands.

Of course, he was bad at hiding his embarrassment. His cheeks were flushed, his voice was shaking, his movements were clumsy. You looked at it with soft amusement - without teasing, just in a friendly way. You smiled. And that was it.

So, one day, when he had almost convinced himself that "let it be just friendship", he was sitting on the grass. Drawing. Or rather, scribbling, as he himself said. When it didn't work, a crumpled sheet of paper would fly to the side. There were already about ten of them lying around - crumpled, distorted with anger. You approached quietly. He didn't notice right away. Or maybe he did - but he felt calm with you. You picked up one of the crumpled sheets. Straightened it out. There was something touching there, a little crooked, but in its own way alive, as always, chaotic, you didn't even make out what was there. He drew the way he felt. And you knew it. They always said he was a good boy, that he should continue. You weren't flattering him - you just sincerely enjoyed watching this process.

Till sat, thoughtfully twirling his pencil. You quietly looked over his shoulder, your eyes running along the lines of the sketches. And suddenly - you noticed a small detail: a fish-shaped cookie. The same one that you were often given for an evening snack. Your little secret, your common weakness.

"Fish cookies?" you asked, still calmly, without taking your eyes off the sheet.

He shuddered. Not because he was scared. It was just... your presence pierced him through and through. His cheeks flushed. His heart began to beat faster. Again. He had already stopped noticing it.

"Yeah..." Till muttered, continuing to move the pencil, although the lines were already spreading. He was nervous.

"Beautiful," you said.

He tensed up. He was ready to defend himself - to mutter that you simply felt sorry for him, that he had "hook-hands", as he always said. Although if someone else had said this, he would have hit him. But inside - inside he wanted you to continue talking. Praising. Looking. Just being there.

He was just about to give out sarcasm, just inhaled... And suddenly - he felt. Something warm touched his cheek. A second. Just a second. You took a last calm breath.

THANKS FOR READING. YAY ←⁠_⁠←

cr : @ alienstagepngg (tg)

#alien stage x reader #fanfic #alnst x reader #alnst luka #alnst #luka x reader

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fat-liberation-history · 2 months ago

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May 6 is International No Diet Day

History of No Diet Day:

The first ever No Diet Day was held in the UK on May 5th, 1992. British feminist Mary Evans Young started it after struggling with anorexia and body acceptance. Back then, it was but a small picnic held by twelve women between 21 and 76, all wearing stickers saying "Ditch that Diet". Originally planned to be held in Hyde Park, London, the group had to use Young's flat instead because of the weather. [1, 2]

Young aspired for it to become an international holiday. Supporters from the US warned her that it might clash with Cinco de Mayo, so the date was moved in the following years from May 5th to May 6th. [2]

In 1993, Lee Martindale coordinated the second celebration of International No Diet Day in the US, bringing the event to an international audience. Nine countries as well as 35 US states participated. [1]

In 1995, Fat Girl published an article in their fourth issue about a group who had used International No Diet Day to protest for fat liberation. The group, called Fat Guerillas, spread warning labels and bookmarks about the dangers of dieting in their local library, bookstore, health food store, and drug store. Afterwise, they drove all over town and removed all the "Magic Diet" ad posters they could find. When they were finished, they celebrated with ice cream. [3]

(The article also came with a recipe for wheatpaste, which was recommended if you wanted to hang up your own posters and make it hard to remove them. [3])

Cooties, a zine from 1998, described International No Diet Day as an opportunity to "draw attention to the fact that the diet industry preys off of people of all sizes, by making them fear fat with misleading & harmful propaganda which falsely states that fat is unhealthy, ugly, wrong, and results from gluttony, laziness & lack of moral character". It therefore encouraged readers to use International No Diet Day to protest against this and raise awareness. [4]

Nowadays, International No Diet Day is sponsored by the National Eating Disorders Association (NEDA). It has a social media campaign that often includes statistical graphics or pictures of food, tagged as #NoDietDay. Australian public health educators, too, use it as a chance to educate. Some restaurants also use the day as advertisement. [2, 5, 6]

Why you shouldn't diet:

Dieting has been associated with physical and mental health issues, such as depression, anxiety, decreased attention span, hair loss, heart and other muscle weakness, various forms of skin irritation, dizziness, eating disorders, menstrual irregularities, various problems of the digestive system, and weakening of the skeletal system. [3]

The diet industry profits off of selling people insecurities about their bodies. [3, 7] Don't buy into their arbitrary standards; stop giving them more money and power.

Most diets fail within 5 years, meaning that even if you manage to lose weight, you will almost certainly regain it. This, too, impacts health negatively. [8, 9, 10]

Your worth as a person does not depend on your weight or on what you eat or on a clothing size.

While thin people are often treated better, it is not because they are "better people", it's because we live in a fatphobic culture. We should work on changing the system, not starve ourselves to fit in it. Stopping to diet both frees mental capacities as well as time and energy that can instead be put into trying to achieve this change.

Sources:

[1] fatlibarchive.org/fat-feminist-herstory-1993

[2] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_No_Diet_Day

[3] fatlibarchive.org/fat-girl-4/

[4] fatlibarchive.org/cooties-7-1998/

[5] nationaleatingdisorders.org/no-diet-day/

[6] YouTube - No Diet Day

[7] fatlibarchive.org/proceedings-of-the-first-feminist-fat-activists-working-meeting-1980/

[8] fatlibarchive.org/more-women-are-on-diets-than-in-jail-1974/

[9] fatlibarchive.org/health-of-fat-people-the-scare-story-your-doctor-wont-tell-you/

[10] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17469900/

#fat liberation

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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Big Tech’s “attention rents”

Tomorrow (Nov 4), I'm keynoting the Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, CA.

The thing is, any feed or search result is "algorithmic." "Just show me the things posted by people I follow in reverse-chronological order" is an algorithm. "Just show me products that have this SKU" is an algorithm. "Alphabetical sort" is an algorithm. "Random sort" is an algorithm.

Any process that involves more information than you can take in at a glance or digest in a moment needs some kind of sense-making. It needs to be put in some kind of order. There's always gonna be an algorithm.

But that's not what we mean by "the algorithm" (TM). When we talk about "the algorithm," we mean a system for ordering information that uses complex criteria that are not precisely known to us, and than can't be easily divined through an examination of the ordering.

There's an idea that a "good" algorithm is one that does not seek to deceive or harm us. When you search for a specific part number, you want exact matches for that search at the top of the results. It's fine if those results include third-party parts that are compatible with the part you're searching for, so long as they're clearly labeled. There's room for argument about how to order those results – do highly rated third-party parts go above the OEM part? How should the algorithm trade off price and quality?

It's hard to come up with an objective standard to resolve these fine-grained differences, but search technologists have tried. Think of Google: they have a patent on "long clicks." A "long click" is when you search for something and then don't search for it again for quite some time, the implication being that you've found what you were looking for. Google Search ads operate a "pay per click" model, and there's an argument that this aligns Google's ad division's interests with search quality: if the ad division only gets paid when you click a link, they will militate for placing ads that users want to click on.

Platforms are inextricably bound up in this algorithmic information sorting business. Platforms have emerged as the endemic form of internet-based business, which is ironic, because a platform is just an intermediary – a company that connects different groups to each other. The internet's great promise was "disintermediation" – getting rid of intermediaries. We did that, and then we got a whole bunch of new intermediaries.

Usually, those groups can be sorted into two buckets: "business customers" (drivers, merchants, advertisers, publishers, creative workers, etc) and "end users" (riders, shoppers, consumers, audiences, etc). Platforms also sometimes connect end users to each other: think of dating sites, or interest-based forums on Reddit. Either way, a platform's job is to make these connections, and that means platforms are always in the algorithm business.

Whether that's matching a driver and a rider, or an advertiser and a consumer, or a reader and a mix of content from social feeds they're subscribed to and other sources of information on the service, the platform has to make a call as to what you're going to see or do.

These choices are enormously consequential. In the theory of Surveillance Capitalism, these choices take on an almost supernatural quality, where "Big Data" can be used to guess your response to all the different ways of pitching an idea or product to you, in order to select the optimal pitch that bypasses your critical faculties and actually controls your actions, robbing you of "the right to a future tense."

I don't think much of this hypothesis. Every claim to mind control – from Rasputin to MK Ultra to neurolinguistic programming to pick-up artists – has turned out to be bullshit. Besides, you don't need to believe in mind control to explain the ways that algorithms shape our beliefs and actions. When a single company dominates the information landscape – say, when Google controls 90% of your searches – then Google's sorting can deprive you of access to information without you knowing it.

If every "locksmith" listed on Google Maps is a fake referral business, you might conclude that there are no more reputable storefront locksmiths in existence. What's more, this belief is a form of self-fulfilling prophecy: if Google Maps never shows anyone a real locksmith, all the real locksmiths will eventually go bust.

If you never see a social media update from a news source you follow, you might forget that the source exists, or assume they've gone under. If you see a flood of viral videos of smash-and-grab shoplifter gangs and never see a news story about wage theft, you might assume that the former is common and the latter is rare (in reality, shoplifting hasn't risen appreciably, while wage-theft is off the charts).

In the theory of Surveillance Capitalism, the algorithm was invented to make advertisers richer, and then went on to pervert the news (by incentivizing "clickbait") and finally destroyed our politics when its persuasive powers were hijacked by Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica, and QAnon grifters to turn millions of vulnerable people into swivel-eyed loons, racists and conspiratorialists.

As I've written, I think this theory gives the ad-tech sector both too much and too little credit, and draws an artificial line between ad-tech and other platform businesses that obscures the connection between all forms of platform decay, from Uber to HBO to Google Search to Twitter to Apple and beyond:

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

As a counter to Surveillance Capitalism, I've proposed a theory of platform decay called enshittification, which identifies how the market power of monopoly platforms, combined with the flexibility of digital tools, combined with regulatory capture, allows platforms to abuse both business-customers and end-users, by depriving them of alternatives, then "twiddling" the knobs that determine the rules of the platform without fearing sanction under privacy, labor or consumer protection law, and finally, blocking digital self-help measures like ad-blockers, alternative clients, scrapers, reverse engineering, jailbreaking, and other tech guerrilla warfare tactics:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

One important distinction between Surveillance Capitalism and enshittification is that enshittification posits that the platform is bad for everyone. Surveillance Capitalism starts from the assumption that surveillance advertising is devastatingly effective (which explains how your racist Facebook uncles got turned into Jan 6 QAnons), and concludes that advertisers must be well-served by the surveillance system.

But advertisers – and other business customers – are very poorly served by platforms. Procter and Gamble reduced its annual surveillance advertising budget from $100m//year to $0/year and saw a 0% reduction in sales. The supposed laser-focused targeting and superhuman message refinement just don't work very well – first, because the tech companies are run by bullshitters whose marketing copy is nonsense, and second because these companies are monopolies who can abuse their customers without losing money.

The point of enshittification is to lock end-users to the platform, then use those locked-in users as bait for business customers, who will also become locked to the platform. Once everyone is holding everyone else hostage, the platform uses the flexibility of digital services to play a variety of algorithmic games to shift value from everyone to the business's shareholders. This flexibility is supercharged by the failure of regulators to enforce privacy, labor and consumer protection standards against the companies, and by these companies' ability to insist that regulators punish end-users, competitors, tinkerers and other third parties to mod, reverse, hack or jailbreak their products and services to block their abuse.

Enshittification needs The Algorithm. When Uber wants to steal from its drivers, it can just do an old-fashioned wage theft, but eventually it will face the music for that kind of scam:

https://apnews.com/article/uber-lyft-new-york-city-wage-theft-9ae3f629cf32d3f2fb6c39b8ffcc6cc6

The best way to steal from drivers is with algorithmic wage discrimination. That's when Uber offers occassional, selective drivers higher rates than it gives to drivers who are fully locked to its platform and take every ride the app offers. The less selective a driver becomes, the lower the premium the app offers goes, but if a driver starts refusing rides, the wage offer climbs again. This isn't the mind-control of Surveillance Capitalism, it's just fraud, shaving fractional pennies off your paycheck in the hopes that you won't notice. The goal is to get drivers to abandon the other side-hustles that allow them to be so choosy about when they drive Uber, and then, once the driver is fully committed, to crank the wage-dial down to the lowest possible setting:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

This is the same game that Facebook played with publishers on the way to its enshittification: when Facebook began aggressively courting publishers, any short snippet republished from the publisher's website to a Facebook feed was likely to be recommended to large numbers of readers. Facebook offered publishers a vast traffic funnel that drove millions of readers to their sites.

But as publishers became more dependent on that traffic, Facebook's algorithm started downranking short excerpts in favor of medium-length ones, building slowly to fulltext Facebook posts that were fully substitutive for the publisher's own web offerings. Like Uber's wage algorithm, Facebook's recommendation engine played its targets like fish on a line.

When publishers responded to declining reach for short excerpts by stepping back from Facebook, Facebook goosed the traffic for their existing posts, sending fresh floods of readers to the publisher's site. When the publisher returned to Facebook, the algorithm once again set to coaxing the publishers into posting ever-larger fractions of their work to Facebook, until, finally, the publisher was totally locked into Facebook. Facebook then started charging publishers for "boosting" – not just to be included in algorithmic recommendations, but to reach their own subscribers.

Enshittification is modern, high-tech enabled, monopolistic form of rent seeking. Rent-seeking is a subtle and important idea from economics, one that is increasingly relevant to our modern economy. For economists, a "rent" is income you get from owning a "factor of production" – something that someone else needs to make or do something.

Rents are not "profits." Profit is income you get from making or doing something. Rent is income you get from owning something needed to make a profit. People who earn their income from rents are called rentiers. If you make your income from profits, you're a "capitalist."

Capitalists and rentiers are in irreconcilable combat with each other. A capitalist wants access to their factors of production at the lowest possible price, whereas rentiers want those prices to be as high as possible. A phone manufacturer wants to be able to make phones as cheaply as possible, while a patent-troll wants to own a patent that the phone manufacturer needs to license in order to make phones. The manufacturer is a capitalism, the troll is a rentier.

The troll might even decide that the best strategy for maximizing their rents is to exclusively license their patents to a single manufacturer and try to eliminate all other phones from the market. This will allow the chosen manufacturer to charge more and also allow the troll to get higher rents. Every capitalist except the chosen manufacturer loses. So do people who want to buy phones. Eventually, even the chosen manufacturer will lose, because the rentier can demand an ever-greater share of their profits in rent.

Digital technology enables all kinds of rent extraction. The more digitized an industry is, the more rent-seeking it becomes. Think of cars, which harvest your data, block third-party repair and parts, and force you to buy everything from acceleration to seat-heaters as a monthly subscription:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

The cloud is especially prone to rent-seeking, as Yanis Varoufakis writes in his new book, Technofeudalism, where he explains how "cloudalists" have found ways to lock all kinds of productive enterprise into using cloud-based resources from which ever-increasing rents can be extracted:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

The endless malleability of digitization makes for endless variety in rent-seeking, and cataloging all the different forms of digital rent-extraction is a major project in this Age of Enshittification. "Algorithmic Attention Rents: A theory of digital platform market power," a new UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose paper by Tim O'Reilly, Ilan Strauss and Mariana Mazzucato, pins down one of these forms:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2023/nov/algorithmic-attention-rents-theory-digital-platform-market-power

The "attention rents" referenced in the paper's title are bait-and-switch scams in which a platform deliberately enshittifies its recommendations, search results or feeds to show you things that are not the thing you asked to see, expect to see, or want to see. They don't do this out of sadism! The point is to extract rent – from you (wasted time, suboptimal outcomes) and from business customers (extracting rents for "boosting," jumbling good results in among scammy or low-quality results).

The authors cite several examples of these attention rents. Much of the paper is given over to Amazon's so-called "advertising" product, a $31b/year program that charges sellers to have their products placed above the items that Amazon's own search engine predicts you will want to buy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is a form of gladiatorial combat that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to surrender an ever-larger share of their profits in rent to Amazon for pride of place. Amazon uses a variety of deceptive labels ("Highly Rated – Sponsored") to get you to click on these products, but most of all, they rely two factors. First, Amazon has a long history of surfacing good results in response to queries, which makes buying whatever's at the top of a list a good bet. Second, there's just so many possible results that it takes a lot of work to sift through the probably-adequate stuff at the top of the listings and get to the actually-good stuff down below.

Amazon spent decades subsidizing its sellers' goods – an illegal practice known as "predatory pricing" that enforcers have increasingly turned a blind eye to since the Reagan administration. This has left it with few competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

The lack of competing retail outlets lets Amazon impose other rent-seeking conditions on its sellers. For example, Amazon has a "most favored nation" requirement that forces companies that raise their prices on Amazon to raise their prices everywhere else, which makes everything you buy more expensive, whether that's a Walmart, Target, a mom-and-pop store, or direct from the manufacturer:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

But everyone loses in this "two-sided market." Amazon used "junk ads" to juice its ad-revenue: these are ads that are objectively bad matches for your search, like showing you a Seattle Seahawks jersey in response to a search for LA Lakers merch:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-02/amazon-boosted-junk-ads-hid-messages-with-signal-ftc-says

The more of these junk ads Amazon showed, the more revenue it got from sellers – and the more the person selling a Lakers jersey had to pay to show up at the top of your search, and the more they had to charge you to cover those ad expenses, and the more they had to charge for it everywhere else, too.

The authors describe this process as a transformation between "attention rents" (misdirecting your attention) to "pecuniary rents" (making money). That's important: despite decades of rhetoric about the "attention economy," attention isn't money. As I wrote in my enshittification essay:

You can't use attention as a medium of exchange. You can't use it as a store of value. You can't use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with "fiat" currency in exchange for it. You have to "monetize" it – that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

The authors come up with some clever techniques for quantifying the ways that this scam harms users. For example, they count the number of places that an advertised product rises in search results, relative to where it would show up in an "organic" search. These quantifications are instructive, but they're also a kind of subtweet at the judiciary.

In 2018, SCOTUS's ruling in American Express v Ohio changed antitrust law for two-sided markets by insisting that so long as one side of a two-sided market was better off as the result of anticompetitive actions, there was no antitrust violation:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3346776

For platforms, that means that it's OK to screw over sellers, advertisers, performers and other business customers, so long as the end-users are better off: "Go ahead, cheat the Uber drivers, so long as you split the booty with Uber riders."

But in the absence of competition, regulation or self-help measures, platforms cheat everyone – that's the point of enshittification. The attention rents that Amazon's payola scheme extract from shoppers translate into higher prices, worse goods, and lower profits for platform sellers. In other words, Amazon's conduct is so sleazy that it even threads the infinitesimal needle that the Supremes created in American Express.

Here's another algorithmic pecuniary rent: Amazon figured out which of its major rivals used an automated price-matching algorithm, and then cataloged which products they had in common with those sellers. Then, under a program called Project Nessie, Amazon jacked up the prices of those products, knowing that as soon as they raised the prices on Amazon, the prices would go up everywhere else, so Amazon wouldn't lose customers to cheaper alternatives. That scam made Amazon at least a billion dollars:

https://gizmodo.com/ftc-alleges-amazon-used-price-gouging-algorithm-1850986303

This is a great example of how enshittification – rent-seeking on digital platforms – is different from analog rent-seeking. The speed and flexibility with which Amazon and its rivals altered their prices requires digitization. Digitization also let Amazon crank the price-gouging dial to zero whenever they worried that regulators were investigating the program.

So what do we do about it? After years of being made to look like fumblers and clowns by Big Tech, regulators and enforcers – and even lawmakers – have decided to get serious.

The neoliberal narrative of government helplessness and incompetence would have you believe that this will go nowhere. Governments aren't as powerful as giant corporations, and regulators aren't as smart as the supergeniuses of Big Tech. They don't stand a chance.

But that's a counsel of despair and a cheap trick. Weaker US governments have taken on stronger oligarchies and won – think of the defeat of JD Rockefeller and the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911. The people who pulled that off weren't wizards. They were just determined public servants, with political will behind them. There is a growing, forceful public will to end the rein of Big Tech, and there are some determined public servants surfing that will.

In this paper, the authors try to give those enforcers ammo to bring to court and to the public. For example, Amazon claims that its algorithm surfaces the products that make the public happy, without the need for competitive pressure to keep it sharp. But as the paper points out, the only successful new rival ecommerce platform – Tiktok – has found an audience for an entirely new category of goods: dupes, "lower-cost products that have the same or better features than higher cost branded products."

The authors also identify "dark patterns" that platforms use to trick users into consuming feeds that have a higher volume of things that the company profits from, and a lower volume of things that users want to see. For example, platforms routinely switch users from a "following" feed – consisting of things posted by people the user asked to hear from – with an algorithmic "For You" feed, filled with the things the company's shareholders wish the users had asked to see.

Calling this a "dark pattern" reveals just how hollow and self-aggrandizing that term is. "Dark pattern" usually means "fraud." If I ask to see posts from people I like, and you show me posts from people who'll pay you for my attention instead, that's not a sophisticated sleight of hand – it's just a scam. It's the social media equivalent of the eBay seller who sends you an iPhone box with a bunch of gravel inside it instead of an iPhone. Tech bros came up with "dark pattern" as a way of flattering themselves by draping themselves in the mantle of dopamine-hacking wizards, rather than unimaginative con-artists who use a computer to rip people off.

These For You algorithmic feeds aren't just a way to increase the load of sponsored posts in a feed – they're also part of the multi-sided ripoff of enshittified platforms. A For You feed allows platforms to trick publishers and performers into thinking that they are "good at the platform," which both convinces to optimize their production for that platform, and also turns them into Judas Goats who conspicuously brag about how great the platform is for people like them, which brings their peers in, too.

In Veena Dubal's essential paper on algorithmic wage discrimination, she describes how Uber drivers whom the algorithm has favored with (temporary) high per-ride rates brag on driver forums about their skill with the app, bringing in other drivers who blame their lower wages on their failure to "use the app right":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

As I wrote in my enshittification essay:

If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you'll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he'd carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers – as a convincer in a "Big Store" con, a way to rope in other suckers who'll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.

Platform can't run the giant teddy-bear con unless there's a For You feed. Some platforms – like Tiktok – tempt users into a For You feed by making it as useful as possible, then salting it with doses of enshittification:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

Other platforms use the (ugh) "dark pattern" of simply flipping your preference from a "following" feed to a "For You" feed. Either way, the platform can't let anyone keep the giant teddy-bear. Once you've tempted, say, sports bros into piling into the platform with the promise of millions of free eyeballs, you need to withdraw the algorithm's favor for their content so you can give it to, say, astrologers. Of course, the more locked-in the users are, the more shit you can pile into that feed without worrying about them going elsewhere, and the more giant teddy-bears you can give away to more business users so you can lock them in and start extracting rent.

For regulators, the possibility of a "good" algorithmic feed presents a serious challenge: when a feed is bad, how can a regulator tell if its low quality is due to the platform's incompetence at blocking spammers or guessing what users want, or whether it's because the platform is extracting rents?

The paper includes a suite of recommendations, including one that I really liked:

Regulators, working with cooperative industry players, would define reportable metrics based on those that are actually used by the platforms themselves to manage search, social media, e-commerce, and other algorithmic relevancy and recommendation engines.

In other words: find out how the companies themselves measure their performance. Find out what KPIs executives have to hit in order to earn their annual bonuses and use those to figure out what the company's performance is – ad load, ratio of organic clicks to ad clicks, average click-through on the first organic result, etc.

They also recommend some hard rules, like reserving a portion of the top of the screen for "organic" search results, and requiring exact matches to show up as the top result.

I've proposed something similar, applicable across multiple kinds of digital businesses: an end-to-end principle for online services. The end-to-end principle is as old as the internet, and it decrees that the role of an intermediary should be to deliver data from willing senders to willing receivers as quickly and reliably as possible. When we apply this principle to your ISP, we call it Net Neutrality. For services, E2E would mean that if I subscribed to your feed, the service would have a duty to deliver it to me. If I hoisted your email out of my spam folder, none of your future emails should land there. If I search for your product and there's an exact match, that should be the top result:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first

One interesting wrinkle to framing platform degradation as a failure to connect willing senders and receivers is that it places a whole host of conduct within the regulatory remit of the FTC. Section 5 of the FTC Act contains a broad prohibition against "unfair and deceptive" practices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

That means that the FTC doesn't need any further authorization from Congress to enforce an end to end rule: they can simply propose and pass that rule, on the grounds that telling someone that you'll show them the feeds that they ask for and then not doing so is "unfair and deceptive."

Some of the other proposals in the paper also fit neatly into Section 5 powers, like a "sticky" feed preference. If I tell a service to show me a feed of the people I follow and they switch it to a For You feed, that's plainly unfair and deceptive.

All of this raises the question of what a post-Big-Tech feed would look like. In "How To Break Up Amazon" for The Sling, Peter Carstensen and Darren Bush sketch out some visions for this:

https://www.thesling.org/how-to-break-up-amazon/

They imagine a "condo" model for Amazon, where the sellers collectively own the Amazon storefront, a model similar to capacity rights on natural gas pipelines, or to patent pools. They see two different ways that search-result order could be determined in such a system:

"specific premium placement could go to those vendors that value the placement the most [with revenue] shared among the owners of the condo"

"leave it to owners themselves to create joint ventures to promote products"

Note that both of these proposals are compatible with an end-to-end rule and the other regulatory proposals in the paper. Indeed, all these policies are easier to enforce against weaker companies that can't afford to maintain the pretense that they are headquartered in some distant regulatory haven, or pay massive salaries to ex-regulators to work the refs on their behalf:

https://www.thesling.org/in-public-discourse-and-congress-revolvers-defend-amazons-monopoly/

The re-emergence of intermediaries on the internet after its initial rush of disintermediation tells us something important about how we relate to one another. Some authors might be up for directly selling books to their audiences, and some drivers might be up for creating their own taxi service, and some merchants might want to run their own storefronts, but there's plenty of people with something they want to offer us who don't have the will or skill to do it all. Not everyone wants to be a sysadmin, a security auditor, a payment processor, a software engineer, a CFO, a tax-preparer and everything else that goes into running a business. Some people just want to sell you a book. Or find a date. Or teach an online class.

Intermediation isn't intrinsically wicked. Intermediaries fall into pits of enshitffication and other forms of rent-seeking when they aren't disciplined by competitors, by regulators, or by their own users' ability to block their bad conduct (with ad-blockers, say, or other self-help measures). We need intermediaries, and intermediaries don't have to turn into rent-seeking feudal warlords. That only happens if we let it happen.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers

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

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

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thegikitiki · 6 months ago

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The Home Laundry Room...

Frigidaire Washers & Dryers, 1972

#1970s #70s #70s appliances #70s ads #vintage ads #1972 #seventies #70s advertising #vintage advertising #laundry room #70s home #70s decor #frigidaire #washer and dryer #magazine ads #reader's digest

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bunnygirlstew · 1 year ago

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Readers Digest has to be the most disappointing case of false advertising.

#tasty bunny #tw vore

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justforbooks · 9 months ago

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Ed McLachlan

Cartoonist whose work appeared in Punch, Private Eye, the Spectator and the Oldie in a 60-year career

The cartoons of Ed McLachlan, who has died aged 84, were at once as deliciously dark and twisted as Charles Addams, as imaginative as William Heath Robinson, as surreal as John Glashan and as quintessentially British as the Punch cartoonist Pont.

Ed’s immediately recognisable pen line, and cast of buck-toothed, big-nosed protagonists, entertained, shocked and outraged from the pages of Punch, Private Eye, the Oldie and Spectator, among many others. Often set in traditional gag cartoon settings, from date nights and office boardrooms to middle-class front rooms and Stannah stairlifts, his cartoons took the mundane and delivered the hilariously absurd.

Giant creatures were often present, creating destruction in otherwise quaintly British scenes. For Private Eye’s 10th anniversary edition in 1971, Ed drew a monstrous hedgehog rushing across a busy road, pulverising an unfortunate car and its occupants as it goes. In another cartoon, an enormous dinosaur rampages through a city past an ongoing cricket match, while an exasperated commentator complains that “once again we have interruption of play caused by movement behind the bowler’s arm”.

Ed combined his vivid imagination with a relentless work ethic, his work also appearing in magazines as various as the New Statesman, the Big Issue, Reader’s Digest, the New Yorker and Playboy.

Initially he had not considered a career in cartoons, despite contributing a number to his college magazine. However, in 1961, while working at a printing company designing posters, he was persuaded by colleagues (by way of a £5 bet) to submit a scrapbook of cartoons to Punch. To his surprise, the magazine bought one for seven guineas, more for an hour’s work than he was earning in a week at the printing office. Within weeks they had bought several more, thus beginning a regular contribution to the magazine that would last until it ceased production in 2002.

Born in Humberstone, Leicestershire, to Edward McLachlan, a structural engineer, and his wife, Josephine, a secretary, Ed went to Wyggeston grammar school, then studied graphic design at Leicester College of Art (now DeMontfort University), graduating in 1959.

Following his success with Punch, in 1965 he went freelance, resolving to establish a career by “making myself a nuisance banging on agencies’ doors”. The following year, he began drawing a series of political cartoons for the Sunday Mirror, under the title McLachlan’s View. In 1967, he started to contribute cartoons to Private Eye, and in 1970 left the Sunday Mirror for the Evening Standard as its new political cartoonist. Between 1972 and 1974, he produced a series of pocket cartoons titled Insiders for the Daily Mirror.

Apart from a brief return to Leicester College of Art as a part-time lecturer in graphics (1967-70), Ed thereon focused on his cartoon and illustration work, which also encompassed children’s books, TV series and advertising campaigns.

In 1969, he wrote and illustrated his first children’s book, Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings. This was the first of four books about a little boy who owns a magic chalkboard, upon which everything he draws becomes real. The books were made into an animated television series, which first aired in Canada before appearing on British television on ITV in 1976, running for 24 episodes. The series was directed by Ivor Wood, best known for shows such as The Magic Roundabout and The Wombles, and narrated by Bernard Cribbins. It remained popular in Canada, where it was remade in 2002.

Ed also wrote and illustrated the children’s books Claude Makes a Change (1979), Magnus in the Land of Lost Property (1985) and The Dragon Who Could Only Breathe Smoke (1985), and illustrated more than 80 books in the Bangers and Mash educational reading series by Paul Groves, which were made into a children’s ITV series in 1989. Nonfiction books include Bill Beaumont’s Bedside Rugby (1986) and John Walker’s Chess for Tomorrow’s Champions (1994), as well as many of the For Dummies instructional series.

Over the years Ed was also in demand for advertising campaigns for brands such as Dunlop, Renault, Alka Seltzer, Dewar’s Whisky and Walkers. Most recently, his cartoons were used for a series of London Underground posters for Timothy Taylor’s Brewery.

He received many awards, including illustrative cartoonist of the year (1980) and advertising cartoonist of the year (1982) from the Cartoonists’ Club of Great Britain, and gag cartoonist of the year twice (1982 and 1997) from the Cartoon Art Trust, which also presented him with a lifetime achievement award in 2011. In 2016, he was given an honorary doctorate from the University of Leicester.

Across the span of his 60-year career, Ed’s style of drawing, a confident ink line and a monochrome wash on artist’s board, remained remarkably consistent. Later in his career, he began to add colour, working skilfully in watercolour on a scale much larger than his cartoons would be reproduced in print. While much of the detail would be lost when the cartoons were shrunk down for reproduction in magazines, when the originals began to be exhibited in a gallery setting – and in the Chris Beetles gallery, of which I am director, from 2001 – his expertise in these mediums could be truly appreciated.

Ed continued to draw cartoons up until his death. In one of his final cartoons, for Private Eye, taste testers at a crisp factory lament their new range of extra crispy snacks, which are so crunchy they have caused one of their colleagues to explode.

He is survived by his wife, Shirley (nee Gerrard), whom he married in 1964, their daughters, Danielle, Joelle and Aimee, and son, Alex, and by four grandchildren.

🔔 Edward Rolland McLachlan, cartoonist, author and illustrator, born 22 April 1940; died 29 September 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books��?

#just for books #Ed McLachlan #in memoriam

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