#aws amazon

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Amazon’s financial shell game let it create an “impossible” monopoly

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then San Francisco (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

For the pro-monopoly crowd that absolutely dominated antitrust law from the Carter administration until 2020, Amazon presents a genuinely puzzling paradox: the company's monopoly power was never supposed to emerge, and if it did, it should have crumbled immediately.

Pro-monopoly economists embody Ely Devons's famous aphorism that "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Rather than using the way the world actually works as their starting point for how to think about it, they build elaborate models out of abstract principles like "rational actors." The resulting mathematical models are so abstractly elegant that it's easy to forget that they're just imaginative exercises, disconnected from reality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/03/all-models-are-wrong/#some-are-useful

These models predicted that it would be impossible for Amazon to attain monopoly power. Even if they became a monopoly – in the sense of dominating sales of various kinds of goods – the company still wouldn't get monopoly power.

For example, if Amazon tried to take over a category by selling goods below cost ("predatory pricing"), then rivals could just wait until the company got tired of losing money and put prices back up, and then those rivals could go back to competing. And if Amazon tried to keep the loss-leader going indefinitely by "cross-subsidizing" the losses with high-margin profits from some other part of its business, rivals could sell those high margin goods at a lower margin, which would lure away Amazon customers and cut the supply lines for the price war it was fighting with its discounted products.

That's what the model predicted, but it's not what happened in the real world. In the real world, Amazon was able use its access to the capital markets to embark on scorched-earth predatory pricing campaigns. When diapers.com refused to sell out to Amazon, the company casually committed $100m to selling diapers below cost. Diapers.com went bust, Amazon bought it for pennies on the dollar and shut it down:

https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/13/18563379/amazon-predatory-pricing-antitrust-law

Investors got the message: don't compete with Amazon. They can remain predatory longer than you can remain solvent.

Now, not everyone shared the antitrust establishment's confidence that Amazon couldn't create a durable monopoly with market power. In 2017, Lina Khan – then a third year law student – published "Amazon's Antitrust Paradox," a landmark paper arguing that Amazon had all the tools it needed to amass monopoly power:

https://www.yalelawjournal.org/note/amazons-antitrust-paradox

Today, Khan is chair of the FTC, and has brought a case against Amazon that builds on some of the theories from that paper. One outcome of that suit is an unprecedented look at Amazon's internal operations. But, as the Institute for Local Self-Reliance's Stacy Mitchell describes in a piece for The Atlantic, key pieces of information have been totally redacted in the court exhibits:

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/amazon-profits-antitrust-ftc/677580/

The most important missing datum: how much money Amazon makes from each of its lines of business. Amazon's own story is that it basically breaks even on its retail operation, and keeps the whole business afloat with profits from its AWS cloud computing division. This is an important narrative, because if it's true, then Amazon can't be forcing up retail prices, which is the crux of the FTC's case against the company.

Here's what we know for sure about Amazon's retail business. First: merchants can't live without Amazon. The majority of US households have Prime, and 90% of Prime households start their ecommerce searches on Amazon; if they find what they're looking for, they buy it and stop. Thus, merchants who don't sell on Amazon just don't sell. This is called "monopsony power" and it's a lot easier to maintain than monopoly power. For most manufacturers, a 10% overnight drop in sales is a catastrophe, so a retailer that commands even a 10% market-share can extract huge concessions from its suppliers. Amazon's share of most categories of goods is a lot higher than 10%!

What kind of monopsony power does Amazon wield? Well, for one thing, it is able to levy a huge tax on its sellers. Add up all the junk-fees Amazon charges its platform sellers and it comes out to 45-51%:

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

Competitive businesses just don't have 45% margins! No one can afford to kick that much back to Amazon. What is a merchant to do? Sell on Amazon and you lose money on every sale. Don't sell on Amazon and you don't get any business.

The only answer: raise prices on Amazon. After all, Prime customers – the majority of Amazon's retail business – don't shop for competitive prices. If Amazon wants a 45% vig, you can raise your Amazon prices by a third and just about break even.

But Amazon is wise to that: they have a "most favored nation" rule that punishes suppliers who sell goods more cheaply in rival stores, or even on their own site. The punishments vary, from banishing your products to page ten million of search-results to simply kicking you off the platform. With publishers, Amazon reserves the right to lower the prices they set when listing their books, to match the lowest price on the web, and paying publishers less for each sale.

That means that suppliers who sell on Amazon (which is anyone who wants to stay in business) have to dramatically hike their prices on Amazon, and when they do, they also have to hike their prices everywhere else (no wonder Prime customers don't bother to search elsewhere for a better deal!).

Now, Amazon says this is all wrong. That 45-51% vig they claim from business customers is barely enough to break even. The company's profits – they insist – come from selling AWS cloud service. The retail operation is just a public service they provide to us with cross-subsidy from those fat AWS margins.

This is a hell of a claim. Last year, Amazon raked in $130 billion in seller fees. In other words: they booked more revenue from junk fees than Bank of America made through its whole operation. Amazon's junk fees add up to more than all of Meta's revenues:

https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2023/q4/AMZN-Q4-2023-Earnings-Release.pdf

Amazon claims that none of this is profit – it's just covering their operating expenses. According to Amazon, its non-AWS units combined have a one percent profit margin.

Now, this is an eye-popping claim indeed. Amazon is a public company, which means that it has to make thorough quarterly and annual financial disclosures breaking down its profit and loss. You'd think that somewhere in those disclosures, we'd find some details.

You'd think so, but you'd be wrong. Amazon's disclosures do not break out profits and losses by segment. SEC rules actually require the company to make these per-segment disclosures:

https://scholarship.law.stjohns.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3524&context=lawreview#:~:text=If%20a%20company%20has%20more,income%20taxes%20and%20extraordinary%20items.

That rule was enacted in 1966, out of concern that companies could use cross-subsidies to fund predatory pricing and other anticompetitive practices. But over the years, the SEC just…stopped enforcing the rule. Companies have "near total managerial discretion" to lump business units together and group their profits and losses in bloated, undifferentiated balance-sheet items:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2021/dec/crouching-tiger-hidden-dragons

As Mitchell points you, it's not just Amazon that flouts this rule. We don't know how much money Google makes on Youtube, or how much Apple makes from the App Store (Apple told a federal judge that this number doesn't exist). Warren Buffett – with significant interest in hundreds of companies across dozens of markets – only breaks out seven segments of profit-and-loss for Berkshire Hathaway.

Recall that there is one category of data from the FTC's antitrust case against Amazon that has been completely redacted. One guess which category that is! Yup, the profit-and-loss for its retail operation and other lines of business.

These redactions are the judge's fault, but the real fault lies with the SEC. Amazon is a public company. In exchange for access to the capital markets, it owes the public certain disclosures, which are set out in the SEC's rulebook. The SEC lets Amazon – and other gigantic companies – get away with a degree of secrecy that should disqualify it from offering stock to the public. As Mitchell says, SEC chairman Gary Gensler should adopt "new rules that more concretely define what qualifies as a segment and remove the discretion given to executives."

Amazon is the poster-child for monopoly run amok. As Yanis Varoufakis writes in Technofeudalism, Amazon has actually become a post-capitalist enterprise. Amazon doesn't make profits (money derived from selling goods); it makes rents (money charged to people who are seeking to make a profit):

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

Profits are the defining characteristic of a capitalist economy; rents are the defining characteristic of feudalism. Amazon looks like a bazaar where thousands of merchants offer goods for sale to the public, but look harder and you discover that all those stallholders are totally controlled by Amazon. Amazon decides what goods they can sell, how much they cost, and whether a customer ever sees them. And then Amazon takes $0.45-51 out of every dollar. Amazon's "marketplace" isn't like a flea market, it's more like the interconnected shops on Disneyland's Main Street, USA: the sign over the door might say "20th Century Music Company" or "Emporium," but they're all just one store, run by one company.

And because Amazon has so much control over its sellers, it is able to exercise power over its buyers. Amazon's search results push down the best deals on the platform and promote results from more expensive, lower-quality items whose sellers have paid a fortune for an "ad" (not really an ad, but rather the top spot in search listings):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/29/aethelred-the-unready/#not-one-penny-for-tribute

This is "Amazon's pricing paradox." Amazon can claim that it offers low-priced, high-quality goods on the platform, but it makes $38b/year pushing those good deals way, way down in its search results. The top result for your Amazon search averages 29% more expensive than the best deal Amazon offers. Buy something from those first four spots and you'll pay a 25% premium. On average, you need to pick the seventeenth item on the search results page to get the best deal:

https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/faculty_scholarship/3645/

For 40 years, pro-monopoly economists claimed that it would be impossible for Amazon to attain monopoly power over buyers and sellers. Today, Amazon exercises that power so thoroughly that its junk-fee revenues alone exceed the total revenues of Bank of America. Amazon's story – that these fees barely stretch to covering its costs – assumes a nearly inconceivable level of credulity in its audience. Regrettably – for the human race – there is a cohort of senior, highly respected economists who possess this degree of credulity and more.

Of course, there's an easy way to settle the argument: Amazon could just comply with SEC regs and break out its P&L for its e-commerce operation. I assure you, they're not hiding this data because they think you'll be pleasantly surprised when they do and they don't want to spoil the moment.

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/2024/03/01/managerial-discretion/#junk-fees

Image: Doc Searls (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/docsearls/4863121221/

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

[bespoke-nautilus]

I fully blame @systlin and @batsintheshadows for this

Have a Tradwife Sauron, being completely ignored by Morgoth

[adampage]

hamgman did you wear amazon boots to christopher daniels’ funeral

look at at them

are those not the same boots? (screengrab of hangman’s boots taken from @likesummerrainn’s gifs)

me: “are those - ?”

hangman: “the amazon metrocharm diego 01s? yes”

[homelanderpilled]

can’t even focus on homelander this season because firecracker is so hot

[aropride]

ordered masks from my local mask bloc in early march and they usually take ~a month to ship but i hadnt gotten mine when i moved out in mid may and i havent gotten a call from the school abt a package being there for me so . thats awesome :( they also havent updated their instagram since january so idek if theyre even active

[optogeneticist-nsfw]

It sucks that your pixiv was taken down hope that you can use another site/app for all of your beautiful art!!! maybe discord or dropbox?

No worries! I've mirrored everything to AO3 so things can be properly age-restricted/tagged/etc (I really liked that Pixiv had mature content settings, so I was looking for that in a replacement.) I'm using an AWS S3 bucket for hosting (it's linked in all the works, and there's a simple navigation system in place if you want to poke around.)

[maretriarch]

just remembered darayas vegan leather punk bracelets

[sarafangirlart]

Haepheastus having proto robot servants is undertapped aspect of his characters, especially if you want to treat his creations like his daughters. And in my opinion, this actually could work in Wonder Woman who uses a lot of greek mythology characters. One of them could become an Amazon and fight with wonder woman.

I haven’t watched this show but I really dig Hephaestus’s personality, he’s actually smart and capable like in mythology (unlike his GOW version). Like I can genuinely imagine this version humiliating and divorcing Aphrodite and then marrying Aglaia.

I don’t really care for Wonder Woman’s interpretation of mythology, the goddesses are too girlbossyfied and there is that one comic that portrays the Amazons as rapists even tho it’s ironically not how it is in mythology despite how ppl expect it to be, also with Ares being cartoonishly evil despite being the father of the Amazons (yeah believe it or not just bc I don’t like ppl woobifying him doesn’t mean I like villainizing him) tho robot amazons would be cool af.

[mydollsaregay]

just having some thoughts about the disney dolls.

while the disney ag stuff is pretty cute (if a bit lacking in quality for the price - especially the extra outfits), i am continually disappointed that they haven’t made the main outfits for the dolls available separately. I’m sorry, but I’m not spending upwards of $100 just because i want a cute rapunzel dress for one of my dolls to wear on halloween 😅

i know that not having the outfits available is likely part of the marketing strategy. lots of parents would think the same thing: “why should i buy another doll when i can get this outfit for the doll my kid already has?” as a result, ag has an incentive to not let it be that easy. if people can take the cheap way out, they will.

however, there is a huge market for princess outfits for existing dolls. i got all of mine from amazon, and there is a shockingly wide selection. unfortunately, most princesses do not have a nice quality version available from any seller - there are a handful of really nice ones for around $25 (there are some frozen ones and a tiana dress that are truly stellar), but god forbid you want a merida dress that looks half decent or a mulan outfit that isn’t a fancy dress she would hate. it’s clearly a thing that people want! heck, i want it! idk.

i’m sure they make more money this way, which means that it’s never, ever going to change, but I don’t like it lol.

i would forgive all of this, however, if only ag would give me my hearts desire: a set of armor for mulan as an extra outfit. i would HAPPILY pay the $70 that most “extra fancy” ag outfits are for that. honestly, i would probably pay even more. because NO ONE is making it. i would happily pay an independent artist on etsy upwards of a hundred buckaroos for such a thing, as i know it would be insanely complicated. however, no one has taken on the task. because its insanely complicated.

anyway. this is a bit of a ramble. i really just want to dress up my dolls in cool armor. someone please make armor for my dolls.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The internet is not a (link)dump truck

Monday (October 2), I'll be in Boise to host an event with VE Schwab. On October 7–8, I'm in Milan to keynote Wired Nextfest.

The second decade of the 21st century is truly a bounteous time. My backyard has produced a bumper crop of an invasive species of mosquito that is genuinely innovative: rather than confining itself to biting in the dusk and dawn golden hours, these stinging clouds of flying vampires bite at every hour that God sends:

https://themagnet.substack.com/p/the-magnet-081-war-with-mosquitoes

Here in the twilight of capitalism's planet-devouring, half-century orgy of wanton destruction, there's more news every day than I can possibly write a full blog post about every day, and as with many weeks, I have arrived at Saturday with a substantial backlog of links that didn't fit into the week's "Hey look at this" linkdumps.

Thus, the eighth installment in my ongoing, semiregular series of Saturday linkdumps:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

This week, the miscellany begins with the first hesitant signs of an emerging, post-neoliberal order. The FTC, under direction of the force-of-nature that is Lina Khan, has brought its long-awaited case antitrust case against Amazon. I am very excited about this. Disoriented, even.

When was the last time you greeted every day with a warm feeling because high officials in the US government were working for the betterment of every person in the land? It's enough to make one giddy. Plus, the New York Times let me call Amazon "the apex predator of our platform era"! Now that it's in the "paper of record," it's official:

https://pluralistic.net/ApexPredator

Now, lefties have been predicting capitalism's imminent demise since The Communist Manifesto, but any fule kno that the capitalist word for "crisis" also translates as "opportunity." Like the bedbugs that mutated to thrive in clouds of post-war DDT, capitalism has adapted to each crisis, emerging in a new, more virulent form:

https://boingboing.net/2023/09/30/bedbugs-take-paris.html

But "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop" (Stein's Law). Perhaps our mistake was in waiting for capitalism to give way to socialism, rather than serving as a transitional phase between feudalism and…feudalism.

What's the difference between feudalism and capitalism? According to Yanis Varoufakis, it comes down to whether we value rents (income you get from owning things) over profits (income you get from doing things):

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

By that metric, the FTC's case against Amazon is really a case against feudalism. Through predatory pricing and acquisitions, Amazon has turned itself into a chokepoint that every merchant, writer and publisher has to pass through in order to reach their customers. Amazon charges a fortune to traverse that chokepoint (estimates range from 45% to 51% of gross revenues) and then forces sellers to raise their prices everywhere else when they hike their Amazon prices so they can afford Amazon's tolls. It's "an economy-wide hidden tax":

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-ftc-sues-to-break-up-amazon-over

Now, feudalism isn't a straightforward proposition. Like, are you sure you mean feudalism? Maybe you mean "manorialism" (they're easy to mix up):

https://locusmag.com/2021/01/cory-doctorow-neofeudalism-and-the-digital-manor/

Plus, much of what we know about the "Dark Ages" comes from grifter doofuses like Voltaire, a man who was capable of dismissing the 800 year Holy Roman Empire with a single quip ("neither holy, roman, nor an empire"). But the reality is a lot more complicated, gnarly and interesting.

That's where medievalist Eleanor Janeaga comes in, and her "Against Voltaire, or, the shortest possible introduction to the Holy Roman Empire" is a banger:

https://going-medieval.com/2023/09/29/against-voltaire-or-the-shortest-possible-introduction-to-the-holy-roman-empire/

Now, while it's true that Enlightenment thinkers gave medieval times a bum rap, it's likewise true that a key element of Enlightenment justice is transparency: justice being done, and being seen to be done. One way to distinguish "modern" justice from "medieval" trials is to ask whether the public is allowed to watch the trial, see the evidence, and understand the conclusion.

Here again, there is evidence that capitalism was a transitional phase between feudalism and feudalism. The Amazon trial has already been poisoned by farcical redactions, in which every key figure is blacked out of the public record:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-09-27-redacted-case-against-amazon/

This is part of a trend. The other gigantic antitrust case underway right now, against Google, has turned into a star chamber as well, with Judge Amit P Mehta largely deferring to Google's frequent demands to close the court and seal the exhibits:

https://usvgoogle.org/trial-update-9-22

Google's rationale for this is darkly hilarious: if the public is allowed to know what's happening in its trial, this will be converted into "clickbait," which is to say, "The public is interested in this case, and if they are informed of the evidence against us, that information will be spread widely because it is so interesting":

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/secrecy-is-systemic

Thankfully, this secrecy is struggling to survive the public outrage it prompted. While the court's Zoom feed has been shuttered and while Judge Mehta is still all-too-willing to clear the courtroom during key testimony, at least the DoJ's exhibits aren't being sealed at the same clip as before:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/27/23892215/google-search-antitrust-trial-documents-public-again-judge-mehta-rules

In 2023, the world comes at you fast. There's an epic struggle over the future of corporate dominance playing out all around us. I mean, there are French antitrust enforcers kicking down doors of giant tech companies and ransacking their offices for evidence of nefarious anticompetitive plots:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/28/23894863/nvidia-offices-raided-french-competition-authority

As ever, the question is "socialism or barbarism." But don't say that too loud: in America, socialism is a slur, one that dates back to the Reconstruction era, when pro-slavery factions called Black voting "socialism in South Carolina."

Ever since, white nationalists used "socialism" make Americans believe that "socialism" was an "extremist" view, so they'd stand by while everyone from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump smeared their opponents as "Marxists":

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4066499-trump-paints-2024-campaign-as-righteous-crusade/

As Heather Cox Richardson puts it for The Atlantic, "There is a long-standing fight over whether support for the modern-day right is about taxes or race. The key is that it is about taxes and race at the same time":

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/09/american-socialism-racist-origins/675453/

The cruelty isn't the point, in other words. Cruelty is the tactic. The point is power. Remember, no war but class war. All of this is in service to paying workers less so that bosses and investors can have more.

Take "essential workers," everyone from teachers to zookeepers, nurses to librarians, EMTs to daycare workers. All of these "caring" professions are paid sub-living wages, and all of these workers are told that "they matter too much to earn a living wage":

https://www.okdoomer.io/praise-doesnt-pay/

The "you matter too much to pay" mind-zap is called "vocational awe," a crucial term introduced by Ettarh Fobazi in her 2018 paper:

https://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocational-awe/

Vocational awe is how creative workers – like the writers who just won their strike and the actors who are still fighting – are conned into working at starvation wages. As the old joke goes, "What, and give up show-business?"

https://ask.metafilter.com/117904/Whats-the-joke-thas-hase-the-punchline-what-and-give-up-show-business

In this moment of Big Tech-driven, AI-based wage suppression, mass surveillance, corruption and inequality, perhaps we should take a moment to remind ourselves that cyberpunk was a warning, not a suggestion. Or, more to the point, the warning was about high-tech corporate takeover of our lives, and the suggestion was that we could seize the means of computation (a synonym for William Gibson's "the street finds its own use for things"):

http://www.seizethemeansofcomputation.org/

We are living in a lopsided cyberpunk future, long on high-tech corporate takeover, short of computation seizing. This point is made sharply in JWZ's "Dispatch From The Cyberpunk City," which is beautifully packaged as a Hypercard stack that you run on an in-browser Mac Plus emulator from the Internet Archive:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/09/neuroblast-dispatch-from-the-cyberpunk-city/

Cast your gaze ahead, to the near future: Public space has all but disappeared. Corporate landlords use AI-powered robots to harass the homeless. The robots, built slick and white with an R2-D2 friendliness now most resemble giant butt plugs covered in graffiti and grime.

Science fiction doesn't have to be a warning. It can also be a wellspring of hope. That's what I tried to do with The Lost Cause, my forthcoming Green New Deal novel, which Bill McKibben called "The first great YIMBY novel":

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865939/the-lost-cause

Writing a hopeful novel of ecological, social and economic redemption, driven by solidarity, repair, and library socialism, was a powerful tonic against despair in this smoke-smothered, flooded, mosquito-bitten time. And while the book isn't out yet, there are early indications I succeeded, like Kim Stanley Robinson's reaction, "Along with the rush of adrenaline I felt a solid surge of hope. May it go like this."

And now, we have a concurring judgment from The Library Journal, who yesterday published their review, which concludes: "a thought-provoking story, with a message of hope in a near-future that looks increasingly bleak":

https://www.libraryjournal.com/review/the-lost-cause-2196385

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/2023/09/30/mesclada/#melange

[littlewigglers]

About my tanks

Usually wouldn't post this but since it's gone from every so often to twice a week now in my asks or messages. Ranging from well meaning to pretty rude.

I am aware the tank I keep my giants in is too small, I've said so before in posts. The person I got them from said my tank was fine at the time so that's why I went ahead and got them.

I do plan to upgrade the tank but I have a number of limiting factors - Money, I don't have £200-300+ to drop on this tank, new substrate and stronger shelves to hold the extra weight. - No car, anything I'd buy has to be delivered to me which greatly limits my options to local stores or very expensive shipping - Where I live limiting my options. All I can get delivered to me(at a reasonable price) currently is either exoterra tanks or fishtanks with lids that wouldn't work/no lids.

So yes I'm aware of the issues and I'm doing what I can with what I've got until I am able to get a new tank. I've plans in place to hopefully have it sorted by late spring.

[the-labyrinth-of-me]

Woke up this morning and went to the kitchen to choose what to have for breakfast. As I opened the kitchen cabinet, I was greeted by five little yellow rubber ducks sitting next to each other. I raised a brow. I closed the cabinet. "What about those ducks?", I asked my husband. "We gotta look up the number of the FBC."

"What ducks?", my husband asked.

"Those ducks?" I opened the cabinet.

"I don't see any ducks", he said and left the kitchen.

Very funny. And I thought I was the one still tired.

Went to the bathroom then where another rubber duck sat on the toilet's lid. Okay, no morning leak for me then.

Another set of ducks on the dining table and - of course - around my little Alan Wake cardboard cutout. I suspected he had something to do with this. But I didn't hear any typewriter keys clacking. I don't even have a typewriter. I got nervous. More and more ducks appeared. I tried to ignore them as best I could and went on with my business to get ready for work, but that uneasy feeling wouldn't go away. My husband left the house to go to work, still unsuspecting. I, however, knew. And I still have goosebumps as I write this. I knew what this was. The Federal Bureau of Control called this an AWE, an Altered World Event. I stood there, deciding what to do. The Alan Wake cutout stared back at me, and he seemed to be uneasy as well.

I wouldn't let my house be taken over by those stupid ducks.

I put gloves on and avoided direct eye contact with them, and put them in a box. One, however, escaped with the speed of light. I jumped. It was gone. I'm too afraid to look for it. I still wait for the FBC to call me. I hope they're not under another lockdown.

[inniave]

ended up without basal drip for a few hours last night and i’m still so fucking sick

[plasticfangtastic]

The Boys season 4 trailer rambles 2/2

there will be some gore in this one so y'all been warn but at the same time it was on the trailer so...

who the fuck is this? I thought it was Victoria Neuman at first? but she seems to be turning into a different person behind the peel-off mask, is she Hughie's new GF, is it Victoria and the lighting of the scene makes it seem off? (like she looks black as she peels her skin instead of the olive complexion of the damaged face)

then we have mystery person 2? they clearly just killed off people here and Hughie and Annie? (is it annie I dunno her hair looks so dark but again lighting and my screeen being eh...)

I was hoping this scene below was Homelander's doing like his catharsis moment when he finally has revenge

but it might just be mystery person 2's doing before being found/spotted by Hughie and Annie.

I wanna believe this are all a sequence of events, Homie sitting down with Mirrorlander speaking to him, he decides is time to enact revenge, he flys away finds a lab in the floors bellow or the guys apartment, kills the guy inside (who looks to be wearing a labcoat) and then cleans his tears.

this on the other hand i do feel bad if HL is being a hypocrite and kills defective supes just like the scientist before him, and if he is here forcing these scientist to do some questionable things on his behalf... go for it babygirl you do you, be happy, torture these fuckers cuz i bet they are all Vought staff anyways so they all probably monstrous people too.

I probably can explain this as just Kripke being himself and the writers being edgelords (so lame) but why are the V-powered animals so aggreasive what is in the formula that is causing these mostly docile and domesticated animals to become hyper-violent? we even see a group of sheep kill and eat a man, like i get chickens killing people bcuz chickens are just viscious animals at times but sheep? like did the compound V made them carnivorous suddenly? can their teeth or stomach even handle meat? is this by design? or did Victoria Neuman feed V to animals as a way to safely test her supe killing virus (as their farm looks like the one where MM and Butcher find the Gen V virus leg) and somehow we learn that V makes animals violent? Is that why Supes are so prone to violence, is it a side effect of compound V? Is that why HL is this insane?

am also insanely curious as to what's going on here? are they chasing after Kimiko, Black Noir Dos, The Deep as this might be in the flat iron building and there is spots of blood just scattered on the steps.

there was also the fight with deep and starlight and butcher and BN v.2 but I imagine the boys location gets leaked and thats just the Seven retaliating.

[as-kind-as-summer]

Actually heartbreaking how terrible most LotR merch is and how nonexistent The Hobbit and Rings of Power merch is

[ourincrediblejourney]

28 August 2023:

I am thrilled to announce that the Fig team will be joining Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Amazon has acquired Fig's technology! ... Existing users will continue to be able to use Fig and will receive ongoing support. What's more, we are now making all the paid Fig Team features completely free. New users will not be able to sign up for Fig's products right now while we focus on optimizing them for existing customers and addressing some needs identified to integrate Fig with AWS. ... We can't wait to continue to innovate with you.

5 February 2024:

Fig is sunsetting, migrate to Amazon CodeWhisperer Happy 2024! ... We will continue supporting Fig until September 1. ... To all Fig’s users, customers, and contributors, we are incredibly grateful for your feedback, contributions, and support over the years. We are thrilled to have made such an impact and we are beyond excited to continue working with you all while we continue to ship!