#Ad Network For Tech Support

[adsnetwork]

Best Travel Ad Network Advertisement

What are Travel Ad Networks? 

An online advertising network, often known as an Ad network, is a company that connects advertisers with websites wishing to run advertisements. An advertising network's primary responsibility is to fulfill the publisher's ad supply and match it with the advertiser's demand.

Online ad networks differ from traditional media ad networks in that they use a central ad server to distribute adverts to consumers, enabling targeting, tracking, and reporting of impressions in ways that are not possible with traditional media alternatives.

A platform called Travel Ad Network offers online travel advertising options. The sector develops, produces, and distributes online advertising campaigns and personalized advertising programs for travel websites. Travel Ad Network serves global customers.

Best Travel Ad Networks for Advertisement:-

7Search PPC 

7Search PPC is one of the leading ad networks. They always worked to benefit their advertisers and publishers' needs.

7Search PPC is often an all-in-one advertising solution for travel ad publishers and advertisers. They also have a straightforward registration process along with indefinite services.

7SearchPPC.com offers Google Adsense alternatives for publishers and pay-per-click services for advertisers. They help advertisers grow their ROI and reach by supplying them with high-quality direct traffic. By offering high-performing advertising, we also assist publishers in making money from their websites. 7Search PPC using sophisticated analytics & bidding on an extensive network of traffic sources. Also, offer alternatives to Adsense for modest websites.

They have various ad formats, including mobile ads, display ads, and pay-per-click ad models.

Along with travel ads, they offer various categories, including pharmacy, entertainment, media, etc. 7Search PPC also provides excellent payment options, including Bitcoin, PayPal, Credit/Debit Cards, etc.

Google Adsense: 

When talking about ad networks, how can we skip Google Adsense? 

Google launched the Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising program called Google Adsense. It was introduced in 2003 and automatically distributed text, pictures, video, and rich media advertisements relevant to the audience and site content.

Pay Per Click or Pay Per model is the basis for calculating the publisher's revenue. The benefit of Google Adsense is that you can apply for an account even if your site has little traffic, and you can even apply for an account with a free Blogspot blog.

Facebook Ads:

There are many distinct types of Facebook advertisements, each with advantages and disadvantages specific to marketers wishing to use Facebook. 

With a headline, copy, and image, Facebook marketplace advertising can be seen in the side columns of the Facebook website.

Through Facebook ads called "Boosted Posts," businesses can promote a single organic post on their Facebook business page for a set fee. The promoted post reaches more audiences and fans than a standard post.

Tumblr Ads:

Tumblr advertisements are available in a variety of formats. Tumblr Spotlight and Radar let "sponsors," or advertisers, be displayed in areas where Tumblr highlights specific content and accounts. The Tumblr community is busy and vibrant, boasting 54 million users and 70 million daily posts that receive over half a billion page views. It is one of the best ad networks for travel advertisements to increase audiences and consumers.

Additionally, Tumblr provides sponsored web post advertising, which are bits of Tumblr content created by advertisers that are mixed in with regular, user-generated material on users' primary dashboard feeds. Minor money signs are used to identify these Tumblr ads as advertisements. You must sign up as a Tumblr sponsor for your online ads on the Tumblr platform.

Reddit Ads:

Reddit ads are banners with a headline, a destination URL, and a potential image. Reddit advertising operates under a bid-based structure, allowing marketers to set campaign budgets and specify the duration of their campaigns. Reddit ads frequently cost less than one cent per impression and offer distinctive targeting capabilities.

People can upvote or downvote an ad, providing advertisers with a quick read on whether users like or detest an ad, which really sets Reddit ads apart. Like every other post on Reddit, each advertisement has a comment section. Advertisers may find this handy as it enables users to give feedback sent directly to the advertiser.

The most effective Reddit advertisements respect their target - Young, tech-savvy people, usually men, are the primary audience of Reddit. Posting a Reddit advertisement can feel a little bit like playing with fire because the Reddit community as a whole is quite cautious of overt marketing. If they are done right, Reddit ads may generate a lot of buzz for little money. Through their website, you can promote Reddit.

YouTube Ads:

Advertisements that show on Google's video-sharing website are known as YouTube ads. Since Google took over YouTube, YouTube advertising has become almost as simple and personalized as AdWords advertising.

YouTube advertisements offer multiple targeting possibilities and a variety of ad types. YouTube advertising may show as banners, in-video overlays, in-stream videos (commercials that play before or after another YouTube video), and other general configurations.

Instagram Ads:

Instagram advertisements are images or videos that are displayed across the platform in locations such as the News Feed, Explore page, Reels feed, Stories, and Instagram Shops.

Instagram is one of the biggest travel lovers' platforms where users go to check out millions of travel posts in a single day. If you have a travel website or a tour and travel forum, nothing is better than promoting your business through Instagram ads. 

Propeller Ads:

This ad alternative is best for popunder ad formats. Providing possibilities for both new and established blog sites, PropellerAds is a rapidly expanding platform. Popunder adverts, which run behind the active browser window and manifest themselves once this window is closed, are a trademark of PropellerAds.

PropellerAds offers more targeted and non-targeted ad options for desktops, such as native ads, banners, and video ads. Additionally serving mobile applications and websites, PropellerAds even provides a push notification ad format for these channels.

Pros and Cons of Travel Ad Networks:

When discussing the pros and cons of using/hiring an ad network, choosing their best and most destructive efforts is not entirely simple. But here is a list of some of their pros and cons according to the majority of users:

Pros:-

Dedicated Support: Travel Ad Networks has a massive team of qualified professionals, ad experts, several upgraded tools, affiliates, and various advertisement roles. These qualities of an ad network help a travel advertiser to get the right traffic for their ads.

Convenience: You don't need to use valuable time from your busy schedule to learn and practice new tactics. Allow the professionals to do the work on your behalf.

Affordable: As you work with ad networks on a cost-per-click or cost-per-install module. About your typical revenue per user, you have an excellent notion. For help conducting a cost-benefit analysis of your investments, you may also ask.

Cons:-

Fake Traffic: First, Non-human technologies are at their height as the market shifts away from the human touch day by day, increasing the likelihood of fraud. Your money might all be wasted because of this. 

Quality Doubts: Because ad networks only provide a certain amount of traffic, there is no assurance that this traffic will ever result in conversions and raise income. Therefore, try to stay away from ad networks with a negative reputation because your money will be lost in an instant without any real gain.

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[mostlysignssomeportents]

Your car spies on you and rats you out to insurance companies

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW (Mar 13) in SAN FRANCISCO with ROBIN SLOAN, then Toronto, NYC, Anaheim, and more!

Another characteristically brilliant Kashmir Hill story for The New York Times reveals another characteristically terrible fact about modern life: your car secretly records fine-grained telemetry about your driving and sells it to data-brokers, who sell it to insurers, who use it as a pretext to gouge you on premiums:

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/11/technology/carmakers-driver-tracking-insurance.html

Almost every car manufacturer does this: Hyundai, Nissan, Ford, Chrysler, etc etc:

https://www.repairerdrivennews.com/2020/09/09/ford-state-farm-ford-metromile-honda-verisk-among-insurer-oem-telematics-connections/

This is true whether you own or lease the car, and it's separate from the "black box" your insurer might have offered to you in exchange for a discount on your premiums. In other words, even if you say no to the insurer's carrot – a surveillance-based discount – they've got a stick in reserve: buying your nonconsensually harvested data on the open market.

I've always hated that saying, "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product," the reason being that it posits decent treatment as a customer reward program, like the little ramekin warm nuts first class passengers get before takeoff. Companies don't treat you well when you pay them. Companies treat you well when they fear the consequences of treating you badly.

Take Apple. The company offers Ios users a one-tap opt-out from commercial surveillance, and more than 96% of users opted out. Presumably, the other 4% were either confused or on Facebook's payroll. Apple – and its army of cultists – insist that this proves that our world's woes can be traced to cheapskate "consumers" who expected to get something for nothing by using advertising-supported products.

But here's the kicker: right after Apple blocked all its rivals from spying on its customers, it began secretly spying on those customers! Apple has a rival surveillance ad network, and even if you opt out of commercial surveillance on your Iphone, Apple still secretly spies on you and uses the data to target you for ads:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

Even if you're paying for the product, you're still the product – provided the company can get away with treating you as the product. Apple can absolutely get away with treating you as the product, because it lacks the historical constraints that prevented Apple – and other companies – from treating you as the product.

As I described in my McLuhan lecture on enshittification, tech firms can be constrained by four forces:

I. Competition

II. Regulation

III. Self-help

IV. Labor

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/30/go-nuts-meine-kerle/#ich-bin-ein-bratapfel

When companies have real competitors – when a sector is composed of dozens or hundreds of roughly evenly matched firms – they have to worry that a maltreated customer might move to a rival. 40 years of antitrust neglect means that corporations were able to buy their way to dominance with predatory mergers and pricing, producing today's inbred, Habsburg capitalism. Apple and Google are a mobile duopoly, Google is a search monopoly, etc. It's not just tech! Every sector looks like this:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Eliminating competition doesn't just deprive customers of alternatives, it also empowers corporations. Liberated from "wasteful competition," companies in concentrated industries can extract massive profits. Think of how both Apple and Google have "competitively" arrived at the same 30% app tax on app sales and transactions, a rate that's more than 1,000% higher than the transaction fees extracted by the (bloated, price-gouging) credit-card sector:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/07/curatorial-vig/#app-tax

But cartels' power goes beyond the size of their warchest. The real source of a cartel's power is the ease with which a small number of companies can arrive at – and stick to – a common lobbying position. That's where "regulatory capture" comes in: the mobile duopoly has an easier time of capturing its regulators because two companies have an easy time agreeing on how to spend their app-tax billions:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Apple – and Google, and Facebook, and your car company – can violate your privacy because they aren't constrained regulation, just as Uber can violate its drivers' labor rights and Amazon can violate your consumer rights. The tech cartels have captured their regulators and convinced them that the law doesn't apply if it's being broken via an app:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/18/cursed-are-the-sausagemakers/#how-the-parties-get-to-yes

In other words, Apple can spy on you because it's allowed to spy on you. America's last consumer privacy law was passed in 1988, and it bans video-store clerks from leaking your VHS rental history. Congress has taken no action on consumer privacy since the Reagan years:

https://www.eff.org/tags/video-privacy-protection-act

But tech has some special enshittification-resistant characteristics. The most important of these is interoperability: the fact that computers are universal digital machines that can run any program. HP can design a printer that rejects third-party ink and charge $10,000/gallon for its own colored water, but someone else can write a program that lets you jailbreak your printer so that it accepts any ink cartridge:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer

Tech companies that contemplated enshittifying their products always had to watch over their shoulders for a rival that might offer a disenshittification tool and use that as a wedge between the company and its customers. If you make your website's ads 20% more obnoxious in anticipation of a 2% increase in gross margins, you have to consider the possibility that 40% of your users will google "how do I block ads?" Because the revenue from a user who blocks ads doesn't stay at 100% of the current levels – it drops to zero, forever (no user ever googles "how do I stop blocking ads?").

The majority of web users are running an ad-blocker:

https://doc.searls.com/2023/11/11/how-is-the-worlds-biggest-boycott-doing/

Web operators made them an offer ("free website in exchange for unlimited surveillance and unfettered intrusions") and they made a counteroffer ("how about 'nah'?"):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

Here's the thing: reverse-engineering an app – or any other IP-encumbered technology – is a legal minefield. Just decompiling an app exposes you to felony prosecution: a five year sentence and a $500k fine for violating Section 1201 of the DMCA. But it's not just the DMCA – modern products are surrounded with high-tech tripwires that allow companies to invoke IP law to prevent competitors from augmenting, recongifuring or adapting their products. When a business says it has "IP," it means that it has arranged its legal affairs to allow it to invoke the power of the state to control its customers, critics and competitors:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

An "app" is just a web-page skinned in enough IP to make it a crime to add an ad-blocker to it. This is what Jay Freeman calls "felony contempt of business model" and it's everywhere. When companies don't have to worry about users deploying self-help measures to disenshittify their products, they are freed from the constraint that prevents them indulging the impulse to shift value from their customers to themselves.

Apple owes its existence to interoperability – its ability to clone Microsoft Office's file formats for Pages, Numbers and Keynote, which saved the company in the early 2000s – and ever since, it has devoted its existence to making sure no one ever does to Apple what Apple did to Microsoft:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

Regulatory capture cuts both ways: it's not just about powerful corporations being free to flout the law, it's also about their ability to enlist the law to punish competitors that might constrain their plans for exploiting their workers, customers, suppliers or other stakeholders.

The final historical constraint on tech companies was their own workers. Tech has very low union-density, but that's in part because individual tech workers enjoyed so much bargaining power due to their scarcity. This is why their bosses pampered them with whimsical campuses filled with gourmet cafeterias, fancy gyms and free massages: it allowed tech companies to convince tech workers to work like government mules by flattering them that they were partners on a mission to bring the world to its digital future:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/10/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers/

For tech bosses, this gambit worked well, but failed badly. On the one hand, they were able to get otherwise powerful workers to consent to being "extremely hardcore" by invoking Fobazi Ettarh's spirit of "vocational awe":

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

On the other hand, when you motivate your workers by appealing to their sense of mission, the downside is that they feel a sense of mission. That means that when you demand that a tech worker enshittifies something they missed their mother's funeral to deliver, they will experience a profound sense of moral injury and refuse, and that worker's bargaining power means that they can make it stick.

Or at least, it did. In this era of mass tech layoffs, when Google can fire 12,000 workers after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years, tech workers are learning that the answer to "I won't do this and you can't make me" is "don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out" (AKA "sharpen your blades boys"):

https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/29/elon-musk-texts-discovery-twitter/

With competition, regulation, self-help and labor cleared away, tech firms – and firms that have wrapped their products around the pluripotently malleable core of digital tech, including automotive makers – are no longer constrained from enshittifying their products.

And that's why your car manufacturer has chosen to spy on you and sell your private information to data-brokers and anyone else who wants it. Not because you didn't pay for the product, so you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.

Cars are enshittified. The dozens of chips that auto makers have shoveled into their car design are only incidentally related to delivering a better product. The primary use for those chips is autoenshittification – access to legal strictures ("IP") that allows them to block modifications and repairs that would interfere with the unfettered abuse of their own customers:

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

The fact that it's a felony to reverse-engineer and modify a car's software opens the floodgates to all kinds of shitty scams. Remember when Bay Staters were voting on a ballot measure to impose right-to-repair obligations on automakers in Massachusetts? The only reason they needed to have the law intervene to make right-to-repair viable is that Big Car has figured out that if it encrypts its diagnostic messages, it can felonize third-party diagnosis of a car, because decrypting the messages violates the DMCA:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/11/drm-cars-will-drive-consumers-crazy

Big Car figured out that VIN locking – DRM for engine components and subassemblies – can felonize the production and the installation of third-party spare parts:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

The fact that you can't legally modify your car means that automakers can go back to their pre-2008 ways, when they transformed themselves into unregulated banks that incidentally manufactured the cars they sold subprime loans for. Subprime auto loans – over $1t worth! – absolutely relies on the fact that borrowers' cars can be remotely controlled by lenders. Miss a payment and your car's stereo turns itself on and blares threatening messages at top volume, which you can't turn off. Break the lease agreement that says you won't drive your car over the county line and it will immobilize itself. Try to change any of this software and you'll commit a felony under Section 1201 of the DMCA:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Tesla, naturally, has the most advanced anti-features. Long before BMW tried to rent you your seat-heater and Mercedes tried to sell you a monthly subscription to your accelerator pedal, Teslas were demon-haunted nightmare cars. Miss a Tesla payment and the car will immobilize itself and lock you out until the repo man arrives, then it will blare its horn and back itself out of its parking spot. If you "buy" the right to fully charge your car's battery or use the features it came with, you don't own them – they're repossessed when your car changes hands, meaning you get less money on the used market because your car's next owner has to buy these features all over again:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/edison-not-tesla/#demon-haunted-world

And all this DRM allows your car maker to install spyware that you're not allowed to remove. They really tipped their hand on this when the R2R ballot measure was steaming towards an 80% victory, with wall-to-wall scare ads that revealed that your car collects so much information about you that allowing third parties to access it could lead to your murder (no, really!):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

That's why your car spies on you. Because it can. Because the company that made it lacks constraint, be it market-based, legal, technological or its own workforce's ethics.

One common critique of my enshittification hypothesis is that this is "kind of sensible and normal" because "there’s something off in the consumer mindset that we’ve come to believe that the internet should provide us with amazing products, which bring us joy and happiness and we spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return":

https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-to-have-great-conversations/

What this criticism misses is that this isn't the companies bargaining to shift some value from us to them. Enshittification happens when a company can seize all that value, without having to bargain, exploiting law and technology and market power over buyers and sellers to unilaterally alter the way the products and services we rely on work.

A company that doesn't have to fear competitors, regulators, jailbreaking or workers' refusal to enshittify its products doesn't have to bargain, it can take. It's the first lesson they teach you in the Darth Vader MBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

Your car spying on you isn't down to your belief that your carmaker "should provide you with amazing products, which brings your joy and happiness you spend hours of the day on, and should ask nothing back in return." It's not because you didn't pay for the product, so now you're the product. It's because they can get away with it.

The consequences of this spying go much further than mere insurance premium hikes, too. Car telemetry sits at the top of the funnel that the unbelievably sleazy data broker industry uses to collect and sell our data. These are the same companies that sell the fact that you visited an abortion clinic to marketers, bounty hunters, advertisers, or vengeful family members pretending to be one of those:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/07/safegraph-spies-and-lies/#theres-no-i-in-uterus

Decades of pro-monopoly policy led to widespread regulatory capture. Corporate cartels use the monopoly profits they extract from us to pay for regulatory inaction, allowing them to extract more profits.

But when it comes to privacy, that period of unchecked corporate power might be coming to an end. The lack of privacy regulation is at the root of so many problems that a pro-privacy movement has an unstoppable constituency working in its favor.

At EFF, we call this "privacy first." Whether you're worried about grifters targeting vulnerable people with conspiracy theories, or teens being targeted with media that harms their mental health, or Americans being spied on by foreign governments, or cops using commercial surveillance data to round up protesters, or your car selling your data to insurance companies, passing that long-overdue privacy legislation would turn off the taps for the data powering all these harms:

https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms

Traditional economics fails because it thinks about markets without thinking about power. Monopolies lead to more than market power: they produce regulatory capture, power over workers, and state capture, which felonizes competition through IP law. The story that our problems stem from the fact that we just don't spend enough money, or buy the wrong products, only makes sense if you willfully ignore the power that corporations exert over our lives. It's nice to think that you can shop your way out of a monopoly, because that's a lot easier than voting your way out of a monopoly, but no matter how many times you vote with your wallet, the cartels that control the market will always win:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

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/2024/03/12/market-failure/#car-wars

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

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

[7searchppcblog]

[defsiarte]

I highly recommend joining Cara right now!

It’s a new portfolio/social media hybrid website made by artists, for artists, as a way to network, find jobs, and see art. Born from ArtStation, Behance, DeviantArt, Instagram, and countless other websites’ implementing predatory AI policies, it aims to fill a gap left in the community for those who don’t wish to support that stuff.

To me at least, it really captures the better parts of being on DA in the early 2010’s. Account setup is very streamlined, your feed is all art and no ads, and the community is very active (Due to a huge exodus of users moving there from Instagram due to Meta’s new AI policy).

The app has all the same functionality as the main site too! You’re able to customize your timeline, mark your work availability, and even toggle your profile between just being a regular timeline and exclusively a portfolio of your strongest works (I have nothing up though bc I just made my acc lol).

A lot of new websites have popped up in the past couple years due to how awful and predatory tech giants have become, and personally I’m all for it. I don’t want an internet where everyone uses the same 5 websites to get all their content. Anyway yeah I highly recommend Cara.

You can see the official explanation of their features and stuff here.

Obligatory plug to own acc

[foone]

So Warframe added a "Pom-2" Alternate 1999 computer (that's needed for weird void magic future science wizardry). Thoughts?

Only thing I have that's a sort of question mark is that I don't know of many setups that would have needed a 5 1/4" floppy in 99 (or why it has both the tower and the under monitor unit)

ugh. OKAY, so... the tower and desktop combination is just weird. I have, on one occasion, run a "server" that was two towers, and the original PC supported a DUAL-DESKTOP mode, but both types together? nonsense.

dual monitor was rare but possible in 1999 (win98 added native support), so I think the best interpretation here is that this is actually two computers. maybe the one on the left is missing the keyboard and mouse because it's being used as some kind of server for the other computer? I used a little case like that to run my first linux server, which was also acting as a router for my internal network.

The OS is weird. The icons above the menu-bar look like win98, the dialog box is windows 3.x, the menu-bar icons on the bottom are pure os X (although they remind me of like a web-TV kinda system, like hotkeys for email/internet/etc), but the greyscale is very classic mac system. Actually it kinda reminds me of C64's GEOS, but GEOS was very classic-mac.

Like most CRT-filters, they turned the scanlines up WAY TOO HIGH. No CRT I've ever seen looked that fucking terrible. The monitor buttons are a bit odd: You didn't get monitors with buttons on the front until long after they were all color... but maybe it's a color monitor that's showing a monochrome OS?

as for the floppies: yeah. There are multiple mistakes here.

5.25" in 1999 is just silly. If you still had 5.25" disk drives in 1999, you were intentionally doing some retrocomputing stuff. For reference, around 2001 my PC repair job would specifically ask me to copy data off 5.25" disks, because they didn't have any 5.25" drives anymore, and I was their only tech who did.

The other mistake is that they have THREE floppy drives. so the PC doesn't really support that, natively? You can do some tricks and make it work (The youtuber Tech Tangents did a video on how it could be done), but realistically two was the normal max.

The final mistake is that all the drive activity lights are on. Those are only supposed to be on while the drive is reading or writing... and I don't see any disks in those drives! Let alone a situation that would involve turning all three on at once (I don't think that's even possible on most floppy controllers!)

In fact, the main time you'd end up with the drive lights stuck on like that is when you've installed the drive cable upside down. That ends up with them getting stuck on and non-functional. So this computer looks, to me, like it was put together incorrectly and no one noticed.

I don't believe that font would be on a black & white retro computer. Nope. Too smooth and too big.

There's also a USB icon on that OS: I don't think there's ever been a monochrome OS that supported OS, and looking at that computer case I don't believe that it has USB. Maybe the tower would, but the desktop? no.

That keyboard is off a Gateway 2000 computer. Something like this:

[bfpnola]

about the ongoing hunger strike to ensure that the historic anti-casteism bill passes in california ^^ wanna support?

if you’re on mobile, go to: https://tinyurl.com/Signsb403

other devices, like laptops: https://www.gov.ca.gov/contact/

—

sample email below from the mobile link, not my own writing:

Subject: Please Sign SB403 (Wahab) to End Caste Discrimination

I am writing to request the governor to sign the historic bill SB403 introduced by State Senator Aisha Wahab, which would end discrimination on the basis of caste. This bill aims to clarify existing California state law and make explicit that discrimination based on caste is illegal by adding caste to ancestry and defining caste in the Civil Rights Act, Fair Employment and Housing Act, and Education Code.

Caste systems are social stratification where each position is characterized by hereditary status, endogamy, and social exclusion. Caste discrimination manifests as workplace discrimination, housing discrimination, gender-based violence, and other physical and psychological forms of violence.

Caste discrimination occurs across industries, including technology, construction, restaurants, and domestic work. In these sectors, caste discrimination has included harassment, bias, wage theft, and even trafficking. Caste is today inextricably intertwined with existing legal protections in state and federal civil rights laws such that discrimination based on one’s caste is effectively discrimination based on the intersection of other protected identities. However, because of the grave discrimination caste-oppressed Californians face, these existing protections must be made explicit.

Caste is a workers rights issues, a women's rights issues, and racial justice issue. It is also a bill that has bipartisan support. That is why we are joined by Asian Law Caucus, Stop AAPI Hate, AAPI Equity Alliance, Tech Equity, Equality Labs, Alphabet Workers Union, Ambedkar Association of North America, Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, AFL-CIO, Californians for Caste Equity, Hindus for Caste Equity, Jakara Movement, South Asian Network, Sikh Coalition, and Sikh American Legal Defense Fund. Every major legal association is in support of caste equity and the lawfulness to make caste equity explicit. This includes the American Bar Association, South Asian Bar Association, National Asian American Pacific Bar Association, and Asian Law Caucus.

That is why we urge you to make history and sign his bill without hesitation. Justice delayed is justice denied. Let's ensure California opportunity for all by ensuring that ancestry and caste discrimination is explicitly prohibited and make history across the country.

Thank You,

[Name]

—

and if you don’t know what caste is? send in an ask @bfpnola or join our Discord server, link in bio, so we can answer you in real-time!

[soaringthroughthegalaxy]

I have a request for your brain cleanse if you’re open to something a little more in the feels.

I’m currently moving houses but I’ve lived here for my entire life. 20 years of calling this place home and in a few days I’ll never be able to call it home again. Tonight is the last night I get to sleep in my bedroom. Long story short it’s been a very emotional few weeks.

I was wondering if you could write something with either echo or hunter or maybe all of the bad batch as a group comforting the reader as they process moving out of their house or the marauder? Or maybe as they say goodbye from something/someone from their childhood? Or whatever you come up with.

Your writing always brightens my day and I’m always excited when I see that you’ve updated and I look forward to seeing what you come up with. And if inspiration doesn’t strike you with this request or you don’t feel comfortable with it then please don’t strain yourself either. I’d be just as happy to see your favourite gifs of each of the batchers if you have some ;)

(Sorry for written an essay lol)

Oh, anon, I’m sending you so much love. I remember when I had to move out of my childhood home, too, and it broke my heart, so I was very much in the feels writing this. And please don't apologise for writing so much, it's lovely!

I added in a memory from my childhood home, and thank you for sharing some of yours with me so I could weave one in, too.

Hold on to the memories from that house, and don’t forget to make some incredible new ones in this next chapter of life <3

As One Door Closes

As the Empire’s grasp on the galaxy deepens, you have no choice but to move your parents to the safety of Pabu. While having them close once again is a blessing, it means closing the door on your childhood home one last time.

Pairing: All Batch x f!reader

Word count: 2.3k

Warnings: leaving behind childhood home, bittersweet, comforting, happy memories, supportive and soft Batch, fraternal polyandry (aka the boys are all with reader).

“That’s the last crate, cyare.” Echo’s voice is soft as he stands beside you in the entrance hall of your childhood home. Footsteps behind you let you know that the rest of your boys had stepped inside, too.

You had them all back now. Utilising the network Rex had built, you’d hit Mount Tantiss hard, rescuing Omega and Crosshair and finding Tech clinging to life in a bacta tank. Every other clone shipped off to Hemlock had been saved, too, and you’d all returned to Pabu. Things had been almost normal until you’d received a transmission from your parents.

The Empire was closing in on your home planet, and they no longer felt safe staying there. During the war, your father – a prominent businessman – had been vocal and proactive in supporting the Republic, and your parents feared retribution if the Empire took hold of the planet. Options had been limited, and, in the end, the only solution had been to move them to Pabu. Having them closer would be a blessing, especially as they’d taken a shine to your boys and Omega, but it meant saying goodbye to where you’d grown up.

Head tilting to the side, you caught sight of the marks etched onto one of the doorframes. “They stopped measuring when I was ten.” You murmured, moving your fingers across the ridges carved into the surface, each denoting your height over childhood.

The next few steps took you up the stairs, and your ascent was silent as you missed every creaky piece of flooring. The boys followed behind you, albeit not as quietly. You grasped the railing on the landing, glancing down to the ground floor. “When I was six, my father bought home some wooden toys he’d found at the market. I remember him lifting me up so I could drop them over the edge of the railing.” You recall wistfully. A small laugh slides from your lips as you glance towards the five men crowded around the top of the stairs, their attention focused on you. “They were toy soldiers with tiny parachutes. Father would put me down, and I’d race to the bottom of the stairs to catch them so they’d never be hurt.”

“That explains a lot.” Crosshair quipped, leaning against the newel post.

More laughter leaves you as your gaze moves back to the ground floor, the memories washing over you. “Over the years, I lost them, one by one. The last one went missing about six months before the war broke out. I guess the galaxy figured I was about to get the real deal and wouldn’t need the toy ones.” You can’t help but tease, enjoying the varying chuckles that filled the air.

You sighed, your gaze lingering on the staircase as if trying to imprint every detail in your memory. Turning, the door to your childhood bedroom loomed ahead, and you pushed it open gently, the soft squeak of hinges echoing in the quiet house. You’d never seen the room so empty before.

The walls were still the exact colour you’d picked out when you’d been sixteen – so mature for your age, confident on your path in life. Funny how a galactic war, a handful of men, and a young girl had led you down a different way.

Stepping further into the room, your gaze lingers on the inbuilt desk near the window, where you’d often spent hours daydreaming and studying. You trace your fingers along the edge, feeling the grooves worn by years of creative exploration.

“Any stories from this room, darling?” You turned to find Tech leaning against the door frame, his eyes fixed on you with a softness that warmed your heart.

Memories flooded back like a tidal wave. “Oh, plenty. This room saw the birth of my first attempts at poetry. Terrible stuff, really. I used to think I would be a famous poet or something.”

Hunter raised an eyebrow, genuinely curious. “Do you have any of those poems saved?”

You shot him a playful glare. “Absolutely not. Some things are best left in the past.”

The room echoed with laughter, the sound bouncing off the now-bare walls. “I remember leaving the window open just a crack once to pry it open after sneaking out to attend a party. Got caught, of course. My mother nearly had a heart attack.”

Wrecker grinned. “Always been a troublemaker, huh?”

“Just a bit.” You admitted with a smirk. “But it was all in good fun. This room was my sanctuary.”

You moved to the inbuilt closet, fingers tapping against the door. “On my fourteenth birthday, my parents went out for the night so my friends and I could have a girls' night. But one of them decided to tell some of the guys at school, so there were quite a few of us.” You recalled. Head tipping towards your boys, the corners of your lips curved into a smile. “Ever heard of seven minutes in heaven?”

The room filled with a chorus of amused groans and smirks. “Oh, please tell me you didn’t play that.” Crosshair teased, a mischievous glint in his eye.

You leaned against the closet door, crossing your arms with a playful grin. “Guilty. Of course, my parents’ bedroom was off-limits, but the closet here seemed like a fine alternative. It wasn’t exactly seven minutes, and heaven was debatable, but it was a memorable birthday, to say the least.”

Echo raised an eyebrow. “And who, may I ask, was your lucky companion?”

You feigned innocence. “That’s a secret I’ll never tell.”

Wrecker scratched his head. “I don’t get it. What’s the point of being in a closet for seven minutes?”

Hunter chuckled, placing a hand on Wrecker’s shoulder. “It’s a game, big guy. You go into a dark closet with someone, and things happen.”

Wrecker’s eyes widened in realisation. “Oh! Got it.”

You shared another round of laughter at Wrecker’s sudden understanding, the camaraderie between you and your boys filling the room with warmth. As the mirth settled, you couldn’t help but feel a bittersweet twinge. This room held countless memories; now, it was time to say goodbye.

Slowly, Tech offered out his hand, encouraging you across the room. Though hard, you slowly stepped back to him, fingers interlacing. It was poignant that while you were leaving this room behind – this house – you were going with them. That this had been home until they’d come along.

With the others having returned downstairs, you pause at the door for a second, looking back at the room you’d grown up in, where so many of your firsts had happened – your first steps when this had been your nursery, your first words, your first kiss, and your first heartbreak. Where you’d laughed until your sides had hurt and sobbed when the weight of the galaxy had felt too much. Where you’d gazed out of the window at the stars and dreamed about the future. “Thank you.” You silently acknowledge the part this little room had played in raising you before you step out of it for the last time, letting Tech guide you back down the stairs.

You circled into the living room, the furniture gone, and the final crates of belongings safely stowed on the Marauder, ready for their next life on Pabu. Indents marked the floor, reminders of where the furniture had once stood for years, and the colour of the walls was far more faded than it once had been, though bright patches still remained where family photos had once hung.

“We watched so many holofilms in here. As a family, we used to stay up as late as possible when I didn’t have school to see how many we could marathon – I used to love the ones about the wizard who went to magic school. But I’d always fall asleep before we could finish them all.” The memory made you smile. “Whenever I had friends over, father would make a blanket fort for us so we could watch the latest holodrama, and mother would bake a Jogan fruit pie and hide packets of sour berry sweets down the side of the couch for us to find.”

“Bet everyone was desperate for an invite.” Hunter watched as you looked around the room, more curious now about what you’d been like as a child.

Glancing over your shoulder towards him, you gave a small laugh. “I wasn’t a popular kid, unfortunately.”

“With how lovely you are, darling, I find that hard to believe.” Tech countered, giving your hand a gentle squeeze.

Warmth seeps into your cheeks – regardless of how long you’d been with them, you’d never be able to gracefully accept their compliments. Hand sliding from Tech’s, your feet carry you to the large window at the back of the room, overlooking the garden. More memories come back – running across the grass with your parents during a game of tag, building snowmen when the weather turned bad, and, in your teens, learning how to shoot with your father’s old blaster.

Crosshair stands beside you, close enough that your shoulder brushes his arm, a steadfast presence even after everything he’d been through. Those hawkish eyes take in the shrubs and flowers your mother had spent years cultivating, and then they find the scorch marks on the fences. “Hm, your aim hasn’t improved.” He teases, a smirk tugging at his lips as he glances down at you. Although he couldn’t understand being sentimental about a place, he knew how important this was to you.

“Rude.” You mutter in response, though there’s no bite to your words as your gaze shifts to look up at him, hand reaching out to give his arm a gentle shove.

Your boys' rich cacophony of chuckles follows you into the kitchen, and for a moment, you’re grateful they’re here with you. Doing this on your own would’ve broken your heart.

You lean back against one of the kitchen counters to take in the whole room. “Mother used to sit me on the counter as a child so I could watch her bake.” You share, lifting a hand to point across the room. “If there’s one thing I won’t miss, it’s that nanowave stove. Makes the most obnoxious noise when the timer runs down.

“Think your mother will bake in her new kitchen?” Wrecker asks, already imagining all the delicious new food he’ll get to try. He was looking forward to branching out.

“Oh, I hope so. If there’s one thing I’ve missed over the last four years, it’s been her Roonan lemon cakes.” Your mouth waters at the thought. At the start of the war, you’d signed up as a liaison officer, and you hadn’t really had the time after that to return home. When shore leave had come around, you’d wanted to spend it with your boys.

A few weeks ago, after receiving your parents’ transmission, you returned here with them and Omega to talk through a plan. Your parents had fawned over the young girl, and the impressed look your mother had given you when she’d realised that you had all five men wrapped around your little finger would forever be seared into your mind. Ushering your parents onto the Marauder, you’d introduced them to Pabu, and they’d immediately fallen in love with the sunshiny island. Your childhood home had gone up for sale quickly after, and someone had snatched it up. The credits had paid for a gorgeous little villa on Pabu for them, and they’d invested the rest. 

One night, when you’d stopped by to see how they were getting on, you’d caught the tail end of one of your father’s calls, where he’d been discussing setting aside some credits in case Omega, or any other grandchildren, wanted to go to college in the future.

You’d cried like a baby at the sweetness of it once you’d made it home and told the boys. Children weren’t something you had thought about – too busy fighting a war and escaping the Empire – but they’d exchanged a few glances as you’d been drying your tears.

The last room you ventured into was the dining room. The large dining table had already been transported back to Pabu, but the marks from where it had been shoved against the wall still lingered. So many family meals, so much laughter, and many late nights spent doing your homework had happened in this room.

As Hunter watched your gaze move to the marks on the wall, he knew what you were thinking. “It’s in their new home, cyar’ika. You won’t have to stop making memories around it – think of it that way.” He comforted.

“I know.” You concede, offering him a thankful smile. “And now you all get to sit around it too.” Your mother had already insisted on hosting a family dinner once a week.

“Sap.” Crosshair teases in his typical fashion.

Snorting, you shake your head fondly. “You love it.” You counter.

“I love you.” He corrects, shooting you a playful wink.

Laughter fills the air again, and as a group, you slowly return to the entrance hall. One by one, your boys file out of the house. Echo stops to kiss your forehead before joining his brothers outside, giving you a moment.  

Alone in the entrance hall, you look around, fingers ghosting along the familiar walls. The memories embedded in the house's very foundation flood your mind, and Echo’s kiss lingers. The final moments you’ve experienced here – of laughter and love with the men you’re building a new life with – offer you comfort.

With a deep breath, you step out onto the porch, closing the door behind you for the last time. The cool breeze coils around you, and as you descend the steps, you cast a final glance at the house that helped shape you.

“Goodbye, old friend.” You whisper, letting go of the home that cradled your history. The embrace of your blood family and the family you’ve found awaits. And while you're excited to make new memories with them all on Pabu, you’ll always treasure the ones you made here.

[projectadulthood]

39 Best Websites to Find Free Textbooks, Research Papers, Study Guides, and Books

Whether you’ve just received a long list of textbooks you need for a specific uni class or are looking for a particular book/research paper for a high school project, books (and journal subscriptions) can be expensive.

The good news is that there are plenty of resources online where you can find free PDF versions of most written materials, starting with Atkinson & Hilgard’s Introduction to Psychology and ending with Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

Note that although some of the websites below provide access to copyright-free texts only, or texts that publishers/authors have agreed to share freely, others have been accused of internet privacy.

However, many people see open access practices as morally acceptable, especially considering the unsustainable prices of academic textbooks and papers.

To quote a recent paper on the topic:

"Since shadow libraries are a product of the cooperation between scholars, who contribute texts and other resources (such as donations, volunteer work, etc.), shadow libraries represent a ‘bottom-up’, radical approach to open access: a physical approximation of the Platonic ideal of knowledge sharing that would exist if there were no legal, economic, or institutional barriers to the circulation of scholarly knowledge."

Free Textbooks

Library Genesis

Library Genesis, or Libgen for short, is a shadow online library website where college students can find academic books (including those that are hard to find/very expensive) and scholarly journal articles.

The site also hosts general-interest books, audiobooks, comics, magazines, and images.

Z-Library

Z-Library is another shadow library website that hosts college textbooks, scholarly journal articles, and general-interest books. It calls itself “the world’s largest e-book library.” It mirrors Library Genesis.

The front page also features some of the most popular books at the time. When we viewed it, these included “Thinking Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, The Book Thief by Markus Zusak, and Harry Potter the Complete Collection by J. K. Rowling.

You can also use the right-hand navigation menu to see the books that have been added most recently, as well as sort through books based on category.

Use the Book Request option if you can’t find a book you’re looking for. There’s no guarantee your book will be added, but community members look at requests to see what books to upload (you can also upload books).

PDF Drive

PDF Drive is an online library with a ton of free ebooks and PDF textbooks in various categories, including academic & education (but also lifestyle, personal growth, art, linguistics, etc.)

ForCoder.su

Forcoder.su has lots of online textbooks on programming. It also provides free access to online courses, like Apache Kafka for beginners and object-oriented programming with Python. Currently, there are hundreds of free courses available.

Online Mathematics Textbooks

Online Mathematics Textbooks is your source for free digital textbooks on all things math. It’s just one page featuring 77 textbooks.

Tech Books for Free Download

Tech Books for Free Download is where you’ll find free science and engineering books on topics ranging from data mining to general relativity.

There’s no way to search for books easily. However, the site is divided into books on Linux, Java, Microsoft, C and C++, Perl/Python, Science, Networking, Database, Security, and Assembly.

Free Tech Books

Free Tech Books is an open textbook library. It provides access to free computer science books and textbooks, plus lecture notes. All the books and lecture notes listed on this site are freely available on authors’ and/or publishers’ sites.

You can browse books by category (computer science, mathematics, supporting fields, operating system, programming/scripting, miscellaneous), author, publisher, or license.

Directory of Open Access Books

Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) is a website that indexes and provides access to academic, peer-reviewed open-access books. All disciplines are covered, but there’s a particular emphasis on humanities, social sciences, and law.

Ubiquity Press

Ubiquity Press has been an open-access publisher of academic, peer-reviewed books and journals since 2012. It was founded by University of College London (UCL) researchers.

Research Papers

Sci-Hub

Sci-hub has the most expansive collection of research papers. Its mission is to “remove all barriers in the way of science.”

Directory of Open Access Journals

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is an online directory of open-access, peer-reviewed research journals covering humanities, social sciences, technology, science, medicine, and art.

The directory indexes journals from different countries and languages. DOAJ is supported financially by publishers, libraries, and other organizations.

Wiley Open Access

Wiley Open Access provides peer-reviewed open-access journals across topics like biochemistry, economics, sociology, mathematics, and law.

SpringerOpen

SpringerOpen publishes open-access journals across a wide range of areas, mainly STEM.

Elsevier

Elsevier publishes open-access, peer-reviewed journals. You can search for journals by title, keyword, or subject (dentistry, nursing, decision sciences, etc.)

Springer Link

Springer Link provides access to ebooks, peer-reviewed journal articles, and other resources (mostly scientific).

BASE

BASE is a search engine for academic texts, including journals, digital collections, institutional repositories, etc. You can access about 60% of the indexed texts for free.

Study Guides

Bibliomania

Bibliomania has study guides to the most-read books, like “A Hero of Our Time,” “Animal Farm,” and even Irish politics. It also has over 2,000 classic texts, book summaries, author biographies, and more.

Books

Open Library

Open Library is an open library catalog of more than 3 million new and old books. The project was created by the nonprofit organization Internet Archive. It has also received partial funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation and the California State Library.

You can read old books without an account. However, for new books, you’ll need to set one up (it takes just a few minutes).

Internet Archive

Internet Archive is a digital library of ebooks. It also has free movies, music, and software.

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is a famous site where you can find lots of free books. There are more than 60,000 books in its collection.

Standard Ebooks

Standard Ebooks take public domain texts and make them as nice as new books. They fix typographical errors and typos, create cool cover art, and format the text for e-readers like Kindle and iPad.

Planet eBook

Planet eBook is where you can download free PDF copies of classics like Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

What really makes Planet eBook stand out is its UX. It’s one of those rare sites that are super easy to navigate and actually look good (aesthetically speaking).

The Ultimate Book Search Engine

The Ultimate Book Search Engine is an ebook search engine that includes 350 open directory sites that relate to ebooks. It was created by the Reddit user u/NotoriousYEG.

Classic Bookshelf

The Classic Bookshelf is a site where you’ll find lots of classic novels, everything from Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy.

Literature.org

Literature.org features classic works of English literature, both fiction and non-fiction.

Bartleby

Bartleby is a site that features both fiction and nonfiction books.

Fiction.us

Fiction.us has a ton of books, including fiction, short stories, children's picture books, poetry, books on writing, and plays.

Classic Literature Library

As the name suggests, Classic Literature Library is where you’ll find classic literature works.

Ideology.us

Ideology.us is a site that has ebooks on philosophy, psychology, sociology, politics, and education.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare is where you’ll find all of Shakespeare’s work. The site is run by The Tech, the largest and oldest newspaper by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Read Books Online

Read Books Online has around 6,000 ebooks, including novels, short stories, poems, essays, plays, and non-fiction.

Public Bookshelf

Public Bookshelf is a site dedicated to romance novels.

Categories of ebooks here include contemporary romance, romantic suspense, historical romance, regency romance, inspirational romance, vampire romance, western romance, general romance, and fantasy and paranormal romance.

The Perseus Project

The Perseus Project is a digital library created by Tufts University with books from Ancient Rome and Greece, published in original languages and English.

Chest of Books

Chest of Books has books on a ton of different subjects, including animals, finance, real estate, science, and travel.

The Literature Network

The Literature Network has books by authors like Anne Bronte, Lewis Carroll, and Lord George Gordon Byron. It also features forums, literature summaries, and quizzes.

The Online Books Page

The Online Books Page is a site by the University of Pennsylvania that houses books in categories like philosophy, history, medicine, science, agriculture, music, anthropology, and more. The site also links to the following:

Banned Books Online: A directory of books that were once banned and links to places where you can read them in full.

A Celebration of Women Writers: A directory that lists online editions of literary works by women as well as resources about women writers.

Prize Winners Online: A directory of prize-winning books.

Many Books

Many Books is “your friendly neighborhood library.” It houses over 50,000 books in genres like romance, mystery, young adult, horror, and non-fiction. You can read books online or download them to your device.

Authorama

Authorama turns public domain books on sites like Google Books and Project Gutenberg into HTML format, making it easier to read them.

Audiobooks

Librivox

Librivox has free audiobooks that you can listen to from any device.

[chaifootsteps]

So anyway. I'm enraged <3 everything about the music video makes me mad <3 I figured at LEAST if nothing else it was nice that Paranoid DJ got some more recognition. Honestly, amazing for him! He's a stand up chap and he deserves every good thing that's ever come his way. Like Micheal, Ashley and other unsung heros he did SO MUCH for hazbin/helluva and making us fall in love with the characters. BUT. THEY. BARELY. CREDITED HIM. And I am mad. I'm even more mad she did nothing in the video captions other than stick a middle finger up to her haters and the drama of the week. That is not the spirit of indie I fell in love with where she used to thank all her viewers and supporters, staff and collaborators. So instead I decided to look for something happy! SPINDLE'S PRECARIOUS FINANCES: https://graphtreon.com/creator/VivienneMedrano Notice on the graph the steady drop in subscribers Viv has gotten on her patreon since this time last year, 2022. (5.1k to 3.5k) If I'm being generous and looking at her peak a few days ago, (because everyone drops their sub and resubscribes at the end of each the month) she makes about 5.7k a month which adds up to 68.4k a year. Which could sound like an okay salary for ONE person but her patreon says she employs "100+ artists and crew members". that is 100+ people she is paying. I spent forever learning about youtube pay rates tonight. RPM is the term used for the amount a youtuber makes per 1000 ad views and it varies SO MUCH its hard to say what Viv's RPM is. BUT!!! The average rpm for a youtuber is $18. However many many forums have discussed that the category of a video greatly changes its rpm. For example, finance and tech videos have a top rpm due to their demographic (more affluent viewers that advertisers want to target) the younger/poorer the video's audience demographic is, the lower the rpm. Gamers are considered among the lower paid but EVEN LOWER THAN THAT are animators. They make PENNIES. (which is kind of sad because they have the highest effort videos and can't mass produce) I've seen animators say they get about 40 to 60 cents per 1000 views. I have no idea what vivziepop makes from youtube but I think it could be $600-18,000 as an absolute ceiling per 1 mil views.

Again, she has an entire studio to pay. Therefore, MOST of spindles money comes from merch and when you factor in the EXTREME oversaturation of merch with the declining viewers, toxic fandom and obvious loss of interest from die hards (based on her patreon) her merch sales are PLUMMETING. Her vacation money right now is probably from her Hazbin contract. Apparently for first time show runners, they make about $30,000 per episode. That's $240,000 she made for season 1 and will make maybe that much or more for season two. It's a good amount of money!! But with her spending rates, the mortgage on her home (that can't be paid off if she was begging for money to pay her dentist in 2019 and hadn't bought the house yet), her lifestyle and studio are NOT sustainable unless hazbin/helluva is her just her foothold in the industry and not the apex of her career.

While she's living the high life like she's 'made it' her whole career is in a very precarious place and what matters the most right now is her online conduct and the quality of her products to determine if she will find work in the future. Of course on the most pessimistic front, she could probably pull it together and do what she does best and leech off other peoples talents for the rest of her career. (eg stepping back, becoming the ceo of spindle and bringing in a network of indie shows by talented new creators that she can slap her name on as a producer and get half the credit)

Anon, there's not a lot of things I enjoy more than good, hard number crunching at Viv's expense. This is sublime.

Hope you're enjoying that Japan-spanning trip full of tea shops and abused animal petting, Viv, because it was probably the worst thing you could have done for yourself at a time like now.

[eretzyisrael]

by Shiryn Ghermezian

The Philly Palestine Coalition on Monday began a petition that demanded the cancellation of the film festival, which is co-sponsored by Israel Bonds, the Consulate General of Israel, and the Jewish Federation of Greater Pennsylvania. The pro-Palestinian group falsely claimed that Israel Bonds “finances the Israeli government’s budget” and “directly contributes to the displacement of Palestinians, the expansion of unlawful settlements, and unchecked settler violence.” The petition also falsely accused the state of Israel of genocide, apartheid, and occupation in its treatment of Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip.

According to the Israel Bonds website, proceeds from the sale of bonds have contributed to Israel’s growth in high-tech, cleantech, and biotech. Capital from Israel bonds have also “helped strengthen every aspect of Israel’s economy, enabling national infrastructure development … [and] expanded transportation networks enabled by investments in Israel bonds help facilitate shipment of ‘Made in Israel’ technology around the world, enhancing national export growth.”

Soon after facing pressure from the Philly Palestine Coalition, the BMFI announced on Monday it pulled the screening of The Child Within Me — a day before the scheduled event.

“Bryn Mawr Film Institute is not a political organization. We don’t endorse or oppose any causes,” the BMFI said in a released statement. “In past years, we have not regarded hosting a screening from the Israeli Film Festival as a political partnership or taking a stance on any issues. This was our feeling when we arranged the 2024 screening many months ago. However, as the situation in Israel and Gaza has developed, it has become clear that our showing this movie is being widely taken among individuals and institutions in our community as an endorsement of Israel’s recent and ongoing actions. This is not a statement we intended or wish to make.”

“BMFI is a safe place for civil and nuanced conversations about diverse stories,” the film institute added. “For the well-being and safety of all patrons, BMFI will not be a location for anger and violence. For those who wish to partake in an IFF screening, there are upcoming screenings at other venues.”

The Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia and the Anti-Defamation League’s chapter in Philadelphia were outraged by the move. They urged the BMFI to immediately reverse its decision to cancel the screening.

“Although BMFI states that this decision was made in an attempt to avoid controversy, this action only serves to blacklist Israeli culture, playing into the hands of antisemites who try to deny the Jewish people their voice and existence,” the two Jewish organizations said in a joint statement on Tuesday. “The IFF intentionally offers a multifaceted view of Israeli society. Each season, carefully curated feature films and documentaries provide glimpses into the intricate tapestry of Israeli life, allowing audiences to form their own informed opinions … Let us celebrate cultural diversity, promote dialogue, and recognize the transformative power of film in connecting us all.”

[mariacallous]

The Islamic State has created fake videos mimicking the look and feel of mainstream news outlets CNN and Al Jazeera, according to a new report from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue shared exclusively with WIRED.

Launched in early March, the campaign was orchestrated by War and Media, a pro–Islamic State media outlet that typically creates long-form videos pushing the group’s ideology and history. The Islamic State, or ISIS, is a UN-designated terror group that perpetrated a genocide of the Yezidi population in Iraq and conducted multiple terrorist attacks, including the 2015 attacks in Paris that left 131 people dead; it has also promoted videos of its members beheading journalists and soldiers.

Central to the campaign were two YouTube channels. One was falsely branded as CNN and pushed English-language videos, and the other was branded with the Al Jazeera logo and pushed Arabic-language videos. The videos featured the logos of the real news outlets, and in the case of CNN, the videos also featured a real-time ticker along the bottom of the screen which changed to match the content being shown. The campaign also deployed a network of social media accounts branded to look like they were affiliated with news outlets, in what appears to be an effort to push ideology to new audiences.

In total, the campaign created eight original videos, four in each language, that discussed topics like the Islamic State’s expansion in Africa and the war in Syria.

One video also focused on the deadly attack on the Crocus City Hall in Moscow in March. The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack, and the video attempted to combat a disinformation narrative promoted by the Kremlin that Ukraine, not the Islamic State, was accountable.

“It was essentially fake news to debunk fake news,” Moustafa Ayad, the executive director for Africa, the Middle East, and Asia at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, tells WIRED.

Ayad also believes the campaign was a test run to ascertain how successful it would be in circumventing censorship efforts on mainstream Western platforms.

“It's the first time we've really seen a concerted effort by an Islamic State outlet to create this fake ecosystem of news that isn't branded as something that's affiliated with the Islamic State,” says Ayad. “It was very much a test of the system and now they know where there are weaknesses in their strategy.”

The videos remained on YouTube for a month and a half before they were removed by the company, but during that time, the videos were also downloaded and republished by Islamic State supporters on their own accounts. Some of those videos are still circulating online today, because they have not been added to the hash-sharing database that platforms use to coordinate the takedown of terrorist content.

“What they did was essentially build this entire little fake ecosystem of social media channels that are doppelgängers of news outlets,” Ayad says.

Each of the videos on YouTube racked up thousands of views, and while none of them went viral, it was “enough for the group to get some traction in circles outside where they would normally get [traction] and saw real people commenting under the videos,” says Ayad.

YouTube did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

In the past, some ISIS supporters have sought to circumvent tech platforms’ moderation by placing the logo of services like Netflix or Amazon Studios on their videos. This attempt appeared to be more sophisticated.

“Those were just simply taking a logo and plugging it on top of the existing Islamic State logo,” says Ayad. “[The new campaign] was actually creating channels as those media outlets and then creating an entire newscast around a specific issue, using footage from a range of different sources—not just the Islamic State, but footage that you could find online or other news channel footage. We really saw it take off right after the Moscow attacks.”

The campaign is just the latest sign of the Islamic State’s growing sophistication in circumventing content moderation efforts. This report comes just a week after the Washington Post revealed that the group has been deploying an AI-generated news anchor in weekly news dispatches that are designed to reach English-language audiences.

“I have no doubt in my mind we will see more of this in the future,” says Ayad. “AI allows them to create more realistic graphics for news that mimic a lot of the new channels. We're gonna see more of that and it's going to get more and more difficult to identify this content.”

[adsnetwork]

Travel Ads Network

Travel advertising is a typical term for marketing aimed at the travel industry. The main goal of travel advertising is to attract travellers from both local and worldwide markets. We can advertise natural culture, resources, legacy, etc. through travel ad to enable interested individuals visit the place. Arrive advertising assists the guest in becoming accustomed to the location even before they actually travel there.

What is the major role of travel advertising? 

We are surrounded by media. Nowadays, every business uses media to sell its goods and services. Visitors, or tourists in this case, visit places and arrange their travel to more well-known spots. Advertising is unquestionably important for any business. Similar to this, the travel business needs to draw clients (tourists).

Technically, tourism is not a product. Businesses cannot offer it to their customers like they can with things since it is an intangible. Therefore, the tourism industry markets a place based on the creativity of travellers.

Based on the expectations they have developed from travel ad, the customer makes their travel arrangements. An unsuccessful advertisement might cost the travel sector money. Effective advertising will surely increase the chances of success, albeit it cannot guarantee it.

In the travel sector, advertising serves three crucial purposes:

• To arm visitors with all the knowledge they require in order to explore and comprehend a place.

• Entice visitors to a place.

• To inform guests of the address and location where all reservations must be made.

The global increase in travel enthusiasm has an effect on travel advertising as well. Many ads merely seek to boost their bottom line by promoting the purchase of their goods, services, lodging, or travel arrangements. Whatever their motivation, they should select a reputable travel advertising network if they decide to use a travel advertisement for their travelling business.

Why advertising for the travel business?

Businesses struggle to capture the attention of their target audience whenever new brands enter the market since their clients now have more options than before. You can conduct advertising for your companies, whether it be in travel or another industry, if you want to dominate the market. Average people view at least 5,000 advertisements every day, which closely correlates to the likelihood that your brand will be seen if you market them with these adverts.

Today's competitive market makes situating your tourism business more difficult, thus marketing organisations place a higher emphasis on promotional efforts. A successful advertising campaign is essential to the growth of a tourism firm.

The key components to success are creative thinking and thorough planning. If you wish to operate travel ad for your tourist firm, you can pick an efficient ad network. That is we'll introduce you to the top advertising network for your travel agency in this blog. Continue reading to learn more about ad networks first.

What is an ad network?

An ad network, which acts as a middleman between publishers and advertisers, is defined as "a massive library of ad inventory from publishers that is curated and sold to advertisers." Nearly half of all advertising spending worldwide is now spent on digital advertising, which is the preferred marketing channel for marketers. By acting as a go-between for newspapers and advertisers, an advertising network streamlines the process.

Let's talk about the ideal advertising network for your travel agency. Let's talk about selecting the greatest ad network before disclosing the ideal one for your travel company.

Finding the best advertising networks is straightforward.

Only one problem exists: there are simply too many choices. It's easy to find the best ad networks. The only problem is that there are simply too many possibilities. The fact that the ad tech industry uses a lot of jargon also doesn't help matters. What is programmatic purchasing exactly? Which of CPM and CPC should you pick? Should you pick the more recent, state-of-the-art IAB units over the older, less creative ones?

If you have not given much thought to how the internet ad tech environment functions, some of these questions may seem overwhelming.Choosing a network for your site may appear to be a challenging undertaking, but this is not always the case. The following are the only variables to consider while choosing the best ad network:

• Payment conditions and compensation.

• The calibre of the network's ads

• Amount of the advertiser network

• Compensation and payment conditions 

• The underlying technology

Best advertising network for travel ads

7SearchPPC

One of the top online travel ad networks is 7SearchPPC. This ad network primarily targets bloggers and publishers in lifestyle niches like DIY, parenting, food, travel, and home.

If you want to run ads for your company at a fair price, they are one of the best Google ad alternatives.

You can monetise your website with the help of the publisher-friendly ad network 7SearchPPC without degrading user experience. According to 7SearchPPC, they collaborate with both large and small publications of all sizes. It might be a fantastic substitute for any size business.

They provide all publishers with an alternative to Adsense and the greatest advertising platform for advertisers. If you use 7SearchPPC for your mobile advertisements, you might receive high-quality leads that will increase your company's reach and return on investment.

7SearchPPC is a cost-effective pay-per-click search engine network with outstanding performance. Compared to other PPC networks, they have the highest ROI (Return on Investment) and receive traffic from hundreds of niche websites, portals, and search engines.

How can you market your travel agency?

• Perform audience research.

• Be aware of the tastes of visitors.

• To get in touch with your desired audience, use Facebook Ads.

• You must identify a niche market for travel.

• Concentrate on growing your B2B network.

• Be active on social media sites at all times.

You can draw in your target markets to your travel firm by adhering to these guidelines.

Conclusion

For individuals looking to advertise their travel agency online, the travel ad network provides solutions. If you opt to advertise your travel agency, you can see immediate results. Since so many people now advertise their businesses online, there is intense rivalry everywhere. You must pick the best ad network if you wish to outspend your rivals through advertising.

For your travel-related ads, you can select 7SearchPPc, where you can obtain high-quality leads with a low cost of conversion. You can get in touch with them without any concern because they have more than 8 years of experience in this sector.

Travel advertising network Travel ad network Travel advertisements Ad network for tech support Travel Ad Ad Network For Travel Advertising For Travel Ppc Ad For Travel Ppc For Travel

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This is your brain on fraud apologetics

In 1998, two Stanford students published a paper in Computer Networks entitled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

https://research.google/pubs/pub334/

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/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The co-authors were Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin, and the “large-scale hypertextual web search-engine” they were describing was their new project, which they called “Google.” They were 100% correct — prescient, even!

On Wednesday night, a friend came over to watch some TV with us. We ordered out. We got scammed. We searched for a great local Thai place we like called Kiin and clicked a sponsored link for a Wix site called “Kiinthaila.com.” We should have clicked the third link down (kiinthaiburbank.com).

We got scammed. The Wix site was a lookalike for Kiin Thai, which marked up their prices by 15% and relayed the order to our local, mom-and-pop, one-branch restaurant. The restaurant knew it, too — they called us and told us they were canceling the order, and said we could still come get our food, but we’d have to call Amex to reverse the charge.

As it turned out, the scammers double-billed us for our order. I called Amex, who advised us to call back in a couple days when the charge posted to cancel it — in other words, they were treating it as a regular customer dispute, and not a systemic, widespread fraud (there’s no way this scammer is just doing this for one restaurant).

In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor hassle, but boy, it’s haunting to watch the quarter-century old prophecy of Brin and Page coming true. Search Google for carpenters, plumbers, gas-stations, locksmiths, concert tickets, entry visas, jobs at the US Post Office or (not making this up) tech support for Google products, and the top result will be a paid ad for a scam. Sometimes it’s several of the top ads.

This kind of “intermediation” business is actually revered in business-schools. As Douglas Rushkoff has written, the modern business wisdom reveres “going meta” — not doing anything useful, but rather, creating a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who want to pay for those things, and squatting there, collecting rent:

https://rushkoff.medium.com/going-meta-d42c6a09225e

It’s the ultimate passive income/rise and grind side-hustle: It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to discover a whole festering nest of creeps on Tiktok talking about how they pay Mechanical Turks to produce these lookalike sites at scale.

This mindset is so pervasive that people running companies with billions in revenue and massive hoards of venture capital run exactly the same scam. During lockdown, companies like Doordash, Grubhub and Uber Eats stood up predatory lookalike websites for local restaurants, without their consent, and played monster-in-the-middle, tricking diners into ordering through them:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/19/we-are-beautiful/#man-in-the-middle

These delivery app companies were playing a classic enshittification game: first they directed surpluses to customers to lock them in (heavily discounting food), then they directed surplus to restaurants (preferential search results, free delivery, low commissions) — then, having locked in both consumers and producers, they harvested the surplus for themselves.

Today, delivery apps charge massive premiums to both eaters and restaurants, load up every order with junk fees, and clone the most successful restaurants out of ghost kitchens — shipping containers in parking lots crammed with low-waged workers cranking out orders for 15 different fake “virtual restaurants”:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/01/autophagic-buckeyes/#subsidized-autophagia

Delivery apps speedran the enshittification cycle, but Google took a slower path to get there. The company has locked in billions of users (e.g. by paying billions to be the default search on Safari and Firefox and using legal bullying to block third party Android device-makers from pre-installing browsers other than Chrome). For years, it’s been leveraging our lock-in to prey on small businesses, getting them to set up Google Business Profiles.

These profiles are supposed to help Google distinguish between real sellers and scammers. But Kiin Thai has a Google Business Profile, and searching for “kiin thai burbank” brings up a “Knowledge Panel” with the correct website address — on a page that is headed with a link to a scam website for the same business. Google, in other words, has everything it needs to flag lookalike sites and confirm them with their registered owners. It would cost Google money to do this — engineer-time to build and maintain the system, content moderator time to manually check flagged listings, and lost ad-revenue from scammers — but letting the scams flourish makes Google money, at the expense of Google users and Google business customers.

Now, Google has an answer for this: they tell merchants who are being impersonated by ad-buying scammers that all they need to do is outbid them for the top ad-spot. This is a common approach — Amazon has a $31b/year “ad business” that’s mostly its own platform sellers bidding against each other to show you fake results for your query. The first five screens of Amazon search results are 50% ads:

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

This is “going meta,” so naturally, Meta is doing it too: Facebook and Instagram have announced a $12/month “verification” badge that will let you report impersonation and tweak the algorithm to make it more likely that the posts you make are shown to the people who explicitly asked to see them:

https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/2/21/23609375/meta-verified-twitter-blue-checkmark-badge-instagram-facebook

The corollary of this, of course, is that if you don’t pay, they won’t police your impersonators, and they won’t show your posts to the people who asked to see them. This is pure enshittification — the surplus from users and business customers is harvested for the benefit of the platform owners:

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

The idea that merchants should master the platforms as a means of keeping us safe from their impersonators is a hollow joke. For one thing, the rules change all the time, as the platforms endlessly twiddle the knobs that determine what gets shown to whom:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

And they refuse to tell anyone what the rules are, because if they told you what the rules were, you’d be able to bypass them. Content moderation is the only infosec domain where “security through obscurity” doesn’t get laughed out of the room:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

Worse: the one thing the platforms do hunt down and exterminate with extreme prejudice is anything that users or business-customers use to twiddle back — add-ons and plugins and jailbreaks that override their poor choices with better ones:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store

As I was submitting complaints about the fake Kiin scam-site (and Amex’s handling of my fraud call) to the FTC, the California Attorney General, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and Wix, I wrote a little Twitter thread about what a gross scam this is:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1628948906657878016

The thread got more than two million reads and got picked up by Hacker News and other sites. While most of the responses evinced solidarity and frustration and recounted similar incidents in other domains, a significant plurality of the replies were scam apologetics — messages from people who wanted to explain why this wasn’t a problem after all.

The most common of these was victim-blaming: “you should have used an adblocker” or “never click the sponsored link.” Of course, I do use an ad-blocker — but this order was placed with a mobile browser, after an absentminded query into the Google search-box permanently placed on the home screen, which opens results in Chrome (where I don’t have an ad-blocker, so I can see material behind an ad-blocker-blocker), not Firefox (which does have an ad-blocker).

Now, I also have a PiHole on my home LAN, which blocks most ads even in a default browser — but earlier this day, I’d been on a public wifi network that was erroneously blocking a website (the always excellent superpunch.net) so I’d turned my wifi off, which meant the connection came over my phone’s 5G connection, bypassing the PiHole:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/28/shut-yer-pi-hole/

“Don’t click a sponsored link” — well, the irony here is that if you habitually use a browser with an ad-blocker, and you backstop it with a PiHole, you never see sponsored links, so it’s easy to miss the tiny “Sponsored” notification beside the search result. That goes double if you’re relaxing with a dinner guest on the sofa and ordering dinner while chatting.

There’s a name for this kind of security failure: the Swiss Cheese Model. We all have multiple defenses (in my case: foreknowledge of Google’s ad-scam problem, an ad-blocker in my browser, LAN-wide ad sinkholing). We also have multiple vulnerabilities (in my case: forgetting I was on 5G, being distracted by conversation, using a mobile device with a permanent insecure search bar on the homescreen, and being so accustomed to ad-blocked results that I got out of the habit of checking whether a result was an ad).

If you think you aren’t vulnerable to scams, you’re wrong — and your confidence in your invulnerability actually increases your risk. This isn’t the first time I’ve been scammed, and it won’t be the last — and every time, it’s been a Swiss Cheese failure, where all the holes in all my defenses lined up for a brief instant and left me vulnerable:

https://locusmag.com/2010/05/cory-doctorow-persistence-pays-parasites/

Other apologetics: “just call the restaurant rather than using its website.” Look, I know the people who say this don’t think I have a time-machine I can use to travel back to the 1980s and retrieve a Yellow Pages, but it’s hard not to snark at them, just the same. Scammers don’t just set up fake websites for your local businesses — they staff them with fake call-centers, too. The same search that takes you to a fake website will also take you to a fake phone number.

Finally, there’s “What do you expect Google to do? They can’t possibly detect this kind of scam.” But they can. Indeed, they are better situated to discover these scams than anyone else, because they have their business profiles, with verified contact information for the merchants being impersonated. When they get an ad that seems to be for the same business but to a different website, they could interrupt the ad process to confirm it with their verified contact info.

Instead, they choose to avoid the expense, and pocket the ad revenue. If a company promises to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” I think we have the right to demand these kinds of basic countermeasures:

https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/

The same goes for Amex: when a merchant is scamming customers, they shouldn’t treat complaints as “chargebacks” — they should treat them as reports of a crime in progress. Amex has the bird’s eye view of their transaction flow and when a customer reports a scam, they can backtrack it to see if the same scammer is doing this with other merchants — but the credit card companies make money by not chasing down fraud:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosalindadams/mastercard-visa-fraud

Wix also has platform-scale analytics that they could use to detect and interdict this kind of fraud — when a scammer creates a hundred lookalike websites for restaurants and uses Wix’s merchant services to process payments for them, that could trigger human review — but it didn’t.

Where do all of these apologetics come from? Why are people so eager to leap to the defense of scammers and their adtech and fintech enablers? Why is there such an impulse to victim-blame?

I think it’s fear: in their hearts, people — especially techies — know that they, too, are vulnerable to these ripoffs, but they don’t want to admit it. They want to convince themselves that the person who got scammed made an easily avoidable mistake, and that they themselves will never make a similar mistake.

This is doubly true for readerships on tech-heavy forums like Twitter or (especially) Hacker News. These readers know just how many vulnerabilities there are — how many holes are in their Swiss cheese — and they are also overexposed to rise-and-grind/passive income rhetoric.

This produces a powerful cognitive dissonance: “If all the ‘entrepreneurs’ I worship are just laying traps for the unwary, and if I am sometimes unwary, then I’m cheering on the authors of my future enduring misery.” The only way to resolve this dissonance — short of re-evaluating your view of platform capitalism or questioning your own immunity to scams — is to blame the victim.

The median Hacker News reader has to somehow resolve the tension between “just install an adblocker” and “Chrome’s extension sandbox is a dumpster fire and it’s basically impossible to know whether any add-on you install can steal every keystroke and all your other data”:

https://mattfrisbie.substack.com/p/spy-chrome-extension

In my Twitter thread, I called this “the worst of all possible timelines.” Everything we do is mediated by gigantic, surveillant monopolists that spy on us comprehensively from asshole to appetite — but none of them, not a 20th century payment giant nor a 21st century search giant — can bestir itself to use that data to keep us safe from scams.

Next Thu (Mar 2) I'll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who's-who of European and US trustbusters. It's livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free:

https://www.brusselsconference.com/registration

On Fri (Mar 3), I'll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival:

https://elevate.at/diskurs/programm/event/e23doctorow/

[Image ID: A modified version of Hieronymus Bosch's painting 'The Conjurer,' which depicts a scam artist playing a shell-game for a group of gawking rubes. The image has been modified so that the scam artist's table has a Google logo and the pea he is triumphantly holding aloft bears the 'Sponsored' wordmark that appears alongside Google search results.]

[timetrek24]

🇺🇲 Explore the Fascinating Fusion of Timekeeping and Communication: Unveiling the Pioneering Motorola and Timex Wristwatch-Pagers that Revolutionized Wearable Technology in the 1990s.

🤝 In 1990, Motorola Inc. made its first attempt to enter the market of electronic wristwatches with a built-in pager (similar devices at the same time were already produced by the Japanese companies Seiko and Casio). The device was called "Motorola Wrist Wach Pager". Since 1991, further production of the devices has been carried out jointly with the Timex Group Corporation under the name "The Timex Tracer Wrist Watch Pager".

👉 Since 1998, further development of the line of electronic watches with the participation of Motorola Inc. and Timex Group was associated with the high-tech "Timex Beepwear Datalink" series. These devices also continued the concept of wristwatch-pagers, but with the integration of the well-known Datalink data transmission platform, which integrates with desktop computer software.

➡️ The Datalink line was introduced in 1994 and was developed in conjunction with Microsoft Corporation as an alternative to conventional PDAs with added attributes such as water resistance and ease of programming. Taken together, all this made it possible to use the “Beepwear Datalink” watch as a full-fledged electronic organizer.

📟 The Beepwear Pager Watch epitomized the convergence of traditional wristwatches with cutting-edge communication capabilities. Introduced in the late 1990s, this innovative device redefined the concept of wearable tech, offering users unparalleled convenience and connectivity on the go.

📞 Equipped with pager functionality, the Beepwear Pager Watch allowed users to receive important notifications and messages directly on their wrist, eliminating the need for separate communication devices. With its sleek and compact design, it seamlessly integrated into everyday life, providing instant access to critical information wherever you went.

⌚️ Beyond its communication features, the Beepwear Pager Watch retained the timeless appeal of a classic timepiece, boasting a stylish and durable design that stood the test of time. With its reliable quartz movement and rugged construction, it was built to withstand the rigors of daily wear, ensuring longevity and reliability for its users.

⚙️ The "Beepware" series, as a joint product of the efforts of Timex Group and Motorola Inc. was patented, and the production of the devices was carried out by the newly created joint company "Beepwear Paging Products". The clock operated in the 900 MHz band. FLEX time was also used, which, if supported by the operator, could synchronize the clock time with the network time, and also automatically adjust to the owner's time zone.

🚀 The launch of the Timex Motorola Beepwear Pager Watch marked a significant milestone in the evolution of wearable technology, showcasing the potential for seamless integration of communication and timekeeping functions in a single device. As one of the pioneering products in this category, it paved the way for future innovations in the wearable tech industry, inspiring a new generation of smartwatches and wearable devices.

💔 However, already in 2002, Motorola Inc. was forced to carry out internal restructuring, including ceasing production and support of its own pagers.

💫 Today, the legacy of the Timex Motorola Beepwear Pager Watch lives on, remembered as a trailblazer in the realm of wearable technology. While newer devices may offer more advanced features, the Beepwear Pager Watch remains a symbol of innovation and ingenuity, reminding us of the transformative power of technology in shaping our lives.

[manorpunk]

(part 2)

The Bible, the Vedas, the Daodejing - the universal truth towards which all these works grasp is neither god nor heaven, but rather, the state-structure. Humanity makes states the same way that ants make hills and bees make hives: unthinkingly, instinctively, irrepressibly. Family, culture, community - all of these are the different cells of the state-structure replicating themselves in our every experience. Let go of sentiment, become subsumed in the world around you, and you too will see the veins of the state-structure.

- Excerpt from Authoritarianism is Good when I Do It, by Maria von Zuckerberg-Lorraine

“Thank you! Xiexie! Multajn Dankojn! Thank you to all my voters and subscribers for your support, mwah!”

Sunny blew a kiss to the unfathomable audience watching her morning updates and affirmations from the other side of a screen.

“This is so exciting, and I couldn’t have done it without you. To celebrate, there’s a 25% off sale for the entire - that’s right, the entire merch store, and we’ve added three new body pillow designs to commemorate the occasion! If you’ve ever wanted to snuggle up close with your new president, now’s your chance. Okay, I have to go now, lots of presidential business to attend to, but don’t get up to trouble while I’m gone, mmkay? Love you! Byeeee!”

The live feed ended. Three thousand miles away, in a Bay Area penthouse apartment, Maria von Zuckerberg-Lorraine regarded what she had just seen. She turned to her bot-ler, a squat old model that she had nicknamed ‘Torgo.’

“Your gin, madam,” Torgo said through a speaker that crackled with age, carrying a bottle of gin and a chilled glass on the flat top of its frame.

“Thank you, Torgo.” Maria poured herself a drink and took a sip. “Can you believe it? Her first act as president is shilling her body pillows to lonely teenagers. I ought to hate it, but it’s so… American.” Maria tossed her hair back and took another sip.

Maria was tall, a hair over six feet, and broad in the shoulders and hips. She was a celebrated member of the Worshipful Order of Posters (more commonly referred to as the Poster’s Union), and the author of numerous lengthy treatises, including Good Things are Bad Actually, I am the Only Smart Person on This Bitch of an Earth, and of course her evergreen bestseller Authoritarianism is Good when I Do It. She was a controversial figure within the posting scene - her detractors claimed that her works are overly self-serving and her popularity is largely due to her evil milf aesthetics, while her supporters referred to her as ‘mommy.’

“Hello, Maria!” Sunny said.

“Hello, Sunny,” Maria replied. She started to take another sip of gin, then froze. There was Sunny, looming on her display screen where she had not been looming just a moment before.

“Fuck! How did you - I didn’t even hear you call,” Maria said, fumbling with her glass as she tried not to spill anything.

“So, funny story, I got access to the presidential broadcast system this morning. Gabe - he’s my tech guy - Gabe took a look at it. Turns out, the code hasn’t been updated in a while, so he was able to find an exploit that lets me force-start a call with anyone in the American League! Isn’t that cool?” Sunny grinned, clasping her hands and tilting back and forth with excitement. Colorful little hearts floated around her.

“So what you’re saying is that you hacked me.”

“No, no, no, I just accessed your connection without your knowledge or consent.”

“Literally that’s… never mind. Not like privacy law means anything nowadays,” Maria hid her frown behind another sip.

“Are you drinking?” Sunny asked.

Maria set her glass back on top of Torgo and laid back in her chair, as if pushed over a heavy existential weight. “The Global Logistics Network has automated away half the jobs in existence and gamified the other half. Aivrcade’s VR worlds are more popular than every other video game and most hard drugs combined. The whole world is turning into one big Skinner box. Why aren’t you drinking?”

“Because it’s like nine thirty in the morning. Listen, I was thinking about offering you a job, but you’re being kind of a bummer right now and it’s making me reconsider.”

Maria sat up. “A job? What job?”

“Oh, you know, Secretary of Education.”

Maria blinked. “As in, your Secretary of Education? As in, you’re offering me an executive cabinet position?”

Sunny nodded. “Why so surprised? You’re smart, you’re popular, and you’re an established name in the Poster’s Union. Sounds like a good candidate to me. That is, until I saw you being surly and drinking alone.”

“Wait. I…”

“Yes?” Sunny leaned forward and rested her chin on her hands.

"So you... hmm." Maria crossed her arms. She knew what Sunny wanted her to say, but her soul could tell that she was getting ready to sell it, and it wasn’t going to leave without a fight.

“Alright," she finally said, "how, may I ask, could I be less of a bummer?”

“Funny you should ask, you just have to answer some questions I have prepared for such an occasion. Question one: did you vote for me?”

Maria drummed her fingers. “I voted for the ghost of John Brown, as I have done for every presidential election. But you were my second.”

“Good enough, I appreciate the honesty. Question two: praise me.”

“Excuse me?”

“Praise me. Min laŭdu. Shake it for the camera so I know how bad you really want it.”

Maria’s fingers clenched around her biceps. “That’s not a question.”

“You’re right, it’s an order. Now get praising,” Sunny said, her smile still warm and bright.

“Alright, alright, fine. You’re… the least likely candidate to start world war three. Marcus believed his own bullshit, but you strike me as a plain and simple grifter.”

Sunny put a finger to her chin and glanced up in an exaggerated pondering gesture. “Hmm. That doesn’t really feel like a compliment. You’ll have to do better.”

“You’re… dedicated, and charismatic.”

“More. Keep going.”

“And… bespoke. You wear the zeitgeist like a glove.”

“And I’m cute.”

“And you’re cute,” Maria sighed.

“That wasn't very convincing. Say it again.”

Maria bit back a scowl. “You are cute.”

“Yay! That wasn’t so hard, now was it?”

“It was very hard and I feel dirty. Any more questions?"

“Nah, I'm satisfied now.”

“Then as long as I’ve got your attention, I have some new policy suggestions,” Maria brushed off the dirty feelings as snatched up her tabule, opened a document, and began reading aloud. “One: no more World War 2 movies.”

“That can wait until - sorry, what?”

“It’s been over a century!" Maria threw her hands up in exasperation, “It's time to move on, we drained that well dry, we should make movies about something else already. Two: if you’re talking about America you can’t cite de Tocqueville anymore. Same principal applies here, it’s overdone, please just read anyone else.”

“Ahem. You can just send me the list. I’ll be going soon, I have plenty of other people I need to call today,” Sunny said.

“Oh? Who’s the next person you’re going to ambush with a high-ranking job?”

“Oh, you know…” Sunny flashed a defensive smile, “JMR, to be my Secretary of Defense.”

Maria’s face went icy. “JMR? As in Jacob Martin Rider? That tiresome creep will be in charge of our defense? That manor-lord? That dracula?” Maria spat.

Sunny rolled her eyes. “C’mon, Maria. You can’t call him a dracula just because he’s gay and ostentatious.”

“The man wears jodhpurs, Sunny. He’s like a white Yukio Mishima.”

Sunny sighed. “I know he’s… like that, but I’m not exactly spoiled for choice here. Stopping Imperial Quebec was probably the only good thing America’s done this century, and when people think about the Quebec Wars, they think about JMR. I can’t afford to pass up that kind of reputation. And for the record, he’s half-Norteño.”

Maria scoffed. “Norteños are white now, it was in this year’s patch notes.”

[harshtechseo]

Top 10+ Free Forum Posting Sites List for 2024

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