#Competition

[jamespotterbbg]

lily and regulus refused to study together. ever. they were much too competitive, even though they weren't in the same year. they were both sharp and quick-witted intellectuals and they couldn't study together to save their lives.

[one-time-i-dreamt]

There’s a thing called “competitive legal poetry”, which is just like any other legal battle except the lawyers are required to speak in rhyming couplets.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

An Epic antitrust loss for Google

A jury just found Google guilty on all counts of antitrust violations stemming from its dispute with Epic, maker of Fortnite, which brought a variety of claims related to how Google runs its app marketplace. This is huge:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/technology/epic-games-google-antitrust-ruling.html

The mobile app store world is a duopoly run by Google and Apple. Both use a variety of tactics to prevent their customers from installing third party app stores, which funnels all app makers into their own app stores. Those app stores cream an eye-popping 30% off every purchase made in an app.

This is a shocking amount to charge for payment processing. The payments sector is incredibly monopolized and notorious for its price-gouging – and its standard (wildly inflated) rate is 2-5%:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/04/owning-the-libs/#swiper-no-swiping

Now, in theory, Epic doesn't have to sell in Google Play, the official Android app store. Unlike Apple's iOS, Android permit both sideloading (installing an app directly without using an app store) and configuring your device to use a different app store. In practice, Google uses a variety of anticompetitive tricks to prevent these app stores from springing up and to dissuade Android users from sideloading. Proving that Google's actions – like paying Activision $360m as part of "Project Hug" (no, really!) – were intended to prevent new app storesfrom springing up was a big lift for Epic. But they managed it, in large part thanks to Google's own internal communications, wherein executives admitted that this was exactly why Project Hug existed. This is part of a pattern with Big Tech antitrust: many of the charges are theoretically very hard to make stick, but because the companies put their evil plans in writing (think of the fraudulent crypto exchange FTX, whose top execs all conferred in a groupchat called "Wirefraud"), Big Tech keeps losing in court:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/03/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself/

Now, I do like to dunk on Big Tech for this kind of thing, because it's objectively funny and because the companies make so many unforced errors. But in an important sense, this kind of written record is impossible to avoid. Any large institution can only make and enact policy through administrative systems, and those systems leave behind a paper-trail: memos, meeting minutes, etc. Yes, we all know that quote from The Wire: "Is you taking notes on a fucking criminal conspiracy?" But inevitably, any ambitious conspiracy can only exist if someone is taking notes.

What's more, any large conspiracy involving lots of parties will inevitably produce leaks. Think of this as the corollary to the idea that the moon landing can't be a hoax, because there's no way 400,000 co-conspirators could keep the secret. Big Tech's conspiracies required hundreds or even thousands of collaborators to keep their mouths shut, and eventually someone blabs:

https://www.science.org/content/article/fake-moon-landing-you-d-need-400000-conspirators

This is part of a wave of antitrust cases being brought against the tech giants. As Matt Stoller writes, the guilty-on-all-counts jury verdict will leak into current and future actions. Remember, Google spent much of this year in court fighting the DoJ, who argued that the company bribed Apple not to make a competing search engine, paying tens of billions every year to keep a competitor from emerging. Now that a jury has convinced Google of doing that to prevent alternative app stores from emerging, claims that it used these pay-for-delay tactics in other sectros get a lot more credible:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/boom-google-loses-antitrust-case

On that note: what about Apple? Epic brought a very similar case against Apple and lost. Both Apple and Epic are appealing that case to the Supreme Court, and now that Google has been convicted in a similar case, it might prompt the Supremes to weigh in and resolve the seeming inconsistencies in the interpretation of federal law.

This is a key moment in the long project to wrest antitrust away from the pro-monopoly side, who spent decades "training" judges to produce verdicts that run counter to the plain language of America's antitrust law:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/08/13/post-bork-era/#manne-down

There's 40 years' worth of bad precedent to overturn. The good news is that we've got the law on our side. Literally, the wording of the laws and the records of the Congressional debate leading to their passage, all militate towards the (incredibly obvious) conclusion that the purpose of anti-monopoly law is to fight monopoly, not defend it:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/14/aiming-at-dollars/#not-men

It's amazing to realize that we got into this monopoly quagmire because judges just literally refused to enforce the law. That's what makes one part of the jury verdict against Google so exciting: the jury found that Google's insistence that Play Store sellers use its payment processor was an act of illegal tying. Today, "tying" is an obscure legal theory, but few doctrines would be more useful in disenshittifying the internet. A company is guilty of illegal tying when it forces you to use unrelated products or services as a condition of using the product you actually want. The abandonment of tying led to a host of horribles, from printer companies forcing you to buy ink at $10,000/gallon to Livenation forcing venues to sell tickets through its Ticketmaster subsidiary.

The next phase of this comes when the judge decides on the penalty. Epic doesn't want cash damages – it wants the judge to order Google to fulfill its promise of "an open, competitive Android ecosystem for all users and industry participants." They've asked the judge to order Google to facilitate third-party app stores, and to separate app stores from payment processors. As Stoller puts it, they want to "crush Google’s control over Android":

https://www.epicgames.com/site/en-US/news/epic-v-google-trial-verdict-a-win-for-all-developers

Google has sworn to appeal, surprising no one. The Times's expert says that they will have a tough time winning, given how clear the verdict was. Whatever this means for Google and Android, it means a lot for a future free from monopolies.

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/2023/12/12/im-feeling-lucky/#hugger-mugger

[keepingitneutral]

House in the woods

Courtesy: Lana Al Khabbaz

[theancientwayoflife]

~ "Freydal": Tournament book of Emperor Maximilian I.

Culture: South German

Date: A.D. 1512-1515

Medium: 255 gouaches heightened with gold and silver in leather strap: paper; leather.

• From the source: The "Freydal" describes the tournaments during Maximilian's knightly love journey.

[nasa]

HBCU Students Make Moves with NASA Tech

In September 2023, students at HBCUs participated in a hackathon at the National HBCU Week Conference, where they used NASA’s technologies to create solutions to problems that affect Black communities. The winning team, Team Airtek, proposed a nano-sensor array for medical diagnoses that would give students on HBCU campuses a non-invasive, non-intensive way to test themselves for precursors for diseases and illnesses like diabetes and COVID.

The hackathon they participated in is a modified version of the full NASA Minority University Research and Education Project Innovation and Tech Transfer Idea Competition (MITTIC) that takes place each fall and spring semester at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

No matter what you’re studying, you can join the MITTIC competition and come up with new and innovative tech to help your community and the world.

MITTIC could be the beginning of your career pathway: Teams can go on exclusive NASA tours and network with industry experts. Show off your entrepreneurial skills and your team could earn money—and bragging rights.

Don’t wait too long to apply or to share with someone who should apply! The deadline for proposals is Oct. 16, 2023. Apply here: https://microgravityuniversity.jsc.nasa.gov/nasamittic.

[ri-afan]

I love this

[rhey-007]

The mystery of Love

Fernando Alonso family fluff

|| P3 of Fernando x goth mommy!reader

• | socialmedia au

Summary: After only 2 appearances on the paddock, little Benny already has all the drivers wrapped around his finger. But which one along with his team will steal the child's heart?

Warnings/Tags: fluff, family fluff, female reader

A/N: WHY IS IT SO HARD TO FIND SUITABLE PICS WITH TODDLER BOYS JXHHZNDNNFNFXEH I had to use Jack Wolff for some🧍‍♀️Anywaaaay this is a longer one just so y'know :)) Enjoy!

(If you'd like to be added to the tag list lemme know!)

Masterlist

✧༺🌊༻✧

"Competition is the best form of motivation"

INSTAGRAM

INSTAGRAM

Silverstone Circuit

liked by maxverstappen1, fernandoalo_oficial and 257,368 others

tagged: y/n._.l/n

•danielricciardo: a little road trip before training! 💪😎

•y/n._.l/n: •fernandoalo_oficial •kl.au_s why is my kid having playdates with literally EVERYONE on the paddock? 🧍‍♀️

→ •kl.au_s: you know well we can't say no to him 👉👈🤭

→ •fernandoalo_oficial: exactly.

→ •y/n._.l/n: I left you for 2 days!

→ •user1: •user2 and tell me they're not together 🧍‍♀️

→ •user2: they already act like a family lol

→ •user3: not Benny adopting the whole grid 😭

•yukitsunoda0511: don't forget about your chauffeur! >:(

→ •user4: of course Yuki had to drive them around 😂

INSTAGRAM

Silverstone Circuit

liked by fernandoalo_oficial, y/n._.l/n and 430,578 others

tagged: silverstonecircuit, y/n._.l/n

•lewishamilton: great race weekend spent in even better company! Thank you Britian!

•fernandoalo_oficial: YOU DID NOT

→ •lewishamilton: yes. I. did. 🤭😎

•user5: not lewis stealing Fernando's kid

→ •user6: not only him, check out Daniel's ig

→ •user7: and Lando's!

→ •user8: basically everyone's lol

•susie_wolff: can't wait to see little bunny again! ❤

→ •user9: the boy got himself a 2nd mother

→ •user10: and whole lotta uncles!

•user11: they even got him a small suit like Jack's I can't 😭✋

→ •user12: they can match!!! 💞

→ •user13: they would slay SO hard 😍

INSTAGRAM

Silverstone Circuit

liked by the_crochet_girl, y/n._.l/n and 50,238 others

tagged: y/n._.l/n

•hulkhulkenberg: ping-pong session before the training with my boy Chiquito and a quick store break to buy mommy some flowers :)

•user14: isn't it weird that every driver posts pictures with Fernando's kid recently?

→ •user15: yeah and all of them only give attention to Benny, what about Klaus????

•y/n._.l/n: thanks for the flowers! Benny already can't wait for another play date with Noemi and Laura! ❤

→ •kevinmagnussen: they can't wait too! ❤

→ •user16: WHY HAVEN'T WE SEEN THE KIDS PLAYING TOGETHER SDHYCYUESNXIEU

→ •user17: we got ROBBED >:(

INSTAGRAM

Silverstone Circuit

liked by pierregasly, fernandoalo_oficial and 728, 956 others

tagged: silverstonecircuit, y/n._.l/n

•charles_leclerc: thanks for the best boy out there, little bunny, for helping the best team! 💪💞

•user18: you know you ain't the best

•maxverstappen1: who said you were the best? 🤨

→ •carlossainz55: Benny ofc 💅

→ •fernandoalo_oficial: no way he said that

→ •pierregasly: I belive he said that about all the teams 😆

•user19: are the drivers fighting over which team is the best in a random kid's eyes???

→ •user20: that's so cute and stupid xD 💞

INSTAGRAM

Silverstone Circuit

liked by y/n._.l/n, valtteribottas and 269, 034 others

tagged: silverstonecircuit, y/n._.l/n, valtteribottas

•zhouguanyu24: thank you Benny and Klaus for supporting us in Britain! Love you! ❤

•user2137: why is everyone posting about Chiquito?

→ •user22: it's clearly a competition for the best team

•user23: Zhou looks so cute playing with Benny I can't TwT 💞

→ •user24: all of them look sooo cute with Chiquito!

•kl.au_s: finally someone mentioned me, thank you

→ •fernandoalo_oficial: and you said you don't care about the sport nor the people 🤨

→ •kl.au_s: shhh 🤫

- see responses (15)

•user25: love how Fernando and the other kid argue in the comments xD

→ •user26: they literally radiate father and son energy!!!

INSTAGRAM

Silverstone Circuit

liked by oscarpiastri, carlossainz55 and 825, 093 others

tagged: silverstonecircuit, oscarpiastri, y/n._.l/n

•landonorris: a small ride around the track in new fav tshirt from the best uncles on the grid 🏎💨😎👏

•danielricciardo: *2nd and 3rd best

→ •lewishamilton: *4th and 5th best

- see responses (10)

→ •y/n._.l/n: shut up you're all best uncles 🙄

→ •user27: I think mommy has enough already 😂

→ •user28: I love how y/n is finally active in the f1 world! hope to see them more often on the races!

•user29: the tshirt I can't 😭💞

→ •user30: he looks so cute in it 7fyxitxufxjccjv

INSTAGRAM

Silverstone Circuit

liked by redbullracing, christianhorner and 618, 110 others

tagged: silverstonecircuit, y/n._.l/n, redbullracing

•maxverstappen1: •redbullracing I've got you a future driver 💪🦬

•charles_leclerc: you wish -_-

→ •georgerussell63: you both wish, we all know Chiquito will choose mercedes 😏👉👉

•user31: not another racing suit 😭✋💞

→ •user32: I'm gonna melt... 💞

•user33: other teams should have tried better tbh :/

→ •user34: mercedes and redbull are defo in top 2

→ •user35: aston is definitely number 1 it's obvious 💁‍♀️

INSTAGRAM

liked by fernandoalo_oficial, y/n._.l/n and 182,137 others

tagged: fernandoalo_oficial, y/n._.l/n, kl.au_s

•logansargeant: 🪱🐟🌊

•user36: love how all the drivers show Chiquito around the teams garages and do stuff related to formula while Logan randomly took all 4 of them fishing 😂

→ •user37: it must have been the time of little bunny's life! 💞

•user38: why is it so cute TwT

•fernandoalo_oficial: thanks for a great time!

•user39: why do I feel like he has NO idea about the competition?

→ •logansargeant: what competition? 👁👄👁

→ •user40: exactly! 😂

INSTAGRAM

Silverstone Circuit

liked by kl.au_s, y/n._.l/n and 389, 136 others

tagged: fernandoalo_oficial, kl.au_s, y/n._.l/n

•pierregasly: dinner time with the new grid fam! 🥘🥗🍕

•fernandoalo_oficial: thanks for inviting us for a FREE dinner! 😍

•user41: the guys are spoiling Benny SOO MUCH

→ •user42: he got 2 free meals (1 that he had to fish himself) 2 f1 suits, a little kart, some plushies and probably waaay more things that we have no idea about

→ •user43: all in a spawn of 3 DAYS!

→ •user44: I wish I was Benny 😭

→ •user45: yes. especially that he has such cool hot parents 😍

•charles_leclerc: why was I not invited 🧍‍♀️

→ •y/n._.l/n: want me to adopt you?

→ •charles_leclerc: yes please 😩🙏 I want free food

→ •user6: charles wtf XD

→ •danielricciardo: I want to be adopted too ✋🤓

- see replies (17)

✧༺🌊༻✧

Tag list: @morgan-getty @lichterfee @ashy-kit

[zelphin124]

SeasonTale Creative Challenge

PLEASE REBLOG SO EVERYONE CAN SEE THIS!

Art and Design by PrinceTal

Greetings, Artists, Voice Actors, and Writers! It is I, Zelphin, and I am hosting an (annual?) competition! Introducing the first year of the SeasonTale Creative Challenge! 

This is a competition to express your creative talents by contributing to SeasonTale for a cash prize! There are three ways to participate: Art, Voice Acting, and Writing! Contribute some time to use one of the three involving SeasonTale to enter the challenge for the prize!

DEADLINE IS NOV 15th, 2023, 12:00 AM (GMT-6)

my birthday hehe~

Winners will be announced on December 1st!

Updates are in #scc info

Scroll down for details!

Rules

It must be a SeasonTale Sans. (I might do other characters from SeasonTale another year)

You MUST tag #SeasonTale Challenge and @zelphin124 in the post so I can see it! Or DM me on Discord!

You CAN do more than one submission (one per Sans for VA, two for writing)

You CAN do the Season Sanses interacting with OCs or popular Sanses, get creative!

DIFFERENT/SIMPLER OUTFITS ARE ALLOWED! I know they are a pain to draw...

You CANNOT steal/copy from other creators!

Please keep all content PG-13

Payments will be made via PayPal (unless negotiated otherwise)

Specific rules within the Google doc!

Prizes

All prizes are in USD currency!

Artists

First place: $55

Second place: $35

Third place: $20

VAs and Writers

First place: $40 

Second place: $30

Third place: $20

Prompts

Summer flirting with literally anyone

Particularly a feisty character

Spring cooking with Swap/Horror

Spring loves cooking Japanese Ramen

Autumn being a gremlin, as usual

Usually being feisty while training or hissing at a cat (he’s scared of cats)

Winter meeting your OC/you in the snowy mountains of SeasonTale

The Four Sanses in a training session

The four Sanses exploring a new AU

Spring comforting someone

Summer flirting with someone

Autumn getting frustrated at someone being annoying and telling them to go away

Winter is an awkward teddy bear trying to organize something

Ft. Iro!Sans for a female character/female voice actors!

Make something up! Be creative! Have fun!

Need more details? Here's the Google Doc:

References

Art and Design PrinceTal

Oh and Iro!Sans

HAVE FUN! I'm so excited to see what you all come up with!

Been dying to do this for a long time~

[best-sharks-bracket]

alright so this is how this is gonna work

we have 512 species of shark in the world

which is a power of 2 therefore I can make a giant bracket for it :)

im going to try to set up this giant bracket soon and uh then voting will start

may the best shark win

[character-of-all-time]

hey. competitions? getting too specific. "middle sibling competition" "most unhinged knife weilding bisexual with abandonment issues competition" "biggest left tit competition" ridiculous, all of you. pure cowardice. if your characters are so good they should win against all. they should climb the ever increasing mountain of corpses free of constraints. so, i give you:

the most character of all time competition

no limits. no categories. simply characters fighting to the fucking death in one single glorious showdown, the ULTIMATE battle, as they should have been all along. if your characters are truely strong they will prevail. they will fight as long as they need to. or do you doubt them?

SUBMISSION RULES:

must be a character

must be from something

must be willing to fight for as long as it takes

send them

[one-time-i-dreamt]

Hozier visited my college and held a competition which I won, the prize was that I got to play Wii Sports Resort while he critiqued me.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

2600’s amazing Hackers on Planet Earth con may go down under enshittification

Catch me in Miami! I'll be at Books and Books in Coral Gables on Jan 22 at 8PM.

It's been 40 years since Emmanuel Goldstein launched the seminal, essential, world-changing 2600: The Hacker Quarterly. 2600 wasn't the first phreak/hacker zine, but it was the most important, spawning a global subculture dedicated to the noble pursuit of technological self-determination:

https://www.2600.com/

2600 has published hundreds of issues in which digital spelunkers report eagerly on the things they've discovered by peering intently at the things no one was supposed to even glance at (I'm proud to be one of those writers!). They've fought legal battles, including one that almost went to the Supreme Court:

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

They created a global network of meetups where some of technology's most durable friendships and important collaborations were born. These continue to this day:

https://www.2600.com/meetings

And they've hosted a weekly radio show on NYC's WBAI, Off the Hook:

https://wbai.org/program.php?program=76

When WBAI management lost their minds and locked the station's most beloved hosts out of the studio, Off the Hook (naturally) led the rebellion, taking back the station for its audience, rescuing it from a managerial coup:

https://twitter.com/2600/status/1181423565389942786

But best of all, 2600 gave us HOPE – both in the metaphorical sense of "hope for a better technological tomorrow" and in the literal sense, with its biannual Hackers On Planet Earth con:

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

For decades HOPE had an incredible venue, the Hotel Pennsylvania (memorialized in the phreak anthem "PEnnsylvania 6-5000"), a crumbling pile in midtown Manhattan that was biannually transformed into a rollicking, multi-day festival of forbidden technology, improbable feats, and incredible presentations. I was privileged to keynote HOPE in 2016:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1D7APjmVbk

But after the 2018 HOPE, the Hotel Pennsylvania was demolished to make way for the Penn15 (no, really) skyscraper, a vaporware mega-tower planned as a holding pen for luxury shopping and empty million-dollar condos sold to offshore war-criminals as safe-deposit boxes in the sky. The developer, Vornado (no, really) hasn't actually done all that – after demo'ing the Hotel Pennsylvania, they noped out, leave a large, unusable scar across midtown.

But HOPE wasn't lost. In 2022, the ever-resilient 2600 crew relocated to Queens, hosted by St John's University – a venue that was less glamorous that the Hotel Pennsylvania, but the event was still fantastic. Attendance fell from 2,000 to 1,000, but that was something they could work with, and reviews from attendees were stellar.

Good thing, too. 2600 is, first and foremost, a magazine publisher, and these have been hard years for magazines. First there was the mass die-off of indie bookstores and newsracks (I used to sell 2600 when I was a bookseller, and in the years after, I always took the presence of 2600 on a store's newsrack as an unimpeachable mark of quality).

Thankfully for 2600, their audience is (unsurprisingly) a tech-savvy one, so they were able to substitute digital subscriptions for physical ones:

https://www.2600.com/Magazine/DigitalEditions

Of course, many of those subscriptions came through Amazon's Kindle, because nerds were early Amazon adopters, and because the Kindle magazine publishing platform offered DRM-free distribution to subscribers along with a fair payout to publishers.

But then Amazon enshittified its magazine system. Having locked publishers to its platform, it rugged them and killed the monthly subscription fees that allowed publishers to plan for a steady output. Publishers were given a choice: leave Amazon (and all the readers locked inside its walled garden) or put your magazine into the Kindle Unlimited system:

https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/arp/B0BWPTCP4K?deviceType=A1FG5NAKX0MRJL

Kindle Unlimited is an all-you-can-eat program for Kindle, which pays publishers and writers based on a system that is both opaque and easily gamed, with the lion's share of the money going to "publishers" who focus on figuring out how to cheat the algorithm. Revenues for 2600 – and all the other magazines that Amazon had sucked in and sucked dry – fell off a cliff.

Which brings me to the present moment. After 40 years, 2600 is still at it, having survived the bookstorepocalypse, the lunacy of public radio management, the literal demolition of their physical home by an evil real-estate developer, and Amazon's crooked accounting.

This is 2600, circa 2024, and 2024 a HOPE year:

https://www.hope.net/

Once again, HOPE has been scheduled for its new digs in Queens, July 12-14. Last week, HOPE sent out an email blast to their subscribers telling them the news. They expected to sell 500 tickets in the first 24 hours. They didn't even come close:

https://www.2600.com/content/hope-ticket-sales-update

It turns out that Google and the other major mail providers don't like emails with the word "hacker" in them. The cartel that decides which email gets delivered, and which messages go to spam, or get blocked altogether, mass-blocked the HOPE 2024 announcement. Email may be the last federated, open platform we have, but mass concentration has created a system where it's nearly impossible to get your email delivered unless you're willing to play by Gmail's rules:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/

For Emmanuel Goldstein, founder of 2600 and tireless toiler for this community, the deafening silence following from that initial email volley was terrifying: "like some kind of a "Twilight Zone" episode where everyone has disappeared."

The enshittification that keeps 2600's emails from being delivered to the people who asked to receive them is even worse on social media. Social media companies routinely defraud their users by letting them subscribe to feeds, then turning around to the people and organizations that run those feeds and saying, "You've got x thousand subscribers on this platform, but we won't put your posts in their feeds unless you pay us to 'boost' your content":

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

Enshittification has been coming at 2600 for decades. Like other forms of oddball media dedicated to challenging corporate power and government oppression, 2600 has always been a ten-years-ahead preview of the way the noose was gonna tighten on all of us. And now, they're on the ropes. HOPE can't sell tickets unless people know about HOPE, and neither email providers nor social media platforms have any interest in making that happen.

A handful of giant corporations now get to decide what we read, who we hear from, and whether and how we can get together in person to make friends, forge community, rabble-rouse and change the world. The idea that "it's not censorship unless the government does it" has always been wrong (not all censorship violates the First Amendment, and censorship can be real without being unconstitutional):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/04/yes-its-censorship/

What can you do about it? Well, for one thing, you can sign up for HOPE. It's gonna be great. They've got sub-$100 hotel rooms! In New York City!

https://store.2600.com/products/tickets-to-hope-xv

If you can't make it to HOPE, you can sign up for a virtual membership:

https://store.2600.com/products/tickets-to-hope-xv-virtual-attendee

You can submit a talk to HOPE:

https://www.hope.net/cfp.html

You can subscribe to 2600, in print or electronically (I signed up for the lifetime print subscription and it was a bargain – I devour every issue the day it arrives):

https://store.2600.com/collections/subscriptions-renewals

2600 is living a decade in the future of every other community you care about, weird hobby you enjoy, con you live for, and publication you read from cover to cover. If we can all pull together to save it, it'll be a beacon of hope (and HOPE).

I'm Kickstarting the audiobook for The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

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/2024/01/19/hope-less/#hack-the-planet

[itscolossal]

The 2023 Audubon Photography Awards Zeros In on Threats to Avian Life Amid the Climate Emergency

[featheredsnek]

Hi hi! I happen to have 3 extra Cy Plushes going around, so.... A COMPETITION! Do a drawing of Cy in the coming weeks, and then my 3 favorite pieces will each have a free Cy plush shipped to them!!

I'll be picking May 1st, so you got some time!!

NO NSFW ART, just SFW please! Nothing suggestive or bloody or hateful or anything like either, he is a young goober!

To submit, either DM it to me or reblog with it! Otherwise have fun, I'm excited to see what you might do! Thanks so much :3