#I say this be The Algorithm^TM

[a-pretty-small-toaster]

I have discovered that lumberjacks are kinda hot.

They swing axes (hot)

...honestly that's the best part.

What, you wanted more? More than axes? What more could you even possibly want?

[mjrdm]

.

[blrblob]

you know things aint right when your drafts get higher than the queue

[transgenbur]

i have so many thoughts about the tommy song/video and theyre a jumbled mess. i wouldnt call this an analysis this is just. most of my thoughts surrounding the video and what it shows about tommy

one of the things that stuck out to me (outside of how depressing and just like. is this guy okay) is something that ive always respected tommy for because he's always stuck with it and its his like. fervent conviction in people doing things theyre passionate about. thats always been one of the things he talks about all the time!!!

when AI started appearing he was talking about death of creativity, with the internet he's always talking about how the real tragedy is the algorithm killing people's passion by driving them with views and money, and even when he talks about youtube itself, and nowadays standup, its so full of passion.

and i think thats really important because it would be extremely easy for someone like tommy, who's in the process of maturing his online image from a very loud, immature and PASSIONATE persona, to make fun of it. it would be so easy to do like so many other creators and laugh at how "cringe" it was and make a quick cash/attention grab with a funny clip of him laughing at himself. but he never has. well don't get me wrong he's laughed at himself or old videos but it's always just. good natured taking the piss out of himself, it's never this like. mocking your younger self who was so excited to do what they did only because now its "cringe".

not only is he constantly giving that advice to other people (its been years of him replying, to any kid in his chat or donations asking advice on how to be a creator etc, "just go and do it if you love it!!"), he's coherent with how he applies it to himself. he realised he was making cash grab tiktok react vids and hated it so much he just stopped uploading for a while.

i dont know i just think there's something admirable about being able to still be sincere in a time where everything especially online has to be processed through a layer of irony. and its even funnier because he's more sincere THROUGH the irony i mean he's literally going into standup.

letting yourself create something that "means" something is fucking hard especially when half the internet still sees you as a kid who screams around. except the thing is that kid DID make stuff that mattered and that meant something because he was, in his own words, having fun.

i think thats what the format of the video was about too. i mean i think it was pretty clearly not a song thats meant to be streamed, its not purely music, its also a video because tommy is also first and foremost an editor who went to film college. its also not a "comedy" song like he's made some before, because those were all intentionally created to land as many jokes and make a big buzz— which doesnt mean they were bad! im philza is a contemporary lyrical masterpiece. but they had a specific purpose and it was to make people laugh and i think this video was completely like. opposite of what peoples expectations are of tommy. the "wow hes not a child anymore hes being mature🤓" reactions are the most obvious aspect of this (which, like, its been a while, get with the program).

i think the point of this was to make something that genuinely meant something but that was also like. as unpalatable to the algorithm and to the TommyInnit Viewer as possible. even now that he's gone into making quieter, more reflective videos, we've never had the flashing texts and the projector images and just all of that. hes always talking about how he hates the way the "youtube formula" has dictated the course of content and stolen all creativity for youtubers. its not meant to be a YouTube Video tm. its just meant to mean something to someone, and obviously process some sort of personal emotions, and i just think thats. yeah. yeah

i mean he even says so outright. "this needless, self indulgent spiral of self gratification" is pretty damn explicit. its not meant to be funny content its really a cry for help or for just. anything at all really

it was also a lot about perception, yknow the "entertainer" dilemma, "its all attention porn"... theres a layer of this point thats universal, everyone struggles with how they're perceived and i think any "artist" or "entertainer" figure can see themselves in it, but there's also a layer thats completely impermeable to most of us because it touches upon the sheer absurdity of a "youtuber". especially one of tommy's popularity. especially one who blew up so so fast so young. i honestly think its IMPOSSIBLE to process that. its about the ethics of having millions of people's time so readily available to you if you just press the right buttons to make the algorithm happy and then you've got them. im like 75% sure i remember him saying this on stream once, something like "your time is valuable" and if a fan didnt value him as an entertainer they should drop him.

and even here^ thats the saddest "lmao" ive seen in my life SORRY LOL but its really just. yeah im not gonna repeat myself it speaks for itself. perception and internet expectations and all that

one of the other images that stuck out to me was also this:

"yeah i know its too much like bo burnham but it wont be in a year though. in a year it will be like tom simons. just let me figure out what that means, ok?"

a lot of the video is about. influences and inspirations. the bo burnham references are so obvious he's poking at them, but i think he's raising a good point about the creativity that he's constantly praising. its never something that springs up on its own, its all about looking at others work and making it your own and feeding yourself with all those experiences and slowly, surely building your own way of doing things (tommyinnit "minecraft talent show" and "a tribute to dream smp" serial quackity + schlatt impersonator would know all about that) ->

and its daunting! its fucking scary to move away from that! which is also the main vibe i got from the video which, outside of his own issues with how he's perceived online, was the sort of existential dread that comes with actually creating. its one thing to preach you need to be passionate and create, its another to sit down and create something thats BY you. its a part of growing up! and we're literally seeing him do it live (well the bits that he chooses to show obviously)! thats also part of why i think tommy's so relatable to so many people is that he's so like. honest and real about what it's like to grow up, simple as that, and growing into yourself.

"this was everything to me" and using the picture of his younger self... man. theres obviously so much sadness underlying the whole thing but i think the nostalgia and melancholy in mourning being someone who was only inspired/excited by your interests and role models is universal. and obviously for tommy a lot of those influences turned out. well i think it was pretty damn clear who/what he was referring to here. ->

i don't think i need to go too in detail about that, especially cause a lot of the video was clearly a way to process his own personal emotions. especially with those next few images. i just hope he's okay and that god doubles his pain and gives it to mr beast to quote my friend bronzetomatoes. man.

of course he had to end with a funny clip about a hot anime girl and i think that kinda. sums it all up in a way. if that makes sense. at the end of the day its about the fact that he has to use humour to make the thing work when its out in the open, even when he tries not to and to be actually honest, but theres also the fact that hes literally a comedian and creating something "honest" IS through humor. its kindof a double edged sword

right well that was my jumbled mess of psychoanalysing tommyinnit i hope he is alright and all that because well that was. something

[storkmuffin]

Yunho's Way of the Live #6 (Ekangmo)

The Yeosang Influence (Part 2/3- You can find part one here.)

*this is my usual rpf that i'm making up based on available materials written in the form of a tumblr essay/blogpost. pls be advised that if you disagree with something i say, you are right and i am wrong. enjoy.

Where we began

So Yunho had this coquette side since he was a little (very tall) thing but (see part 1 and his whole ang-dae-yeooo baby voice) but unlike Yeosang, Geisha Coquetry was not always his initial impulse. Take for example this early interview, where in response to a question that must've been along the lines of, Do you think I can tell my parents about my stanning Ateez? from an Atiny evidently young enough to need to care about that (Why do people romanticize being young by the way? Extreme youth sucks ass. Being a grown up is incomparably better.), he gives a very ambiguous, smart ass, mean-oppa sort of answer, using something very close to his Real Yunho Voice (tm - See discussion here)

Yunho: Would Mother and Father like our Ateez Oppa? The ones who always flip their eyes like this and go Auugh? Would they like them??

The date on this video is July 2, 2021, which means the actual response was given sometime earlier than that. I mean, this is a great answer, but it walks that line between negging the asker in a tantalizing way (Why, little girl who will be upset I call you a little girl, do you give a shit what Mommy and Daddy want you to listen to? ), and a smart-ass boy being a smart-ass in a not quite appropriate setting. It also fits the rougher image that Ateez has always had. I know International Atiny get very frustrated by the limitations placed on Ateez by the mores of Korean audiences, but from where I am sitting these people seem pretty free to run about as wild as Idols are allowed to be and still be Kpop Idol.

The thing is, unlike Wooyoung's flirty banter with his Youngbuin that went viral enough to catch my eye in my previously Kpop-free algorithm, if this footage of Yunho being a smartass was the first clip I'd seen of any of the Ateez members? It would have turned me off of Ateez. I do not find boys who get sarcastic enticing enough to pursue down a Youtube rabbit hole, even if they look like Yunho.

Showing You, Yes, You, Especially You, A Good Time

A comment that both K-Atiny and the commentary editrixes at KQ keep repeating, almost like a slogan, is 그래, 니들이 즐거우면 됬다. Which in translation is something like, Well, all right, I guess, as long as you guys are happy/ enjoying yourselves, that's enough. In the case of the employees at KQ who have to make the content, this often applies to when the members stop engaging with the camera (and the viewer) to instead break out into fits of giggles at some inside joke they never explain. From the K-Atiny, this phrase is applied to when a government pairing (ooh look at me use new vocabulary!) gets too into BL Fanservice on stage or in (often deceptively, it must be added) edited content to an extent that the fan feels left out, or in the worst instances, turned off altogether. It's a lament, when a fan says it, because if she was happy with what she was given, she could just take the thrills and apply it to her IRL boyfriend or her vibrator or whoever. Having to say, I'm happy for you means, in actuality, The rules of fandom engagement dictate that I can't actually complain but this content makes me feel alienated.

And one pair, that does function as a team but isn't encouraging you to ship them, Ekangmo, Yeosang and Yunho, are excellent at never ever forcing the K-Atiny to have to feel that 그래, 니들이 즐거우면 됬다 (I'm happy if you two are happy) type of resigned acceptance. They are working as a team to make us happy, rather than each other. The very consistent audience orientation, which is I think a discipline that Yeosang is actually really great at practicing because it just comes naturally to him (whereas Yunho has to be deliberate about it), is just so fizzy and fine.

WHERE IS THE EKANGMO UNIT SONG?

But until then, we have these joint lives of Yeosang and Yunho. (I'm not going to liveblog these, but only discuss the highlights. I don't think. )

Initially, Yunho Tried Out a Protector of Yeosang Type Persona

First up, because I picked it, is this one, where at 1:57 Atiny ask Yunho what Yeosang is doing, and Yunho calls him over.

Did you ffw'd to where I said? Because you hear Yunho using his real voice to call for Yeosang, and Yeosang also answer in his real voice and cadence. Yunho's voice is much lower and deeper than his 'for-showbiz' voice, whereas Yeosang's is much more sing-song and lighter than his Please I'm a Doberman Please voice.

And of course, on brand, on theme, par for the course, for the two of them address nakedness. The chat starts with Atiny asking why Yunho's shirt is all ripped up, and he answers by saying that he's trying to meet a certain level of skin exposure in tiny cumulative bits. Then he asks Yeosang if he's naked, and Yeosang replies that he's going to put something on in his singsong voice, which Yunho reaffirms.

Yunho, ever business minded, wants the pairing to have a slogan as well as a pairing name, and he solicits the Atiny to come up with something. Because their totemic mascot animals are both canine, there's a lot of barking and dog related puns in response, which Yunho disapproves of quite sternly. At 4:30, Yunho readjusts his glasses in a disappointed manner to ask, rhetorically, "You call that a slogan, everyone?" (Mean oppa could clearly have been his persona, but that wouldn't sell, you see.) Yeosang has the correct Geisha response - he evidently doesn't like the suggestions either, but he says, in his very dulcet voice (at 5:05) that "It's not necessary to come up with or finalize something right this minute. It would be nice to have something that's novel and unique feeling though." Yunho, Mean Oppa, picks the one that is based on an Ateez lyric, deciding for everyone, because he doesn't think anyone can come up with a novel and unique one that would pass muster. Because he's a mean oppa.

Yeosang, being the chakhae oppa, agrees. He wants there to be peace. They say the slogan together, which is very dorky, by the way (5:40 - 5:49). Yunho is many things but he's not actually cool, alas.

They ask the (very kind) Atiny (who are also paying to see this) what they think, and they get a very polite version of Y'all are Dorks, which is "It's cute." For different reasons, Yeosang and Yunho both object: Yeosang is for a variety of reasons sick of being called cute, and Yunho knows what they really meant to say. Then Yunho goes into mean oppa mode to Yeosang (at 6:00)- when Yeosang says what they were going for was something cool, he tells Yeosang that declaring yourself cool is what makes it cute (diminutive). Yoesang goes, Oh is that so? while Yunho laughs.

At this stage, Yunho is reactive to Yeosang as much as he is in sync and tuning himself to Yeosang. He keeps breaking out of Geisha mode to be disapproving, or sarcastic, or sharp. At 7:18, for example, they engage in a discussion about how it is that Yeosang ends his fanchats, because Yunho is very invested in the correct way to run his own fanchats. Yeosang loves being asked questions by someone who is actually going to let him answer and listen, so he gives a pretty detailed answer, but then the Yeodoongie that followed him into Yunho's chat start to tease him, gently.

And something interesting happens. At 7:44, Yunho reads some of the chatter and goes, "Wait, why are you making fun of our Yeosang? What is this? Are you playing Who Can Tease Yeosang The Most? Who? Who is teasing our Yoesang??" He drops out of 존댓말 into informal speech, defending Yeosang, because everyone must be very gentle to Yeosang (despite Yeosang being kind of savage whenever he feels like it tbh).

At 9:30, we go back to the Ekangmo perennial topic of nudity. (This is not the only reason I want the unit song and video. I swear.) Because their food had been delivered (as announced by the manager that lives with them) they were trying to wrap up, so Yunho was promising to do more of these joint fanchats - "We promise that if one of us calls the other one will come running over." Yeosang agrees, but then Yeosang says the phrase 팬티 바람으로 달려 올뻔 하다가 about this time - "I almost ran over here in nothing but my panties" - and Yunho laughs at his word choice, then he says " 서로 팬티 바람이어 가지��� 조심해야 해. 어쩔수 없어." - we're constantly in nothing but panties so we have no choice but to be careful - which makes Yeosang laugh.

Korean language note: As with most other languages, there's a bazillion ways to describe being in just your underpants, as well as words that describe men's, women's, and other different types of underpants. These two guys - aged what, 25 in 2024, one very muscular, the other one very tall, using the word "panty" to describe their constant state of deshabille is a deliberate CHOICE.

Yeosang then "innocently" kicks it up a notch to say that the manager hyung is also in constant states of undress, (in just his panties) which makes Yunho give him a LOOK. Yunho tries to bring things to some sort of order, so he gives an explanation that they both turn on fanchat/livechat as their last to-do item of the day before washing up and going to bed, which is why they are in just their panties whenever they do a live. It's not that they are constantly in just their underwear in their dorm.

Yeosang doesn't concur, which makes Yunho give him a look. "That's wrong?" he asks. Yeosang laughs, then says, he dresses properly always. Yup. Suure.

Then, within a month, Yunho began imitating Yeosang outright. (to be continued in part 3. Or 7. Whatever the number should be)/

[shannonsketches]

This might come across as a little mean and I’m so sorry this is probably a teenager but oh my god update this has officially turned into my favorite interaction I’ve ever had on the internet I’m crying

All that and I never got an example. But I did get a hot tip that there is fanart on dA fjdjdj

The last little like sent me. Cherry on top. 10/10 Top Quality Organic Fandom. Never Change.

Disregard that last post, OP's definitely mad that Bulla is treated like a toddler and Trunks is treated like a teenager askljda

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Big Tech’s “attention rents”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I wrote in my enshittification essay:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

or

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[olderthannetfic]

Genuine question in good faith, WHY do people do placeholder fics on ao3? Like, I assume that it's residue from being used to websites that have an algorithm, but I still don't get it bc:

Are placeholder fics REALLY that popular on algorithm-based websites anyway? If I see a fic that looks good and then I click it and I find it's just a placeholder that hasn't been posted yet, I won't want to return to it. Has Society(TM) really become that okay with placeholder fics in such a short amount of time? Again, genuine question. I'm not judging those who are okay with placeholders, so long as they keep them off the archives. Different strokes for different...websites?

2. Let's say it's not for algorithm reasons. Let's say it's, i dunno, someone who wants to advertise what's coming up in their next project and uses the placeholder as a preview until it's posted. I still don't understand why they'd do a placeholder fic. To my knowledge, ao3 allows "synopsis" fics where you post a preview of what's to come. Why not do that? And if I'm wrong and they're not allowed, put on your big human pants and write out a drabble of the first chapter/prologue of your "placeholder" fic just so you have SOMETHING to actually post. Just write a preview and edit it or add the real thing later!

Those are the only reasons I can think of why someone might have a placeholder fic. The only other reason I can think of is they want to publish something on a certain day/rearrange the order of a series or something and are unaware you can change the date on ao3 and reorder series fics.

Like, I'm not asking as a way to complain or make fun of the people who do this, I'm truly curious about what their logic is.

--

[twilightknight17]

honestly i planned to just read hours other side because youtube algorithm shoves p2 at me and now i'm ridiculously invested in whatever the fuck tatsuya and jun have going on. then i saw jade say in the notes that Technically mainline hours verse isn't required for hours other side but it still made me go "Okay i'll just. invest in a 37t83748748r year old series now, nbd. i shall submerge myself in this series the authors have worked on for a million years 🙏"

safe to say, no regrets and actually, i'm surprised i never stumbled upon mainline hours naturally because i also really like ryomina?? i really like what you've done with the worldbuilding, the characters, their relationship—it just really scratches The Itch(TM) and i'm so obsessed with it. i've currently reached the cascade fics and UGH i need to give all those kids a hug, and when i reached that part with futaba's uncle tripping over his own feet and threatening to sue and akira had a meltdown... gotta be honest i started crying a little DJSNIDWJKX all of the pain just feels so real i'm like Argghhh these fucking Children why is no one taking care of themmmm

genuinely the series is such a huge aspiration for me, from the Giant world you've build with all the fics to the way you show whose pov it is just by switching up first and last name usage (lmao. i do that too so it's an incredibly validating thing to see when it's in someone else's fic). i hope one day i'll be able to share a massive world with the fandom as well—

<- (guy who's terrible at plotting)

—but for now i just wanted to tell you thank you very much for sharing hours verse with us 🙏

I barely know what to say, oh my gosh. <3 Thank you so much!

I'm a firm believer in it never being too late to start reading something. Especially when its ridiculous author is still thinking about it and contemplating more dumb ideas. XD

I will back Jade up that technically you don't need Other Hours for mainline Hours, either, but some of the references will definitely be orphaned without it. But if you're on Cascade, definitely have fun! That's where I started taking things further off the rails.

(I'm so happy someone pointed out the name thing because I felt so clever doing that. :'D )

And... doing something this big is a lot of work. And a lot of notes. And a lot of double-checking who's supposed to know what and when and where. XDDD But you figure out where you want to start, and you do it one piece at a time, and eventually you have enough worldbuilding that things settle into place. I think if that's something you want to do, you'll definitely be able to, and I wish you the best of luck, because it's so much fun. <3

[marta-bee]

Chris Hayes, one of the MSNBC hosts, recently wrote a book about what he calls "the attention economy" - basically the way social media and most other things besides are vying for our attention and crowding out space for us to be alone with our own thoughts. It sounds a bit luddite when I put it like that, but hearing him talk about it, he's clearly thought it through and has something intelligent to say about it all.

At least one of his points is we should carve out time away from our phones and other screens. Like, take a twenty minute walk and leave your phone, your MP3 player, all that at home and just Be with ourselves. Which is a really good idea, actually. Fanfic authors know how easily Tumblr can kill the muses. It's like the scrolling taps into a very different part of my brain than what I need to actually tell a story. They pull against each other, and honestly, the easy fun of the Tumblr scroll usually wins out.

But the media landscape being what it is, the conversations so quickly turn to the evils of kids and screen-time. Or how The Algorithm (TM) blasts our mental health. Or the way we're alienated from our real-life communities because Twitter (or whatever) is Right There.

My whole life, so much of the relationships I value the most play out over a screen. Growing up, I had a hard time with the family I was born into, but was close with a particular part of my extended family in Germany, and between visits my cousin and I would write just absolutely mammoth amounts of email and chat on AIM every day. The Kid is in a different city than me, and though we can and do call, chatting and texting is so much easier. And more generally, growing up I just never really connected with people in person the same way I did with geeks online. But, like, specific geeks. The same specific geeks over years, to the point I knew their kids' names and visited a few of them in real life.

There's just something about having something in common that I cared about, and also having the time to think about what I wanted to say and how to say it. Maybe that's the little neurodivergent person I've always had in me. Maybe it's being a bit anxious and not easily understood by the people in my offline life. I don't know. It's clearly not the same, but it felt Real all the same.

Don't get me wrong. The algorithm really is evil and damaging, and the push to just keep scrolling needs to be reckoned with. I manage it by using RSS rather than the Tumblr dash, which takes a lot of set-up work and limits who I can follow, but also means I'm looking at and enjoying specific posts rather than trying to keep up with whatever people are posting. It makes it easier to do it for a certain time and then step away and do something else, knowing the new posts will still be there whenever I check back. And the news is the worst! We really do need to keep ourselves informed, but also set limits so it doesn't overwhelm our whole day. When I'm good, I check into Google news once or twice a day for maybe 15 minutes, and increasingly I'm seeing it as one more water-drop in a larger bucket rather than fresh outrages every damned time. On good days.

So, yes, there are dangers that need to be managed. I worry for teens who don't yet have the skills to do that. Heck, I worry for a lot of adults I know for the same reason. I actually agree with Chris on quite a lot of what he's said in those interviews. But also, I worry about that twelve-year-old Marta, if she hadn't been able to find people she was actually comfortable with on Prodigy message boards and listservs. And I certainly wouldn't have come out so well if my parents were always monitoring what I said and did. I needed that, and I'm sure other people did, too.

I don't know the solution. God help the parents and the teens navigating this all today; it really is a much less safe world in so many ways than the one I grew up in. But I worry for the little geeklets, and hope they find a comfy corner to grow up into proper geeks. Somehow.

[bluedalahorse]

Look.

I think people assume* there is a certain pipeline to being an August Horn af Årnäs Enjoyer (TM). Like, obviously you must have shipped Chuck and Blair back in the Gossip Girl days, right? Or did you imprint on one of those problematic paranormal boyfriends of the early 2010s? Which overplayed Byronic & brunette fandom man of yore is responsible for this? Who hurt you?

Well. I am here to answer your question, and the answer is very different than you think. I will not name the fandom or the characters directly, because the TERF author of said book series has done too much harm and I don’t want her intellectual property to be any more spread around by the algorithms. But I will say that when I used to read the boy wizard books, my favorite of the seven redheaded sibling side characters was the cranky prefect who didn’t fit in with the rest of the family. And also I shipped him with the intense broom-sports captain from his house and year.

Does anyone even remember that those two used to be shipped?

Anyway. That pairing is the true August Horn Enjoyer Pipeline. I promise. It’s science!

*Maybe people don’t assume. This is a Fandom Humor post, not a peer-reviewed academic paper.

[accirax]

initial thoughts on DCAS episode 20

^ reminder for everyone that this applies to these initial thoughts as well! it was quite the surprising sight to have pop up at the beginning of the episode, though.

... what is Emily's motivation to kill Trevor here, exactly? i guess she took a page out of Riya's book when it comes to pushing gays off of cliffs.

yayyyyyyy, they're finally getting along! :D

does framing people for theft and twisting their already broken ankles count as "working"?

i guess we do know from Aiden in Season 2 that Tom and Jake were the most popular players. it makes sense (especially given the grandparent context Ally goes into), but it was still quite surprising.

i really hope that Tom and Jake talk this out at some point, whether in the finale finale or in the tomjake miniseries, because the truth of the situation is that Tom's absence from Jake's life was contributing to his misery, which was apparently much greater than anyone expected. i know that Tom never intended it to be that way, but i'm also sure that his fooling around with lying about having a boyfriend wasn't doing Jake any favors. i just want to make sure that the inadvertent hurt that Tom caused Jake doesn't get swept under the rug.

haha, it's puns in visual storytelling :)

this is understandable. Riya can and will use your backstory against you.

.......................................sigh

this might sound like an odd critique given how much people love to dunk on DC's writing (especially in All Stars), but i actually think that the ONC writers don't have enough faith in themselves. i mean that in the sense that, across the season, they set up really compelling plotlines and rivalries between both Jake/Ally and Connor/Riya that people will naturally want to see fulfilled.

for Ally and Jake, just being here and being forced to work together after everything they've been through is already enough, especially when Connor's hopes are stacked on top of it as well. we're in it with the characters for the ride. so, we don't need more bits of fake drama, like Jake being petty and shocking Ally out of nowhere last episode, or Ally reacting stupidly to Riya's obvious lie, to keep up invested. we don't need a huge last-minute spectacle to feel like Ally and Jake working together is a big deal, because they've been subtly and slowly convincing us of that through the entire season. instead, diverting from the steady characterization to inject needless drama in is just going to convince everyone that nothing matters.

i don't know if this could be a miscalculated flaw from trying to account for the fact that any viewer could hop in at any time on youtube, or appealing to the youtube/tiktok algorithm, or an internal, insecure standard to insert drama into the show at any cost, but i hope that the writers realize how good they are at using heartfelt scenes to build up character dynamics across entire seasons and stop breaking character for silly plot twists in season 4. i have a lot of faith in the writers. i hope they can find that faith in themselves.

y'know, everyone keeps saying that...

OOH THE MOTION BLUR??? POP OFF ONC ANIMATION TEAM I SEE YOU

the "Ally, you're going there!" sign was so fucking funny

that's not very "i'll never work with or trust Riya again" of you, Grett

i literally said before Riya struck her pose, "i hope that Riya does the 'aren't you gay?' pose when it's her turn" and then she did! it's her signature move for a reason ;D

this is, like, the exact same spot and pose as when Trevor initially found Derek and Kristal kissing. i wonder if that was intentional. also, the Gay Thoughts Montage(tm) was really funny.

why would you do it like that? hasn't Trevor suffered enough...? (/j)

@venus-is-thinking pointed out the hilarity of Jake being the one to say this, as he's one of the two contestants who actually has been in the mines before. i guess it just goes to show how disorienting the bags were.

get his ass!!!

i KNEW Ally was going to make a minecraft reference as soon as Kristal explained the challenge. miiiiiiiiiiiiine diiiiiiiiiiamoooooooonds...

way to keep your eyes on the prize, queen.

we love money laundering!! (i think that's close enough to what money laundering is? also i'm joking, obviously.)

again, what is Emily's motivation here? i know it's technically "get the show canceled to embarass Kristal," but she really believes in that so strongly as to put the lives of six innocents-- including an eight year old-- at risk to do so? idk, i feel like Emily's character fell off the realm of reality into supervillain status. it's sad :(

boy, i sure am glad that we witness Riya and Yul pick up 10 gems in this scene! (/s /j)

very brave, Jake. i feel like this parallels something in s1, although i can't remember what. maybe it's just Alec protecting Fiore? that doesn't seem particularly relevant, unless Jake is also auditioning to be her dad.

James: wait... does that mean Jake and Ally are going to fall madly in love with each other? #rivalstolovers.

they look like paleontological fossils in there. the fuck happened to them?

somebody, quick, give them a miniseries! this is too good of a poster opportunity to pass up!

you have to make sure you strike a slay pose, even as you're dying.

props to the trailer for making it look like Ally was the one who sent the rocks to James' face instead of Riya. that was a fun setup and subversion of expectations!

see, Riya can and will use your backstory against you! i was kind of expecting her to do this to Jake, too, given the setup from earlier in the episode. i guess they might be saving that for the finale proper, though.

(check out the reblog for my thoughts on the ending, i ran out of images)

[iantimony]

tuesday line go up (derogatory)

hello from the end of my workday. writing this on my office computer as i watch my simulation crash in real time in the background. convergence line go up :(

listening: astonishing legends the body on the moor part 1, for some reason astonishing legends is such good Cleaning And Organizing noise to my brain. i've raised my eyebrow at some of their conclusions sometimes but i love a good unsolved mystery that doesn't focus on true crime what i can say

more 00s, just whatever shit the spotify algorithm spits out basically..."hard and heavy headbanging tuesday afternoon". i think for brevity i am going to focus on posting only the things that stuck out to me or are ear worms at the moment, which for this week is miss murder by afi, the kill by 30 seconds to mars, and out of control by hoobastank, especially the line in the latter after the chorus that goes 'and i may never know the answer to this endless mystery' that for some reason tickles my brain.

reading: Bring Back Those Pumped Italian Sodas (Anna Hezel): i LOVE italian sodas. the candy shop on main street near me does italian sodas and it is my favorite little treat to do a hot girl walk downtown and get a little bevvy to come with me. they whip so hard. bring them back everywhere!!!!!!!!!!!!

elitism is the enemy of the people (Mina Le) and the linked The machine in the garden. (Emily Sundberg) ... discourse(tm) about What Substack Is For, which means nothing to me as a non-substack user. i use a rss reader to follow a few specific substacks but i do not use the platform even a little bit. sundberg seems to disparage the list format (shoutout to miss deb perelmen who i saw in there as an example of things that are pushed on the platform now) (deb's newsletter is one of the ones i follow with my rss feed lol) slash the concept of "list of content I’m consuming" which. looks at my weekly roundup posts. lol. i do understand to an extent, though - does my weekly roundup post make me a Writer(tm)?? i would kinda agree that no not really.

this zine that i think i reblogged yesterday is very cute.

watching: i saw the new alien movie with a friend! it was really good, i enjoyed it, i did look up the jumpscares beforehand because i do not do well with those in theaters especially the big imax ones, but it ended up not being necessary - the local theater here has no imax or any of the big surround sound gimmick things, which i actually prefer, and it also means the tickets were dirt cheap. 10/10 experience. the movie itself was fun, the correct amount of peen/vag imagery that one would expect from an alien movie. important to note that the dehumanization of an android character (who is also the only black character and strongly autism coded) is a big plot thing, it is not Good that he is treated that way and that is also a plot thing but it is important to know going in so it's not a surprise (thanks to someone in a server i'm in for pointing that out, i didn't clock it as being potentially triggering when i saw it but i was like ohh yeah that does make sense to warn people about). really good cast and plot overall, there was only like one point where i was like "whyyy nooo that makes no sense, why would you do that" (without too much spoiling, the gravity turns on and off in a portion and they were just. zooming up an elevator shaft using the lack of gravity. like why would you not be staying near the ladder. you KNOW it's going to turn off at some random point. anyways), but in general the decisions the characters made were really reasonable which made it very fun to watch the consequences of like, yeah, that is also the choice i would have made, shit. the ending made me go EUGH!! in a good way. lots of good easter eggs that i probably missed some of. made me weirdly nostalgic for my dad because when i was growing up he had a life-size hyper-realistic rubber facehugger model. he used to mime getting attacked by it. my mom hated that fucking thing. it must have gotten thrown out or given away at some point. anyways, as the kids would say: it's kino

thank u celestialtourguide for ur dropout login xoxo, i have been watching a lot of 'make some noise'. i love how sometimes you can hear the crew laughing in the background.

youtubesphere:

jimmy robins: The Fallout of Watcher's Betrayal, what sparked me looking more at dropout. also found out from the comments section that sam reich is son of robert reich ??? wild

finished the george r r martin problem. basically: yeagh

dangelo wallace: not gonna link em all but his videos on chapell roan, katy perry, blake lively, and starbucks. pop culture updates that mean nothing to me. good background noise tho

mina le: underconsumption-core, travel outfits, and Paul Mescal’s shorts, the luxury of privacy & the celebrity vs. influencer paradox. my boyfriend is a proponent of the tiny inseam shorts and i wholly encourage it. more of that, please, from everyone.

made in the moment: My Crafty Boston Apartment Tour. as someone who is also just moved into my own apartment alone for the first time and is in the process of making the space feel like mine, this hits interestingly.

playing: dnd as normal. i finally got to go mask-off, was replaced by a doppleganger like six months ago and finally got to pop off and kill some guys and beat the shit out of my friends lol >:b i have also moved the game that i run to biweekly instead of weekly. i just have too much fucking things happening and dm burnout real.

making: evil eye coasters! these made me very nervous because of how streaky the underglaze is! so i did the tedious task of re-coloring in around my sgraffito lines of my [redacted] coasters. clear coated them and crossing my fingers. these coasters are also too thin, two of them are too warped to use as coasters so ill have to figure out what to do with them. maybe drilling a hole (carefully...) so i can hang them up somewhere? the [redacted] coasters are like twice the thickness so i don't think they'll be warped as bad thankfully.

i also. made. mesopotamian foot bowl :) i did not have a reference image at the time because that happened to be when the t mobile towers went down for a few hours last saturday so i kinda just freeballed it but he looks. so silly i love him. i think im gonna have to modify him, i was chatting with the studio owner about it and she was like "if you threw that bowl on a wheel you should hollow the legs out, wheel pottery twists slightly as it dries and that plus the drying rates being different will make them just pop right off", which, i can always glue them back on! but i should give him the best odds possible. bonus lil tushy

i made a BIG BOWL !! it's not really clear from the image but it's the most clay i've ever thrown at once, i think it's like. 2.5 lb?? i didn't actually weigh it first oops i should weigh it. but it's like a foot across at the top. i put it on little ball feet to use as some sort of display bowl i think.

and there's one more bowl that is really unremarkable so no picture for now.

fiber art: made a fucking. magic the gathering card cozy for a friend that my local mtg group is putting together a care package for. it's so fucking stupid i love it. not gonna post a pic of the front, it's just a dark red border to hold the card in. i might outline the swamp symbol with matching embroidery floss (or maybe navy??) to make it pop more, might also sew a small square of fabric on the inside to hide the loose ends. colors were chosen to match his main commander which is braids

eating: FINALLY finished the gyudon. um . didn't cook many more recipes. i was going to do one pot chicken meatballs with greens and deb smittenkitchen's corn bacon and parmesan pasta last night but i spent two hours wandering walmart like my ancestors wandered the desert and came home and just had leftovers lol. the cooking will commence......today after i post this and go home.

misc: the midwest is hot this week! fml! on the plus side i don't think my average energy bill in my new place will be worse than my old one despite the worse insulation based on the mid-cycle energy report email i got, on the minus side now i am not splitting that cost so technically it feels more expensive :( thankfully i have finally been finishing the process of closing my dad's accounts so i will have a little padding in my bank account, plus i think i am supposed to get the fellowship i won deposited soon?? shrug. i booked some flights using credit card points that in retrospect i should have booked with Money because of that fellowship but oh well. i am still in the Everything Is So Expensive stage of moving as i finish getting furniture and miscellaneous home goods, hence the two hour walmart wander yesterday. i still need a couch. i think i am getting a frat house walmart futon for like $150 just because it's space efficient and won't break the bank and will be easy to sell when i move out. i should probably order that before i go visit home for 3 weeks ...... anyways. that's this tuesdaypost done and dusted.

[heartshapedcreaturefromcriptoon]

Self proclaimed "Video Essayist" on YouTube who just really wants you to know they're a Video Essayist (TM): *makes an 11minute video on Helluva Boss being, on why Helluva Boss is "conservative", is lowkey off the bat kind of annoying, says they made another, longer video about Helluva Boss already they suggest that you watch, self deprecatingly really wants to make clear how much of a "weeb" they apparently are about the show and their love/hate relationship they apparently have with Medrano, is apparently yet another queer person who apparently just could not see the MarthaMayberry ship coming from a mile away from the first episode*

Me: Well, I already think you're an insufferable dork just for showing a clip of yourself playing the ukulele alone, but you're a queer person actually talking about this show, so I'm just gonna hear out what you have to say now, I guess... :)

"Video Essayist" (TM): *Immediately goes on to refer to the Stolitz ship as RAPE one minute in, shows clips of Stolas in his BDSM harness and ball gag while saying this, but apparently doesn't actually have balls themself to actually just SAY the word RAPE out loud on YouTube lest their poor little budding Video Essayist TM Career be hurt by it, so they go out of their way to censor their own intense talking point they just brought up by saying "The R Word" and "R Wording" instead using the actual words they mean to say when making their argument as not to offend the precious algorithms feefees UWU*

Me: *clicks off the damn video and deletes it from my watch history, just as immediately as they couldn't say it*

[twothpaste]

hi! what is sheezy

It'a an old art site that's comin' back with a fresh coat of paint! Back in the day, Sheezy Art was a smaller alternative to DeviantArt with similar vibes & features. It didn't survive competition from bigger art sites & social media - the original team shut it down in 2013. A couple years ago, a new team tried to reboot it, but had to close it prematurely due to Money Problems (TM). They've reworked their financial plans and rebooted it yet again. Hopefully the third time's a charm? It's not currently open to new users, but will be sometime soon!

Sheezy's fun 'cause it's designed like an oldschool art website. No corporate bullshit, no algorithms to appease, your page is customizeable to a hilariously goofy extent, etc. Built for small artists to find community with each other & have a good time. A lotta users on there embrace that it's a silly unprofessional space, so it's super chill. I can't say for certain if Sheezy will stick around this time, but last time I met a lotta cool artists and had a blast! Will for sure be postin' about it here when it's open to new users.

[olderthannetfic]

https://olderthannetfic.tumblr.com/post/733060687430123520/found-a-new-anti-ao3-post-going-around-and-this#notes

what was fascinating about the post in question - i saw a version where someone reblogged to criticize those points - is that it made it clear how much a lot of angry moralizing gen z kiddos don't understand basic stuff about how the internet works. they were saying that it was just greedy for ao3 to ask for money because "it has a lot of users so they have plenty of money." someone reblogged from the 22-yro saying that to explain that "having a lot of users" only makes you money if you either have advertisements or you sell those users' data. ao3 does neither, so in that case, having a lot of users in fact just COSTS money. the only way to make an ao3 that wouldn't need donations is to make it a website you wouldn't want to use. it's actually bizarre to me, as a millennial, that people don't understand this, but i guess that shows how low tech literacy goes when you exclusively use sites that are slaves to the algorithm, when you've grown up entirely in the social media era.

i also think it shows that even a lot of people who claim to advocate on behalf of oppressed groups don't really see them as people, particularly when they're coming from other countries. they don't consider that the group "palestinians" and "people who read fanfiction on ao3" has any overlap. they don't think of palestinians OR israelis as people who might have silly hobbies like reading fanfic. same with ukrainians, same with whomever. i've personally known people in all three of those groups who are active in fandom, but sure, they all agree with your take (tm) that donating to ao3 is somehow taking money away from palestine.

also, as someone who donated to ao3 and also donated to the palestine children's relief fund, i kind of wonder how many people making these posts are donating to palestine-related charities themselves lol

--

Oh, it's always like this, right down to the "No, users cost money" debunkings.