#US Service robotics Market

[ragini-14]

Service Robotics Market Size 2024 Top Companies, Long-term Planned Business Strategy up to 2030

The Service Robotics Market Research Report 2024 begins with an overview of the market and offers throughout development. It presents a comprehensive analysis of all the regional and major player segments that gives closer insights upon present market conditions and future market opportunities along with drivers, trending segments, consumer behaviour, pricing factors and market performance and estimation and prices as well as global predominant vendor’s information. The forecast market information, SWOT analysis, Service robotics Market scenario, and feasibility study are the vital aspects analyzed  in this report.

The Service robotics market is expected to grow at 25% CAGR from 2022 to 2029. It is expected to reach above USD 161.68 billion by 2029 from USD 21.7 billion in 2023.

Access Full Report:

https://exactitudeconsultancy.com/reports/15736/service-robotics-market/

[miunachan]

Ultimate List of Business Ideas ♥ [UPDATED]

Hi ❀ʕ·ᴥ·ʔ

Today, after hours of brainstorming and collecting impressions, I proudly present to you the ultimate list of business ideas for the newly released Businesses & Hobbies pack ✧. ✲ﾟ･｡✧･ﾟ

I've categorized the business ideas to provide a more structured overview, because there are so many  (๑❛ʚ❛๑). They are sorted into the following categories: 📌 Service-based small businesses 🍽️ Restaurants & entertainment venues 🛍️ Retail & creative shops 🛠️ Craft & manufacturing businesses 🎭 Fantasy & unconventional businesses.

Also for some of these ideas, I recommend using CC or mods to deepen the immersion, but that's completely up to you — sometimes using your own imagination does the trick too~ The recommended or sometimes necessary packs are included behind the business idea as well as CC/mod recommendation markers ❀✿❀

If you feel like something's missing, please comment your idea(s) and I will happily add them to the list so that the compendium can continue to grow (◕ω◕✿)

My other story ideas ✧. ✲ﾟ･｡✧･ﾟ ✿ Soft & Cozy Story Ideas ✿ Very Dramatic Story Ideas

Please take a look at my Patreon for more cute Sims 4 stuff~ You can find the original post here.

As always, happy simming! - MiunaChan ♥

📌 Service-Based Small Businesses

💉 Tattoo Studio (Hobbies & Businesses) 💆 Wellness Studio/Spa (Spa Day) 💅 Nail Salon (Spa Day) 💇 Hair Salon/Barbershop (CC/mods recommended) 💆‍♂️ Massage Center (Spa Day) 🧖 Sauna / Onsen Retreat (Spa Day, Snowy Escape) 🏋️ Gym & Personal Training (Fitness Stuff, Spa Day) 🧘 Yoga Studio (Spa Day) 🏔️ Rock Climbing Tours (Snowy Escape) ⛸️ Ice Skating Rink (Seasons) 🎢 Roller Skating Rink (Seasons) 🏊 Pool (Seasons) 📖 Library

👶 Daycare for Infants & Toddlers (Seasons, Parenthood) 🤓 Preschool (Parenthood, High School Years) 🐱 Pet Daycare (Cats & Dogs) 🐕 Pet Training & Agility Classes (Cats & Dogs)

🏨 Hotel/Motel (Get to Work) 🧺 Laundrette (Laundry Day Stuff) 🎉 Event Planning Agency (My Wedding Stories) 🏥 Cosmetic Surgery Clinic (CC/mods recommended) 🗣️ Public Relations Agency

🏕️ Campground & Outdoor Retreat (Outdoor Retreat) 🏞️ Private Garden Maze & Fishing Lake (Cottage Living) 🏫 Lecture Hall & Public Speaking Center 🤖 Robotics Workshop (Discover University) 🎭 Improv Theater & Acting School (Get Famous, Get to Work) 📖 Creative Writing & Journalism Workshops 👗 Etiquette & Manners School (My Wedding Stories) 💻 Coding Bootcamp & IT Training 🎮 E-Sports & Gaming Coaching

🍽️ Restaurants & Entertainment Venues

💻 Internet Café 🐾 Pet Café (Cats & Dogs) 🎲 Tabletop & Board Game Café 🧋 Bubble Tea Shop (High School Years)

🍔 Fast-Food Restaurant (Dine Out) 🥐 Bistro (Cozy Bistro Kit, Dine Out) ☕ Traditional Tea House (Snowy Escape) 🥦 Vegan Specialty Store (Cottage Living) 🥘 Food Market & Culinary Stalls (Cottage Living, City Living)

🎤 Bar/Lounge/Nightclub/Karaoke Club (City Living, Get Together) 🎸 Live Music & Jazz Club 😂 Comedy Club 🎥 Cinema (Movie Hangout Stuff) 🎳 Bowling Alley (Bowling Night Stuff)

🍦 Ice Cream Parlor (Seasons) 🎂 Bakery/Pastry Shop (Dine Out) 🚚 Food Truck (Snowy Escape, Cottage Living) 🧑‍🍳 Cooking Classes & Culinary School (Dine Out, Cottage Living)

🍇 Vineyard & Wine Tasting (Cottage Living) 🍸 Barista & Mixology Courses 🏰 Medieval Tavern (Get Together, Seasons) 🎭 Movie Studio Tour (Get Famous) 🏦 Museum & Science Exhibition (Discover University)

🛍️ Retail & Creative Shops

🌸 Flower Shop (Seasons) 💐 Flower Arranging School (Seasons) 🕯️ Candle Shop (Eco Lifestyle) 🏺 Pottery Studio (Hobbies & Businesses)

🖼️ Art Gallery (Get to Work) 🎨 Artist’s Studio & Creative Workshops (City Living) 📚 Bookstore (Get to Work) 📖 Comic Book & Nerd Store (City Living, Journey to Batuu) 🖌️ Art Studio & Painting Classes (City Living, Get to Work)

🧸 Toy Store 🛎️ Souvenir Shop (Island Living, Snowy Escape, Journey to Batuu) 🔮 Crystal & Occult Store (Realm of Magic, Crystal Creations Kit) 💎 Crystal Workshop (Crystal Creations Kit) 🏺 Antique Shop (Eco Lifestyle) 🔥 Fireworks Shop (Seasons) 🎵 Record & Music Instrument Store (City Living) 🎸 Music School (City Living)

📷 Photography Studio & Workshops (Get to Work, City Living) 🧥 Thrift Store (High School Years, Eco Lifestyle) 👘 Costume & Formal Wear Rental (CC/mods recommended)

🛠️ Craft & Manufacturing Businesses

🪑 Furniture Workshop (Eco Lifestyle) 💍 Jewelry Design Studio (Crystal Creations Kit) 👗 Bridal Boutique (My Wedding Stories) 💡 Lamp & Lighting Workshop 🎸 Musical Instrument Crafting (City Living) 👠 Shoe Workshop (CC/mods recommended) 👜 Handbag & Leather Goods Studio (CC/mods recommended) 👕 Tailoring & Fashion Design (CC/mods recommended)

🏡 Tiny House Design & Sales (Tiny Houses, Eco Lifestyle) 🌱 Gardening & Herbalism Workshops (Cottage Living, Realm of Magic) 🔧 DIY & Handicraft Workshops (Eco Lifestyle)

🎭 Fantasy & Unconventional Businesses (CC/Mods Recommended)

🕵️ Private Detective Agency (Get to Work) 💘 Dating Agency 🧹 Cleaning Service 🧠 Psychological Counseling & Therapy 🏚️ Second-Hand Furniture Store (Eco Lifestyle)

🎨 Black Market for Stolen Art (Get to Work, Jungle Adventure) 🧑‍🔬 Secret Alchemy Lab (Realm of Magic) 🎲 Backyard Poker Club 🎰 Gambling Den or Casino (Get to Work) 💻 Cybercriminal Hacker Hideout (Get to Work) 🏚️ Brothel 💋 Woohoo Playrooms 🔮 Medium/Psychic Business (Realm of Magic) 🧪 Potion Bar (Realm of Magic) 🕍 Cemetery & Tombstone Sales (Live and Death, Realm of Magic) 🦇 Secret Occult Society (Vampires, Werewolves, Realm of Magic) 🏕️ Nudist Colony 🕹️ Arcade & Retro Gaming Lounge (High School Years, City Living) 💭 Bubble Blower Lounge (City Living) ⛪ Church

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Bossware is unfair (in the legal sense, too)

You can get into a lot of trouble by assuming that rich people know what they're doing. For example, might assume that ad-tech works – bypassing peoples' critical faculties, reaching inside their minds and brainwashing them with Big Data insights, because if that's not what's happening, then why would rich people pour billions into those ads?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/06/surveillance-tulip-bulbs/#adtech-bubble

You might assume that private equity looters make their investors rich, because otherwise, why would rich people hand over trillions for them to play with?

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/11/19/private-equity-vampire-capital/

The truth is, rich people are suckers like the rest of us. If anything, succeeding once or twice makes you an even bigger mark, with a sense of your own infallibility that inflates to fill the bubble your yes-men seal you inside of.

Rich people fall for scams just like you and me. Anyone can be a mark. I was:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security

But though rich people can fall for scams the same way you and I do, the way those scams play out is very different when the marks are wealthy. As Keynes had it, "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." When the marks are rich (or worse, super-rich), they can be played for much longer before they go bust, creating the appearance of solidity.

Noted Keynesian John Kenneth Galbraith had his own thoughts on this. Galbraith coined the term "bezzle" to describe "the magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it." In that magic interval, everyone feels better off: the mark thinks he's up, and the con artist knows he's up.

Rich marks have looong bezzles. Empirically incorrect ideas grounded in the most outrageous superstition and junk science can take over whole sections of your life, simply because a rich person – or rich people – are convinced that they're good for you.

Take "scientific management." In the early 20th century, the con artist Frederick Taylor convinced rich industrialists that he could increase their workers' productivity through a kind of caliper-and-stopwatch driven choreographry:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Taylor and his army of labcoated sadists perched at the elbows of factory workers (whom Taylor referred to as "stupid," "mentally sluggish," and as "an ox") and scripted their motions to a fare-the-well, transforming their work into a kind of kabuki of obedience. They weren't more efficient, but they looked smart, like obedient robots, and this made their bosses happy. The bosses shelled out fortunes for Taylor's services, even though the workers who followed his prescriptions were less efficient and generated fewer profits. Bosses were so dazzled by the spectacle of a factory floor of crisply moving people interfacing with crisply working machines that they failed to understand that they were losing money on the whole business.

To the extent they noticed that their revenues were declining after implementing Taylorism, they assumed that this was because they needed more scientific management. Taylor had a sweet con: the worse his advice performed, the more reasons their were to pay him for more advice.

Taylorism is a perfect con to run on the wealthy and powerful. It feeds into their prejudice and mistrust of their workers, and into their misplaced confidence in their own ability to understand their workers' jobs better than their workers do. There's always a long dollar to be made playing the "scientific management" con.

Today, there's an app for that. "Bossware" is a class of technology that monitors and disciplines workers, and it was supercharged by the pandemic and the rise of work-from-home. Combine bossware with work-from-home and your boss gets to control your life even when in your own place – "work from home" becomes "live at work":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

Gig workers are at the white-hot center of bossware. Gig work promises "be your own boss," but bossware puts a Taylorist caliper wielder into your phone, monitoring and disciplining you as you drive your wn car around delivering parcels or picking up passengers.

In automation terms, a worker hitched to an app this way is a "reverse centaur." Automation theorists call a human augmented by a machine a "centaur" – a human head supported by a machine's tireless and strong body. A "reverse centaur" is a machine augmented by a human – like the Amazon delivery driver whose app goads them to make inhuman delivery quotas while punishing them for looking in the "wrong" direction or even singing along with the radio:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/#virtual-whips

Bossware pre-dates the current AI bubble, but AI mania has supercharged it. AI pumpers insist that AI can do things it positively cannot do – rolling out an "autonomous robot" that turns out to be a guy in a robot suit, say – and rich people are groomed to buy the services of "AI-powered" bossware:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

For an AI scammer like Elon Musk or Sam Altman, the fact that an AI can't do your job is irrelevant. From a business perspective, the only thing that matters is whether a salesperson can convince your boss that an AI can do your job – whether or not that's true:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/25/accountability-sinks/#work-harder-not-smarter

The fact that AI can't do your job, but that your boss can be convinced to fire you and replace you with the AI that can't do your job, is the central fact of the 21st century labor market. AI has created a world of "algorithmic management" where humans are demoted to reverse centaurs, monitored and bossed about by an app.

The techbro's overwhelming conceit is that nothing is a crime, so long as you do it with an app. Just as fintech is designed to be a bank that's exempt from banking regulations, the gig economy is meant to be a workplace that's exempt from labor law. But this wheeze is transparent, and easily pierced by enforcers, so long as those enforcers want to do their jobs. One such enforcer is Alvaro Bedoya, an FTC commissioner with a keen interest in antitrust's relationship to labor protection.

Bedoya understands that antitrust has a checkered history when it comes to labor. As he's written, the history of antitrust is a series of incidents in which Congress revised the law to make it clear that forming a union was not the same thing as forming a cartel, only to be ignored by boss-friendly judges:

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

Bedoya is no mere historian. He's an FTC Commissioner, one of the most powerful regulators in the world, and he's profoundly interested in using that power to help workers, especially gig workers, whose misery starts with systemic, wide-scale misclassification as contractors:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/02/upward-redistribution/

In a new speech to NYU's Wagner School of Public Service, Bedoya argues that the FTC's existing authority allows it to crack down on algorithmic management – that is, algorithmic management is illegal, even if you break the law with an app:

https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/bedoya-remarks-unfairness-in-workplace-surveillance-and-automated-management.pdf

Bedoya starts with a delightful analogy to The Hawtch-Hawtch, a mythical town from a Dr Seuss poem. The Hawtch-Hawtch economy is based on beekeeping, and the Hawtchers develop an overwhelming obsession with their bee's laziness, and determine to wring more work (and more honey) out of him. So they appoint a "bee-watcher." But the bee doesn't produce any more honey, which leads the Hawtchers to suspect their bee-watcher might be sleeping on the job, so they hire a bee-watcher-watcher. When that doesn't work, they hire a bee-watcher-watcher-watcher, and so on and on.

For gig workers, it's bee-watchers all the way down. Call center workers are subjected to "AI" video monitoring, and "AI" voice monitoring that purports to measure their empathy. Another AI times their calls. Two more AIs analyze the "sentiment" of the calls and the success of workers in meeting arbitrary metrics. On average, a call-center worker is subjected to five forms of bossware, which stand at their shoulders, marking them down and brooking no debate.

For example, when an experienced call center operator fielded a call from a customer with a flooded house who wanted to know why no one from her boss's repair plan system had come out to address the flooding, the operator was punished by the AI for failing to try to sell the customer a repair plan. There was no way for the operator to protest that the customer had a repair plan already, and had called to complain about it.

Workers report being sickened by this kind of surveillance, literally – stressed to the point of nausea and insomnia. Ironically, one of the most pervasive sources of automation-driven sickness are the "AI wellness" apps that bosses are sold by AI hucksters:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/15/wellness-taylorism/#sick-of-spying

The FTC has broad authority to block "unfair trade practices," and Bedoya builds the case that this is an unfair trade practice. Proving an unfair trade practice is a three-part test: a practice is unfair if it causes "substantial injury," can't be "reasonably avoided," and isn't outweighed by a "countervailing benefit." In his speech, Bedoya makes the case that algorithmic management satisfies all three steps and is thus illegal.

On the question of "substantial injury," Bedoya describes the workday of warehouse workers working for ecommerce sites. He describes one worker who is monitored by an AI that requires him to pick and drop an object off a moving belt every 10 seconds, for ten hours per day. The worker's performance is tracked by a leaderboard, and supervisors punish and scold workers who don't make quota, and the algorithm auto-fires if you fail to meet it.

Under those conditions, it was only a matter of time until the worker experienced injuries to two of his discs and was permanently disabled, with the company being found 100% responsible for this injury. OSHA found a "direct connection" between the algorithm and the injury. No wonder warehouses sport vending machines that sell painkillers rather than sodas. It's clear that algorithmic management leads to "substantial injury."

What about "reasonably avoidable?" Can workers avoid the harms of algorithmic management? Bedoya describes the experience of NYC rideshare drivers who attended a round-table with him. The drivers describe logging tens of thousands of successful rides for the apps they work for, on promise of "being their own boss." But then the apps start randomly suspending them, telling them they aren't eligible to book a ride for hours at a time, sending them across town to serve an underserved area and still suspending them. Drivers who stop for coffee or a pee are locked out of the apps for hours as punishment, and so drive 12-hour shifts without a single break, in hopes of pleasing the inscrutable, high-handed app.

All this, as drivers' pay is falling and their credit card debts are mounting. No one will explain to drivers how their pay is determined, though the legal scholar Veena Dubal's work on "algorithmic wage discrimination" reveals that rideshare apps temporarily increase the pay of drivers who refuse rides, only to lower it again once they're back behind the wheel:

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

This is like the pit boss who gives a losing gambler some freebies to lure them back to the table, over and over, until they're broke. No wonder they call this a "casino mechanic." There's only two major rideshare apps, and they both use the same high-handed tactics. For Bedoya, this satisfies the second test for an "unfair practice" – it can't be reasonably avoided. If you drive rideshare, you're trapped by the harmful conduct.

The final prong of the "unfair practice" test is whether the conduct has "countervailing value" that makes up for this harm.

To address this, Bedoya goes back to the call center, where operators' performance is assessed by "Speech Emotion Recognition" algorithms, a psuedoscientific hoax that purports to be able to determine your emotions from your voice. These SERs don't work – for example, they might interpret a customer's laughter as anger. But they fail differently for different kinds of workers: workers with accents – from the American south, or the Philippines – attract more disapprobation from the AI. Half of all call center workers are monitored by SERs, and a quarter of workers have SERs scoring them "constantly."

Bossware AIs also produce transcripts of these workers' calls, but workers with accents find them "riddled with errors." These are consequential errors, since their bosses assess their performance based on the transcripts, and yet another AI produces automated work scores based on them.

In other words, algorithmic management is a procession of bee-watchers, bee-watcher-watchers, and bee-watcher-watcher-watchers, stretching to infinity. It's junk science. It's not producing better call center workers. It's producing arbitrary punishments, often against the best workers in the call center.

There is no "countervailing benefit" to offset the unavoidable substantial injury of life under algorithmic management. In other words, algorithmic management fails all three prongs of the "unfair practice" test, and it's illegal.

What should we do about it? Bedoya builds the case for the FTC acting on workers' behalf under its "unfair practice" authority, but he also points out that the lack of worker privacy is at the root of this hellscape of algorithmic management.

He's right. The last major update Congress made to US privacy law was in 1988, when they banned video-store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you rented. The US is long overdue for a new privacy regime, and workers under algorithmic management are part of a broad coalition that's closer than ever to making that happen:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

Workers should have the right to know which of their data is being collected, who it's being shared by, and how it's being used. We all should have that right. That's what the actors' strike was partly motivated by: actors who were being ordered to wear mocap suits to produce data that could be used to produce a digital double of them, "training their replacement," but the replacement was a deepfake.

With a Trump administration on the horizon, the future of the FTC is in doubt. But the coalition for a new privacy law includes many of Trumpland's most powerful blocs – like Jan 6 rioters whose location was swept up by Google and handed over to the FBI. A strong privacy law would protect their Fourth Amendment rights – but also the rights of BLM protesters who experienced this far more often, and with far worse consequences, than the insurrectionists.

The "we do it with an app, so it's not illegal" ruse is wearing thinner by the day. When you have a boss for an app, your real boss gets an accountability sink, a convenient scapegoat that can be blamed for your misery.

The fact that this makes you worse at your job, that it loses your boss money, is no guarantee that you will be spared. Rich people make great marks, and they can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. Markets won't solve this one – but worker power can.

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

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

[srbachchan]

DAY 6274

Jalsa, Mumbai Aopr 20, 2025 Sun 11:17 pm

🪔 ,

April 21 .. birthday greetings and happiness to Ef Mousumi Biswas .. and Ef Arijit Bhattacharya from Kolkata .. 🙏🏽❤️🚩.. the wishes from the Ef family continue with warmth .. and love 🌺

The AI debate became the topic of discussion on the dining table ad there were many potent points raised - bith positive and a little indifferent ..

The young acknowledged it with reason and able argument .. some of the mid elders disagreed mildly .. and the end was kind of neutral ..

Blessed be they of the next GEN .. their minds are sorted out well in advance .. and why not .. we shall not be around till time in advance , but they and their progeny shall .. as has been the norm through generations ...

The IPL is now the greatest attraction throughout the day .. particularly on the Sunday, for the two on the day .. and there is never a debate on that ..

🤣

.. and I am most appreciative to read the comments from the Ef on the topic of the day - AI .. appreciative because some of the reactions and texts are valid and interesting to know .. the aspect expressed in all has a legitimate argument and that is most healthy ..

I am happy that we could all react to the Blog contents in the manner they have done .. my gratitude .. such a joy to get different views , valid and meaningful ..

And it is not the end of the day or the debate .. some impressions of the Gen X and some from the just passed Gen .. and some that were never ever the Gen are interesting as well :

The Printing Press (15th Century)

Fear: Scribes, monks, and elites thought it would destroy the value of knowledge, lead to mass misinformation, and eliminate jobs. Reality: It democratized knowledge, spurred the Renaissance and Reformation, and created entirely new industries—publishing, journalism, and education.

⸻

Industrial Revolution (18th–19th Century)

Fear: Machines would replace all human labor. The Luddites famously destroyed machinery in protest. Reality: Some manual labor jobs were displaced, but the economy exploded with new roles in manufacturing, logistics, engineering, and management. Overall employment and productivity soared.

⸻

Automobiles (Early 20th Century)

Fear: People feared job losses for carriage makers, stable hands, and horseshoe smiths. Cities worried about traffic, accidents, and social decay. Reality: The car industry became one of the largest employers in the world. It reshaped economies, enabled suburbia, and created new sectors like travel, road infrastructure, and auto repair.

⸻

Personal Computers (1980s)

Fear: Office workers would be replaced by machines; people worried about becoming obsolete. Reality: Computers made work faster and created entire industries: IT, software development, cybersecurity, and tech support. It transformed how we live and work.

⸻

The Internet (1990s)

Fear: It would destroy jobs in retail, publishing, and communication. Some thought it would unravel social order. Reality: E-commerce, digital marketing, remote work, and the creator economy now thrive. It connected the world and opened new opportunities.

⸻

ATMs (1970s–80s)

Fear: Bank tellers would lose their jobs en masse. Reality: ATMs handled routine tasks, but banks actually hired more tellers for customer service roles as they opened more branches thanks to reduced transaction costs.

⸻

Robotics & Automation (Factory work, 20th century–today)

Fear: Mass unemployment in factories. Reality: While some jobs shifted or ended, others evolved—robot maintenance, programming, design. Productivity gains created new jobs elsewhere.

The fear is not for losing jobs. It is the compromise of intellectual property and use without compensation. This case is slightly different.

I think AI will only make humans smarter. If we use it to our advantage.

That’s been happening for the last 10 years anyway

Not something new

You can’t control that in this day and age

YouTube & User-Generated Content (mid-2000s onward)

Initial Fear: When YouTube exploded, many in the entertainment industry panicked. The fear was that copyrighted material—music, TV clips, movies—would be shared freely without compensation. Creators and rights holders worried their content would be pirated, devalued, and that they’d lose control over distribution.

What Actually Happened: YouTube evolved to protect IP and monetize it through systems like Content ID, which allows rights holders to:

Automatically detect when their content is used

Choose to block, track, or monetize that usage

Earn revenue from ads run on videos using their IP (even when others post it)

Instead of wiping out creators or studios, it became a massive revenue stream—especially for musicians, media companies, and creators. Entire business models emerged around fair use, remixes, and reactions—with compensation built in.

Key Shift: The system went from “piracy risk” to “profit partner,” by embracing tech that recognized and enforced IP rights at scale.

This lead to higher profits and more money for owners and content btw

You just have to restructure the compensation laws and rewrite contracts

It’s only going to benefit artists in the long run ‎

Yes

They can IP it

That is the hope

It’s the spread of your content and material without you putting a penny towards it

Cannot blindly sign off everything in contracts anymore. Has to be a lot more specific.

Yes that’s for sure

“Automation hasn’t erased jobs—it’s changed where human effort goes.”

Another good one is “hard work beats talent when talent stops working hard”

Which has absolutely nothing to with AI right now but 🤣

These ladies and Gentlemen of the Ef jury are various conversational opinions on AI .. I am merely pasting them for a view and an opinion ..

And among all the brouhaha about AI .. we simply forgot the Sunday well wishers .. and so ..

my love and the length be of immense .. pardon

Amitabh Bachchan

[bamtwozled]

You Guys Ever Think About Snokoplasm (2008)

I have been pondering snokoplasm, as one does, and besides the influence of 21 year old phil’s incomparable weirdguy charm, I think it stands out so much to me because it’s a really efficient little piece of slice-of-life science fiction.

one hates to make sweeping generalizations about science fiction as a whole when it encompasses so many subgenres and when the conventions shift based on culture of origin, but the perception at least is that (at minimum western) scifi can have a bit of an exposition problem. sometimes there’s kind of no way around it, and the story literally just can’t progress until the audience knows a certain amount, but sometimes you just want to drop the audience in, give them enough real world points of comparison to be able to anchor themselves a bit and identify with what the protagonist considers normal, and have them keep up from there. this is the approach phil takes in snokoplasm.

the main text of the video is about a minute and three seconds. the final 10 seconds are…ambiguous? I’m unclear if this is the intended use of snokoplasm and the vision is simply incomprehensible to me or if it’s just a certified weird phil moment (said with all the reverence it deserves). in that extremely short time, we get all of this information, either explicitly or implicitly:

- snokoplasm is a thing that exists, and it is a common item in this setting we’ve found ourselves in, because phil’s character does not see the need to provide context to an in-universe audience that should already know what it is. it’s an item used frequently enough that one would reasonably run out of it, and running out isn’t a crisis, but it’s still something you’d need often enough to want to replace it pretty quickly.

- there is a store called A47 that stocks snokoplasm. it’s specifically “the local” A47, implying that this is a well known chain at least regionally, and that it’s a pretty common type of shop rather than a niche specialty thing. this supports what we know from the first point. arguably this is also our first real clue that we’ve diverged from our normal universe and this isn’t just some weird shit regular phil found somewhere, in that he’s citing a store that doesn’t exist like it’s a thing everyone knows about, but for those of us who don’t live in the UK it could be dismissed as some british fuckery, so I think the next detail is more of the tipping point. we also find out a couple seconds later that the store exclusively stocks snokoplasm, so it’s clearly a pretty significant market in this society.

- the store is staffed by an exohelper, reenacted with a robotic voice. this is our main notice that we’ve crossed into scifi territory, but it’s just a science fiction-y prefix and overlay to the concept of a shop worker/cashier, so it’s not like we’ve been given too much to keep up with. the exohelper starts out with generic customer service lines, but then gets judgy about his choice of snokoplasm color, culminating in the “he’s just gonna buy the blue snokoplasm off the internet” comment, and it also argues with him on green vs yellow. you can begin to fill in some aspects about a world which has at least partially replaced retail workers with robots, but also gives these new workers a degree of personality beyond blank subservience. I also think it’s worth noting that the exohelper is built so it’s perceived as female, so we get a little bit of insight on gender perception in this society as well.

- the color of snokoplasm you buy may or may not necessarily make a tangible difference in terms of the product’s utility, but it DEFINITELY has societal baggage associated with it. based on phil saying “look at these muscles” as a counterargument to the idea that he’d want the blue snokoplasm, it may be linked to a concept of masculinity, or at least to a broader idea of “toughness”. buying the blue would be an embarrassing thing for him that he shouldn’t want to do in person, but that someone else might assume he does based on some aspect of how he presents himself (other people have delved more into the idea of snokoplasm color as a metaphor for gender roles and sexuality, and anything I could say here would be stolen from them and is also kind of out of scope here since it dips more into thematic interpretation vs literal reading, but I feel I should point it out. also I do think the fact that the exohelper is specifically presented as female adds a layer here)

- we even get a brief hint as to the economy of this society—the snokoplasm he buys costs 14 million…I don’t actually know what he says here sorry. but it’s 14 million of them. this seems to be a pretty normal cost for the product based on his reaction. obviously we cannot calculate any kind of actual value here, in that. well we don’t actually know what snokoplasm is. we will never know what snokoplasm is, because that’s the whole bit, and so we can’t compare to a real world equivalent, but we at least get some kind of baseline for the kind of money someone would be willing to drop on a quick purchase.

that is a lot of information about this world in a very short time but it doesn’t feel like an infodump; it’s convincingly just this guy talking about his slightly weird exchange with a worker on a standard shopping trip. almost a third of the video’s runtime is the “green”/“yellow” back and forth because that’s the only part of this that’s particularly remarkable to our viewpoint character, which means we get all of the rest of that information in like 40-45 seconds.

and obviously there is still a lot we don’t know about the universe this takes place in. we can get as far as “there’s probably not an ongoing immediate catastrophe, because this character would presumably not be making a video about his shopping trip,” but a lot of other things are wide open. but the fact that we can tell this much from one minute of one guy describing a pretty normal day in this society feels like a really strong start.

all of this to say I genuinely think it’s a neat little piece of storytelling contained in this one-off joke video from 16 years ago, and when I say “I want a phil scifi project” I’m not only saying that in an “I love and support phil lester” way (although that is also true). I just really want to see what he’s capable of.

[sreppub]

Restaurant owners/chefs/waitstaff AU.

The Robins in their cute waiter uniforms, Bruce the manager/owner trying to herd them, the Batgirls as the chefs lol

Green Arrow as a Definitely Not A Knock Off version of the Batcave(?), but THEIR menu is all organic and vegan (it’s GREEN, get it??) versions of what Bruce’s restaurant offers

The Batcave(?) was a high end dining establishment that is more of a family restaurant these days? Or it’s super fancy still and the all Robins leave to open a less strict establishment aka: Dick is the one that owns Nite-Wing (the wing shop the silly character that Nite-Wing takes his name from lol), Tim opens a coffee shop, etc

The Iron Fam has the Chuck Cheese style entertainment&arcade “restaurant” that also has laser tag and their animatronics are just robots lol.

The Super’s have a farm->table BBQ stall at the farmer’s market

The Flash has a food truck? Or they are the deliver guys?

Green Lanterns are the food inspectors

The Wonders have a Themyscira Food place. It’s very classy but cozy place

Who has the local pizza place?

The villains have like, Chik-à-fila

The Teen Titans all quite their parent’s restaurants and run the local Mall food court for a summer

You sent this super quickly after I said I wanted new AUs and I am so impressed anon. Did you just have this ready?!! Thank you!!!

Anyways I love it! I love wings and I would go to Nite-Wing all the time lol. And maybe also to see the cute dog and hot wings guy. I think it’s a tiny place with stupid bright colours and like 2 bar seats. (I hate it. I would hate this place) I know, coloured floor grout is futile, AND the black through-colour ACT, who ARE we??? Well, the reno was bankrolled by Bruce, so that’s who we are. The drinks fridge wasn’t even secondhand, that’s who we are. Also, Dick had Damian paint a wall mural, not pictured because I didnt wanna draw it lol

I know what you’re thinking. There’s a second street entrance/back of house corridor behind the pink wall, and the front counter is ADA compliant. I’m not an animal.

Secondly, I would love if the Waynes used one of their properties, a townhouse in the city, and converted it into a restaurant inspired by Alfred’s cooking 🥹 Classy, but has gotten homier and cozier over time. The kids multiply, and their friends hang out there and suddenly adults and young people hang out here…. This kind of thing! Two floors for the restaurant and an event space/gallery, and then lofts up top. 3-4 storeys, in my mind. They probably own the block.

Wouldn’t be crazy for Green Arrow to buy a property across the street 🤣

Idk if I’d have Tim running a cafe day-to-day… He does do a pop-up for their gallery events. Maybe he’s on the business side. If you’ve ever seen Chef, I’m thinking of RDJ’s character giving Casper a loan and the food truck…

Not to say he’s too good for food service. The YJ98 crew definitely hop around their families restaurants at will, for fun and enrichment.

IRONFAM PIZZA-ARCADE IS AMAZING AND I WILL BE THINKING ABOUT THIS FURTHER. you really oughta take the credit for this, anon, before I go off the rails and people start thinking I’M smart or something 😂 A robot-garage-themed restaurant sounds rad as HECK. Dum-E serving food would be a show in itself.

Farmer’s market stalls, my beloved.

They’re all going to live in one big terrible amalgamated city/group of cities and Gotham/Metro/Star/etc are neighbourhoods/cities within it. Oh damn.

[sreegs]

gonna start this post upfront by saying tumblr's fuckin up bad with moderation right now, regarding the wave of trans people being targeted. but i'm not here to discuss that issue, i'm going to talk about the nature of large and small social spaces on the internet

as this post rightly points out, examining our existing social network structure reveals the crux of the problem: we are tenants on someone else's service. extrapolating from that, we're the source of revenue for someone's business. under that model, there is no incentive whatsoever for a social network to apply a "fair" or "just" moderation scheme. their goal is to maximize the number of people using the service and minimize blowback from advertisers regarding "what goes on" on the site

there will not be an alternative social network that gets this right at scale, unless it meets the following criteria:

1. Has ample moderators to thoughtfully deal with user moderation cases

2. Has terms of service that you agree with

3. Has a moderation team that understands how to apply moderation according to the terms of service, and amends it when necessary

4. Does not rely on external income source to pay for the site

Number 1: An ideal social network is one that has numerous, well-treated moderators who are adept at resolving conflict. Under capitalism, this is a non-starter, as moderation is seen as a money sink that just needs to be barely enough to make the site usable.

Number 2: An ideal social network has terms of service you agree with. Unfortunately there's no set of rules everyone will find fair. While this is not a problem for the people who want to use the site, it will inevitably create an outgroup who are pushed away from the site. The obvious bad actors (nazis, terfs, etc) are pretty straightforward, but there are groups that do things you might find "unpleasant" even if you support their right to do it. Inevitably this turns into lines drawn in the sand about how visible should that content be.

Number 3: An ideal social network has moderators who have internalized the terms of service and consistently make decisions based on the TOS. If a situation comes up where there's no clear ruling in the TOS, but users need a moderation decision regarding it, the moderation team must choose how to act and then, potentially, amend the TOS if the case warrants it. Humans, though, are not robots, and no, AI is not the solution here jesus christ. There will always be variance in moderation decisions. And when it comes to amending the TOS, who's the decision maker? The sites' owners? The moderation team? Users as a whole?

Number 4: An ideal social network does not rely on an external income source to pay for the site. The site pays for itself, and its income flow covers the costs necessary with reserves for unexpected situations. Again, under capitalism this is a no-go, because a corporate social network's only goal is to maximize money. Infinite growth, not stasis. A private social network paid by members requires enough paying members to be sustainable, and costs will generally go up over time, not down. A social network that has some lump sum of cash just generating wealth is also unreliable because, first you need a large lump sum to begin with, and that mechanism is tied to the whims of the investment market. And, again, costs of the site will go up, not down.

As you've read through these you're probably reaching the conclusion: making a large-scale social network that is fair and sustainable is very, very difficult, if not impossible with our current culture and economic systems. There might be a scale where you can reach "almost fair" and "barely sustainable", but then you have to cap its growth.

So the "town square" social network is rife with problems and we need to abandon it's model as the ideal network. Should we go small instead? We have a model already for that with message boards and forums. Though they weren't without their problems, they didn't have the scale that exacerbated those problems to crisis levels. Most of the time.

If you're thinking maybe you need a small network like this, free from a corporate owner (like Discord), the tools are out there for you to accomplish it. However, before you try, keep the above points in mind. Even if you're not out to create a large-scale social network, an open network will run away from you. And all of those points above are guidelines for a good online community.

You and your network of 50 friends and friends of friends might all get along together, but every single person you add increases the risk of creating moderation problems. People also change, or simply have episodes of irrational behavior. You need a dedicated team of moderators who are acting coherently for and agreeably to the community.

And you absolutely must keep this in mind: inevitably, as you add more people, someone will do vile shit. CSAM and violence type shit. You have to be prepared to encounter it. You have to have a plan to see and handle that, and the moderators who are part of your moderation team must be prepared to see and handle it too.

There's been a steady trickle of new alternative social networks (or social media networks) popping up, but you cannot expect those to be perfect havens. Tumblr was once the haven for weirdos on the internet. Now it's hostile to its core members. This is not trying to rationalize staying here because "hey, it could be worse". This is just trying to warn you to temper your expectations, especially because new networks that suddenly get a huge influx of new members hit a critical point where many falter, change, or fail.

Examine who's running those networks closely. Think critically about what they're touting as the benefits of those networks. And if you decide to join them, do not, under any case, expect those new homes to be permanent.

[sugarcream-sims]

ISSUE 2 | LEGACY

<< PREV | NEXT >> TRANSCRIPT BELOW

We have another exclusive with Iris Liddell of Liddell Genomics, and as always, I consider myself privileged to breathe the same air… it’s truly humbling to stand in your illustrious presence.

IRIS LIDDELL: You honor me.

Of course, you’re here today to discuss more than your own accomplishments, incredible as they are.

LIDDELL: Please, my good sir. My company’s market domination would never have been possible without the work of the founder of Liddell Genomics, Alice Liddell. Or indeed the work of my direct predecessor, former CEO Elise Liddell, who oversaw the merger with Hinagiku Robotics…

Before she mysteriously vanished a decade ago, as I recall.

LIDDELL: Unsolved to this very day.

It must have been very difficult for you, losing your mother at such a tender age…

LIDDELL: Oh, not at all.

As resilient as one would expect, from the heiress of the company that some say rules the world.

LIDDELL: My, my. People do say the most curious things… LG may provide life-extending healthcare for upwards of 97% of government officials in the first world, but we prefer to stay out of politics.

An impressive figure, to be sure! On that note, we’d like to ask about your upcoming biographical film, the Liddell Legacy, set to release across all streaming services on February 13th.

LIDDELL: Go right ahead.

Until this point, details about the Liddells have been very sparse, limited to matters of public record and biographic blurbs from your PR department… what made you decide to so freely share information about your life, and the lives of your two predecessors?

LIDDELL: The short and sweet answer is that I believe the public has a right to know. LG cares for the people of this world from the point they’re first laid down in their cradles, to the time they enter their graves. We maintain the very largest collection of personal data ever put to record; highly detailed dossiers. Why shouldn’t our beloved customers get to access me, the same as I access them?

So it’s a matter of reciprocity?

LIDDELL: It’s also about building trust. I want to establish a relationship with all the bright, beautiful consumers of LG gene therapies. I am not merely the architect of your destinies, shaping your resistance to cancers and diseases, granting you all the bodies of your dreams. I am also your close, personal friend.

I feel closer to you already!

LIDDELL: I am so very happy to hear that.

Moving along, I have to say, one of the subjects I’m the most excited to learn about is the founder of Liddell Genomics, Alice Liddell. She created the company from the ground up, humbly using her vast inheritance in pursuit of her passion for genetic perfection… only to step down from the throne of her genemod empire a scant decade later. In terms of historical significance, Alice Liddell is comparable to the great conquerors of the ancient world, but we know more about Alexander the Great or Napoleon than the woman who created the company that doubled the human lifespan & cured the common cold.

LIDDELL: A lack of documentation that our film seeks to correct.

I don’t want to ask for spoilers, but what are you willing to tell our readers now?

LIDDELL: I can say that the focus of the film will not only illuminate much of what went on behind the curtain here at Liddell Genomics during its grand and tumultuous creation, but also bring to light the deeply private details of the personal lives of my predecessors… withholding nothing.

Details like what exactly the Founder gets up to, these days…?

LIDDELL: I’m aware of the rumors, good sir. We don’t need to play coy.

Ah, you found me out.

LIDDELL: Ask your burning question.

Is it true that Alice Liddell was placed in cryostasis, around the end of her reign?

LIDDELL: …yes. It was her will.

So the rumor is true? That’s incredible!

LIDDELL: At the time, our anti-aging technology was somewhat more primitive. Foremost in the Founder’s thoughts, after securing LG’s grip on the private health market and cloning herself an heir, was ensuring her own youth would spring abundant and eternal.

So the genemod mogul Alice Liddell was as afraid of aging as anyone…

LIDDELL: To the world, she was the tech tycoon who forged a new era in blood, with ruthless business acumen. To me, she was Grandmother. A playful and dreamy woman, often lost in her own imagination, desiring nothing more or less than to vanish into her sweet and simple dreams.

So it’s more involved than just being put on ice.

LIDDELL: That’s correct. Just as she outlined in her personal designs, she’s been placed in a cryostatic slumber. The exact details are proprietary, but much of her natural bioliquid is drained through dialysis, and replaced with a potent cocktail of freeze-resistant artificial blood and neurostims. While her heart might only beat once per minute, her brain is quite active in REM.

She really is dreaming…

LIDDELL: It’s my own dearest dream to ensure that her dream continues unabated, weaving into perpetuity.

Eternal life?

LIDDELL: As near as the billions of credits generated by Liddell Genomics will allow. We’re further refining the process of life extension every day. So you see, good sir, that what might at first blush appear to be the story of an autocratic tech giant dominating the global health market… is actually the gentle and relatable tale, of a family seeking to fulfill the dream of their beloved Grandmother to remain joyful and beautiful at any expense.

It’s what anyone with a heart and billions of credits at their disposal would do.

LIDDELL: It’s part of why I’m so proud to share our story with the masses.

“THE LIDDELL LEGACY” IS COMING TO STREAMING SERVICES FEB 13. DOWNLOAD YOUR COPY FROM BULLETBANK & RECEIVE LIDDELL GENOMICS GENEMOD COUPONS!

<< PREV | NEXT >>

[seat-safety-switch]

All across the world, there is a rush by marketeers to sell you new appliances. The last couple decades of increasingly-shitty build quality have failed to plump their margins enough, so now they're trying the carrot. Now, when you buy a refrigerator, it can be connected to the internet. Some ovens need to be connected to the internet, or they can't cook a turkey. If you went back in time and explained this state of affairs to someone in the Victorian Era, they'd shoot you.

When did our civilization lose its inherent distrust of machines pretending to be human? Half of our most popular science-fiction franchises are about a glad-handing, smiling robot trying to steal or murder our children. Now we're going to let a refrigerator lock down access to nutrients for those same children, because it couldn't resolve DNS? No more of this, I say, which is why I've started a new business.

Here at Appliance Endumbinators, our crack team of computer scientists, computer engineers, and angry people with hammers will work hard to remove any semblance of "intelligence" from your appliances. If you bought a new barbecue and it refuses to work unless you use factory-authorized propane, we'll rip its circuit boards out and splice together the miles of wiring that make up its nervous system until it gives in. We'll find your car and use an angle grinder to cut out the part of its positronic brain that obeys speed limits. And just for laughs, we'll duct-tape a thrift store alarm clock to your coffee maker, so that it can still have your brew ready for breakfast.

Book us in now, before the machines have their way with you. Become the master of your own home, comfortable with the most idiotic of automatons as you watch your neighbours suffer with thousand-page manuals, helpless service calls, and outsourced below-minimum-wage customer support just to toast a waffle.

[fleurywiththesave]

OKAY okay lol now see this is so far from the truth BUT i just saw that gif of Matty/Perry Ellis thingy again AND stylist mattdrai au?

oooooh. OOOOOOH, anon. I don't know if you mean Matthew as the stylist or Leon as the stylist, but I can actually see it going either way. Matthew is the intensely enthusiastic rising star who Leon is strong-armed into going to see for some new game day suits, and he wasn't prepared for how peppy Matthew would be. Or how long his eyelashes would be.

OR Leon is the somewhat abrupt and oddly aggressive stylist and tailor who all the best guys use for their NHL Awards duds, and Matthew is convinced to enlist his services because "he'll make you miserable, but he'll make you look great." Only Matthew's not miserable. Other than the fact that Leon seems so determined to make him put clothes on when he really thinks he'd rather be taking them off.

You know what, as long as we're all here.....

Matthew is quite certain that if he had to choose between spending twelve hours getting fitted for a suit or spending twelve hours getting dental surgery, he'd pick dental surgery before Satan had even finished asking the question. But Ekky insists that this guy is the best of the best and that Matthew just needs to put up with whatever he says if he wants to look halfway decent on the red carpet.

He's pretty sure that means that this Leon isn't going to let him wear his slides with a suit.

He almost walks past the storefront, if it even counts as that. It's an unassuming door that must lead into a space behind the specialty foods market that occupies the windows. The narrow hallway just leads to another door, and Matthew has to briefly consider the possibility that Ekky has secretly obtained the rights to his life insurance and is planning to have him murdered before he braces himself and opens it.

"Hello?" he calls. There's a desk, but no one sitting at it, and zero signage to confirm that he's in the right place. "Hello?"

"Matthew." It's not a question. The guy who's just emerged from the back is staring at him. Matthew is staring too, but he has a feeling it's for very different reasons. He's staring because Leon turns out to be no more than thirty, with the best hair Matthew's ever seen and thick-framed black glasses that are kind of making him sweat behind the knees.

Leon is staring with something more like horror, scanning Matthew from head to toe like a robot and apparently not at all happy to see his ripped-neck Panthers shirt, athletic shorts, and the trusty slides. Matthew has a vague idea that perhaps he should apologize. Leon closes his eyes — actually closes his eyes — for a second and takes a deep breath before speaking again.

"Okay. It's okay, we have time. Come with me."

The dim hallway and tiny foyer turn out to be misleading, as Leon leads Matthew into a massive room with brilliant lighting and more racks of clothes than he's ever seen in his life. The walls are decorated with pictures of what must be some of Leon's clients, all dressed and styled to the nines. Matthew even spots a photo of Henrik Lundqvist, damn. Maybe he is in the right place.

"Okay," Leon says, coming to a stop by some of the racks and flipping through them with almost disturbing efficiency. "NHL Awards. Rule number one: pick something other than the ass to emphasize. Anyone who's watched a single hockey game has been there, done that."

"Well, what if that's my best feature?" Matthew can't help but ask. Leon glances back at him and snorts.

"No. Rule number two. No. Sneakers. That's for actors trying to fake relatability at the Oscars. You'll wear dress shoes and you'll like it."

Matthew resists the urge to hide his sandals behind the potted plant in the corner.

"What's rule number three?" he asks.

"That depends on how much trouble you give me," Leon answers. "All right, we'll start with these three racks. What jumps out?"

Matthew hasn't been this nervous about giving the wrong answer to a question since his post-draft interviews. He studies the array of suits in front of him and starts to feel a little dizzy from all the choices. He had no idea they could come in so many colors and patterns. Does Brady know about this?

"Well, okay," he finally says, looking at a gray suit that seems like a reasonably safe option. "I kind of like this—"

"No," Leon says flatly before Matthew can even pick up the hanger, and he snatches his hand back like he's been burned. "Single-breasted only."

"Um. Right. Then how about—"

"Absolutely not. Do you want to look washed out?"

"I don't—"

"Try this one," Leon says, pulling a lighter-than-navy blue suit off the rack and shoving it at him. "With the cream shirt."

Matthew stares at the array of white button-downs in front of him. He swears he can hear Leon's soul dying as he sighs and picks one up.

"This. Go."

When Matthew comes back out, trying not to draw attention to his bare feet, Leon slides his glasses down and studies him carefully, even walking in a circle around him several times. Matthew tries to stay still, but it's not so easy when that behind the knees sweating is picking up again and Leon is close enough for Matthew to get a whiff of his cologne, which is somehow earthy and light at the same time.

"Good," Leon finally proclaims. "Look in the mirror, tell me if you like it."

"Oh," Matthew says when he steps in front of the trifold mirror. He wasn't expecting to be surprised — a suit is a suit, right? — but apparently this particular suit is subtly different from any of the ones he owns. He seems tall and strong, despite being end-of-season skinny, and the jacket draws attention to his shoulders, and the color makes his eyes look brighter. "Hey, that's really nice. What about a tie?"

"No tie," Leon says. He's pulled out a tape measure and is flying through the notes he wants to take with the same startling efficiency as before. Matthew barely has a chance to appreciate Leon's hand on his thigh before he's done with the inseam. "Clearly you don't like having something too close to the neck." He smirks at Matthew in the mirror, and Matthew barely manages to bite back a retort about how there are some things he wouldn't mind having too close to his neck. "You can leave the top button open, but that's it."

When Leon is done getting all his measurements, Matthew finds that he's reluctant to leave.

"So, uh, you'll call me when it's done?" he asks.

"Nope," Leon says, tilting his head toward the sewing machine on the side of the room. "Get comfortable, you're going to be here awhile."

Over the next several hours, Matthew discovers that he could be quite happy putting up with pretty much anything Leon says, regardless of whether or not he's going to get a great suit out of it. He learns that Leon started sewing when he was twelve, making things for his sister and her friends; that he finished his studies in Germany a full year early; that he came to New York with the intention of getting some intern experience through Parsons and focusing on women's wear, but one of his father's former players came to Leon asking for help with a suit and the rest is history. Leon, in turn, learns an awful lot — probably more than he was expecting — about the grief Matthew gets from Taryn for his sartorial choices, about Matthew's feelings on the NHL dress code, and about how his style has changed since leaving Calgary for Florida.

Matthew only has to stop himself from making a suggestive remark about what they'd both look like out of a suit a few times, though it doesn't keep him from wondering.

"There," Leon finally says, pressing a garment bag into Matthew's hands. "Please tell me you know that you're supposed to cut the pocket and vent stitching before you wear the suit."

"I'm not a complete dunce," Matthew says indignantly. Leon doesn't have to know that his billet mom had to inform him of that little fashion rule after he'd already been wearing his new juniors suit for two months.

"Just partially," Leon says, but there's no bite behind it. He grins when he walks Matthew to the door, wishes him luck at the awards.

It's hard to walk away.

Two weeks later, when Matthew cuts the tacking stitches on the night of the ceremony, he discovers a slip of paper in his left pocket.

Rule number three: call me after you win.

— Leon

[mushiemellows]

✨UPDATED!✨

All of my Frobin fics I have written from December 2023 when I first started writing, up through my most recent work posted October 2024, stored in one convenient place! 🌸

🍔 Staying Right Here (and not a step closer)

RATING: E

words: 317,056 status: COMPLETE chapters: 14

Set the week Post-Enies Lobby. The core lore mostly canon compliant getting together fic. Weird sex, fast food, and an accidental wedding. My first big fic, and an adventure into writing smut. Epilogues go up through timeskip/Fishman Island reunion.

🐊 These Foolish Things

RATING: M

words: 14,178 status: ONE SHOT

Includes the Wanihana ship to tell a story of Robin's healing over time. A songfic that uses a whole catalog of Frank Sinatra songs to frame Franky and Crocodile's differing relationships to Robin. A bit more serious, as it discusses abuse. This one was a practice in writing in complex tense.

✈️ Floating Through the Stratosphere

RATING: E

words: 30,742 status: COMPLETE chapters: 2

Modern day airplane pilot AU except they are only rarely on the plane. Half one-bed-rom-com, half amnesia medical drama. This was a really fun world to build up, and I've been considering writing more stories within this world.

🕵🏻‍♀️ The Sunday Affair

RATING: E

Words: 108,898 status: COMPLETE chapters: 11

Robin is a Russian spy, Franky is an American spy. Its 1967 Cold War DC. Franky is assigned to find and kill an assassin named Sunday, Robin has to assassinate an agent named Flam. Oh, and they're married.

⏱ Another Day in the Sun

RATING: T

words: 43,413 status: ONGOING chapters: 7/ ???

The crew is stuck in a time loop, living the same day over and over again, but only some can tell. Matchmakers Robin and Franky have to get everyone to kiss each other. A thinly veiled fun little excuse to make everyone make out. And also its a bit (lot) poly (Paradise+EB5). An adventure in keeping things T.

👌 The Contest

Rating: M

Words: 10,220 status: ONE SHOT

Nami has the crew bet how long they can all go without…finding their satisfaction, so to speak. She’s determined to make it out of the contest eight hundred thousand beri richer, but that will mean making plenty of sacrifices. Will the crew be able to hold it together or will the pressure make them pop? (EB5+Frob+a bit of Paradise with Jinbe+some NamiRobin tease)

🍼 Super Troupers

RATING: M

words: 11,130 status: ONGOING chapters: 1 (/3)

A baby fic! Chapter 1 is mostly set up, pregnancy, and delivery. But I'm still working at the follow up chapters, I want to tell more little stories with each of the boys. A bit sweet and sappy and emotionally indulgent but I don't care I love this fambly. M rating only for blood and a few intense discussions around pregnancy.

⚡️ What Makes a Man

RATING: M

words: 58,073 status: ONGOING chapters: 14 (/25)

Putting the Franky in Frankenstein. A reanimation fic. Franky dies at Laugh Tale but leaves behind instructions for Robin to put him back together. Mainly meant to be little pocket character studies. BACK FROM THE DEAD, NOT ABANDONED FIC! I told ya I'd update it.

💀 For the Thrill of It

RATING: E

words: 46,551 status: COMPLETE chapters: 2

Nasty spooky Thriller Bark monsterfucker erotica. Brook joins the party and things get Weird. 5+1 but more like a 5+2. Established Frob with added skeleton. Chapter 2 has now been added, Robin's pov + bonus scenes. And perhaps a chapter 3 still lives in the back of my brain.

🤖 Handle With Care

RATING: E

words: 13,365 status: ONE SHOT

More nasty erotica for the sake of itself. Franky gets hurt, needing significant repairs and a full service tune up. This one is distinctly T4T. This one was written simply because no one else had written like, proper robot shit with Franky on ao3 and I was so appalled to see the hole in the market that I just HAD to fill it.

🧰 Showoff (the devil’s in the details)

RATING: E

words: 16,929 status: ONE SHOT

Even MORE pwp. Post-Egghead on the run to Elbaf, Franky shows Lilith Sunny and all of his little inventions. Things heat up between him, her, and Robin, but Vegapunk keeps all the praise to herself. This one was written in gut reaction to the most recent chapter, and I think I wrote it for entirely personal reasons lol. Franky just wants to be told he did a good job.

That's all I wrote! 610,000 words this year (of just my posted fics, not counting other works and wips) (and 45,000 words posted Halloweek alone!). I'm really proud about how my writing has developed over the year, I hadn't written much in the past so this was a huge journey, but a really fun one. Thanks for growing with me! Enjoy the works!

[theliteraryarchitect]

Hi! I wanted to say, I read that you are a professional editor, and think it's amazing! You also give very logical and well explained advice. I was wondering; would you say being an editor is a job you can support yourself with? I actually aspire to become one someday, but I'm not exactly sure if it's a good plan.

Thank you for your time, and I hope you have a good day/night

Hey there. Great question. It's totally possible to support yourself as an editor. I've done it, and so have other editors I know. However there are a few important things to consider before choosing editing as a career path.

Your chances of being a self-employed freelancer are extremely high. The number of in-house editing jobs in publishing are low and getting lower. While being self employed can give you a certain amount of flexibility, it also comes along with a lot of hustle and hassle, namely fluctuating income, a stupid amount of confusing tax paperwork, and the need to constantly promote yourself to clients in order to maintain steady work.

You probably won't make as much money as you'd think. Editing is one of the many skilled jobs that suffers from market saturation, which has sadly driven down the price the average client is willing to pay for editing services. I can't tell you the number of overqualified editors I know charging barely more than minimum wage for their work. Personally I've stuck to my guns about charging what I'm worth, but I've sometimes suffered by not having as much work as my colleagues who charge less.

Robots have already chipped away at the future of editing as a human occupation, and will continue to do so at exponential speed in the years ahead. They will never obliterate the job completely, as there will always be humans who prefer to work with humans instead of machines. But the outlook will become ever bleaker as more humans compete for fewer gigs, which in turn will drive down prices even further.

If you are also a writer, editing may adversely affect your writing. I don't mean that you'll become a worse writer, quite the opposite. My editing work has brought new depths to my writing, and I'm grateful for all I've learned by working with my clients. However, editing takes time, uses creative energy, and requires staring at a screen (or paper), and personally the more I edit, the less time/creativity/screen-staring capabilities I have left for my own writing.

If you mention you're an editor, someone will troll your post for a typo, grammatical error, or misused word, and then triumphantly point it out to you in the comments. This is mostly a joke. But it does happen every single time.

I hope this hasn't been too discouraging. If you feel a true passion for editing and really enjoy the work, none of the above should dissuade you. However, if you think you might be happy in any number of occupations, I'd honestly advise you to explore other options. Choosing a career path at this point in history is a gamble no matter what, but the outlook for editors is especially grim.

If you'd like to work with writers and aren't attached to being an editor, there are a few jobs (still freelance) that I believe will survive the coming robot apocalypse. Do a little Google research about "book coaches," "writing coaches," or "book doulas." These are people who act primarily as emotional supporters and logistical helpers for writers who are trying to get their book published or self published. Some of them do actual editing, but many do not, and due to the therapeutic nature of their work I believe they will flourish longer than editors in the coming robot apocalypse.

If you do explore editing as a path, the further away you can lean from spelling and grammar (e.g. proofreader or copyeditor), the longer your skills will be useful when competing with robots. AI still struggles to offer the same kind of nuanced, story-level feedback that a human can give. (Speaking from experience here--I'm a developmental editor and have yet to see a dent in my workload because of robots.) They'll catch up eventually, but it could be a while, and as long as there are human readers, there will always be humans who are willing to pay for a human perspective on their writing. Human spell checkers maybe not so much.

Hope this helps!

[doctorforks]

Hello! So. The robot/driver au. It's a thing. A thing that fascinates. I have questions!! Sorry if it's a bother but you said questions are fine so I thought it'd be fine but if not, please ignore this!

So.

It's said that FYODOR has a similar personality with Mr. Dot, but it doesn't look like it much from the pictures so far. It looks like FYODOR is more friendly in an AI way while Mr. Dot is less smile-y and has the charisma of a sock soggy with milk. In what way are they similar?

2. Is Dazai interested in the Bus FYODOR we mainly see specifically or is he interested in robot dolls in general?

3. Who's the ex? ('Planted a bomb' hehe. Nice reference)

4. Is Dazai interested in Mr. Dot at all?

5. What are Fukazawa's thoughts on the happenings?

6. Is Dazai the first aspiring robot fucker or have there been more before him? Do the robot dolls have parts that can be used for that purpose? What is the opinion of the majority of the population when it comes to robot-fuckers like Dazai? Sorry, I'm not well-versed in robot fucker media.

7. Are there any other robot dolls? Any that could rival FYODOR? (A teto to FYODOR'S miku, if you will)

And that's probably it. Sorry if some of those are obvious or already answered!

I love all these questions so let's do this 😼

The dolls are mainly created for public service, meaning they'd have a friendly demeanor. That being said, dr dostoyevsky also has a friendly smile that he uses when outdoors or with important people. As of now we've only seem him in his house. The dolls also have deadpan expressions if you're wondering, so they're not different at all!

Dazai is interested in the android fyodor specifically

The ex(es) don't have any important names or identities, mostly because dazai doesn't bother remembering them

See, the irony of dazai liking fyodor is that he is automatically attracted to dostoyevsky as well. He ignores the fact that he is talking to him through the androids lol

I don't have a role for fukuzawa in this au besides being ranpo's adoptive father. If you mean fukuchi, he doesn't really care about what dostoyevsky does but he pitied dazai enough to save him from his potential wrath. That's all

Dazai is definitely not the first, although he might be the first to have some of these feelings reciprocated (from the creator, but alas). The dolls were purposefully made to be attractive, so Fyodor has her own fanbase made of very mature adults who can totally be trusted with her merch and figurines. Also; the dolls don't have genitals. For now at least

There are some holograms and virtual assistants, but nothing relevant enough to rival FYODOR. She is the first and most realistic android mascot in the market. And while there will definitely be some rivaling companies working on their own androids, it will take a long time to gain the same international importance as fyodor has. For now there are some cheap sex dolls online lol

[gender-trash]

THE VANCOUVER TRIP BOOK HAUL POST (in approximate order of acquisition)

from elliott bay book company in seattle:

google reviews lied to me there weren't any used books here. still, this bookstore was open fairly late and for this we must credit them. for some reason there's a thin line between "queer friendly bookstore" and "unsalvageably astrology-pilled woo dispensary" and elliott bay book co is kiiiinda straddling it. on the other hand they stocked swindles 2 AND the hands of the emperor so clearly SOMEONE working there has taste.

massy books:

the problem with becoming bookbindingpilled is i sometimes find myself picking books up from used bookstores purely because the binding is really nice, which is how i wound up with that book in the center of the top row. in my defense it's a folio society edition for cheap how was i meant to resist??

cross & crows:

the proprietress of this bookstore was really nice & chatted with me fairly extensively about the vorkosigan saga books :) for some reason i am under a wizard's curse to own extremely mangled mass market paperback editions of same; e.g. my copy of barrayar has had about a half inch eaten away from the fore edge on both front and back covers by some sort of bug. true to form, this copy of ethan of athos has a hole burned in the front cover.

white dwarf:

i walked in here hoping to buy some dumbfuck vintage pulp scifi with extremely inaccurate robotics content and i was NOT disappointed.

pulpfiction books:

tor books is periodically like "hey what if we do ANOTHER collection of chinese science fiction and fantasy short stories in translation" and every fucking time i open my mouth like a baby bird. product/market fit babey

macleod's:

google reviews described this as a cave of used books and they were NOT WRONG. this store was barely navigable with all the stacks of books on the floor and had a deranged bordering on nonexistent organizational scheme. lots of rare books with awesome binding. grading on sheer Used Bookstore Ambiance this was by far my favorite. i think that book on dutch golden age paintings weighs like ten pounds by itself.

the paper hound:

i didnt take any pictures of the shelf labels bc i was definitely flagging at this point but they were Deeply idiosyncratic <3 cute little store with quite a lot (especially for its size) of weird obscure shit pertinent to my interests.

(at this point i got on a bus, missed my stop bc i had no cell service and no way to check directions, got on a different bus, took the subway back to where i'd parked the rental car, took every possible wrong turn until i stumbled upon the hotel again, dropped off my books, and took the car to...)

carson books & records:

the checkout clerk commented on my eclectic taste and it was almost 10pm and i'd walked like eight miles while hauling around a suitcase increasingly full of books so i just said 'yeah'.

and now we play the fun game of "which of these are for fic research, which ones are for various hyperfixations, which ones are 'sequels' to nonfiction i really enjoyed, which ones i just thought Looked Interesting, and which ones are things i've seen recommended and hadn't managed to acquire yet"

[cryingpariah]

The Seraphim coming to the conclusion on one of their playdates that their templates were all pretty useless as warlords. Powerful pirates, naturally. Influential pirates, unquestionably. Good parents.... eh, 50/50. But the warlord system was a crapshoot from the start.

Gryphon: Papa never really did what anyone told him even when he didn't take me-days.

Gabriel: Baba spent all his time in Alabasta running his secret club, so he didn't help the World Government with stuff either.

Monty: Joker ran the black market cuz he had dirt on everyone.

Jimmy: Papa only ever did things for the Government because they made him. But he still helped people whenever he could.

Thea: Big Sis knew better than to listen to the barking of stupid government dogs. And she helped Straw Hat Luffy break into Impel Down right under their noses!

Jinta: The government never asked Uncle to do very much, but he never did any of the bad things they wanted him to. I want to be brave like him someday.

Lami: Law bwoke the gear.

Ashken: Moria just sat on his butt.

Nemo: *holding up an old flyer for Buggy's Delivery Service* Dada!

And then the robot clones meant to replace all of these guys escaped, gained freewill, and now spend their days eating cheesy goldfish crackers and watching Bluey while musing about how stupid the government is.

The Marines really did pick some of the most rebellious, intelligent, diva-ish pirates the seven seas have ever seen and thought ‘yes, they are going to unequivocally listen to us. This is a great plan.’ The thought process has the Seraphims heads spinning!

“I mean, they’re pirates! Pirates doesn’t listen to anybody!”

“I don’t think the government understands the freedom of the seas.”

“Or doubles crosses! Did they check to make sure no one crossed their fingers when they made this deal? I doubt it!”

“BSJALSALA DKBSSLSB!”

“Seconded Nemo, seconded.”

[mariacallous]

It took only a few hours to wipe $152 billion of value from Tesla’s market cap and more than $100 million in value from TrumpCoin.

The end of the bromance between Elon Musk and President Donald Trump has been brewing for weeks, but on Thursday the breakup went nuclear. Musk took to the platform he owns, X, to lambast Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” which includes provisions that restrict immigration, limit green energy subsidies, and is estimated to increase the US deficit by $2.4 trillion. Trump shot back on Truth Social, the platform he owns, to say that Musk is against the bill only because it would take away electric vehicle tax credits that Musk’s company, Tesla, benefits from. It quickly devolved into dozens of posts, most of them from Musk, who claimed Trump is in the Epstein Files—which is, he claims, why they haven’t been made public.

Tesla’s stock is down roughly 14 percent at the time of writing, which is the biggest single-day hit to its market cap in years. Trump’s crypto coin is down nearly 10 percent.

This is a high-stakes divorce for everyone involved. Trump claimed he would terminate Musk’s governmental subsidies and contracts, which help rake in billions of dollars for companies like Tesla and SpaceX. In return, Musk posted that he would decommission SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, which is used by NASA to transport cargo and astronauts to the International Space Station, “immediately.” Steve Bannon, a Trump ally and vocal critic of Musk, told The New York Times that he “is advising the president to cancel all of Musk’s contracts and launch several investigations.”

“They should initiate a formal investigation of his immigration status because I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately,” Bannon said. It has been reported that Musk may have lied on his visa forms, which would likely have made it illegal for him to work in the United States in the 1990s.

Tesla’s stock drop comes at a delicate time for the electric-vehicle maker. This month, the company is due to debut its long-awaited (and much-delayed) robotaxi service in Austin, Texas. Musk has said that investors should think of Tesla as a robotics and autonomous vehicle technology company rather than an electric automaker—putting its self-driving tech and humanoid robot ambitions, rather than new car models, at the center of its now $916 billion market capitalization. Bloomberg reported that the company has internally targeted next week for a launch. Musk has repeatedly claimed that his AI company, xAI, would also soon release a new model, though the launch has been delayed.

Tesla’s latest quarterly results, posted in April, were its worst in years as production, deliveries, and sales fell, particularly in Europe. The company has scaled down its ambitions to produce a more affordable electric vehicle, nixing plans to use new and advanced manufacturing techniques. Musk attempted to placate worried investors by announcing that he would leave his so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) post and return to his companies, including Tesla, mostly full-time.

Musk denied Thursday that his about-face on Trump has anything to do with electric vehicle subsidies. Musk has maintained since he joined Trump’s campaign that Tesla does not need federal tax credits, which can reach $7,500 per car, to sell its vehicles. But in an X post, Musk betrayed the first inklings of annoyance with Trump’s EV policy. “Keep the EV/solar incentive cuts in the bill, even though no oil & gas subsidies are touched (very unfair!!), but ditch the MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK in the bill,” he wrote.

Since February, thousands of protesters opposing Musk’s and Trump’s politics—everything from their climate stances to the actions of DOGE—have gathered outside of Tesla showrooms and service centers across the world. What began as a grassroots movement now has a central organization and a name: the Tesla Takedown. On Thursday afternoon, organizers put out a three-word statement: “Sell, Sell, Sell.”