#constraint's

[emry-stars-art]

Recent warm up doodle for y’all

[ot3]

i do fundamentally agree with the idea that stuff like 'man' and 'women' dont have to be mutually exclusive, people can identify as whatever they want, and gender is there to be played around with as much as anyone likes. but i do feel like we're seeing a trend amongst some subsets of people where they can't hold those beliefs and Also accept the fact that as it stands 'woman' is still a very real and important political class of people. like it really would be great if we were in a place culturally where gender categorizations werent very politically relevant. but they clearly are. and i feel like a lot of people in an attempt to find an understanding of gender that makes them more comfortable have subconsciously kind of abandoned a framework that calls for a structured women's lib movement.

and it's like, on one side you have large swathes of the population who still aren't fully sold on the whole 'women are people' thing. and then on the other side you have a group who correctly understand that the whole gender thing is pretty bullshit. but then, instead of using feminism as a platform to try and build towards a world that reflects those ideals politically they have just kind of retreated fully into idpol and abandoned the scraps of the feminist framework to the radfems to re-appropriate into. fucking. nouveau phrenology.

it just sucks man it feels like we're sort of at an all time low in regards to public interest in meaningful feminism that i've witnessed in my lifetime.

[postanagramgenerator]

What anagram program or website do you use please tell me

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well mostly the anagrams appear out me gourde

i bear woes

[aroaceleovaldez]

the dynamic of demigods thinking which other demigod is the most powerful is always amusing to me because. like, we know the big 3 kids are all the most powerful. That's just a fact of their universe. And then we know nearly every character views Percy as the strongest demigod, and most people are very rightfully intimidated by him.

and you look at the powers of the Big 3 kids and there's Percy, but then you realize Nico is just kind of objectively more powerful than him but simply chooses to hang out in Percy's shadow like he's Percy's scary dog privileges. Like, the two of them are pretty equally capable of causing multiple different apocalypses. Nico just also has like four different instakill powers and it's not like he doesn't use them. He very much uses them! Not infrequently, even! And they don't seem to take a significant amount of energy from him! And other demigods are pretty intimidated by both of them! But Nico makes a conscious point to keep his cards close to his chest and not let on exactly how dangerous and scary he can be if he wants to. People are already scared enough of him without knowing anything about him and he doesn't like that. Percy doesn't think about that nearly as much, and so usually just goes in guns blazing and that's part of why he's considered a wildcard. And then Nico himself puts Percy on a pedestal, so those who do know more about Nico's abilities then presume Nico knows something they don't about Percy that implies Percy is even stronger than him.

And even on a meta level Nico's narrative role requires him to be functionally more powerful than Percy, because he very often serves the purpose of getting Percy out of situations he can't handle on his own. That's just part of his function as a character! But also narratively he can't overshadow Percy so he just takes a backseat of his own accord and that's very amusing to me.

[transmechanicus]

Polyamory is not inherently bad or toxic, it just has higher demands on time and energy to manage multiple relationships, which means people who would arguably struggle to manage an entirely mono relationship are going to struggle even more in a poly one, and due to the interlocking relationships and elevated public scrutiny, that’s going to be viewed as much messier than it would otherwise.

[dailymanners]

If you give someone a ride home, or walk someone home, don't leave or drive away until you see them get inside and close the door behind them. Make sure you see to it that they get fully get inside safely before you leave.

This also applies to temporary residences, such as a hotel, airbnb, dormitories, ect.

Seeing to it that they fully make it inside safely isn't just about fear of something as drastic as an assault or a mugging. It would also be awfully annoying and stressful for them if they lost their key, and before realizing they're locked out their ride or walking companion has already sped off, so now they're stuck outside alone with nowhere else to go, and possibly a dead phone (when it rains it pours). Or maybe there's dangerous fauna in the area. Or maybe the neighbor's poorly trained dog with aggression issues is loose. Or maybe they slip and hurt themselves while walking to the door.

Even if you're absolutely positive they'll make it to the door safely, it's still a kind and thoughtful gesture to let them know that you care enough about their safety to see to it that they make it inside safely.

[theamazingian]

reading that the Knuckles show focuses more on the human characters than the Sonic cast again

[dandeeliion]

the thing is. you are dick grayson and eight years old, and your parents’ deaths are a spectacle. then, you are dick grayson, with many more years behind you, and the unveiling of your identity is a spectacle. you are a flying grayson, the last of the flying graysons, and so your own death, too, is made a spectacle.

[chia-chalk]

Avenpaz in their uniforms from the stonehearts myriad celestia ouuughhh,,,,,

[puyoupuyou]

🌕🌳

fear not, the hero of bygone times

for terrible fate awaits you

beneath the leafy glade of the doomsday moon

this piece is a part of The Legend of Zelda: Color Wheel collaboration project!

everyone's work is super duper good so make sure you check them out!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The specific process by which Google enshittified its search

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me SATURDAY (Apr 27) in MARIN COUNTY, then Winnipeg (May 2), Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), and beyond!

All digital businesses have the technical capacity to enshittify: the ability to change the underlying functions of the business from moment to moment and user to user, allowing for the rapid transfer of value between business customers, end users and shareholders:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Which raises an important question: why do companies enshittify at a specific moment, after refraining from enshittifying before? After all, a company always has the potential to benefit by treating its business customers and end users worse, by giving them a worse deal. If you charge more for your product and pay your suppliers less, that leaves more money on the table for your investors.

Of course, it's not that simple. While cheating, price-gouging, and degrading your product can produce gains, these tactics also threaten losses. You might lose customers to a rival, or get punished by a regulator, or face mass resignations from your employees who really believe in your product.

Companies choose not to enshittify their products…until they choose to do so. One theory to explain this is that companies are engaged in a process of continuous assessment, gathering data about their competitive risks, their regulators' mettle, their employees' boldness. When these assessments indicate that the conditions are favorable to enshittification, the CEO walks over to the big "enshittification" lever on the wall and yanks it all the way to MAX.

Some companies have certainly done this – and paid the price. Think of Myspace or Yahoo: companies that made themselves worse by reducing quality and gouging on price (be it measured in dollars or attention – that is, ads) before sinking into obscure senescence. These companies made a bet that they could get richer while getting worse, and they were wrong, and they lost out.

But this model doesn't explain the Great Enshittening, in which all the tech companies are enshittifying at the same time. Maybe all these companies are subscribing to the same business newsletter (or, more likely, buying advice from the same management consultancy) (cough McKinsey cough) that is a kind of industry-wide starter pistol for enshittification.

I think it's something else. I think the main job of a CEO is to show up for work every morning and yank on the enshittification lever as hard as you can, in hopes that you can eke out some incremental gains in your company's cost-basis and/or income by shifting value away from your suppliers and customers to yourself.

We get good digital services when the enshittification lever doesn't budge – when it is constrained: by competition, by regulation, by interoperable mods and hacks that undo enshittification (like alternative clients and ad-blockers) and by workers who have bargaining power thanks to a tight labor market or a powerful union:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

When Google ordered its staff to build a secret Chinese search engine that would censor search results and rat out dissidents to the Chinese secret police, googlers revolted and refused, and the project died:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragonfly_(search_engine)

When Google tried to win a US government contract to build AI for drones used to target and murder civilians far from the battlefield, googlers revolted and refused, and the project died:

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/01/technology/google-pentagon-project-maven.html

What's happened since – what's behind all the tech companies enshittifying all at once – is that tech worker power has been smashed, especially at Google, where 12,000 workers were fired just months after a $80b stock buyback that would have paid their wages for the next 27 years. Likewise, competition has receded from tech bosses' worries, thanks to lax antitrust enforcement that saw most credible competitors merged into behemoths, or neutralized with predatory pricing schemes. Lax enforcement of other policies – privacy, labor and consumer protection – loosened up the enshittification lever even more. And the expansion of IP rights, which criminalize most kinds of reverse engineering and aftermarket modification, means that interoperability no longer applies friction to the enshittification lever.

Now that every tech boss has an enshittification lever that moves very freely, they can show up for work, yank the enshittification lever, and it goes all the way to MAX. When googlers protested the company's complicity in the genocide in Gaza, Google didn't kill the project – it mass-fired the workers:

https://medium.com/@notechforapartheid/statement-from-google-workers-with-the-no-tech-for-apartheid-campaign-on-googles-indiscriminate-28ba4c9b7ce8

Enshittification is a macroeconomic phenomenon, determined by the regulatory environment for competition, privacy, labor, consumer protection and IP. But enshittification is also a microeconomic phenomenon, the result of innumerable boardroom and product-planning fights within companies in which would-be enshittifiers try to do things that make the company's products and services shittier wrestle with rivals who want to keep things as they are, or make them better, whether out of principle or fear of the consequences.

Those microeconomic wrestling-matches are where we find enshittification's heroes and villains – the people who fight for the user or stand up for a fair deal, versus the people who want to cheat and wreck to make things better for the company and win bonuses and promotions for themselves:

https://locusmag.com/2023/11/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-dont-be-evil/

These microeconomic struggles are usually obscure, because companies are secretive institutions and our glimpses into their deliberations are normally limited to the odd leaked memo, whistleblower tell-all, or spectacular worker revolt. But when a company gets dragged into court, a new window opens into the company's internal operations. That's especially true when the plaintiff is the US government.

Which brings me back to Google, the poster-child for enshittification, a company that revolutionized the internet a quarter of a century ago with a search-engine that was so good that it felt like magic, which has decayed so badly and so rapidly that whole sections of the internet are disappearing from view for the 90% of users who rely on the search engine as their gateway to the internet.

Google is being sued by the DOJ's Antitrust Division, and that means we are getting a very deep look into the company, as its internal emails and memos come to light:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

Google is a tech company, and tech companies have literary cultures – they run on email and other forms of written communication, even for casual speech, which is more likely to take place in a chat program than at a water-cooler. This means that tech companies have giant databases full of confessions to every crime they've ever committed:

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

Large pieces of Google's database-of-crimes are now on display – so much, in fact, that it's hard for anyone to parse through it all and understand what it means. But some people are trying, and coming up with gold. One of those successful prospectors is Ed Zitron, who has produced a staggering account of the precise moment at which Google search tipped over into enshittification, which names the executives at the very heart of the rot:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

Zitron tells the story of a boardroom struggle over search quality, in which Ben Gomes – a long-tenured googler who helped define the company during its best years – lost a fight with Prabhakar Raghavan, a computer scientist turned manager whose tactic for increasing the number of search queries (and thus the number of ads the company could show to searchers) was to decrease the quality of search. That way, searchers would have to spend more time on Google before they found what they were looking for.

Zitron contrasts the background of these two figures. Gomes, the hero, worked at Google for 19 years, solving fantastically hard technical scaling problems and eventually becoming the company's "search czar." Raghavan, the villain, "failed upwards" through his career, including a stint as Yahoo's head of search from 2005-12, a presiding over the collapse of Yahoo's search business. Under Raghavan's leadership, Yahoo's search market-share fell from 30.4% to 14%, and in the end, Yahoo jettisoned its search altogether and replaced it with Bing.

For Zitron, the memos show how Raghavan engineered the ouster of Gomes, with help from the company CEO, the ex-McKinseyite Sundar Pichai. It was a triumph for enshittification, a deliberate decision to make the product worse in order to make it more profitable, under the (correct) belief that the company's exclusivity deals to provide search everywhere from Iphones and Samsungs to Mozilla would mean that the business would face no consequences for doing so.

It a picture of a company that isn't just too big to fail – it's (as FTC Chair Lina Khan put it on The Daily Show) too big to care:

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

Zitron's done excellent sleuthing through the court exhibits here, and his writeup is incandescently brilliant. But there's one point I quibble with him on. Zitron writes that "It’s because the people running the tech industry are no longer those that built it."

I think that gets it backwards. I think that there were always enshittifiers in the C-suites of these companies. When Page and Brin brought in the war criminal Eric Schmidt to run the company, he surely started every day with a ritual, ferocious tug at that enshittification lever. The difference wasn't who was in the C-suite – the difference was how freely the lever moved.

On Saturday, I wrote:

The platforms used to treat us well and now treat us badly. That's not because they were setting a patient trap, luring us in with good treatment in the expectation of locking us in and turning on us. Tech bosses do not have the executive function to lie in wait for years and years.

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/22/kargo-kult-kaptialism/#dont-buy-it

Someone on Hacker News called that "silly," adding that "tech bosses do in fact have the executive function to lie in wait for years and years. That's literally the business model of most startups":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40114339

That's not quite right, though. The business-model of the startup is to yank on the enshittification lever every day. Tech bosses don't lie in wait for the perfect moment to claw away all the value from their employees, users, business customers, and suppliers – they're always trying to get that value. It's only when they become too big to care that they succeed. That's the definition of being too big to care.

In antitrust circles, they sometimes say that "the process is the punishment." No matter what happens to the DOJ's case against Google, its internal workers have been made visible to the public. The secrecy surrounding the Google trial when it was underway meant that a lot of this stuff flew under the radar when it first appeared. But as Zitron's work shows, there is plenty of treasure to be found in that trove of documents that is now permanently in the public domain.

When future scholars study the enshittocene, they will look to accounts like Zitron's to mark the turning points from the old, good internet to the enshitternet. Let's hope those future scholars have a new, good internet on which to publish their findings.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

[emptymilk-bottle]

doctor doctor

[0hpotato]

🌱 Happy Odaiba Day! 🌱

I actually wanted to make these 2 years ago but I'm glad I managed to finish it for the 25th anniversary (^v^)/

💫 You can get it here!

[liam-summers]

AtS | 3.04 -> BtVS | 6.04

Angel will remember Buffy. "We're not going to do crossovers, but we're not going to pretend Buffy wasn't the great love of Angel's life," Greenwalt promises. "In the first episode, everybody's waiting for the other shoe to drop about her death because they know he's got to be grief-stricken." Later, when the Slayer is resurrected on Buffy, the repercussions will be felt on Angel, too. "We won't act as if when she comes back to life, he doesn't want to see her."

- David Greenwalt, for TV Guide Online: "Angel Delivers a Devil of a Time"; August 14, 2001.

[mellific]

hey everyone i'm BACK with a new and updated cat commission format! here is the deal:

this form will be open 8AM - 8PM pacific time tomorrow july 15th

pay-what-you-want on completion

these will be slow, i'm hoping to get a pool of cats that i can randomly pull from over like.... many months

essentially what you're signing up for is "probably a cat picture one to twelve months from now" at pwyw rates! $20 per would be lovely but slkfdslkj these are going to happen so far out so please pay whatever circumstances permit at the time

>> COMMISSION FORM HERE &lt;<

[antirepurp]

the way jolyne breaks so much convention as a jojo protagonist from not being introduced as an inherent badass and having to earn the right to be called that over the course of the story to her life being over from the moment that story begins while still not painting the events of it as a soul-crushing tragedy but rather a journey through which she reconciles and finds new meaning and purpose to herself as a person. i love jojo stone ocean i wish women were real