#ean edit

[abstractreign]

bearing witness to the breasts that be blessed

also when your best friend is extremely gay:

{ do not reb/og if not @afigitis or @dandybarista

[hamishsteele]

They’re here! The brand new definitive editions of DeadEndia 1 and 2! Available in both soft and hard back and containing tons of extra stuff! Out the first week of May!

These copies feature extended and additional scenes, plus a treasury of concept art, guest comics and more at the back! Preorder links below:

Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/deadendia-hamish-steele/1128112234?ean=9781454948964

Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/deadendia-hamish-steele/1142540458?ean=9781454948995

Amazon: https://a.co/d/acJoXNP

Amazon: https://a.co/d/3Ddmhph

Indiebound: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781454948957

Indiebound: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781454948988

[nametakensff]

Lovely Mess (D/isco E/lysium, M/M)

I wrote this really quickly but then had a week full of interruptions before being able to edit it - but anyway, here's 2.3k of H/arry and J/ean being gross 🥰

Pre-Martinaise, Pre-amnesia H/arry gets J/ean to indulge him in the archive rooms of the station. Things gets messy (literally)

~~~~~

Content:

M/M, H/arry has a sneezing fetish, J/ean gets off on indulging him, manually induced sneezes, mentions of hay fever, rapid sneezes, dry humping, prelude to anal sex, anal fingering, spray, sneezing on someone, LOTS of mess, graphic descriptions of mess, verbal teasing, dirty talk, praise kink, embarrassment/humiliation, nose blowing, handkerchiefs

CW: Mess (I mean it), complicated/toxic relationship, abusive language, mentions of alcohol abuse, H/arry is extremely pushy, J/ean should love himself a little bit more, rough sex, degrading language directed towards the fetish, H/arry spits on J/ean's asshole, they're both idiots who enable each other's worst behaviour even if they do care deeply for each other

NSFW - Minors DNI!

“Hhd’Tishh!! ‘TTtsch’uu! Kt’tssch’iew!! Ttsschh’uu!!”

Jean rocked forward helplessly, shivering as each sneeze seemed only to aggravate the tickle rather than alleviate it. Of course, said tickle could only truly be assuaged if the source of its insistence was removed. Given that the reason he was sneezing himself stupid was because of Harry’s greedy and merciless inducing, he didn’t have much faith that he’d find relief any time soon.

“Fuck, Jean! Bless you!”

And there it was. Jean’s face heated at the blessing Harry all but moaned, already pinkened by the supreme effort of releasing an endless stream of tickly little sneezes. Every time he pondered these affairs with a clear head not clouded by impending or recently completed orgasm – when he analysed the situation objectively, the way in which Harry would pester him and he would indulge - he often wondered why he gave in at all. But without fail, the second Harry would approach him, all heated eyes and wandering hands, Jean would cave. Harry might be the deviant with the obscure fetish, but then what did that make him? What was his excuse for all the many times he would get so worked up over the attention he’d end up cumming harder and faster than Harry?

Harry smiled at him, drunk with arousal and power (and yes, okay, the Irish coffee Jean had watched him fix himself this morning). Jean shouldn’t let him treat him like a plaything, not really, but at the very least with Harry, he cared – which was more than could be said about some of the other men (and women) he had permitted to fuck him. He may have a shitty way of showing it half the time, the selfish maniac, but he at least had the decency to express remorse when he did happen to hurt Jean. And it wasn’t as if Jean was an angel. He dished out plenty of hurt himself. It was the nature of their partnership, and of their friendship. Go hard or go home, no in-betweens. Which was probably another reason why Jean was pressed up against the uncomfortable shelves of the archive room, his superior officer’s muscular thigh wedged securely between his own whilst he clutched at him for support, spraying Harry with each and every sneeze that was tortured out of him.

Harry jiggled the little wire he used for such occasions against the wall of Jean’s irritated nostril, and Jean heard the shuddering sigh of anticipation the older man couldn’t hold back as he watched his nostrils twitch and flare. It barely took any motion at all now to push him over the edge. He inhaled, a short, desperate little exclamation of breath before he was sneezing again, all over Harry’s hand, his wrist, and catching his face and shirt.

“Hupt’Tschu! Hhk’TsschUu! Hpt’tshh!-Tschh-Tschtt!! Hht-! Hh’AHtt’Tschhieww!! Putain…”

Harry groaned appreciatively, rocking his hips with each ticklish release. His cock was rock solid as he pressed against the younger man, and just the sensation of that huge erection prodding into him made Jean whine. He wanted Harry to bend him over and fuck him five minutes ago, already. He snuffled reflexively, and that was enough to send him over the edge for another violent triple.

“IhKk’TschHh!! Hh’itshiew!! Hgk’TISHh’ieww!!”

To his utter embarrassment, that final sneeze had been an incredibly messy affair alongside the regular dousing of spray. There now hung two small trails of clear mess, dripping down over his moustache.

“Fuck,” He murmured, blushing violently and reaching up to hide the display, even though Harry would have seen it, could not have missed it, watching him sneeze as he was through unblinking, starstruck eyes.

Jean bristled with indignation as Harry suddenly gripped his wrist and pinned it to his side, halting his attempt to clean himself up. He tried with his other hand, the one that had been gripping Harry’s bicep, but it was no use. That he worked out obsessively and had the body to show for it meant nothing in the face of the older man’s years of hardwired athleticism, even now that he used his arms to lift bottles of beer to his lips more than anything else. He could only stare daggers back at Harry, hoping to cow him into submission. Perhaps this would have worked at a time when Harry’s entire being wasn’t concentrated in the girthy length of his cock. But it was, and so it didn’t.

“Let go of me, you fucking maniac!” Jean spat, angry at Harry for merely smirking back at him and angrier at himself for finding that it made him even hotter.

“Nope. Nuh-uh. Not until you promise you’ll leave yourself alone.”

Jean blinked at him.

“I’ve got fucking snot running down my face, you moron, and it’s your fault. I’ll still fucking sneeze for you, just let me wipe it away.”

Harry didn’t budge. Jean felt his heart race when he realised that Harry’s eyes, pupils blown wide with arousal, were lingering over the sight of mess that was ever so gradually creeping down his face and threatening to slip over his closed lips. He sniffled thickly, nostrils flaring with effort, hoping to pull some of it away, but it barely made a difference. Harry exhaled, and Jean felt his cock twitching against his hip.

“You can clean up in a minute. Just. Keep going like that? I swear I’ll make it up to you.”

Jean knew he would, knew that Harry genuinely enjoyed making him cum, for all his flaws. He didn’t even care if it was a matter of machismo for the older man – he just wanted to have a fucking orgasm, and indulging Harry without resistance was the fastest way of getting one. He sniffled again, wincing just a little at the dense sound of it, before shaking Harry’s hands away and resting his own on the older man’s shoulders.

“Fine.” He grumbled, ignoring Harry’s toothy grin and tilting his head back slightly, nostrils already fluttering in anticipation. “Just don’t come crying to me when I make a mess of your fucking uniform.”

“I never do!” Harry eagerly replied, wasting no time in reinserting that devilish inducing tool.

Every little prod urged the tickle onwards with the most delicious building of pressure. Jean had never disliked the sensation of sneezing, but the sheer quantity of sneezes he was prone to, particularly with his hay fever, had somewhat desensitised him to how pleasurable of a reflex it truly was. He both hated and thrilled in the way Harry was brushing off on him, transforming a banal bodily function into something undeniably hedonistic.

One final prod of the tool, so devious and teasing that it brought fresh tears to his eyes, and Jean was buckling forward with the subsequent release.

“Hut’Tschuu!-Tish’iew!-Hh’tsSCHhuu!! Tishh’ieww-Tschtt!! Huh-! Kishh’uu! Dzsh’ieww!! Hhk’Tisshhiew!!”

There was no way he could open his eyes as the sneezes overwhelmed him, barely giving him a chance to breathe. He could feel himself approaching a desperate state of light-headedness, but damn it all, it felt so fucking good to purge the tickle, and the shameless moans Harry was making just elevated the eroticism to euphoric heights. He gave in to each sneeze, letting them do with him as they would. His cock throbbed and twitched in the painfully tight constraints of his trousers.

“IhGKk’Tschu!! Hgk’Tscch!!-Tshh-‘Tschieww!! Hupt’Tschh! Igk’Tshieww!! Tschh! Tsh! Hh-!”

Harry had at least removed that cruel little wire, and Jean could feel the sneezes winding down, perhaps due to lack of oxygen more than anything else. His breath scissored in and out of him, chest jumping with effort as he built up to one final, cleansing explosion.

“hhHAGk’TshHhieww!! Ah…”

Fuck. He was trembling, at last able to blink his bleary eyes open. His face felt hot with effort, tears streaming down his face as his breathing gradually evened out again.

“Ohh, Vic. Jean. Good boy.”

Harry murmured, leaning forward to press a kiss to his burning cheek. Those words, predictably, went straight to his solid cock and he blushed right up to the tips of his ears. He was so, so embarrassingly easy.

When Harry pulled back, Jean took the time to assess the damage. His fit had dislodged no small amount of clear mess, built up over hours of aggravating hay fever and Harry’s ruthless tickling. It had spattered over Harry’s chest, some glittering in the chest hair that peaked out through the unbuttoned upper section of his shirt, the rest leaving specks of damp discolouration as his sneezes saturated the fabric. He looked down to where their legs locked, and even as he did so another drop spilled from the pinkened rim of one nostril to join the damage there. As with Harry’s shirt, the material stretched across his thigh was darkened with slippery moisture. Jean noticed he had even managed to sneeze, or drip, onto the straining material across Harry’s crotch, which throbbed happily as he regarded it.

He didn’t need a mirror to visualise the mess he had made of himself; he could feel the result of his body-shaking fit dripping past his moustache and over his lips, down to his bearded chin. Judging by the damp sensation of his shirt clinging to his pectorals, he’d definitely drenched parts of his own chest as well.

The droplet that had recently escaped now gathered anew, hanging precariously in place. Harry had noticed, because how could he not, and he took the opportunity to tease Jean’s sensitive nostril, ever so delicately, tracing the flaring rim with one outstretched finger.

Jean gasped immediately, cringing at the intensity of the tickle, and sneezed all over Harry’s hand.

“AEgkK’TschIeww!! HHd’TtSChHhht!! Oh m’by god…”

He blinked and shivered, relishing in the trembling aftermath and unable to help the soft little whimper of pleasure that slipped through his lips, only partially open to allow himself to breathe. He snuffled, the sound of it crackling and obscenely congested.

Harry pulled his hand back, connected to Jean’s nostrils by one delicate, glistening strand before it stretched to its limit and fell away.

“Wow.” He smiled, sounding completely fucking enraptured, and held the hand up for Jean to see as he himself admired the prodigious results of that violent double. Jean blushed to see the skin glistening in the poorly lit room, slick and sticky. He was frightened for a second that Harry might actually lick himself clean, and even more frightened at the way his cock didn’t seem to wilt in the slightest, but thankfully Harry just wiped it off on the ruined material of his own shirt.

“Poor baby. So stuffy. You made such a lovely mess for me, Jean-Jean.”

He was saying the most ridiculous, unbelievable things in that gruff, rumbling voice of his, speaking more because he liked the sound of what he was saying over whether he thought Jean might actually enjoy it. Jean did enjoy it, though, and that fucking enraged him. He would always come back for more, no matter how strange or obscure the sex became, because he was a fucking fool and Harry could play him – just about anyone, really, but especially him – like a fucking fiddle.

“You’re a fucking pervert, Harry. A disgusting creep!”

He meant it, too, yet they both knew that this vitriol towards the particulars of Harry’s proclivities was a facade. In reality, Jean was angry because once again, Harry had pushed his boundaries and his buttons and he’d loved it anyway. His outburst only spurred Harry on, rubbing himself shamelessly on Jean’s hip.

“Yeahh, baby. I’m a downright tramp. But you fucking love it, Vic. I’m making you hard.”

Jean gasped as Harry’s baritone voice rumbled against him; he could feel it in his chest, the rasp of it echoing in his skull as Harry licked a line down the shell of his ear. The feeling of his facial hair rubbing against his cheek made him shudder. And he was right – he was so, so right. Jean was giddy with arousal, intoxicated with the utter filthiness of it all.

“Let me – let me clean myself up.” He managed, and Harry obeyed, giving Jean enough room to retrieve his handkerchief and indulge in a long, crackling blow. It was several such blows, in fact, and Jean squirmed as Harry refused to look away. He wondered if his body would soon become unable to distinguish between the twin burning flames of humiliation and intense arousal. He used the unsullied part of his handkerchief to clean his beard and moustache, hoping if he missed a spot Harry would let him know before the unavoidable walk of shame back to the bullpen.

“You okay?” Harry asked, voice far too fucking tender as he stroked at Jean’s cheek. He knew if he looked Harry in the eye his gaze would be equally as saccharine, and it made Jean want to scream, or melt. Maybe both.

“I’m fine. Fuck me, god dammit. Fuck me right now,” He snarled, bucking his hips against Harry and groaning as the older man immediately humped him back, pawing him all over.

“You gonna beg me for it?” Harry murmured against Jean’s lips, breathy with arousal.

“Fuck you.”

“That’s not very nice.”

“Neither the fuck are you, shitkid.”

“It’s okay,” Harry drawled, grinning at him before flipping Jean around and bending him over the small, nearby reading table. Jean moaned as Harry pulled his trousers and underwear down his thighs, shivering in anticipation. “I forgive you. I’ll fuck you anyway.”

Jean rested his forehead on his folded forearms and moaned again, heating at the sensation of Harry spreading his cheeks with his huge hands before spitting on his hole, happy in the knowledge that he had worked Harry up just enough to be railed as hard and as fast as he liked.  

“Feel free to sneeze again, if you need to.” He could hear the smirk in Harry’s voice, the popping cap of his portable lube bottle, and then the sensation of his coated fingers probing inside of him, stretching him open.

“Fuck you,” Jean gasped out, reaching between his legs as Harry lined up their hips, getting ready to enjoy the ride.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Saturday linkdump, part the sixth

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

On September 14, I'm hosting the EFF Awards in San Francisco.

I usually write this blog 5-6 days/week, but every now and again, I take a break, and when I do, I get massive link backlogs of stuff I want to write about, but lack the time to address in depth. When that happens, I turn my Saturday edition into a linkdump. Today, I present the sixth in the series – here's the other five:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Why was I offline and away from my blog? I went to the dirt rave. Yes, I was one of the 70,000+ people stuck in the mud at this year's Burning Man, and when I emailed my editor at the New York Times to say I might be late on the op-ed I was working on, she asked me to write about what this year's mud crisis meant:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/06/opinion/burning-man-flood-playa-climate-change.html

tl;dr:

Bad weather is normal at Burning Man (it's a feature, not a bug);

Mostly burners leapt to the occasion, which is what people almost always do in disaster situations;

This is the second Burning Man heavy weather year in a row;

The climate emergency is tipping the Black Rock Desert from "extremely challenging" to "impossible";

This isn't the last event, place and tradition that will have to be radically reconsidered in light of the climate emergency;

But now I'm home, in my hammock, with all the laundry done – just in time to leave again. I'm about to head back to my hometown of Toronto for a book launch. The Internet Con, my latest nonfiction (from Verso Books) came out last week, and I'll be appearing at Another Story Bookshop on Tuesday:

https://anotherstory.ca/events/29283

Internet Con is a "Big Tech disassembly manual." It explains how Big Tech got so big (lax anti-monopoly enforcement, which led to regulatory capture, which let Big Tech abuse our privacy, labor rights, and consumer rights), and how we can use interoperability so it's no longer Too Big to Fail, nor Too Big to Jail:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con

You can read a long excerpt from the book in Wired, which lays out some of the shovel-ready legislative, regulatory and technical proposals that are the book's main purpose:

https://www.wired.com/story/the-internet-con-cory-doctorow-book-excerpt/

You can also hear me read the whole introduction and first chapter of the audiobook on my podcast:

https://craphound.com/internetcon/2023/08/01/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation-audiobook-outtake/

That comes from the audiobook, a DRM-free, independent edition that I financed, produced and narrated myself. You can get the audiobook everywhere except Audible, Apple Books, and Audiobooks.com, all of which have mandatory DRM policies. You can also get it direct from me:

https://transactions.sendowl.com/products/78992826/DEA0CE12/purchase

The DRM-free ebook is available everywhere ebooks are sold (Kobo, Kindle, Nook, etc), as well as in my own DRM-free ebook store:

https://transactions.sendowl.com/products/78992801/9C4FC2B8/purchase

Verso's books are sold in bookstores around the world; you can support your local bookseller by buying it through Bookshop:

https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation-cory-doctorow/18771891?ean=9781804291245

If you'd like a signed copy, there's stock at Book Soup:

https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245

Now, it was inevitable that I would do a book event for Internet Con in Toronto – I've never had a bad event there, and I love my hometown – but the timing of this event was driven by a non-book-related factor. Talking Heads is appearing together at TIFF, to support the re-release of Stop Making Sense, the greatest concert film in human history:

https://pluralistic.net/StopMakingSense

People often ask me what my favorite book is, and I always tell them that you should never trust people who have one favorite book, as it inevitably turns out to be The Bible, The Fountainhead, or Mein Kampf. But while I don't have a favorite book, I have a clear and unambiguous favorite band.

If I was forced to listen to no music other than Talking Heads for the rest of my life, I would be perfectly happy. Ecstatic, even. Throw in David Byrne, Tom Tom Club and Casual Gods and I probably wouldn't even notice anything missing.

There's a running joke among my Burning Man campmates that whenever I'm in charge of the music, I'm just shuffling Talking Heads rarities, and whenever someone puts on anything else, I demand to know which Talking Heads album it came from. Which is all to say: I have tickets for the Talking Heads event at TIFF and I could *not be more excited.*

Continuing on the Canadian theme, one of the annual highlights of Canadian media is the Massey Lectures, a series of public lectures given around the country and rebroadcast on CBC. These are always great, but recent years have been superb – Ron Deibert's 2020 series was unmissable:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/11/10/dark-matter/#citizenlab

This year's Masseys are shaping up to be the GOAT. They're presented by Astra Taylor, an activist rock-and-roller turned documentary filmmaker who is one of the founders of the Debt Collective, fighting for student debt cancellation. Everything Astra does is amazing and her profile on CBC Ideas gives some background on the role that unschooling played in making her the powerful activist she is today:

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/astra-taylor-interview-2023-massey-lecturer-1.6959320

There's no question that things are messed up right now, but Astra and people like her shine out like beacons of hope. 17 years ago, self-described "democracy nut" Tom Stites gave one of the seminal lectures on the role news media play in democracy:

http://citmedia.org/blog/2006/07/03/guest-posting-is-media-performance-democracys-critical-issue/

17 years later – and from his perch as editor at the essential International Consortium of Investigative Journalists – Stites presents us a long-overdue, extremely pertinent followup: "Building Civic Energy is the Goal, Not Saving Old News Business Models":

https://banyanproject.coop/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Hope-College-speech-for-Banyan-website-1.pdf

Stites's intervention is extremely timely, because policymakers all over the world have made the mistake of thinking that Big Tech is stealing the news media's content, which is absolutely untrue. It is good, actually, to index news stories and let people discuss, quote from and link to news stories. News you're not allowed to talk about isn't news, it's a secret.

But Big Tech is stealing from news. They're not stealing content – they're stealing money. The Google/Apple duopoly rakes 30% off every subscription payment collected in an app. The Google/Meta duopoly rakes 51% out of every ad-dollar (and maintain that death-grip through creepy, privacy-invading surveillance ads). Meta and Twitter hold social media subscribers hostage, forcing publishers to pay to reach their own subscribers.

We don't want the news to be Big Tech's partners – we need them to be Big Tech's watchdogs. "Link taxes" and other profit-sharing arrangements between the media and tech cut against the civic energy Stites wants to build.

(You can read more about this – along with policy prescriptions for halting Big Tech's rent-extraction from the news – in "Saving the News From Big Tech," my EFF white-paper:)

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

If your spirits are lifted by stories of principled activists achieving important – and improbable – victories, you could do worse than to attend the EFF Awards on in San Francisco Sept 14 (I'm the emcee). This year, we're honoring Alexandra Elbakyan for her founding of Sci-Hub, the Library Freedom Project and the Signal Foundation:

https://www.eff.org/awards/effawards/2023

In more activist news: Mozilla produced a startling and astoundingly good – if demoralizing – report on the state of digital privacy and security in the automotive sector:

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/its-official-cars-are-the-worst-product-category-we-have-ever-reviewed-for-privacy/

Entitled, "It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy," the report reveals just how absolutely terrible the automotive sector is when it comes to privacy practices, collecting (and selling) (and giving away) information about your sex life, your geneology, your genetic characteristics, and your smell (no, seriously).

Their recommendations for which new car you should buy boil down to "don't buy a new car." I have been urging consumer research groups to release a report like this for a decade. There are whole categories of gadgets – like, say, "smart speakers" – that are unsafe at any speed. At a certain point, reviewers need to have the guts to say that every manufacturer in an entire sector is a dumpster fire and they should all be dragged in front of a firing squad – or at least a Congressional committee.

Cars, after all, are nightmares of privacy invasion and rent-extraction, the source of autoenshittification on a massive scale, a mobile form of technofeudalism:

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

The fact that cars score so badly on privacy is especially ironic given the campaign Big Car waged against the 2020 Massachusetts Right to Repair ballot initiative, in which car manufacturers held themselves out as the defenders of driver privacy from unscrupulous third parties who couldn't be trusted to handle the vast troves of data your car collects with every hour that God sends:

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

This is a familiar refrain: monopolists often claim that any check on their absolute authority over their users will expose those users to privacy risks. Apple has run a global ad-campaign claiming this, and while Apple does prevent Facebook from spying on iPhone owners, they also secretly spy on those customers in exactly the same way that Facebook used to, and lie about it:

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

It turns out that giant companies just aren't good proxies for their customers' interests, and that the power they amass through monopolization shouldn't be counted on as a source of user safety. Monopolists won't reliably defend user privacy – that job belongs to democratically accountable regulators. That's an argument I developed in detail with Bennett Cyphers in our EFF white-paper "Privacy Without Monopoly":

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

That is, rather than getting privacy by "voting with your wallet," you need to get it by voting with your ballot. "The market" is an election that you vote in with dollars, which means that the people with the most dollars always win. When there are zero cars on the market that are safe to drive, you can't vote with your wallet by buying a good one.

On a related subject, the DOJ Antitrust Division has brought the most important tech anti-monopoly case of the century, charging Google with monopolizing search:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/06/technology/modern-internet-first-monopoly-trial-us-google-dominance.html

Part of the DOJ case turns on the fact that Google goes to extraordinary lengths to keep you from every trying another search engine, paying out more than $45 billion every year to be the default search on every device, program and service you might use. In other words, Google spends entire Twitter's worth of dollars every year, lighting it on fire to keep you from finding out about rivals.

Google argues that this is fine, actually, because these are only defaults, and users can dig through their settings to change their search engine. Sure, Google – and the first 20 search results you serve are only defaults, and it wouldn't matter if you were ordered to put them ten screens down, because users could always scroll to see them.

But search defaults aren't the only way that Google locks in searchers – and then harms us by invading our privacy. Google's ubiquitous Chrome browser ties Google's search to Google's invasive, nonconsensual, total surveillance. Chrome turned 15 this year and Google made a huge PR splash out of the anniversary:

https://blog.google/products/chrome/google-chrome-new-features-redesign-2023/

But all that puffery conspicuously failed to mention that Google had quietly rolled out its long-discredited, new surveillance technology, FLOC, which it pretended to kill in 2021:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/22/ihor-kolomoisky/#not-that-competition

FLOC is back, rebranded as the Topics API: this is a system for spying on you so advertisers can target you. Google is spinning this as a privacy improvement because it might someday replace "third party cookies," one of the creepiest web surveillance systems.

But as Ron Amadeo writes for Ars Technica, Chrome is the last major browser to support third party cookies – both Safari and Firefox block them by default. So Google is basically saying, "We are going to improve your privacy by changing how we spy on you, even though all our competitors don't do this kind of spying at all":

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/09/googles-widely-opposed-ad-platform-the-privacy-sandbox-launches-in-chrome/

This kind of gaslighting, where Google pisses in all our mouths and tells us it's raining, is the hallmark of a decrepit, arrogant, crapulent monopolist that needs to be shattered in the courts. Kudos to the DoJ for doing the people's business here – and kudos to DoJ antitrust boss Jonathan Kanter for promising that he will not go into corporate law when he finishes his stint in government.

The DoJ isn't the only public agency that's serving the American people. The FCC just announced proceedings to force cybersecurity labels for "smart" devices:

https://www.fcc.gov/consumer-governmental-affairs/fcc-proposes-cybersecurity-labeling-program-smart-devices

This is long overdue, and it's a welcome action from the FCC, which was hamstrung for years because cowardly Democratic senators joined with homophobic, libelous Republicans in blocking confirmation hearings for the amazing Gigi Sohn:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/#unrequited-love

After years of abuse, Sohn bowed out. Now, Anna Gomez has been confirmed to fill that fifth FCC chair, turning the FCC into a fully operational battle station:

https://www.fiercewireless.com/wireless/senate-votes-approve-anna-gomez-5th-fcc-commissioner

The fact that there's all this great stuff going on in the administrative branch is easy to lose sight of amidst the circus of federal electoral politics, in which Donald Trump has retained his role as ringmaster and chief distractor.

Thankfully, we have expert Pantsless Emperor skewerers like Ruben Bolling around – his latest Tom the Dancing Bug revives his brilliant Calvin and Hobbes-inspired Trump gag:

https://boingboing.net/2023/09/06/tom-the-dancing-bug-a-calvinesque-and-hobbesian-look-at-taking-a-mug-shot.html

Well, that's me signing off for the weekend – I've got to pack for my flight to Toronto. If you're looking for more weekend fun, check out the trailer for Fractured Veil, the video game my old pal Chris DiBona has been working on for seven years and which is heading for Steam early access next month:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjNd3QQnENU

Just watch it. I mean. Wow.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/09/nein-nein/#everything-is-miscellaneous

Image: Roel Schroeven (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/roelschroeven/45413895

CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

[wildbeautifuldamned]

Steiff Muzzle Bear 1908 Limited Edition White Replica EAN 017446 ebay lax2phx-9

[baesol]

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♡　﹒　AA i just found out that we hit 14k followers! i am honestly so thankful and grateful for all of you guys' support, i obviously wouldn't be here without each and every one of you guys! i'm so so glad that you guys enjoy my moodboards & posts, it makes me feel so happy and gives me so much motivation to continue posting! below are some of my favourite tumblr blogs!

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@i-jiwon, @contexty, @yeritos, @eliatopia, @yoyojoy, @poetiqe, @i4sullyoon, @iluvrei, @wiotas, @9society, @yongloop, @i8chae, @miunote, @v-ico, @v-eu, @v6mpcat, @y-eora, @goovis, @v-ean, @hyeism, @sullistival, @s-heon, @k-yujin, @ky-ujin, @webzzo, @alfaire, @arttmeow, @min2ji, @vivihrts, @isngh0n, @k-alu, @froopis, @boos2bies, @y-izhou, @chaey2k edit are you literally kidding me, i had 3 paragraphs of my fav blogs but tumblr wouldn't let me mention that many people i'm literally cyring sotp.. 😭😭 IM SORRY i love you all so so much

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again thank you so much for all of your support and kindness, it means a lot to me! hope to see you guys again at 15k! LY ALL!

[journeytothewestresearch]

New JTTW Book!!!

La pérégrination vers l'Ouest: Intégrale des estampes de l'édition japonaise de 1806-1837 (English: The Journey to the West: Complete Prints from the Japanese Edition of 1806-1837) This new French publication collects and comments on restored woodblock prints from Ehon Saiyuki (繪本西遊記, 1806-1837), the first complete Japanese translation of Journey to the West. I have scans of the antique Chinese and Japanese versions of JTTW on my blog, and I can say with full confidence that the woodblock prints from the latter are FAR superior. They are gorgeous beyond words. Most are in black and white, but a few are in color.

Here is the official publisher link for those looking to buy:

https://www.editions2024.com/livres/white-boy-2rslx... Below, I present a google-translated version of the product info.

Illustrations by Ōhara Tōya, Utagawa Toyohiro, Katsushika Taito II Text abridged and translated by Evelyne Lesigne-Audoly and Delphine Mulard Introductions and comments by Christophe Marquet, Vincent Durand-Dastès, Xavier Guilbert and Delphine Mulard. Under the direction of Christophe Marquet * 836 two-color & four-color pages on a Holmen Book 2.0 80g * 18 x 24cm * cardboard cover, bowls, attached labels, hot stamping * sewn binding with edge and 2 bookmarks, attached endpapers * ISBN 978-2-383870-79-1 / EAN 9782383870791 * Publication 11/2023

[tracineu13]

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-book-of-bill-alex-hirsch/1144490969?ean=9781368104807

Spent an hour of filling out orders for me and a few of my friends since this is the version with 16 extra pages (I actually prefer the regular edition's red Bill cover though, honestly). I'm gonna have a lot of points after these books ship out.

[homunculus-argument]

Random stuff from a story arc I edited out of an Unfinished Book:

There's the story of Maur-Ean, a human boy raised by orcs - his name literally translates to "ear cutter", as unlike orcs and elves, humans have round ears, so orcs have concluded that humans dock their children's ears so they won't be torn in war. Besides being unaware that his name is literally just a degoratory name for his species, Maur-Ean takes a long time to figure out that he literally is a human, and that's not just something his clan calls him as an insult. Recovering from the initial shock after his first brush with his own kind, Maur-Ean comes to the conclusion that the only logical way to deal with this is to end the human race.

As the only orcs that Maur-Ean (and so far, the reader) has ever known are more or less hunter-gatherer nomads living in an arid steppe where iron is rare, they can barely hold their own against the invasive human empire enroaching on their territory, but it turns out there is another kind: The Orcs Within Stone, an almost mythical and terrifying people who have abandoned the natural orc way of life and practice in dark and prohibited human arts. Maur-Ean and a friend (another outcast of the clan) head out to find them.

Maur-Ean and his friend do eventually find them, and to their surprise, they don't live in caves, underground, or somehow magically within stone, but stone houses- a whole city of them. The 'dark arts' they practice are mostly agriculture and sciences like metalworking and primitive engineering, and they find it funny that Plains Orcs consider reading and writing to literally be a form of witchcraft.

Maur-Ean's initial plan of "find the clan leader and convince them to ride their warriors into battle" wasn't exactly appliable in a semi-democratic city-state, the City Orcs are fascinated by him. And while many of them do admire his determination on this self-appointed quest of exterminate his own race, most of them burst into laughter the first time they hear him speak. Not because he's a human who can speak, but because he speaks the exact same rural dialect as the clan that raised him. Obviously he would, but the Stone Orcs find it so unexpected that it's funny.

Imagine encountering a dog that can speak fluent english, but nobody warned you that it talks in a flawless Lancashire accent.

[housekonig]

Beginning | Previous | Next

AN: For context, Lowie is Dr. Bart Eane's department head and the person urging him to publish and publish quickly. Meredith knows Lowie all too well, as she's an accomplished and popular professor who has already published three books, including the two seen in this scene. Like her husband, Meredith studies history (undergrad), but her specialty is anthropology, where she focuses on early Vernick, specifically children's role in developing society.

TRANSCRIPT BELOW:

Meredith: ...you won't convince me that's his best book! (Laughs)

Dr. Eane: What?! Honey, Lord of the Moths is a masterpiece, and that's why he's my favorite writer. (Laughs)

Dr. Eane: Then again, we'll have to agree to disagree. (Laughs) He's still my favorite writer.

Meredith: Excuse me! I thought I was.

Dr. Eane: Fine. He's my second favorite writer. You, of course, are my first.

Meredith: And soon, the country will see why you're mine.

Dr. Eane: Ahh, you're assuming Lowie's damn edits will stop.

Meredith: Lowie is tough and knows his shit, Bart. Trust him, but not more than your gut or research.

Dr. Eane: They're not worried about my research or my writing.

Meredith: Then what's the issue?

Dr. Eane: They are.

[maiemorrae]

Luctine Archives Vol: 1 RELEASED

Luctine Archives Vol. 1 is a collection of the shorter moments and scenes between characters from across Luctine. See a moment of strained friendship, the excitement of new beginnings, and more in this short story collection.  "Cynthia Averdale: Bonds" Takes place early on during "Lost Recollections", taking place from Cynthia's POV and granting an insight into her thoughts as she watches over Ellis.  "Eliza Stockwin: The Clocktower" follows The Grand Commander as an investigation into one of the Capital City's infamous arcanists, Spectre, leads to an unexpected one-on-one between enemies.  "Amelia Stockwin: The Medius Malfunction" is about the unveiling of the Medius System by its inventor Amelia Stockwin, and the initial demonstration of the groundbreaking creation. "Illiya Rhys: Prelude to Arrival" shows the final moments of travel between Illiya Rhys and Rathel Stolas as they make their way to Alemere to begin their training to become Physickers in a new training program. 

I'm very excited to announce that my flash fiction collection is now available to purchase! I'm very excited to see this project come to fruition and hope anyone who reads my stories enjoys them. Below you'll find links to where you can get the book! In the future I do plan to do similar projects but with much longer short stories and have already begun curating/editing stories for that collection.

A very big thank you to all the friends and family who have supported me as I've grown into a writer and who are always excited to hear about and read my new stuff. I couldn't do this without their support and I can't wait to keep putting together new stories for them and anyone else to read.

Where to Buy (USD 1.99)

Books2Read Link: https://books2read.com/u/3L5DLJ

Barns & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/luctine-archives-vol-1-maie-morrae/1144786347;jsessionid=89CF7741108E036D829992CD564CE19F.prodny_store02-atgap06?ean=2940179509417

[hamishsteele]

Announcing...

👻 DEADENDIA PREORDER BONUSES! 👻

If you preorder the new editions of DeadEndia, you can receive special, exclusive prints and a Gord Bookmark!

CLICK HERE TO REDEAM YOUR PRE-ORDER RECEIPT

We also have a FAQ Page for more information on how this works. CLICK HERE FOR FAQs

-

And of course, you can still preorder the books at your local store or any of the following links:

Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/deadendia-hamish-steele/1128112234?ean=9781454948964

Barnes and Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/deadendia-hamish-steele/1142540458?ean=9781454948995

Amazon: https://a.co/d/acJoXNP

Amazon: https://a.co/d/3Ddmhph

Indiebound: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781454948957

Indiebound: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781454948988

[nametakensff]

For the like 4 D/isco E/lysium fans on here, I have 2 fics I need to edit but are otherwise done - which would you rather I focus on?

The sick fic follows on from my fic 'Worth It' where K/im ends up getting much more sick than either J/ean or H/arry did from the same cold. K/im x H/arry, partially NSFW, mostly whump and fluff

The cat allergy fic features K/im and J/ean at a crime scene with a murder victim's cat. NSFW because of references to bg K/im x H/arry x J/ean

[romajuliettemai]

Just wanted to make this known- the exclusive edition of Our Violent Ends is coming back on June 4, 2024, and you can preorder it now if you're interested!

Here's the link:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/our-violent-ends-chloe-gong/1138779231?ean=9781665961936

(also this means our demands were heard!)

[inks-books]

Ready for adventure? Ready to see a side of the Fae that people often ignore? Want to see characters with disabilities save the day? Or see a bunch of different magic systems that fit different personalities? Wanna see a spell hacker, a shapeshifter, and a Seer go on a heist? People cheating death until Death itself knocks on their door and makes them go mad? Want to see someone who will stop at nothing to get revenge? Or see the living cities take control of a chase scene? Then you've come to the right place. There's this and so much more going on in the Tales of Dai-Nē Book 1: The Mark of Dai-Nē.

Time to preorder now!

Amazon:

Barns&Noble:

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-mark-of-dai-ne-i-n-knight/1145837204?ean=9798989942626

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Serializing the first chapter of Red Team Blues

My next novel is Red Team Blues, which comes out on Apr 25; it’s easily the most “commercial” book I’ve ever written — a “grabby thriller” (to quote my publisher), or, as Molly “Web3 Is Going Just Great” White put it, “don’t start reading it at bedtime if you have to be awake for something the next morning.”

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/17/have-you-tried-not-spying/#unsalted-hash

Red Team Blues is the story of Martin Hench, a 67 year old, near-retirement forensic accountant who specializes in unwinding Silicon Valley finance scams, who stumbles into the most dangerous job of his life. He gets embroiled in cryptocurrency heist that exposes the finance rot at the heart of tech and the way that it curdled the dream of technology as a force for connection and good.

I’ll be doing a giant tour (San Diego, LA, Burbank, Berkeley, San Francisco, PDX, Mountain View, Vancouver, Calgary, Gaithursburg, DC, Toronto, London, Hay, Oxford, Manchester, Nottingham, Berlin); you can follow the upcoming dates in each day’s edition of my Pluralistic newsletter; here’s today’s:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/17/have-you-tried-not-spying/#bragsheet

And to whet your appetite, I’m going to spend the next week or so syndicating the first chapter of Red Team Blues, starting today. In this installment, we meet Martin Hench and the Unsalted Hash, his “foolish and ungainly” tour bus, just as he’s being roped in for the job of his career.

I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering the book! And if you read the book, I hope you’ll post a review or recommendation to your social media or blog. There is literally no greater favor you can do for a writer than to tell the people who trust your judgment about a book you enjoyed. It’s gift more precious than gold.

Here’s where US readers can pre-order the book:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865847/red-team-blues

Here’s pre-orders for Canadians:

https://services.raincoast.com/scripts/b2b.wsc/featured?hh_isbn=9781250865847&ht_orig_from=raincoast

And for readers in the UK and the rest of the Commonwealth:

https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/red-team-blues-cory-doctorow/7225998?ean=9781804547755

And now, here’s today’s serial installment:

One evening, I got a wild hair and drove all night from San Diego to Menlo Park. Why Menlo Park? It had both a triple-­Michelin-­star place and a dear old friend both within spitting distance of the Walmart parking lot, where I could park the Unsalted Hash, leaving me free to drink as much as I cared to and still be able to walk home and crawl into bed.

I’d done a job that turned out better than I’d expected — ­well enough that I was set for the year if I lived carefully. I didn’t want to live carefully. The age for that was long past. I wanted to live it up. There’d be more work. I wanted to celebrate.

Truth be told, I also didn’t want to contemplate the possibility that, at the age of sixty-­seven, the new work might stop coming in. Silicon Valley hates old people, but that was okay, because I hated Silicon Valley. Professionally, that is.

Getting close to Bakersfield, I pulled the Unsalted Hash into a rest stop to stretch my legs and check my phone. After a putter around the picnic tables and vending machine, I walked the perimeter of my foolish and ungainly and luxurious tour bus, checking the tires and making sure the cargo compartments were dogged and locked. I climbed back in, checked my sludge levels and decided they were low enough that I could use my own toilet, then, finally, having forced myself to wait, sat on one of the buttery leather chairs and checked my messages.

That’s how I learned that Danny Lazer was looking for me. He was working the usual channels — ­DMs from people who I tended to check in with when I was looking for work — ­and it put a shine on my evening, because sixty-­seven or no, there was always work for someone with my skill set. Danny Lazer had a problem with his Trustlesscoin keys, which relied on the best protected cryptographic secrets in the world (nominally). So I messaged him. One rest stop later, just past Gilroy, I got his reply. He was eager to see me. Would I call on him at his home in Palo Alto?

My pathetic little ego swelled up at his eagerness. I told him I had a big dinner planned the next night, but I’d see him the morning after. Truth be told, putting off a man as important as Danny Lazer, even for twenty-­four hours, made me feel more important still. I could tell from his reply that the delay chafed at him. I felt petty, but not so much so that I canceled my dinner. My dear old friend was a lively sort, and it was possible we’d walk from the restaurant to her place for an hour or three before I returned to the Walmart parking lot.

Dinner didn’t disappoint, and neither did the fun and games afterward. It was a very nice capstone to a very successful job, and a very good prelude to another job for one of the nicest rich men (or richest nice men) in Silicon Valley.

Danny was old Silicon Valley, a guy who started his own UUCP host so he could help distribute the alt hierarchy and once helped Tim May bring a load of unlicensed firearms across state lines from a Nevada gun show. He’d lived like a monk for decades, writing cryptographic code and fighting with the NSA over it, and had mortgaged his parents’ house back east to keep himself and a couple of programmers in business in a tiny office for a decade while he and Galit lived in a thirty-­foot motor home that needed engine tuning once a month just so it could trundle from one parking space to the next.

It was a bet that there would come a day when the internet’s innocence would end and people would want privacy from each other and their governments, and he kept doubling down on that bet through every boom and bust, living on ramen and open cereal boxes from the used food store, refusing to part with any equity except to promising hackers who’d join him, and then the bet paid off, and he became Daniel Moses Lazar, with a 75 percent stake in Keypairs LLC, whose crypto-­libraries and workflow tools were the much-­ballyhooed picks and shovels of the next internet revolution. Keypairs wasn’t the first unicorn in Silicon Valley, but it was the first one that never took a dime in venture capital and whose sole angels were Danny’s parents back in Jersey, to whom Danny sent at least $100 million before they made him stop, insisting that they had nothing more they wanted in this world.

Galit picked out a big place in Twin Peaks that you could see Alcatraz from on a clear day, gutted it to the foundation slab, bare studs, and ceiling joists, completely rebuilt it while being mindful of both Danny’s specification for networking receptacles throughout, and Galit’s encyclopedic knowledge of the Arts and Crafts Movement. One day, as she was bringing out some Mendocino grig and a cheese board for the two of them to enjoy from their half-­built porch, she gasped, complained of pain in both arms, then her chest, and then she collapsed and was dead before the ambulance arrived.

It had been a good marriage: twenty-­two years and no kids, because there was nowhere in their old RV to put them unless they wanted to hang them from the rafters. She’d been his rock while he’d built up Keypairs, but he’d been hers, too, rubbing her feet and helping her deal with the endless humiliations that a woman doing administrative work in Silicon Valley had to put up with. He didn’t see it that way, though: after he took possession of her ashes, all he could talk about was how they’d wasted nearly a quarter of a century chasing a fortune that didn’t do either of them a bit of good, and it had cost them the time they could have spent in a beach shack in the Baja while he did two hours of contract work a month to pay for machete sharpening and new hammocks once a year.

A procession of Silicon Valley’s most powerful leaders and most respected technologists filed through the Palo Alto teardown they’d bought to perch in while the Twin Peaks project was underway. People who weren’t merely wealthy but famous for their vision, their sensitivity, their insight. They argued with him about his crushing regrets and tried to tell him how much good he’d done, both for Galit and for the world, but he was unreachable. A consensus emerged among the Friends of Danny that he was not long for this world. Not that he was going to kill himself or anything but that he would simply stop caring about living, and then nature would take its course.

They were right — ­given all facts in evidence, that was a foregone conclusion. But there was one hidden variable: Sethuramani Balakrishnan, who was twenty-­five, brilliant, and had made a series of lateral moves within Keypairs: customer support, then compliance, and finally Danny’s PA, a job she was vastly overqualified for.

She helped him flip the house, then to turn Keypairs over to a management committee carefully balanced between hackers who’d been with Danny since the PDP-­8 days, people with real managerial experience and proven experience growing companies and running big teams. He got rid of all the shares he’d taken in over the years to sit on advisory boards and stuck everything into Vanguard index-­tracker funds — ­the ones that didn’t buy a lot of tech stocks.

As far as anyone could tell, Sethu didn’t try to talk him out of any of this, just offered efficient, intelligent, and supremely organized help in getting Danny’s life’s work out of a realm in which it had to be actively managed by someone with Danny’s incredible drive, insight, and technical knowledge, and into an investment vehicle managed by an overgrown spreadsheet, one that would multiply his money ahead of the CPI, year on year, until someone built a guillotine on his lawn.

What Sethu did talk him into was buying a condo around the corner from that Palo Alto teardown, an eight-­story place, quiet, built on the grave of another Palo Alto teardown that had been snapped up by property developers in the glory days before NIMBY planning ended all high-­density infill within fifty miles of Stanford.

THIS IS THE LAST DAY for the Kickstarter campaign for the audiobook of my next novel, a post-cyberpunk anti-finance finance thriller about Silicon Valley scams called Red Team Blues. Amazon’s Audible refuses to carry my audiobooks because they’re DRM free, but crowdfunding makes them possible.

[Image ID: A squared-off version of Will Staehle's cover for the Macmillan edition of 'Red Team Blues.']