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gyuswhore · 5 months ago

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Cherry Picker [teaser]

part of the winter with you collab hosted by @camandemstudios!

Choi Seungcheol x reader

est. word count: um 30k (?) EDIT: projecting near 20k [see reblogs] EDIT pt2: we're back to 30k (possibly more)

est. release date: January 10th

warnings: Hockey player! Seungcheol, figure skater! reader, *deep breath* ENEMIES TO LOVERS, angst, fluff, smut [MINORS DNI], more to be added in final post

synopsis: Cherry Picking [ice hockey]: a manoeuver in which a player, the floater, literally loafs (spends time in idleness) or casually skates behind the opposing team's unsuspecting defencemen while they are in their attacking zone. There wasn't much you counted on in life; just your skates, your drive and how it felt to win. And of course, your local ice rink, that is now being colonised by an obnoxious hockey team in all their big, loud, stinking glory. Neither does it help that one particular red donned specimen forgets to leave his cherry picking on the ice.

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[a/n]: I first wrote hockey player Cheol quite literally a full year ago and I promised to expand on the concept, so here we are!!! im so excited for y'all to read this bc im genuinely putting my heart and ass into this fic. lmk your thoughts about the teaser!!! please remember to support the rest of the fics coming out in association with the winter with you collab, all of these writers are working so hard to bring you fics you're going to love 🥹

masterlist

The ice is empty, mostly. Placing your laptop in the sound booth and your shoes under the benches, you step foot on the ice. They’re there, on the other end, sitting on the cold ice with their jerseys still on, eating what looks like cups of dippin dots.

Seungcheol and Jeonghan, you remember from Lorelai’s squealing, either don’t notice you on the ice, or simply choose not to. Because it’s easy as you skate up to them, gaining speed from across the rink, you slide to a stop, sending a perfect spray of ice from your skates, directly into their cups.

Seungcheol’s full spoon hangs mid air, halfway to his mouth, now garnished with ice shavings.

“Thought you’d have the respect to keep the dippin dots out of this,” Jeonghan comments, disbelief in his eyes as he looks up at you.

“Ice is booked.”

“What time?” Seungcheol asks. Your gaze flickers to the left side of his face, a nasty bruise blooming purple and blue that you hadn’t noticed before.

“Two sixteen. It’s nearly fifteen minutes past.”

“You’re only one person.”

“And?”

“And…you have about 97% of the rink to yourself.”

You raise your brows, hands on your hips. “But I booked 100% of it. So I’m gonna need that plane of ice you’re currently sitting on.”

“What if I don’t move?” Seungcheol presses. It’s menacing, the way he looks at you, like he’s a dragon only waiting to be provoked.

“We’ll find out another day,” Jeonghan sings before you can snap back, grabbing onto the collar of Seungcheol’s red and white jersey to yank him up. He continues to glare as he obliges with his friend’s tugs, nearly as angry as you are. “Let’s go, sport.”

You watch as they walk to the exit of the ice, realising they’re wearing their shoes instead of their skates.

Jeonghan calls from the benches, right before he and Seungcheol move out of view. “Trash those for us, would you?”

Their half eaten dippin dots cups, with the ice now melting on them remains on the floor of the rink.

Once again, the unexplainable urge to kick something befalls you, hearing them laugh and talk from far away as they exit the rink behind their long gone teammates.

You give in, swinging a leg over to kick the cups and spoons, dippin dots and plastic scattering across the ice. It’s another sprawl of mess you’ll have to clean up, but it feels good to ruin something of his, no matter how inconsequential.

The empty rink is only encouraging you, needing to scream so loud the plastic barriers crack and break. You know it’s impossible, but that doesn’t stop the urge.

You channel it into the most aggressive warmups on ice you’ve ever done. Your spins are faster, your jumps higher. But this also means you crash heavier, fall harder.

It’s then, sitting on the bench to take a break, breathing so heavy you can hardly sip your water, you find an unmistakable headline on your browser home page.

Everything stops.

!HOT TOPIC!

SEAT AT RISK FOR SVT HOCKEY TEAM’S SHINING STAR? Read All About It Here!

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hypno-matt · 4 months ago

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The Wheel of Hypnosis

I've recently been experimenting with giving myself (and other people) a way to obey commands with just a push of a button, and I think I found a way to do it. Introducing, The Wheel of Hypnosis!!

This Wheel has been equipped with a bunch of hypnotic commands, ranging from easy to do to incredibly mind breaking, alongside a bunch of suggestions to act in different ways or to change certain behaviours.

Each command specifies the number of minutes in which it is active. For example, "Edge (10 mins.)" means to, well, edge for 10 minutes. These are all suggested times, however, and if anyone here wants to play this you can obey these commands for as little, or as long as you see fit.

If the wheel labds on something that is beyond a sub's level of comfort, or if they just dont want to follow it, they can simply not do it. Comfort and fun is the aim of the game, so if any command makes you uncomfy you can simply choose to stop, or roll again.

With all that being said, how do you play?

Well, it's simple. If you're playing with a dom, anytime they tell you to spin the wheel, you do. There is no winning or losing, the game ends whenever your dom wants it to, or when your mind is too broken to keep going!!

If you are alone, or you don't have a dom, you can just spin the wheel whenever you want, and obey it. I recommend knowing how to wake yourself up from trance, however, or having an awakener ready in a separate tab, so you can wake yourself up if you get too mushy!

Or, there's always a third option. You can post the link, and for every x number of notes that you get (5,10, whatever you want), you have to spin the wheel and show your followers the results. This essentialy makes you into a giant free use toy for all of Tumblr to see, which is particularly fun for people who like to show off how blank they are <3

In any case, if anyone does plan to play this game, I hope that they do so with care. Have an awakener ready, make sure to never do anything that is too uncomfy, and stop whenever you want to or need to stop. Besides that, I hope you people have fun~

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year ago

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Even if you think AI search could be good, it won’t be good

TONIGHT (May 15), I'm in NORTH HOLLYWOOD for a screening of STEPHANIE KELTON'S FINDING THE MONEY; FRIDAY (May 17), I'm at the INTERNET ARCHIVE in SAN FRANCISCO to keynote the 10th anniversary of the AUTHORS ALLIANCE.

The big news in search this week is that Google is continuing its transition to "AI search" – instead of typing in search terms and getting links to websites, you'll ask Google a question and an AI will compose an answer based on things it finds on the web:

https://blog.google/products/search/generative-ai-google-search-may-2024/

Google bills this as "let Google do the googling for you." Rather than searching the web yourself, you'll delegate this task to Google. Hidden in this pitch is a tacit admission that Google is no longer a convenient or reliable way to retrieve information, drowning as it is in AI-generated spam, poorly labeled ads, and SEO garbage:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/03/keyword-swarming/#site-reputation-abuse

Googling used to be easy: type in a query, get back a screen of highly relevant results. Today, clicking the top links will take you to sites that paid for placement at the top of the screen (rather than the sites that best match your query). Clicking further down will get you scams, AI slop, or bulk-produced SEO nonsense.

AI-powered search promises to fix this, not by making Google search results better, but by having a bot sort through the search results and discard the nonsense that Google will continue to serve up, and summarize the high quality results.

Now, there are plenty of obvious objections to this plan. For starters, why wouldn't Google just make its search results better? Rather than building a LLM for the sole purpose of sorting through the garbage Google is either paid or tricked into serving up, why not just stop serving up garbage? We know that's possible, because other search engines serve really good results by paying for access to Google's back-end and then filtering the results:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/04/teach-me-how-to-shruggie/#kagi

Another obvious objection: why would anyone write the web if the only purpose for doing so is to feed a bot that will summarize what you've written without sending anyone to your webpage? Whether you're a commercial publisher hoping to make money from advertising or subscriptions, or – like me – an open access publisher hoping to change people's minds, why would you invite Google to summarize your work without ever showing it to internet users? Nevermind how unfair that is, think about how implausible it is: if this is the way Google will work in the future, why wouldn't every publisher just block Google's crawler?

A third obvious objection: AI is bad. Not morally bad (though maybe morally bad, too!), but technically bad. It "hallucinates" nonsense answers, including dangerous nonsense. It's a supremely confident liar that can get you killed:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/01/mushroom-pickers-urged-to-avoid-foraging-books-on-amazon-that-appear-to-be-written-by-ai

The promises of AI are grossly oversold, including the promises Google makes, like its claim that its AI had discovered millions of useful new materials. In reality, the number of useful new materials Deepmind had discovered was zero:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

This is true of all of AI's most impressive demos. Often, "AI" turns out to be low-waged human workers in a distant call-center pretending to be robots:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/31/neural-interface-beta-tester/#tailfins

Sometimes, the AI robot dancing on stage turns out to literally be just a person in a robot suit pretending to be a robot:

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

The AI video demos that represent "an existential threat to Hollywood filmmaking" turn out to be so cumbersome as to be practically useless (and vastly inferior to existing production techniques):

https://www.wheresyoured.at/expectations-versus-reality/

But let's take Google at its word. Let's stipulate that:

a) It can't fix search, only add a slop-filtering AI layer on top of it; and

b) The rest of the world will continue to let Google index its pages even if they derive no benefit from doing so; and

c) Google will shortly fix its AI, and all the lies about AI capabilities will be revealed to be premature truths that are finally realized.

AI search is still a bad idea. Because beyond all the obvious reasons that AI search is a terrible idea, there's a subtle – and incurable – defect in this plan: AI search – even excellent AI search – makes it far too easy for Google to cheat us, and Google can't stop cheating us.

Remember: enshittification isn't the result of worse people running tech companies today than in the years when tech services were good and useful. Rather, enshittification is rooted in the collapse of constraints that used to prevent those same people from making their services worse in service to increasing their profit margins:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/26/glitchbread/#electronic-shelf-tags

These companies always had the capacity to siphon value away from business customers (like publishers) and end-users (like searchers). That comes with the territory: digital businesses can alter their "business logic" from instant to instant, and for each user, allowing them to change payouts, prices and ranking. I call this "twiddling": turning the knobs on the system's back-end to make sure the house always wins:

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

What changed wasn't the character of the leaders of these businesses, nor their capacity to cheat us. What changed was the consequences for cheating. When the tech companies merged to monopoly, they ceased to fear losing your business to a competitor.

Google's 90% search market share was attained by bribing everyone who operates a service or platform where you might encounter a search box to connect that box to Google. Spending tens of billions of dollars every year to make sure no one ever encounters a non-Google search is a cheaper way to retain your business than making sure Google is the very best search engine:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Competition was once a threat to Google; for years, its mantra was "competition is a click away." Today, competition is all but nonexistent.

Then the surveillance business consolidated into a small number of firms. Two companies dominate the commercial surveillance industry: Google and Meta, and they collude to rig the market:

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

That consolidation inevitably leads to regulatory capture: shorn of competitive pressure, the companies that dominate the sector can converge on a single message to policymakers and use their monopoly profits to turn that message into policy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

This is why Google doesn't have to worry about privacy laws. They've successfully prevented the passage of a US federal consumer privacy law. The last time the US passed a federal consumer privacy law was in 1988. It's a law that bans video store clerks from telling the newspapers which VHS cassettes you rented:

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

In Europe, Google's vast profits lets it fly an Irish flag of convenience, thus taking advantage of Ireland's tolerance for tax evasion and violations of European privacy law:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

Google doesn't fear competition, it doesn't fear regulation, and it also doesn't fear rival technologies. Google and its fellow Big Tech cartel members have expanded IP law to allow it to prevent third parties from reverse-engineer, hacking, or scraping its services. Google doesn't have to worry about ad-blocking, tracker blocking, or scrapers that filter out Google's lucrative, low-quality results:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Google doesn't fear competition, it doesn't fear regulation, it doesn't fear rival technology and it doesn't fear its workers. Google's workforce once enjoyed enormous sway over the company's direction, thanks to their scarcity and market power. But Google has outgrown its dependence on its workers, and lays them off in vast numbers, even as it increases its profits and pisses away tens of billions on stock buybacks:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/25/moral-injury/#enshittification

Google is fearless. It doesn't fear losing your business, or being punished by regulators, or being mired in guerrilla warfare with rival engineers. It certainly doesn't fear its workers.

Making search worse is good for Google. Reducing search quality increases the number of queries, and thus ads, that each user must make to find their answers:

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

If Google can make things worse for searchers without losing their business, it can make more money for itself. Without the discipline of markets, regulators, tech or workers, it has no impediment to transferring value from searchers and publishers to itself.

Which brings me back to AI search. When Google substitutes its own summaries for links to pages, it creates innumerable opportunities to charge publishers for preferential placement in those summaries.

This is true of any algorithmic feed: while such feeds are important – even vital – for making sense of huge amounts of information, they can also be used to play a high-speed shell-game that makes suckers out of the rest of us:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/11/for-you/#the-algorithm-tm

When you trust someone to summarize the truth for you, you become terribly vulnerable to their self-serving lies. In an ideal world, these intermediaries would be "fiduciaries," with a solemn (and legally binding) duty to put your interests ahead of their own:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/07/treacherous-computing/#rewilding-the-internet

But Google is clear that its first duty is to its shareholders: not to publishers, not to searchers, not to "partners" or employees.

AI search makes cheating so easy, and Google cheats so much. Indeed, the defects in AI give Google a readymade excuse for any apparent self-dealing: "we didn't tell you a lie because someone paid us to (for example, to recommend a product, or a hotel room, or a political point of view). Sure, they did pay us, but that was just an AI 'hallucination.'"

The existence of well-known AI hallucinations creates a zone of plausible deniability for even more enshittification of Google search. As Madeleine Clare Elish writes, AI serves as a "moral crumple zone":

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

That's why, even if you're willing to believe that Google could make a great AI-based search, we can nevertheless be certain that they won't.

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/2024/05/15/they-trust-me-dumb-fucks/#ai-search

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

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

djhughman https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Modular_synthesizer_-_%22Control_Voltage%22_electronic_music_shop_in_Portland_OR_-_School_Photos_PCC_%282015-05-23_12.43.01_by_djhughman%29.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #twiddling #ai #ai search #enshittification #discipline #google #search #monopolies #moral crumple zones #plausible deniability #algorithmic feeds

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intheupside · 4 months ago

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which teammate could go on dancing with the stars?

the way kris goes: sid has no chance and doc’s like kris would probably be good at it but i don’t want to say him 😂

Cody Glass: Going on vibes alone -- I'd probably have to say (O'Connor). It'd just be funny. I think he'd do a good job, but he's just a funny guy I would love to watch dance.

Matt Nieto: I could see Kris Letang doing pretty well on that show for some reason. He seems like he'd be good.

Sidney Crosby: I'll go with Petey. He can move. He can sing, but he can move too.

P.O Joseph: Honestly, I would say (Tomasino). I feel like he can, I like his energy so far.

Jesse Puljujarvi: Hayes. He can do everything.

Kevin Hayes: I think Noel (Acciari). He was a big dancer when we were younger.

Noel Acciari: I'd say either Tanger or Hayesy, I think they could dance.

Alex Nedeljkovic: I feel like I've seen (Pettersson) dance. Cookie (Acciari), that guy is good at anything he does. He's not going to be the best, because not everybody is the best at everything, but he's good at a lot of things.

Joel Blomqvist: Karl. I think he's a pretty stylish man, I think dancing would suit him pretty well.

Michael Bunting: Myself. I haven't seen anyone else dance, but I would say myself. I would compete, for sure. Maybe reach the semis. I don't want to get too ahead of myself, but for sure.

Anthony Beauvillier: I would say Michael Bunting. I've seen him dance, he's got some moves.

Rickard Rakell: Bunting. Pretty recently, I saw some of his moves. (raises eyebrows) He's pretty good.

Marcus Pettersson: Raks. He's got good movement, he has control of his body. I feel like everybody else has good control too, but there's a lot of stiff people in here.

Bryan Rust: Petey. He seems to have the flexibility and coordination, I think he would do well.

Matt Grzelcyk: I think Tanger. He's athletic, a good-looking guy. I think he'd have some good dance moves. (Letang, overhearing from the next stall: "I what?!")

Kris Letang: (Turns to Grzelcyk) Grz, you got some moves? Sid has no chance. Petey can sing, I know Petey loves the karaoke. Maybe OC. Do you need the personality for it? He thinks he does.

Valtteri Puustinen: I say Jesse. Did you see the video where he's on the bike in his home? (Waves arms around, imitating the video) I think he's so good.

Sam Poulin: I'd say Tanger because he skates really well, he'd be a good fit for that.

Erik Karlsson: Rusty. He's got some pretty good moves, and he's pretty good at direction, he'd be easy to coach.

Owen Pickering: Rutger (McGroarty). He'd love something like that, he loves the attention.

Ryan Shea: Not Kevin (Hayes), not (Jack St. Ivany), not Petey. Honestly, I feel like Karl. I'd probably say (Anthony) Beauvillier too, he's pretty quick. I feel like he has good feet.

Tristan Jarry: I want to say Matt Nieto, I think he'd be good at it, just the vibe he puts out. He'd do really well with it.

Phil Tomasino: I'm gonna say (Pickering). He's got a lot of confidence, let's go with Picks.

Blake Lizotte: I feel like Karl could do well on that show. He just takes care of himself. He's dressed nice. He would fit the TV personalty. He's a good skater, so he probably could dance.

Ryan Graves: I bet Tanger would be OK. I've never seen him dance, but that'd be it.

Drew O'Connor: I think (St. Ivany). He's a Cali boy, he's got that kind of swagger about him. He might be a little stiff, but he's got that entertainment background. His brother's a movie star or something. I can't say Tanger. Like, Tanger would probably be decent at it but I don't want to say Tanger.

Jack St. Ivany: I'd go with (Kevin Hayes). He would do a good job with it, just being super lighthearted. I haven't seen his boots moving yet but I'm sure he can move his hips. (Me: Drew said you.) I think I could do all right. I would do better than OC, if we're being honest. I get the feet moving.

#pittsburgh penguins #sidney crosby #kris letang #erik karlsson #rickard rakell #anthony beauvillier #rutger mcgroarty #kevin hayes #marcus pettersson #bryan rust

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