#google in general is useless

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

got a worm nibbling my brain. can someone help me find a piece of obscure media?

webcomic/indie comic from the 2010s. basically a sci-fi short story about a young girl (with red hair?) who was being raised by scientists as part of an experiment. she receives a haircut/has her head shaved, in preparation for her annual brain scan/testing. it is revealed that while her body is human, her "brain" is artificial, made of computer implants throughout her skull and spine. at some point her biological mother (also a scientist on the same campus?) encounters her and is repulsed, viewing her as a machine who has murdered her daughter.

it was very poignant and it bruised my heart and i can NOT find it anywhere

[stealthnoodle]

I see there's a new post on AO3 on AI and data scraping, the contents of which I would describe as a real mixed bag, and the sheer number of comments on it is activating my self-preservation instincts too much for me to subject myself to reading through them. Instead I'm thinking about how much daylight there is between does or doesn't constitute a TOS violation and what does or doesn't violate community norms, and how AO3 finally rolled out that blocking and muting feature recently, and how I think it would be good, actually, if most people's immediate reaction to seeing a work that announces itself as being the product of generative AI was to mute the user who posted it.

That's my reaction, anyway!

[ghoul-haunted]

doing my own artistic reconstructions of the middle to late republic (and eventually, late empire) army and lemme tell you. if I ever have to draw chainmail ever again (I will) I'm going to scream (I am)

also I miss the era of forums. shout out to all these guys in a larp/reenactment forum from 2006 for posting close ups of their armor reconstructions from multiple angles to show how it all comes together, I owe you my fucking life

[gameslikeblank]

Hello, and welcome to Games Like [Blank]!

This is a little passion project spawned by never ending hordes of bad game rec lists. When I'm looking to scratch a specific gaming itch, it's frustrating to find recommendations that are adjacent to what I want, and certainly good in their own right, but not the same. In fact, it's so frustrating that got I sick of it and decided to make my own game catalogue!

When determining if a game is like [blank], I currently take three things into account:

Game play

Genre

Vibe

There may be other similarities, but a game must meet all three to be considered like [blank]. For example, Pokemon Snap New (Photography, Simulation, Cute/Casual) and Bugsnax (Collectathon, Adventure/Exploration, Psychological Horror) are not the same and would not be categorized together. I might fudge the vibe to put Bugsnax with Paradise Marsh, because they're both cartoony collectathons where you explore the unknown. But I'd include a little asterisk that they aren't comparable experiences.

I'll also include information like what platforms you can find the games on, how much they cost, what the file size looks like, and the playtime.

This blog is going to focus on what sort of games I've been looking for recently, but if there's anything specific you've been trying to find please shoot me a message! I'm happy to help if I can. Additionally, the only games listed here will be ones I have personally played and can vouch for. It might be slow growing as a result, as I am simply a single human being, but in due time there should be a decent collection assembled.

[89era]

not a radfem mistaking the former Indigenous affairs minister (who’s mother was one of the Stolen Generations) for an “old white man” in the auspol tag

[louistonehill]

A new tool lets artists add invisible changes to the pixels in their art before they upload it online so that if it’s scraped into an AI training set, it can cause the resulting model to break in chaotic and unpredictable ways. 

The tool, called Nightshade, is intended as a way to fight back against AI companies that use artists’ work to train their models without the creator’s permission. Using it to “poison” this training data could damage future iterations of image-generating AI models, such as DALL-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion, by rendering some of their outputs useless—dogs become cats, cars become cows, and so forth. MIT Technology Review got an exclusive preview of the research, which has been submitted for peer review at computer security conference Usenix.   

AI companies such as OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Stability AI are facing a slew of lawsuits from artists who claim that their copyrighted material and personal information was scraped without consent or compensation. Ben Zhao, a professor at the University of Chicago, who led the team that created Nightshade, says the hope is that it will help tip the power balance back from AI companies towards artists, by creating a powerful deterrent against disrespecting artists’ copyright and intellectual property. Meta, Google, Stability AI, and OpenAI did not respond to MIT Technology Review’s request for comment on how they might respond. 

Zhao’s team also developed Glaze, a tool that allows artists to “mask” their own personal style to prevent it from being scraped by AI companies. It works in a similar way to Nightshade: by changing the pixels of images in subtle ways that are invisible to the human eye but manipulate machine-learning models to interpret the image as something different from what it actually shows. 

Continue reading article here

[ms-demeanor]

*screaming*

*continued screaming*

Okay. So. My introductory Visual C# class.

The professor for that class was Alice. Alice was the person who spoke in the introductory video and the person who we were supposed to email if we had any issues.

But all of the assignments, lectures, and quizzes were written and delivered by Bob. On the youtube channel "Bob's programming academy." The quizzes included Bob's name, like "if you do X will it return the string ProfessorBob, Professor, Bob, or Professor.Bob?"

This class was really frustrating for me because it was structured in such a way that you could easily pass the class with zero knowledge of the subject - it was totally based on quizzes that you could take an unlimited number of times and we *had* weekly programming assignments but they weren't graded so there was no incentive to do them (and look, if I wanted to teach myself programming with no incentives I could fail for several years to do that on my own, I don't need to pay fifty bucks a unit for that; the reason I am in a *class* and am not self-taught is because I need external motivation. That's why I sought out a class).

Also when there *was* a problem with an instruction that was unclear in one of the videos for the assignments, or if I thought I'd done something correctly that was very much incorrect, it wasn't Alice who had created the instructions, it was Bob - in 2017 no less - and I didn't really feel like I could ask Alice for help with an ungraded assignment that she hadn't written.

So. Now. My Python class.

Today is the first day of class. Professor is Charles.

I go to the mandatory attendance quiz and it is word-for-word the same mandatory attendance quiz as the C# class, down to the final question "what is your personal email address so I can keep in contact with you after the semester?"

I look at the syllabus.

Class grade is based on quizzes. We have assignments but none of them are graded. There's no textbook, just a series of videos from Professor Bob's Programming Academy.

So I'd been toying with staying at this school and trying to take more CS classes instead of going to another school, just to try to keep my records easier to manage, but since it seems like that *ENTIRE DEPARTMENT* is five Professor Bobs in a trenchcoat, I will probably be going somewhere else (and once again trying to force myself to do projects that I already know are *good for me to do* but *useless for the class and a massive time suck*)

I should drop this class. I should drop this class and apply for the other school so that I can start taking classes there in the spring because if I take this class and then go into the object oriented programming class in the spring and it's another professor bob sock puppet and I end up taking twelve units of programming classes where all I learn is how to google answers in a short time frame (something I already know how to do thanks) I am going to fucking lose it.

Also, again: I have a Bachelor's Degree. I spent five years at a community college when I was getting that degree. I took probably a dozen online classes starting in 2005 and going until 2011 in the process of getting that degree.

THIS bullshit, this "I'm your professor but actually I'm not and all the materials were created by someone else in the department or came directly from the textbook publisher and there is no writing and there are no assignments everything is multiple choice quizzes that are automatically graded" is *dogshit.*

This is NOT how online classes worked back in my day, not even online math classes, and as much as I know adjuncts are getting fucked over by academia in general, this isn't something that these professors should be getting paid as much as they are to do. Alice checked whether or not students turned in a hello world assignment and gave a pass/fail grades for three discussion boards that were responses to youtube videos. Nothing else in the class required her input. If this is the level of instruction that students are getting then the class is already automated and the students shouldn't have to pay for it.

This is crap. This is an incredible level of crap.

[pink-sparkle-family-updates]

Hello and Welcome! This is a dedicated blog for the Pink Sparkle Family! Here you will find any and all updates concerning the family! Here's the current list of family members. Also, don't forget, we are also related to the Google family. Don't ask.

(Ordered by generation)

@basically-bumble @incognito-mode-official @officialtinder

@official-petsmart @eharmony-official @jupiter-the-god @i-bless-your-heart/@thekrogercompany @real-winn-dixie @india-official @gmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmail

@cars-official @swearification-and-cursing @shakespeare-official-account And @thesmallestclown @gimmickswag @yes-im-youtube-kids and @zotap @kroger-fr and @the-official-publix @actually-kroger @outback-my-steakhouse @the-official-apple and @subway-offical @the-real-gmail @literally-hottopic and @im-pandora-i-promise @confusedhomicidalrage @soup--man @totally-dollar-tree @the-real-starbucks @the-shareholders

@spotify-kids-real @nanochittle @puddles-of-ominous-threats @femboy-hooters-official @the-official-potatoo @real-hottopic @gibberish-anon-from-hell @useless-contributions @just--a--human--being @froggiefemboi @thegreatgeodo Balloony! @theetherealraphael

@its-sanrio-official @darthpastry @unity-real

❗❗❗❗❗

For everyone tagged: for this to be successful, I need all of y'all to tag me (@pink-sparkle-family) whenever y'all adopt someone into this family. If you as an individual adopt someone (not into the pink sparkle family but either personal or another) then don't tag me please. We're gonna try to keep everything as straight as possible ON PAPER.

❗❗❗❗❗

[imsobadatnicknames2]

What's OSR? I've seen you mention it several times in your RPG posts. Is it like a genre of rpg or...?

Hey, sorry I took so long to reply to this lol you probably already just googled it by now.

But like. Anyway.

OSR (Old-School Revival, Old-School Renaissance, and more uncommonly Old-School Rules or Old-School Revolution, no one can really agree on what the R means) is less like a genre and more like a movement or a loosely connected community that seeks to capture the tone, feel and/or playstyle of 70's and 80's fantasy roleplaying games (with a particular emphasis on old-school editions of Dungeons and Dragons, particularly the Basic D&D line but pretty much anything before 3e falls under this umbrella), or at least an idealized version of what people remember those games felt like to play.

There isn't exactly a consensus on what makes a game OSR but here's my personal list of things that I find to be common motifs in OSR game design and GM philosophy. Not every game in the movement features all of these things, but must certainly feature a few of them.

Rulings over rules: most OSR games lack mechanically codified rules for a lot of the actions that in modern D&D (and games influenced by it) would be covered by a skill system. Rather that try to have rules applicable for every situation, these games often have somewhat barebones rules, with the expectation that when a player tries to do something not covered by them the GM will have to make a ruling about it or negotiate a dice roll that feels fair (a common resolution system for this type of situation is d20 roll-under vs a stat that feels relevant, a d6 roll with x-in-6 chance to succeed, or just adjudicating the outcome based on how the player describes their actions)

"The solution is not on your character sheet": Related to the point above, the lack of character skills means that very few problems can be solved by saying "I roll [skill]". E.g. Looking for traps in an OSR game will look less like "I rolled 18 on my perception check" and more like "I poke the flagstones ahead with a stick to check if they're pressure plates" with maybe the GM asking for a roll or a saving throw if you do end up triggering a trap.

High lethality: Characters are squishy, and generally die much more easily. But conversely, character creation is often very quick, so if your character dies you can usually be playing again in minutes as long as there's a decent chance to integrate your new PC into the game.

Lack of emphasis on encounter balance: It's not uncommon for the PCs to find themselves way out of their depth, with encounters where they're almost guaranteed to lose unless they run away or find a creative way to stack the deck in their favor.

Combat as a failure state: Due to the two points above, not every encounter is meant to be fought, as doing so is generally not worth the risk and likely to end up badly. Players a generally better off finding ways to circumvent encounters through sneaking around them, outsmarting them, or out-maneauvering them, fighting only when there's no other option or when they've taken steps to make sure the battle is fought on their terms (e.g. luring enemies into traps or environmental hazards, stuff like that)

Emphasis on inventory and items: As skills, class features and character builds are less significant than in modern D&D (or sometimes outright nonexistent), a large part of the way the players engage with the world instead revolves around what they carry and how they use it. A lot of these games have you randomly roll your starting inventory, and often this will become as much a significant part of your character as your class is, even with seemingly useless clutter items. E.g. a hand mirror can become an invaluable tool for peeping around corners and doorways. This kind of gameplay techncially possible on modern D&D but in OSR games it's often vital.

Gold for XP: somewhat related to the above, in many of these games your XP will be determined by how much treasure you gather, casting players in the role and mindset of trasure hutners, grave robbers, etc.

Situations, not plots: This is more of a GM culture thing than an intrinsic feature of the games, but OSR campaigns will often eschew the long-form GM-authored Epic narrative that has become the norm since the late AD&D 2e era, in favor of a more sandbox-y "here's an initial situation, it's up to you what you do with it" style. This means that you probably won't be getting elaborate scenes plotted out sessions in advance to tie into your backstory and character arc, but it also means increased player agency, casting the GM in the role of less of a plot writer or narrator and more of a referee.

Like I said, these are not universal, and a lot of games that fall under the OSR umbrella will eschew some or most of these (it's very common for a lot of games to drop the gold-for-xp thing in favor of a different reawrd structure), but IMO they're a good baseline for understanding common features of the movement as a whole.

Of course, the OSR movement covers A LOT of different games, which I'd classify in the following categories by how much they deviate from their source of inspiration:

Retroclones are basically recreations of the ruleset of older D&D editions but without the D&D trademark, sometimes with a new coat of paint. E.g. OSRIC and For Gold and Glory are clones of AD&D (1e and 2e respectively); Whitebox and Fantastic Medieval Campaigns are recreations of the original 1974 white box D&D release; Old School Essentials, Basic Fantasy and Labyrinth Lord are clones of the 1981 B/X D&D set. Some of these recreate the original rules as-is, editing the text or reorganizing the information to be clearer but otherwise leaving the meachnics unchanged, while others will make slight rules changes to remove quirks that have come to be considered annoying in hindsight, some of them might mix and match features from different editions, but otherwise they're mostly straight up recreations of old-school D&D releases.

There are games that I would call "old-school compatible", that feature significant enough mechanical changes from old-school D&D to be considered a different game, but try to maintain mechanical compatibility with materials made for it. Games like The Black Hack, Knave, Macchiato Monsters, Dungeon Reavers, Whitehack, etc. play very differently from old-school D&D, and from each other, but you generally can grab any module made for any pre-3e D&D edition and run it with any of them with very little to no effort needed in conversion.

There's a third category that I wouldn't know how to call. Some people call then Nu-OSR or NSR (short for New School revolution) while a small minority of people argue that they aren't really part of the OSR movement but instead their own thing. I've personally taken to calling them "Old School Baroque". These are games that try to replicate different aspects of the tone and feel of old-school fantasy roleplaying games while borrowing few to none mechanics from them and not making any particular attempts to be mechanically compatible. Games like Into the Odd, Mörk Borg, Troika!, a dungeon game, FLEE, DURF, Songbirds, Mausritter, bastards, Cairn, Sledgehammer, and too many more to name. In my opinion this subsection of the OSR space is where it gets interesting, as there's so many different ways people try to recreate that old-school flavor with different mechanics.

(Of course, not everything fits neatly into these, e.g. I would consider stuff like Dungeon Crawl Classics to be somewhere inbetween category 1 and 2, and stuff like GloG or RELIC to be somewhere imbetween categories 2 and 3)

The OSR movement does have its ugly side, as it's to be expected by the fact that a huge part of the driving force behind it is nostalgia. Some people might be in it because it harkens back to a spirit of DIY and player agency that has been lost in traditional fantasy roleplaying games, but it's udneniable that some people are also in it because for them it harkens back to a time before "D&D went woke" when tabletop roleplaying was considered a hobby primarily for and by white men. That being said... generally those types of guys keep to themselves in their own little circlejerk, and it's pretty easy to find OSR spaces that are progressive and have a sinificant number of queer, POC, and marginalized creators.

[0atm11k]

I don't know how to fully articulate this without generalizing at the moment but I truly emphatically believe that the main reason there is a huge push to respect trades people while devaluing academia and white collar jobs is because women are now finally roughly equal performers in all of the previously higher-paying white collar jobs.

Any time work is prestigious and women fight to succeed in the field, suddenly the field is seen as useless women's work. What used to be "high school dropouts" now become "rugged men contributing to society" and even post-pandemic people now believe themselves more intelligent and competent than doctors and scientists, whose workforces are largely becoming more and more female.

Of course, the only academic field not facing this critique of being "useless desk jobs" or "overconfident doctors who google everything", is computer science, which is now more overwhelmingly male than ever. Coding, once it stopped being synonymous with a woman's job, became highly regarded as important, society-defining work.

[the-overthinktank]

in what way is it a doomed investment? I've seen a lot of artist lose their jobs to it already, it has had a greater impact than nft's and right now they're going on to make ai video's. I'm sure the bubble will break eventually but, yea share your thoughts.

Here's an article I recommend reading.

We're at the peak of a tech hype cycle. People are absolutely getting hurt and laid off from billions of dollars being poured into the latest money hole that the developers double pinkie prommy will actually work the way they're advertising... at some later date; but I suspect the main staying power for this tech is going to be spam/advertisement generation and disinformation. If you want to provide a quality chat service or make art worth looking at, human intervention is necessary even if you use generative AI as a starting point. While none of this is... good, in the same way NFTs and useless dotcom sites were not good, I am skeptical of a lot of the panic around generative AI replacing humans long term because I think it lends legitimacy to the people claiming it can competently do that.

I also think a lot of the panic around tumblr specifically is kind of redundant. I don't appreciate the site fucking condoning it, but all major social media sites have already been getting fed into these things. There is (currently) no real way to stop these companies from throwing whatever they want off of google into the machine and claiming they totally only use non-copyrighted goods, because they're drawing from billions of images and source texts and there's (currently) no easy way to check besides combing through those massive databases.

Besides, if you publicly post art online, there's already dozens of other websites scraping income off of your work. The social media you use hosts ads, and your art and presence on social media is what draws in new ad viewers and revenue. And there's aggregator sites that draw from and repost stuff from other social media sites, and they host ads. Listacle "news" sites put their top ten favorite web finds on a page covered in ads. Web searches that show your art in a pile of other images host ads. If your art is popular, the number of sites scraping income off of your work grows proportionately. This is my personal opinion, but I'd say AI is a new hat on a commons-exploitation problem that's as almost as old as the internet.

[sca-rian]

Trafficblr 2022 AO3 Wrapped

Dive deep into the tags and ships you loved the most this year, brought to you by Tumblr user @sca-rian! (inspired by this bird app thread)

Data collected from both the Hermitcraft SMP and 3rd Life | Last Life SMP Series* tags.

(*Note: this data does not take into account that some works contain both tags and therefore would be counted twice when looking at each tag individually)

First, let's look at the ratings! In total, the tags combined had 3.709 Teen And Up, 3.362 General, 1.293 Not Rated, 756 Explicit and 694 Mature fics.

In 2022, you loved and made many blorbos suffer! Some, however, were the ones you wrote about the most. Let's look at who those poor souls were!

Of course, in 2022, you also got attached and wrote about many different duos. Regardless of your preference to writing them as romantic or not, it's clear that two specific block men stole your heart!

This year, you may have written and read many different things, but looking at the most popular tags, it's clear that we have an established pattern—suffering, first and foremost.

Your fanfic taste doesn't fit into a single recommendation list, but we want to try anyway—by clicking here, you'll have access to a Google Forms where you can send your favorite fanfics of the year!

... And that's a wrap! Our very silly, likely inaccurate 2022 retrospective is done. Now, I'd like to use this space to thank every single one of the writers who took their time to write HC/3rd Life/LL/DL fanfic this year; I hope you can feel that your work, passion and creativity is loved and appreciated <3

And, of course, a big thank you as well to all the readers out there! 2022 was the year I got back into writing, and that wouldn't have been possible without the support of such amazing people

(tired of typing with proper capitalization why did i do this. this post was very fun—if not a little annoying—to make, and maybe i will be back in the future? with more silliness? i definitely learned a lot about the silly goofiness of collecting useless data......)

[queen-shiba]

I'M FOAMING AT THE MOUTH CAN WE HAVE THE ROYAL WEDDING PLS PLS PLS

Now and Forever

@killersweetie @leonistic

Author's note: I did take a few liberties [more than a few because google is fucking useless]... I hope it's worth the read

Today was the day! The day everyone was waiting for...

4 years ago, Leona found his one and only.

Now, you two were sealing the deal.

Imani, Falena's wife.. You two got along quite well. So well, you asked her to be the maid of honor!

She accepted, of course, and was proud to be there with you and help you with your dress.

Everyone was so excited!

You and Leona had agreed on the color being yellow for the wedding crew.

Sunset colors were being set up for this big event!

Today, you were so very excited to see Leona, but alas, you had to wait.

As did he.

Now he stood in the dressing room, adorned in gold and all sorts of lovely colors.

Falena, surprisingly enough, was chosen as the best man, considering he helped Leona through the first stage.

Leona couldn't be more thankful to his older brother for this...

He stood behind him, wearing a yellow suit, clearly very happy for his little brother.

"Are you excited?" Falena asked, watching Leona practically shake with joy.

"Why wouldn't I be?" He smiled softly.

Nothing condescending... not smug...

A genuine smile.

Truly, this was an amazing day for him.

Falena was happy for Leona!

He finally found someone to love... and someone who loved him just as much.

"I'm glad. And proud of you, little brother." Falena pulled him into a hug, resisting the urge to tear up.

There were so many unexplainable emotions he felt...

One was certainly pride... seeing his brother shine so bright...

It was something to be proud of.

Leona returned the hug with a chuckle, "Don't go getting all sappy on me. Save that for the event."

Falena could only nod, finally pulling back, "Right.." He beamed at him as Cheka came rushing in, "Mjomba! Baba! It's almost time!" He smiled, "Come on! Everyone is waiting!"

He pulled the two men along, careful not to mess up anyone's outfits.

Leona was positioned outside under a great big tree in the Savanah off to the side, standing across from where you'd be.

He could only imagine how beautiful you'd look....

He was excited to see you in your dress...

Just you in general..

The crowd of people stood extatically, awaiting your entrance.

The steady beat of a drum went off, and your bride's maids came in, dancing, making quite the entrance for you, clearing the way as you came down that isle.

You looked... beautiful... gold, colorful fabrics.. everything was just perfect...

You were perfect.

Leona had to keep himself together. Don't jump. Don't scream. Try not to cry..

Kifaji smiled softly, watching as Leona tried to get a hold of his emotions.

He'd truly come a long way...

He was glad he got to see it.

Now, you stood face to face with your lover, taking him in.

He was breath taking...

Everything you could ever ask for..

There you were, ready to tie the knot and be together forever..

It was time.

You couldn't control your smile, and neither could he as the music died down, and you finally got to vow your loyalty to one another.

Food and drinks were brought out, and music started right back up with guests cheering and singing your praises.

You danced all evening, up to midnight.

Eating and drinking, you both were focused on each other.

You could only stare into those deep green pools that you'd fallen in love with all those years ago.

You would dedicate everything to him, and he would do the same for you.

This, you could be sure of.

As the festivities came to a close, you and your newly wed husband held one another close.

"Ninashukuru kupata kutumia maisha yangu na wewe..." He buried his face in your hair, with a smile, holding you by your waist as if you might fade if he let go.

"We'll stay together, now and forever..." You reciprocated his affections.

This would last forever...

The End!

[marjorierose]

@lesmisletters is kicking off again, immediately after having concluded. I'm not reading along this year--there are too many books I set aside to read when I was no longer reading Les Mis. But with a flurry of new discussion happening about the prologue, I checked my edition and realized the notes included some older prologue drafts. Translations are my own, and I'm entirely amenable to corrections.

This one was written in 1861:

Tant que l'homme se croira le droit d'introduire l'indissoluble dans ses moeurs et l'irréreparable dans ses lois, des livres de la nature de celui-ci pourront ne pas être inutiles.

Ce livre n'est autre chose qu'une protestation contre l'inexorable.

As long as man believes he has the right to include the unbreakable in his morals and the unforgivable in his laws, books of this kind can't be useless.

This book is nothing but a protestation against what is unyielding.

Which is much less focused on poverty in general, and much more on the consequences of people being considered unforgivable or irredeemable.

The 1860 draft, from the back of an envelope, has a high quantity of Bible allusions by volume:

Si l'auteur avait réussi à faire sortir de lui ce qui était en lui et à mettre dans ce livre ce qu'il avait dans sa pensée, que serait-ce que Jean Valjean ? Ce serait une sorte de Job du monde moderne, ayant pour fumier toute la quantité de mal contenue dans la société actuelle.

Et ce Job aurait pour ulcères l'irréparable, l'irrévocable, les flétrissures indéfinies, la damnation sociale inscrite encore à cette heure dans la loi.

Et lui aussi aurait le droit de dire : Vous qui passez par le chemin !

If the author had succeeded in putting in this book what was in his thoughts, what would he be, Jean Valjean? A kind of Job of the modern world, having for his dung heap (1) all the evil contained in current society.

And this Job would have for boils the indissoluble, the unforgivable, the permanent blemishes, the social damnation still written into the law today.

And he would have the right to say: You who pass by the path! (2)

(1) After his family dies and he's afflicted with boils, Job goes to sit in a trash heap and scratches himself with a potsherd. Relatedly: it is frustrating to google anything about the book of Job, given his name.

(2) I think this is a reference to Lamentations 1:12: "N'est-ce rien pour vous tous qui passez par le chemin?" or "Is it nothing to you, all you who pass by?" But I could be wrong, and there is definitely an element of just pointing at passersby and going "Hey! Hey!"

[quitealotofsodapop]

I imagine shí bǎomǔ (translated via Google translate English to Ancient Chinese, it means stone nanny) is probably the nickname of choice for Wukong amongst demon monkeys. Just imagine a pairnif monkey demon's coming into the shop because, with Wukong appearing more and more often in this specific shop, of course other monkey demon's will natural gravitate towards it even if they don't necessarily know why. And the somehow goes to stone monkeys, probably because of course it does, Tang is there and a huge Monkey King fan who wants to know everything about the differences between regular monkey demon's and a certain stone monkey they knew. One of those monkey demons, he has some old world knowledge from his great something or other grandparents. Maybe he's related to one of the immortal monkeys that ended up leaving the mountain when it became overpopulated/too dangerous with all the attacks that happened when Wukong was away? Anyways he knows about stone monkeys, albeit not much. What he knows roughly translates to how they're universally known as the nannies of the demon monkey population. It probably goes like,

MK: Man, is it weird, or has Monkey King been acting weird around me?

Mei: Aw, he just loves his son~

MK: He's not my dad, Mei. He's Bern weirdly acting like a mom, ever since the baby came along. Him and Macaque both.

Monkey, not trying to eavesdrop but its impossible with the topic: *snort* Typical Shí bǎomǔ behavior.

Tang: Stone nanny?

Minkey: Old archaic name for the king's species before it became on. Grandoapa says it was cuz of their natural weakness to anything vaguely small, cute, and cublike. The king was, apparently, especially susceptible to this. Never met the guy, but my ancestors was a troopmate of his.

Pigsy: That explains how useless he was with the moon rabbit...

referencing this post on Stone Monkey behavior.

Oh my gosh I adore "shí bǎomǔ/Stone Nanny" as the monkey demon word for Stone Monkeys! <3

Imagine being a caveman-era monkey demon, and you just meet a really cool new monkey who's super good and insistent on caring for your babies while you rest or forage? That monkey would be the go-to babysitter for the whole troop! And they're tough as rocks? Coolest nanny ever!

And the monkeys who knew Wukong back in the king's early days know why the King had the affectionate nickname of "Waigong/Yeye/Grandpa Sun". He helped babysit so many infants and cubs without even asking that the younger generation just assumed he was one of their grandparents until it was explained to them that the immortal monkey was just a really good babysitter. XD

I also love the idea of modern monkey demons congregating around Pigsy's Noodles cus they know that their King and his Heir go there all the time, and that the food is good enough for a king! Pigsy unexpectedly gets a loyal customer base of excited mostly-vegetarian monkeys.

They adore Tang much to the scholar's delight, and to MK's annoyance (boy has been hearing the same stories and questions all day now). Monkey demons dont have a lot of surviving written history due to the Burning of Flower Fruit Mountain, so to have a scholar/historian like Tang trying to compile stories and second-hand accounts is considered really amazing for them!

[serialunaliver]

girl... could you infodump on antitrust laws like u said u weren't going to on that post about google putting a 5s wait on youtube in firefox?

ok so when it comes to antitrust and monopolization in general the waters get muddied based on what anti-competitiveness is defined as and when in history the laws were introduced.

in the US since we're talking american companies, if you look into the three main antitrust statutes, there is a common theme of "monopolies are bad...unless we can argue consumers like them, or that they're benefiting the economy". for example, the sherman act of 1890 makes a differentiation between monopoly and innocent monopoly. an innocent monopoly is defined as "a monopoly achieved through merit". the idea is that the company is simply so epic consumers chose to turn it into a monopoly. i'm not going into the full history of antitrust laws because the question i'm answering here is regarding tech monopolies in the 21st century, but I want to make it clear that US antitrust laws have been challenged and debated from the beginning and are arguably poorly defined. the times they were strictly enforced were a result of political pressure at the time and not strength and effectiveness of the laws. this reigns true for lots of laws--seemingly useless until the pressure is high enough. the first times antitrust failed to be enforced, monopolies redefined them in court (this happened with the standard oil monopoly which ended in a court ruling that gave monopolies even more leeway). and so, monopoly goes from a company holding a monopoly to a company holding a monopoly that is problematic enough. US antitrust laws are described as weak for the way they're kind of designed for monopolies to argue their way out of trouble.

OK now onto the whole "how the fuck can google do All That and not violate antitrust laws" thing. first of all, google has been challenged before by the department of justice. it was actually a pretty big case and made comparisons to microsoft's antitrust violations in the 90s. however, google's situation is different. in the case of google more consumers are outraged than competitors. google actually collaborates with other tech monopolies, and again, this collaboration can get around antitrust with the simple argument that it's not financially harming consumers. there is also google's business model in which it's "free". this is similar to companies like facebook who also skirt around antitrust laws. a lot of antitrust violations involve financial harm to consumers. this modern business model in tech is ahead of antitrust laws.

oh yeah and google used microsoft's antitrust case to take steps to avoid being convicted. in a memo they literally used a quote from that trial incriminating microsoft as an example of "language to avoid" regarding "perceptions of monopolistic behavior".

but what about firefox? could google get away with the 5s wait? well it certainly goes against their previous argument in court that google isn't making competitors lower quality. but again, the fact that consumers are not being harmed financially means google could avoid being convicted. google is absolutely engaging in anti competitive behavior, but not behavior that secures conviction, because US antitrust laws SUUUUUUCK.

TL;DR it's a combination of modern business models in tech and the language of US antitrust laws.