#it was inescapable in 2012

[beevean]

Got sonadow generation. My first boost style game. I blasted through Sonic's campaign, had great fun, but I'm terrible at shadow's gameplay even tho I'm also having fun!

The thing I got from the Sonic campaign was I THINK IT'S HOMING MISSILES BE CAREFUL SONIC I THINK IT'S HOMING MISSILES BE CAREF-

But jokes aside, loving the experience. 3d style green hill and 2d style city escape are fantastic. Altho what I can say so far about the boost style of game is that I miss the spin dash and I don't get why I shouldn't be able to do it??? I understand there's the boost already but... Idk.

Also fuck Vector's mission.

Eyyyyyyy that's great! Gens is one of my fave games, it has some of my favorite level design in the series :D

Yeah, in theory the Boost replaces the Spin Dash's primary function, which is to gain speed. But what it doesn't do is making you gain momentum, which is why Spin Dash jumping is its own fun. And man is the Spin Dash in Gens busted lmao, classic sonic be nyoom. But yes, the Boost games are less about gaining your speed to find shortcuts, and more about keeping that speed and dodging obstacles.

yeah, Vector's mission is infamous, but IIRC you don't need to complete it, you have multiple choices to get the keys! Sadly, the game is so short that you'll end up doing it anyway. Well, it was, now it comes bundled with Shadow's existential crisis :P

[sanctus-ingenium]

is that a Of Monsters and Men quote in your blog header? if so, good taste!!!! if not, it's still very cool!!!

Yes :) it's one of the best fit songs for the seascapes & associated characters

[doctor-octiddius]

*Jealous of Your Cigarette by Hawksley Workman plays in the background* (For a guy who makes a bunch of gifs of Sid's characters, I feel like I don't post them enough. Anyways, Inescapable is a banger movie, and no, I am not blinded by the dilf, I promise.)

[charming-celestial]

Carl Beukes as Peter, in Inescapable (2012)

[archangeltwins]

Peter

cape town native, probably has dual citizenship / passports for SA & Canada/US

'upper middle class' but his outfits are described as "two paychecks away from homelessness" because his sense of style is disastrous

prefers t-shirts and longsleeves to more formal dress

casual social drinker, but only one or two beers. father was probably an alcoholic and grew up in a turbulent home and does not want that to be him

total momma's boy

bibliophile, lover of books, words, and likes to book-bind as a hobby

user of pet names to the max. even in other languages

very soft-spoken and a giver of awkward smiles, unfortunate reflex with anxiety

"guy you'd sit in a coffee shop with" vibes

coffee and tea lover

man who would cook his gf / bf breakfast, and serve in bed, after a night's romp in the sheets

he'd be the one to get his girl / guy a bouquet of roses ( or several ) on v-day

is likely the one to stop and re-tie his partner's shoes if they've got their arms full as a cute gesture

type to carry a puppy around the pet store in a chest-carrier while looking for necessities

would be the one to give forehead kisses and snuggles after disagreements anyways

wears his heart on his sleeve all the time

raker of leaves only to grab his gf / bf and jump in the pile

s'mores and hot chocolate on cool autumn nights lover

man who has one of those "kiss the chef" aprons for baking / grilling

takes a ton of pictures of the cat in the laundry basket kind of guy

he'd be the hand-swing / piggyback ride bf on fall walks

"spilled your apple cider? take the rest of mine. i can buy another. it's no problem" total sweetheart

gets excited about fall / summer festivals guy

man who makes oatmeal raisin cookies but leaves out the raisins so he can playfully toss 'em at his partner

rainy day umbrella holder because he doesn't want his partner getting soaked -- whilst he looks like a scraggly cat

man who calls out of work to stay in with his partner when they have cramps / pains / a general bad day

probably experiments with ethnic ingredients for dinners, often disastrously, but he has the Spirit(tm)

" lovemaking, not fucking " type of guy

[hawkp]

[burningcheese-merchant]

Hey so if everyone that follows me or otherwise sees this reblog can you PLEASE reblog it as well? Because this news needs to be delivered to everyone. I am freaking out so fucking bad right now you have no idea

AO3 has been scraped, once again.

As of the time of this post, AO3 has been scraped by yet another shady individual looking to make a quick buck off the backs of hardworking hobby writers. This Reddit post here has all the details and the most current information. In short, if your fic URL ends in a number between 1 and 63,200,000 (inclusive), AND is not archive locked, your fic has been scraped and added to this database.

I have been trying to hold off on archive locking my fics for as long as possible, and I've managed to get by unscathed up to now. Unfortunately, my luck has run out and I am archive locking all of my current and future stories. I'm sorry to my lovelies who read and comment without an account; I love you all. But I have to do what is best for me and my work. Thank you for your understanding.

[funonion001]

I don't care for that blue jester twink in crk. I want him OUT of my feed--PURE VANILLA KILL HIM!!!!!

[honeyrisuke]

that new lady gaga song made me remember why I couldn't stand her music in the 2010s her music is fine. its clean party pop. its good, even. but by god if i have to hear that shit one more time today I'm gonna break a law

[doctor-octiddius]

I SEE HIM EVERY TIME I CLOSE MY EYES, I FUCKING LOVE THIS MOVIE !!!!!!

Alexander Siddig in Inescapable!!! (screams)

[butchniqabi]

had a horrible experience at school today. got onto the subject of kpop and one guy mentioned hes never heard a kpop song and i said you probably have i mean gangnam style was inescapable after it came out and he said whats gangnam style. and im like what. and he said ive never heard of it. and so i sung a little bit of it and more people were like ive never heard that song and im like what. it came out in like 2012 what do you mean you dont know it and they said amatullah we were 5 years old in 2012. 🧍🏽‍♀️

[lizardsfromspace]

The key to healing the planet is to study what causes GO Events. What are GO Events? They are...

An artifact of pop culture

Inescapably gigantic for several months to years

Popular to all ages and all peoples

Goofily sincere

Confirmed GO Events:

The Macarena (1995-1997)

The summer of Pokemon Go (2016)

Gangnam Style (2012)

Likely GO Events (fuller investigation pending research grants):

Old Town Road (2019)

Despacito (2017)

Confirmed non-GO Events:

Pokemon (1996-2001): confirmed Age-Targeted GO Event, lacked appeal among the goofy uncles, cool aunts, and dorkazoid middle-aged parents who are, as deeper research shown, the true drivers of GO Events' long-term viability; indeed, our most avuncular citizens falling into the generational divide of "stop playing that dang Game Boy and rake the leaves" is one of the more well-known pitfalls that prevent the expansion of a potential event beyond its original age bracket

Only by manifesting a perpetual series of Macarenas and Old Town Roads can we achieve world peace. We should also probably stop global warming, but it's important to study "Gangnam Style" too. This list of GO Events is incomplete and you can help the project by expanding it

[charming-celestial]

[mariacallous]

What, exactly, does a social network do? Is it a website that connects people with one another online, a digital gathering place where we can consume content posted by our friends? That’s certainly what it was in its heyday, in the two-thousands. Facebook was where you might find out that your friend was dating someone new, or that someone had thrown a party without inviting you. In the course of the past decade, though, social media has come to resemble something more like regular media. It’s where we find promotional videos created by celebrities, pundits shouting responses to the news, aggregated clips from pop culture, a rising tide of A.I.-generated slop, and other content designed to be broadcast to the largest number of viewers possible. The people we follow and the messages they post increasingly feel like needles in a digital haystack. Social media has become less social.

Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, admitted as much during more than ten hours of testimony, over three days last week, in the opening phase of the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust trial against Facebook’s parent company, Meta. The company, Zuckerberg said, has lately been involved in “the general idea of entertainment and learning about the world and discovering what’s going on.” This under-recognized shift away from interpersonal communication has been measured by the company itself. During the defense’s opening statement, Meta displayed a chart showing that the “percent of time spent viewing content posted by ‘friends’ ” has declined in the past two years, from twenty-two per cent to seventeen per cent on Facebook, and from eleven per cent to seven per cent on Instagram.

The F.T.C. is arguing that Meta maintained an illegal monopoly in the “personal social networking services” industry, in part by buying up Facebook’s competitors, such as Instagram, which the company acquired in 2012, and the messaging platform WhatsApp, which it acquired in 2014. But the F.T.C.’s definition of the social-media industry is hazy, and the antitrust case was already dismissed once, in 2021, partly because the “personal social networking services” market was too loosely defined. Meta’s counter-argument is, in a sense, that social media per se doesn’t exist now in the way that it did in the twenty-tens, and that what the company’s platforms are now known for—the digital consumption of all kinds of content—has become so widespread that no single company or platform can be said to monopolize it. In one of its slides at trial, Meta exhibited a graphic of a boxing ring showing the logos of Instagram, Facebook, and the various companies that Meta argues are competitors, including TikTok, YouTube, and Apple’s iMessage, though the F.T.C. doesn’t define any of those three as such. The company also used smartphone screenshots from the various apps to demonstrate how they’ve gravitated toward common formats: short video clips look similar on both Instagram and TikTok; messages look essentially the same in Instagram DMs as on Apple’s iMessage. Even as such similarities serve as helpful evidence for Meta’s defense, they also demonstrate how stultifying the entire online ecosystem has become. While in 2012 Facebook may have seemed singular and inescapable, now it looks like part of a crowded marketplace of apps competing to serve the same purpose.

The F.T.C.’s case, which originated during Donald Trump’s first term, entails reëvaluating business deals that it approved more than a decade ago, when the industry looked dramatically different. This makes the commission’s case less than airtight. Benedict Evans, an influential technology analyst, called the F.T.C.’s market definition of social networks “gerrymandering.” He told me, “By the F.T.C.’s definition, TikTok doesn’t compete with Facebook at all. Does that mean it would be O.K. for Facebook to buy TikTok?” Antitrust lawyers must prove that allegedly monopolistic practices cause consumer harm. In another antitrust case currently unfolding against Google, a court found that the company maintained a monopoly over parts of the online-advertising market by integrating its various automated advertising technologies, illegally privileging itself and harming its publishing customers by “reducing their revenue.” In the case of Meta, though, there is no price differential to point to—Meta’s platforms all allow users to access them for free—so the question of harm is less clear-cut.

The F.T.C. is arguing, instead, that Meta’s purported monopoly has led to a lack of innovation and to reduced consumer choice. But that, too, is difficult to prove in the case of Meta’s WhatsApp and Instagram acquisitions, because both sales occurred early in those companies’ life spans. In 2014, when WhatsApp was acquired, it had around half a billion users; now it has more than two billion. As Evans put it, the F.T.C. is arguing that “if Meta hadn’t bought WhatsApp, it would have become this voracious competitor.” He continued, “What we all actually know from following the history is that the founders of WhatsApp didn’t want to do any of the things that Meta did to fuel its runaway expansion. One of WhatsApp’s founders once compared the service’s goals to those of Craigslist, Zuckerberg recalled during his testimony. Meta, by contrast, aggressively pursued growth, loading WhatsApp with features such as social groups and video calls. The F.T.C. notes that market competition can result in “improved features, functionalities, integrity measures, and user experiences”; it’s hard to mount a persuasive argument that an independent WhatsApp would necessarily have provided more of those things than a Zuckerberg-owned one. (Many social networks fail; Path and Google+ were two other threats that Zuckerberg perceived, but neither grew into a viable competitor. He did at one point attempt to buy Snapchat, and though that company survived, it failed to become a major rival.)

One of the most surprising moments in Zuckerberg’s testimony came when the F.T.C. presented him with a memo that he sent to company executives, in 2018, suggesting that it might be better to spin Instagram into its own entity by choice. Zuckerberg wrote that Instagram was potentially undermining Facebook’s success, and that businesses that are independent often perform better than they would within a parent conglomerate. “Over time we may face antitrust regulation requiring us to spin off our other apps anyway,” he noted, with some prescience. Seven years ago, before the advent of TikTok and the diversification of content across digital platforms, that kind of split might have resulted in more varied products for users, more quickly—or it might not have. Either way, the social-media landscape today is arguably in the midst of a dramatic overhaul. TikTok may ultimately be banned; generative A.I. may supplant the existing model of an open, user-generated internet. On April 15th, the Verge broke the news that OpenAI is developing a social network of its own, to compete with the likes of Instagram and X. The F.T.C. may be chasing an old problem just as newer, bigger ones appear on the horizon.

This week, the European Union fined Apple and Meta for anticompetitive practices, but the penalties—five hundred million euros and two hundred million euros, respectively—are relatively modest. If the U.S. case prevails, the F.T.C. will have to decide whether to force a wholesale breakup of Meta or seek less dramatic “remedies.” One factor in this calculus might be the wishes of President Trump. In recent months, Zuckerberg has visited the White House repeatedly, and he’s ingratiated himself to the Administration with moves, at Meta, against D.E.I. and fact-checking. So far, despite a growing closeness with Silicon Valley, Trump has nevertheless continued to back the suit against Meta. As in the Administration’s ongoing trade war, Trump appreciates a pronounced threat as a tool to force a deal. Bytedance, the owner of TikTok, has all but capitulated to a mandated sale of a majority of the company. With regard to Trump, at least, Zuckerberg might be expected to capitulate one way or another.

[sutekinaoneesan]

Julian Bashir mastering the art of falling gracefully in a heap on the floor…

“The Passenger” (S01E09)

“Distant Voices” (S03E18)

“By Inferno‘s light” (S05E15)

Inescapable (2012)