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loveemagicpeace · 6 months

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💕Understanding Signs🧚🏼‍♀️

🥊Fire element-fire suggests to many the intuition function. This is because fire tends to perceive in pictures, and to get an instantaneous grasp of a situation. Fire does not reason or think in any classical sense of the word: it either understands or it doesn't. This is why fire people can be extremely creative yet not good at logical reasoning. People with a lot of fire energy have a great impulse, which is sometimes difficult to control. They often make a decision all at once and quickly. They don't like waiting.

They perceives things through pictures and sudden flashes of insight. A fire person will study something for a long time without comprehending it, and then the significance will become clear in an instant. Fire is often psychic, in the ordinary meaning of the word. Fire is the most positive or yang of all the elements. It is the energy of spirit, and operates within the universe by energizing and transforming. It is not characteristic of fire to work along lines already set, or to respond to energy patterns that are imposed from without. Fire rises: it cannot stay at one level for long. This gives fire people a dramatic, intense quality. They do not enjoy standing still.

Fire element-fire is an emotional element, but it tends toward the more active and dynamic emotions— anger, joy, ebullience, and enthusiasm. Also fire signs are very positive in everything they do. For ex.: Leo Mars - Regardless of the situation, they will always want to cheer someone up with a funny show or put on a show to make the person happy again. Leos in general always have an inner child (they will always be ready to watch cartoons with you). Sagittarius Venus-They will be the best at helping you through a difficult breakup. They always find faith in life and know how to find meaning even when it is difficult to see it. They have a special charm with which they always bring people good mood and instill hope. They will never stop believing. Aries Sun- will always be ready for action. They are not afraid of dangerous things and like something that is more risky. They are the only sign that is rarely afraid, usually they will be the ones who will be the bravest. They have harder time dealing with sadness, depression, or the kind of feeling that comes from quiet contemplation of one's surroundings.

Fire people do not like to show sadness or grief: their typical response is to make fun of their own unhappiness. Even when they are down, they are often capable of making others feel better. Being an outgoing, positive energy, fire does not easily play passive roles.

Earth element- earth signs are most concerned with perceiving an external, physical reality. But earth is not simply concerned with perceiving it, it is also concerned with ordering it in the way that is most effective in a given situation. Earth signifies concern with the physical, with practical, common-sense matters. Earth is a symbol for direct sense experience of the physical universe, without ideas, concepts, beliefs, or wishful thinking to cloud perception. Thus matter, and through it the symbol earth, signifies limits to our freedom in which regard the element earth is related to the planet Saturn).

Unlike fire, earth is stable, the most stable of all the elements. Also unlike fire, earth is passive: it needs to be acted on and formed by an external energy. For earth people to be really productive, there must be a positive, assertive energy provided by the planetary combinations in their charts.Otherwise, the earth type of personality remains passive.

Taurus is a sign who will give you a lot, spoil you, buy you gifts, take you to a luxury hotel, take care of you. They do a lot related to money. They are a sign that will spoil you with material things and may not be so creative themselves. But they also know how to be selfish and stubborn and do not care about your feelings.

Earth tends to resist change, and it can signify structures that break down under pressure because they lack the flexibility that allows adaptation.Earth signifies making do with what is available. Earth people are adept at dealing with the details that must be attended to in everyday reality in order to make it work effectively. Being a relatively passive element, earth perceives better than fire. Earth people are usually close to their gut reactions to life. Inner experience is valued less highly by the earth temperament, because earth tends to focus its perceptions externally.

Virgo and Capricorn especially are inclined to sacrifice emotional needs when these come into conflict with their view of reality. Although Capricorn looks like a cold sign and people wouldn't expect it to have so many emotions and make sacrifices for others - in fact it does. Capricorns often sacrifice their time for the people they love and can build a relationship for years and years, even if it ends up not being what they might have wanted. A Capricorn can have a lot of work and responsibilities, but still finds time to see you or cook you lunch, do something practical for you. Virgo it is often seen as a judgmental and sometimes not so accessible sign (a sign that gives you the feeling that they don't like something or that they are angry). But in reality, they are a sign that cares a lot about others-they will always be ready to take care of you.

Air element-Like fire, air may be more concerned with things that are not yet real, that are abstract and unrelated to a given reality. Air is as concerned with the relationship of things in the outer world as earth is, but air is more interested in abstractions. The difference between the symbols fire and air can be seen in the difference in the behavior of actual fire and wind. Fire rises, whereas wind moves horizontally.

Like fire, air can become so involved in abstractions that it loses touch with physical reality and practical considerations. But unlike fire, air hovers just above the Earth's surface, so that though it is fond of abstractions, the abstractions are closer to physical reality than those of fire. Air is associated with thinking and logic, and as such it is less personal than fire. Fire is usually connected with the vital, personal drive, or the will, and the abstractions are one's personal abstractions. But air, which has a social, external conception of truth, is more inclined to abstractions that have little to do with the individual.

In this way air is similar to earth: both are primarily concerned with a reality external to the self. Fire and water are more concerned with personal, inward kinds of truth.

Air always has a strongly social quality. All three air signs have to do with relating to others— Gemini to the immediate world through mind and speech, Libra through achieving perfect balance within a one-to-one relationship, and Aquarius through group consciousness and interaction.Air lacks fire's ability to go off on its own to be itself.

Aquarius as a sign of revolution, it is related to revolutionary movements, not non-conforming individuals, thinking in a different way, breaking the rules. Aquarius desire freedom to impose their ideals on society as a whole. Gemini they like to open different topics, talk long into the night. Their thoughts are quick and unpredictable. But they often have problems with getting attached to someone. Although air is very social, it is sometimes unable to handle real intimacy well. This is because air operates extensively, rather than intensively.

Libra is the only air sign in which the drive for close, personal relationships is strong, but even here there is a detached, non-intimate quality often obscured by the cleverness of the sign.

Water element presents the greatest difficulty. But even though water may feel good or bad much more quickly and sensitively than the other elements, it is no more judgmental as to whether something may be good, bad, pleasant, or unpleasant. Of the four elements, water is in some ways the most difficult to understand. Water is the most yin of the four elements, and the most bound up in the maternal, feminine archetype which is so poorly expressed in our culture.

Strongly watery people who comprehend this element from first-hand experience cannot readily communicate what they comprehend. Water people are poor at communication or unwilling to communicate. It is just that what they have to communicate is extremely difficult to put into words.

Scorpio communication is difficult because water represents non-linear, non-rational, non-discriminative modes of thought-the very antithesis of air. Fire and water both represent non-rational functions, but fire has more to do with sudden, lightning-like comprehension, whereas water has a subtle, feeling- toned understanding that comes into being at no particular point, seeming rather to have existed always.

Water is the best at feeling relationships and the ways every thing interacts with every other thing. Water may see and understand in a way that is hard for the other elements, especially air, to comprehend, but it sees very well.Often the best way for water to communicate is by means of art, especially poetry and music. Water people usually are artistic. Another factor that sometimes places a barrier between water and other elements is that water experience is very personal. In this respect water is nearer to fire, and more distant from air and earth. Water people's personal experience can be so vivid that external reality fades into insignificance beside it.

Pisces are very artistic and also the most dreamy sign of all water signs.They have their heads in the clouds most of the time and are also the sign that is the most naive. Cancer is the most family-oriented and caring sign. A sign that also prefers to spend time with people close to it. They like to be in their comfort zone. Scorpio is the most mysterious, the sign that fights the most. Is also the most private sign and doesn't like to share his stuff with others. It is a sign that has a problem with trust. Scorpio is also very deep sign.

Water is a symbol of empathy. Empathy is the ability to feel what another feels as if one were that other person. A water person understands feelings and emotions better than any other elemental type, and is capable of great emotional depth and compassion for others. Men in particular have a problem with the water parts of their nature because watery qualities are so out of accord with masculinity. Water people often have stronger ties with the past, a stronger involvement with familiar people, places, and situations. In a strong water person there is the protective, maternal streak; in a weak water person, there can be emotional grasping and possessiveness. Water has a need to self-dramatize like fire; but unlike fire, water is willing to take other people's emotions seriously as well.

🎸For personal readings u can sign up here: https://snipfeed.co/bekylibra 🎸

-Rebekah💍🦋🌙

#astrology #zodiac signs #planets #understanding signs

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imaginariumwanderer · 22 days

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So I finished the latest story...

This is pretty horrifying from a cookie's perspective. One of cookiekind's main forms of happiness is their ability to express their various colorful flavors/personality. I suppose it's the same thing as tripping a living human of their sentient and individuality. Ego death. Leaving behind hollow flesh

We be committing unspeakable crimes against nature with this one✨

We be crumbling our colleagues while slowly losing our mind with this one✨

On another note, "eyecing" make its glorious return. I have no memory of it being used before the Mystic Flour update. Can anyone point out the other times it was used, if there's any?

????!!!!! OMG HIIII

MORE CJ PAWLIKOWSKI VOICE ACTING YES YES YES

Don't do it, don't give me hope...

I know he's the last to be released u don't need to tease me like that

So the other-space here clearly refer to the Dark side of the Moon, right? Is there any other-space I don't know about? Also, I guess this confirmed Shadow Milk is the only one able to do this astral projection thing. On one hand, it increases his chance of appearing a bit more before his own update, on the other hand, we most likely won't see the other Beasts having any talking-role any time soon

The implications here...

So the Beasts may likely have their own voices of their Light just like the Ancients does. And "Soul Jam"... Without an (s), Shadow Milk is specifically referring to his Soul Jam here, I can't believe my headcanon of the Light of Deceit/Knowledge whispering things to him is becoming true

It's a thing unique to Shadow Milk and not the other Beasts too. Interesting how both the voices of the Light of Truth and Deceit operate differently from the other Lights' (referring to the theory that the Light of Truth have never make an actual appearance since all instances of it in-game were all Shadow Milk's disguise)

... Clownage. Whelp! time to integrate that into my daily vocabulary!

Alright, so we got confirmation Smilk is not only aware of Dark Enchantress' plans but he's actively helping her out. Whenever he's oblivious to her other, secret plans (stealing the Beasts' Soul Jams) or he's aware and already have a counter measures to it though, is still up in the air.

My money is on the latter. Shadow Milk have shown time and time again he's way more knowledgeable than he let on. The way Dark Enchantress was depicted in his previous "play" does show us a certain level of... Appreciation(?) but who's to say he actually trusts her? It really does feel like a "I rub your back if you rub mine and then we'll backstab each other" kind of deal. Now I'm curious about the other Beasts' opinions on Dark Enchantress as well.

Where's Dark Enchantress anyways? We haven't seen her make any on-screen appearance in a while. I, um, I missed her a lot actually. I missed the diabolical meema

Laughing at Wind Archer cookie repeatedly telling Smilk to stfu from the moment they've met. He's saying what we've all been thinking

Also laughing at Shadow Milk basically only here to make cryptic riddles and mocks our Wind Archer. He really does have nothing better to do lol

Yeah that's right, FRIENDSHIP will save the day!

For real tho, tons of intriguing implications about the Ultimate Cookie with this one. I gotta mulls over them for awhile...

GUYS NEW SMILK'S SPRITE JUST DROPPED

HE'S ROLLING HIS EYES. HE'S SO DONE I'M DEAD

"In conclusion, this changed nothing!"

Kidding, kidding! I was getting real worried for Wind Archer there despite knowing full-well it's not crk's style to let something happen to a character unless they're a minor villain or an elderly *grinding my teeth trying not to bring up Elder Faerie again oops too late-*

The unexpected yet sweet moment of empathy Wind Archer have toward the Ultimate Cookie combined with the stunning animation toward the end were definitely my favorite part of this little adventure. Although I half-expected for him to have his magical girl transformation like White Lily and Dark Cacao right then and there-

"Beast-Yeast EP 5 coming soon to theaters near you! Remember to stay tuned, mkay? Okie dokie? Pinkie promiseee?"

#see me analyzing this mf's dialogues like there's no tomorrow #this one did not get spellchecked either sorry for all the mistakes #it's kinda more of a first reaction thing #crk #cookie run kingdom #wind archer cookie #shadow milk cookie #1m4 rambles #text #game screenshots #crk spoiler

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talonabraxas · 1 month

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Quetzalcōātl 'Feathered Serpent' Talon Abraxas

Quetzalcoatl: From Feathered Serpent to Creator God

Quetzalcoatl, a feathered serpent or ‘plumed serpent’, was one of the most important gods in the ancient Mesoamerican pantheon. The name Quetzalcoatl is a combination of two Nahuatl (the language of the Aztecs) words, quetzal, which is the emerald plume bird, and coatl, which means serpent. Therefore, Quetzalcoatl is commonly also known in English as the Plumed Serpent or Feathered Serpent.

Quetzalcoatl in Creation Myths

Most importantly, however, is the elevation of Quetzalcoatl to the status of a creator god. According to the Aztecs, Quetzalcoatl was one of the four sons of Tonacateuctli and Tonacacihuatl, the original creator gods. Quetzalcoatl and one of his brothers, Tezcatlipoca, were given the task of creating the world.

In one version of the myth, the two brothers constantly fight with each other, which resulted in the creation and destruction of several successive ages. During the 1st Age, for instance, Quetzalcoatl attacked Tezcatlipoca with a stone club, causing his enraged brother to command his jaguars to eat up all the people. The Aztecs believed that this cycle of creation and destruction happened four times, and that we are currently living in the 5th Age.

In an alternate version of the myth, the two brothers are more co-operative and succeeded in creating the earth and the sky by transforming themselves into giant serpents and ripping a female reptilian monster known as Tlaltcuhtli (or Cipactli) in half. The two gods then created other things, such as the sun and the moon, the first man and woman, and other gods.

To create humans, Quetzalcoatl had to go into the Underworld and collect some bones. He took his companion Xolotl, a dog-headed god, with him. Mictlanteuctli and Mictlancihuatl, the two gods that ruled that realm, gave him a puzzle he was expected to complete before he could take the bones. He was expected to blow a conch shell horn without holes in it. Quetzalcoatl got worms to make holes in the shell then put bees inside it so the shell would make a sound.

Although he completed the task, Quetzalcoatl decided he was going to steal some of the bones and then pretend he was leaving the Underworld with none. He was caught by one of the Underworld gods and falls into a pit that was made to trap him, where he dropped and mixed the male and female bones. But Quetzalcoatl was able to escape the pit and took the bones to the snake goddess Cihuacoatl, who formed them into human beings by mixing the bones, corn, and some of Quetzalcoatl’s blood. -Ancient Origins

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iminseriousdebt · 3 months

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GENLOSS RAMBLE

Heyo! This is a little ramble I needed to make before the founders cut comes out! yipee!

(GENERATION LOSS SPOILERS)

So we can see in the above images the methods Showfall Media is using to control gl!Sneeg gl!Charlie and gl!Ranboo, they use an already pre-existing technology called an Electroencephalogram (EEG). Now this technology has been in use for decades, and essentially how it works is that it uses electrodes placed onto your scalp combined with a conductive gel to measure the electrical activity in your brain, these electrical signals are usually referred to as “brain waves” and these brainwaves can be subdivided into four categories, Gamma (greater than 30 Hz), Beta (13-30 Hz), Alpha (8-12 Hz), Theta (3.5-7.5 Hz), and Delta (0.1-3.5 Hz)

These different brainwaves are generally assosiated with different emotions, awareness levels, brain activities, etc. Now if Showfall Media has installed these onto sneeg, charlie, and ranboo, that means they have access to their thoughts and feelings, but brainscanning isn’t an absolute precise device, it still takes a lot of human effort and time to properly interpret the brainwaves. If Showfall somehow had a tool to easily interpret the signals they could much more easily operate, say, a live show. Lucky for them there is already a real life solution to this problem, kinda.

Its called Brain Generative Pre-Training Transformer, or BrainGPT for short. What its goal is, is to act as an assist tool for human neurologists to use in real neuroscience cases and case studies, what it does is it uses a Large Language Model (LLM) full of pre-existing human research papers and other neuroscience knowledge too vast for human comprehension. And whenever a neurologist hands BrainGPT a prompt, (such as anomalous finding or to asses the fields understanding of a certain topic) , ��would generate likely data patterns reflecting its current synthesis of the scientific literature” (braingpt.org)

Now in regards to Generation Loss, what this means is that Showfall Media potentially has acces to this sort of technology, and would be able to use it in the production of their shows, now BrainGPT has a good way to go before its widely avalable. But in the genloss au, it can be far into development at this point, and be available for companies to use in whatever way they see fit.

Now reading and decoding brain signals is one thing, but to mind control someone is far beyond what is capable today, but Showfall Media has somehow developed technology to do so, the way I’m guessing they did it is that they produced certain brainwaves from the electrodes on the actors heads to give them the emotional reactions they needed for the show. I can’t exactly get into the technical stuff cause I’m not a neurologist, but its just a hunch on how I think they did it.

As for the mind controlling devices themselves, I feel there’s a more subtextual reason as to why those objects in particular are chosen as the devices that are central to the show’s operation. Ranboo’s mask has been a heavy emphasis throughout Gen 1 TSE,

Its been a central figure in not only generation loss’ marketing, but also ranboo’s marketing, because when you think of ranboo one of the first things that pops up is the mask, atleast in the wider public’s eye.

But these general associations not only exist with Ranboo, with Slimcicle you usually think of the wide brim glasses, with Sneeg its his backwards cap, and this is with the other cast members too when their introduced on the spinning carousel in episode 2. Furthermore, with Niki it’s that’s she's just so nice, with Austin its that he’s just a gay guy, and with Vinny and Ethan these associations don’t really exist. So, with Vinny he's just the “hoarder”, and Ethan isn't even introduced. And then there's Jerma, who is relinquished to a goofy character with a weird voice and a strange sense of humour which sort of fits his public image.

But what I wanna mention with Ranboo’s mask specifically is that with the three images shown on the genloss twitter of the control devices, sneeg’s is just a hat, like theres nothing special about it, just a hat with electrodes on it, when you take it off he’s completely in control of himself. But, with charlie’s it’s a good bit harder to just take it off. His glasses are drilled into his skull connected to electrodes which are also implanted in his skull, with an additional feature of a speaker in his jaw. But if you remove the glasses, there would be a lot of bleeding and his vision would be impaired, but he would still be a free man.

But with Ranboo, poor, poor, Ranboo… Like Charlie, they have electrodes implanted on to their brain connected to a switch on the back of their skull (which also may or may not also be connected to their spine, idk its hard to tell). These sprout wires that thread through the mask and lead into their throat, and the mask piece itself is sewn shut onto their SKIN.

Now this makes me wonder, why is Ranboo so heavily guarded when the other are (relatively) easy to set free? Is it because Ranboo is an integral part of the show and therefore high risk? Is it because Showfall needed extra resources for the chat to be able to control them?... Or is it because Ranboo tried to escape so many times before that they were forced to disfigure them to such an extreme degree, and yet somehow, SOMEHOW, they are able to resist, whether it be tapping SOS on their hand when they're on full control mode or shanking a Showfall employee with a dagger, Ranboo, Resists. But Showfall will never let them leave. Or they will? Idk founders cut hasn’t come out yet as of writing this, anyway ramble over. You can leave now.

#generation loss #genloss #gl!ranboo #gl!slimecicle #gl!charlie #gl!sneegsnag #ramblings #i wrote this at 3am please help #ranboolive #showfall media #hashtag #Yeah!

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clinicse · 2 months

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EYESURGERYANTALYA - GOLD

Are you considering eye laser surgery in Turkey? This bustling nation has rapidly become a top destination for individuals seeking advanced eye care treatments at affordable prices. Procedures such as eye laser surgery not only offer a chance for clearer vision but also feature state-of-the-art technology and highly qualified specialists. Additionally, options like trifocal lens surgery and blepharoplasty further enhance your overall eye health and appearance. With its rich culture and scenic beauty, Turkey makes for an appealing backdrop while you undergo transformative treatments.

Eye laser surgery turkey

When considering eye laser surgery Turkey, patients are often drawn by the combination of advanced technology and affordable prices. This type of surgery, often referred to as LASIK, uses state-of-the-art lasers to correct common vision problems such as nearsightedness, farsightedness, and astigmatism. Many clinics in Turkey offer experienced surgeons and modern facilities, making it a popular destination for those seeking improved vision.

One of the main advantages of choosing Turkey for eye laser surgery is the significant cost savings compared to many Western countries. Patients can expect to save anywhere from 30% to 70% on the total cost of the procedure, including travel expenses. This affordability often does not compromise quality, as many Turkish clinics adhere to international standards and boast accreditations from recognized bodies.

Additionally, the pre-operative consultations and post-operative care are typically thorough, ensuring that patients feel comfortable and informed throughout their journey. With a growing number of success stories, eye laser surgery in Turkey continues to gain popularity, making it an appealing option for those looking to enhance their vision safely and effectively.

Trifocal lens surgery turkey

Trifocal lens surgery Turkey is rapidly gaining recognition as an innovative solution for those seeking to improve their vision. This advanced surgical procedure allows patients to obtain clear vision at multiple distances, reducing the need for glasses or contact lenses. With the help of cutting-edge technology and skilled surgeons, many individuals are experiencing enhanced quality of life through this transformative surgery.

Many clinics in Turkey offer a comprehensive package for trifocal lens surgery, including pre-operative evaluations and post-operative care. These packages often come at a fraction of the cost compared to Western countries, making Turkey an attractive destination for medical tourism. Patients can not only experience substantial cost savings but also take advantage of the robust medical infrastructure available in the country, ensuring a safe and comfortable surgical experience.

Furthermore, the success rates for trifocal lens surgery in Turkey are impressive, with many patients achieving satisfactory results within days of the procedure. The procedure itself is typically quick, minimally invasive, and performed with precision, allowing for faster recovery times. As more individuals learn about the benefits of this procedure, Turkey continues to solidify its reputation as a leader in ophthalmic surgery.

Blepharoplasty turkey

Blepharoplasty, commonly known as eyelid surgery, is an increasingly popular cosmetic procedure in Turkey. It involves the removal of excess skin, fat, and muscle from either the upper or lower eyelids to enhance the appearance of the eyes and provide a more youthful look.

Turkey has become a top destination for blepharoplasty due to its combination of skilled surgeons and affordable prices. Many individuals from around the globe are seeking these procedures in major cities such as Istanbul, where advanced medical facilities and experienced professionals abound.

Patients considering blepharoplasty Turkey can expect a thorough consultation where doctors assess individual needs and create tailored treatment plans. Post-operative care and follow-ups are also essential components of the surgery, ensuring that patients achieve the best possible results with minimal complications.

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frozenfries · 4 months

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Cozy Café : A VALORANT Headcanon

It’s been a hot minute since I’ve written for this game, but inspiration struck at a random time. This totally hasn’t been sitting in my drafts since last January

Prompt: If the agents worked at a café, what would their roles and/or signature drink be?

Amidst the chaos of battle, a quaint café stands as a sanctuary for the weary agents. Here, they can take refuge from their high-stakes duels, and trade their weapons for aprons to pursue a different kind of mission: the art of brewing the perfect cup of coffee.

Phoenix: with his vibrant personality and quick reflexes, he’s the charismatic face of the café. Entertaining customers with his barista skills comes naturally as he conjures up dazzling coffee concoctions with a flair of his hand, a burst of flame and a confident grin. His signature drink, The Ignition Latte, is a fiery blend that invigorates even the most exhausted of patrons. Jett: agile on and off the battlefield, she brings her lightning-fast speed and precision to the café. With a swift motion of her finger, she effortlessly crafts delicate latte art, transforming each cup into its own masterpiece. Her Cloud Burst Cappuccino is a smooth delight, creating a moment of feather-light happiness for those who drink it. Viper: the formidable chemist brings her scientific expertise to the world of coffee. With a touch of her gloved hand, she infuses her creations with unique flavors and aromas, leaving customers in awe. Her Venomous Mocha is a mysterious blend that tantalizes the taste buds and leaves a lingering, addictive aftertaste. Sage: with her nurturing personality and herbal knowledge, she adds a touch of serenity to the café and its menu. Her Rejuvenation Tea is a calming infusion that restores both body and mind, providing a moment of tranquility amidst the chaos of everyday. Omen: ever the enigma, he brings an air of mystery to the café. With a flick of his wrist, he conjures up ethereal and smoky concoctions, leaving people wondering how he manages to capture such unique flavors. His Shadowy Cold Brew is a chilling experience that takes customers on a journey through darkness and light. KAY/O: the robotic agent assists in the day-to-day operations of the café, precisely measuring ingredients, ensuring efficiency, and maintaining the coffee shop's cutting-edge technology. KAY/O's presence adds a futuristic touch to the atmosphere, making customers feel like they've stepped into a realm where man and machine coexist harmoniously. Sova: a master archer, you can find him behind the counter carefully crafting his signature drink, The Tracker's Shot: a potent blend of espresso and a hint of blueberry syrup, topped with a delicate foam art of a wolf's paw print. Sova takes great pride in his creation, often using it as a conversation starter with customers, enthralling them with tales of his adventures in the wilderness. Cypher: the watchful surveillance expert provides security for the establishment. He has a keen eye for detail, which translates seamlessly into his signature drink, The Watchful Eye Latte: a meticulous combination of steamed milk, a shot of espresso, and a dash of vanilla spice syrup, served with a meticulous swirl of latte art depicting an intricate camera lens.

Chamber: the polished agent with a mysterious past has a taste for the unconventional, which is reflected in his signature creation, The Trademark Mocha: a rich concoction of dark chocolate, a double shot of espresso, and a hint of cinnamon, sprinkled with a dash of edible gold glitter that gives it an otherworldly shimmer.

Astra: with the ability to infuse her cosmic energy into any environment, she can elevate even a simple drink into an otherworldly experience. The Celestial Brew starts with a base of rich, smooth espresso, followed by a fusion of steamed milk and vanilla syrup, creating a swirling galaxy effect. To top it off is a dollop of homemade lavender-infused whipped cream, a touch of stardust and a sprinkle of edible glitter.

#valorant #valorant headcanons #valorant phoenix #valorant jett #valorant viper #valorant sage #valorant omen #valorant kay/o #valorant sova #valorant cypher #valorant chamber #valorant astra #valorant fanfiction #valorant x reader

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genderkoolaid · 2 years

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https://thenewinquiry.com/on-hating-men-and-becoming-one-anyway/

found this beautiful article written in 2019 which sums up so so much about transmisandry and the dilemma of trans men, where they’re grouped with the perpetrator class even though they’re equally vulnerable

OHHH kissing you this article is so fucking good. 100% gonna post some quotes from it. I love how this is written & its a really good explanation of how "trans-inclusive" radical feminism & radical feminist ideas fuck over transmascs in a unique & painful way. Like!!:

But trans men’s manhood is inseparable from our transness, and the relationship between trans men and cis womanhood can’t be accurately understood by separating trans status from gender in order to claim we’re oppressed by one but not the other. The day-to-day operations of gendered power in our lives make no such distinction, and while theories of intersectionality are often invoked to defend such claims, the idea that these “axes” can be neatly separated relies on the exact additive conception of oppressive power relations that intersectionality was invented to disprove. In the critique where she coined the term, Kimberlé Crenshaw argues that Black women are frequently excluded from antidiscrimination case law, feminist theory, and anti-racist politics precisely because their experiences cannot be reduced to the sum of racism and sexism. She references the case of DeGraffenreid v. General Motors, in which five Black women plaintiffs were denied consideration of their Title VII claims because the discrimination they experienced was particular to Black women rather than all Black people or women of all races. Because each form of discrimination was treated as a “discrete set of experiences” in this case rather than part of a multidimensional whole, “the boundaries of sex and race discrimination doctrine [were] defined respectively by white women’s and Black men’s experiences.” In reality, however, Black women relate to power differently from either group, and their experiences cannot be understood by combining the experiences of oppression each have. Similarly, trans men’s relationship to gender cannot be understood by adding the privilege of maleness to the oppression of transness; the interaction between these axes substantively transforms both such that it generates an experience qualitatively different from either alone.

He even discusses black trans men&mascs experience with gendered racism & how exorsexism play a part in this. Read this article.

(Although it is fun how he talks about Tumblr in the past tense, like its a ghosttown. My friend we are still doing "do trans men experience misogyny" discourse here lmao)

#also im thinking of making a new pinned post potentially w a reading list & if so #this is def going on it #m.#ask box #transandrophobia #transmisandry #anti transmasculinity #transunity

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bonzos-number-1-fan · 7 months

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What R# Means: The ABC's of Fear.

The grading system used by the OIAR is one of TMAGP's more central mysteries. The show is rife with administrative work that's obfuscated even to the employees that assign each case's rating.

I have my own theory about DPHW that I think is proving more and more likely each episode, but as of yet I don't think a comprehensive theory on CAT# or R# has been given. CAT# is still proving a hard to crack but I now think I can take a strong stab at the meaning behind R#.

Spoilers for TMAGP 1-7 below the cut.

For the people who aren't keeping close track of this I'll break down how those terms are used. Each incident the OIAR assesses is assigned a case number in the following format CAT#R#DPHW. CAT, short for Category, is assigned a value of 1, 2, 3, or any combination of those three digits (12, 13, etc.). R, short for Rank, are graded C, BC, B, AB, A, or S (potentially AS but it's not come up). For DPHW each letter is a category itself and replaced with a digit from 0-9 for its grading. So there are 6 separate statistics that the OIAR uses to assess each incident.

If I'm correct about DPHW it's a ranking based on the qualities the incident presents. That's obviously very valuable information. Because of how CAT# is formatted we know it's likely three non-mutually exclusive facets. I had some idea about what it could be but it's proving quite tricky to nail down.

However it's R# that is the topic of today's post and it's something I've had a few ideas on before. We know can assume from its formatting it's a linear scale. C is the "worst/weakest/etc." while S is the "best/strongest/etc.". Initially, I thought that R# was simply a straight forward ranking of potency or threat. Higher the rank, spookier the incident. Very early on that seemed like a strong idea. It was quickly disproven but I then had the idea that Rank was instead the scale of the effect. Higher the rank, wider the incident. Also quickly disproven.

Now I'm thinking it's graded on how hard it is to deny an incident's supernatural nature. Simply put, an outside observer can more readily find a believable rational explanation for an incident of lower rank than of higher rank. Either via their own conviction to believe the supernatural isn't real, or based on the story the OIAR cooks up to explain it.

For that to make sense it needs to tick two boxes. It needs to be able to be pre-assigned to an incident as all CAT#R#DPHW's seem to be, and it needs to be useful information to track. As they're operating under the assumption that CAT#R#DPHW's can be pre-assigned then they're operating under the assumption that each type of incident is relatively stable. Meaning that the likelihood that it can be rationally explained is also relatively stable. Tick 1. There is also a really strong reason for the OIAR to use this as a grade. They're the Office of Incident Assessment and Response, the Response Department might be dead but it was a part of the initial plan. Grading each incident on how likely they are to cause concern should the details go public is very useful for deciding how to approach any given case. Tick 2.

It being useful is all well and good but it does also need to have some evidence so let's look at our highest ranked incident to this point: CAT23RAB2155 - Transformation (Eye) -/- Trespass. A man grew eyes over his body. That's pretty tricky to explain away as a medical mystery. On the other end of the scale we've got CAT2RC1157 - Dolls (Watching), or CAT2RC3338 -Agglomeration (Miscellany) -/- Congregation†. Just a creepy doll and some crappy antiques. I think of all the incidents the one that's the least immediate fit is CAT3C7494 - Collection (Blood) -/- Musical. Most of that incident is very easy to slot in here. "It's just a violin that has sharp strings, so what?". But it's also a violin that made some people eat some other people. However, mass hysteria events do get reported every so often IRL and do have a very long history. So in the grand scheme of things I don't think the details of the event are necessarily all that outlandish. It's really in the realms of urban legend and witch hunts than it is definitive proof of the supernatural.

With all that out the way this is the broad strokes of how I could see this breaking down. C ranks are things you can entirely write off as urban legends, freak accidents, and stress. Potentially things that might not need any covering up at all. I think the majority of events people could entirely say didn't happen will end up in C. "Of course the doll wasn't watching you, dolls aren't alive". B ranks are things that are harder to entirely discount as things that happened but are themselves still relatively easy to excuse as mundane. "Sure, the circumstances of that blogger's disappearance are strange but people go missing all the time, doesn't mean a monster did it". We don't have any A ranks but given the AB rank we do have I'd say A's are things in which no rational explanation can account for it, and as such require more extensive covering up, if it indeed happened. "Okay, maybe the supernatural is real because people don't just grow eyes like that".

As I mentioned early, an S rank does exist. We've not seen this attributed to anything in the show yet and so it might prove to be a special case. However on Klaus' sheet‡ from the ARG it's attributed to an interesting incident. A CAT1RS[No DPHW] with the note Mr. B. And, well, if you know, you know.

From Klaus' sheet we also know that the higher ranked incidents happen less often than lower ones and that idea generally tracks with what we know of TMP and TMA. The supernatural tends to be something you can explain away. It often is explained away. Incredibly overt manifestations are a rarity.

This one will be a slow burn to see if it bears out. Much like with DPHW's it's only really interesting when things go against the theory. I'm not as certain on this one as I am the DPHW theory but I do think it's got legs with our current data.

† This did also feature people who seemed to erase their physical features from your memory after you interacted with them. This isn't something I mention in the theory because it's not taken into account by the header and case number. A major flaw in the OIAR's methodology here is that all incidents are only ever one thing. So the case number is based solely on the presence of lots of miscellaneous objects, rather than the mind-wiping people carrying them.

‡I have made an incident master doc here, containing all the current cases, their CAT#'s, R#'s, DPHW's, etc. It has about as much information on each as I think is reasonable, including who narrates it, a link to its episode, and any other relevant notes, as well as headers for incidents we didn't hear. Additionally it also contains the Klaus sheet (German and English) and links to it when an incident matches. It will be updated each episode after the episode is publicly available.

#the magnus protocol #tmagp speculation #tmagp theory #klaus = kl4-u5

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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years

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Tiktok's enshittification

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

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/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

When a platform starts, it needs users, so it makes itself valuable to users. Think of Amazon: for many years, it operated at a loss, using its access to the capital markets to subsidize everything you bought. It sold goods below cost and shipped them below cost. It operated a clean and useful search. If you searched for a product, Amazon tried its damndest to put it at the top of the search results.

This was a hell of a good deal for Amazon’s customers. Lots of us piled in, and lots of brick-and-mortar retailers withered and died, making it hard to go elsewhere. Amazon sold us ebooks and audiobooks that were permanently locked to its platform with DRM, so that every dollar we spent on media was a dollar we’d have to give up if we deleted Amazon and its apps. And Amazon sold us Prime, getting us to pre-pay for a year’s worth of shipping. Prime customers start their shopping on Amazon, and 90% of the time, they don’t search anywhere else.

That tempted in lots of business customers — Marketplace sellers who turned Amazon into the “everything store” it had promised from the beginning. As these sellers piled in, Amazon shifted to subsidizing suppliers. Kindle and Audible creators got generous packages. Marketplace sellers reached huge audiences and Amazon took low commissions from them.

This strategy meant that it became progressively harder for shoppers to find things anywhere except Amazon, which meant that they only searched on Amazon, which meant that sellers had to sell on Amazon.

That’s when Amazon started to harvest the surplus from its business customers and send it to Amazon’s shareholders. Today, Marketplace sellers are handing 45%+ of the sale price to Amazon in junk fees. The company’s $31b “advertising” program is really a payola scheme that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to bid on the chance to be at the top of your search.

Searching Amazon doesn’t produce a list of the products that most closely match your search, it brings up a list of products whose sellers have paid the most to be at the top of that search. Those fees are built into the cost you pay for the product, and Amazon’s “Most Favored Nation” requirement sellers means that they can’t sell more cheaply elsewhere, so Amazon has driven prices at every retailer.

Search Amazon for “cat beds” and the entire first screen is ads, including ads for products Amazon cloned from its own sellers, putting them out of business (third parties have to pay 45% in junk fees to Amazon, but Amazon doesn’t charge itself these fees). All told, the first five screens of results for “cat bed” are 50% ads.

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.

This is why — as Cat Valente wrote in her magesterial pre-Christmas essay — platforms like Prodigy transformed themselves overnight, from a place where you went for social connection to a place where you were expected to “stop talking to each other and start buying things”:

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

This shell-game with surpluses is what happened to Facebook. First, Facebook was good to you: it showed you the things the people you loved and cared about had to say. This created a kind of mutual hostage-taking: once a critical mass of people you cared about were on Facebook, it became effectively impossible to leave, because you’d have to convince all of them to leave too, and agree on where to go. You may love your friends, but half the time you can’t agree on what movie to see and where to go for dinner. Forget it.

Then, it started to cram your feed full of posts from accounts you didn’t follow. At first, it was media companies, who Facebook preferentially crammed down its users’ throats so that they would click on articles and send traffic to newspapers, magazines and blogs.

Then, once those publications were dependent on Facebook for their traffic, it dialed down their traffic. First, it choked off traffic to publications that used Facebook to run excerpts with links to their own sites, as a way of driving publications into supplying fulltext feeds inside Facebook’s walled garden.

This made publications truly dependent on Facebook — their readers no longer visited the publications’ websites, they just tuned into them on Facebook. The publications were hostage to those readers, who were hostage to each other. Facebook stopped showing readers the articles publications ran, tuning The Algorithm to suppress posts from publications unless they paid to “boost” their articles to the readers who had explicitly subscribed to them and asked Facebook to put them in their feeds.

Now, Facebook started to cram more ads into the feed, mixing payola from people you wanted to hear from with payola from strangers who wanted to commandeer your eyeballs. It gave those advertisers a great deal, charging a pittance to target their ads based on the dossiers of nonconsensually harvested personal data they’d stolen from you.

Sellers became dependent on Facebook, too, unable to carry on business without access to those targeted pitches. That was Facebook’s cue to jack up ad prices, stop worrying so much about ad fraud, and to collude with Google to rig the ad market through an illegal program called Jedi Blue:

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

Today, Facebook is terminally enshittified, a terrible place to be whether you’re a user, a media company, or an advertiser. It’s a company that deliberately demolished a huge fraction of the publishers it relied on, defrauding them into a “pivot to video” based on false claims of the popularity of video among Facebook users. Companies threw billions into the pivot, but the viewers never materialized, and media outlets folded in droves:

https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/facebook-online-video-pivot-metrics-false.html

But Facebook has a new pitch. It claims to be called Meta, and it has demanded that we live out the rest of our days as legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-poly cartoon characters.

It has promised companies that make apps for this metaverse that it won’t rug them the way it did the publishers on the old Facebook. It remains to be seen whether they’ll get any takers. As Mark Zuckerberg once candidly confessed to a peer, marvelling at all of his fellow Harvard students who sent their personal information to his new website “TheFacebook”:

> I don’t know why.

> They “trust me”

> Dumb fucks.

https://doctorow.medium.com/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video-adbe09319038

Once you understand the enshittification pattern, a lot of the platform mysteries solve themselves. Think of the SEO market, or the whole energetic world of online creators who spend endless hours engaged in useless platform Kremlinology, hoping to locate the algorithmic tripwires, which, if crossed, doom the creative works they pour their money, time and energy into:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/11/coercion-v-cooperation/#the-machine-is-listening

Working for the platform can be like working for a boss who takes money out of every paycheck for all the rules you broke, but who won’t tell you what those rules are because if he told you that, then you’d figure out how to break those rules without him noticing and docking your pay. Content moderation is the only domain where security through obscurity is considered a best practice:

https://doctorow.medium.com/como-is-infosec-307f87004563

The situation is so dire that organizations like Tracking Exposed have enlisted an human army of volunteers and a robot army of headless browsers to try to unwind the logic behind the arbitrary machine judgments of The Algorithm, both to give users the option to tune the recommendations they receive, and to help creators avoid the wage theft that comes from being shadow banned:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/05/tracking-exposed-demanding-gods-explain-themselves

But what if there is no underlying logic? Or, more to the point, what if the logic shifts based on the platform’s priorities? If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you’ll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he’d carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers — as a convincer in a “Big Store” con, a way to rope in other suckers who’ll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.

Which brings me to Tiktok. Tiktok is many different things, including “a free Adobe Premiere for teenagers that live on their phones.”

https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-fragments-of-media-you-consume

But what made it such a success early on was the power of its recommendation system. From the start, Tiktok was really, really good at recommending things to its users. Eerily good:

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1093882880

By making good-faith recommendations of things it thought its users would like, Tiktok built a mass audience, larger than many thought possible, given the death grip of its competitors, like Youtube and Instagram. Now that Tiktok has the audience, it is consolidating its gains and seeking to lure away the media companies and creators who are still stubbornly attached to Youtube and Insta.

Yesterday, Forbes’s Emily Baker-White broke a fantastic story about how that actually works inside of Bytedance, Tiktok’s parent company, citing multiple internal sources, revealing the existence of a “heating tool” that Tiktok employees use push videos from select accounts into millions of viewers’ feeds:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

These videos go into Tiktok users’ ForYou feeds, which Tiktok misleadingly describes as being populated by videos “ranked by an algorithm that predicts your interests based on your behavior in the app.” In reality, For You is only sometimes composed of videos that Tiktok thinks will add value to your experience — the rest of the time, it’s full of videos that Tiktok has inserted in order to make creators think that Tiktok is a great place to reach an audience.

“Sources told Forbes that TikTok has often used heating to court influencers and brands, enticing them into partnerships by inflating their videos’ view count. This suggests that heating has potentially benefitted some influencers and brands — those with whom TikTok has sought business relationships — at the expense of others with whom it has not.”

In other words, Tiktok is handing out giant teddy bears.

But Tiktok is not in the business of giving away giant teddy bears. Tiktok, for all that its origins are in the quasi-capitalist Chinese economy, is just another paperclip-maximizing artificial colony organism that treats human beings as inconvenient gut flora. Tiktok is only going to funnel free attention to the people it wants to entrap until they are entrapped, then it will withdraw that attention and begin to monetize it.

“Monetize” is a terrible word that tacitly admits that there is no such thing as an “Attention Economy.” You can’t use attention as a medium of exchange. You can’t use it as a store of value. You can’t use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with “fiat” currency in exchange for it. You have to “monetize” it — that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

In the case of cryptos, the main monetization strategy was deception-based. Exchanges and “projects” handed out a bunch of giant teddy-bears, creating an army of true-believer Judas goats who convinced their peers to hand the carny their money and try to get some balls into the peach-basket themselves.

But deception only produces so much “liquidity provision.” Eventually, you run out of suckers. To get lots of people to try the ball-toss, you need coercion, not persuasion. Think of how US companies ended the defined benefits pension that guaranteed you a dignified retirement, replacing it with market-based 401(k) pensions that forced you to gamble your savings in a rigged casino, making you the sucker at the table, ripe for the picking:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

Early crypto liquidity came from ransomware. The existence of a pool of desperate, panicked companies and individuals whose data had been stolen by criminals created a baseline of crypto liquidity because they could only get their data back by trading real money for fake crypto money.

The next phase of crypto coercion was Web3: converting the web into a series of tollbooths that you could only pass through by trading real money for fake crypto money. The internet is a must-have, not a nice-to-have, a prerequisite for full participation in employment, education, family life, health, politics, civics, even romance. By holding all those things to ransom behind crypto tollbooths, the hodlers hoped to convert their tokens to real money:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

For Tiktok, handing out free teddy-bears by “heating” the videos posted by skeptical performers and media companies is a way to convert them to true believers, getting them to push all their chips into the middle of the table, abandoning their efforts to build audiences on other platforms (it helps that Tiktok’s format is distinctive, making it hard to repurpose videos for Tiktok to circulate on rival platforms).

Once those performers and media companies are hooked, the next phase will begin: Tiktok will withdraw the “heating” that sticks their videos in front of people who never heard of them and haven’t asked to see their videos. Tiktok is performing a delicate dance here: there’s only so much enshittification they can visit upon their users’ feeds, and Tiktok has lots of other performers they want to give giant teddy-bears to.

Tiktok won’t just starve performers of the “free” attention by depreferencing them in the algorithm, it will actively punish them by failing to deliver their videos to the users who subscribed to them. After all, every time Tiktok shows you a video you asked to see, it loses a chance to show you a video it wants you to see, because your attention is a giant teddy-bear it can give away to a performer it is wooing.

This is just what Twitter has done as part of its march to enshittification: thanks to its “monetization” changes, the majority of people who follow you will never see the things you post. I have ~500k followers on Twitter and my threads used to routinely get hundreds of thousands or even millions of reads. Today, it’s hundreds, perhaps thousands.

I just handed Twitter $8 for Twitter Blue, because the company has strongly implied that it will only show the things I post to the people who asked to see them if I pay ransom money. This is the latest battle in one of the internet’s longest-simmering wars: the fight over end-to-end:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/10/e2e/#the-censors-pen

In the beginning, there were Bellheads and Netheads. The Bellheads worked for big telcos, and they believed that all the value of the network rightly belonged to the carrier. If someone invented a new feature — say, Caller ID — it should only be rolled out in a way that allows the carrier to charge you every month for its use. This is Software-As-a-Service, Ma Bell style.

The Netheads, by contrast, believed that value should move to the edges of the network — spread out, pluralized. In theory, Compuserve could have “monetized” its own version of Caller ID by making you pay $2.99 extra to see the “From:” line on email before you opened the message — charging you to know who was speaking before you started listening — but they didn’t.

The Netheads wanted to build diverse networks with lots of offers, lots of competition, and easy, low-cost switching between competitors (thanks to interoperability). Some wanted this because they believed that the net would someday be woven into the world, and they didn’t want to live in a world of rent-seeking landlords. Others were true believers in market competition as a source of innovation. Some believed both things. Either way, they saw the risk of network capture, the drive to monetization through trickery and coercion, and they wanted to head it off.

They conceived of the end-to-end principle: the idea that networks should be designed so that willing speakers’ messages would be delivered to willing listeners’ end-points as quickly and reliably as they could be. That is, irrespective of whether a network operator could make money by sending you the data it wanted to receive, its duty would be to provide you with the data you wanted to see.

The end-to-end principle is dead at the service level today. Useful idiots on the right were tricked into thinking that the risk of Twitter mismanagement was “woke shadowbanning,” whereby the things you said wouldn’t reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter’s deep state didn’t like your opinions. The real risk, of course, is that the things you say won’t reach the people who asked to hear them because Twitter can make more money by enshittifying their feeds and charging you ransom for the privilege to be included in them.

As I said at the start of this essay, enshittification exerts a nearly irresistible gravity on platform capitalism. It’s just too easy to turn the enshittification dial up to eleven. Twitter was able to fire the majority of its skilled staff and still crank the dial all the way over, even with a skeleton crew of desperate, demoralized H1B workers who are shackled to Twitter’s sinking ship by the threat of deportation.

The temptation to enshittify is magnified by the blocks on interoperability: when Twitter bans interoperable clients, nerfs its APIs, and periodically terrorizes its users by suspending them for including their Mastodon handles in their bios, it makes it harder to leave Twitter, and thus increases the amount of enshittification users can be force-fed without risking their departure.

Twitter is not going to be a “protocol.” I’ll bet you a testicle¹ that projects like Bluesky will find no meaningful purchase on the platform, because if Bluesky were implemented and Twitter users could order their feeds for minimal enshittification and leave the service without sacrificing their social networks, it would kill the majority of Twitter’s “monetization” strategies.

¹Not one of mine.

An enshittification strategy only succeeds if it is pursued in measured amounts. Even the most locked-in user eventually reaches a breaking-point and walks away, or gets pushed. The villagers of Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof tolerated the cossacks' violent raids and pogroms for years, until they were finally forced to flee to Krakow, New York and Chicago:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

For enshittification-addled companies, that balance is hard to strike. Individual product managers, executives, and activist shareholders all give preference to quick returns at the cost of sustainability, and are in a race to see who can eat their seed-corn first. Enshittification has only lasted for as long as it has because the internet has devolved into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”:

https://twitter.com/tveastman/status/1069674780826071040

With the market sewn up by a group of cozy monopolists, better alternatives don’t pop up and lure us away, and if they do, the monopolists just buy them out and integrate them into your enshittification strategies, like when Mark Zuckerberg noticed a mass exodus of Facebook users who were switching to Instagram, and so he bought Instagram. As Zuck says, “It is better to buy than to compete.”

This is the hidden dynamic behind the rise and fall of Amazon Smile, the program whereby Amazon gave a small amount of money to charities of your choice when you shopped there, but only if you used Amazon’s own search tool to locate the products you purchased. This provided an incentive for Amazon customers to use its own increasingly enshittified search, which it could cram full of products from sellers who coughed up payola, as well as its own lookalike products. The alternative was to use Google, whose search tool would send you directly to the product you were looking for, and then charge Amazon a commission for sending you to it:

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/10ft5iv/comment/j4znb8y/

The demise of Amazon Smile coincides with the increasing enshittification of Google Search, the only successful product the company managed to build in-house. All its other successes were bought from other companies: video, docs, cloud, ads, mobile; while its own products are either flops like Google Video, clones (Gmail is a Hotmail clone), or adapted from other companies’ products, like Chrome.

Google Search was based on principles set out in founder Larry Page and Sergey Brin’s landmark 1998 paper, “Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” in which they wrote, “Advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”

http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/361/

Even with that foundational understanding of enshittification, Google has been unable to resist its siren song. Today’s Google results are an increasingly useless morass of self-preferencing links to its own products, ads for products that aren’t good enough to float to the top of the list on its own, and parasitic SEO junk piggybacking on the former.

Enshittification kills. Google just laid off 12,000 employees, and the company is in a full-blown “panic” over the rise of “AI” chatbots, and is making a full-court press for an AI-driven search tool — that is, a tool that won’t show you what you ask for, but rather, what it thinks you should see:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/1/20/23563851/google-search-ai-chatbot-demo-chatgpt

Now, it’s possible to imagine that such a tool will produce good recommendations, like Tiktok’s pre-enshittified algorithm did. But it’s hard to see how Google will be able to design a non-enshittified chatbot front-end to search, given the strong incentives for product managers, executives, and shareholders to enshittify results to the precise threshold at which users are nearly pissed off enough to leave, but not quite.

Even if it manages the trick, this-almost-but-not-quite-unusuable equilibrium is fragile. Any exogenous shock — a new competitor like Tiktok that penetrates the anticompetitive “moats and walls” of Big Tech, a privacy scandal, a worker uprising — can send it into wild oscillations:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/watch-the-surpluses/#exogenous-shocks

Enshittification truly is how platforms die. That’s fine, actually. We don’t need eternal rulers of the internet. It’s okay for new ideas and new ways of working to emerge. The emphasis of lawmakers and policymakers shouldn’t be preserving the crepuscular senescence of dying platforms. Rather, our policy focus should be on minimizing the cost to users when these firms reach their expiry date: enshrining rights like end-to-end would mean that no matter how autocannibalistic a zombie platform became, willing speakers and willing listeners would still connect with each other:

https://doctorow.medium.com/end-to-end-d6046dca366f

And policymakers should focus on freedom of exit — the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought, and preserving the data you created:

https://www.eff.org/interoperablefacebook

The Netheads were right: technological self-determination is at odds with the natural imperatives of tech businesses. They make more money when they take away our freedom — our freedom to speak, to leave, to connect.

For many years, even Tiktok’s critics grudgingly admitted that no matter how surveillant and creepy it was, it was really good at guessing what you wanted to see. But Tiktok couldn’t resist the temptation to show you the things it wants you to see, rather than what you want to see. The enshittification has begun, and now it is unlikely to stop.

It's too late to save Tiktok. Now that it has been infected by enshittifcation, the only thing left is to kill it with fire.

[Image ID: Hansel and Gretel in front of the witch's candy house. Hansel and Gretel have been replaced with line-drawings of influencers, taking selfies of themselves with the candy house. In front of the candy house stands a portly man in a business suit; his head is a sack of money with a dollar-sign on it. He wears a crooked witch's hat. The cottage has the Tiktok logo on it.]

#pluralistic #Lauren Leffer #tiktok #surplus allocation #fauximation #potemkin ai #the algorithm #creative labor #algorithms exposed #enshittification #bytedance #giant teddy bears #convincers #big store con #pivot to video #scissor bucket #Emily Baker-White

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