#monopolize

[gaylordthethird]

Metabolizing that Joe joins season 4 of traffic life

#manalizing #meterfasting #idk the word #monopolize

[sheilamurrey]

You cannot monopolize the power

Silver Birch was a spirit guide who spoke through Maurice BarbanellYou cannot monopolize the power

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#channel #ebb and flow #evolution #monopolize #nations #organization #power #purify #service #Silverbirch

[chisaiyume]

Title: Kimi ni Furetara

Author: Wata Nobu

Genre: romance, school life, shoujo, smut

Synopsis[baka-updates]:

1) Kimi ni Furetara After school ended, in the nurse's office. I found out about Senpai's "secret." Don't make that pained face. For now, forget about that girl and please indulge in me.

2) Monopolize Hana's friend Shinobu was a nerdy kid who developed into a super cool guy, but he doesn't know it! Hana keeps him in glasses so no one will notice how handsome he is. Hana is torn between her guilt and her possessive nature.

3) Masshiro Valentine When Misa's boyfriend breaks up with her to date her friend, she's crushed. Handsome stranger Yuki tells her, "I know of you, because I love you."

4) Love Costume Ichigo loves cos-play and her boyfriend, Hayato. But he only seems passionate when she's in costume…

5) I Will Comfort You Nanami loves Ichijyou. But Ichijyou's already has a girlfriend. Then he breaks up with her and turns to Nanami…

#manga #kimi ni furetara #wata nobu #monopolize #masshiro valentine #love costume #i will comfort you

[we-survive-endlessly]

Oh this song is a MASTERPIECE. The funky bass, the harmonies, the synth, the chromaticism, the rap line, one of the rappers (Rawhyun?) saying Fuck That. I’m in looooovvvveee with this song.

#ntx #monopolize #Rae’s recs #Spotify

[hidemiwoods]

monopolize him : Talking and Reading from Japan by Hidemi Wood

Episode from An Old Tree in Kyoto by Hidemi Woods   Audiobook: The Family in Kyoto: One Japanese Girl Got Freedom by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. Apple Books, Google Play, Audible 43 available distributors in total. Audiobook  : Japanese Dream by Hidemi Woods On Sale at online stores or apps. Apple Books, Audible, Google Play, Nook Audiobooks,  43 available distributors in…

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#audiobook #childhood #family #grandchild #grandfather #Japan #Japanese #Japanese custom #Kyoto #love #monopolize #new podcast #podcast #reading #talking

[forecast0ctopus]

enterprise diplomacy event

#jim is also there somewhere doing captain things so they can’t monopolize his time rn unfortunately #star trek #star trek tos #star trek tos fanart #star trek fanart #leonard mccoy #leonard bones mccoy #doctor mccoy #spock #mr spock #spock: if i recall correctly you are not even required to be here? #bones: if i’m not here someones liable to get poisoned or assassinated and it ll probably be you or jim. so #also he just gets bored

[1introvertedsage]

The truth must in time dawn on the human conscience that no man has a right to monopolize anything and no man has a right to hoard up millions for riotous luxury, and domineering power while his fellow men are suffering - that no man has the right to ignore the divine law of brotherhood.

~Prof. J.R. Buchanan M.D.~

#Truth Thursday #truth #human consciousness #sleeping #greed #hatred #ignorance #human conscience #monopoly #monopolize #selfish #hoarding #luxury #assumed power #reality #karma #the day will come #justice #divine #divine law #divine healing #LHA #they will see #visions #thank Jupiter for today #Jupiter's day #sad reality

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Too big to care

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Remember the first time you used Google search? It was like magic. After years of progressively worsening search quality from Altavista and Yahoo, Google was literally stunning, a gateway to the very best things on the internet.

Today, Google has a 90% search market-share. They got it the hard way: they cheated. Google spends tens of billions of dollars on payola in order to ensure that they are the default search engine behind every search box you encounter on every device, every service and every website:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

Not coincidentally, Google's search is getting progressively, monotonically worse. It is a cesspool of botshit, spam, scams, and nonsense. Important resources that I never bothered to bookmark because I could find them with a quick Google search no longer show up in the first ten screens of results:

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

Even after all that payola, Google is still absurdly profitable. They have so much money, they were able to do a $80 billion stock buyback. Just a few months later, Google fired 12,000 skilled technical workers. Essentially, Google is saying that they don't need to spend money on quality, because we're all locked into using Google search. It's cheaper to buy the default search box everywhere in the world than it is to make a product that is so good that even if we tried another search engine, we'd still prefer Google.

This is enshittification. Google is shifting value away from end users (searchers) and business customers (advertisers, publishers and merchants) to itself:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/05/the-map-is-not-the-territory/#apor-locksmith

And here's the thing: there are search engines out there that are so good that if you just try them, you'll get that same feeling you got the first time you tried Google.

When I was in Tucson last month on my book-tour for my new novel The Bezzle, I crashed with my pals Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden. I've know them since I was a teenager (Patrick is my editor).

We were sitting in his living room on our laptops – just like old times! – and Patrick asked me if I'd tried Kagi, a new search-engine.

Teresa chimed in, extolling the advanced search features, the "lenses" that surfaced specific kinds of resources on the web.

I hadn't even heard of Kagi, but the Nielsen Haydens are among the most effective researchers I know – both in their professional editorial lives and in their many obsessive hobbies. If it was good enough for them…

I tried it. It was magic.

No, seriously. All those things Google couldn't find anymore? Top of the search pile. Queries that generated pages of spam in Google results? Fucking pristine on Kagi – the right answers, over and over again.

That was before I started playing with Kagi's lenses and other bells and whistles, which elevated the search experience from "magic" to sorcerous.

The catch is that Kagi costs money – after 100 queries, they want you to cough up $10/month ($14 for a couple or $20 for a family with up to six accounts, and some kid-specific features):

https://kagi.com/settings?p=billing_plan&plan=family

I immediately bought a family plan. I've been using it for a month. I've basically stopped using Google search altogether.

Kagi just let me get a lot more done, and I assumed that they were some kind of wildly capitalized startup that was running their own crawl and and their own data-centers. But this morning, I read Jason Koebler's 404 Media report on his own experiences using it:

https://www.404media.co/friendship-ended-with-google-now-kagi-is-my-best-friend/

Koebler's piece contained a key detail that I'd somehow missed:

When you search on Kagi, the service makes a series of “anonymized API calls to traditional search indexes like Google, Yandex, Mojeek, and Brave,” as well as a handful of other specialized search engines, Wikimedia Commons, Flickr, etc. Kagi then combines this with its own web index and news index (for news searches) to build the results pages that you see. So, essentially, you are getting some mix of Google search results combined with results from other indexes.

In other words: Kagi is a heavily customized, anonymized front-end to Google.

The implications of this are stunning. It means that Google's enshittified search-results are a choice. Those ad-strewn, sub-Altavista, spam-drowned search pages are a feature, not a bug. Google prefers those results to Kagi, because Google makes more money out of shit than they would out of delivering a good product:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/2/24117976/best-printer-2024-home-use-office-use-labels-school-homework

No wonder Google spends a whole-ass Twitter every year to make sure you never try a rival search engine. Bottom line: they ran the numbers and figured out their most profitable course of action is to enshittify their flagship product and bribe their "competitors" like Apple and Samsung so that you never try another search engine and have another one of those magic moments that sent all those Jeeves-askin' Yahooers to Google a quarter-century ago.

One of my favorite TV comedy bits is Lily Tomlin as Ernestine the AT&T operator; Tomlin would do these pitches for the Bell System and end every ad with "We don't care. We don't have to. We're the phone company":

https://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76aphonecompany.phtml

Speaking of TV comedy: this week saw FTC chair Lina Khan appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. It was amazing:

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

The coverage of Khan's appearance has focused on Stewart's revelation that when he was doing a show on Apple TV, the company prohibited him from interviewing her (presumably because of her hostility to tech monopolies):

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/apple-got-caught-censoring-its-own

But for me, the big moment came when Khan described tech monopolists as "too big to care."

What a phrase!

Since the subprime crisis, we're all familiar with businesses being "too big to fail" and "too big to jail." But "too big to care?" Oof, that got me right in the feels.

Because that's what it feels like to use enshittified Google. That's what it feels like to discover that Kagi – the good search engine – is mostly Google with the weights adjusted to serve users, not shareholders.

Google used to care. They cared because they were worried about competitors and regulators. They cared because their workers made them care:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/4/4/18295933/google-cancels-ai-ethics-board

Google doesn't care anymore. They don't have to. They're the search company.

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

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

#pluralistic #john stewart #the daily show #apple #monopoly #lina khan #ftc #too big to fail #too big to jail #monopolism #trustbusting #antitrust #search #enshittification #kagi #google

[arkiwii]

she's horsin' around

#sorry for monopolizing the arknights tag #me: gets free from artblock #the arknights tag: HERE IT COMES #arknights #grani #stalkiwiart

[thunderboltfire]

I have a lot of complicated feelings when it comes to what Neflix has done with the Witcher, but my probably least favourite is the line of argumentation that originated during shitstorms related to the first and second season that I was unlucky to witness.

It boils down to "Netflix's reinterpretation and vision is valid, because the Witcher books are not written to be slavic. The overwhelming Slavic aestetic is CDPR's interpretation, and the setting in the original books is universally European, as there are references to Arthurian mythos and celtic languages" And I'm not sure where this argument originated and whether it's parroting Sapkowski's own words or a common stance of people who haven't considered the underlying themes of the books series. Because while it's true that there are a lot of western european influences in the Witcher, it's still Central/Eastern European to the bone, and at its core, the lack of understanding of this topic is what makes the Netflix series inauthentic in my eyes.

The slavicness of the Witcher goes deeper than the aestetics, mannerisms, vodka and sour cucumbers. Deeper than Zoltan wrapping his sword with leopard pelt, like he was a hussar. Deeper than the Redanian queen Hedvig and her white eagle on the red field.

What Witcher is actually about? It's a story about destiny, sure. It's a sword-and-sorcery style, antiheroic deconstruction of a fairy tale, too, and it's a weird mix of many culture's influences.

But it's also a story about mundane evil and mundane good. If You think about most dark, gritty problems the world of Witcher faces, it's xenophobia and discrimination, insularism and superstition. Deep-seated fear of the unknown, the powerlessness of common people in the face of danger, war, poverty and hunger. It's what makes people spit over their left shoulder when they see a witcher, it's what makes them distrust their neighbor, clinging to anything they deem safe and known. It's their misfortune and pent-up anger that make them seek scapegoats and be mindlessly, mundanely cruel to the ones weaker than themselves.

There are of course evil wizards, complicated conspiracies and crowned heads, yes. But much of the destruction and depravity is rooted in everyday mundane cycle of violence and misery. The worst monsters in the series are not those killed with a silver sword, but with steel. it's hard to explain but it's the same sort of motiveless, mundane evil that still persist in our poorer regions, born out of generations-long poverty and misery. The behaviour of peasants in Witcher, and the distrust towards authority including kings and monarchs didn't come from nowhere.

On the other hand, among those same, desperately poor people, there is always someone who will share their meal with a traveller, who will risk their safety pulling a wounded stranger off the road into safety. Inconditional kindness among inconditional hate. Most of Geralt's friends try to be decent people in the horrible world. This sort of contrasting mentalities in the recently war-ridden world is intimately familiar to Eastern and Cetral Europe.

But it doesn't end here. Nilfgaard is also a uniquely Central/Eastern European threat. It's a combination of the Third Reich in its aestetics and its sense of superiority and the Stalinist USSR with its personality cult, vast territory and huge army, and as such it's instantly recognisable by anybody whose country was unlucky enough to be caught in-between those two forces. Nilfgaard implements total war and looks upon the northerners with contempt, conscripts the conquered people forcibly, denying them the right of their own identity. It may seem familiar and relevant to many opressed people, but it's in its essence the processing of the trauma of the WW2 and subsequent occupation.

My favourite case are the nonhumans, because their treatment is in a sense a reminder of our worst traits and the worst sins in our history - the regional antisemitism and/or xenophobia, violence, local pogroms. But at the very same time, the dilemma of Scoia'Tael, their impossible choice between maintaining their identity, a small semblance of freedom and their survival, them hiding in the forests, even the fact that they are generally deemed bandits, it all touches the very traumatic parts of specifically Polish history, such as January Uprising, Warsaw Uprising, Ghetto Uprising, the underground resistance in WW2 and the subsequent complicated problem of the Cursed Soldiers all at once. They are the 'other' to the general population, but their underlying struggle is also intimately known to us.

The slavic monsters are an aestetic choice, yes, but I think they are also a reflection of our local, private sins. These are our own, insular boogeymen, fears made flesh. They reproduce due to horrors of the war or they are an unprovoked misfortune that descends from nowhere and whose appearance amplifies the local injustices.

I'm not talking about many, many tiny references that exist in the books, these are just the most blatant examples that come to mind. Anyway, the thing is, whether Sapkowski has intended it or not, Witcher is slavic and it's Polish because it contains social commentary. Many aspects of its worldbuilding reflect our traumas and our national sins. It's not exclusively Polish in its influences and philosophical motifs of course, but it's obvious it doesn't exist in a vacuum.

And it seems to me that the inherently Eastern European aspects of Witcher are what was immediately rewritten in the series. It seems to me that the subtler underlying conflicts were reshaped to be centered around servitude, class and gender disparity, and Nilfgaard is more of a fanatic terrorist state than an imposing, totalitarian empire. A lot of complexity seems to be abandoned in lieu of usual high-fantasy wordbuilding. It's especially weird to me because it was completely unnecessary. The Witcher books didn't need to be adjusted to speak about relevant problems - they already did it! The problem of acceptance and discrimination is a very prevalent theme throughout the story! They are many strong female characters too, and they are well written. Honestly I don't know if I should find it insulting towards their viewers that they thought it won't be understood as it was and has to be somehow reshaped to fit the american perpective, because the current problems are very much discussed in there and Sapkowski is not subtle in showing that genocide and discrimination is evil. Heck, anyone who has read the ending knows how tragic it makes the whole story.

It also seems quite disrespectful, because they've basically taken a well-established piece of our domestic literature and popular culture and decided that the social commentary in it is not relevant. It is as if all it referenced was just not important enough and they decided to use it as an opportunity to talk about the problems they consider important. And don't get me wrong, I'm not forcing anyone to write about Central European problems and traumas, I'm just confused that they've taken the piece of art already containing such a perspective on the popular and relevant problem and they just... disregarded it, because it wasn't their exact perspective on said problem.

And I think this homogenisation, maybe even from a certain point of view you could say it's worldview sanitisation is a problem, because it's really ironic, isn't it? To talk about inclusivity in a story which among other problems is about being different, and in the same time to get rid of motifs, themes and references because they are foreign? Because if something presents a different perspective it suddenly is less desirable?

There was a lot of talking about the showrunners travelling to Poland to understand the Witcher's slavic spirit and how to convey it. I don't think they really meant it beyond the most superficial, paper-thin facade.

#The witcher #Sorry if its convoluted I just got reminded of something and it made me a little angry #and as I had this conversation a lot of times I've decided to put it into written text #sorry about being bitter #but these are some of my favourite books and I'm still upset when I get reminded how badly they were treated in the recent adaptation #I'm not saying you should never change anything #But it's good to have enough background to understand why some things are the way they are in the original #and to understand what the source material is about #we don't talk about particular character's looks or something (altough I feel they could care more about it too) #but central themes tropes and motifs #long post #it may seem like I'm talking from a high horse here #people are welcome to interpret literature however they want #Nobody has a monopol on themes #I just think that in this particular case the cultural context influences the worldbuilding #and if changed it doesn't have the same impact anymore #meta

[bellshazes]

name one difference between etho's nameless wolf in tfcs2 who died in a cave in after repeatedly walking into fire as etho halfheartedly tried to stop it while constantly acknowledging they would not last til the end of the episode. and bdubs last life. you simply cannot

#peter posts #'laughter of sadness' 'i thought it was gonna be different'. the TREE BURNING. #big i've connected the dots (i haven't connected shit) moment #ALSO MONOPOLIZED THE COWS.

[hrzwrm]

#another one #he's monopolized my brain #like the lil capitalist freak he is #art #digital art #fanart #charlie and the chocolate factory #willy wonka and the chocolate factory #catcf #wwatcf #willy wonka

[midnight-moth]

Do you ever just look and Rain and think like wow what a beautiful ghoul? But then you look at Cumulus and think wow, what a beautiful ghoul? But then you look at Dew and then … you know where I’m going.

#they are all very beautiful #it’s sort of unfair them monopolizing all of the beauty like that #also I started thinking about golden years ghouls while I was driving #and how beautiful they would be with white hair and wrinkles and age spots #and then I started crying #👍

[pinkd3mon]

i know the hc that meta knight is super overprotective and doesn't really trust the kumazaki trio + marx, but like. what if it was bandana dee instead. bandee is the one that hisses like a cat whenever magolor is in vicinity and shoots death glares at susie when kirby's not looking. and they are terrified of him.

Someone who gets it

#kirby #kots #kirby of the stars #hoshi no kirby #magolor #susie kirby #bandana dee #marx kirby #the kirby novels truly is the gift that keeps on giving #can't believe it gave us canonically protective Bandana #he straight up was like 'dedede and Kirby are too good to mistrust people so I must be the one to do so' #the magolor-bandana bad blood dynamic is not only canon is also mutual #it's so funny Magolor having beef with this one child #like everyone in the kirby series has beef with a child right but at least that child is god #Bandana is just some kid #and on top of that a WADDLE DEE /derogatory #you know Magolor is fuming #first bandana is able to connect to the lor starcutter when Magolor couldn't #then another Bandana protects the gem apple tree so everyone has a fair share instead of Magolor monopolizing it #that bandana also straight up threatens Magolor so that his prizes are fair #then Magolor comes back to the right dimension and Bandana is the one who's keeping an eye on him so Kirby doesn't overtrust him #i just know Magolor is going insane thinking this one child is haunting him #'I'm getting sick of this dude' -Magolor #like susie sees Bandana threatening her and she's probably all condescending 'aww what a cute lifeform' #but Bandana just gives Magolor a side look and Magolor has to repeat in his mind 'i went to hell for my redemption' over and over #he isn't planning anything evil in the second page he's just going insane #i just know every other redeemed villain makes fun of Magolor for his beef with a child waddle dee #i have mix thoughts on Bandana's thoughts on Taranza #on one hand Taranza nails the pattern of redeemed villain who hurt his friend and his king specifically but i don't see him hating him #btw my ultimate hc is that Bandana lowkey hates Meta Knight for the whole invation thing but he's really good at hiding it

[gggoldfinch]

yeah my new blorbo is an immortal sin-eater who wears a kilt and old lady clothes. what about it.

my long-time fascination with sam spruell has come back with a vengeance and idk what to do with all this rabid energy besides finally have enough bravery to publicly say I think he’s so so hot 💁🏻‍♀️ I’m rotating him in my actively-on-fire brain

(Click for better quality. Do not repost :) )

#ohhhhh to be domestic with the reformed sin-eater #he’s my husband frfr #my camera roll has been monopolized by this man #I was gonna draw a whole bunch more but ran out of steam almost immediately 😭 #fargo season 5 #ole munch #goldfinch draws

[basu-shokikita]

The other day I was rewatching Dethclown and I realized that, when they're all lecturing Toki for hanging out with Rockzo, Skwisgaar specifically points out that drunk driving while shooting guns is not what a real friend would take you to do.

And then, guess who's drunk driving and shooting guns with Toki in the next season:

Just think it's funny that Skwisgaar took Toki to do the exact same activity he was judging him for doing with somebody else. It's almost as if it wasn't about the tour at all, just saying.

#metalocalypse #toki wartooth #skwisgaar skwigelf #skwistok #my jealous skwisgaar agenda prevails #he wants to be tokis one friend and mentor and buddy and model and #he wants all of tokis attention on him hes just like that #and this isnt even a explicitly shippy post i just tagged it skwistok cuz i be tagging all the posts abt them with skwistok #its about how skwis wants to monopolize toki like a totally normal person #he refuses to share his lil guy #but he'd never admit it out loud #basu post