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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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This is your brain on fraud apologetics

In 1998, two Stanford students published a paper in Computer Networks entitled “The 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.”

https://research.google/pubs/pub334/

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/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

The co-authors were Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin, and the “large-scale hypertextual web search-engine” they were describing was their new project, which they called “Google.” They were 100% correct — prescient, even!

On Wednesday night, a friend came over to watch some TV with us. We ordered out. We got scammed. We searched for a great local Thai place we like called Kiin and clicked a sponsored link for a Wix site called “Kiinthaila.com.” We should have clicked the third link down (kiinthaiburbank.com).

We got scammed. The Wix site was a lookalike for Kiin Thai, which marked up their prices by 15% and relayed the order to our local, mom-and-pop, one-branch restaurant. The restaurant knew it, too — they called us and told us they were canceling the order, and said we could still come get our food, but we’d have to call Amex to reverse the charge.

As it turned out, the scammers double-billed us for our order. I called Amex, who advised us to call back in a couple days when the charge posted to cancel it — in other words, they were treating it as a regular customer dispute, and not a systemic, widespread fraud (there’s no way this scammer is just doing this for one restaurant).

In the grand scheme of things, this is a minor hassle, but boy, it’s haunting to watch the quarter-century old prophecy of Brin and Page coming true. Search Google for carpenters, plumbers, gas-stations, locksmiths, concert tickets, entry visas, jobs at the US Post Office or (not making this up) tech support for Google products, and the top result will be a paid ad for a scam. Sometimes it’s several of the top ads.

This kind of “intermediation” business is actually revered in business-schools. As Douglas Rushkoff has written, the modern business wisdom reveres “going meta” — not doing anything useful, but rather, creating a chokepoint between people who do useful things and people who want to pay for those things, and squatting there, collecting rent:

https://rushkoff.medium.com/going-meta-d42c6a09225e

It’s the ultimate passive income/rise and grind side-hustle: It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to discover a whole festering nest of creeps on Tiktok talking about how they pay Mechanical Turks to produce these lookalike sites at scale.

This mindset is so pervasive that people running companies with billions in revenue and massive hoards of venture capital run exactly the same scam. During lockdown, companies like Doordash, Grubhub and Uber Eats stood up predatory lookalike websites for local restaurants, without their consent, and played monster-in-the-middle, tricking diners into ordering through them:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/19/we-are-beautiful/#man-in-the-middle

These delivery app companies were playing a classic enshittification game: first they directed surpluses to customers to lock them in (heavily discounting food), then they directed surplus to restaurants (preferential search results, free delivery, low commissions) — then, having locked in both consumers and producers, they harvested the surplus for themselves.

Today, delivery apps charge massive premiums to both eaters and restaurants, load up every order with junk fees, and clone the most successful restaurants out of ghost kitchens — shipping containers in parking lots crammed with low-waged workers cranking out orders for 15 different fake “virtual restaurants”:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/01/autophagic-buckeyes/#subsidized-autophagia

Delivery apps speedran the enshittification cycle, but Google took a slower path to get there. The company has locked in billions of users (e.g. by paying billions to be the default search on Safari and Firefox and using legal bullying to block third party Android device-makers from pre-installing browsers other than Chrome). For years, it’s been leveraging our lock-in to prey on small businesses, getting them to set up Google Business Profiles.

These profiles are supposed to help Google distinguish between real sellers and scammers. But Kiin Thai has a Google Business Profile, and searching for “kiin thai burbank” brings up a “Knowledge Panel” with the correct website address — on a page that is headed with a link to a scam website for the same business. Google, in other words, has everything it needs to flag lookalike sites and confirm them with their registered owners. It would cost Google money to do this — engineer-time to build and maintain the system, content moderator time to manually check flagged listings, and lost ad-revenue from scammers — but letting the scams flourish makes Google money, at the expense of Google users and Google business customers.

Now, Google has an answer for this: they tell merchants who are being impersonated by ad-buying scammers that all they need to do is outbid them for the top ad-spot. This is a common approach — Amazon has a $31b/year “ad business” that’s mostly its own platform sellers bidding against each other to show you fake results for your query. The first five screens of Amazon search results are 50% ads:

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

This is “going meta,” so naturally, Meta is doing it too: Facebook and Instagram have announced a $12/month “verification” badge that will let you report impersonation and tweak the algorithm to make it more likely that the posts you make are shown to the people who explicitly asked to see them:

https://www.vox.com/recode/2023/2/21/23609375/meta-verified-twitter-blue-checkmark-badge-instagram-facebook

The corollary of this, of course, is that if you don’t pay, they won’t police your impersonators, and they won’t show your posts to the people who asked to see them. This is pure enshittification — the surplus from users and business customers is harvested for the benefit of the platform owners:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

The idea that merchants should master the platforms as a means of keeping us safe from their impersonators is a hollow joke. For one thing, the rules change all the time, as the platforms endlessly twiddle the knobs that determine what gets shown to whom:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

And they refuse to tell anyone what the rules are, because if they told you what the rules were, you’d be able to bypass them. Content moderation is the only infosec domain where “security through obscurity” doesn’t get laughed out of the room:

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

Worse: the one thing the platforms do hunt down and exterminate with extreme prejudice is anything that users or business-customers use to twiddle back — add-ons and plugins and jailbreaks that override their poor choices with better ones:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/29/23378541/the-og-app-instagram-clone-pulled-from-app-store

As I was submitting complaints about the fake Kiin scam-site (and Amex’s handling of my fraud call) to the FTC, the California Attorney General, the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and Wix, I wrote a little Twitter thread about what a gross scam this is:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1628948906657878016

The thread got more than two million reads and got picked up by Hacker News and other sites. While most of the responses evinced solidarity and frustration and recounted similar incidents in other domains, a significant plurality of the replies were scam apologetics — messages from people who wanted to explain why this wasn’t a problem after all.

The most common of these was victim-blaming: “you should have used an adblocker” or “never click the sponsored link.” Of course, I do use an ad-blocker — but this order was placed with a mobile browser, after an absentminded query into the Google search-box permanently placed on the home screen, which opens results in Chrome (where I don’t have an ad-blocker, so I can see material behind an ad-blocker-blocker), not Firefox (which does have an ad-blocker).

Now, I also have a PiHole on my home LAN, which blocks most ads even in a default browser — but earlier this day, I’d been on a public wifi network that was erroneously blocking a website (the always excellent superpunch.net) so I’d turned my wifi off, which meant the connection came over my phone’s 5G connection, bypassing the PiHole:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/28/shut-yer-pi-hole/

“Don’t click a sponsored link” — well, the irony here is that if you habitually use a browser with an ad-blocker, and you backstop it with a PiHole, you never see sponsored links, so it’s easy to miss the tiny “Sponsored” notification beside the search result. That goes double if you’re relaxing with a dinner guest on the sofa and ordering dinner while chatting.

There’s a name for this kind of security failure: the Swiss Cheese Model. We all have multiple defenses (in my case: foreknowledge of Google’s ad-scam problem, an ad-blocker in my browser, LAN-wide ad sinkholing). We also have multiple vulnerabilities (in my case: forgetting I was on 5G, being distracted by conversation, using a mobile device with a permanent insecure search bar on the homescreen, and being so accustomed to ad-blocked results that I got out of the habit of checking whether a result was an ad).

If you think you aren’t vulnerable to scams, you’re wrong — and your confidence in your invulnerability actually increases your risk. This isn’t the first time I’ve been scammed, and it won’t be the last — and every time, it’s been a Swiss Cheese failure, where all the holes in all my defenses lined up for a brief instant and left me vulnerable:

https://locusmag.com/2010/05/cory-doctorow-persistence-pays-parasites/

Other apologetics: “just call the restaurant rather than using its website.” Look, I know the people who say this don’t think I have a time-machine I can use to travel back to the 1980s and retrieve a Yellow Pages, but it’s hard not to snark at them, just the same. Scammers don’t just set up fake websites for your local businesses — they staff them with fake call-centers, too. The same search that takes you to a fake website will also take you to a fake phone number.

Finally, there’s “What do you expect Google to do? They can’t possibly detect this kind of scam.” But they can. Indeed, they are better situated to discover these scams than anyone else, because they have their business profiles, with verified contact information for the merchants being impersonated. When they get an ad that seems to be for the same business but to a different website, they could interrupt the ad process to confirm it with their verified contact info.

Instead, they choose to avoid the expense, and pocket the ad revenue. If a company promises to “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” I think we have the right to demand these kinds of basic countermeasures:

https://www.google.com/search/howsearchworks/our-approach/

The same goes for Amex: when a merchant is scamming customers, they shouldn’t treat complaints as “chargebacks” — they should treat them as reports of a crime in progress. Amex has the bird’s eye view of their transaction flow and when a customer reports a scam, they can backtrack it to see if the same scammer is doing this with other merchants — but the credit card companies make money by not chasing down fraud:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rosalindadams/mastercard-visa-fraud

Wix also has platform-scale analytics that they could use to detect and interdict this kind of fraud — when a scammer creates a hundred lookalike websites for restaurants and uses Wix’s merchant services to process payments for them, that could trigger human review — but it didn’t.

Where do all of these apologetics come from? Why are people so eager to leap to the defense of scammers and their adtech and fintech enablers? Why is there such an impulse to victim-blame?

I think it’s fear: in their hearts, people — especially techies — know that they, too, are vulnerable to these ripoffs, but they don’t want to admit it. They want to convince themselves that the person who got scammed made an easily avoidable mistake, and that they themselves will never make a similar mistake.

This is doubly true for readerships on tech-heavy forums like Twitter or (especially) Hacker News. These readers know just how many vulnerabilities there are — how many holes are in their Swiss cheese — and they are also overexposed to rise-and-grind/passive income rhetoric.

This produces a powerful cognitive dissonance: “If all the ‘entrepreneurs’ I worship are just laying traps for the unwary, and if I am sometimes unwary, then I’m cheering on the authors of my future enduring misery.” The only way to resolve this dissonance — short of re-evaluating your view of platform capitalism or questioning your own immunity to scams — is to blame the victim.

The median Hacker News reader has to somehow resolve the tension between “just install an adblocker” and “Chrome’s extension sandbox is a dumpster fire and it’s basically impossible to know whether any add-on you install can steal every keystroke and all your other data”:

https://mattfrisbie.substack.com/p/spy-chrome-extension

In my Twitter thread, I called this “the worst of all possible timelines.” Everything we do is mediated by gigantic, surveillant monopolists that spy on us comprehensively from asshole to appetite — but none of them, not a 20th century payment giant nor a 21st century search giant — can bestir itself to use that data to keep us safe from scams.

Next Thu (Mar 2) I'll be in Brussels for Antitrust, Regulation and the Political Economy, along with a who's-who of European and US trustbusters. It's livestreamed, and both in-person and virtual attendance are free:

https://www.brusselsconference.com/registration

On Fri (Mar 3), I'll be in Graz for the Elevate Festival:

https://elevate.at/diskurs/programm/event/e23doctorow/

[Image ID: A modified version of Hieronymus Bosch's painting 'The Conjurer,' which depicts a scam artist playing a shell-game for a group of gawking rubes. The image has been modified so that the scam artist's table has a Google logo and the pea he is triumphantly holding aloft bears the 'Sponsored' wordmark that appears alongside Google search results.]

#pluralistic #victim blaming #fraud #going meta #douglas rushkoff #ad-tech #local search #wix #amex #thai food #business #rent-seeking #entrepreneurship #passive income #chokepoint capitalism #platform lawyers

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jefffrose24 · 5 months

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winning moment

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abukarhaji · 1 year

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Foods to eat on a ketogenic diet

If you're considering starting a ketogenic diet, one of the most important things to know is what you should and shouldn't be eating. The goal of the ketogenic diet is to enter a state of ketosis, which is when your body switches from burning carbohydrates for energy to burning fat. In order to do this, you need to drastically reduce your carbohydrate intake and increase your fat intake. Here are some foods to focus on when following a ketogenic diet:1. Meat: Beef, chicken, pork, lamb, and other types of meat are all great sources of protein and healthy fats.2. Fish: Fatty fish like salmon, mackerel, and sardines are rich in omega-3

#pluralistic #victim blaming #fraud #going meta #douglas rushkoff #ad-tech #local search #wix #amex #thai food #business #chokepoint capitalism #platform lawyers

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blueberryfruitbat · 2 months

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@staff

I retain ownership and rights over my content.

"We never want to do anything with your work that surprises you" Selling it to Midjouney without warning surprises me.

But not AI, which you profit from and we don't, which is different than allowing Search Engine APIs to see and display the art.

And you are getting paid to use my art and content, which should mean I get proper reimbursement for my creations, which are as you say "entirely mine".

#batty babbles #i am not a lawyer #so take this with heap of salt #but they spring this AI shit on us when their ToS never hinted at this sort of use or gave us warning #And info has already come out that they provided test packets of posts from as far back as 2012 without permission to midjourney.#i want there to be a class action against midjourney and other ai platforms already to make this shit illegal.#anti ai #fuck ai #current events #artists on tumblr

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the-final-sif · 2 years

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Also, just as a general comment on the whole Dream situation on one of the takes I kept seeing; y'all know that snapchat is like, an actual platform people use to talk to each other, right? It's not like, a creepy platform only used by predators. Right? Like. I've never had a snapchat account, and literally all throughout college I'd get offered people's snapchats and have to say I didn't have it and ask for their phone number instead. My like 45 year old boss uses snapchat to talk with her like 20 year old kids. I once had to write an actual email to another human being to tell them no, they could not put down their snapchat handle as an emergency contact method for their club paperwork.

Idk I had to actually check with other people in the discord to make sure I wasn't insane, and no, other people reported the same thing. Snapchat is a normal platform people use to talk to others. But for some reason, I kept seeing that take that somehow giving a snapchat was inherently predatory and that threw me for one hell of a loop. I'm really just not sure where that idea came from.

#dreamwastaken #dream discourse #discourse #this is def more of a personal opinion but it's been bugging me since I got that anon awhile back and I want to throw this out there #sif speaks #like again I am remaining in my camp of waiting on words from lawyers #but I did want to address this because that take was weird as hell to me #and made me question whether snapchat was really just like a niche platform everyone else at my college used for some reason #also had one person for that club try to put down a discord handle #the snapchat person was understanding #the discord handle person tried to argue with me that their phone number was too personal #and I was like #dude if you end up lost in the middle of nowhere we need to be able to call you on a real actual phone not see if you have discord on #alright back to me talking about defamation laws b/c legal cases make my brain go burr

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craycraybluejay · 8 months

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Blocked and reported. I have a feeling this may be the IP evader, but it could be someone else. Also, I have a feeling someone got mad pissy at me and sicced their followers on me. Could be that, too.

Anyway, this is what you guys make yourselves look like. We are not making things up when we say the weird purity cult is a breeding ground for harassment, violence, and misinformation.

Part 1: Very clear intent to cause harm (suicide baiting)

Part 2: Baseless accusation of a political stance I am directly, vehemently, and most importantly, publicly opposed to that has killed *my people* in several different categories. Easy rage bait and also bait for other harassers to read and react violently without verifying their sources.

Analysis questions:

1) Is this the kind of environment we want to foster online and let bleed into the real world?

2) Is harassment okay against someone you disagree with who is not harming anyone?

3) Do you think sending this ask made this person feel better or worse about themselves and the world around them? Why or why not?

4) What can we learn from this behaviour? Is this something we want to replicate or not? Why?

#online harassment #tw harassment #tw sui bait #smear campaign #targeted harassment #the cruel irony of accusing someone who is part of minorities that make up most of who nazis targeted of being a nazi #analysis #block evasion #listen the moment i get myself a nice cushy job i can and will take legal action against these types of people #also i may study to become a lawyer. and i will with much excitement take on plaintiffs in harassment and hatecrime cases #witch hunting #internet culture #purity culture #anti purity culture #sui bait tw #if it needs any more trigger tags let me know please #anon you should be publicly humiliated on a bigger platform but unfortunately you attack strangers who are literally just minding #their business #projecting #anon is projecting #anon do you have anything to tell us about your political beliefs 🤨🎤#me when being an anarchist means im a nazi..?#anyway #don't be this guy #don't do this #you look stupid and pope francis or hillary clinton or whomever your idol is isn't going to fuck you #also to my followers dont do what im doing im trying to spread awareness but dont feed or inspire the trolls #hugs to anyone who read this #and if you accidentally stumbled on this and it triggered you please please block sui bait trigger tags i beg you #tumblr ban these idiots faster please </3

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thespacesay · 1 year

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one thing I feel like people miss in the discussions around the ridiculously low pay rates allowed for certain groups of disabled individuals is that in order to effectively change that, we first need to tackle funding for programs that support the types of disabled individuals who receive these pays. while i'm speaking to my personal connections to this, those low pay rates typically are social programs. these programs create jobs that are applied for via social workers assigned to disabled individuals by the state, and not through job applications. they are notoriously underfunded, primarily run by companies or groups who want to be seen as progressive, and typically are shut down rather than given increased funding.

for example: a recent change in a local pay rate for disabled individuals made it so my downs syndrome brother got like... $7 every two weeks (low hours + low pay) instead of $3. cool! for people who need more hours and the money it gives them, that sounds great!

but the thing is, at least for all the programs I know of, these programs are typically designed with people like my brother as the primary goal: adult disabled indiviuals for whom the goal of work is not to have a job, not to make money, but to provide a consistent socialization system. my brother is financially supported by our family, and he's disabled in ways where financial wellbeing is beyond his cognitive abilities. almost no money is put into the programs beyond paying a program manager, and it's generally used as a public "look at us, being so nice to provide for disabled adults!" thing. when my brother's pay went up due to legal changes... the company decided to simply end the program rather than invest in paying more.

again, i'm fully for raising their wages. I think the absolutely pitiful amount of money they're paid for legitimate work is terrible, and i'm well aware that my brother works with others who need what finances they can get through these jobs. but there's more to this than just wages. there's campaigning for better social programs so that there's something for them to fall back on. there's looking into how your local programs for disabled individuals are run, and ensuring they have enough money and equipement to provide a safe working environment for their workers. there's understanding who is paying these wages, what their goals are, and holding them accountable to helping disabled people instead of using people like my brother on an endless stream of advertisements to show how socially progressive they are.

and i'm really not joking about those ads. god, I really, really wish I was. my brother is visibly disabled, adores public attention, and very friendly. he's in like... 3 programs and featured in newsletters or ads probably 3-5 times a year. those programs have also let him wander out the door and not noticed for over an hour, fired program managers for manufactured reasons after they request funding for small but meaningful changes, and... been the local police. guess which group is the only one that never shuts down from a lack of funding?

I honestly can't tell you how best to help disabled people in your area. my needs as a disabled person are vastly different than either of my brothers, and all of us have terrible problems with employment not providing for us in vastly different ways. but if you're just tacking on "disabled people deserve better wages" to a broader "people deserve a living wage" with no nuance, you have got to understand that you can be actively harming the very people you want to support.

#i don't know how best to phrase this all #but just. i'm upset for my brother because when this program shuts down he's losing access to his friends who live in group homes #and i'm upset for his friends who are in turn losing more of their already very limited access to places outside of their house #i'm frustrated in the so-called progressive groups that pushed for this and said nothing when it led to 3/5 of the major programs #for disabled adults in that area who cannot work 'standard' jobs to close #because there was no effort to hold the companies providing those programs accountable to not just... close. fire them. anything like that.#and god knows none of them and none of the families of this group of largely cognitively/physically disabled adults in our area #have any fucking money to hire lawyers to even see if there *is* a case that could be brought #and of course the remaining programs are a new one by a group that i don't trust at all with my brother's health and safety #and the even worse one: the fucking cops!#just... there's probably poorly phrased shit throughout this and i really hope people can provide some better ideas and shit #but this is a personal rant in response to seeing 'progressives' use disability as a cute platform and having a lack of detailed attention #to the ramifications of how they tried to 'help' them #i'm also struggling to try to define like... i'm disabled. i'm not who these conversations are about #these conversations are about a different group of disabled individuals than me #and in the area my brother lives in i'm passingly familiar with a lot of the group of disabled adults who utilize the social programs #these wage conversations typically refer to #and among them i don't think i know any who *can* self advocate about this #also the consistency with which this happens every like. 5 or so years is really terrible #in reference to calling these jobs programs: they are programs. we apply my brother to them via his state social worker

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jethroq · 2 years

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speaking of people who change lawyers a lot, Kanye just fired his divorce lawyed and hired a new one. this is the fifth lawyer.

#alex jones 🤝 kanye west #not listening to any downer lawyers who keep saying shit like #’the facts of the case look bad for you’#’you really shouldn’t escalate the situation by going on rants about active cases on public platforms’

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jamies · 2 years

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im literally fucking crying like the partial results for the elections is devastating

#it’s so fucking hard sometimes to defend the philippines when so many filipinos are fucking STUPID #why the FUCK are you voting for the son of a dictator??????? WHO HAS NO CONCRETE PLATFORM?????#why the FUCK are people voting a fucking misogynist ACTOR over a human rights lawyer who has been working for 30+ years????????#im literally crying like man #i literally have no words left right now #filipino tag

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wikihowtoguides · 29 days

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#Creating an Online Lawyer Consultation Platform | Follow These Steps #lawyer #Making wedsitie #Wikihow

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atohii · 4 months

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Love that Tumblr made a for you page but it's so bad that it's 33% my actual dash 15% the porn bots in my tags 20% posts I missed from my dash (thus making the what you missed tab useless) 14% discourse in fandoms I dont even know about and 18% things that are actually new and relevant to me

#i keep getting bridgerton discourse. i have never watched the show. i have made one (1) thing ever pertaining to it #ON ANOTHER PLATFORM #about people freaking out abt the bridgerton musical lawsuit bcs they thought their fics would be targeted #which first of all i did not crawl through the trenches posting a/n i do not own the characters etc etc on ffn for you to be worried about #your fics on Lawyers: The Website

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webmarketingar · 9 months

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#RC2 #ReadyCOLLECT #CloudBased #WebBased #HOA #Collection #Covenant #Violation #Assessment #Application #Software #Platform #LawFirm #Attorney #Lawyere #HOAIndustry

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dduane · 11 months

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Had an idea you might be able to use for something: Klingon Soap Operas.

(sigh)

Thanks for the thought. I appreciate your kindness!

But unfortunately, because you've sent me the idea and I've read it, I can now not use it, ever. No matter how much I might like to.

This isn't about you, you understand. And in its way it probably seems like a cruel paradox. You were only trying to be helpful! But if I was working on something for Trek and this concept came up even in casual discussion, I would be honor-bound (and contractually required) to inform them that the idea had come to me from a reader or fan. And then—rightly, from their point of view—they would forbid me to use it, because the idea's originator might some day, despite all their friendly intentions now, sue them over it. And the evidence that I was at fault would be easy to obtain. Sending a DM on any major platform generates an electronic "paper trail" that will confirm its target has opened and read the message in question. And that electronic record can be subpoenaed and submitted as evidence, and would stand up in court.

"Oh, come on, who'd do a thing like that, what are the odds...?" people will say. But it's not generally known that I've already been involved in a high-stakes lawsuit in which someone tried to sue Mattel over material I wrote when developing the initial form of the "Barbie: Fairytopia" universe (and the first Fairytopia film) for them. I'd never so much as met or communicated with the person suing them, had never read even a word of their work... but they still went to great trouble and expense attempting to prove that I'd had access to their material and used it without permission.

Mattel won the suit (as I'd frankly been expecting: the attorney handling their defense was one of the most expert IP lawyers in the US). But it gave me the chills... and made it clear how very wrong things could go, and the kind of damage that could be done to my career and my personal life, if I even accidentally used ideas from unauthorized sources.

Seriously, folks. I know you all mean well! But please don't make me tap the sign. DO NOT SEND ME STORY IDEAS, no matter how vague or general or unformed they may be. To do so is to absolutely guarantee that they will never, ever happen.* (And in my own universes, your innocently-meant suggestion could mean that neither you or anyone else will ever see that particular Young Wizards or Middle Kingdoms plot, no matter how much you'd like to... because I take this stuff seriously.)

...Thanks, all.

*This is also why I don't read fanfic set in my universes. Which you also shouldn't send me: please and thank you.

ETA: I would really, really appreciate it if y'all would refrain from giving @eldritchcatpossumamalgam grief in the tags. They made an honest, well-intentioned mistake, that's all, and they don't deserve to be personally raked over the coals for it. (And any of you who think I would derive any kind of satisfaction from that happening plainly don't know me very well.) So thanks in advance for your cooperation.

#fanfic #story ideas #Don't.#Just...#you know...#DON'T.#(thanking you)

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