#project nessie

[infinitemonkeytheory]

#amazon #ftc #project nessie #monopoly #ars technica

[thackeroy]

Finished stitching up the Lock Ness Monster on my Cryptid project by Witchy Stitcher, only four left to go!

#my content #project || cryptids #cross stitch #craftblr #needlework #queer crafts #trans crafter #crafts #crafting #crafter #needlecraft #needlepoint #cross stitcher #witchy stitcher #the witchy stitcher #cryptid #cryptozoology #loch ness monster #nessie

[mouse-fantoms]

Me *gets done crocheting project*: …Well now what to do

My brain: JATP crochet!

Me: We already did that

My brain: …BIGGER GHOSTS-

Me: NO-

#like I got done crocheting a Nessie and that was my thought process #ngl I saw a pattern of how to crochet a beanie and the way my mind went ‘…I could make an orange one and then that’d be Luke’s… I would then #have Luke’s beanie in my possession’ #…but then see if I make that orange beanie then I would need to have a area to keep it and it could just go on a big ghost plush then 👀 #me justifying making one crochet thing to justify another crochet project creation #also I have discovered my toxic trait is being crochet envious like I see a large crochet ghost I am like ‘I could do that 👀’ #my only issue is to make the big verison I would need more yarn but if I do do ya’ll are gonna hear about it #it’s just the way that that was indeed what my brain did #jatp #julie and the phantoms #jatp netflix #crochet

[devil-latte]

Candle the Masquerade Update: July 9th 2022

I did it!

After completely filling up 3 pages (plus margins) worth of brainstorming notes for the Candle the Masquerade project I have finally ironed out my first draft of the scent concepts for all 13+1 clans. @_@

It was important to me to have a spread of scent concepts that are diverse and compliment one another because many people have expressed interest in buying multiple clans' candles in one order. I want to make sure any combination of clans yields a variety of scents and also that each concept has a good amount of thought going into it and references important facets of the clan their themed around.

However I will covetously be keeping this concept list to myself for now until after I do some test pours. It would be a bummer if I hyped you up for a certain scent concept that ended up not working out.

Stay tuned to hear more about the project and the eventual scent reveal in the future.

#candle the masquerade #vampire the masquerade #vtm #nessy says stuff #my projects #prismafire #handmade candles #scented candles

[downthetubes]

Crowdfunding Spotlight: Who Killed Nessie? A Quick Chat with Paul Cornell & Rachael Smith

downthetubes catches up with award-winning comics writer Paul Cornell and award-winning comics writer/artist Rachael Smith to chat about their latest project, Who Killed Nessie?, currently seeking crowdfunding support on Zoop. Every year, legendary creatures from all over the world gather for an annual convention. But never has there been a murder. Who Killed Nessie? is an all-new graphic novel,…

View On WordPress

#Adventure Comics #Crime Comics #Crowdfunded Comic Projects #downthetubes News #Humour Comics #Nap Comix #Paul Cornell #Rachael Smith #Who Killed Nessie #Zoop

[danataiko]

#la vie parisienne #magazine #messy nessy chic #paris #le monocle #cultura inquieta #homosexualidad #vintage #anonymus vintage people #anonymus people project

[mostlysignssomeportents]

How Google’s trial secrecy lets it control the coverage

I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

"Corporate crime" is practically an oxymoron in America. While it's true that the single most consequential and profligate theft in America is wage theft, its mechanisms are so obscure and, well, dull that it's easy to sell us on the false impression that the real problem is shoplifting:

https://newrepublic.com/post/175343/wage-theft-versus-shoplifting-crime

Corporate crime is often hidden behind Dana Clare's Shield Of Boringness, cloaked in euphemisms like "risk and compliance" or that old favorite, "white collar crime":

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/07/solar-panel-for-a-sex-machine/#a-single-proposition

And corporate crime has a kind of performative complexity. The crimes come to us wreathed in specialized jargon and technical terminology that make them hard to discern. Which is wild, because corporate crimes occur on a scale that other crimes – even those committed by organized crime – can't hope to match:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/12/no-criminals-no-crimes/#get-out-of-jail-free-card

But anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. After decades of official tolerance (and even encouragement), corporate criminals are finally in the crosshairs of federal enforcers. Take National Labor Relations Board general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo's ruling in Cemex: when a company takes an illegal action to affect the outcome of a union election, the consequence is now automatic recognition of the union:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/06/goons-ginks-and-company-finks/#if-blood-be-the-price-of-your-cursed-wealth

That's a huge deal. Before, a boss could fire union organizers and intimidate workers, scuttle the union election, and then, months or years later, pay a fine and some back-wages…and the union would be smashed.

The scale of corporate crime is directly proportional to the scale of corporations themselves. Big companies aren't (necessarily) led by worse people, but even small sins committed by the very largest companies can affect millions of lives.

That's why antitrust is so key to fighting corporate crime. To make corporate crimes less harmful, we must keep companies from attaining harmful scale. Big companies aren't just too big to fail and too big to jail – they're also too big for peaceful coexistence with a society of laws.

The revival of antitrust enforcement is such a breath of fresh air, but it's also fighting headwinds. For one thing, there's 40 years of bad precedent from the nightmare years of pro-monopoly Reaganomics to overturn:

https://pluralistic.net/ApexPredator

It's not just precedents in the outcomes of trials, either. Trial procedure has also been remade to favor corporations, with judges helping companies stack the deck in their own favor. The biggest factor here is secrecy: blocking recording devices from courts, refusing to livestream the proceedings, allowing accused corporate criminals to clear the courtroom when their executives take the stand, and redacting or suppressing the exhibits:

https://prospect.org/power/2023-09-27-redacted-case-against-amazon/

When a corporation can hide evidence and testimony from the public and the press, it gains broad latitude to dispute critics, including government enforcers, based on evidence that no one is allowed to see, or, in many cases, even describe. Take Project Nessie, the program that the FTC claims Amazon used to compel third-party sellers to hike prices across many categories of goods:

https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/amazon-used-secret-project-nessie-algorithm-to-raise-prices-6c593706

Amazon told the press that the FTC has "grossly mischaracterize[d]" Project Nessie. The DoJ disagrees, but it can't say why, because the Project Nessie files it based its accusations on have been redacted, at Amazon's insistence. Rather than rebutting Amazon's claim, FTC spokesman Douglas Farrar could only say "We once again call on Amazon to move swiftly to remove the redactions and allow the American public to see the full scope of what we allege are their illegal monopolistic practices."

It's quite a devastating gambit: when critics and prosecutors make specific allegations about corporate crimes, the corporation gets to tell journalists, "No, that's wrong, but you're not allowed to see the reason we say it's wrong."

It's a way to work the refs, to get journalists – or their editors – to wreathe bold claims in endless hedging language, or to avoid reporting on the most shocking allegations altogether. This, in turn, keeps corporate trials out of the public eye, which reassures judges that they can defer to further corporate demands for opacity without facing an outcry.

That's a tactic that serves Google well. When the company was dragged into court by the DoJ Antitrust Division, it demanded – and received – a veil of secrecy that is especially ironic given the company's promise "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful":

https://usvgoogle.org/trial-update-9-22

While this veil has parted somewhat, it is still intact enough to allow the company to work the refs and kill disfavorable reporting from the trial. Last week, Megan Gray – ex-FTC, ex-DuckDuckGo – published an editorial in Wired reporting on her impression of an explosive moment in the Google trial:

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

According to Gray, Google had run a program to mess with the "semantic matching" on queries, silently appending terms to users' searches that caused them to return more ads – and worse results. This generated more revenue for Google, at the expense of advertisers who got billed to serve ads that didn't even match user queries.

Google forcefully disputed this claim:

https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/1709726778170786297

They contacted Gray's editors at Wired, but declined to release all the exhibits and testimony that Gray used to form her conclusions about Google's conduct; instead, they provided a subset of the relevant materials, which cast doubt on Gray's accusations.

Wired removed Gray's piece, with an unsigned notice that "WIRED editorial leadership has determined that the story does not meet our editorial standards. It has been removed":

https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/

But Gray stands by her piece. She admits that she might have gotten some of the fine details wrong, but that these were not material to the overall point of her story, that Google manipulated search queries to serve more ads at the expense of the quality of the results:

https://twitter.com/megangrA/status/1711035354134794529

She says that the piece could and should have been amended to reflect these fine-grained corrections, but that in the absence of a full record of the testimony and exhibits, it was impossible for her to prove to her editors that her piece was substantively correct.

I reviewed the limited evidence that Google permitted to be released and I find her defense compelling. Perhaps you don't. But the only way we can factually resolve this dispute is for Google to release the materials that they claim will exonerate them. And they won't, though this is fully within their power.

I've seen this playbook before. During the early months of the pandemic, a billionaire who owned a notorious cyberwarfare company used UK libel threats to erase this fact from the internet – including my own reporting – on the grounds that the underlying research made small, non-material errors in characterizing a hellishly complex financial Rube Goldberg machine that was, in my opinion, deliberately designed to confuse investigators.

Like the corporate crimes revealed in the Panama Papers and Paradise Papers, the gambit is complicated, but it's not sophisticated:

Make everything as complicated as possible;

Make everything as secret as possible;

Dismiss any accusations by claiming errors in the account of the deliberately complex arrangements, which can't be rectified because the relevant materials are a secret.

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/2023/10/09/working-the-refs/#but-id-have-to-kill-you

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

Image: Jason Rosenberg (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/underpants/12069086054/

CC BY https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

--

Japanexperterna.se (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/japanexperterna/15251188384/

CC BY-SA 2.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/

#pluralistic #secrecy #opacity #google #antitrust #trustbusting #wired #working the refs #megan grey #semantic matching

[robertreich]

How Amazon Is Ripping You Off

Shopping on Amazon? Stop! Watch this first.

Amazon is the world’s biggest online retailer. This one single juggernaut of a company is responsible for nearly 40% of all online sales in America. In an FTC lawsuit, they’re accused of using their mammoth size, and consumers’ dependence on them, to artificially jack up prices as high as possible, while prohibiting sellers on Amazon from charging lower prices anywhere else.

They’re accused of using a secret algorithm, codenamed "Project Nessie," to charge customers an estimated extra $1 billion dollars,

If this isn’t an abuse of power that hurts consumers, what is? So much for all of those “prime” deals you thought you were getting.

Project Nessie isn’t the only trick Amazon has been accused of using to exert its hulking dominance over the online retail industry — leading to higher prices for you.

Much of the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit centers around the treatment of independent merchants who sell items on Amazon’s online superstore — accounting for 60 percent of Amazon's sales.

Amazon allegedly uses strongarm tactics that force these sellers to keep their prices higher than they need to be. Like barring them from selling products for significantly less at other stores — or else risk being hidden in Amazon’s search results or having their sales stopped entirely.

And Amazon is accused of engaging in pay-to-play schemes and charging merchants excessive fees that end up costing you even more.

Independent sellers are effectively forced to pay Amazon to advertise their products prominently in search results. If they don’t fork over cash, then their products get buried underneath products of companies who do. This hurts sellers but also harms shoppers who have to parse through less relevant products that may be more expensive or lower quality.

And to be eligible for the coveted “Prime” badge on their items — which is considered crucial for competing on the platform — independent sellers are pushed into paying Amazon for additional services like warehousing and shipping, even if they could get those services cheaper elsewhere. If sellers forgo trying to qualify for Prime, their goods apparently become harder for customers to find.

When all of these extra fees are added up, Amazon takes around a 50 percent cut of each sale made by a third party. It’s projected that Amazon will earn around $125 billion from collecting fees in the U.S. in 2023, most of which get passed on to you.

By charging all of these extra fees and stifling independent companies from selling their products for less elsewhere, Amazon is using its dominance to essentially set prices for all consumers across the internet.

And when you combine Amazon’s control of ecommerce with all of the other industries it has entered by gobbling up companies — such as Whole Foods, One Medical, and MGM — you’re left with a behemoth that simply has too much power.

This is all part of a much larger problem of growing corporate dominance in America. In over 75% of U.S. industries, fewer companies now control more of their markets than they did twenty years ago.

The lack of competition and consumer choice has resulted in all of us paying more for goods because corporations like Amazon can raise their prices with impunity. By one estimate, corporate concentration has cost the typical American household $5,000 a year more than they would have spent if markets were truly competitive.

This power isn’t just being used to siphon more money from you. A giant corporation has the power to bust unions, keep workers’ wages low, and funnel money into our political system.

It’s a vicious cycle, making giant corporations more and more powerful.

But under the Biden administration, the government is making a strong effort to revive antitrust law and use its power to reign in big corporations that have grown too powerful.

We must stop the monopolization of America. This FTC lawsuit against Amazon is a great start.

#youtube #Amazon #Video #Politics #shopping #Joe Biden #monopoly

[duckprintspress]

Coming Soon: Mythical Creature Pride Pins and Stickers!

Have you been wondering what Duck Prints Press has coming next? Well, wonder no longer, because here we have it – an official announcement!

Our next crowdfunding campaign will be to produce enamel pins and die-cut stickers featuring six mythical creatures in the colors of six Pride flags!

For this project, we are working with the artist Pippin Peacock (personal page | Instagram | Tiktok), who is designing all the artwork and deciding which creatures to pair with which flags. Not all the pairings are settled yet, but they will be within the next week. Our six flags are: wlw flag, mlm flag, asexual flag, bisexual flag, trans flag, and non-binary flag (we’ve got more as stretch goals!). Our creatures include the pictured phoenix, dragons, nessie, pegasus, and more!

We expect to launch this project in mid-March, and it will run for under three weeks; we’ll strive to complete fulfillment so you’ll have your lovely, awesome Pride stickers and pins during Pride month, 2024!

Want to be among the first to know when this project goes live later this month? Make sure you follow our pre-launch page on Kickstarter!

#duck prints press #pride 2024 merch campaign

[theskeptileptic]

Chapter 13 includes:

hot cocoa pranks

bad grandfathers

good Alfreds

BadLessons

a secret

light stalking

heavier stalking

panic attacks

gala behavior

bitchy behavior

rich people being threatened

more backstory

Nessie pajama pants

showers

sleep

forehead kisses (1)

#batman #bruce wayne #tim drake #dick grayson #jason todd #damian wayne #batfam #fanfic

[jemaniacreates]

Splatoon Fanfic Timeline

Remember when I said my fanfic has heavy reliance to the lore? Well, that is at the cost of the timeline.

Since Splatoon moves in real time, it was challenging to arrange the events of the playable story mode without making the past too slow-paced.

To make the story make sense, the goal was to shave a year off the original timeline. To help me out, I took major Splatfests and some directs that mention of the playable story modes. I chose to ignore when the live performances originally took place, moving them to somewhere within the timeline.

Here's a TLDR:

XX15: Hitto (Captain) moves to Inkopolis Plaza and meets Cuttlefish, later defeats Octavio XX16: Pearl and Marina meet, Callie vs Marie Splatfest XX17: Maika (Agent 4) enters Octo Canyon and saves Callie. Hachi and Co fall into Kamabo Co XX18: Hachi leaves Kamabo Co., later moving in with Maika XX19: Hitto is made captain, Hachi and Maika resign from the NSS, Final Splatfest (Splatoon 2) XX20: Pearl and Marina start dating XX21: Maika graduates from high school XX22: Sanne (Neo 3) enters Alterna, Hachi goes on world tour. XX23: Hachi enters the Spire, Sanne saves the world, Shiver becomes leader, Hachi exits the Memverse.

Dual Complexity takes place 2 weeks later.

I want to make it clear that this is a fan canon, and these are just my version of the events prior to the fanfic so that enough people will have context that I couldn't focus too much on in the main story.

Longer Version:

XX15:

Hitto (Captain) moves to Inkopolis Plaza in May. He meets Cuttlefish who tries to warn him about the Octarians. Hitto finally accepts, if it only means getting better at turf wars.

Hitto turns a new leaf and becomes a real agent, defeating Octavio in December, seven months after joining.

XX16:

Pearl and Marina meet in January at Mount Nantai.

Callie vs. Marie Splatfest takes place in July

XX17:

Octavio escapes and begins the “Octo Valley Rehab Project”. We’ll touch more in that when we get to it.

Hitto and Cuttlefish travel to the Cape in May, and the events of the Squid Sisters Stories take place.

Maika (Four) moves to Inkopolis Square for the Summer in July, casually living until she noticed Marie watching her. She follows her to Octo Canyon and stumbles upon the campaign.

Hitto and Cuttlefish survey the cape, encountering Hachi (Eight) in October and falling into the Metro.

Later in early December, Maika saves Callie. So, Octo Canyon took five months to finish.

XX18:

Hachi and Co. escape Kamabo Co in June, taking him eight months to do so (heh).

After staying with OTH, Hachi moves in with Maika in July.

XX19:

Hitto becomes captain in March and has Maika and Hachi resign from the New Squidbeak Splatoon.

Maika and Hachi begin working at Grizz Co. for the time being.

The final Splatfest takes place.

XX20:

Pearl and Marina are officially in a relationship, starting in January.

Hachi is invited to Off the Hook's world tour.

XX21:

Maika graduates from high school. This is the first time she gets contact from Marie since her leave, even if it’s just a casual conversation. She quits Grizz Co. and begins a job as a tutor.

In August, Hachi quits Grizz Co. for the tour.

XX22:

This is where we really start screwing around with the timeline...

In September, the remaining members of the NSS notice some disturbance in the Crater, leaving Cuttlefish to watch Octavio. Octavio somehow escapes, and Cuttlefish goes to Splatsville to find a new agent.

Sanne (Neo 3) starts on Alterna in October, a month after moving to Splatsville, Hachi would end up in the Memverse months later in February (The same time the first Direct for the DLC dropped) when OTH would wrap up their tour.

XX23:

Sanne saves the world shortly before the Nessie vs. Alien vs. Bigfoot Splatfest, when Deep Cut have finally seen the 'monstrosities' they spoke of. This means she was going in and out of Alterna for six months, and given she was not explaining why, it left her in a rough patch with her friend group. She hasn’t completely surveyed the haven however.

Hachi would 100% the Order Spire in September the same year (when the second Direct dropped) and after Shiver was made leader of Deep Cut. This makes the events of Side Order last for eight months, haha.

With OTH's tour over, the trio travel back to drop Hachi home, only to receive a certain message from Marie asking the gang to come back together after five years of radio silence from the NSS.

Two weeks later: Dual Complexity.

#splatoon #splatoon 2 #octo expansion #splatoon 3 #return of the mammalians #side order #splatoon fanfiction #agent 3 #agent 8 #marina ida #new squidbeak splatoon #squid sisters #callie cuttlefish #marie kensaki #pearl houzuki #neo agent 3 #agent 4 #dual complexity #smallfry

[bumblebeeappletree]

We've been developing a community-led native oyster and seagrass restoration project in the Scottish Highlands.

🌾 To support our work you can become a member here: https://mossy.earth

MOSSY EARTH MEMBERSHIP

===============================

The rewilding membership that restores nature across a wide range of ecosystems.

🌲 Support a diversity of ecosystems

🐺 Rewild habitats to bring back biodiversity

🦫 Fund neglected species & ecosystems

Learn more and become a member here: https://mossy.earth

💪 OUR PARTNERS IN THIS VIDEO

===============================

🌊 Moray Ocean Community

IG: @morayoceancommunity

X: @morayocean

CCN:https://www.communitiesforseas.scot/c...

⏱️TIMESTAMPS⏱️

00:00 Intro

01:19 The beginning

03:06 The community

03:26 Nessie

05:19 Drone mapping

07:45 Why we care about these species

08:57 Our tasks

10:41 Going underwater

14:10 Costs

14:52 Our plan

🔎 ABOUT THIS PROJECT

===============================

Native oysters (Ostrea edulis) are considered functionally extinct in many parts of Europe. Native oyster beds were once widespread in the UK and known as ‘the poor man’s food’, but have declined by 95% in the United Kingdom since the mid-19th century. This habitat-forming species would have once been present throughout our coastlines alongside other habitats such as seagrass beds, but now they are either absent or in relatively small, fragmented populations. There are no known remaining wild native oyster populations within the Cromarty Firth, but they were present in the area in the recent past. This community-led marine enhancement project, in partnership with Moray Ocean Community, aims to reintroduce native oysters to the Cromarty firth and generate open access data on the coastal and marine habitats found in the wider area.

Find out more about this project here: https://www.mossy.earth/projects/nati...

#mossy earth #solarpunk #tidalpunk #rewilding #ocean #marine life #sea #coast #water #oysters #marine habitat #sea grass #scotland #europe #uk #Cromarty Firth #Moray Ocean Community #Youtube

[rhinowalker]

Today is finally my birthday! I’m so happy to be 24 years old now, and so grateful for all of you who have supported me through this journey of my life. I’m thankful to be able to share my love and support with you as well as my family and friends around here in this world. I am always thankful to my comfort characters getting to grow so fast, Rataxes is my leading favorite character and the only female character I love so much was Nessie. I am very adored to my comfort characters, Rataxes, Jeffy, Harold Berman, and Nessie, they make a great fit for my comfort and joy. And now that I’m so honored to be a great artist and animator today and have been working hard for this long time of projects for art and animation. Thank you for the support and love of all of your appreciation. Wishing me a wonderful day today of my birthday. 🥳

#jeffy #supermariologan #crossover #sml #hey arnold #harold berman #rhinoceros #smljeffy #lord rataxes #rataxes #babar lord rataxes #babar #ballad of nessie #nessie #danielle rhinoceros #november birthday

[7nessasaryevils]

Figured it might be good to order all my The Sign fics for easier viewing pleasure! Plus, in this way, I offer both hurt and comfort. And the smut… cannot forget the smut 🤣♥️

#the sign #the sign bl #the sign the series #bl series #thailand bl #idol factory #the sign spoilers #the sign cast #the sign phaya #the sign tharn #phaya x tharn #tharnphaya #phayatharn #yai the sign #yaisand #khemthongthai #chalothon #Singh #naga #Garuda #ao3 #ao3feed #ao3 fanfic #ao3 writer #ao3fic #ao3 link #series

[barbwritesstuff]

Girl, you been hella busy with all these projects!! How do you keep everything straight??? I do hope you're eating, sleeping, and getting some downtime! We appreciate all you do as fans, but don't overdo it! We love you!! Thank you for all your hard work ! But remember it's ok to take a break every now and then!

~a slightly concerned Nessy

I just really like writing. I hope it's okay. I know I've done a few projects this year, but I've been taking care of myself. I want to make writing my career, but I'm also aware how hard that is to do, so I've been doing a lot of experimenting and exploring. I hope that makes sense.

[holdingup-fallingsky]

rules: find out what color your aura is through this quiz, and then make a moodboard with that color.

I got tagged by @nessie-stardust and @jmkho (thank you!!!)

I got orange!

guitars, fanta bottles, sunglasses, orange peels, butterflies, popsicles, paper lanterns. your essence is orange: dreams hold you aloft and inspire you to be better. you thrive on creativity; there is always a new inspiration that moves you and takes your heart. you draw friends but may show all of them the same smile. you are the restless. you are the adventurer. you find kinship in like-minded individuals of apricot, amber, fire, and terracotta, who share your enthusiasm. you are also drawn to the pensive souls blue and green, who will help you grow and see which projects and emotions are worth your time. however, you may struggle to get along with the headstrong personalities of grey and purple who are too rigid in their perspective.

I tag @ofthecaravel @satans-helper @joshsindigostreak @currentlyfangirling10 @runwayblues

#tag game #this honestly is not the color I thought I’d get #but I love it