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digitalmidnight · 2 years

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Character interaction headcannons excluding the Dream Team

Susie and Magolor have many intelligent debates about technology. Susie believes modern technology is better and Magolor argues that ancient technology is better. They never will come to an agreement and the debates are all in good fun.

Prince Fluff is friends with many Waddle Dees. Beyond that, he is unknown to the people of Dreamland.

Daroach and Dark Meta Knight have a whole sworn partners gimmick as well, but only when Daroach is on "solo" missions. Dark Meta Knight does not show up when the rest of the Squeak Squad is around

Susie, Magolor, Marx and Dark Meta Knight all have a "Hey you can't bully him, I'm the only one who can bully him" relationship with Taranza.

Taranza finds Susie, Magolor and Marx a tad too high energy for him, and Dark Meta Knight still reminds him of the mirror, but he enjoys his friends company (even if they drain his social battery)

Ribbon was wary of Waddle Doos because of Waddle Dee?. She knows now that they are fine and never let her bias show.

Marx takes the side of whoever last gave him food. His friends joke his loyalty is only tied to food, yet Marx would stand with his friends if given the opportunity. Opportunity has not arisen yet.

Adeline and Elline are "art rivals". They have (literal) art fights with one another to test their skills when they see one another. They are both highly competitive and hate to lose. It's all in good fun, or so they say.

Gooey vaguely remembers many people in the sense he remembers they are friends, but not many important details. He is just happy to be included.

Ribbon and Elfilin made fast friends with one another, but due to matters in their homeland they barely get to see one another

Besides Magolor, the only other friend the Lor has "talked" to is Taranza, where it soothes him about the loss. Taranza is unaware why he feels happier aboard the Lor, figuring it is just because he is around friends.

Queen Sectonia met with Papi. They keep one another company in the after life. They have met other familiar faces there too, yet the others don't interact with them. Queen Sectonia is back in her orginal form and grows flowers for them both, even if neither of them can enjoy them as they did in life.

Kracko and Whispy Woods are on good terms. During drought, Kracko makes sure Whispy Woods is doing well. They often pass the days away just talking.

Susie has little to no friends who were not once villains themselves

Lololo and Lalala host the Meta-Knights for tea at their castle whenever possible. They are largely unaffected by the happenings in Dreamland and are amused to hear these tales second-hand

Marx has met Papi

Dark Meta Knight likes to help out his friends. He would not be caught dead helping his friends. They will sometimes find rare items that they have been wanting for awhile on their doorsteps, unaware of how it got there.

Ribbon is fine with ChuChu. ChuChu is not fine with Ribbon. ChuChu figures every action of Ribbon's is passive aggressive, while Ribbon doesn't get why they aren't friends.

The Squeak Squad and the Meta-Knights have a friendly rivalry where they each talk up their respective leaders. They all know its in good fun and they respect both leaders.

Marx and Gooey have traveled together across Popstar for long periods of time without issue with one another. They both are a menace to wherever they visit together though, as both of them have a hearty appetite and a knack for mischief.

The citizens of Dreamland (Burning Leo, Chilly, Poppy Bros Jr. Etc.) are all a close knit community, however suffer from mob mentality. They will help one another out, but rumors spread like wildfire.

The Three Mage Sisters flip-flop between "Kirby is our friend(?) and the friends of my friend are also our friends(?)" And "They probably don't want to be friends with us because the whole incident thing". They don't know of any of the others backstory and remain distant, yet polite, acquaintances.

Marx, Taranza and Gooey are slightly closer than the others in their friend group as they are the ones who stay on Popstar the most. However, if they had to name a favorite friend in the friend group, none of them would choose one another.

Rick, Kine and Coo are still wary of anyone who they know has threatened the safety of Dreamland.

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hussyknee · 1 year

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i'm so confused rn, can you explain the goncharov thing?? i get off tumblr for five minutes

(Edits closed as of 28 Nov.)

Lmaoooo

Nah I getchu. So this post has been circulating for like two years:

Link to post.

But yesterday, it had inspired someone to do this:

Link to post.

Next thing I knew there were fake Letterboxed reviews.

Goncharov moodboards. Really good ones.

Link to post.

Meta analysis. So many fake meta essays. Disturbingly good ones. And of course the memes. (Edit: HAVE I SAID THIS SHIT IS DISTURBING)

As you can see, the myth just started to grow, characters and ships and tropes being added one after the other, almost bizzarely without contradiction, until there was enough of shape to the whole thing for people to start posting fanfic about it on AO3. "No beta we die like ice-pick Joe" is already a tag.

Link to post.

It was hilarious in the beginning, but the way it's developed within less than a day, kind of like it's being willed into existence, is freaking me out a bit. We're toying with powers beyond our comprehension. 😂😂😂

Link to post.

Of course, there could be an ulterior motive as well.

Link to post (tags mine).

Edit: guys, please tag these posts "unreality" so people with disassociation issues can filter them out (not this one, this is an explainer). <3

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Edit 2: Aparently the boots in the original post are actually referring to a movie called Gomorrah that came out in 2008, directed by Mateo Garrone, based on the Scampia Feud. And other people had also been making posts about the fake movie for a while before the poster took off.

found by @thepotch

Edit 3: Explainer: why did those boots have this movie on them anyway?

Edit 4: Alt text added to all images courtesy of @valentineish ❤️

Edit 5: Turns out tumblr has done this kind of thing before. Nine years in this hell place and I had to have "Squiddles" and penis smp explained in the replies.

Edit 6: This post collects the Lore so far.

Edit 7: Lynda Carter (real one)/ earns more/ Tumblr cred.

Edit 8: Holy shit y'all we have the theme music. With sheet music. And it's on Spotify!

Edit 9: THERE IS A TRAILER WITH THE THEME MUSIC

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I made this post 18 hours after the movie poster went up. Closed edits 27 hours after first posting. So all of the above happened within 45 hours of the movie poster going up.

Edit 10: Google document live-compiling all the lore so far (Day 3)

Edit 11: Masterpost of Goncharov soundtracks (Day 3)

Edit 12: Entertainment news articles covering the Gonch-posting (real) (Contd from yday)

Edit 13: The music from the masterpost all compiled into a 31-minute original score with video edits on YouTube (edit: unfortunately taken down)

Edit 14: Staff's Goncharov art showcase for Tumblr Tuesday

As of closing on Day 3 there are 371 works in the AO3 tag.

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Updating with Day 3 shenanigans I missed yesterday:

Edit 15: Goncharov TV Tropes page

Edit 16: Ethics of Gonchposting

Important PSA 1 (how to reduce harm to Tumblr's neurodivergents)

Important PSA 2 (reality affirmation, anti-bullying)

Important PSA 3 (why you should stop trying to vandalise legit information sites)

Edit 17: Character lore from beezlebub whose poster they originated from

Edit 18: What we know about/ Director Matteo JWHJ0715 (#unreality)

Edit 19: Link to post with screenshotted and described NYT article (scroll down) and this golden exerpt from BuzzFeed: 💀

(alt text included)

End of Day 4 there are now 485 works in the Goncharov tag on AO3

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Didn't get to update this on Day 5, so these are the Day 5 doings:

More trailers!

Trailer 1 (My favourite)

Trailer 2

Trailer 3

Trailer 4

I also just found out about the Goncharov Game Jam.

It appears this opened a day after after the meme took off.

Goncharov was first entered into Wikipedia between Day 4 and 5 (attempts to vandalise it with fake info don't count, incidentally – please knock that shit off) under List of Internet Phenomena. This was then expanded into its own Wikipedia page at the end of Day 5 because, according to the talk history: "the topic now meets the notability threshold for its own artice due to significant coverage in The New York Times and other sources cited." We're on Wikipedia, people!

And then we made The Guardian half a day later. So while the meme is definitely dying down to embers by now, it still stays winning.

YouTube channels with episodes on the meme:

InformOverlord (4:30)

Lessons in Meme Culture (2:43)

End of Day of 5 there were 511 works on AO3, and End of Day 6 (today) there are 556.

🚨BREAKING 🚨 from Martin Scorsese's daughter's TikTok (real actual)

tw: unreality:

We did it you guys!

Clarification: Francesca Scorcese asked her Dad about the meme and Martin played along. Please reblog this PSA to help Tumblr people with psychosis. Thanks.

Final edit: Day 8. Media reactions to Scorcese's TikTok (everyone from Forbes to Vulture). That one Tumblr user who said they'd do a screenplay if their post got notes has promised to shoot a single scene, but please don't be dicks just because you reblogged it; leave them alone until they get around to it themselves. As of end of Day 8 there are 609 works in the AO3 tag. I love all you lunatics. Peace! ❤️

#goncharov 1973 #reasons i can never leave this hellsite #we've ascended from pirating criterion movies to straight up manifesting them into existence #get on our level twits #knee of huss #goncharov #tumblr lore #tumblr memes #tumblr culture

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greatandquestionablecontent · 7 months

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I have Plans for whumptober! I have one fic that's written and needs to be edited, and then one that I'll write at some point between now and the end of the month. I was hoping to do some more and I might still do other prompts, but at the very least I'll commit to these two.

MORE MOUNTAIN SEQUENCE BULLSHIT

“I’ll take one final step, all you have to do is make me” (Whumptober Day 19, 2023) -- Delta has gone to get help, leaving Jade and Ari alone in a cave to wait. Jade decides she’s done waiting, and guided by a mysterious voice, brings Ari along with her to an unknown fate. Written but unedited.

“Not much longer...” | Bridal Carry | Borrowed Clothing (Whumptober Day 30) -- Jade and Ari get rescued! They are not well. Hurt/comfort, magical healing, etc. Unwritten, but I've got some scribbles about it.

#meta and rambles #stay tuned #harass me if i dont post these by the end of the month lmao #im so hyped about the day 19 one #its in my docs/outline titled DRAG HER #which is a lot less poetic than that lyric but also so much more ominous >:)#whumptober 2023

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ichigokeks · 2 years

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Animal symbolism || sharks

As mentioned in previous chapters He Cheng raised multiple sharks which Mo Guan Shan found fascinating but scary. Sharks are perceived as dangerous by most people due to their aggressive presentation in media. Sharks, however, symbolise authority, knowledge, efficiency and opportunity.

He Cheng is the shark in He Tian's life. To most people he is scary and it is jarring to meet him. But to He Tian he is the one to raise him and guide him, he is the one who has a solution for everything and can take care of anything. He is the most powerful man in the story (as of yet).

#19 days #old xian #19 days update #he tian #he cheng #19 days analysis #19 days meta #19 days edit

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im-totally-not-an-alien-2 · 6 months

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Halloween prompts year 2 day 19

Bruce felt the wind rushing through his hair as he fell. The batsuit he was wearing only seconds ago was nowhere on his person not did he have any tools or a utility belt, only an unfamiliar tshirt and jeans and the much smaller body of a child.

Below him was a snowy landscape filled with trees and no sign of civilization nearby. Just as Bruce was preparing to do a very painful landing maneuver to save himself he just...stopped. He thought for a moment that one of the supers had come to rescue him as he slowly drifted down, much like the snowflakes that had started to come down around him but he was still alone.

Alright. So hes bodyswapped with a meta. He can work with this.

Elsewhere Danny finds himself in the body of freaking Batman in the middle of a Justice League fight where Batman had just been hit with unidentified magic from an unknown creature.

Just his luck. Its a ghost and he doesn't have his powers. But at least he knows how to make weapons thanks to his parents

Bruce proceeds to have to deal with dannys grocery list of powers and figure out how to control them while looking for civilization

Danny is trying really hard not to be outed as a fake Batman cause he doesn't know the Justice League doesn't actually support the anti-ecto acts

#halloween prompts #dpxdc #prompts #they are both having a time. not a good time but definitely a time

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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months

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Zuck’s gravity-defying metaverse money-pit

Tomorrow (Oct 31) at 10hPT, the Internet Archive is livestreaming my presentation on my recent book, The Internet Con.

Think of everything that makes you miserable as being caught between two opposing, irresistible, irrefutable truths:

"Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops" (Stein's Law)

"Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" (Keynes)

Both of these are true, even though they seemingly contradict one another, and no one embodies that contradiction more perfectly than Mark Zuckerberg.

Take the metaverse.

Zuck's "pivot" to a virtual world he ripped off from a quarter-century old cyberpunk novel (reminder: cyberpunk is a warning, not a suggestion) was born of desperation.

Zuck fancies himself an avatar of the Emperor Augustus (that's why he has that haircut) (no, really). The emperors of antiquity are infamous for getting all weepy when they run out of lands to conquer.

But the lachrymosity of emperors has little causal relationship to the anxieties of tech monopolists! Alexander weeps because he just loves a good conquest and when he finishes conquering the world, he's terminally bored. That's not Zuck's problem at all. When Zuck attains monopoly status, his company develops an autoimmune disorder, as his vicious princelings run out of enemies to destroy and begin to knife one another.

Any monopoly faces these destructive microincentives, but tech is exceptional here because tech has the realtime flexibility and speed that brick-and-mortar businesses can never match:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

Sociopaths with tech monopolies are worse for the same reason that road-rage would be worse in a flying car: adding new capacity to indiscriminate self-destructive urges turns ordinary car crashes into low-level airburst warfare:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

The flexibility of digital gives tech platforms so much latitude to break things in tiny increments. A tech platform is like a Jenga tower composed of infinitely divisible blocks. The Jenga players are the product managers and executives who have run out of the ability to grow by attracting new business thanks to their monopoly dominance. Now they compete with one another to increase the yield from their respective divisions by visiting pain upon the business customers and end users their platform connects. By tiny increments, they increase the product's cost, lower its reliability, and strip it of its utility and then charge rent to restore its functionality:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/24/cursed-bigness/#incentives-matter

This is the terminal stage of enshittification, the unstoppable autocannibalism of platforms as they seek to harvest all the value created by business customers and end users, leaving the absolute minimum of residual value needed to keep both stuck to the platform. This is a brittle equilibrium, because the difference between "I hate this service but I just can't stop using it," and "Get me the fuck out of here" is razor-thin.

All it takes is one tiny push – a whistleblower, a livestreamed mass-shooting, a Cambridge Analytica – and people bolt for the doors. This triggers the final stage: the "pivot," which is a tech euphemism for "panic."

For Zuck, the pivot got real after a disappointing earnings call triggered a mass sell-off of Facebook stock, history's worst one-day value incineration, which lopped a quarter of a trillion dollars off the company's market cap:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-19/dramatic-stock-moves-of-2022-led-by-meta-dive-nordic-flash-crash

This was when the metaverse became the company's top priority.

Now, in my theory of enshittification, the step that follows the pivot is death: "Finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die":

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

Many people have asked me about the conspicuous non-death of Facebook! That's where I have to fall back on Stein's Law: "Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops." Facebook can't continue to annihilate value, alienate its workers, harm the public, hemorrhage money in support of a mediocrity's cherished folly forever. Can it?

Admittedly, it sure seems like it can. Facebook's metaverse pivot has thus far cost the company $46,500,000,000. That is: $46.5 billion. That's even more money than Uber torched, seeking to maintain the illusion that they will be able to create monopolies on both transport and the labor market for driving and recoup the billions the Saudi royal family let them use for the con:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/11/bezzlers-gonna-bezzle/#gryft

Don't worry: the Saudi royals are fine! They cashed out at the IPO, collecting a tidy profit at the expense of retail investors who assumed that a pile of shit as big as Uber must have a pony under it, somewhere:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

Uber has doubled the cost of rides and halved drivers' wages, using illegal gimmicks like "algorithmic wage discrimination" to squeeze a little more juice out of the nearly exhausted husks of its workforce:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

But Stein's Law hasn't been repealed. Drivers can't drive for sub-subsistence wages. Do that long enough and they'll literally starve: that's what "subsistence" means. We lost a decade of transit investment thanks to the Uber con, at the same time as traditional taxi drivers were forced out of the industry. Uber can't be profitable and still pay a living wage, and the fantasy of self-driving cars as a means of zeroing out the wage-bill altogether remains stubbornly, lethally unworkable:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Which means we're at the point where you can get off a commuter train at a main station and find yourself stranded: no taxis at the taxi-queue, no busses due for an hour, and no Uber cars available unless you're willing to pay $95 for a ten-minute ride in a luxury SUV (why yes, this did happen to me recently, thanks for asking).

As more and more of us are exposed to these micro-crises, the political will to do something will increase. This can't go on forever. "Don't use commuter rail" isn't a viable option. "Walk three miles each way to the commuter rail station" isn't viable either. Neither is "Pay $95 for an Uber to get to the station." Something's gotta give…eventually.

"Eventually" is the key word here. Remember the corollary of Stein's Law: Keynes's maxim that "markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Sure, anything that can't go on forever eventually stops, but that is no guarantee of a soft landing. You can't smoke two packs a day forever – but in the absence of smoking cessation, the eventual terminus of that habit is stage-four lung cancer. Keep hammering butts into your face and your last smoke will come out a crematorium chimney.

Zuckerberg hasn't merely blown a whole-ass Twitter on the metaverse with nothing to show for it – he's gotten richer while doing it! In the past year, his net worth increased by 130%, to $59 billion, thanks to an increase in Facebook's share-price, driven by investors who stubbornly remain irrational, keeping the Boy Emperor solvent long past any reasonable assessment of his performance.

What are these investors betting on? One possibility is that the rise and rise of Facebook's share-price represents a bet on technofeudalism. Since the Communist Manifesto, Marxists have been predicting the end of capitalism. That end seems to have come, but what followed capitalism wasn't socialism, it was the return of feudalism, an economic system where elites derive their wealth from rents, not profits:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

Profit is the income you get from investing in capital – machinery, systems, plant – and then harvesting the surplus value created by workers who mobilize this capital. Capitalism produces massive returns for its winners – in the Manifesto's first chapter, Marx and Engels just geek out about how productive and dynamic this system is.

But capitalism is also a Red Queen's Race, where the winners have to run faster and faster to stay in the same place. Capitalism drives competition, as other would-be winners pile into the sector, replicating the systems that the current winners are using and then improving on them. This is why the prophets of capitalist end-times like the FBI informant Peter Thiel say that "competition is for losers."

Capitalism's "profits" stand in contrast to the feudalist's "rents." Rents are income you get from owning something that other people need to produce things. The capitalist owns the coffee-shop, but the feudalist owns the building. When a rival capitalist opens a superior coffee-shop and drives the old shop out of business, the capitalist loses, but the rentier wins. Now they can rent out an empty storefront in the neighborhood everyone's coming to because of that hot new cafe.

Feudal and manorial lords also made their fortunes by extracting surplus value from workers, but these rentiers don't care about owning the means of production. The peasant in the field pays for their own agricultural equipment and livestock – control over the means of production is necessary for worker liberation, but it's not sufficient. The worker's co-op that owns its factory can still find the value it produces bled off by the landlord who owns the land the factory sits on.

The jury's still out on whether American workers really see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires," but America's capitalists have a palpable, undeniable loathing for capitalism. The dream of an American "entrepreneur" is *PassiveIncome: money you get from owning something capitalists and/or workers use to create value. Digital technology creates exciting new possibilities for rent-extraction: a taxi-operator had to buy and maintain a car that someone else drove. Uber can offload this hassle onto its drivers and rent out access to the chokepoint it created between drivers and riders, charging all the traffic can bear. This is feudalism in the cloud – or as Yannis Varoufakis calls it, cloudalism.

In Varoufakis's Technofeudalism, he describes Amazon as a feudal venture. From a distance, Amazon seems like a bustling marketplace of manic capitalism, with sellers avidly competing to offer more variety and lower costs in a million independently operated storefronts. But closer inspection reveals that Amazon is a planned economy, not a market.

Every one of those storefronts pays rent to the same landlord – Amazon – which determines which goods can be offered for sale. Amazon sets pricing for those goods, and extracts 45-51% of every dollar those sellers make. Amazon even controls which goods are shelved at eye-height when you enter the store, and which ones are banished to a dusty storeroom in a distant sub-basement you'll never find:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/14/flywheel-shyster-and-flywheel/#unfulfilled-by-amazon

Zuck's metaverse is pure-play technofeudalism, Amazon taken to the logical extreme. It's easy to get distracted by the part of Zuck's vision that will convert us all into legless, sexless, heavily surveilled low-resolution cartoon characters. But the real action isn't this digitization of our fleshy wants and needs. Zuck didn't spend $46.5B to torment us.

The cruelty isn't the point of the metaverse.

The point of the metaverse is to rent us out to capitalists.

Zuck doesn't know why we would use the metaverse, but he believes that if he can convince capitalists that we all want to live there, that they'll invest the capital to figure out how to serve us there, and then he can extract rent from those capitalists and start earning "passive income." It's an Uber for Cyberpunk Dystopias play.

Zuck's done this before. Remember the "pivot to video?" Zuckerberg wanted to compete with Youtube, but he didn't want to invest in paying for video production. Videos are really expensive to produce and the median video gets zero views. So Zuck used his captive audience to trick publishers into financing his move into video. He fraudulently told publishers that videos were blowing up on Facebook, outperforming boring old text by vast margins.

Publishers borrowed billions and raised billions more in the capital markets, financing the total conversion of newsrooms from text to video and precipitating a mass extinction event for print journalists. Zuck kept the con alive by giving away (fewer) billions to some of those publishers, falsely claiming that their videos were generating fortunes in advertising revenue. These lucky, credulous publishers became judas goats for their industry, luring others into the con, the same way that the "lucky" guy a carny lets win a giant teddy-bear at the start of the day lures others into putting down $5 to see if they can sink three balls in a rigged peach-basket.

But when we stubbornly refused to watch videos on Facebook, Zuck stopped spreading around these convincer payouts, and precipitated a second mass-extinction event in news media, as the new generation of video journalists joined their predecessors in Facebook-driven unemployment. Given this history, it's surreal to see publishers continue to insist that Facebook is stealing their content, when it is so clearly stealing their money:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/saving-news-big-tech

Metaverse is the new Pivot to Video. Zuckerberg is building a new world, which he will own, and he wants rent it to capitalists, who will compete with one another in just the way that Amazon's sellers compete. No matter who wins that competition, Zuckerberg will win. The prize for winning will be a rent increase, as Zuckerberg leverages the fact that your "successful" business relies on Facebook's metaverse to drain off all the value your workers have produced:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/

This can't last forever, but how long until Zuck's reality distortion field runs out of battery? That's the $46.5B question.

The market can certainly remain irrational for a hell of a long time. But the market isn't the only force that regulates corporate outcomes. Regulators also regulate. Europe's GDPR is now seven years old, and it plainly outlaws Facebook's surveillance.

For nearly a decade, Facebook has pretended that this wasn't true, and they got away with it. Mostly, that's thanks to the fact that Ireland is a corporate crime-haven with a worse-than-useless Data Protection Commission:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

But anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. Facebook has finally been dragged into EU federal jurisdiction, where it will face exterminatory fines if it continues to spy on Europeans:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/07/luck-of-the-irish/#schrems-revenge

In response, Facebook has rolled out a subscription version of its main service and its anticompetitive acquisition, Instagram:

https://about.fb.com/news/2023/10/facebook-and-instagram-to-offer-subscription-for-no-ads-in-europe/

For €10/month, Facebook will give you an ad-free experience across its service offerings (it's €13/month if you pay through an app, as Facebook recoups the 30% #AdTax rents that the feudal Google/Apple mobile duopoly extracts).

But this doesn't come close to satisfying Facebook's legal obligations under the GDPR. The GDPR doesn't ban ads, it bans spying. Facebook spies on every single internet user, all the time. The apps we use are built with "free" Facebook toolkits that extract rent from the capitalists who make them by harvesting our data as we use their apps. The web-pages we visit have embedded Facebook libraries that do the same thing for web publishers. Facebook buys our data from brokers. Facebook has so many ways of spying on us that there's almost certainly no way for Facebook to stop spying on you, without radically transforming it operation.

To comply with the GDPR, Facebook must halt surveillance advertising altogether. There's no way to square "spying on users" with "you can't surveil without explicit consent, and you can't punish people for refusing."

And of course, "not spying" isn't the same as "not advertising." "Contextual advertising" – where ads are placed based on the thing you're looking at, not who you are and what you do – is hundreds of years old. Context ads underperform surveillance ads by a slim margin – about 5% – but they're vastly more profitable for publishers. That's because surveillance ads are feudal, controlled by rentiers like Facebook, who own vast troves of the surveillance data needed to run these ads. Traditional ad intermediaries (agencies, brokers) took 10-15% out of the total advertising market. Ad-tech companies – the Google/Facebook duopoly – take 51% out of every ad dollar spent.

Eliminate surveillance ads and you torch their feudal estates. Facebook will always know more about someone reading a news article than the publisher – but the publisher will always know more about the article than Facebook does:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

There are rents under capitalism, just as there are profits under feudalism. The defining characteristic of a system is what happens when rents and profits come into conflict. If profits win – for example, if productive companies beat patent trolls, or if news publishers escape Facebook's rent-extraction – then the system is capitalist. If rents win – if investors continue to bet large on the metaverse as its losses pass $50 billion and head for the $100 billion mark – then the system is feudal.

Anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop. The question isn't whether the platforms will eventually become so enshittified that they die – the question is whether they will go down in an all-consuming fireball, or whether they'll go down in a controlled demolition that lets us evacuate the people they've trapped inside them first:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/09/let-the-platforms-burn/

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/2023/10/30/markets-remaining-irrational/#steins-law

Image: Diego Delso (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Puente_de_las_cataratas_Victoria,_Zambia-Zimbabue,_2018-07-27,_DD_10.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

#pluralistic #mark zuckerberg #meta #enshittification #facebook #twitter #elon musk #billionaires #follies #failing up #metaverse #steins law #big tech #technofeudalism

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rageserenity · 1 month

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It's 2024. Are you still thinking about movieverse!Cherik? Because I am.

For the past several months, there's only been a very slow trickle of posts/fics in the xmcu cherik tag. Let's try to breathe some life back into this incredible pairing!

With one clear winner of my poll, here's thirty prompts for the thirty days of April. (This is a super chill, laid-back event---do these in any order, interpret them as loosely as you like! Create in any medium! Fic, art, gifs, meta, incoherent screaming about the otp…all winners in my book.)

The only rule here is to cherik too close to the sun. Alright. Here are the prompts.

Mutual Pining

Doesn't really even need elaboration! Write that horrifically slow slow-burn. Gif every time McAvoy made insane fuck me eyes on screen. Make a playlist of songs about impossible love.

2. Alternate Meetings

There are endless quotes about how these two complete each other in a way no one they'd met before or after ever did. How else could they have met?

3. Erik Has A Telepathy Kink

This is basically canon. Let my boy get freaky!

4. Canon Fix-It

All the times Fox fucked it up. There are endless options.

5. Hurt/Comfort

Put them in that Situation. Put them in that Blender. Break them apart and put them back together ❤️‍🩹

6. Canon Compliant

Draw that missing scene! Gif your favourite cherik moment!

7. Beach Divorce

Make it worse. Make it better. Show it to us exactly how it was. Break it down in a 3,000 word meta. Go wild!

8. Domestics

Sometimes you just want to see them doing normal couple things. Erik put the gun down.

9. Found Family

The real heart of x-men!

10. Time Travel

There are SO many possibilities here. Stick them in a time loop. Give them a chance to change their past.

11. AU

Love a good AU!

12. There Is Only One Bed

Had to get this one in here. What better way to amp up the tension?

13. Genosha

By some miracle, cherik actually did end up together at the end of 2019s trash bag disaster Dark Phoenix. We aren’t making a big enough deal about this.

14. Declaration(s) of Love

Who says it first? How do they say it and when? Have they said it…without saying it?

15. Jealousy

Need I say more.

16. Reunion

These two have absolutely no chill.

17. Soulmates

Classic prompt, had to get this in here too.

18. The DOFP Aircraft

The TENSION here. Break it down for me. How does Charles feel about his injury? How does Erik feel about his injury?

19. Gay Mutant Road Trip

You already know.

20. Body Swap

SO fun when people have superpowers.

21. First Kiss

When? How? Who initiated it?

22. The Mansion

Mansion!content is a genre of its own.

23. Conflicting Ideology

Give me your theses. Who’s right? Can they ever reconcile completely? Write a fic where it drives them apart.

24. Sebastian Shaw

A trope unto himself.

25. Team As Matchmaker

They had to have known something was going on, didn’t they?

26. Cooking

Charles deserves a good meal. Also, imagine Erik using his powers in the kitchen. The sheer domesticity…

27. Hurt No Comfort

Plenty of scope with these two 🥲

28. Growing Old Together

Giving Sirs Ian Mckellan and Patrick Stewart their props as well!

29. Making Up

*pushes chess board across the table* sorry babe

30. Charles Xavier Did More For Mutants Than You'll Ever Know

Rising to each other’s defense. Only I can insult this man.

I will be tracking #revivecherik to reblog stuff! Here’s a fic collection for the same. Let’s get this ball rolling! Please feel free to send me an ask if you’ve got anything to say! And most importantly, let’s all have fun 😁

*I know a few of you preferred something like a gift exchange because of the commitment factor—I’m super down to organise a tiny one for the handful of us! If this promptathon doesn’t flop horribly, we can hopefully do a whole bunch of stuff :)

If you read this post all the way through, please reblog for reach! Thank you! Hoping you participate come April.

Shoutout to @inmymagnetoera for reaching out and helping with this!

#revivecherik #cherik #charles xavier #erik lehnsherr #xmfc #james mcavoy #michael fassbender #x men days of future past #x men #charles x erik #magneto #professor x

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hamletthedane · 8 months

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Hamlet’s Age

Not to bring up an age-old debate that doesn’t even matter, but I have been thinking recently how interesting Hamlet’s age is both in-text and as meta-text.

To summarize a whole lot of discussion, we basically only have the following clues as to Hamlet’s age:

Hamlet and Horatio are both college students at Wittenberg. In Early Modern/Late Renaissance Europe, noble boys typically began their university education at 14 and usually completed at their Bachelor’s degree by 18 or 19. However, they may have been studying for their Master’s degrees, which was typically awarded by age 25 at the latest. For reference, contemporary Kit Marlowe was a pretty late bloomer who received a bachelor’s degree at 20 and a master’s degree at 23.

Hamlet is AGGRESSIVELY described as a “youth” by many different characters - I believe more than any other male shakespeare character (other than 16yo Romeo). While usage could vary, Shakespeare tended to use “youth” to mean a man in his late teens/very early 20s (actually, he mostly uses it to describe beardless ‘men’ who are actually crossdressing women - likely literally played by young men in their late teens)

King Hamlet is old enough to be grey-haired, but Queen Gertrude is young enough to have additional children (or so Hamlet strongly implies)

Hamlet talks about plucking out the hairs of his beard, so he is old enough to at least theoretically have a beard

In the folio version, the gravedigger says he became a gravedigger the day of Hamlet’s birth, and that he’s be “sixteene here, man and boy, thirty years.” However, it’s unclear if “sixteene” means “sixteen” or “sexton” (ie has he worked here for 16 years but is 30 years old, or has he been sexton there for thirty years?)

Hamlet knew Yorick as a young child, and the gravedigger says Yorick was buried 23 years ago. However, the first quarto version version of Hamlet says “dozen years” instead of “three and twenty.” This suggests the line changed over time. (Or that the bad quarto sucks - I really need to make that post about it, huh…)

Yorick is a skull, and according to the gravedigger’s expertise, he has thus been dead for at least 7-8 years - implying Hamlet is at least ~15yo if he remembers Yorick from his childhood

One important thing sometimes overlooked - Claudius takes the throne at King Hamlet’s death, not Prince Hamlet. That is mostly a commentary on English and French monarchist politics at the time, but it is strange within the internal text. A thirty year old Hamlet presumably would have become the new monarch, not the married-in uncle (unless Gertrude is the vehicle through which the crown passes a la Mary I/Phillip II - certainly food for thought)

Honestly, Hamlet is SO aggressively described as being very young that I’m fairly confident the in-text intention is to have him be around 18-23yo. Placing his age at 30yo simply does not make much sense in the context of his descriptors, his narrative role, and his status as a university student.

However, it doesn’t really matter what the “right” answer is, because the confusion itself is what makes the gravedigger scene so interesting and metatextual. We can basically assume one of the following, given the folio text:

Hamlet really is meant to be 30yo, and that was supposed to surprise or imply something to the contemporary audience that is now lost to us

Older actors were playing Hamlet by the time the folio was written down, and the gravedigger’s description was an in-text justification of the seeming disconnect between age of actor and description of “youth”

Older actors were playing Hamlet by the time the folio was set down, and the gravedigger’s description was an in-text JOKE making fun of the fact that a 30-something year old is playing a high-school aged boy. This makes sense, as the gravedigger is a clown and Hamlet is a play that constantly pokes fun at its own tropes and breaks the fourth wall for its audience

The gravedigger cannot count or remember how old he is, and that’s the joke (this is the most common modern interpretation whenever the line isn’t otherwise played straight). If the clown was, for example, particularly old, those lines would be very funny

Any way you look at it, I believe something is echoing there. It seems like this is one of the many moments in Hamlet where you catch a glimpse of some contemporary in-joke about theater and theater culture* that we can only try to parse out from limited context 430 years later. And honestly, that’s so interesting and cool.

*(My other favorite example of this is when Hamlet asks Polonius about what it was like to play Julius Caesar in an exchange that pokes fun of Polonius’ actor a little. This is clearly an inside-joke directed at Globe regulars - the actor who played Polonius must have also played Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play, and been very well reviewed. Hamlet’s joke about Brutus also implies the actor who played Brutus is one of the main cast in Hamlet - possibly even the prince himself, depending on how the line is read).

#hamlet #hamlet meta #hamlet’s age #this obviously does NOT imply anything about being 30yo btw #any age is a good age to be driven to madness by guilt and grief #It’s just very usual for shakespeare to describe somebody well past their apprentice age as a ‘youth’ SO MUCH #and that makes those lines very interesting #shut up e #willy shakes #posting this while EXHAUSTED going to see a million errors and tone problems tomorrow sorry in advance yall #**very unusual #long post #posting Hamlet meta like it’s 2014 hell yeah

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unadulteratedsoulsweets · 8 months

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A DC X DP #19 Our Pharaoh, Your Duke

Imagine dis…

I kept reading about Tucker as a reincarnation of a powerful Pharoh from the Ancient civilization of Egypt and he wouldn’t stop reincarnating as long as people kept making and improving tablets. I don’t know if that is part of the canon or if that episode in DP is just another Sam and Undergrowth situation.

Anyway, just a thought is passing by…

….

Tucker was enjoying his afterlife with his spouses, Danny Phantom the High Ghost King in the Infinite Realm, and Sam Manson the heir and apprentice to the Ancient of Nature Undergrowth. All three of them were enjoying a rare day off that over-laps each other’s schedules. Tucker became the high leader also known as The Pharaoh in the Egyptian section of the Infinite Realms when the old ruler wished to pass on and when he was able to prove himself to be powerful enough to protect his section in the Realms as well as wise enough to lead them to prosperity. Add the fact that he is married to the High King and bump up other ghosts’ attitudes toward him as he is one of the official consorts of the new King.

The trio was just in a middle of a picnic when Tucker started to feel dizzy accompanied by a headache. Both of Tucker’s partners look at him with worry and concern in their eyes, as Tucker is about to reassure them that he was fine when darkness suddenly invaded his eyes.

…

Tucker is so sure that he has his reincarnation in control but the fact that he suddenly had clarity after months in the standard of his new body. Tucker felt panic fill him, A powerful entity or not every time he reincarnates, he forgets his life before and during his time in the Infinite Realms to not disrupt the normal flow of events, he only recovers his original memories when he was in the brink of death or something is need to change.

He also is worried about whatever his spouse would do as he remembered being in their presence when he was forcibly reincarnated. But by the looks of it, whoever did target him knew nothing about the complexity of the cycle thus having his memories with him along with some abilities that were muted to something more discreet. Tucker was just glad that it was him instead of his spouse.

…

As a child, Tucker no wait his new name is Duke Thomas, took it upon himself to explore this new world as it is taking his spouses a while to find him, which led him to believe that this universe may be part of a small sector of which Clockwork cannot interfere due to the delicate relationship between time and its citizens. Tucker was ecstatic when he had seen the futuristic appeal around him but felt disappointed when he had a need that only the rich and those who have connections can own them. He felt his eyes widen at the mention of aliens and other world beings and people around seemingly saving the world daily, not because of the heroes his lovely husband is an interdimensional/universal Hero and King, but because it has aliens which made him think about the opportunities of bragging rights to his husband the moment, they reunited.

When Tucker/Duke took notice of the city that his parents decided to call home, he was already thinking about his wife’s reactions will be, it seems she will either fall in love with the architecture that screams everything goth and the amount of gargoyle around each building or joins a rogue named poisoned Ivy to her crusade towards nature. It also seems that some of his powers mutated that seems to focus on his eyes, to accommodate this new universe or is it to accommodate this new body, he wondered.

As he was growing up, he began to have doubts about his so-called ordinary family as Danny’s luck rubbed them off the moment they all said I do at the altar. He just hopes that it is something he can handle future he could handle. There have been rules and laws about protecting people with power that were later named as Meta humans, he breath a sigh of relief when he saw no mention of the Infinite Realms from all data base.

…

When Bruce took him into his ward it took everything in Tucker/Duke to not scream fruit loop at the billionaire much more when he discovered a hidden base below his mansion’s basement, he doesn’t know that if Bruce is an upgrade is a degrade at the fury persona. It just never occurred to him that one day he will be a daytime vigilante like the origins of his husband. Honestly, he can’t help but have a new profound respect for his husband when he was just starting, he may be in the daytime schedule but it still took time to adjust. He also had a family of an experienced team from the start yet Danny has only him, Sam, and his sister as safety nets, he is so going to spoil Danny the moment they all saw each other.

The moment he laid eyes on Jason he can’t help but hiss quietly at his state. A liminal at the verge of hunger, no wonder his random outburst of anger kept getting worse each time he lost himself. With little to no materials that can handle the contaminated ectoplasm as well to turn it into a pure ectoplasm he was able to make a filter, yet it takes too much time to purify a liter of it yet reveals a small vial of a pure version. Yet it was better than nothing, whenever he was tasked to get them treats and coffee, he would always put the small vial of pre-ectoplasm into his drink which greatly improved his mood but unfortunately, he was the one who kept doing errands as Jason won’t drink anything else without his secret ingredient. Cass had already noticed him doing something to Jason’s drink but shrugged it off seeing that it was improving his mood, but he can’t help but feel that there is another shoe about to drop.

…

He was right, there was another shoe waiting to drop. You know, with his experience with Danny Tucker should have already known not to jinx things.

A group of archeologists found a new hidden tomb deep within Egypt and decided to go exploring yet the new guy on the job seemed to have done something and unleashed an endless number of Egyptian soldiers that seem to attack everything in sight. Though they are not killing anyone anyone who was sliced with their weapons is immediately teleported to a prison deep below the surface and forced to live a life of hard manual labor like a slave.

Tucker/Duke was shaken awake by Stephanie as the news of the Egyptian soldiers made their way to the mainland and the soil of the US. Much worse is that these soldiers found themselves at Gotham harbor and Batman is calling in every vigilante in Gotham to hold off the army while the JLD finds a way to undo the mess, every member of the magical side of the JL has already interrogated the new archeologist whether he had stolen something or he had disrespected someone in the site. Duke was pretty sure he heard Constantine grumble at the fact that this would be much easier if mind control magic is present but no, it just had to be neither of the common reason when an army of the dead raises themselves from the dead.

Now when Tucker/ Duke was wakened up after he had just gone and stayed awake for the past 14 hours straight due to an exam that his dumb professor insisted on having despite having no to little effect on one’s final grades as well as a case that needed his vigilante self his full attention, much to say he is not happy.

…

At the battleground, other members of the JL have already gone into Gotham to aid Batman and his associates while others were able to evacuate the civilians and now joining in the fight. Every person fighting is starting to feel hopeless as this Egyptian army kept coming back at them while their fighters are getting wary and tired at each wave they faced. As some of the people of the JL were about to succumb to what looked like their inevitable fate there come Signal in his yellow-clad suit and looked like he just crawled out of bed, climbed the Wayne tower with a megaphone in one hand, and proceeded to… scold the army?

Some of them blinked at the ridiculousness while some seem to pinch themselves at the absurdity of the situation. How Signal kept screaming at the undead army how his GPA and sleep is much more important than their so-called invasion to return the Ancient civilization of Egypt to its former glory. As jaws began to drop as all undead Egyptian soldiers seems to lower their heads in shame as they listen to Signal scold them for what looked like a half hour scolding before he heaved a deep breath and ordered the soldiers to go back where they came from and return the prisoners to the living world.

Just moments before each JL and JLD members try to reboot their respective minds at what had just transpired a crack was heard seemingly echoing throughout the ruins and a green portal began to form. There, two beings came through a black-haired woman with plants crawling up to her arms and legs with a wreath on top of her head and a white hair man with a crown floating above his head and a cape that looked like made out of stars dragged Signal by the arm and dragged him back to the portal. Now all heroes are scrambling to make sense of what had happened in a matter of minutes as well as trying to get back their youngest brother back, Duke may be older than Damian but he was the latest one to be adopted thus making him the youngest by their standards.

…

Back in the Infinite Realms Duke is quietly sleeping sandwiched and snuggled between the loves of his life while wearing his Pharaoh regalia he just can’t help but feel like he had just forgotten something.

Meh, he’ll tackle that after he had his full rest with both Sam and Danny’s arms and presence beside him.

…

PS: If someone out there wanted to continue or make a fic about this you are free to do so, don’t forget to tag me though.

#dc x dp #dc x dp prompt #batman #ghost king danny #duke thomas #tucker foley

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