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#peter is conflicted
jo-v-ie · 1 year
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mollspeak · 2 years
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shipping two characters you love equally is difficult because on one hand, you want them both to be happy, but on the other, you want one of them to be put in danger and the other one to go absolutely batshitfucking insane to get them back
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infectedpaul · 6 months
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Cloudburst
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Enshittification isn’t inevitable: under different conditions and constraints, the old, good internet could have given way to a new, good internet. Enshittification is the result of specific policy choices: encouraging monopolies; enabling high-speed, digital shell games; and blocking interoperability.
First we allowed companies to buy up their competitors. Google is the shining example here: having made one good product (search), they then fielded an essentially unbroken string of in-house flops, but it didn’t matter, because they were able to buy their way to glory: video, mobile, ad-tech, server management, docs, navigation…They’re not Willy Wonka’s idea factory, they’re Rich Uncle Pennybags, making up for their lack of invention by buying out everyone else:
https://locusmag.com/2022/03/cory-doctorow-vertically-challenged/
But this acquisition-fueled growth isn’t unique to tech. Every administration since Reagan (but not Biden! more on this later) has chipped away at antitrust enforcement, so that every sector has undergone an orgy of mergers, from athletic shoes to sea freight, eyeglasses to pro wrestling:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2021/07/09/the-importance-of-competition-for-the-american-economy/
But tech is different, because digital is flexible in a way that analog can never be. Tech companies can “twiddle” the back-ends of their clouds to change the rules of the business from moment to moment, in a high-speed shell-game that can make it impossible to know what kind of deal you’re getting:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/27/knob-jockeys/#bros-be-twiddlin
To make things worse, users are banned from twiddling. The thicket of rules we call IP ensure that twiddling is only done against users, never for them. Reverse-engineering, scraping, bots — these can all be blocked with legal threats and suits and even criminal sanctions, even if they’re being done for legitimate purposes:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
Enhittification isn’t inevitable but if we let companies buy all their competitors, if we let them twiddle us with every hour that God sends, if we make it illegal to twiddle back in self-defense, we will get twiddled to death. When a company can operate without the discipline of competition, nor of privacy law, nor of labor law, nor of fair trading law, with the US government standing by to punish any rival who alters the logic of their service, then enshittification is the utterly foreseeable outcome.
To understand how our technology gets distorted by these policy choices, consider “The Cloud.” Once, “the cloud” was just a white-board glyph, a way to show that some part of a software’s logic would touch some commodified, fungible, interchangeable appendage of the internet. Today, “The Cloud” is a flashing warning sign, the harbinger of enshittification.
When your image-editing tools live on your computer, your files are yours. But once Adobe moves your software to The Cloud, your critical, labor-intensive, unrecreatable images are purely contingent. At at time, without notice, Adobe can twiddle the back end and literally steal the colors out of your own files:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process
The finance sector loves The Cloud. Add “The Cloud” to a product and profits (money you get for selling something) can turn into rents (money you get for owning something). Profits can be eroded by competition, but rents are evergreen:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon
No wonder The Cloud has seeped into every corner of our lives. Remember your first iPod? Adding music to it was trivial: double click any music file to import it into iTunes, then plug in your iPod and presto, synched! Today, even sophisticated technology users struggle to “side load” files onto their mobile devices. Instead, the mobile duopoly — Apple and Google, who bought their way to mobile glory and have converged on the same rent-seeking business practices, down to the percentages they charge — want you to get your files from The Cloud, via their apps. This isn’t for technological reasons, it’s a business imperative: 30% of every transaction that involves an app gets creamed off by either Apple or Google in pure rents:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell/posts/3788112
And yet, The Cloud is undeniably useful. Having your files synch across multiple devices, including your collaborators’ devices, with built-in tools for resolving conflicting changes, is amazing. Indeed, this feat is the holy grail of networked tools, because it’s how programmers write all the software we use, including software in The Cloud.
If you want to know how good a tool can be, just look at the tools that toolsmiths use. With “source control” — the software programmers use to collaboratively write software — we get a very different vision of how The Cloud could operate. Indeed, modern source control doesn’t use The Cloud at all. Programmers’ workflow doesn’t break if they can’t access the internet, and if the company that provides their source control servers goes away, it’s simplicity itself to move onto another server provider.
This isn’t The Cloud, it’s just “the cloud” — that whiteboard glyph from the days of the old, good internet — freely interchangeable, eminently fungible, disposable and replaceable. For a tool like git, Github is just one possible synchronization point among many, all of which have a workflow whereby programmers’ computers automatically make local copies of all relevant data and periodically lob it back up to one or more servers, resolving conflicting edits through a process that is also largely automated.
There’s a name for this model: it’s called “Local First” computing, which is computing that starts from the presumption that the user and their device is the most important element of the system. Networked servers are dumb pipes and dumb storage, a nice-to-have that fails gracefully when it’s not available.
The data structures of source-code are among the most complicated formats we have; if we can do this for code, we can do it for spreadsheets, word-processing files, slide-decks, even edit-decision-lists for video and audio projects. If local-first computing can work for programmers writing code, it can work for the programs those programmers write.
Local-first computing is experiencing a renaissance. Writing for Wired, Gregory Barber traces the history of the movement, starting with the French computer scientist Marc Shapiro, who helped develop the theory of “Conflict-Free Replicated Data” — a way to synchronize data after multiple people edit it — two decades ago:
https://www.wired.com/story/the-cloud-is-a-prison-can-the-local-first-software-movement-set-us-free/
Shapiro and his co-author Nuno Preguiça envisioned CFRD as the building block of a new generation of P2P collaboration tools that weren’t exactly serverless, but which also didn’t rely on servers as the lynchpin of their operation. They published a technical paper that, while exiting, was largely drowned out by the release of GoogleDocs (based on technology built by a company that Google bought, not something Google made in-house).
Shapiro and Preguiça’s work got fresh interest with the 2019 publication of “Local-First Software: You Own Your Data, in spite of the Cloud,” a viral whitepaper-cum-manifesto from a quartet of computer scientists associated with Cambridge University and Ink and Switch, a self-described “industrial research lab”:
https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first/static/local-first.pdf
The paper describes how its authors — Martin Kleppmann, Adam Wiggins, Peter van Hardenberg and Mark McGranaghan — prototyped and tested a bunch of simple local-first collaboration tools built on CFRD algorithms, with the goal of “network optional…seamless collaboration.” The results are impressive, if nascent. Conflicting edits were simpler to resolve than the authors anticipated, and users found URLs to be a good, intuitive way of sharing documents. The biggest hurdles are relatively minor, like managing large amounts of change-data associated with shared files.
Just as importantly, the paper makes the case for why you’d want to switch to local-first computing. The Cloud is not reliable. Companies like Evernote don’t last forever — they can disappear in an eyeblink, and take your data with them:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/9/23789012/evernote-layoff-us-staff-bending-spoons-note-taking-app
Google isn’t likely to disappear any time soon, but Google is a graduate of the Darth Vader MBA program (“I have altered the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further”) and notorious for shuttering its products, even beloved ones like Google Reader:
https://www.theverge.com/23778253/google-reader-death-2013-rss-social
And while the authors don’t mention it, Google is also prone to simply kicking people off all its services, costing them their phone numbers, email addresses, photos, document archives and more:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/22/allopathic-risk/#snitches-get-stitches
There is enormous enthusiasm among developers for local-first application design, which is only natural. After all, companies that use The Cloud go to great lengths to make it just “the cloud,” using containerization to simplify hopping from one cloud provider to another in a bid to stave off lock-in from their cloud providers and the enshittification that inevitably follows.
The nimbleness of containerization acts as a disciplining force on cloud providers when they deal with their business customers: disciplined by the threat of losing money, cloud companies are incentivized to treat those customers better. The companies we deal with as end-users know exactly how bad it gets when a tech company can impose high switching costs on you and then turn the screws until things are almost-but-not-quite so bad that you bolt for the doors. They devote fantastic effort to making sure that never happens to them — and that they can always do that to you.
Interoperability — the ability to leave one service for another — is technology’s secret weapon, the thing that ensures that users can turn The Cloud into “the cloud,” a humble whiteboard glyph that you can erase and redraw whenever it suits you. It’s the greatest hedge we have against enshittification, so small wonder that Big Tech has spent decades using interop to clobber their competitors, and lobbying to make it illegal to use interop against them:
https://locusmag.com/2019/01/cory-doctorow-disruption-for-thee-but-not-for-me/
Getting interop back is a hard slog, but it’s also our best shot at creating a new, good internet that lives up the promise of the old, good internet. In my next book, The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (Verso Books, Sept 5), I set out a program fro disenshittifying the internet:
https://www.versobooks.com/products/3035-the-internet-con
The book is up for pre-order on Kickstarter now, along with an independent, DRM-free audiobooks (DRM-free media is the content-layer equivalent of containerized services — you can move them into or out of any app you want):
http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org
Meanwhile, Lina Khan, the FTC and the DoJ Antitrust Division are taking steps to halt the economic side of enshittification, publishing new merger guidelines that will ban the kind of anticompetitive merger that let Big Tech buy its way to glory:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/07/biden-administration-corporate-merger-antitrust-guidelines/674779/
The internet doesn’t have to be enshittified, and it’s not too late to disenshittify it. Indeed — the same forces that enshittified the internet — monopoly mergers, a privacy and labor free-for-all, prohibitions on user-side twiddling — have enshittified everything from cars to powered wheelchairs. Not only should we fight enshittification — we must.
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Back my anti-enshittification Kickstarter here!
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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/2023/08/03/there-is-no-cloud/#only-other-peoples-computers
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Image: Drahtlos (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Motherboard_Intel_386.jpg
CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en
cdsessums (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Monsoon_Season_Flagstaff_AZ_clouds_storm.jpg
CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/deed.en
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sirspeep · 9 months
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rolling this pic in the monkees tag like eris with the golden apple
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beaulesbian · 8 months
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starker-sorbet · 2 months
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Tony finding himself falling for the decorator Pepper hired to help re-decorate his penthouse. A decorator who is suspiciously his type, a fact that Pepper definitely knows and is counting on if her smirk whenever she walks past is any indication
@starkerfestivals Extended AUpril: Decorator card below
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sciderman · 3 months
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"AMTA for saving my best friend aka boyfriends LIFE AND WELLBEING! And helping him figure out his identity, helping him mourn when his girlfriend died AND paying for his apartment?"
Completely leaves out the part where he used to murder people and his help is really just tormenting him everyday, in the comments he's all "oh woe is me, I feel like I'm being used" except in some of the comment replys he ends up genuinely pouring his heart out but of course he'll crop those from the screen shots he sends Pete.
wade can paint himself a SAINT and peter will buy it actually (he's an idiot) and it gets wade right in the heart
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winterdadandspiderson · 4 months
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WINTERDAD AU #1
(part one because this got way too long. this is essentially the plot of an old fic i started back in 2020 and what would've happened of i'd continued it. i might try and write it again one day, perhaps, if i don't give up after 2 chapters. anyway here we go)
- mary parker was a shield agent when she met the winter soldier, both were on a mission. they fought, but never got as far as mortally wounding each other. mary would always slip away. it was like a game. bucky had been kept out the ice for a few weeks at that point, running a long job. but the longer he's out, the more he starts to remember little pieces, who he used to be.
- mary feels pity for him, seeing through the stone cold image hydra forged for him, to the person within. they fight. but then they also talk. they keep seeing each other while bucky scouts. eventually one thing leads to another and they develop a relationship of sorts. 
- mary later discovers she's pregnant but bucky never finds out. he's taken back, wiped and put under the ice once more. mary quits her job at shield so she can provide for her kid and keep them safe. knowing full well if anyone in shield or hydra caught wind that she was carrying the winter soldiers child, they'd never be safe.
- she's sad that bucky disappeared again, she knows hydra likely had him wiped and iced again. but she moves on, meeting richard soon after who she tells she's expecting a son, that the father disappeared without a word (technically not a lie) he tells her he'll love him like he's his regardless.
- when her son is born she names him peter james parker (during the few weeks they met, the last time they talked, bucky ended up remembering his first name, mary wanted peter to have at least a piece of him)
- peter ends up looking a LOT like bucky. he has the same shade of dark brown hair, facial structure which shows as he grows. but he has mary's eyes)
- the plane crash was really just an unfortunate incident. peter still goes to live with aunt may and uncle ben when he's seven. and then things go as they usually do in canon. the avengers form, yada yada all that stuff, you know the drill.
- when he's 14 peter is bitten by the radioactive spider. BUT. an important detail here is that due to the expiermentation bucky was subjected to by hydra and the enhancements which altered his genes, some of that, though remaining dormant, passed onto peter. but it didn't really do anything, it was just there. but it did keep him alive after the spider bite. without those enhancements in his blood peter would've died. instead, he gained his powers.
- uncle ben still gets shot, which as usual influences peter to become spider-man. and months after tony still comes along and recruits him to fight in germany. peter does.
- when he briefly faces bucky ("you have a metal arm? that is AWESOME, dude!") neither know so that also goes as normal. bucky is bewhildered by the kid who managed to block a hit with so much force behind it, while also shocked to know that he was just that, a kid.
- now one vastly different thing here is that while the avengers do split for a good year, steve and tony eventually talk and make amends. the avengers reassemble, deciding that they need to put the world before their feud. they're not on super good terms, but they tolerate each other. tony still refuses to forgive bucky.
- homecoming happens during the time where things are still rocky between the avengers so peter still deals with vulture alone. but he does see tony more often, stopping by for lab days to work on his suit among other things, to keep up the "internship" charade. tony grows fond of him, though he doesn't admit it.
its post homecoming where things start to go wrong.
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deadpresidents · 2 months
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I am absolutely not joking when I tell you that one of the main reasons I started this blog way back in 2008 (yes...SIXTEEN YEARS AGO) was because I thought: "Maybe I should post some of these random articles I've written about Franklin Pierce in case there are other people like me."
Quite frankly, I didn't think that there were, but I'm happy that I was wrong. And shocked to find out over those sixteen years (!!!) that there were actually tens of thousands of people interested in reading my random stuff about Franklin Pierce. I just happened to branch out and talk about other Presidents too.
But since we're talking about him tonight, in case anybody wants to go back, I might as well share links to some of those pieces about Franklin Pierce:
•Pierce Bicentennial Essay Originally written for the New Hampshire Historical Society's website celebrating Pierce's 200th birthday in 2004 •"When tears and toil and conflict will be unknown" When former President Pierce wrote a moving letter to President Abraham Lincoln following the death of Lincoln's son, Willie -- a tragedy that Pierce also experienced as President. •"After the White House what is there to do but drink?" •"Franklin Pierce and the Consequences of Ambition" •"In Concord: The Friendship of Pierce and Hawthorne" A piece about the lifelong friendship between Franklin Pierce and author Nathaniel Hawthorne -- and friendship that endured controversy and lasted until Hawthorne's death while on holiday with former President Pierce. •My 2011 review of Peter A. Wallner's two-volume biography of President Pierce -- Franklin Pierce: New Hampshire's Favorite Son (2004) and Franklin Pierce: Martyr for the Union (2007) -- which is the definitive modern biography about Franklin Pierce's life and times.
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aliceisaperson · 18 days
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I kind of really want to change my profile picture to this just because Bryce looks so FUCKING GOOD HERE but I can’t bring myself to replace
Him
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enjoy-purple-skies · 9 months
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Alternatively: Peter Lukas Visits Night Vale
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inwhichiramble · 1 year
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As I was watching the new Guardians trailer I was like oooohhh Peter and Nebula best friend excellence!! That’s awesome!! But I was nOT EXPECTING THAT LITTLE TIDBIT AT THE END, MR. QUILL, WHAT IS HAPPENING
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movedtodykedvonte · 10 months
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So confused where fandom/fic writers got this interpretation that Miles does stupid shit that doesn’t make sense or barely works out in the end or puts his friends in unnecessary danger all the time. Like in both movies the others simply underestimate him and don’t understand what Miles is doing cause he thinks like Miles, not like your everyday Spiderman. He uses his Venom Strike to throw Kingpin in the ITSV movie and literally saves Gwen and Peter because they went into battle less than ready. Then had the entire plan to lure the Spiders in ATSV, yet I keep seeing him written like he doesn’t think or gets his friends in trouble even when he understands the danger. Most of the time his different thinking has helped or led people to fix personal issues.
The first movie alone pretty much sets in stone that the exact opposite of what he wants is others to get hurt by his actions, inactions or the actions of others and trying to live up to that belief and the expectations it carries. Across the Spider-verse hammers it home with how he constantly tries to save people because that’s what he should do, rather than listen to some theory that is clearly not absolute at best and outright wrong at worst. Every fic has him being the one to cause issues and not fix them when his planning and actions literally helped save Gayatri and her father.  (c’mon we know the glitching was the spot)
Yeah, I get making him stubborn or strong willed cause he doesn’t listen all the time but usually it’s for a good and valid reason, if he listened every time he was told not to, guess how many of our beloved characters would be dead?
#cause all the times he acts rash are because hes being lied to misled or not treated like he is gonna have to be spiderman and is spiderman#first gwen with the entirety of spider society and why he couldn't come then talked over by Miguel and blamed for what he couldn't possibly#control not to mention the shoddy nature of miguels entire theory#cause if it was true 1610b earth 42 and mayday wouldnt have happened or would collaspe casue miles was never supposed to be spiderman#so many things would be going wrong if it was true#miles is pretty level headed most of the time and quick he outsmarted the guy who made the trans dimension tech for crying outloaud#he simply doesnt tell his exact plan he does it and its up to others to figure it out cause why would he narrate his plan to them#he litteraly tells miguel he just doesnt know what miles is doing in response to miguel thinking hes just running blindly even Peter & Gwen#are suprised cause the whole point of miles story is others thinking they know it and underestimating him#him being dumb and rash and naive in fics just isnt a good source of conflict especially if its post ATSV and BTSV#he is constantly stating he doesnt need to prove himself as spiderman to anyone but himself soemthing he realizes in ITSVs climax#he already knows he spiderman and be damned if hes gonna try to prove it to someone who wanted his dad to die like yall treat him like he#learned nothing Miguel made more issues by not listening to Miles about the spot like he wants to wait for him to get stronger so Miles dad#will die think about that and say Miles is rash and doesn;t think again he isnt inexperienced or naive anymore save that for Pavitr who jinx#himself and has only been spiderman for 6 goddamn months#miles morales#across the spiderverse#atsv#spiderverse#atsv spoilers#spiderman#mini rant over im actually going to sleep now
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eastonapologist · 5 months
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erickson/halloran. for your consideration.
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thepastneverforgets · 11 months
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idk what it's trying to say exactly but i think it's saying something important that the two most experienced and steadfast spider-ppl involved in the whole conflict ( jessica and peter b ) are both in their own ways, carrying a baby. learning what it means to be mentor and parent to the future generations, who might just find a new way of doing things.
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