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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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Social Quitting

In “Social Quitting,” my latest Locus Magazine column, I advance a theory to explain the precipitous vibe shift in how many of us view the once-dominant social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, and how it is that we have so quickly gone asking what we can do to get these services out of our lives to where we should go now that we’re all ready to leave them:

https://locusmag.com/2023/01/commentary-cory-doctorow-social-quitting/

The core of the argument revolves around surpluses — that is, the value that exists in the service. For a user, surpluses are things like “being able to converse with your friends” and “being able to plan activities with your friends.” For advertisers, surpluses are things like “being able to target ads based on the extraction and processing of private user data” and “being able to force users to look at ads before they can talk to one another.”

For the platforms, surpluses are things like, “Being able to force advertisers and business customers to monetize their offerings through the platform, blocking rivals like Onlyfans, Patreon, Netflix, Amazon, etc” and things like “Being able to charge more for ads” and “being able to clone your business customers’ products and then switch your users to the in-house version.”

Platforms control most of the surplus-allocating options. They can tune your feed so that it mostly consists of media and text from people you explicitly chose to follow, or so that it consists of ads, sponsored posts, or posts they think will “boost engagement” by sinking you into a dismal clickhole. They can made ads skippable or unskippable. They can block posts with links to rival sites to force their business customers to transact within their platform, so they can skim fat commissions every time money changes hands and so that they can glean market intelligence about which of their business customers’ products they should clone and displace.

But platforms can’t just allocate surpluses will-ye or nill-ye. No one would join a brand-new platform whose sales-pitch was, “No matter who you follow, we’ll show you other stuff; there will be lots of ads that you can’t skip; we will spy on you a lot.” Likewise, no one would sign up to advertise or sell services on a platform whose pitch was “Our ads are really expensive. Any business you transact has to go through us, and we’ll take all your profits in junk fees. This also lets us clone you and put you out of business.”

Instead, platforms have to carefully shift their surpluses around: first they have to lure in users, who will attract business customers, who will generate the fat cash surpluses that can be creamed off for the platforms’ investors. All of this has to be orchestrated to lock in each group, so that they won’t go elsewhere when the service is enshittified as it processes through its life-cycle.

This is where network effects and switching costs come into play. A service has “network effects” if it gets more valuable as users join it. You joined Twitter to talk to the people who were already using it, and then other people joined so they could talk to you.

“Switching costs” are what you have to give up when you leave a service: if a service is siloed — if it blocks interoperability with rivals — then quitting that service means giving up access to the people whom you left behind. This is the single most important difference between ActivityPub-based Fediverse services like Mastodon and the silos like Twitter and Facebook — you can quit a Fediverse server and set up somewhere else, and still maintain your follows and followers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/23/semipermeable-membranes/#free-as-in-puppies

In the absence of interoperability, network effects impose their own switching cost: the “collective action problem” of deciding when to leave and where to go. If you depend on the people you follow and who follow you — for emotional support, for your livelihood, for community — then the extreme difficulty of convincing everyone to leave at the same time and go somewhere else means that you can be enticed into staying on a service that you no longer enjoy. The platforms can shift the surpluses away from you, provided that doing so makes you less miserable than abandoning your friends or fans or customers would. This is the Fiddler On the Roof problem: everyone stays put in the shtetl even though the cossacks ride through on the reg and beat the shit out of them, because they can’t all agree on where to go if they leave:

https://doctorow.medium.com/how-to-leave-dying-social-media-platforms-9fc550fe5abf

So the first stage of the platform lifecycle is luring in users by allocating lots of surplus to them — making the service fun and great and satisfying to use. Few or no ads, little or no overt data-collection, feeds that emphasize the people you want to hear from, not the people willing to pay to reach you.

This continues until the service attains a critical mass: once it becomes impossible to, say, enroll your kid in a little-league baseball team without having a Facebook account, then Facebook can start shifting its surpluses to advertisers and other business-users of the platform, who will pay Facebook to interpose themselves in your use of the platform. You’ll hate it, but you won’t leave. Junior loves little-league.

Facebook can enshittify its user experience because the users are now locked in, holding each other hostage. If Facebook can use the courts and technological countermeasures to block interoperable services, it can increase its users’ switching costs, producing more opportunities for lucrative enshittification without the risk of losing the users that make Facebook valuable to advertisers. That’s why Facebook pioneered so many legal tactics for criminalizing interoperability:

https://www.eff.org/cases/facebook-v-power-ventures

This is the second phase of the toxic platform life-cycle: luring in business customers by shifting surpluses from users to advertisers, sellers, etc. This is the moment when the platforms offer cheap and easy monetization, low transaction fees, few barriers to off-platform monetization, etc. This is when, for example, a news organization can tease an article on its website with an off-platform link, luring users to click through and see the ads it controls.

Because Facebook has locked in its users through mutual hostage-taking, it can pollute their feeds with lots of these posts to news organizations’ sites, bumping down the messages from its users’ friends, and that means that Facebook can selectively tune how much traffic it gives to different kinds of business customers. If Facebook wants to lure in sports sites, it can cram those sites’ posts into millions of users’ feeds and send floods of traffic to sports outlets.

Outlets that don’t participate in Facebook lose out, and so they join Facebook, start shoveling their content into it, hiring SEO Kremlinologists to help them figure out how to please The Algorithm, in hopes of gaining a permanent, durable source of readers (and thus revenue) for their site.

But ironically, once a critical mass of sports sites are on Facebook, Facebook no longer needs to prioritize sports sites in its users’ feeds. Now that the sports sites all believe that a Facebook presence is a competitive necessity, they will hold each other hostage there, egging each other on to put more things on Facebook, even as the traffic dwindles.

Once sports sites have taken each other hostage, Facebook can claw back the surplus it allocated to them and use it to rope in another sector — health sites, casual games, employment seekers, financial advisors, etc etc. Each group is ensnared by a similar dynamic to the one that locks in the users.

But there is a difference between users’ surpluses and business’s surpluses. A user’s surplus is attention, and there is no such thing as an “attention economy.” You can’t use attention to pay for data-centers, or executive bonuses, or to lobby Congress. Attention is not a currency in the same way that cryptos are not currency — it is not a store of value, nor a unit of exchange, nor or a unit of account.

Turning attention into money requires the same tactics as turning crypto into money — you have to lure in people who have real, actual money and convince them to swap it for attention. With crypto, this involved paying Larry David, Matt Damon, Spike Lee and LeBron James to lie about crypto’s future in order to rope in suckers who would swap their perfectly cromulent “fiat” money for unspendable crypto tokens.

With platforms, you need to bring in business customers who get paid in actual cash and convince them to give you that cash in exchange for ethereal, fast-evaporating, inconstant, unmeasurable “attention.” This works like any Ponzi scheme (that is, it works like cryptos): you can use your shareholders’ cash to pay short-term returns to business customers, losing a little money as a convincer that brings in more trade.

That’s what Facebook did when it sent enormous amounts of traffic to a select few news-sites that fell for the pivot to video fraud, in order to convince their competitors to borrow billions of dollars to finance Facebook’s bid to compete with Youtube:

https://doctorow.medium.com/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video-adbe09319038

This convincer strategy is found in every con. If you go to the county fair, you’ll see some poor bastard walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that he “won” by throwing three balls into a peach-basket. The carny who operated that midway game let him win the teddy precisely so that he would walk around all day, advertising the game, which is rigged so that no one else wins the giant teddy-bear:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

Social media platforms can allocate giant teddy-bears to business-customers, and it can also withdraw them at will. Careful allocations mean that the platform can rope in a critical mass of business customers and then begin the final phase of its life-cycle: allocating surpluses to its shareholders.

We know what this looks like.

Rigged ad-markets:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

Understaffed content moderation departments:

https://www.dw.com/en/twitters-sacking-of-content-moderators-will-backfire-experts-warn/a-63778330

Knock-off products:

https://techcrunch.com/2021/12/08/twitter-is-the-latest-platform-to-test-a-tiktok-copycat-feature/

Nuking “trust and safety”:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/twitter-dissolves-trust-safety-council-2022-12-13/

Hiding posts that have links to rival services:

https://www.makeuseof.com/content-types-facebook-hides-why/

Or blocking posts that link to rival services:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/19/better-failure/#let-my-tweeters-go

Or worse, terminating accounts for linking to rival services:

https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2022/12/twitter-suspends-mastodon-account-prevents-sharing-links/

That is, once a platform has its users locked in, and has its business customers locked in, it can enshittify its service to the point of near uselessness without losing either, allocating all the useful surplus in the business to its shareholders.

But this strategy has a problem: users and business customers don’t like to be locked in! They will constantly try to find ways to de-enshittify your service and/or leave for greener pastures. And being at war with your users and business customers means that your reputation continuously declines, because every time a user or business customer figures out a way to claw back some surplus, you have to visibly, obviously enshittify your service wrestle it back.

Every time a service makes headlines for blocking an ad-blocker, or increasing its transaction fees, or screwing over its users or business customers in some other way, it makes the case that the price you pay for using the service is not worth the value it delivers.

In other words, the platforms try to establish an equilibrium where they only leave business customers and users with the absolute bare minimum needed to keep them on the service, and extract the rest for their shareholders. But this is a very brittle equilibrium, because the prices that platforms impose on their users and business customers can change very quickly, even if the platforms don’t do anything differently.

Users and business customers can revalue the privacy costs, or the risks of staying on the platform based on exogenous factors. Privacy scandals and other ruptures can make the cost you’ve been paying for years seem higher than you realized and no longer worth it.

This problem isn’t unique to social media platforms, either. It’s endemic to end-stage capitalism, where companies can go on for years paying their workers just barely enough to survive (or even less, expecting them to get public assistance and/or a side-hustle), and those workers can tolerate it, and tolerate it, and tolerate it — until one day, they stop.

The Great Resignation, Quiet Quitting, the mass desertions from the gig economy — they all prove the Stein’s Law: “Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop.”

Same for long, brittle supply-chains, where all the surplus has been squeezed out: concentrating all the microchip production in China and Taiwan, all the medical saline in Puerto Rico, all the shipping into three cartels… This strategy works well, and can be perfectly tuned with mathematical models that cut right to the joint, and they work and they work.

Until they stop. Until covid. Or war. Or wildfires. Or floods. Or interest rate hikes. Or revolution. All this stuff works great until you wake up and discover that the delicate balance between paying for guard labor and paying for a fair society has tilted, and now there’s a mob building a guillotine outside the gates of your luxury compound.

This is the force underpinning collapse: “slow at first, then all at once.” A steady erosion of the failsafes, flensing all the slack out of the system, extracting all the surpluses until there’s nothing left in the reservoir, no reason to stay.

It’s what caused the near-collapse of Barnes and Noble, and while there are plenty of ways to describe James Daunt’s successful turnaround, the most general characterization is, “He has reallocated the company’s surpluses to workers, readers, writers and publishers”:

https://tedgioia.substack.com/p/what-can-we-learn-from-barnes-and

A system can never truly stabilize. This is why utopias are nonsense: even if you design the most perfect society in which everything works brilliantly, it will still have to cope with war and meteors and pandemics and other factors beyond your control. A system can’t just work well, it has to fail well.

This is why I object so strenuously to people who characterize my 2017 novel Walkaway as a “dystopian novel.” Yes, the protagonists are eking out survival amidst a climate emergency and a failing state, but they aren’t giving up, they’re building something new:

https://locusmag.com/2017/06/bruce-sterling-reviews-cory-doctorow/

“Dystopia” isn’t when things go wrong. Assuming nothing will go wrong doesn’t make you an optimist, it makes you an asshole. A dangerous asshole. Assuming nothing will go wrong is why they didn’t put enough lifeboats on the Titanic. Dystopia isn’t where things go wrong. Dystopia is when things go wrong, and nothing can be done about it.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. The social media barons who reeled users and business customers into a mutual hostage-taking were confident that their self-licking ice-cream cone — in which we all continued to energetically produce surpluses for them to harvest, because we couldn’t afford to leave — would last forever.

They were wrong. The important thing about the Fediverse isn’t that it’s noncommercial or decentralized — it’s that its design impedes surplus harvesting. The Fediverse is designed to keep switching costs as low as possible, by enshrining the Right Of Exit into the technical architecture of the system. The ability to leave a service without paying a price is the best defense we have against the scourge of enshittification.

(Thanks to Tim Harford for inspiring this column via an offhand remark in his kitchen a couple months ago!)

[Image ID: The Phillip Medhurst Picture Torah 397. The Israelites collect manna. Exodus cap 16 v 14. Luyken and son.]

#pluralistic #social media #post-twitter #post-facebook #switching costs #network effects #web theory #locus magazine #exodus #decentralization

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eddiediaaz · 14 days

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Hello, I would love to get all your Merthur fic recs/bookmarks 👉🏽👈🏽 I have been scouring AO3 but I’m sure I’m missing some really good ones!!

oh hiii! omg okay well i haven't read merthur fics in quite a bit of time, so these fics are mostly all very old, but here we go! also i've mostly read modern aus, i hope that's your thing hehe.

we are all diamonds by footloose

the student prince by fayjay

hotel camelot by orphan account

awake by cori lannam

The One Where Their (Mother) Tongues Get Acquainted by emjayelle

And like the cycle of the year, we begin again by katherynefromphilly

there are no gays in football by malu_3

This Silly Ol' Dance Is Perfect for Two by slantedknitting

nobody moves, nobody gets hurt by leandra

a summer in delphi by rotrude

Arcane Asylum by newkate

also: please read the warnings and tags properly, some of these fics have ao3 archive warnings and deal with heavy subjects/tropes

#alie replies #thatsveryood #fanfic #merthur #bbc merlin #merlin

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fishyfishyfishtimes · 1 month

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Daily fish fact #732

Sterba's corydoras!

Like other corydoras catfish, these fish have a pretty unique way of reproducing: a male and a female will form a "T-shape", with the female's head resting between the pectoral fins and body of the male. The male releases some sperm, and the female moves it to her pelvic fins, which form a kind of "basket". The female Sterba's cory will then lay a single egg, places it in her pelvic fin basket, and swims off to place the now fertilised egg in a suitable safe spot. Then the cycle repeats until all eggs are fertilised!

#fish #fish facts #fishfact #biology #zoology #fishblr #cory cat #cory catfish #corydoras #corydoras catfish #sterba's cory #sterba's corydoras #sterba's corydoras catfish

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whencartoonsruletheworld · 2 months

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I have to admit the reveal that glitchtrap was the mimic was a p good twist like I vividly remember when hw came out and the fandom collectively went ???

Apparently the Mimic is controversial rn and you know what I'm gonna out myself as a HUGE Mimic fan. I'm obsessed with this little freak. I LOVE the narrative implications of him. I love the commentary on the dangers of AI. I love the metaphor for the cycle of abuse. But at the same time and in contrast, I ESPECIALLY love the fact that it basically became an antithesis to the idea of "cycling the same story over and over." We all thought Willy-boy escaped HELL but no! He's just a normal bitch who's still over there! The Mimic is just a copycat trying to make the original story happen again and the new characters will be fighting to break the narrative cycle. How fucking COOL is that for a sequel villain??? I fucking love it

also.... i dont remember if it was Cori or North who pointed this out to me, but it's pretty sick how the original video game's premise, if you missed the ghost newspapers, was that the animatronics were malfunctioning AI who didn't realize they weren't doing their jobs, and now the Mimic is doing the same thing. The Mimic Epilogues specifically rely on the Mimic not being able to tell humans from endoskeletons. It's so fucking cool

#fnaf #im an english major can you tell

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callie-the-creator · 9 months

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boyfriend!coryxkenshin hcs

sfw. this was also posted on my wattpad, so there is no point to accuse me of plagiarism or anything

• you already know cory is a hopeless romantic aka...the best type of partner! you lucky thing! you scored yourself the best of the best

• cory has not one ounce of toxicity in his very soul

— "he's a good man, savannah, a GOOD man. 😤"

• oh, what's that? you gave cramps either from your menstruation cycle or they just popped out from nowhere?

— this man would do everything in his power to make sure that you're comfortable and have everything you have to make yourself feel better

— he definitely wouldn't make fun of you or belittle you if it was because of your period (unlike those boyfriends😒)

• you already know that you'll make a few special appearances in his videos whether that be sss episodes or playing games specifically made for couples or ones that allow multiplayer

— it takes two, the dark pictures anthology, cuphead, you name it! you'll just have to motivate him enough to finish the games though since that's where he falls short...🫢

• but for the important question! what is his love language?

— personally, it's to each their own on the topic, but this is what i think: as much as i want to say physical touch, i feel like he's more of a quality time type of guy, you know? even if he does youtube, he still takes breaks and you can bet that he'll spend most of that time with you!

• there is not one dull moment as long as you're with him

• wouldn't be able to stop smiling if he caught you wearing his merch or any of his clothes for that matter...just not his puka shell necklace. never his necklace. ☝️ that's a big no-no

• he's definitely the type of bf who would play songs that remind him of you

— *cries into pillow uncontrollably*

• and when he is recording, you are known to bring him snacks or water and wave 'hi' to the camera

— but i'd doubt he'd need any snacks since this main usually has skittles, now and laters, and nutrigrain bars stockpiled in his recording room.

• if you text him randomly, he'll make a big deal about it and be all giddy. you make him so happy! 🥺

— also, if he's too scared while playing a horror game and dashie isn't picking up the phone, you're the second-best option for decisions! but you know what they say..."with great power comes great responsibility"

• personally, i don't think he's neutral on the topic of pda, but he's the subtle type bc he wants to be careful to not make you uncomfortable, especially when you two are out in public.

• since he's known to record really late at night, he'd do anything in his power to be quiet and not wake you up during his 3 scary games or his spooky scary sunday videos

— if he happened to wake you up by his screaming would definitely deadpan the camera and be like, "now why did you have to go and wake up my gf? 😐"

— deny deny deny, as rodrick heffley would say.

• we already know cory likes his anime, so i'm saying that you would binge-watch all types of shows and movies together. but, again, you'll need to motivate and encourage him a lot since he has trouble finishing stuff or gaining interest in shows

• would want cuddles or just to hang out with you if he got too upset over a game

— he has rage quit a few times

• cory would let you sit on his lap while he plays games in his spare time

— he will kiss your head or shoulder randomly. he'd also keep on hand pressed against the small of your back to support you, to make sure that you won't fall off. 💔 you guys are so cute togetherrrr

• his fans love you. i have nothing more to add to this.

• fanart and edits!! different youtubers garner different communities, and some are more likely to make fanart than others, but cory's has the best of both worlds! though, his fandom leans more towards the editing side of things, so expect lots to pop up on your fyp

• i feel like there would be a few videos like “3 minutes of cory being soft with his s/o” or, even better: “cory and y/n being the best couple for 8 minutes” compilations going around on youtube, tiktok, reddit, etc.

…that’s all i got! until next time <3

#cory kenshin #coryxkenshin #youtubers #yt #youtuber x reader #youtuber imagines #gamer boy #gamer bf #gamer boyfriend #coryxkenshin x reader #coryxkenshin imagine #coryxkenshin fanfic #headcanons #my hcs #samurai stand up #samurai #the chosen #the shogun #comfort youtuber

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swallowtailed · 1 month

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palisade 41

honestly don’t really know where to begin here.

because, like, we all kinda knew this was coming, right? odds were it had to happen sometime. now it has.

but there’s still a real cosmic unfairness to the timing of it. figure died right after they decided they didn’t want to. breaking the wheel of their resurrection is fine and all, but they fought so hard to escape clem and join perennial that it doesn’t really ring true to me.

hearing future in the same sentence reminded me that there’s another suite of definitions for figure, aside from the noun meaning shape or form—the verb meaning guess, consider, imagine.

i’m inclined to read future and perennial as two sides of the same coin—two views of the principality. future sees an inevitable road toward culmination, perennial sees that it’s all the same fucking cycle. also, future seizing on a moment of power from perennial and turning it to their own ends.

real gur just cannot catch a break. they’re stuck with future, inside their own reanimated corpse, guarded by the shell of figure? some real eternal torment there.

so, you know. shit sucks!!

i was really, really hoping eclectic would steal future, and it would also have been incredible for gur sevraq (who, as we know, stole the future) to be stolen from future, but the dice fall as they will

really interesting contrast between the two sides of this arc wrt divine/axiom/mortal/etc relationships. thisbe is guiding integrity and communicating with ebullience, building relationships across ways of being. figure is destroyed just by exposure to divine power, subsumed by the weight of a god rearing up on its own. the axiom being willing to treat with thisbe, the divine destroying figure. which is maybe less about those powers than about the hands moving them—instrumentalization as always a core theme of palisade.

of course it is also a cautionary tale of the capriciousness of dice. if figure and gur had gotten to speak with future i can imagine it going more like thisbe’s side. but maybe not! we’ll never know.

characters being demanded to envision a future was one of my favorite beats in partizan and it was really cool to hit that again (and to call back to leap!). but also heartbreaking. cori, happy and safe…

aw fuck the crew’s still gonna have to find out that figure is dead… mortality of course goes hand in hand with grief. much like valence’s death i think the positioning of figure’s death is ultimately going to be shaped most by reactions to it

dre’s pc deaths are always so fraught, huh. valence and chine were also kind of messy, sudden deaths—no clean tragedy. which, like, is life, but also, ;-;

the music was incredible. like breathing. and the way the dirge just stops—blinks out.

eclectic drawing up the seismic power of opposition, his own power, was really moving. a bit of grace in that moment.

i’m not sure where they’re gonna go from here, especially in terms of character arcs. it’s a rough downbeat. kind of falls in line with the conflict turns, though—fighting back and forth down to the bitter end. might be a bleak finale although at least one more thing seems set to unfold in this arc so honestly who knows

incidentally, bets on that: the smell of computer parts immediately made me think of the nobel, but the mechanical whine heard across the continent made me wonder if it could be palisade waking up (/being woken up). either way, it’s definitely getting to be alarm clock time, right?? (on the other hand maybe this is just motion activating all across palisade, but a bunch of motion factories just got taken down.)

it’s nice that the a-plot crew were having a fun heist though. cori deserves an alise breka mission

tragedy-ass podcast.

#fatt #palisade #palisade spoilers #fatt spoilers #friends at the table spoilers #hello world #fatt lb #:(((((

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professional-bulshitter · 2 months

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watched episode 3x10 of community (regional holiday music) again and the last part is so well written, crafted?? dunno anymore

but cory trying to convince Abed to go and win regionals just so they can go and win semis and shit is so fucking real because it reflects on the manner in which it was all supposed to be fun and enjoyment and for them to be together and all that and instead the way it's reduced down to a race you somehow inserted yourself into and can't really get out of.

it's like work that you take up because you want to earn enough money to be able to retire but that time never comes and instead you keep running and running and running till you die competing in a cycle and race that you never really wanted to be a part of.

it's like reducing everything you are and can do to something that can add value to you and make you worthy,,, and seeing everyone and everything as a part of what you can achieve so much so that you don't really know who you are anymore because you're too lost in the system

and it's about a system that doesn't care for you and will never care for you because if you don't do exactly what it wants you to do, it will discard you. There might be an unfortunate incident where the bus falls and everyone who couldn't do what was needed of them died and they will be replaced because it's a system that has got to run because it's been running for too long. And still it will be your fault because the systems and structures will make you feel it is, Because at the end of the day you fall because you couldn't keep up and never because someone orchestrated or wrote down your demise by a bus crash/fall.

and that at the end of the day all you need to do to survive, is break the cycle (ish)

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gabessquishytum · 9 months

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Okay as a Particular Kind of asexual I have a rather specific au. It could work for both Hob or Dream but for my purposes let's go with Dream on this one. Human Dream is a HUGE workaholic. Like stressed 24/7, can't relax for the life of him, insomnia to the MAX. he's tried EVERYTHING. Yoga, affirmations, candles, drugs, fuck it he's even tried going GLUTEN FREE for fucks sake but nothing can break this cycle of physical and mental stress. He's gotten the "You need to get laid dude" but he can give HIMSELF an orgasm just fine, and it hasn't reset his brain or body, and the effort of going out, finding someone who wants him, determining whether they're a seriel killer, doing the Whole Hookup Song and Dance, with the high probability that it won't even work or be particularly good? It's just more stress on his plate. So a friend, could be a good friend (Lucienne) or a bad friend (Corinthian), suggest he see a Professional. A professional Dom, that is. He needs out of his head for a while, and that's the whole idea right? Just letting someone else do the driving. Cue Hob, Gentle Dom Extraordinaire, who has JUST the right touch for this mess of a man. He's kind and friendly, the kind of guy you WANT to listen to honestly, a guy you can trust, and he never gets meaner than some teasing, keeping Dream from feeling defensive and storming off. Dream goes in pretty skeptical of the whole thing, but by the time he's come out he's already addicted. Their first few sessions are distictly non sexual, but after a while they start branching out, working out Dream's physical stress...

I do think it would be really good in the other direction too, I just don't think Hob would have particular trouble NEEDING a Dom, I think he'd just try it as he does many things in his Insatiable Lust for Life and falls for Dream's Domming specifically. Soft Dom Dream? You'd never guess, especially since outside their sessions he's such a..stone cold asshole tbh. You'd think he'd be mean and demanding, but his soft deep voice says such sweet things instead, Hob MELTS.

Thanks for the platform to project all this outwards, it would be stewing in my mind FORVER otherwise

Ooo yes I'm a big fan of domination being a part of lifestyle which isn't always sexual. Dream being dommed into basic self care is something that can be so personal actually. And honestly? I can see Hob benefitting from the same thing. I can definitely imagine him going through fluctuating mental health and needing a steady hand to get him back on the right track.

Back to Dream, though. I love the idea of him going to Hob with certain expectations (Cori told him that it would be all whips and chains). But Hob is soft and kind, and he quickly puts Dream at ease. The first session is all about finding out what Dream wants, what his triggers are, how he wants to feel at the end. Hob eases him into the dynamic by guiding him through a series of orders - it's more like a guided breathing exercise than anything else, and it does give Dream a more realistic idea of what sessions with Hob are going to be like. There's also a very nice massage specifically for Dream’s hands, which he's never had before.

He leaves feeling like he's floating, with strict instructions from Hob to call if he feels any negative side effects whatsoever. He can't believe how good he feels! And he wants to be such a good boy for Hob.

Within a few weeks, Dream is eating nutritious meals and going to bed without his work laptop. He's got more important things to do in bed! He's got to send Hob a picture of his cute little hole stretching around an egg plug by 9pm, or he'll be in big trouble...

#the sandman #dreamling #nsft

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glassdragons · 5 months

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Tank update. Cycle crashed recently and has restablized. Devil Spike is pissier than usual, but since the rams and nerites are chill I'll let that sort itself out.

Still unnamed betta girl Heket is doing great. Huge appetite, eats only the tiny snails, zero interest in the corydoras. She DOES eat all the cory food which has become a nuisance I have yet to sort.

Scarlet Temple continues to do nothing but grow algae. I'm surprised the two lotuses haven't exploded yet (words that will haunt me in the future), but the sagittaria is quickly overtaking the bare sections of sand.

#bettablr #fishblr #Heket the betta

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justinspoliticalcorner · 4 days

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Joan E. Greve at The Guardian:

Summer Lee, a Pennsylvania congresswoman, easily beat back a primary challenge on Tuesday, delivering progressives one of their most significant victories yet of this election cycle as they brace for a wave of pro-Israel funding targeting pro-ceasefire candidates. The Associated Press called the 12th district Democratic primary at 9.21pm, roughly an hour and an half after Pennsylvania polls closed at 8pm ET. Lee defeated local council member Bhavini Patel, who had criticized the progressive “Squad” member over her calls for a ceasefire in Gaza. Patel had pitched herself as a “pro-Biden Democrat”, suggesting she would better support the president’s agenda in Congress.

But Lee waved off that criticism, and she often pointed to the $1.2bn in government funding she delivered for her Pittsburgh-based district over her first term as evidence of her legislative effectiveness. “I am so humbled and proud to win my first primary re-election to be the congresswoman for this incredible district I’ve spent my life fighting for,” Lee said in a statement celebrating her victory. “Our campaign was built on a record of delivering for our democracy, defending our most fundamental rights, and expanding our vision for what is politically possible for our region’s most marginalized communities.” That argument appeared to sway many of Lee’s constituents as well as local Democratic leaders. In February, the Allegheny county Democratic party formally endorsed Lee for the first time, after the group backed her rival in the 2022 primary.

Lee’s 2022 primary made national headlines because of the involvement of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). According to OpenSecrets, the Super Pac United Democracy Project, which is affiliated with Aipac, spent a total of $3.3m against Lee in 2022. She ultimately defeated her opponent, Pittsburgh attorney Steve Irwin, by less than 1,000 votes, or 0.9 points. This year, progressives largely expected pro-Israel groups like UDP to again invest heavily in attack ads against Lee. But surprisingly, they chose to stay out of Lee’s primary, a choice the congresswoman’s allies credited to her popularity and legislative record. Despite the absence of the pro-Israel lobby, one Super Pac did get involved in Lee’s primary to boost Patel’s campaign. The Moderate Pac, which aims to support centrist Democrats and is largely funded by Republican megadonor Jeffrey Yass, spent more than $600,000 supporting Patel. Lee and her allies turned Yass’ involvement in the race into a campaign issue, lambasting the billionaire’s Super Pac contributions.

[...] Although UDP opted to stay out of Lee’s race, progressive leaders believe her successful campaign strategy could still be instructive for other pro-ceasefire lawmakers expected to be targeted by pro-Israel groups in their primaries. Aipac and its political affiliates reportedly plan to spend $100m this election cycle, after pouring nearly $50m in to the 2022 midterms. At least two other “Squad” members, Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri, have already attracted primary challengers, and Aipac has already endorsed their opponents. Lee alluded to Bowman and Bush on Sunday, telling supporters that her victory would reverberate around the country.

AIPAC and pro-Israel Apartheid groups got handed an L last night, as incumbent pro-Gaza Ceasefire progressive Dem Summer Lee holds on in the PA-12 primary, fending off Bhavini Patel.

#Summer Lee #2024 Pennsylvania Elections #2024 Elections #2024 US House Elections #Pennsylvania #Bhavini Patel #Jeffrey Yass #AIPAC #United Democracy Project #Ceasefire NOW

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