Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.

Might I add:

The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child

The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship

The adventures of a space roomba

Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)

I don’t know a snappy description but the my nemesis cynthia story certainly lives in my head

hilariously, these are almost all in my fic tag. so, a compiled list from the notes (and some extras):

I am in love with you /p

Adding Faceblind Prince Charming and Cinderella

21. The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship

22. The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed

adding the Doctors Without Borders one

I LOVE tumblr storytime, so here’s a bunch more your weekend reading. Enjoy!

24. The Queen with Three Cursed Children

25. Tiny Dragon with one coin hoard

26. Haunted house

27. Shark hero was about to go rogue

28. Grandma lives in the woods comic

29. A Different Aftermath comic

30. Battery (microstory but I love it so much)

31. It’s A Date comic

32. Supervillian kidnaps rival’s kid and they want to stay

33. Narrative Town

34. I have been hired to clean the wizard tower comic

35. Robot Apocalypse

36. The Statues That Do Not Weather

37. Kushiel

38. Tooth Fairy

39. Alien abduction

40. Felonious wish-granting

41. When humans met actual space orcs

42. Space cousins

WAIT REBLOG THIS VERSION INSTEAD

Lately I’ve been doing this thing where when men give me shit at my job, I choose to instead speak to their wives/girlfriends/female counterpart. I had a dude today try to yell at me and I ignored him and instead spoke in a very level voice to his wife instead. He literally stomped his feet like a fucking toddler and said “stop ignoring me! I’m talking!” And his wife said “George, please use a quieter voice. You’re embarrassing me.”

constantly torn between “i wish i was normal” and “i want to get weirder”

really appreciating all the people encouraging me to listen to the second voice i will keep you all in mind

needed to draw this post by @saionjeans

Eagerly getting into the submersible industry, that’s the point there right?

I’m being informed that in light of recent events this is no longer true

He can’t. He’s bad at drawing.

I drew this a month ago, made myself cry laughing about it, and then completely forgot about it until now, when I picked up my sketchbook

public libraries are so sick. there are five books I want to read and they're all relatively new so they're only available in hardback which is so expensive but it just cost me $0 to place holds on them. five books for zero dollars. it requires nothing but clicking a button and then going to the library to pick them up when they're ready. zero dollars. that's crazy

@certifiedlibraryposts

Certified Library Post

Google is (still) losing the spam wars to zombie news-brands

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TONIGHT (May 3) in CALGARY, then TOMORROW (May 4) in VANCOUVER, then onto Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Even Google admits – grudgingly – that it is losing the spam wars. The explosive proliferation of botshit has supercharged the sleazy "search engine optimization" business, such that results to common queries are 50% Google ads to spam sites, and 50% links to spam sites that tricked Google into a high rank (without paying for an ad):

https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2024/03/core-update-spam-policies#site-reputation

It's nice that Google has finally stopped gaslighting the rest of us with claims that its search was still the same bedrock utility that so many of us relied upon as a key piece of internet infrastructure. This not only feels wildly wrong, it is empirically, provably false:

https://downloads.webis.de/publications/papers/bevendorff_2024a.pdf

Not only that, but we know why Google search sucks. Memos released as part of the DOJ's antitrust case against Google reveal that the company deliberately chose to worsen search quality to increase the number of queries you'd have to make (and the number of ads you'd have to see) to find a decent result:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/24/naming-names/#prabhakar-raghavan

Google's antitrust case turns on the idea that the company bought its way to dominance, spending the some of the billions it extracted from advertisers and publishers to buy the default position on every platform, so that no one ever tried another search engine, which meant that no one would invest in another search engine, either.

Google's tacit defense is that its monopoly billions only incidentally fund these kind of anticompetitive deals. Mostly, Google says, it uses its billions to build the greatest search engine, ad platform, mobile OS, etc that the public could dream of. Only a company as big as Google (says Google) can afford to fund the R&D and security to keep its platform useful for the rest of us.

That's the "monopolistic bargain" – let the monopolist become a dictator, and they will be a benevolent dictator. Shriven of "wasteful competition," the monopolist can split their profits with the public by funding public goods and the public interest.

Google has clearly reneged on that bargain. A company experiencing the dramatic security failures and declining quality should be pouring everything it has to righting the ship. Instead, Google repeatedly blew tens of billions of dollars on stock buybacks while doing mass layoffs:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/21/im-feeling-unlucky/#not-up-to-the-task

Those layoffs have now reached the company's "core" teams, even as its core services continue to decay:

https://qz.com/google-is-laying-off-hundreds-as-it-moves-core-jobs-abr-1851449528

(Google's antitrust trial was shrouded in secrecy, thanks to the judge's deference to the company's insistence on confidentiality. The case is moving along though, and warrants your continued attention:)

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/the-2-trillion-secret-trial-against

Google wormed its way into so many corners of our lives that its enshittification keeps erupting in odd places, like ordering takeout food:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/24/passive-income/#swiss-cheese-security

Back in February, Housefresh – a rigorous review site for home air purifiers – published a viral, damning account of how Google had allowed itself to be overrun by spammers who purport to provide reviews of air purifiers, but who do little to no testing and often employ AI chatbots to write automated garbage:

https://housefresh.com/david-vs-digital-goliaths/

i liked this bit from the above. in case you missed it in your scrolling:

unsung benefit i think a lot of ppl are sleeping on with using the public library is that i think its a great replacement for the dopamine hit some ppl get from online shopping. it kind of fills that niche of reserving something that you then get to anticipate the arrival of and enjoy when it arrives, but without like, the waste and the money.

bonus it ALSO fills that dopamine hit of in-person shopping. “oh I didn’t go in looking for this but hmm, I’m tempted… I can’t resist… oh ho ho I have made some irresponsible decisions at the library today [carrying my stack of ten random books]” and then it doesn’t even matter if you don’t like them because a) free b) you’re gonna give them back anyway

Librarian here! Please please please please PLEASE do this! We don’t have any way to know if you read them, and we don’t care! We’re happy to see those books go out because that helps our stats. And that affects how much money we can get.

So grab that silly paperback romance, and maybe this new YA fantasy, oh and check for the new movies too! And don’t forget to check Libby and hoopla for music and ebooks and e-audio.

People who say this are literally saying that they prefer for the workers to all be inexperienced and desperately looking for other jobs. But they somehow also expect good service.

Some people really, actually like jobs that let them be physically active, feel the adrenaline rush of a fast-paced environment, multi-task like a champion, and interact with a wide variety of people.

They just don’t want to be exploited about it.

If Waffle House was a viable lifetime career choice, you’d get a whole lot of experienced, highly skilled staff whose work is fucking flawless and who are genuinely happy to see you because they competed to be there.

If you actively want fast food workers to be paid low and treated poorly, you don't get to demand your food not be spat in, let alone service with a smile.

Technically this passes the bechdel test

bechdel test but the himbos are trying to get in

#Is this the scrub daddy everyone is raving about?

@fraddit you canNOT just leave this in the tags

Happy black cat day!!

Here are some black cats I've drawn through the years

Seal fur thong, 18th century

Jiggly and bouncy physic for everyone! 

Pecs deserves it too, don’t you agree?

more fighting games need to implement man tit jiggle in their idle animations