a most respectable, singular, and amiable bitch

Mixed signals.

"A funny thing happened on the way to the enshittocene: Google – which astonished the world when it reinvented search, blowing Altavista and Yahoo out of the water with a search tool that seemed magic – suddenly turned into a pile of shit.

Google's search results are terrible. The top of the page is dominated by spam, scams, and ads. A surprising number of those ads are scams. Sometimes, these are high-stakes scams played out by well-resourced adversaries who stand to make a fortune by tricking Google[...]

Google operates one of the world's most consequential security system – The Algorithm (TM) – in total secrecy. We're not allowed to know how Google's ranking system works, what its criteria are, or even when it changes: "If we told you that, the spammers would win."

Well, they kept it a secret, and the spammers won anyway.

...

Some of the biggest, most powerful, most trusted publications in the world have a side-hustle in quietly producing SEO-friendly "10 Best ___________ of 2024" lists: Rolling Stone, Forbes, US News and Report, CNN, New York Magazine, CNN, CNET, Tom's Guide, and more.

Google literally has one job: to detect this kind of thing and crush it. The deal we made with Google was, "You monopolize search and use your monopoly rents to ensure that we never, ever try another search engine. In return, you will somehow distinguish between low-effort, useless nonsense and good information. You promised us that if you got to be the unelected, permanent overlord of all information access, you would 'organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.'"

They broke the deal." -Cory Doctorow

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

imagine two mated wyrms twisting around each other, possessing an uncountable number of limbs, each claw of good or evil interlocked with its opposite, the coil twists further around itself into a skein of flesh. how i would describe DNA to a wizard

i am skeptical you could do that actually, tiktok user

[id: the first image is a screenshot of a tiktok taken in a museum. a white woman is gesturing at an art piece, a large swatch of fabric draped over a flagpole. the text at the bottom of the screen says "standing next to art we could do"

the second image is a description of the piece from the tiktok. it says:

Flag I

2009, Teresa Margolles

Artwork Caltion

The fabric of Flag I contains traces of blood, soil and other substances from the sites of murders around the northern border of Mexico, testifying to the thousandsof violent deaths associated with the powerful drug cartels that control smuggling routes to the United States.

end id]

I'm absolutely delighted that this is the tweet of mine that's finally made the crossover

something about percy winning against ares by drawing first blood, not giving a fuck that it’s the god of war he is making an enemy out of vs him being caught totally unaware by luke and luke drawing first blood because percy hesitated, because this is his friend, because making an enemy out of a god is way more preferable over making an enemy out of a friend. percy winning against insurmountable odds vs him losing because his loyalty is truly and undoubtedly fatal.

im going to start compiling all the shitty booktok videos i find except theyre on reels bc i suck

Why did they get put in the Panopticon

thought that was the funniest way to point them out

lindsay lohan taking photos of the paparazzi with a disposable camera, 2004 📸

“The first feminist gesture is to say: “OK, they're looking at me. But I'm looking at them.” The act of deciding to look, of deciding that the world is not defined by how people see me, but how I see them.” ― Agnès Varda

If a worker who isn't the owner says ANYTHING similar to "I'm not really supposed to do this but-" and then does something that helps you, under no circumstances inform the business, including through reviews. You tell them that the worker was polite, professional, the very model of customer service and why you like to go there. You do not breathe a word of the rulebreaking.

Employee-customer solidarity

Even if they don't- Your review can be the thing that wrecks someone up accidentally;

"Janie was so helpful when I wanted to buy a new washing machine on Friday, she stayed with me for half an hour and wasn't pushy at all, we had a good laugh about our cats' silly antics and she got Adam and Suzy to carry it to the car for me- 10/10 excellent service, I'd come back any day!"

-But Management has a policy that workers should spend no more than 10 focused minutes on any customer at a time, and that they should always try to upsell the insurance and the higher price model, so Janie was breaking policy.

-And they aren't supposed to have their phones on the sales floor, so now Janie is going to be quizzed on whether she was showing photos of her cat to a customer.

-Adam is a warehouse worker and shouldn't have been in the front-of-house at all, Suzy is a porter, and store policy is both to use a trolley to move heavy items, and that only the porters should do it, so now Janie is in trouble for pulling Adam off-task, Adam is in trouble for walking through the shop floor, and Suzy is in trouble for poor handling procedure. Maybe the store even has a paid delivery service that Janie was supposed to upsell as soon as you said "I can't put this in my car without help", so this was all against policy.

Your review should always be as bland as possible, "10/10, five star service, will shop here again, thank you to Janie at the Town Street branch" You NEVER know what was technically a rule-break, capitalism is not your friend, the review process is part of the panopticon.

FIVE STARS, TEN OUT OF TEN, VERY GOOD, NOTHING MORE.

and a good one from when jason was little.

i can never write a soulmates au cause i very quickly stop thinking about romance and start thinking about the sociological implications of a world where soulmates are a confirmed verifiable thing

is casual dating a thing in a world where everyone has a soulmate out there somewhere? is it frowned upon? is there a movement of people fighting for the idea that you don't HAVE to wait for your soulmate to find true love? is it considered queer to be in a non-soulbound relationship? how does polyamory function? how about aromantic people?

is it guarenteed you'll find your soulmate within your lifespan? are you drawn to find eachother even if you're born a million miles apart? if it's the kind of universe with physical soul marks (ie. matching moles, first words on skin), are there medical options to change or remove your mark? would it be considered a tabboo? could someone fake a soul mark? could you catfish someone by pretending to match them? isn't there some kind of inherent horror in knowing destiny has entwined you with a stranger?

In days like these, lobotomy helps me cope. Use code TREPANATION133 for a 20% discount!

Genuinely, I don’t know how else to get the word out, but I feel like if your home-cooked dinners don’t taste right, you're missing either paprika, sugar, butter, or chicken bouillon.

Still not right? It might be missing one of these: Mustard powder, soy sauce, fish sauce, vinegar. MSG. Ketchup. Mushroom powder. Maple syrup. Honey.

Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat by Samin Nosrat is a great source for beginner cooks. The Netflix Show and Book are fantastic, but the idea is there in the name.

You're probably low on one of them if your dish isn't hitting right. More butter, more salt, a splash of lemon juice, etc. All can help bring out the best in a dish.

Also salt as you go. Its always better to properly salt each part of a dish than to just salt at the end.

Salt your pasta water.

Fallen.

-

Really enjoyed working on this commission about Jason. Thanks to my amazing commissioner🙏

i’ve been crying laughing at this all morning it’s so real

Bad idea: Age gap discourse but in a fantasy land where there's multiple races who have vastly different lifespans and life styles.

Is it wrong for a 27 year old human to date a 140 year old stone elf, considering most stone elves don't get out of diapers till their 30s?

Is it wrong for a 80 year old dwarf to date a two year old fire wisp, when fire wisps only live up to 5 years (between the eruptions) and have memories of their past lives, so in a way they're "born" at age 400,000+? That octogenarian dwarf is way younger than the fire wisp that's only physically younger than some of the socks the dwarf has!

Is it wrong for a chronomancer who was never born to date, well, anyone? They are zero years old and infinity years old and negative one hundred and seventeen years old all at once. They look like an old human, sure, with the long white beard and the wrinkly skin, but as far as anyone can tell, they've always looked like that. We've seen the cave paintings.

Is it wrong for a 30 year old lizardman (that's old in lizardman years) to date a human who is 60 years old in biological years (because of aging spells), 26 years old in lived-experience years, but only 13 years old in calendar years? (ie, they were born 13 years ago, but spent some of that time in sideways timelines, so they've lived more years than have passed in their home timeline?)

Is it wrong for a 12,000 year old dragon date a pile of 400 kobolds when kobolds only live like 10 years on average, but reach full maturity in one year? And if you disagree, can you do anything about it? You do know what happened to the last policeman who tried to arrest a dragon, right? Their city is still smoldering, 50 years later.

Is it wrong for anyone to date the time worm? It's the same age, every year. So the age gap can only intensify. If you start dating the time worm when you're both the same age, when do you break it off because you've become too much older than them?

And most confusing of all... What about the fairies? They could be anything between a thousand and a day old, they would lie about their age either way, and they can look like whatever they want. There's fairies we know for a fact have been around since the founding of The City of Towers, who met the silent mother herself, and also look like they're at most ten years old. Is it wrong to date them, or just really uncomfortable for everyone who sees it? And on the other side there's fairies who are "born" (hatched? They come from plants, I'm not sure what the verb even would be. Seeded? Sprouted, maybe) this week who are already appearing like middle-aged men and dancing with widows in what looks like a scheme to run off with her fortune but they never take the money, because what would a fairy want with worthless metal discs? Maybe fairies have a hive mind or genetic memory or reincarnation with full memories, they'd never tell you or give you a straight (or consistent) answer anyway.

Stone golems are really the only inter-race dating situation anyone can agree on. They're unthinking & unmoving solid rock during the day, so those hours don't count. Thus their "real age" is a nice even half of their true age. So if you meet a stone golem who was dug out 30 years ago, watch out: that's a 15 year old, and if you're a 25 year human, that's too young for you, even though their dig-date is five years before your birth-date.

Oh this is easy actually you can only date if you're within one or two challenge ratings of each other, otherwise you need to double the species with the weaker CR. So a level 10 adventurer can date 1,024 orcs or a juvenile dragon, and a commoner can date a housecat (but watch out for bites)