Y’know, After A Certain Amount Of Rent-lowering Gunshots, It Starts Just Being A Dangerous Neighborhood.

I gotta piss hard. See you in a sec

📢📢This place📍is not ❌ a place of honor🏅🎖no highly esteemed deed 🏆is commemorated here 🙅🏻‍♀️ nothing valued💰💸is here 🚫

What is here was dangerous 🔪🔪and repulsive 🤢 to us 🤮

This message 📩 is a warning🗣 about danger⚠️

The danger ⛔️ is in a particular location 🗺🌎 it increases 📈towards a center🎯

The center of danger ☢️ is here ⬇️ of a particular size 🤏🏼🔍and shape 🟣🟪 and below us 👇🏼

The danger 🚧 is still present 🎁 in your time 🕰️ as it was in ours ⏳

The danger 🆘 is to the body🧍🏼‍♀️🧍🏽🧍🏼‍♂️and it can kill😵⚰️ ☠️

The form❓of the danger 🧨 is an emanation 💥 of energy ⚡️

The danger 🛑 is unleashed 🔑🔓 only if you substantially disturb 👉🏼👉🏼 this place physically 👷🚜

This place is best👍🏼 shunned 🤫🙈and left uninhabited ⏹⏮🏃🏻‍♀️🏃🏃‍♂️💨🏚🏚🏚

Electronic Frontier Foundation

What Reddit Got Wrong

After weeks of burning through users’ goodwill, Reddit is facing a moderator strike and an exodus of its most important users. It’s the late

The monetization creep has been evident for a while. Reddit has added a subscription ”Reddit premium”; offered “community rewards” as a paid super-vote ; embraced an NFT marketplace; changed the site's design for one with more recommended content; and started nudging users toward the official mobile app. The site has also been adding more restrictions to uploading and viewing “not safe for work” (NSFW) content. All this, while community requests for improvements to moderation tools and accessibility features have gone unaddressed on mobile, driving many users to third-party applications. Perhaps the worst development was announced on April 18th, when Reddit announced changes to its Data API would be starting on July 1st, including new “premium access” pricing for users of the API. While this wouldn’t affect projects on the free tier, such as moderator bots or tools used by researchers, the new pricing seems to be an existential threat to third-party applications for the site. It also bears a striking resemblance to a similar bad decision Twitter made this year under Elon Musk.

[...]

Details about Reddit’s API-specific costs were not shared, but it is worth noting that an API request is commonly no more burdensome to a server than an HTML request, i.e. visiting or scraping a web page. Having an API just makes it easier for developers to maintain their automated requests. It is true that most third-party apps tend to not show Reddit’s advertisements, and AI developers may make heavy use of the API for training data, but these applications could still (with more effort) access the same information over HTML. The heart of this fight is for what Reddit’s CEO calls their “valuable corpus of data,” i.e. the user-made content on the company’s servers, and for who gets live off this digital commons. While Reddit provides essential infrastructural support, these community developers and moderators make the site worth visiting, and any worthwhile content is the fruit of their volunteer labor. It’s this labor and worker solidarity which gives users unique leverage over the platform, in contrast to past backlash to other platforms.

one of my favorite parts of moby dick is when ishmael wants/needs to tell us something but he desperately doesn't want to have to talk about it, he just buries it in a bunch of irrelevant information.

at the very beginning, he goes to church. a place filled with "silent grief... insular and incommunicable." and he sees these marble tablets on either side of the pulpit and says 'I don't really remember them all that well' (which is likely a lie. at the least it's extremely out of character for a man who directly quotes the internal monologues of other men) and proceeds to give three paraphrased examples. the first tablet is for a teenager, lost overboard off patagonia. the tablet was paid for by his sister. the second is for 6 men, taken by a whale they were hunting in the pacific. the tablet was paid for "by their surviving shipmates." the third is for a captain, killed on his own boat by a sperm whale off japan. the tablet was paid for by his widow. all seemingly normal.

except they're not. the first one is a red herring, seemingly irrelevant to our story. but the second? a memorial for a crew lost to a whale, left by their surviving shipmates? that's exactly what we're reading. the surviving shipmate is ishmael. he's all that remains. and then he pivots, drawing our attention to the much clearer parallel- the captain who loses his life on his own boat to a sperm whale. and we all immediately go "oh I know who that is! ahab!!" and ishmael succeeds. he needs us to see the sailors remembered by their surviving crew, but even more he needs to not address it. he needs us to not ask him about it. he wants this story to be told but he doesn't want to be the one telling it. he wants to pretend to be someone else, to be someone other than the one who survived. and for 135 chapters, he gets to be.

Hell’s Chicken Sinner Sprites

I LOVE HER SO MUCH

GONCHAROV (1973) dir. Martin Scorsese

“It funny because for many years people thought Goncharov was the main antagonist of the film, after all, he’s the one everyone’s out to get, right? But it seems people are starting to understand that in actual fact, it is time that is the main adversary in this story. There’s never enough of it and that torments a lot of characters, especially Goncharov, because he’s fighting so desperately to find his place in a world that is so keen on keeping him ostracized.”

[template by @bitchronan]

A Snowy Day in Liurnia

“Mother says you’re not to be trusted,” the young girl said, twirling a finger in her red locks. The woman laughed, her large hat flopping about strangely in the girl’s eyes. It made her smile in spite of her uncertainty. The crone knelt down somewhat to meet her gaze, cold blue eyes crowning a warm smile.

“Thine mother speaks true, my dear. Trust is a thing earned, not given. Though, in time will thou too grant it?” She said, as a weathered hand reached out and pat her head, softly. The girl stepped aback, not in fright but surprise. The woman’s touch was frigid as ice. It was true then. She really was the snow witch.

“…are you the reason why it’s snowing now? The manor’s never seen a blizzard before…” the young Ranni asked, taking steps forward again. The snow witch smiled further, a spark of mischief to her grin now. 

“Tis not easy to get the attention of the Carians, dear. A full moon oft outshines a dark one, after all.” She let out a laugh, shrill as the icicles hanging from the manor’s eaves. Ranni smiled, laughing too. How had this stranger crept inside the castle’s walls though? Rennala and Radagon were vigilant as any since the war had ended, but a snowfall had drawn the attention to the now frozen lake beyond the walls and the Academy. 

A fog had crept in that morning, and with it, a stooped figure tending to the trees in the small groves tucked away in the Carian Manor. Ranni had ran out to explore the growing drifts, but had found the curious figure plucking snowflakes from the air as one might take fruit hanging from a branch. 

“Tis a good omen though, young mistress,” the hag said, finally putting away her little game. An omen indeed, a guiding light of the moon had brought her here, and the one to answer the call had surprised her further. The daughter of Rennala and Radagon themselves would be her student. 

“An… Omen?” the girl stepped back, fear tinging her voice. The snow witch merely laughed again, this time loudly and the snow gathering around them seemed to sparkle with each note of her voice.

“Oh, mine apologies dearest, tis not what I meant. A sign. A very good, sign. Thou art steeped in sorcery, thy blood calls out to it and it responds. Thine path is bright, perhaps brighter than most,” she stooped down again, this time resting fully on her heels. The odd down garb sparkled like starlight in the grove, bringing the young Ranni closer still. 

“…if you… really think so. The Academy teaches sorcery…” was all she could manage to say. The snow witch tilted her head at that, her smile going from one of mischief to something dark and bitter, as a sour taste received when sweetness was expected. She relaxed however, recalling her purpose here.

“The Academy is most equipped to turn lesser minds into vessels, ready to receive instruction from thy mother and her students. Thou, however, deserve something better than that. She will teach thou what she must, but I have a question for thee.” 

Ranni looked up as the snow witch stood, her cold, blue eyes almost glowing in the shadow of her strange hat.

“What is it?” she squeaked, feeling a tinge of fear. The hag shut her eyes, smiling that softer smile again. She tilted her head before extending a hand.

“I can teach thee not of Glintstone, but of ice and cold. Of the chill of night and starlight.” She whispered, lowering herself once more to meet Ranni’s gaze evenly. The young child furrowed her brows, a hand brushing damp bangs back from the wetness of the snowfall. 

“A chill night? It’s so cold now though!” she complained, folding her arms and pouting. The witch giggled at that. She was indeed the perfect student. 

‘Oh young Ranni, thou shalt learn beautifully,’ the snow witch thought.  

Apparently spez has said that the blackout is 'noise' and 'will pass'. Two days was never enough. I'm not using Reddit until pigboy backs off. This blackout needs to be indefinite.

And when you leave for good, make sure to delete your valuable content. Shitheel isnt making a cent of my posts.

The content of spez's internal memo:

Hi Snoos,

Starting last night, about a thousand subreddits have gone private. We do anticipate many of them will come back by Wednesday, as many have said as much. While we knew this was coming, it is a challenge nevertheless and we have our work cut out for us. A number of Snoos have been working around the clock, adapting to infrastructure strains, engaging with communities, and responding to the myriad of issues related to this blackout. Thank you, team.

We have not seen any significant revenue impact so far and we will continue to monitor.

There’s a lot of noise with this one. Among the noisiest we’ve seen. Please know that our teams are on it, and like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well. The most important things we can do right now are stay focused, adapt to challenges, and keep moving forward. We absolutely must ship what we said we would. The only long term solution is improving our product, and in the short term we have a few upcoming critical mod tool launches we need to nail.

While the two biggest third-party apps, Apollo and RIF, along with a couple others, have said they plan to shut down at the end of the month, we are still in conversation with some of the others. And as I mentioned in my post last week, we will exempt accessibility-focused apps and so far have agreements with RedReader and Dystopia.

I am sorry to say this, but please be mindful of wearing Reddit gear in public. Some folks are really upset, and we don’t want you to be the object of their frustrations.

Again, we’ll get through it. Thank you to all of you for helping us do so.

Rewatched Goncharov (1973) and did a few studies of my favourite scenes