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SilkyP posted:That soured you on this awesome story? You goon Eh, I just hate that poo poo, like when people thank God for saving them from a car accident, no it was the firemen and medical team who did that. As for their getting trapped, I forgot to mention the bit where they slid down a rockface while having to watch out for massive rocks also tumbling down and trying to kill them. They didn't have the energy to get back the way they came
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Dec 7, 2018 08:40
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Rondette posted:Eh, I just hate that poo poo, like when people thank God for saving them from a car accident, no it was the firemen and medical team who did that. Thank God you cleared that up.
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Dec 7, 2018 09:29
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POOL IS CLOSED posted:If you didn't get to the end, this one was all money laundering. The big red flags are overly complicated business relationships and transactions that don't seem intended to generate a profit. Yeah, it’s just one piece of what I bet is an interesting story. I wonder where the money they’re washing is really coming from.
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Dec 7, 2018 11:12
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The unnerving part is that someone thought this was a good layout
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Dec 7, 2018 12:09
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BattleMaster posted:The unnerving part is that someone thought this was a good layout I was confused by that too and thought it was some kind of ironic retro web design thing?
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Dec 7, 2018 12:14
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This is why you don't leave the trail kids. 
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Dec 7, 2018 14:12
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Rondette posted:Eh, I just hate that poo poo, like when people thank God for saving them from a car accident, no it was the firemen and medical team who did that. I mean, I'm not a big God person, but any set of circumstances can be explained by God watching out for you without having to set up a Rube Goldberg machine of events including a vagrant's death to deliver you matches. The inspiration to look one more time, maybe there's a hidden pocket, the fact that they remained dry enough to use, could all be the "work" of an omnipotent deity. I'm especially loathe to blame someone in a life-or-death situation to find miracles in surviving.
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Dec 7, 2018 14:43
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Brawnfire posted:I mean, I'm not a big God person, but any set of circumstances can be explained by God watching out for you without having to set up a Rube Goldberg machine of events including a vagrant's death to deliver you matches. The inspiration to look one more time, maybe there's a hidden pocket, the fact that they remained dry enough to use, could all be the "work" of an omnipotent deity. I'm especially loathe to blame someone in a life-or-death situation to find miracles in surviving. Fair point. Here is a long article from the woman's POV. It was written 12 years ago, when they were still together . It mentions a bit about Donovan (the dead man) and his life. He sounded like a bit of an odd-sock. https://www.dmagazine.com/publications/d-magazine/2006/december/lost/ quote:Brandon told the rescuers that we had found a campsite belonging to a John Donovan. Smith had flown search missions for Donovan a year ago and immediately radioed in the discovery of the bag and campsite.
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Dec 7, 2018 14:55
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Agaragon posted:My favorite part is the fact that after that whole clusterfuck of a first date they REMAINED a couple for two loving years. It's one of those situations where you come out either closer than ever or completely separating forever. I had one of those, but it wasn't as dramatic. She just drank way too loving much and ended up naked and throwing up in my bathroom for about an hour, and then I had to stealth her through the house without anyone else seeing her after she drunkenly stumbled out still buck-rear end naked before I could bring her clothes, and then she collapsed in front of my mother as I was trying to put her to bed. Her biggest regret is that she didn't remember any of the fun stuff she did that night.
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Dec 7, 2018 15:25
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A rabbit hole of weirdness has opened up over on Reddit. There's a sub there dedicated to the Oakland County Child Killer case, which until recently had become pretty dormant, with only sporadic discussion popping up every few weeks. Until about a month ago, when a user called "TheraKoon" began spamming the subreddit with hundreds of posts detailing his own comprehensive theory of the case. It manages to tie in Casey and Caylee Anthony, the murder of JonBenet Ramsey, the Chelsea Bruck killing, and the work of an unidentified individual he calls the "Dark Artist," whose involvement in the case relates to altering official photos of the victims, suspects, and crime scenes, to include hidden images like this "cartoon bear" supposedly edited into a photo of Chris Bruck's suicide scene, and this "Frankenstein's monster" found in a photo of JonBenet's room. The theory itself seems to revolve around a secret ring of child pornographers/ritual murderers operating over a 20-30 year span. At one point the poster (using an alternate account) attempted to explain himself. In another post he claims to know who the Dark Artist is, that they were involved together in the underground art community of Detroit for some time, and that he has recognized this person's "artwork" in crime scene photos for years. Naturally, plenty of Redditors have dismissed him as a nut, to which he responds with things like "Every time they knowingly right [sic] 'seek help' knowing drat well im telling the truth they are willfully and actively helping assist in the cover up of a murder. Many of the members have already participated in murder. Disgusting, it's them who should be seeking help."
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Dec 7, 2018 17:25
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chitoryu12 posted:It's one of those situations where you come out either closer than ever or completely separating forever. This belongs in the Weird poo poo My Ex Did thread.
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Dec 7, 2018 17:35
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That's a bold assumption that they broke up.
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Dec 7, 2018 17:53
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Terrible Opinions posted:That's a bold assumption that they broke up. They say at the end that they went out for 2 years and separated though? Or are you talking about the Goon's date? My (told here somewhere before) horror 'early days of dating' story involves me blocking his toilet with a massive poo poo and he had no bog brush or gloves for me to deal with it with. After about 10-15 minutes of thinking 'wtf do I do I really like this dude and this could end it' I went out and asked for some gloves and explained the shituation, and cleared it up. We're still together after 9 years and have a kid now. He said that he found the way I dealt with it very cool and respected me for it..so I guess so far so good.
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Dec 7, 2018 18:21
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Terrible Opinions posted:That's a bold assumption that they broke up.
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Dec 7, 2018 18:22
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I was referring to the goon date.
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Dec 7, 2018 18:28
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Rondette posted:They say at the end that they went out for 2 years and separated though? Or are you talking about the Goon's date? This should’ve been the ending to How I Met Your Mother
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Dec 7, 2018 18:39
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ChickenOfTomorrow posted:you're right. presidents bad. Da Share Zone keeps knocking it out of the park!
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Dec 7, 2018 19:15
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I was going through some microfilmed newspapers recently and came across a story from 1951. Frank Di Cicco (or DiCicco) was being housed in the Columbus, Ohio prison. He had been in trouble a few times, this time landing in the pen for forgery. Di Cicco obviously wanted to be out of prison, but apparently didn't think he would stay out of trouble if freed. He decided to undergo a frontal lobotomy, to cure him of his criminal tendencies, which seems to have been performed during the summer or early fall of 1951. A few months later, in July 1952, his surgeon, Dr. John Scholl, convinced the parole board to release DiCicco two years early as an experiment. The 1952 article on his release said he wasn't sarcastic as he had been when he was first incarcerated and he wasn't as melancholy. Di Cicco was hopeful of staying out of trouble. As lobotomies were/are complete bullshit (Walter Freeman's preferred method was sticking an icepick in your eye sockets and fiddling around), I'm kinda curious as to what became of Di Cicco. Newspaper archives and genealogy records aren't pulling up anything except perhaps a census record for 1930. He lived in Lakewood at the time of his imprisonment in 1951 and was born in c. 1922. On a similar note: Irving Wallace's lobotomy story (The Operation of Last Resort/They Cut Out His Conscience) has finally been freely digitized somewhere. It originally ran in the Saturday Evening Post and it's pretty messed up.
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Dec 8, 2018 06:41
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Busket Posket posted:For some reason I find these intentional rabbit holes both fascinating and creepy as poo poo. All this effort to set up dozens of digital and physical storefronts that are too expensive to actually shop at, all for what? Why? Who benefits and how?!? A Youtube critic guy (and goon) Dan Olsen made a good argument that it looks like one weird company set up a bunch of shell networks and was basically scamming Youtube, who may have actually known and just not cared because they were getting paid anyway and no one caught on for a long time. Here's the video if you want a breakdown: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKp2gikIkD8. Crux of it is that he just rehosted one of the weird videos on a fresh account and somehow several different big networks behind them simultaneously and almost immediately each claimed copyright on one video. The weird aspect of all that to me, that I don't think has been covered in this thread, was that there was a whole ElsaGate conspiracy theory that "obviously" these were somehow grooming videos for the large pedo conspiracy. Which was baffling because at the same time the guy behind the Tickled documentary found a legit network of predators who were tricking children into making fetish videos for giant lady/shrunken man and general pain fetishes. But I barely saw that get any coverage. Not quite a  warning given the thread but there's a picture of a kid's foot post-Lego stomp, and it gets a little dark toward the end with actual creeps in the Youtube comments trying to contact the kid https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/21-11-2016/hello-my-name-is-ally-how-children-are-being-exploited-by-youtube-predators/
Parakeet vs. Phone has a new favorite as of 14:26 on Dec 8, 2018 |
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Dec 8, 2018 11:24
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Parakeet vs. Phone posted:The weird aspect of all that to me, that I don't think has been covered in this thread, was that there was a whole ElsaGate conspiracy theory that "obviously" these were somehow grooming videos for the large pedo conspiracy. Which was baffling because at the same time the guy behind the Tickled documentary found a legit network of predators who were tricking children into making fetish videos for giant lady/shrunken man and general pain fetishes. But I barely saw that get any coverage.
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Dec 8, 2018 16:29
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We are currently alive in a world so broken and so stupid that no editor would allow it to be published as fiction.
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Dec 8, 2018 16:33
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Parakeet vs. Phone posted:The weird aspect of all that to me, that I don't think has been covered in this thread, was that there was a whole ElsaGate conspiracy theory that "obviously" these were somehow grooming videos for the large pedo conspiracy. Which was baffling because at the same time the guy behind the Tickled documentary found a legit network of predators who were tricking children into making fetish videos for giant lady/shrunken man and general pain fetishes. But I barely saw that get any coverage. Yeah I remember that too, and how it got almost no media coverage while made-up conspiracies/trends get whole awareness campaigns. quote:Not all accounts circling the “challenge” scene operate in the shadows. This user brazenly posts videos of himself giving “shoutouts” to young boy’s accounts in order to gain their favour. His 5000 favourited videos mostly consist of young boys. There were also several “slime challenges” going around where adults were asking children to either slime their toys or themselves and record it, likely also to satisfy fetishes. From another David Farrier piece: quote:Police are advising parents to keep a close eye on their children’s social media activity after a series of suspicious posts were made on community pages in Wellington and Auckland. I feel like it’s most unnerving because it’s so easy to misuse a social media culture that ties both psychological and financial worth to SEO and impressions, nudging children and their parents to do irrational things for the chance to go viral (see: DaddyOFive/FamilyOFive, the parents who abused their children for YouTube views and lost custody of two of them, but didn’t think they did anything wrong). It’s using operant conditioning of “you do what I ask, you get likes and views and positive comments that your developing brain craves while you’re not yet able to see darker subtexts!” And as an abused child who grew up in the dial-up era, compared to kids now who just have the internet omnipresent, it’s easy to understand how appealing it would have been at a young age to get all this admiration and validation from strangers around the world (ooh fancy) just for filming their weird request.
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Dec 8, 2018 16:39
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Busket Posket posted:I feel like it’s most unnerving because it’s so easy to misuse a social media culture that ties both psychological and financial worth to SEO and impressions, nudging children and their parents to do irrational things for the chance to go viral (see: DaddyOFive/FamilyOFive, the parents who abused their children for YouTube views and lost custody of two of them, but didn’t think they did anything wrong). It’s using operant conditioning of “you do what I ask, you get likes and views and positive comments that your developing brain craves while you’re not yet able to see darker subtexts!” Other people have written about it at more length and with more wisdom and authority than I could ever have, but basically, the whole "numbers go up" thing in our brains is hard-wired and it's only relatively recently that terrible people have been exploiting it for profit. I grew up loving games, and I'm not going to give them up, but anything that presents itself as a game (e.g. health insurance companies saying "play such-and-such" with information about your fuckin' body, or anything that tries to squidge your nerves with a little red circle with a number in it) I send pretty much immediately to the bin. I feel like that's why Twitter became so influential and so awful - it turned having thoughts and ideas and feelings into something that can be measured and scored. Probably not a new observation, but it applies anywhere that human interaction is visibly measured and probably more so when there's loving money involved.  the only thing I want "influencers" to spill is their blood. all of it.
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Dec 8, 2018 17:08
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Busket Posket posted:For some reason I find these intentional rabbit holes both fascinating and creepy as poo poo. All this effort to set up dozens of digital and physical storefronts that are too expensive to actually shop at, all for what? Why? Who benefits and how?!? I can't make out exactly what's going on with the scheme in that NY Times article, but people have apparently set up other schemes based around selling overpriced goods on Amazon Markets in order to launder money from stolen credit cards. See: https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/02/money-laundering-via-author-impersonation-on-amazon/
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Dec 8, 2018 18:19
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Three pages late BUT Annihilation deserves a spot on that 25 best sci-fi films of the pst decade or whatever it was Annihilation is a very good film imo
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Dec 9, 2018 01:58
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RC and Moon Pie posted:On a similar note: Irving Wallace's lobotomy story (The Operation of Last Resort/They Cut Out His Conscience) has finally been freely digitized somewhere. It originally ran in the Saturday Evening Post and it's pretty messed up. My Lobotomy, by Howard Dully with Charles Fleming, is a fantastic book and very 
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Dec 9, 2018 02:13
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InediblePenguin posted:actual child exploitation being utterly ignored in favor of having fun discussing bizarre conspiracy theories is so loving standard I'm angry but not surprised It’s not hard to see how they got conflated though. There was this weird element of terrorizing children in a lot of these videos, or the peppa pug going to the dentist and getting tortured one, and nobody could really tell whether that was an algorithm, a troll, or someone preying on children. James Bridle covered a lot of it, both in articles and in the TED talk but a lot of that just came from the fact that no one really understood what it was we were seeing or why.
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Dec 9, 2018 02:26
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Pastry of the Year posted:We are currently alive in a world so broken and so stupid that no editor would allow it to be published as fiction. This is an appropriate post for pretty much any thread anymore. Btw crazy redditor aside, the unsolved mysteries sub is actually pretty good for this sort of stuff.
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Dec 9, 2018 04:05
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Depressio111117 posted:Three pages late BUT Annihilation deserves a spot on that 25 best sci-fi films of the pst decade or whatever it was It was a pretty good book, too. One of a trilogy you can read on Scribd for free. Not like crazy good but drat interesting and nice psychological/body horror stuff that you rarely see now. There's one scene where a dude is in a crawlspace looking at some insane drawings and realizes the person who drew them is literally inches away, just stuffed even deeper and staring at him. I legit got goosebumps like I was 12 and reading Stephen King for the first time. I basically spent 2 days inhaling those books. Highly recommended if you like that weird horror stuff.
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Dec 9, 2018 04:47
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Is there an article or something explaining what happened with the father of five YouTube guy?
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Dec 9, 2018 05:35
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GelatinSkeleton posted:Is there an article or something explaining what happened with the father of five YouTube guy? Did you want a basic rundown of the whole story, or what’s happening now? I can’t find any substantial updates since July 2018, but here’s a good article on how, even though their two youngest siblings were found to be psychologically damaged by the “pranks” (enough that CPS had cause to place them on supervised probation and the parents took an Alford plea to avoid jail time), the older three are trained to focus on “losing their careers” by having their YouTube channel shut down. It’s a twisted new form of stage parenting, where children are raised to believe that creating viral content is how they earn happiness/worth and anyone who questions their parents’ motives is just a jealous enemy.
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Dec 9, 2018 10:49
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Busket Posket posted:Did you want a basic rundown of the whole story, or what’s happening now? I can’t find any substantial updates since July 2018, but here’s a good article on how, even though their two youngest siblings were found to be psychologically damaged by the “pranks” (enough that CPS had cause to place them on supervised probation and the parents took an Alford plea to avoid jail time), the older three are trained to focus on “losing their careers” by having their YouTube channel shut down. It’s a twisted new form of stage parenting, where children are raised to believe that creating viral content is how they earn happiness/worth and anyone who questions their parents’ motives is just a jealous enemy. There's a weird kind of logic that does go along with being angry about "losing their careers" because poo poo, man, people are dying in America today because they're poor and can't afford basic necessities and these kids probably have legitimate reason to fear that being a social media figure was their best way out of that.
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Dec 9, 2018 16:03
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Busket Posket posted:It’s a twisted new form of stage parenting, where children are raised to believe that creating viral content is how they earn happiness/worth and anyone who questions their parents’ motives is just a jealous enemy. Didn't some goon write a dystopian short story about everyone fighting for likes and to be 'influencers' and the climax was a fight between mechas piloted by one person that made cat videos and some other dude? And the narrator is fatally injured in the melee and is crowded by drones/bystanders looking to turn his death into views and clicks? Anyone have that?
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Dec 9, 2018 20:33
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LeJackal posted:Didn't some goon write a dystopian short story about everyone fighting for likes and to be 'influencers' and the climax was a fight between mechas piloted by one person that made cat videos and some other dude? And the narrator is fatally injured in the melee and is crowded by drones/bystanders looking to turn his death into views and clicks? poo poo that was from the marble economy thread, I think.
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Dec 10, 2018 00:20
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LeJackal posted:Didn't some goon write a dystopian short story about everyone fighting for likes and to be 'influencers' and the climax was a fight between mechas piloted by one person that made cat videos and some other dude? And the narrator is fatally injured in the melee and is crowded by drones/bystanders looking to turn his death into views and clicks? idk what you're remembering the second part from, but the first part of that description is from this Cefte posted: Attention Deficit Disorder The afternoon sun angled through a tear in the tent. Ma Bao-Zhi grunted, then shifted his face towards the shade and screwed up his eyes. In the absence of light, the retinal burns from his always-on pupil-tracking HUD-halo danced before his field of vision. He sat up and stretched. It was a new day. The corner of his visual field that was perpetually occupied by the DistroNet feed blinked. A major announcement was incoming from the most influential association of experts that he had ever been a part of: The Council Of Two Million With A Remit Of Everything. The upstart replacement of last year's not-hegemon, the Coven of Eight to the Seven; Masters of Knowledge, the Council had, yesterday, consisted of just over 50.3% of the surviving inhabitants of what had once been Taiwan SAR. However, as he scanned the headlines, he noted that an overnight disputation on the meaning of Buddha-nature had resulted in nearly two hundred being purged from the membership roster, and, more importantly, from the Council's ReDistroList. Ma had never posted to any discussion regarding Buddha-nature, for which he was now extremely thankful. Attention Distribution Cannot Be Gamed, he though, nodding to himself. It was a mantra every child knew, and it was obviously true. 'Gaming' would imply an illegitimate practice, and since the attention economy was inherently legitimate, any practice that arose thereof could not be 'gaming'. The use of randomly-assigned attention redistribution lists to strengthen the network-influence of an association of experts was one of the most powerful practices there was - without it, no modern association of experts could compete. With the saccadic grace of long practice, his pupils flipped to the updated, slightly smaller ReDistroList, and settled down to start his highly-encouraged ten hours of daily network-reinforcement. Ten hours - ten icons - each one painstakingly designed by the expert it represented. The Coven of Eight to the Seven had highly encouraged eight hours of ReDistroList attention, but the Council's superior attention ethic had led to an expert association network both wider and deeper in links, and thus, far more influential. The Coven defined their area of expertise too narrowly, and left themselves open to a ratio attack. It was a trivial task for the Council to dial down the attention ratio of key knowledge industries overnight, leaving the Coven rudderless and sinking. Ma had been a third-quartile defector, holding out longer than most; his punishment was to enter the Council with six month's half-ratio deficit. Half as likely to be randomly assigned to other experts ReDistroList, he counted himself lucky - the fourth quartile had been exiled entirely. As is, he was comfortably off in a deficit camp outside Taibao. Ma shook himself; introspection was an audience of one. The first icon belonged to Tracy Liu: 166kg, pink highlights and moderator by acclaim of a yaoi fandom for the ancient classic, Glengarry Glen Ross. The minutes ticked by, and as the completion bar for the first icon flipped over into green and Tracy's hand-drawn icon faded from sight - young Al Pacino gently cupping young Jack Lemmon's testicles on a bed of index cards - Ma decided that he would treat himself with an hour of free attention. He rucked the covers back from his legs and withdrew his 75MHz future-proofed laptop from its pouch. Minutes later, halfway through the boot-sequence, Ma heard the unmistakable whirring of a Bother-Gyro. He dug rapidly through the contents of the tent for the thick blanket he'd found the week before, to muffle the fans of the laptop, but the blanket had been redistributed. It was too late anyway: the Bother-Gyro's tracking software had heard the fans. "Go away!" shouted Ma. < Hello Friend And How Are You And Woo! > The Bother-Gyro hovered just out of Ma's reach. "滚蛋!" < Would You Like A Comestible?! Marmalade Is In This Week! > "gently caress off." Bother-Gyros were increasingly common, flying over the water from the Penghu Collective, and Ma had tangled with them before, when he was a high-ratio member of the Coven: an attractive target. The Collective were Min-speakers, and the language barrier was starving them of culture-based attention, and forcing them to desperate measures. He knew that while they would advertise to any moving object, their main purpose was to gain the attention of the victim. Even compared to the average camp member, Ma's influence ratio was low... "Hey! Bot! There's a high-ratio family just over that wall! You can bother them all at once! Think of the attention gains!" Unfortunately for Ma, the Bother-Gyro was also running off a 75MHz chip, which did not support voice recognition. Even more unfortunately, what little resources it did have to bring to bear were mainly concentrated on measuring the direction of gaze of the victim, and Ma's gaze had briefly moved from the Gyro to the wall he was gesturing at. The Gyro aimed a module at the RFID tag on Ma's halo. *pffffsss* "gently caress!" Pepper-spray will catch anyone's attention. Whilst Ma rolled around in the dirt, the Bother-Gyro gently settled on the ground next to him, conserving battery. Proximity was worth less attention than direct eye-contact, but it was still worth something. After a minute, the database updated the Gyro on Ma's uninspiring attention value, and it buzzed off in search of less deficient prey. ---- The afternoon was nearly over before Ma's eyes stopped watering, and the pupil-tracker started to update correctly. Luckily, his HUD-halo was undamaged - it could still receive and transmit audio, video, pupil-tracking data and, indeed, record everything that Ma did. Nine hours of ReDistroList remained on his schedule, but he had bigger things on his mind. Of all the places, his deficit camp was lucky enough to be in viewing distance of a celebrity battle. It wasn't entirely by chance, of course. Celebrity Mechas were very power-hungry, and required tethering to the grid network, and deficit camps had the tendency to spring up in unused land along grid lines. While city dwellers might have had the massed influence to force such a destructive event outside their municipal margins, a deficit camp by definition could not face up to even the most minor celebrity's choice of land-resource. This particular battle was between the gigantic robots piloted by a pornography magnate and a man who was extremely good at making videos of cats. Hovering cameras darted about the provided every possible angle around the machines, while in-cockpit vision was granted by cameras attached to both control modules. There were no adverts - the battle itself drew all the attention the participants needed. The pornographer had outfitted his mecha with water sprinklers, providing the substrate for projected holograms of noted starlets and their riveting performances. The cat man, showing disdain for the practice of up-attending, had a far more stripped-down mecha, bowing to demand only by having a control module shaped like a cat's head. While his initial surge in influence had been off the back of a pet British Shorthair, his true power came from his decision to breed several thousand of the creatures and lock them in a vast complex filled with pastel colors and assorted common household items. Cuteness, too, can be brute-forced. As the two machines started to stride towards each other, Ma watched camp-dwellers who sought influence more than health run between the legs of the mechas. Like so much in the attention economy, it was a dual payoff. Simply being near a mecha guaranteed a proportion of the attention that the pilot was constantly exuding, and that was worth the risk of injury in itself. But, if a camera tracked by millions happened to autofocus on a lucky expert? Why, a single second's worth of attention was more than the expert might otherwise see in a lifetime. The battle was joined, and as the mechas stamped to and fro, they came closer and closer to the western edge of the camp - the edge furthest from Ma. Even those experts in the camp whose lack of attention ethics had placed them dangerously close to exile from their associations could not help but pay heed. Lasers flashed, missiles flew, and clouds of smoke emerged even when not strictly necessary. In fact, the battle, like most battles, was more bark than bite: it was considered bad form to actually kill another celebrity, not least because it tended to alienate part of your potential audience. After all, who didn't enjoy both pornography and cat videos? The din didn't just attract the attention of experts - from miles around, Bother-Gyros wheeled in, guided by the very human tendency to correlate decibels and attention. Ma gazed in wonder as a two flocks of gyros of different manufacture, bathed in the proximity wash from the mechas, each mistook the other flock as the source of attention. Overriding the normal guideline that led them to disperse for maximal coverage, the gyros spiralled madly in ever decreasing circles as they sought to increase that flow. As he watched, the gyrating super-flock, consisting of nearly a hundred Bother-Gyros, whirled into the cloud of spray being produced by pornographer's mechanical contraption. A hundred automatic protection circuits flared into action, and the mass of gyros punched in the opposite direction - straight into the air intake ducts of the cat-mecha. One gyro would have been unfortunate. Five would have led to an emergency shutdown. But no mecha-designer had considered such a freak occurrence as the emergent behaviour so briefly displayed by the gyro-flocks. Admittedly, QA and Safety were neglected disciplines ever since the advent of the attention economy - who would dedicate their lives to a discipline that involved something so unquantifiable as preventing rare occurrences? After all, it's not as though someone might lose their accumulated attention - just their lives. With a massive crunch, the flywheels at the center of the cat-mecha broke apart, releasing a torrent of kinetic energy, and sending parts of the mecha in every direction. The pornographer tried to backpedal his mecha away from the burning debris, but his attention elsewhere, he stepped directly on one of the experts that had been trailing his footsteps. As his machine overturned, the pornographer clutched at the control panel, seeking the emergency eject key, but by chance also fat-fingering the steam overcharge system. The porn-mecha's control module blasted off the chassis - straight into the side of one of the few fixed-wall buildings in the camp. The steam explosion, while softer, was far more deadly. Ma had hit the ground as soon as he saw the first gyro sucked into the air-intake - luckily so, as burning debris had taken out several of his neighbours. Now, his view obscured by what remained of the same three foot-wall he had urged the gyro to surmount earlier that day, he flicked his eyes to open a newsline. The events of the past minute had gone viral - his feed was already filling with commentary from the other side of the world. Every last survivor would soon be bombarded with requests for commentary on the death of the celebrities. Celebrities plural? The feed from the cat-mecha was still active. In fact, the explosion had blown the control module right over the camp, landing to the east, far from the screams of the scalded and poisoned camp dwellers. Ma held a rag over as much of his mouth and nose as he could reach through his HUD-halo, and levered himself to his feet. The cat man was alive. In fact, he was almost unhurt - a mere fractured collarbone. He was, however, trapped inside his module, and mouthing something - the audio feed from his cockpit had cut out. Ma tore his attention from his HUD-halo and looked out, directly at the smoking module in the distance. Never mind proximity attention - to be the man who saved a celebrity from almost certain death? To be the only source of an audio feed for the sole celebrity survivor of what the international feeds were calling the Disaster of Taibao? Ma started to trot towards the control module, avoiding the prone bodies of those less fortunate survivors, around some of whom flames still flickered. He tore his foot away from the grasp of one, whilst muttering thanks for the last few seconds of absolute attention they granted him. He stepped over a corpse, then briefly glanced behind him. The least concussed of the able-bodied camp survivors were already moving after him. Turning his back to the setting sun, Ma broke into a run.
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Dec 10, 2018 01:36
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Holy poo poo.
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Dec 10, 2018 03:30
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I would like and subscribe.
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Dec 10, 2018 04:01
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Teacher in California has a nervous breakdown and starts cutting her students' hair while singing the national anthem https://www.reddit.com/r/visalia/comments/a3is6z/my_buddies_teacer_forcefully_cut_his_hair/
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Dec 10, 2018 05:07
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Negrostrike posted:Teacher in California has a nervous breakdown and starts cutting her students' hair while singing the national anthem Yeah, I read that earlier. Sounds like she had a psychotic break and thank god the only casualty were hair and the kids’ psyches.
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Dec 10, 2018 06:36
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shelley posted:idk what you're remembering the second part from, but the first part of that description is from this Yeah, the ending got mixed up in my head. Thanks!
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Dec 10, 2018 07:39
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