The Clown Army Plummets

uaaa i was very inspired by the notes.. you articulated my feelings in drawing such a creature with many bows quite well

[oc] Warning: Bad Bunny ahead... 🐰❤

I’m on tour with my new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Catch me in LA TONIGHT (Jun 19) at Skylight Books, and on SUNDAY (Jun 21) at Kepler’s in Menlo Park. After that, it’s Toronto, NYC, Philly and Chicago.

#25yrsago TVA bans SETI@Home https://web.archive.org/web/20010625113535/https://www.knoxnews.com/archives/browserecent/06162001/archives/31399.shtml

#25yrsago Scott McCloud on microtransactions and Napster https://web.archive.org/web/20010708054658/http://www.thecomicreader.com/html/icst/icst-6/icst-6.html

#20yrsago Wardialling telemarketers stumble on Homeland Security batphones https://web.archive.org/web/20060630104202/https://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060616/NEWS/606160329/1006

#20yrsago NAB: Evidence is irrelevant to copyright treaties https://web.archive.org/web/20060622174657/https://drn.okfn.org/node/133#comment-246#comment-246

#20yrsago LA Times censors newsroom Internet feed https://web.archive.org/web/20060702051259/http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2006/06/protecting_reporters_from.html

#20yrsago Matt Stone’s memo to MPAA censors https://web.archive.org/web/20060619220447/https://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2006/06/preparing_for_t.html

#20yrsago Stonehenge pocket-watch predicts solstices https://web.archive.org/web/20060627053213/http://www.thinkgeek.com/gadgets/watches/7d2b/

#15yrsago Mean things authors say about each other https://www.flavorwire.com/188138/the-30-harshest-author-on-author-insults-in-history

#15yrsago Glasses with 720p HD video camera https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/zioneyez/eyeztm-by-zioneyez-hd-video-recording-glasses-for

#15yrsago ICANN votes to roll out 400-800 new generic top-level domains https://www.flickr.com/photos/wseltzer/5852419280/

#10yrsago W3C DRM working group chairman vetoes work on protecting security researchers and competition https://lwn.net/Articles/691108/

#10yrsago Thoughts and Prayers: a Congressional mass-shooting simulator https://thoughtsandprayersthegame.com/

#5yrsago The doctrine of dynastic wealth https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#caste

#5yrsago The gig economy's dark-money, astroturf "community groups" https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/19/dynastic-wealth/#astroturf

credit to the talented @bevsi for her amazing characters and art <3

What is Isiro Week?

Isiro Week is a week dedicated to the relationship between Isidora Velasco and Ro Cambria from the webcomic 'Heartstrings'!

What is Heartstrings?

Heartstrings is a lesbian webcomic (although a physical release might be coming soon) centered around the musicians Isidora Velasco and Ro Cambria.

Isi is a famous pop-star with two big secrets: she's gay, and she used to be the bassist for Velvet Crowbar, a fairly popular punk band.

Ro is my wife (lead vocalist for Velvet Crowbar and serial monogamist).

Heartstrings is created by the lovely Bev Johnson and her wife, Mrs. Bev Johnson. It can be read here.

Bev Johnson is on tumblr @bevsi, but she also as a linktree with all of her other socials! If you enjoy Heartstrings, please consider donating to her Patreon!

How do I participate?

The most common ways to participate in a ship week is through drawing fan art or writing fanfiction, but those aren't the only ways! You can write poetry, make edits, ship threads/polls, graphics--anything you like! If you can't or just don't want to create something, you can still support the fandom by liking, sharing, and commenting on other people's contributions.

What are the prompts?

Free day/Songfic - Monday, June 22nd

Tattoo Parlor/Flowershop AU - Tuesday, June 23rd

Movie Star AU - Wednesday, June 24th

Coming Out - Thursday, June 25th

Demon/Angel - Friday, June 26th

Bodyguard AU - Saturday, June 27th

Velvet Crowbar!Isi - Sunday, June 28th

Anything else?

If you're posting your works on Tumblr, please tag them #isiro week 2026 and/or #isiro week so that we can find them and reblog them! Also feel free to tag us directly @isiroweek

On Twitter or Bluesky, the same thing applies! Please tag your works with the isiroweek tags or tag us directly (we use the same username on all three websites!) and we'll retweet/reskeet all your wonderful creations! If you're posting on AO3, feel free to add your works to our IsiroWeek Collection! Remember that fanfic isn't the only kind of fanwork accepted on AO3--many people post their art and other creations on there!

I’m on tour with my new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Catch me in LA TONIGHT (Jun 19) at Skylight Books, and on SUNDAY (Jun 21) at Kepler’s in Menlo Park. After that, it’s Toronto, NYC, Philly and Chicago.

Partway through Bridget Read's unmissable chronicle of pyramid ("multi-level marketing") schemes, Little Bosses Everywhere, there comes a dual revelation: no one is selling any product to end-users and no one knows it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway

That is to say, all the hustlers who have spent thousands of dollars on Mary Kay, Herbalife and Amway have failed to move any of their product (beyond a statistically insignificant number of sales to friends and family who quickly tire of being hustled and stop buying this substandard, overpriced junk). But none of these "entrepreneurs" knows it, or admits it to anyone – not their "downlines" (friends they've lured into the swindle), nor their "uplines" (friends who recruited them into the con).

Each pyramid scheme victim thinks that they're the only failure in the whole bunch. They go to massive "sales conferences" where people boast about all the sales they're making, and they're all lying about it. Incredibly, the pyramid schemers who run these criminal enterprises have figured out how to make a virtue out of this situation: they offer "sales coaching" courses to help people make the sales that "everyone else is making." In other words, once you've gone bust failing to sell Amway, they'll get you to go further into debt to learn how to correct the (nonexistent) issues with your sales strategy so that you can join the (imaginary) legion of people who sell Amway by the bushel.

Con artists have a name for this kind of swindle: it's called a "big con," which is when everyone a mark comes into contact with is in on the scam. Here's how the big con worked: after a "roper" snared a victim (usually on an intercity train), they would telegraph ahead and let the home team know they had a live one. From that point forward, every single person the victim came into contact with was in on it – from the porter who collected his bags at the train station to the cab driver to the Western Union clerk he uses to cable his banker and ask for a cashier's check for his life's savings.

In the big con, dozens of skilled actors are putting on a play for an audience of one: you. It's a real-world, non-hallucinatory version of "gang stalking delusion," which is when someone going through a mental health crisis believes that everyone they meet is in on a conspiracy to drive them crazy:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/03/mission-space/#gsd

The situation that people suffering from GSD hallucinate is actually happening to people ensnared in a big con…and pyramid schemes are a big con. What's more – as Read's book makes clear – you can't understand modern American politics without understanding pyramid schemes.

One of the most destructive pyramid schemes in American history is Amway. The FTC was about to shut Amway down in the mid-1970s, but then Nixon resigned and Ford became president. Ford had been the Congressman to Amway's founders Jay Van Andel (then the head of the US Chamber of Commerce, which is to say, America's most powerful business lobbyist) and Dick DeVos (yes, that DeVos). Ford and the Amway swindlers were thick as thieves, and so Ford called off the FTC. Rather than going to jail, DeVos and Van Andel became morbidly wealthy, and they used some of their stolen money to found and fund the Heritage Foundation (yes, that Heritage Foundation).

The political class running America are pyramid scheme swindlers, funded by pyramid scheme money. They're running a big con on all of us. That's true of the Trumps, who've excreted a diarrhoeic slurry of shitcoins that have made them billions – and lost billions for their "investors":

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-106/

Trump insists that he is a self-made man who made his money with successful real estate deals. In reality, he lied all the time about his real estate, committing a string of felonies in order to defraud the banks, even as he went bankrupt, time and again:

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

Baby I’m so sorry but a LOT of white people had periods of time as kids or even early adults where they regularly regurgitated slurs and direct racism and performed cruelty on racialized people. It can legitimately anywhere from “saying slurs on COD at 12” to “putting various unsanitary and hard to remove things into Black classmates hair” to “excluded racialized kids around them because they were yucky/etc.” to “assaulting racialized people around them” to “spent time on /b/ and gained standard 4chan racism brainworms”

You also straight-up can’t guess what it’ll be until they mention it or it jumps out. As an example, back in montana there was a white woman in my local kink community who was generally SO fucking sweet, kind, and caring to everyone around her, including me. One day she posted this on Facebook out of literal nowhere:

And doubled down after I called her on it.

Please understand that “hasn’t deconstructed racist social beliefs” means “can and will use racism when useful or they think they’re safe to, or will engage in white solidarity”

If they haven’t actually put in the work to destroy the white supremacy they’ve been internalizing from society their whole life, this can be basically any white person, at any time, no matter how they’ve behaved previously and how much you think they’d never do something like that.