Rogues in fantasy TTRPGs that aren’t Dungeons & Dragons
How to Rogue: a D&D 5e Masterpost
D&D 5e: Roguish Archetypes Masterpost Part I & Part II
Building a Rogue in 3.5 and Pathfinder: Collected Resources
Rogues in Fantasy Literature Masterpost
Dagger Fighting Masterpost
Thieves’ Cant Masterpost
Lock Picking Masterpost
Traps Masterpost
Tags and Credits
Basic Tags
How to Rogue: Exploring the Rogue class in D&D and assorted roleplaying games. Includes #fluff (roleplaying tips, character concepts, #backstories), #crunch (optimisation tips, guides, #magic items, #homebrew), and memes.
Rogues in Fiction: Exploring the Rogue archetype in literature, folklore, poetry, comics, games, etc, and #analysis thereof. Also relevant art.
Rogues in Theory: Exploring the Rogue archetype in history and society, and relevant subjects. Also #words of the trade (#etymology, synonyms, #thieves’ cant, linguistics).
Rogues in Practice: Tips on #how to stab and #how to steal (or, ahem, how to write/roleplay about stabbing and stealing), #exemplars of the trade (real life rogues and their exploits), and some less exemplary exploits. See also our esteemed colleagues in the #animal kingdom.
Art - Rogues Gallery: Rogue character portraits.
Art - Scene: Landscapes, fight scenes, #bar brawls, #heists, dungeon-crawling, etc. For urban landscapes, see #the city speaks.
Thieves’ Tools: Lockpicks! And assorted tools for breaking and entering where you’re not supposed to.
Tools of the Trade: Weapons! Mostly knives and daggers from all over the world (see the Dagger Fighting Masterpost for all the relevant tags), and some pretty swords and crossbows and the like.
Prison Ballads: The soundtrack.
…There is some overlap.
Quirky Thematic Tags
The ecstasy of gold: For loot, treasure, gold, and the deadly sin of greed.
The city speaks: For the hidden splendour of the city, from the gutters to the rooftops.
Heroes and villains: For good and evil and that grey waste in between which Rogues so often populate.
The phantom of liberty: For freedom, and storming the gates of heaven.
No tears for the creatures of the night: For the deadly sin of lust and its professionals.
The gambler’s face cracks into a grin: For gamblers and card cheats.
Dishonour on your cow: For honour among thieves, criminal codes, omertà, and blood feuds. File under the deadly sin of pride.
Fearlessly fleeing: For craven rogues and clever rogues. Wait, there’s a difference?
The ramblin’ rover: For vagrants and vagabonds and for the long-winding road.
The right to be lazy: For the deadly sin of sloth.
The hired man: For (mostly against tbh) the Rogue’s nemesis, the cop. See also #prison.
Swinging from the gallows tree: For the ignominious end that awaits us.
The quirk is strong with this one: See also #the potatoes of defiance, #big thief little thief, #the thrill of the heist, #the rich remember, #daring escape, #be the chaos you want to see in this world, #carnival, #stabbity, #only knives left, #dubito ergo sum, #fuck the king, #profanity makes everything better, #information wants to be free, #a begging I will go, #forbidden fruit, #the groaning rogue, #I fought the law, #the deserter. (#Tag namer explains some of the quirkiness.)
More Tags
Tabletop tales: It happened in somebody’s game.
D&D history: The conceptual and mechanical evolution of the Thief Rogue class in D&D, and other interesting stuff from the history of #roleplaying.
TRS: The Rogue speaks. Not to be confused with TSR.
Self explanatory: #D&D, #3.0, #3.5, #5e, #Pathfinder, #Pathfinder 2e, #AD&D, #roguish archetype, #feat, #skill trick, various #skills (#deception, #sleight of hand, #stealth, etc), #rogue fashion, #correspondence, #long post.
For anything else, try the search function and hope, but don’t get your hopes up because tumblr’s search function is appalling. Googling with the parametre site:theoutcastrogue.tumblr.com might actually be better.
Credits
All original work published here (i.e. the words and the occasional photograph of @theoutcastrogue aka @we-are-rogue, 2016–2026) is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence.
Avatar image: “Tymora’s Luck” (detail) by Ryan Pancost, from Dragon Magazine #388 | Wizards of the Coast 2010
Header image: “The Thief” (detail) by capprotti, for the game Exile Gods | Distant Orbit 2009
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"The thing is only acting in self defense because it gets attacked first"
The very first experience it has with the base crew is that they save it from people shooting at it, give it warm hugs, and kill the people trying to deatroy it. After that it attacks and impersonates an unknown (at the time) member of the crew. After that it gets surrounded by dogs who are angry but too scared to approach, then it changes, then it attacks the huskies, and only then does anyone in the base camp treat it with hostility.
You can imagine anything you want for the unknowns (before the movie starts, whether it can tell animals apart, etc), but you are fully wrong if you characterize its reception as being preemptively attacked. You can interpret things lots of ways, but saying the humans at the camp attack it first is factually wrong.
"None of the men know each other enough to recognize an impersonation."
The entire first act of the movie is devoted to establishing that they know each other with an Intimacy so deep they can anticipate one another's actions and attitudes. They have been in an isolated arctic base for months and months where they can barely leave the same building. They are in one another's personal space throughout the movie. It's a vital plot point that the Thing can immitate people down to memories and personality traits. It's a vital metaphorical point as well. It's so deeply and fundamentally superficial and factually incorrect to call them unfamiliar with each other that it implies total inattention to what is happening on screen.
There are so, so many completely reasonable ways to read ideas of social disaffectation, queerness, and more into the text of the movie without misrepresenting the factual text. I'm screaming and crying and throwing up blood, what else would everyone like to propose about horror movies that sounds great aside from being entirely spurious? Someone told me psychological thrillers are the only good horror movies an hour and a half ago, we could start there. I want people to think in these ways about horror but also talking about it in a way that depends on the the text of the film does require a certain amount of knowing the actual text of the film.
Actually I think this is important tags that speak to a larger idea about horror conversation:
The Thing is, at heart, not a movie about any singular decision or behavior creating a bad outcome. Baked into the 1982 movie is failure, death, entropy, inevitable loss. It's not a movie that's meant to have a right solution, or a right decision - but when someone comes at this very bleak story without a good grounding in horror, there's a kind of urge to treat it like a puzzle. If only they were closer. If only they communicated.
That's not meeting it where it's at, because it rests on a situation where none of those elements really exist. People acted the best they could in the circumstances with the tools and information they had - and it simply was not enough. Nearly everyone dies. Even with the ambiguous ending, whoever is human is going to die, because it's winter in Antarctica and he is hundreds of miles from anywhere with no shelter and no food and no transportation. That's the sort of horror it is, the idea that when faced with extinction humanity's best efforts won't succeed. Creating an interpretation where if we had "just" this or that is shying away from the bleakness. But at the same time, not facing up to the idea that some things really might not be solvable, that the worst can happen in spite of it all, is a necessary skill. Not one we need to indulge in constantly, but we should have that knowledge.
And in a greater capacity, this is where I see things go very wrong when someone unfamiliar with or disdainful of horror tries to expound on the genre. It comes from a place of not wanting bad things to happen - not rose colored glasses or naivete - but not wanting the animal to die, not wanting the house to burn, not wanting the parents to lose a child. Not wanting to feel sick or hurt, a normal and human response to a genre which constantly steps over those lines, and quite often does so artlessly and with nothing but puerile shock at heart. That makes it difficult to examine in good faith, and wanting to see horror as something good for oneself leads most people to look for the places where horror doesn't stray close to the boundaries. Solving the problem of "bad horror" by presenting horror comedy or psychological thrillers as better side of horror, for example. But that's just another case of wanting to solve something that doesn't exist to have a solution. Part of getting the genre is recognizing not only that bad things happen in horror, but the ugly and awful and transgressive side is not a mistaken choice, not an error. It's part of what horror is, like a person, you can't understand it without understanding what you dislike along with what you like. Horror can't be corrected out of a set of flaws, those have to be accepted as part of seeing the genre as a whole.
I'm using this post to add on why I keep a pretty safe distance between me and the media I'm a fan of, and the fandom. This is a useful place to start, because it's touching on the technical parts of fandom that drive me up a wall.
In brief, fandom seems to be predominantly comprised of people who only want to talk about what isn't in the media. There is a fandom for The Thing on tumble, and it's very much about ideas that come from the movie, but not about anything innthe actual film. The few times I've had the misfortune to enjoy media with a large fandom, I find almost exclusively shipping, fantasies about specific characters antithetical to the subject matter, and an almost oppositional distaste for any of the actual intended or unintended meaning in the media. None of those are a problem per se, because the world is a big place and it doesn't matter in the grand picture what people want to pretended about a book or movie or TV series. This is mostly a me problem, where I can be perfectly fine and ignore what comes across my dashboard, but this is also a me post, which means I can complain about the phenomenon.
Anyway, where I find it frustrating is the encroachment of fandom focus on what isn't in the media into my little wading pool of enjoying digging through the ideas that are in the media, when a "what if it was completely different" idea inspired by the media gains so much traction that it begins to be treated as a reflection of the text, sometimes even exiting its primary fandom, like The Thing, into general circulation. Which is how you get people discussing the "creature is misunderstood" not-present ideas of The Thing by fandoms, while effectively ignoring the vastly more significant elements of the film relating to the Reagan era 1980s, cold war paranoia, and so on. Once a fandom non-textual idea propagates far enough, it not only occludes the ideas inside the original media, in my experience it almost invariably excises anything that was challenging about it. For example, how rapidly fandom's latched onto the idea of Remmick in Sinners as a misunderstood tragic figure - rather than anything to do with what the film is saying about systemic racism. It feels like a companion behavior towards people whose take away from media like Breaking Bad, Fight Club, or Obsession is that the male protagonist is meant to be viewed in a positive light - because that is an easy and more comfortable option than for example treating any character who isn't a guy or isn't white or isn't straight as a vital, human person at the center of the film.
And to bring it all back to The Thing, that's why the fandom, who do not care about the text of the film, are such a source of frustration. Wanting it to be about a nice monster is also not wanting to sit with the way the film approaches human trust and the speed with which a belief in everyone being a potential enemy creates systemic breakdown. It's much less comfortable to examine human flaws inside best intentions, and fandom effectively pushes that uncomfortable idea entirely out of its sandbox.
I got a job at a gas station across from a casino and a guy keeps coming in to buy whole cartons of cigarettes and talks in the third person calling himself "snake eyes pete" and every time I tell him his total hes like "tell ya what if old Pete rolls a snake eyes why dont you give it to him for free?" and he rolls the same set of loaded dice on the counter and it does not matter how many times he rolls snake eyes I will not give him the cartons for free he gets so mad
Snakeyes Pete is from Toronto he gave me a button once that said "Canadians have the best luck" and i said i thought that was the Irish and he said "I fucking hate the irish" and i said okay
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Okay, this is crazy. This woman is Karina Raeck, an 88-year-old German sculptor who in her youth appeared in a Pasolini film, modeled for Salvador Dali, and danced flamenco among other things. Then she went to a concert in Berlin and saw Psarantonis, a Cretan singer and lira-player. This made her go to Crete and seek the musician's village. She learnt about the place and its history, and ended up staying. She lived there for 20 years.
Psarantonis (now very old, but still kicking and performing) sure is a memorable figure
She wrote a book dedicated to the Cretan resistance against the Nazis, and constructed a monument called "Andartis" (means rebel, guerilla, or partisan), aka "The Partisan of Peace" or "Peace Guerilla". It's an angel with one wing that can only be seen properly form above (say, from a plane), located on the Nida Plateau. All the monument's stones had been scattered on this plateau by partisans in 1941, to prevent the German planes from landing. She made sure the expenses were paid by the German Ministry of Tourism, as an apology from the German people. (see also: the Battle of Crete.)
She is now a permanent resident of the village in the video, which is not far from the musician's village she originally sought all those years ago. She is much beloved in the entire area. Here she is in ~2015:
P.S. In the video, timestamp ~0:19, the woman in the green t-shirt turns to the guy on her right and says something excitedly. Now with context, I can tell what she says: "It's Karina!" (Η Καρίνα!)
ppl act like being genuinely anti-copyright is some big radical thing but like every major copyright case of the last forever is game studios going "we estimate our lost revenue to surpass infinity billion dollars" and the judge trying to kill the defendant right there with his gay little judge hammer
and ppl on here will yell at you for pointing this out!! ppl will insist that copyright is there to protect small artists against big corporations, like these companies couldn't annihilate this website's art scene overnight by sending matt a cease and desist letter for pokesonas or leon kennedy yaoi or whatever. any coherent defence of copyright as a legal framework requires you to acknowledge the corrosive stranglehold it has over artistic expression and then justify that with a fantasy of getting rich in a lawsuit that you absolutely would not win. selfish shitty petit bourgeois baby mindset
exactly ^_^ small artists get paid jack shit regardless of whether their album shows up on spotify or a torrent site. the only actual losses are felt by the spotify investors who see artists and art as a commodity that can be purchased and milked for profit. copyright is valuable to them insofar as it can monopolise art by leveraging state authority, locking out unsanctioned competitors who don't have the millions of dollars in startup capital necessary to be considered legitimate.
ngl when this started doing numbers i was scared i was about to get yelled at by everyone but this is probably the best set of notes i've ever seen on a post of mine, so before i mute notifications i want to spotlight some tags and additions.
this one made me happy. while i don't want to be misinterpreted as saying "all artists are morally obligated to voluntarily give up the possibility of ever getting paid" (since this wouldn't meaningfully alter the structural problems at play), i do like when stuff is public domain. if you want to release your original work for free then the creative commons license is your new best friend
real as hell and not mentioned nearly enough in these discussions, thank you for bringing it up. if copyright monopolises the distribution of educational materials for decades after publication then the only source of up-to-date knowledge is locked behind a paywall that's simply inaccessible to anyone outside of a fairly select group.
if, for example, i wanted access to the lancet medical journal then it'd run me about 22 bucks a month. certainly not nothing, but cheaper than a premium netflix subscription. a minimum wage bartender in my country could cover this in about 2-3 hours. in somewhere like india, where the minimum wage can be as low as $1.92 per day, we're talking about more than a quarter of someone's entire income for something that costs me the equivalent of a round of drinks. when every journal comes with its own pricetag, shadow libraries like sci-hub are vital for people and institutions that can't realistically pay for unlimited access.
on the other hand, profit.
shit sucks, it's horrible and it serves to maintain imperialist exploitation in a supposedly post-colonial world.
great addition, thank you again for bringing it up.
insanely funny, thanks for reminding me of it, check out the video here. it should also be mentioned that metallica's biggest hit ever is incredibly similar to a 1989 song by excel, who said at the time that even if it is stolen, they couldn't pursue a "lengthy, tiring court battle" against the biggest metal band in the world. once again small artists can't even get into the courtroom, let alone win.
grouped these ones together because they illustrate the kinda central point of all of this: every single time this conversation comes up, you have one side basing their arguments on the actual real-world effects of copyright and another which ignores them in favour of an imaginary good copyright that functions completely differently.
for example, as you said, ip law has absolutely been used to screw racialised (particularly Black) musicians out of getting paid ever since the earliest days of the record industry. it replicates and perpetuates existing wealth disparity through an unequal balance of power: when you have a kid trying to escape poverty up against professional contract lawyers, the negotiations get very one-sided and the artist comes out much worse off. the only way to win is to become one of the suits and restart the process from the other side. this is why rappers start their own labels, why diddy, dre and jay z are all billionaires, and why most of michael jackson's wealth came from buying other artists' publishing rights rather than the billions of dollars he made for sony.
just like any other capitalist legal framework, ip law was built by an exploitative, racist society and preserves the power structures of that society under the guise of free and fair exchange. it places power in the hands of those able and willing to exploit others. it is directly implicated in over a century of misery worldwide, particularly against racialised/colonised people, and i have never, ever in my life seen a pro-copyright argument that properly acknowledges this.
thank you to everyone who spoke up here, and thank you to anyone who read this entire fuckin essay lol ^_^
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The fact is that David Lynch treats the subject of evil better than just about anybody else making movies today—better and also differently. His movies aren’t anti-moral, but they are definitely anti-formulaic. Evil-ridden though his filmic world is, please notice that responsibility for evil never in his films devolves easily onto greedy corporations or corrupt politicians or faceless serial kooks. Lynch is not interested in the devolution of responsibility, and he’s not interested in moral judgments of characters. Rather, he’s interested in the psychic spaces in which people are capable of evil. He is interested in Darkness. And Darkness, in David Lynch’s movies, always wears more than one face. Recall, for example, how Blue Velvet’s Frank Booth is both Frank Booth and “the Well-Dressed Man.” How Eraserhead's whole postapocalyptic world of demonic conceptions and teratoid offspring and summary decapitations is evil… yet how it’s “poor” Henry Spencer who ends up a baby-killer. How in both TV’s Twin Peaks and cinema’s Fire Walk with Me, “Bob” is also Leland Palmer, how they are, “spiritually,” both two and one. The Elephant Man’s sideshow barker is evil in his exploitation of Merrick, but so too is good old kindly Dr. Treeves—and Lynch very carefully has Treeves admit this aloud. And if Wild at Heart’s coherence suffered because its myriad villains seemed fuzzy and interchangeable, it was because they were all basically the same thing, i.e. they were all in the service of the same force or spirit. Characters are not themselves evil in Lynch movies—evil wears them.
This point is worth emphasizing. Lynch’s movies are not about monsters (i.e. people whose intrinsic natures are evil) but about hauntings, about evil as environment, possibility, force. This helps explain Lynch’s constant deployment of noirish lighting and eerie sound-carpets and grotesque figurants: in his movies’ world, a kind of ambient spiritual antimatter hangs just overhead. It also explains why Lynch’s villains seem not merely wicked or sick but ecstatic, transported: they are, literally, possessed. Think here of Dennis Hopper’s exultant “I’LL FUCK ANYTHING THAT MOVES” in Blue Velvet, or of the incredible scene in Wild at Heart when Diane Ladd smears her face with lipstick until it’s devil-red and then screams at herself in the mirror, or of Bob’s look of total demonic ebullience in Fire Walk with Me when Laura discovers him at her dresser going through her diary and just about dies of fright. The bad guys in Lynch movies are always exultant, orgasmic, most fully present at their evilest moments, and this in turn is because they are not only actuated by evil but literally inspired: they have yielded themselves up to a Darkness way bigger than any one person. And if these villains are, at their worst moments, riveting for both the camera and the audience, it’s not because Lynch is “endorsing” or “romanticizing” evil but because he’s diagnosing it—diagnosing it without the comfortable carapace of disapproval and with an open acknowledgment of the fact that one reason why evil is so powerful is that it’s hideously vital and robust and usually impossible to look away from.
-David Foster Wallace, "The Theme of Evil in the Films of David Lynch"
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Forget "Don't be evil"; Google's true motto is a form of vulgar spidermanism: "With great power comes no responsibility." The internet's de facto boss is an absentee landlord.
Google – a thrice-convicted monopolist – is the gateway to the internet, with more than a 90% search market share that it attained by buying out all its competitors and bribing Apple more than $20b/year not to start a rival search engine:
Google likes to position itself as a wise steward of the internet. They say they use their vast troves of data about the internet and its users to connect the right person with the right information at the right moment. As their mission statement has it, "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful":
The tacit argument is, "Sure, we repeatedly violated antitrust law in order to monopolize the internet, but the internet needs a monopolist. It's scary out there! We have amassed power so that we can protect and guide you."
It's a bullshit argument and no one should accept it – but even if you think it's worth harnessing monopoly power to promote a wise king to rule over the internet, you'd still want Google to take that responsibility seriously. If we're to have a landlord for our civilization's digital nervous system, let's not have it be an absentee landlord.
Google is an absentee landlord. In 2019, they chose to deliberately worsen search results in order to make you search repeatedly to find the information you're seeking, because every fresh query lets them serve fresh advertisements:
Not all of Google's enshittification can be attributed to deliberate sabotage. Much of it is the result of neglect. Ask Google for a product review and they'll pass over the most rigorous, honest websites on the internet in favor of affiliate scammers who repackage Amazon best-of lists to peddle overpriced, underperforming junk that's sometimes so bad it's dangerous:
And of course, Google AI search results present the company with a highly refined and confident-sounding way to launder spam into product recommendations:
Could Google do better? Provably so. Kagi, a small company that runs a search engine powered by Google's own search index consistently delivers results that are substantially superior to Google's – using Google's own infrastructure:
If Kagi (a startup with a handful of engineers) can extract useful search results from Google's databases, then Google – a thrice-convicted monopolist that's had its pick of thousands of the top computer scientists from the world's most prestigious universities for a generation – could also do so.
They just choose not to.
They're too big to fail. They're too big to jail. They're too big to care.
Google's AI search isn't a way to fix its broken core product: it's a way to partially remediate the damage Google itself inflicted on the open internet, while imprisoning the web in a walled garden that would make Steve Jobs drool:
It's a deadly combination: Google has committed hundreds of billions to stock buybacks and its AI money-furnace, financed by mass layoffs targeting the people who keep the core services useful. The too-big-to-care company is still the internet's gatekeeper, but half the guards at the gate have been fired and the other half have pulled so much overtime that they keep falling asleep on the job.
Google has become a scammer's paradise.
Take Google's "answer box." This is the part of the search results page that tries to answer your query directly, without sending you elsewhere for that info. Back in 2023, Google's Answer Box was taken over by scammers who impersonated airline help desks. When Google's users searched for airlines' toll-free phone numbers, Google directed them to phones that rang in the scammers' boiler room, where they were tricked into giving up their passport info and credit card numbers to boiler-room thieves:
(This was an especially devastating attack because the airlines themselves hide their customer service phone numbers – as enshittified monopolists, they want your money, not your complaints – so it's normal to search Google for the number you're seeking, rather than scouring the airlines' deliberately confusing customer service sites.)
This is especially galling because Google has an extensive "verified merchant" program that goes to enormous lengths to establish the true identity of every merchant whose businesses are listed on Google, in maps, ads and search results. Google "knows" which URLs belong to the airlines. If it can be tricked into scraping a different website for the airlines' phone numbers, that's because Google couldn't be bothered to connect its own database of canonical airline URLs to the process that serves phone numbers to the 90% of the web-using public who search with Google.
Google's database of the canonical URLs for businesses doesn't stop at airlines or even large businesses. Nearly every local merchant has undergone Google's verification process, which includes a step where Google physically mails a postcard with a unique number to the merchant's registered address, which the merchant must then key into Google to prove that they're located where they say they are.
Despite this, Google's ad-sales system will happily sell anyone the right to advertise a different website for queries for specific merchants, and those ads appear above the real result for the business's website. To make this even worse, Google's spent years making it more difficult to distinguish ads from "organic" search results, changing the font and size of the "ad" warning to make it harder to spot, and making the font and color of the ad itself closer to the color of the search results below it.
This is a gift to fraudsters. I had my own run-in with it in 2023, when I was tricked by a Google ad into ordering dinner from my local Thai place using a scam site that had cloned the restaurant's menu. The scammers marked up the price by 15%, then passed the order on to the restaurant, pocketing the vig:
This scammer – based out of a UC Berkeley dorm-room – had copied hundreds of restaurant websites, then bought Google ads for the restaurants' names, ensuring that searchers would see the scam result before the real one. Remember: Google knows what the true URL is for every one of those restaurants but it sold the scammer ads for a different URL that appeared when people searched for the restaurant by name.
Google could trivially add a step to the ad sales pipeline that detects mismatches between a merchant's known URL and the URL in an ad bought against the merchant's name. It could automatically resolve these mismatches by sending an email to the merchant's verified email address that says, "Hey, are you buying an ad with a new URL? If so, just reply to this email."
I don't know why Google doesn't do this. Maybe they make huge sums from these scam ads and they don't want to forego the revenue. Or maybe they just don't care.
Whichever it is, there's real consequences for this negligence by the internet's absentee landlord. Take abortions: fake abortion clinics – where pregnant women are bullied or tricked out of the abortions they're seeking – buy Google ads against the names of real abortion clinics. Google makes millions sending abortion-seekers to fake abortion providers:
Google started off as the ideal "intermediary" – the fancy economist's term for a "middleman." They took as their duty to figure out the best websites for you to look at based on your interests, serving as an honest broker between internet users and internet publishers. In the quarter-century since the company's founding, as it transformed itself into a monopolist, it developed the curse of every intermediary: it got Main Character Syndrome.
This is Tim Wu's formulation: the reason for an intermediary existence is to serve the parties to the transaction. Ebay says it exists to connect buyers and sellers, Uber is supposed to connect drivers and riders, dating sites are supposed to connect people with their love-matches. But intermediaries are cursed with an enviable position: by dint of sitting between these different groups of people, the intermediary learns everything about both sides of the transaction, while each side only knows about its own position.
Amazon knows the price you're willing to pay, it knows who's set the lowest price, and it knows how many identical items that match your query are for sale. But the sellers don't know any of that, and you only know some of it. By capitalizing on that information (rather than using it to efficiently match buyers and sellers), Amazon can match you with the sellers willing to pay the highest junk fees, rather than the ones who offer the best price for the best goods:
This is Wu's Main Character Syndrome in action. Once Amazon attains a dominant market share, it can maximize its own welfare at the expense of its buyers and sellers, transforming itself from a helper to a parasite:
Google says it wants to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," but every dime it spends fighting fraud (a critical part of this mission!) is a dime it can't spend on stock buybacks, executive compensation and AI servers. "Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" is the mission of a good intermediary; "do the absolute minimum to fight fraud" is the mission of a formerly good intermediary with terminal Main Character Syndrome.
Google keeps finding ways to expose its users to fraud while lining its own pockets. That restaurant markup scam that caught me in 2023? Three years later, it's way worse.
San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu just filed suit against GuestReservations.com, BookOnline.com and Booking Holdings for running a massive version of the restaurant menu scam – one that extracted millions from people booking hotel rooms:
Here's how the scam worked: these companies put up websites with deceptive URLs, like SanFranciscoMarriott.GuestReservations.com, and then bought the associated Google ad-word ("San Francisco Marriott"). At the top of Google searches for "San Francisco Marriott booking" was the ad for SanFranciscoMarriott.GuestReservations.com. This site would sell you a room at the Marriott, at a markup of 35% to 85%.
This is a pure ripoff. If Google had served the correct result at the top of the page – if it had used its own database of confirmed merchants and their associate websites to validate its ads – then people booking hotels would have saved 35% to 85% on their rooms.
City Attorney Chiu says that the perps here registered domains for all kinds of hotels, even tiny ones in small towns, all over America. That means that it's not just visitors to San Francisco who got screwed by these creeps – it's also San Franciscans who booked hotel rooms around the country.
Google bears the lion's share of the blame here, but Visa and the other credit card companies are critical to these scams. Card companies allow merchants to set terms of service that refuse refunds under almost any circumstances, and, more often than not, the card issuers side with the merchants over their own customers when they call to cancel a charge from one of these scammers.
I discovered this for myself when I was tricked into buying theater tickets from a ripoff site that had registered the URL of the show I wanted to go to. I figured out that I'd been rooked within a minute of clicking the buy button, but it took months and multiple appeals – and ultimately a threat to cancel my credit card – to get Visa to refund me.
Visa – another bloated monopolist with terminal Main Character Syndrome – can see that it has merchants who generate zillions of appeals and charge-backs because they run scam businesses like these. They could treat these merchants as the fraudsters they are, but because the crooks wreathe themselves in gauzy excuses and lengthy terms of service, Visa enables these massive, nationwide cons.
Google, Visa and the other monopolists who serve as de facto regulators for our society have arrogated to themselves the power to observe every transaction and block the obvious scams. We pay for their failure to take minimal, obvious steps to protect us from the scammers who thrive on their platforms.
Why should they? They're the main characters. They're Bizarro-world spidermen, whose great power confers no responsibility.
Was reading tweets by the anthropologist William Buckner (he has a lot of interesting papers on comparative cultural anthropology) and he greatly praises Eggers' The Northman for its uncompromising depiction of the Norse lifestyle and worldview... with one exception.
Movie protagonist goes on a murderous rampage in revenge for an act that most of the rampage's victims were unrelated to? Fine, that's just what movie protagonists do.
Movie protagonist takes part in a rape-and-pillage raid of a peasant village in which able-bodied men and fertile women are sold into slavery (some being destined for human sacrifice) while everyone else is locked into a barn which is set on fire? Well, y'know, it was a different time.
Movie protagonist has a romance with two women? Oh hell no.
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I remember as a kid the nearby small town had a "computer expert" who had a full storefront and office. If someone bricked their computer or it loaded with viruses he'd factory reset it for them and try to get it working again. He'd also buy, refurbish, rest, and resell old computers. But the main thing he advertised was if people brought him a computer and a list of programs they wanted installed on it he'd get them all set up. Flat rate of like 20 bucks.
Didn't realize until I was older and like, looking back on some of the tech stuff my mom needed help with and knew more about how software is priced that he was pirating it. Guy had a whole business set up where people who didn't know how computers worked would pay him 20 bucks to install Microsoft Office on their laptop because it was cheaper than buying it in the store and they didn't want to be bothered with figuring out how to install programs even if they could afford them normally. Like that guy was practically printing money well into the early 2000s. Very good hustle. Only small business owner I respect.
