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kirnet · 2 years

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cure

1.7k words. kirnet/atton kind of. set right after Telos

As much as she wanted to, Kirnet could not cross the threshold into the garage.

All it would take was one measly step and she would be in the same room as Bao-Dur, who was slowly picking his way through the damaged mass of the Hawk’s internal organs, his new arm illuminating his profile in the dim light. Once, she would have walked in without a second thought, tapped his flesh arm to get his attention, and offered to change the drying kolto patches that covered his fresh injuries.

Kirnet stepped back.

The shuttle crash had taken its toll on the engineer, but Atris and her handmaidens had helped with the worst of the injuries. He would be just fine for now.

The thought of Atris filled Kirnet’s mouth with a foul taste as her feet led her through the ship. Bao-Dur had been a bittersweet surprise, a familiar smile that made her slink away every time it called her by her old title. But reuniting with Atris had just been sour. All of the old scars that Bao-Dur nicked open had poured out on the academy floor, staining Atris and her too-white robes with a crimson that only Kirnet could see.

She would have just loved that analogy.

Sith. Jedi. The footage of her trial. A handmaiden sparring with air in her cargo hold. All of it was quickly becoming too much, building to a binding pressure that didn’t allow Kirnet’s lungs to fully expand. She spent a decade preparing for when she would have to return to the Republic, but she never expected her past to catch up to her all in one day.

The Force worked in strange ways. Though for Kirnet, “worked” was a strong term.

“Shutta!”

Kirnet paused outside of the medbay, unsure how she had even ended up there. The room was turned over; drawers were half-open and medical supplies were strewn across the bed where Atton sat. He was turned away from her, his head bowed as he struggled to open a small plastic packet in his hands. With a huff, he grabbed the packet with his teeth and tore.

“You talkin’ to me- Oh, space.” Kirnet breathed as Atton spat onto the floor, the corner of the packet slightly ripped. He whipped his head around, his expression as bitter as the kolto now leaking from the packet. But Kirnet was fixated on his temple where an ugly plum bruise was spreading to his eye. “Shit, what happened to you? Did the handmaidens do this?”

“What? No.” Atton wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as Kirnet snatched the packet up. “I must have hit my head during the crash. I’m fine. I can, uh, deal with this.”

The plastic gave some resistance, but Kirnet was able to fully tear a side off and remove the kolto patch. “Whatever you say,” she mumbled as she passed it back. Atton fumbled to get it unfolded for a moment, grumbled a complaint about the sticky texture, and attempted to place it onto his wound. Kirnet remained in place as he hissed, his fingers bumping against a particularly swollen section of skin. “Or maybe I should-”

“Yeah.” Atton’s head snapped back, his lips pressed into a thin line.

Kirnet gritted her teeth at the slime that now coated her fingers, but she easily adjusted the patch with feather-light touches to better cover the bottom half of his bruise. Atton squirmed underneath her, his knees knocking against the sides of her thighs. “You’re gonna need two. You look like shit.”

Atton scoffed as he leaned back to look at her better. “I think you mean to say ‘rugged and charming.’”

With a noncommittal hum, Kirnet pulled back, mentally preparing herself for the journey through the medbay’s meager supplies. But then she paused, hand half raised, her thoughts from earlier creeping back into her skull. “Would you mind if I tried to-” she vaguely gestured, her gaze glued to her feet, “- if I tried to heal it?”

“With what? The Force?” Atton cocked an eyebrow. “No offense, Kirnet, but knocking an assassin droid when it’s already standing on ice over doesn’t exactly make you the most capable.”

“More than you can do.” She braced, the hair on her arms raising, but Atton didn’t question further. Instead, he just tilted his head back and mumbled something about not wanting to grow a third eye. He shivered slightly as Kirnet’s fingernails trailed up to the edges of the bruise, though he kept himself remarkably still afterwards.

Kirnet was always more of a talker than a fighter, and she was even less of a healer. But war demanded innovation, so she learned as she did best: hands-on on the battlefield, her own skin marred with blaster burns and cuts. And while Kirnet had never been as skilled as a true Jedi healer, she had prevented plenty of soldiers under her command from bleeding out, and she was sure that they didn’t mind the gnarly scars she left while she did it.

Except for Bao-Dur. She had been so caught up in her own agony that she hadn’t even noticed the bleeding stump bumping against her as he dragged her to safety.

She didn’t have to be a Jedi to sense the anger simmering under his skin. It had always been there during the war, threatening to burn Kirnet every time they bumped shoulders, but she had never felt it at this intensity before. Bao-Dur, with his quiet words and soft eyes, hated. And he had every right to when she was onboard.

Kirnet sucked in a deep breath, closed her eyes, pretended she was in command again. Atton’s skin was warm under her fingers as she focused, a pleasant cool like a Dantooine breeze spreading down her limbs. She tuned out the sound of Atton’s sudden gulp, focusing only on the the way the recycled ship air tickled the back of her hands.

The Force was still foreign to her, but it could never be a stranger. Kirnet had forgotten exactly what it had felt like during her youth; maybe it had been a warm and comforting heat, or maybe it had been light like the tall blades of grass that tickled your palms on the plains around the Enclave. Now it was cold and heavy, all too similar to the Telos ice cap, and though it teetered on the edge of growing frigid, it never did.

The edges of the bruise lightened, turning from deep wine to an sickly green before her eyes. It inched forward, slowly working its way to the dark center of the injury.

And then it stopped.

It was like getting picked up and shook around by a kath hound. Kirnet’s vision swam as she pulled her hands away. She breathed, ragged, though she had sense enough to wave Atton’s hands away before he could steady her. “I’m fine,” she coughed, Atton’s face doubling as she shook her head.

Atton dizzyingly rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I’m really convinced. Just let me handle it, alright? Go meditate, or whatever it is you do.”

“Atton.” The pilot paused just before standing up, his arms braced on the edge of the bed. Kirnet wanted to hate the way her voice trembled, but she simply didn’t have the energy. “Let me try one more time, please. Unless it hurt?”

“No, no. It’s more like an itch, if anything.” It took much longer for the temperature in her hands to drop then before, so they both waited in silence, her fingers in Atton’s hairline. “You don’t have to do this, you know. Not that I’m complaining, but Bao-Dur looks a lot worse then me.”

Kirnet’s hands warmed up.

“Oh.” Atton frowned, his gaze stuck on a spot on Kirnet’s forehead. “Is that what this is about? What, are you two that close?”

“No,” Kirnet mumbled, the feeling slowly ebbing from her fingers. “He was just a tech. I just- I used to be able to do this.” Atton remained silent as her tongue fumbled with the words. “A lot of people I used to know have been popping up lately, and you’re just… you. So far.”

“I- thanks?”

“I mean to say that I can’t disappoint you, not truly. You never knew me as a general. As the General.” And Bao-Dur did. He might have just been an acquaintance, but he had been by her side right up to the end, for all the good it did the both of them. What would he think if she offered to tend to his wounds and failed?

Just another failure out of many. Kirnet couldn’t take any more of his blood on her hands.

“Maybe. But I meant what I said about that glow on Telos.” Atton straightened up, pressing his bruise a little harder into Kirnet’s fingers, though he didn’t make any pained noises. “Sure, you’re in a bad spot now, but unless you start swinging around a red saber and talking like that old witch, I think you’re doing alright. See?” He took her near-frozen hands in his, winced at the contact, and pulled them away from his face.

Kirnet blinked. The bruise, though still visible, had shrunk miraculously. Atton stood, his chest brushing against her still-outstretched palms. “I honestly didn’t think that this was going to work,” she half-laughed as he glanced down at her.

“Great. Glad I’m your test subject. I’ll be in the cockpit, as per fucking usual.” Atton pulled back. “You gonna talk to Bao-Dur?”

“Not now,” Kirnet responded, already busying herself with tidying up the medbay. She spared Atton a small smile. “But I will soon. And Atton?” He paused by the door. “Set a course for Dantooine.”

“I can’t convince you for Nar Shaddaa?”

Cold fingers grazed her brow as Kirnet brushed her bangs back. “Not yet. But soon.”

Not a failure, then.

A promise.

#UGH ok this one fought me. this was originally gonna be a kirnet/bao dur thing but like. i think at this point shes mentally too fragile to #actually go up to him. maybe ill have to write one later into the game where shes come to terms with him and theyre good buds #bc they didnt know each other. not truly. malachor was the longest she ever looked at him. but hes a microcosm of all of her failings #and atton is just Some Guy that she happens to enjoy the company of at this point lmao #also he got his head injury from kreia knocking him the fuck out on telos. his head hit the concrete with gusto #this isnt profound but eh #kirnet/atton #kirnet cavira #my writing #kotor

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comradekatara · 2 months

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this is such a negligible detail in the scheme of things but ever since my friend pointed it out i haven’t been able to stop thinking about how in natla aang just like. has his bison whistle. from the start. whereas aang finding the bison whistle in “the waterbending scroll” is such a subtle yet crucial moment because it reflects how even though sky bison are thought to be extinct, there are still traces and relics of air nomad culture existing in the world. just like the central object of that episode, katara’s waterbending scroll, is rightfully returned to her as a crucial part of her heritage that has been systematically exterminated, the bison whistle is yet another object that has been paraded around and reduced to a trinket on the market, rather than a meaningful cultural artefact. and the fact that aang is able to recognize and repatriate it for its original intended purpose is microcosmic of the show’s themes overall, of preserving one’s heritage in the face of cultural erasure and genocide. it’s central to aang’s arc, as well as katara’s, that they have an obligation to preserve their cultures at all costs in a world that is so intent on eradicating them. to cling to those traces with all they have and assert their practical value as they embody their unique cultural ideals through its practice rather than merely existing as a curiosity or exotic decoration within a hegemonic paradigm. aang in particular actively functions as a living testament to counter the imperialist assertion that his culture has no place in this world. and he does that through asserting his values, but also through practicing his culture in mundane, quotidian ways, such being able to properly make use of a bison whistle due to actually having a bison, or being able to learn off of the scroll due to being an actual waterbender. and so aang finding the bison whistle at that specific point in time is specifically significant as it concerns the central theme of the episode, and how that reflects the show’s themes as a whole.

#and of course natla doesn’t understand that at all because they don’t understand ANYTHING #but whatever. it’s fine. I’m fine #aang #katara #analysis #also not letting katara STEAL the scroll #ridiculous.#she would risk her life for that scroll #if kanna already had it the whole time then what’s the point????? about the erasure and trivialization of indigenous knowledge #GOD……. it’s a fucking massacre……

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mostlysignssomeportents · 6 months

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The enshittification of garage-door openers reveals a vast and deadly rot

I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library on Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!

How could this happen? Owners of Chamberlain MyQ automatic garage door openers just woke up to discover that the company had confiscated valuable features overnight, and that there was nothing they could do about it.

Oh, we know what happened, technically speaking. Chamberlain shut off the API for its garage-door openers, which breaks their integration with home automation systems like Home Assistant. The company even announced that it was doing this, calling the integration an "unauthorized usage" of its products, though the "unauthorized" parties in this case are the people who own Chamberlain products:

https://chamberlaingroup.com/press/a-message-about-our-decision-to-prevent-unauthorized-usage-of-myq

We even know why Chamberlain did this. As Ars Technica's Ron Amadeo points out, shutting off the API is a way for Chamberlain to force its customers to use its ad-beshitted, worst-of-breed app, so that it can make a few pennies by nonconsensually monetizing its customers' eyeballs:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/chamberlain-blocks-smart-garage-door-opener-from-working-with-smart-homes/

But how did this happen? How did a giant company like Chamberlain come to this enshittening juncture, in which it felt empowered to sabotage the products it had already sold to its customers? How can this be legal? How can it be good for business? How can the people who made this decision even look themselves in the mirror?

To answer these questions, we must first consider the forces that discipline companies, acting against the impulse to enshittify their products and services. There are four constraints on corporate conduct:

I. Competition. The fear of losing your business to a rival can stay even the most sociopathic corporate executive's hand.

II. Regulation. The fear of being fined, criminally sanctioned, or banned from doing business can check the greediest of leaders.

III. Capability. Corporate executives can dream up all kinds of awful ways to shift value from your side of the ledger to their own, but they can only do the things that are technically feasible.

IV. Self-help. The possibility of customers modifying, reconfiguring or altering their products to restore lost functionality or neutralize antifeatures carries an implied threat to vendors. If a printer company's anti-generic-ink measures drives a customer to jailbreak their printers, the original manufacturer's connection to that customer is permanently severed, as the customer creates a durable digital connection to a rival.

When companies act in obnoxious, dishonest, shitty ways, they aren't merely yielding to temptation – they are evading these disciplining forces. Thus, the Great Enshittening we are living through doesn't reflect an increase in the wickedness of corporate leadership. Rather, it represents a moment in which each of these disciplining factors have been gutted by specific policies.

This is good news, actually. We used to put down rat poison and we didn't have a rat problem. Then we stopped putting down rat poison and rats are eating us alive. That's not a nice feeling, but at least we know at least one way of addressing it – we can start putting down poison again. That is, we can start enforcing the rules that we stopped enforcing, in living memory. Having a terrible problem is no fun, but the best kind of terrible problem to have is one that you know a solution to.

As it happens, Chamberlain is a neat microcosm for all the bad policy choices that created the Era of Enshittification. Let's go through them:

Competition: Chamberlain doesn't have to worry about competition, because it is owned by a private equity fund that "rolled up" all of Chamberlain's major competitors into a single, giant firm. Most garage-door opener brands are actually Chamberlain, including "LiftMaster, Chamberlain, Merlin, and Grifco":

https://www.lakewoodgaragedoor.biz/blog/the-history-of-garage-door-openers

This is a pretty typical PE rollup, and it exploits a bug in US competition law called "Antitrust's Twilight Zone":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

When companies buy each other, they are subject to "merger scrutiny," a set of guidelines that the FTC and DoJ Antitrust Division use to determine whether the outcome is likely to be bad for competition. These rules have been pretty lax since the Reagan administration, but they've currently being revised to make them substantially more strict:

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-and-ftc-seek-comment-draft-merger-guidelines

One of the blind spots in these merger guidelines is an exemption for mergers valued at less than $101m. Under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, these fly under the radar, evading merger scrutiny. That means that canny PE companies can roll up dozens and dozens of standalone businesses, like funeral homes, hospital beds, magic mushrooms, youth addiction treatment centers, mobile home parks, nursing homes, physicians’ practices, local newspapers, or e-commerce sellers:

http://www.economicliberties.us/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Serial-Acquisitions-Working-Paper-R4-2.pdf

By titrating the purchase prices, PE companies – like Blackstone, owners of Chamberlain and all the other garage-door makers – can acquire a monopoly without ever raising a regulatory red flag.

But antitrust enforcers aren't helpless. Under (the long dormant) Section 7 of the Clayton Act, competition regulators can block mergers that lead to "incipient monopolization." The incipiency standard prevented monopolies from forming from 1914, when the Clayton Act passed, until the Reagan administration. We used to put down rat poison, and we didn't have rats. We stopped, and rats are gnawing our faces off. We still know where the rat poison is – maybe we should start putting it down again.

On to regulation. How is it possible for Chamberlain to sell you a garage-door opener that has an API and works with your chosen home automation system, and then unilaterally confiscate that valuable feature? Shouldn't regulation protect you from this kind of ripoff?

It should, but it doesn't. Instead, we have a bunch of regulations that protect Chamberlain from you. Think of binding arbitration, which allows Chamberlain to force you to click through an "agreement" that takes away your right to sue them or join a class-action suit:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model

But regulation could protect you from Chamberlain. Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act allows the FTC to ban any "unfair and deceptive" conduct. This law has been on the books since 1914, but Section 5 has been dormant, forgotten and unused, for decades. The FTC's new dynamo chair, Lina Khan, has revived it, and is use it like a can-opener to free Americans who've been trapped by abusive conduct:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

Khan's used Section 5 powers to challenge privacy invasions, noncompete clauses, and other corporate abuses – the bait-and-switch tactics of Chamberlain are ripe for a Section 5 case. If you buy a gadget because it has five features and then the vendor takes two of them away, they are clearly engaged in "unfair and deceptive" conduct.

On to capability. Since time immemorial, corporate leaders have fetishized "flexibility" in their business arrangements – like the ability to do "dynamic pricing" that changes how much you pay for something based on their guess about how much you are willing to pay. But this impulse to play shell games runs up against the hard limits of physical reality: grocers just can't send an army of rollerskated teenagers around the store to reprice everything as soon as a wealthy or desperate-looking customer comes through the door. They're stuck with crude tactics like doubling the price of a flight that doesn't include a Saturday stay as a way of gouging business travelers on an expense account.

With any shell-game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Corporate crooks armed with computers aren't smarter or more wicked than their analog forebears, but they are faster. Digital tools allow companies to alter the "business logic" of their services from instant to instant, in highly automated ways:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/

The monopoly coalition has successfully argued that this endless "twiddling" should not be constrained by privacy, labor or consumer protection law. Without these constraints, corporate twiddlers can engage in all kinds of ripoffs, like wage theft and algorithmic wage discrimination:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

Twiddling is key to the Darth Vader MBA ("I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it further"), in which features are confiscated from moment to moment, without warning or recourse:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure

There's no reason to accept the premise that violating your privacy, labor rights or consumer rights with a computer is so different from analog ripoffs that existing laws don't apply. The unconstrained twiddling of digital ripoff artists is a plague on billions of peoples' lives, and any enforcer who sticks up for our rights will have an army of supporters behind them.

Finally, there's the fear of self-help measures. All the digital flexibility that tech companies use to take value away can be used to take it back, too. The whole modern history of digital computers is the history of "adversarial interoperability," in which the sleazy antifeatures of established companies are banished through reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other forms of technological guerrilla warfare:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

Adversarial interoperability represents a serious threat to established business. If you're a printer company gouging on toner, your customers might defect to a rival that jailbreaks your security measures. That's what happened to Lexmark, who lost a case against the toner-refilling company Static Controls, which went on to buy Lexmark:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-business-model-lexmarks-anti-competitive-legacy

Sure, your customers are busy and inattentive and you can degrade the quality of your product a lot before they start looking for ways out. But once they cross that threshold, you can lose them forever. That's what happened to Microsoft: the company made the tactical decision to produce a substandard version of Office for the Mac in a drive to get Mac users to switch to Windows. Instead, Apple made Iwork (Pages, Numbers and Keynote), which could read and write every Office file, and Mac users threw away Office, the only Microsoft product they owned, permanently severing their relationship to the company:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

Today, companies can operate without worrying about this kind of self-help measure. There' a whole slew of IP rights that Chamberlain can enforce against you if you try to fix your garage-door opener yourself, or look to a competitor to sell you a product that restores the feature they took away:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

Jailbreaking your Chamberlain gadget in order to make it answer to a rival's app involves bypassing a digital lock. Trafficking in a tool to break a digital lock is a felony under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright, carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine.

In other words, it's not just that tech isn't regulated, allowing for endless twiddling against your privacy, consumer rights and labor rights. It's that tech is badly regulated, to permit unlimited twiddling by tech companies to take away your rightsand to prohibit any twiddling by you to take them back. The US government thumbs the scales against you, creating a regime that Jay Freeman aptly dubbed "felony contempt of business model":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/23/how-to-fix-cars-by-breaking-felony-contempt-of-business-model/

All kinds of companies have availed themselves of this government-backed superpower. There's DRM – digital locks, covered by DMCA 1201 – in powered wheelchairs:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/when-drm-comes-your-wheelchair

In dishwashers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/03/cassette-rewinder/#disher-bob

In treadmills:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vapescreen/#jane-get-me-off-this-crazy-thing

In tractors:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/

It should come as no surprise to learn that Chamberlain has used DMCA 1201 to block interoperable garage door opener components:

https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1233&context=iplr

That's how we arrived at this juncture, where a company like Chamberlain can break functionality its customers value highly, solely to eke out a minuscule new line of revenue by selling ads on their own app.

Chamberlain bought all its competitors.

Chamberlain operates in a regulatory environment that is extremely tolerant of unfair and deceptive practices. Worse: they can unilaterally take away your right to sue them, which means that if regulators don't bestir themselves to police Chamberlain, you are shit out of luck.

Chamberlain has endless flexibility to unilaterally alter its products' functionality, in fine-grained ways, even after you've purchased them.

Chamberlain can sue you if you try to exercise some of that same flexibility to protect yourself from their bad practices.

Combine all four of those factors, and of course Chamberlain is going to enshittify its products. Every company has had that one weaselly asshole at the product-planning table who suggests a petty grift like breaking every one of the company's customers' property to sell a few ads. But historically, the weasel lost the argument to others, who argued that making every existing customer furious would affect the company's bottom line, costing it sales and/or fines, and prompting customers to permanently sever their relationship with the company by seeking out and installing alternative software. Take away all the constraints on a corporation's worst impulses, and this kind of conduct is inevitable:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/

This isn't limited to Chamberlain. Without the discipline of competition, regulation, self-help measures or technological limitations, every industry in undergoing wholesale enshittification. It's not a coincidence that Chamberlain's grift involves a push to move users into its app. Because apps can't be reverse-engineered and modified without risking DMCA 1201 prosecution, forcing a user into an app is a tidy and reliable way to take away that user's rights.

Think about ad-blocking. One in four web users has installed an ad-blockers ("the biggest boycott in world history" -Doc Searls). Zero app users have installed app-blockers, because they don't exist, because making one is a felony. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to defend yourself against corporate predation:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/27/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse/

The temptation to enshitiffy isn't new, but the ability to do so without consequence is a modern phenomenon, the intersection of weak policy enforcement and powerful technology. Your car is autoenshittified, a rolling rent-seeking platform that spies on you and price-gouges you:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

Cars are in an uncontrolled skid over Enshittification Cliff. Honda, Toyota, VW and GM all sell cars with infotainment systems that harvest your connected phone's text-messages and send them to the corporation for data-mining. What's more, a judge in Washington state just ruled that this is legal:

https://therecord.media/class-action-lawsuit-cars-text-messages-privacy

While there's no excuse for this kind of sleazy conduct, we can reasonably anticipate that if our courts would punish companies for engaging in it, they might be able to resist the temptation. No wonder Mozilla's latest Privacy Not Included research report called cars "the worst product category we have ever reviewed":

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/its-official-cars-are-the-worst-product-category-we-have-ever-reviewed-for-privacy/

I mean, Nissan tries to infer facts about your sex life and sells those inferences to marketing companies:

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/nissan/

But the OG digital companies are the masters of enshittification. Microsoft has been at this game for longer than anyone, and every day brings a fresh way that Microsoft has worsened its products without fear of consequence. The latest? You can't delete your OneDrive account until you provide an acceptable explanation for your disloyalty:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/8/23952878/microsoft-onedrive-windows-close-app-notification

It's tempting to think that the cruelty is the point, but it isn't. It's almost never the point. The point is power and money. Unscrupulous businesses have found ways to make money by making their products worse since the industrial revolution. Here's Jules Dupuis, writing about 19th century French railroads:

It is not because of the few thousand francs which would have to be spent to put a roof over the third-class carriages or to upholster the third-class seats that some company or other has open carriages with wooden benches. What the company is trying to do is to prevent the passengers who can pay the second class fare from traveling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich. And it is again for the same reason that the companies, having proved almost cruel to the third-class passengers and mean to the second-class ones, become lavish in dealing with first-class passengers. Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

https://www.tumblr.com/mostlysignssomeportents/731357317521719296/having-refused-the-poor-what-is-necessary-they

But as bad as all this is, let me remind you about the good part: we know how to stop companies from enshittifying their products. We know what disciplines their conduct: competition, regulation, capability and self-help measures. Yes, rats are gnawing our eyeballs, but we know which rat-poison to use, and where to put it to control those rats.

Competition, regulation, constraint and self-help measures all backstop one another, and while one or a few can make a difference, they are most powerful when they're all mobilized in concert. Think of the failure of the EU's landmark privacy law, the GDPR. While the GDPR proved very effective against bottom-feeding smaller ad-tech companies, the worse offenders, Meta and Google, have thumbed their noses at it.

This was enabled in part by the companies' flying an Irish flag of convenience, maintaining the pretense that they have to be regulated in a notorious corporate crime-haven:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town

That let them get away with all kinds of shenanigans, like ignoring the GDPR's requirement that you should be able to easily opt out of data-collection without having to go through cumbersome "cookie consent" dialogs or losing access to the service as punishment for declining to be tracked.

As the noose has tightened around these surveillance giants, they're continuing to play games. Meta now says that the only way to opt out of data-collection in the EU is to pay for the service:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/30/markets-remaining-irrational/#steins-law

This is facially illegal under the GDPR. Not only are they prohibited from punishing you for opting out of collection, but the whole scheme ignores the nature of private data collection. If Facebook collects the fact that you and I are friends, but I never opted into data-collection, they have violated the GDPR, even if you were coerced into granting consent:

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/11/the-pay-or-consent-challenge-for-platform-regulators.html

The GDPR has been around since 2016 and Google and Meta are still invading 500 million Europeans' privacy. This latest delaying tactic could add years to their crime-spree before they are brought to justice.

But most of this surveillance is only possible because so much of how you interact with Google and Meta is via an app, and an app is just a web-page that's a felony to make an ad-blocker for. If the EU were to legalize breaking DRM – repealing Article 6 of the 2001 Copyright Directive – then we wouldn't have to wait for the European Commission to finally wrestle these two giant companies to the ground. Instead, EU companies could make alternative clients for all of Google and Meta's services that don't spy on you, without suffering the fate of OG App, which tried this last winter and was shut down by "felony contempt of business model":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

Enshittification is demoralizing. To quote @wilwheaton, every update to the services we use inspires "dread of 'How will this complicate things as I try to maintain privacy and sanity in a world that demands I have this thing to operate?'"

https://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/698603648058556416/cory-doctorow-if-you-see-this-and-have-thoughts

But there are huge natural constituencies for the four disciplining forces that keep enshittification at bay.

Remember, Antitrust's Twilight Zone doesn't just allow rollups of garage-door opener companies – it's also poison for funeral homes, hospital beds, magic mushrooms, youth addiction treatment centers, mobile home parks, nursing homes, physicians’ practices, local newspapers, or e-commerce sellers.

The Binding Arbitration scam that stops Chamberlain customers from suing the company also stops Uber drivers from suing over stolen wages, Turbotax customers from suing over fraud, and many other victims of corporate crime from getting a day in court.

The failure to constrain twiddling to protect privacy, labor rights and consumer rights enables a host of abuses, from stalking, doxing and SWATting to wage theft and price gouging:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens

And Felony Contempt of Business Model is used to screw you over every time you refill your printer, run your dishwasher, or get your Iphone's screen replaced.

The actions needed to halt and reverse this enshittification are well understood, and the partisans for taking those actions are too numerous to count. It's taken a long time for all those individuals suffering under corporate abuses to crystallize into a movement, but at long last, it's happening.

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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somerandomdudelmao · 11 months

Note

i was writing this all out in the tags of one of your recent updates (part 9 of 'donatello') when i realized i might as well just send it to you directly before i hit tag limit. (i hope you don't mind haha) this recent comic really reminded me of a concept that i've seen in your work that i haven't seen commented on a lot (though i could be wrong.)

casey jr and donatello's relationship as you've portrayed it is interesting in a number of ways. one i've been thinking about recently is the aspect of physical touch, and how you use that to represent the underlying themes/ideas behind their dynamic (and the story as a whole).

in the series, donnie is generally the least physical of his brothers, in that he prefers to be the one to initiate contact. (as a fellow autistic, i relate to this on a visceral level /lighthearted.) however, in your portrayal, this rule bends for casey's sake.

you've been setting up casey to follow in donatello's metaphorical footsteps for a while now, with this coming to fruition (to an extent) in recent storylines.

but going back a bit further. there's this major theme of... i guess i would call it 'responsibility?' that has been weaved through the story from... basically, day one.

in the first comic, his conversation with f!leo following leo's brief foray as a nugget (one of my favorite lines from this series overall is "...and leo-nugget." amazing, genuinely), casey admits to him that it was scary being responsible for someone that could get hurt so easily.

in one of the following chapters, we see the question asked: 'but who is there to save you?' (this chapter being a bit of a microcosm of the theme/story as a whole haha.)

though it was a chapter i had originally assumed was just for funsies and angst opportunities, i now realize i was wrong (though, i don't know exactly how intentional you were being with all of this, so i could be missing the mark here.) it actually sets up his arc rather nicely -- with casey being the one to save donatello when he was injured/knocked unconcious.

now, bringing this all back around to the original intent of this ask: how physical touch is used to represent their narrative dynamic (is that a thing? 'narrative dynamic'? am i just making shit up right now? whatever its fine /rehtorical)

taking everything in account, i want to return to a specific moment that really struck me in the comics leading up to donatello's death. it's the time where the resistance is being attacked, and donnie, despite being sick, goes out and uhhh... extirpates the problem (its always fun to see donnie go apeshit with dangerous weaponry /positive.)

during his dramatic reveal and attack, casey is by his side, clutching onto him not to cling, but to physically support him (at least, that's how i think that moment was supposed to be interpreted? i could be totally wrong here.)

i can't help but feel this is emblematic of the larger themes at play here-- i.e., casey's arc in relation to donatello.

i can't help but find it interesting how donatello, backbone of the resistance--

(despite his soft shell... which is why him no longer wearing his battle shell when he got sick was actually symbolic foreshadowing of-- *sound of gunshots*)

[editors note: i'm gonna stop myself right there, before this goes from ungodly long to "will break your dash and ask box if allowed to continue further"]

-- and certified plot mechanic (oh, so that's why he named it convenient plot-twist serum... finally, the mystery has been solved /joking /lighthearted), who is a very independent/self-sufficient character, allows casey jr to subvert his rules with casual touch. enough so, that when he is so weak that he can barely stand, he trusts casey jr to keep him upright.

out of everyone, he trusts casey.

casey jr, who, at the very beginning of the comic, saved donatello's life, physically carrying him back to the base. and casey jr, the one who, now, has rescued donatello from a fate worse than death, only to once again bring him back to safety.

(...can you tell i'm a little bit obsessed with your comic? lmao)

[also to note those most recent panels: a return to the "norm," with casey clinging to donatello's side, also providing a nice parallel. i know it's because he is very much reunited with his uncle who has been dead for two years, but c'mon. let me have this /joking.)]

anyway, i hope this made sense, and if you did manage to get through my pretentious (and probably somewhat far-fetched) rambles about the "symbolic narrative significance of touch" in a fanwork about the teenage mutant ninja turtles (/lighthearted), may i just say: i am in love with your work, and can only aspire to tell a story as engaging, heartfelt, and clever as the one you have woven.

you are a blessing to this fandom, and i am so excited to see where you go with this story.

I have to say that I didn't specifically do the mental planning for all of this. Most of this theme is simply because I do what I feel will be right. It's more of an intuitive desire than a prescribed plan, so it was pretty surprising to me to see this thought actually being formulated haha

Thank you:>

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chinchillasinunison · 1 year

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Some more random bits of Welcome Home observation..............

So the concept of "eating with your eyes" Wally has going on calls to mind the idea of media consumption. Wally Darling absorbs what he needs through his eyes alone, passing his judgments purely on aesthetics (loves apples for the look, not the taste, to the point where he can't even recognize them in different forms). And that's got me thinking about all the varying sorts of creative expression depicted in Welcome Home.

Out of everyone in the neighborhood who has a special "thing," Wally's is the only one limited to two dimensions. The others involve the creation of a 3 dimensional object (Eddie's crafts and Poppy's baking), performance (Barnaby and Sally), or with physicality as a necessary component (Julie's games and Frank's bug catching/studying). You could say that compared to the others, his painting is... much more flat. Perhaps that could be a metaphorical reflection of his outlook? Wally has a vast field of view, but no depth perception, as it were?

The other detail that stands out to me in regards to everyone's "thing" is that Howdy... doesn't have one. Like... think about how weird that is for a second. He doesn't make anything original. He has others share with him their jokes, their ideas, their creations, in exchange for necessities like food. In the context of the in-universe show, what educational function is his segment supposed to serve? Simple: it conveys that art is a commodity that can be bought and sold. It's basically a microcosm of the life of an artistic professional without the middleman of currency.

So then....... what does that mean in the grand scheme of my "Wally is self-aware of his status as a children's TV show character and trying to monitor the neighborhood so the others don't grow beyond their initial roles" speculation? I think it gives a different potential motive to consider: self-preservation. Wally is aware that he is an art piece, but more importantly, that he is a product. Literally, the first line of his description beyond the opening blurb is that he is the most popular character in merchandise. The show must keep itself in top form so The Playfellow Workshop can sell, sell, sell those sing-along records and tie-in Little Golden Books and paper doll playsets. Otherwise? Well, Howdy doesn't just give away hot dogs for free, even if you're hungry. You need to pay for it. That's economics.

So Wally tries to keep the neighborhood agreeable. Palatable. Digestible. Apples always the same shade of red and as thin as the canvas he paints on. Only to swallow up with the eye, not to savor. Otherwise, if things get too complicated? Well, we all know the fate of the in-universe show....

Then again, still, I could be way off base. I just found all of this really interesting and want to share. And it has made me more suspicious of Howdy of all characters, so that's gotta count for something.

#welcome home #wally darling #howdy pillar

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hogans-heroes · 2 months

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Freight Train, Baby

(Westcore AU)

On summer break from his university in San Francisco, Bucky goes to stay with his grandfather in an Arizona mining town. He might be able to get used to the edge-of-the-world feeling or the social microcosm of the town, but a lone boy and his motorcycle whom no one knows the origins of might derail Bucky in more ways than one.

———

“Ay!” said Bucky’s grandfather, jabbing him with the broom handle. “You just got off the bus from San Franfrisky and I won’t have you hankerin’ over local renegades, ya hear?”

Bucky made a face, taking the broom. “I flew here. And you’re a local renegade yourself, Gramps.”

Gramps huffed. “Not to your grandmother I wasn’t. Suppose every rebel’s got a believer. That one though…” He pointed toward the window. “You’d better treat that one like a wild coyote.”

Bucky leaned against the sun-warped glass, peering through the heat shimmer at the rising trail of dust where the mystery boy had departed the main road. That deep voice had dripped into Bucky’s insides like the traces of melted popsicle still on his fingers, tugging his barred-up heart out to the desert with a danger-tinted urge to find what it was about this place that made people into rebels and believers.

———

(Yet another chaptered fic in my WIP list. The American West is my first love and I’m feeling nostalgic so gonna be sharing it with you XD)

#my mota AUs #mota #masters of the air #buck x bucky #Westcore au #even though that’s not the title it’s what I’m referring to it as #stoked for this #top tier vibes

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ao3cassandraic · 8 months

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Meta roundup

I can't even find all my own meta any more, so here's my attempt to fix that!

s2's Final Fifteen Minutes, and Related Posts

You can kind of see my thoughts evolving here. I'm not displeased at that!

When angels overplay

Kayfabe: A Good Omens meta

Prologue

Part 1

Part 2, The Chinwag

Part 3, The Fiasco

Part 4, The Aftermath

Heaven and Hell as surveillance states

Coffee as forced-teaming tactic

Crowley refusing complicity

The Metatron failing Aziraphale's tests

Aziraphale may justly feel abandoned by Crowley

Why does the Metatron even want Aziraphale?

Jimbriel the Holy Fool

Jimbriel the Holy Fool (cw: historical ableism around mental health and cognitive ability)

The almost-defenestration scene, what Crowley is up to

The almost-defenestration scene, ending

Aziraphale's memory, Jimbriel, the Metatron, and forgiveness

Muriel

"No one" and Odyssey intertextuality

Muriel as possible s3 mole

Muriel as bookshop proprietor

Good Omens God is a Horror

Good Omens God is a m-fing open-source techbro

Good Omens God as abusive parent to the Ineffables

Crowley the Maker, God the Wrecker: Part 1, Part 2

Costume Meta

Jimbriel's ball costume

Clothing and identity in Good Omens

Color on angels (from s2 preview)

Crowley's 1941 costume and the Blackshirts

Crowley's sleeve garter

Crowley's bee!demon getup

Bildad the Shuhite

s2 Dagon

s2 Uriel

Saraqael

s2 Michael

Muriel

s2 Beelzebub

Jimbriel

Shax, also Shax, original Shax (with some wrong guesses)

Random Intertextuality

With Gulliver's Travels

s2 as tragedic in structure

Dies Irae

Britten's War Requiem

With Nineteen Eighty-Four

Miscellaneous Other Meta

Angels, demons, language, and culture: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4

Saraqael, Heaven's Only Competent Angel

Heaven's so-called command team

The ineffable educators

"Funny old world" (Crowley in the elevator)

do be do be do

Job's children as Heaven microcosm

Crowley and the Bentley: partners in threat

a Bentley headcanon (n.b. this one's been Neiled, but I still think it's cute)

Crowley loves his Bentley

Is Heaven even literate? And sequel ("yes, but").

Aziraphale's deeply crappy work situation, compassion fatigue

The Ineffables' understanding of love: love as ritual

Schools of ethics in Good Omens

Can Heaven and Hell attribute miracles?

As far as they can: how Aziraphale and Crowley interact differently with their head offices

#good omens meta #my meta #holy crap how did I write this much freakin' meta

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rabid-citrus · 8 months

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FIRST ENTRY OF OC-TOBER!!

Day one: fave oc!! Featuring Flanelle and Dots!!

prompt list by @bweirdart

#orannge art #orannge ocs #digital art #oc artwork #character design #digital drawing #oc-tober #bweirdoctober #tales of calmford town #< my original microcosm

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mzminola · 11 months

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Okay I don't like Alfred having raised Bruce after Thomas & Martha died, so okay, what would I prefer?

I think Bruce should have bounced around relatives. Some who genuinely cared, some who wanted his inheritance, some who were good with kids, some who were inexperienced but trying, some who the courts picked when two others were fighting, etc. Heck, let's throw some Wayne Enterprises board members in there too.

It opens up the opportunity for Bruce to have a wide range of parental experiences, and a way to pull random knowledge, skills, and stories out of his pocket that nobody in his adult life knows enough to contradict. Oh who taught you to sharpshoot, Brucie? To box? To identify the components of perfumes? One of my cousins, sorry, ha ha, don't remember which one!

Gotham's problems work best when there's no one single person or organization at the root of it all, and dragging Bruce around like this makes him a microcosm of that. Batman is one of Gotham's avatars, so let that be reflected in his childhood in more ways than the original double homicide.

It's also a solid reason for him to seek emancipation at sixteen, letting him yeet himself across the globe for his self-directed Batman training quest.

Gives him early opportunity to practice undercover personas! After the third guardianship change, baby Bruce realizes the adults don't know what he's "supposed" to be like, and goes ham coming up with fresh personalities at each changeover.

What about Alfred, then? Where does the stalwart supporter/enabler who snarks at Bruce at every opportunity while keeping his secrets and stitching him up?

Well, when Batman is a brand new vigilante who's great at detective work and fighting, and not so great at keeping his cowl from getting yanked off...

Alfred Pennyworth is the first person Batman ever saves.

He's been helping Bruce keep that mask on ever since.

#highly subjective opinion time #I just straight up think Alfred and Bruce's dynamic works better if they meet as adults #Bruce Wayne #Alfred Pennyworth #DC #Batfam #Batman #Gotham #comics meta #I think Bruce should have gone through ridiculous levels of custody battles #and it should be part of his reason for wanting so desperately to give Dick Grayson a stable home #even while knowing it's far from the best one

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animentality · 4 months

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My buddy told me that Baldur's Gate 3 was under contractual obligation to be as accurate to DND lore and mechanics as possible in order to have Wizards of the Coast's permission to adapt it.

And while the combat is fantastic, the story is lacking because it's not allowed to flourish in any way that challenges the many, many iterations of previous DND lore.

And it's funny because I've been playing divinity original sin 2, one of Larian's original games...

And it's like... oh.

Surprise surprise.

The homebrew campaign is better than a straightforward rule-following campaign.

It's a microcosm for real life.

#baldurs gate 3 #bg3 #divinity original sin 2

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thevirginwitch · 1 year

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The Origin & Evolution of Correspondences in Witchcraft

This post was shared a week early over on my Patreon! Working a day-job and running a blog full-time is a ton of work, so any support is insanely appreciated! Patrons will receive early access to content, exclusive content such as research notes and book recommendations, free tarot readings, access to a private Discord channel within my server, discounted products from my Etsy store, free digital files, voting power on my content, and MUCH more! Check it out here for as little as $2/month.

If you’ve been a witch for a while, you’ve probably asked yourself: where do correspondences come from? Who decided that lavender was good for calming, or that obsidian was good for absorbing negative energy? Where does the concept of correspondences come from in the first place? To answer these questions, we must first look at something called “correlative thinking”: Marcel Granet (1884-1940), a French sociologist, coined the term “correlative thinking”, which can be defined as “thinking of an item of one class by correlating it with an item of another class”, typically organizing and relating “natural, political/social, and cosmological data in highly ordered arrays or systems of correspondence.” Sound familiar?

Correlative thinking takes many forms throughout religion, philosophy, and humanity – even showing up as early as Mesopotamia, where they believed events on earth ran parallel to events in heaven: “each city-state had its own patron god and every change in the balance of power between the city-states was seen as the direct reflection of a change in the relationship of the gods.” (Cavendish, pg. 12) In ancient Greece and among Hellenic philosophers, they came up with the “macrocosm/microcosm” analogy, which describes the relationship between the smaller, human being (the microcosm) with the much bigger, seemingly infinite cosmos (the macrocosm).

This correlative thinking is prevalent in many magical texts throughout the years – including The Emerald Tablet (late 8th-early 9th century), The Picatrix (a 9th century Arabic grimoire), The Key of Solomon (1312), and the Three Books of Occult Philosophy (1533). After the publication of The Three Books of Occult Philosophy and the boom of new-age spiritualism in the 1970s, there have been a massive number of publications related to witchcraft, correspondences, ritual magic, and more. For the purpose of this post, however, we’ll be focusing on these foundational texts to better understand the evolution and origin of correspondences.

The Emerald Tablet, dated around the late 8th-early 9th century, is one of the most highly influential texts within the philosophical and occult realm. An English translation of a line of text within The Emerald Tablet provides one of the most popular terms among new agers and modern pagans: “That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above”. A shortened version of this phrase, “as above, so below”, can be found in Helena Blavatsky’s work, Isis Unveiled (1877), where it became massively popularized among the modern pagan community. This phrase, along with terms related to correlative thinking, tie back to many cultures – including China, India, and more.

The Picatrix, 9th-century Arabic grimoire on astrological magic, is yet another influential piece of text. This text contained astrological magic, magical potions and spells, and different Hermetic, Neoplatonic, and Aristotelianism philosophical passages – and it also included the explanations of links between planets and intangible objects such as colors and perfumes/fragrances.

After a few series of translations in the 12th and 13th centuries, the information within the Picatrix (and other sources) were recorded and arranged by Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535) in his work, Three Books of Occult Philosophy in 1509 (not being published until 1533). From there, Dr. John Dee (1527-1604) expanded on Agrippa’s work in the 1580s and 1590s.

Shortly after, in 1620, the Magical Calendar was published, which compressed much of the previous material. This calendar, amazingly recorded on one page, “contains tables of correspondences arranged by number, from one to twelve. The material is based largely on the extensive tables in Agrippa, book II, but goes beyond this, especially in its inclusion of sigils.” (Skinner, pg. 14)

Moving onto another incredibly influential text, The Signature of All Things, published by Jakob Bohme in 1764, covers a similar concept to correlative thinking known as ‘the doctrine of signatures’: God created everything on Earth with a “signature”, or sign, that tells you what that object’s purpose is. The idea is that any plant, herb, or object on earth should resemble what it’s purpose is – for example, walnuts (which look like brains) are used for brain health, and tomatoes (which are red, plump, and contain ventricles like the human heart) are used for heart health. Obviously, this concept was adopted in the context of medicinal use – by looking up an object’s signature within this book, a physician could theoretically find treatments for specific illnesses. While the contents of this book (and similar texts) have been debunked as pseudoscience, the influence of the doctrine of signatures is prevalent in witchcraft correspondences today.

In 1888, the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn was founded, and during that time S L MacGregor Mathers (1954-1918) and Dr. Wynn Wescott (1845-1925) prepared knowledge lectures for the Order, which eventually led to the generation of a Book of Correspondences (unpublished). According to Adam McLean in his edition of The Magical Calendar, this book circulated among members of the inner order of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and was later published by Aleister Crowley as his own work, Liber 777 (1909). Meanwhile, in 1908, The Kybalion (an anonymously written text, though often attributed to William W. Atkinson [1862-1932]) was published, including topics like “The Principle of Correspondence” and “The Planes of Correspondence”.

From here on, we have an uproar in magical texts, thanks to the new-age/spiritualism movement of the 70s and 80s – popular authors like Gerald Gardner, Scott Cunningham, Ray Buckland, and many others published works on the subject of magic, often including their own correspondences, typically influenced or inspired by the works of Crowley, Mathers, and Atkinson. Of course, the contents of these modern texts are what is most recognizable to practitioners today – we usually find tables of information, relating astrological signs, herbs, planets, feelings, colors, and more to their “meanings”: protection, anti-stress, happiness, love, etc.

As it stands, correspondences are a by-product of the ‘correlative thinking’ concept we covered earlier – this correlative thinking shows up in Mesopotamia, and evolved throughout magical texts and grimoires, eventually becoming these “tables of magical correspondences” that we are familiar with seeing in modern witchcraft and pagan books and resources.

As I round off this post, I want to share a quote from Richard Cavendish in his book, The Black Arts: “Man is a tiny replica of the universe. If two things are naturally associated together in the human mind, which is an image of the ‘mind’ of the universe, this is evidence of a real connection between the two things in the universe. Many of the important magical analogies and connections are not natural to most people’s minds today, but have been handed down by tradition from the remote past. This enhances their value for occultists, who believe that humanity was a great deal wiser in these matters in the remote past than it is now.” As practitioners, particularly modern practitioners, I feel we put too much emphasis on older concepts and traditions. While there’s nothing necessarily wrong with sticking to traditions and building off of older magical systems, I think it’s just as important that we work on our own magical systems – what does the color red mean to you? What about the planet Jupiter? Find out what works for you – you may find that it makes you feel more connected to your craft and your practice, and your workings could become more powerful, too.

Sources/Further Reading:

Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism by Wouter Hanegraaff

Three Books of Occult Philosophy by Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa

The Signature of All Things by Jakob Bohme

The Black Arts by Richard Cavendish

A History of Magic, Witchcraft and the Occult by DK

The Complete Magician’s Tables by Stephen Skinner

Neurobiology, Layered Texts, and Correlative Cosmologies: A Cross-Cultural Framework for Premodern History by Farmer et al

https://youtu.be/p0z3MuuB9uc

https://youtu.be/gYSGSjU84vE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gx1av438mLY

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/matauryn/2018/06/03/magickal-correspondences/

https://howardchoy.wordpress.com/tag/correlative-thinking/

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/An-abstract-diagram-meant-to-illustrate-the-perfectly-correlative-structure-of-the_fig4_237249544

https://swedenborg.com/emanuel-swedenborg/explore/correspondences/

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highpriestofpalkism · 3 months

Note

Also, if I may ask, how do you interpret the Creation Trio + Arceus as deities? In other words, do you think they're benevolent and merciful or wrathful and quick to anger? For instance, the story of the human and the sword in D/P/Pt indicates that while they will certainly intimidate, they seem hesitant to kill, even in retaliation. On the other hand, in PMD and the anime, they seem all too eager to eliminate humans because of perceived slights.

Now! This sure is a question, because I've basically created my set of headcanons for all of the Creation family throughout the years, since they're one of my the main objects of my brainrot DJHDGD

To me, they all act differently, and also situationally.

Dialga is the most cynical one. He is benevolent and enacts the role and purpose Arceus gave him fully, and he can show warmer emotions such as gratefulness when in the right situations (PMD2 being the biggest example), but, normally, in my opinion Dialga is neutral at best and has a certain disregard for mortals at worst, thinking of them as mere droplets of water in the vast river of time; thus, he often ignores them and their troubles, unless they do trouble him directly, unless reverence and worship is shown to him. He can also be very merciless.

Palkia is instead pretty emotional. He's the kindest and warmest of the three, and appreciates mortals as their own unique microcosms that should be respected as such, and he offers thankfulness to those who worship him. However he can also turn out to be very ruthless and instinctive in what he's doing, and he doesn't stand when his dominion is messed with by someone or something (PMD2), often harbouring to brute force. Despite his naturally kind nature, he can turn out to be as solemn as Dialga when the situation requires it.

Giratina despises mortals, be it Pokémon or humans. He sees them as the "perfect creations of his father" whom he wants to destroy as vengeance for what has been done to him: not only banished, but also forgotten by all. While probably the most brutal of the three, he is still very subtle most times, being deceptive and persuading to mortals as to use them as means for his own schemes (Volo). For short, in his eyes mortals are just a means to an end, so easily fooled and tricked.

Arceus, instead, is generally emotionally far from the mortal world, but they love their own creations and cares for them from the distance, as they watch over all (PMD2, Legends). They're not very prone to anger, but rather tends to resolve conflict with intricancies behind the scenes as to solve the universe's biggest problems. Regarding the mainline universe, they originally thought of Pokémon as the only creatures to inhabit this world, as humans were born as a "mistake of evolution"; but once the Ancient Hero of Hisuian mythos proved human dignity to them by challenging them in a friendly match, Arceus got that Pokémon and humans deserved equal respect, and even more did deserve the bond between them

I hope I haven't been too long with this DJDGDHDHDH, I know these are mostly headcanons and don't have much concrete proof in the games (be it DPPT, PLA or PMD), but I've grown to imagine them as their own characters, and with such personalities! I hope I answered your question in a satisfying way ♥️😭🙏

#arcy's shit #arcy's headcanons #headcanons #pokemon #creation trio #arceus #dialga #palkia #giratina

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rallamajoop · 1 year

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The RE4 Remake and Luis Serra Navarro

I have a gazillion thoughts about the new RE4 remake, and a dozen different aspects I kind of want to talk about. But you’ve got to start somewhere, so let’s talk Luis.

I doubt it’d be controversial to call Luis “easily the most interesting new character introduced in this game.” We’ve got complex and questionable motivations, a bunch of plot-relevant backstory, and a bonus-serve of extra random details about his childhood – much of which is very easy to miss, and rewards you for paying attention. By the end of this game, I’m pretty sure I know more about Luis than I do about Leon, and I still have questions. He’s not just one of my favourite parts of this new game, he’s a perfectly little microcosm of all the ways the remake has reworked awkward aspects of the original – mostly for the better, but not without creating new problems in the process.

But to get into all that, let’s start back with the original Luis from 2004.

So, for context, I haven’t actually played the original RE4. Since getting into the franchise, I’ve been consuming past canon instalments mostly by the lazy strategy of watching cutscene compilations on youtube. I am fully aware of the important place RE4 has in gaming history, the way it defined 3rd-person-shooter over-the-shoulder-gaming (or, to use my preferred term, lookit-the-booty-shooty). I have watched Jacob Geller wax rhapsodic about multiple different versions of this game.

But for all that people remember about the original RE4, the plot rarely seems to be more than a footnote. And for my own money, all I can tell you is that either this is just not a gaming experience well-served being experienced through the youtube-only medium (hardly the stuff of serious critique), or me and the original RE4 just aren’t clicking somewhere. I’m all for campy horror (see everything I’ve ever written about the Hammer films just to begin with), but RE4’s sense of humour largely leaves me cold. And Luis is – again – a pretty good demonstration of the kind of record-scratch moments that made it so hard to get into.

You can find a compilation of all Luis' cutscenes here, for reference. Like the remake, Leon first finds Luis tied up and gagged in a village house – apparently the only un-infected person in the vicinity. His first act on being un-gagged is to ask for a cigarette – a decent little character-moment. Luis claims to be a former cop from Madrid, who quit because he felt his work went unappreciated. Given Luis’ general demeanour, it wouldn’t be surprising to learn he was actually let go for taking bribes or something, but that’s more of a vibe. When Leon admits he was a cop back in Raccoon City, Luis claims he ‘might have seen a sample of the virus in a lab at the department’, and… hang on, Madrid PD has T-Virus samples lying around? The hell? Where’s this going?

But we don’t find out, because the conversation is interrupted, and Luis makes a break for it.

As in the remake, Luis’ next scene is to show up for the cabin siege scene, where he backs up Leon with a handgun. Cool, that tracks with the whole ‘former cop’ backstory.

Luis gets two further appearances, though the first mostly consists of him running up to say “I’ve got something for you guys! What… oh, shit, I must have dropped it,” and going away again, and it’s exactly as awkward as it sounds. But he does at least establish that the ‘something’ is a plagas-suppressant, as he knows Leon and Ashley are infected, and wants to help.

His final scene has him return with the suppressant, only to be stabbed in the back and killed by Saddler. As he lies dying, he admits he was really a researcher working for the Los Illuminados all along, only lately turned traitor – and we’ve officially hit our record-scratch moment.

So what was all that stuff about being a cop? Luis has good reason to lie about being a researcher, but ‘unemployed former cop’ is a heckuva cover story for a scientist, and what was that about Madrid PD having T-Virus samples? Luis-the-researcher might well have seen the virus somewhere, but why bring it up at all?

More than anything, these feel like leftover artifacts of a character who’s been substantially reworked somewhere in development, just without actually rewriting the start of the script to match. Luis’ story, like so much of this game, feels badly in need of a second draft.

Luis goes on to get something of an afterlife in collectable documents, and another scene in Ada’s DLC campaign. He’s still trying to get a plaga sample to her in this version, and he’s still responsible for the lab that cures Leon and Ashley of their infections. Ada's commentary on his character is interesting, and documents suggest he had a grandfather who used to hunt in the region, but he doesn’t get much more backstory.

Regardless, nearly 20 years later, Luis has finally got his second draft, and there’s a lot here that’s improved. (Have a new cutscene compilation link for reference.)

To begin with, any talk about being a cop is gone (an easy win). We find out he’s a researcher much earlier too – Leon is a lot less trusting of Luis this time, and calls in for a background check. He’s informed Luis used to work for Umbrella, and reacts as you’d expect. The cabin siege scene still goes off in similar fashion (though this time, Luis doesn’t feel it necessary to comment on Ashley’s tits the moment he meets her – another definite improvement).

This time though, Ashley starts coughing up blood immediately after they escape, and Luis’ offer to help remove the parasites happens right after the cabin siege, rather than being left for some awkward whoops-I-dropped-it moment later. The new scene actually finishes with the very same exchange (“Why are you helping us?”/ “It just makes me feel better”) – but this version, similarly, feels so much better. A+ revision work so far.

The remake also spells out Luis’ deal with Ada sooner too – her first proper scene in this version is her first contact with Luis. Again, Luis’ story ends in the castle with a stab in the back, and the stolen sample he was carrying being reclaimed by one of the villains (Krauser, this time, since Saddler apparently likes to delegate more in this version). But in between, things get a little odd.

Having already offered to help them, Luis contacts Leon by radio a couple of times during the castle chapters – firstly to say he’s waiting for Leon and Ashley in the courtyard. But Luis isn’t in the courtyard. His next message claims that he ran into trouble, and he’s had to retreat to the ballroom. But he’s not in the ballroom either. No further calls happen, nor does Leon react to his absence in either location.

Leon finally runs into him, apparently by chance, after being thrown down a hole and wandering for some time through tunnels deep under the castle. How did Luis end up down there too? No idea.

I’m glad he does though, because the following chapter you spend with Luis as your cabin-siege-style partner is a very good time. Though Leon is still distrustful and Luis still evasive, they exchange some great banter and generally make a good team. We encounter Luis’ love for Don Quixote, he admits he was working for Los Illuminados… and then Krauser stabs him, and Leon lights one last cigarette for him before he dies. It’s touching and very well done (not to mention dense with slashy subtext, if you want to take it that way).

Exploring Luis’ lab during the game’s final chapter adds some nice details too – equipment pilfered from Umbrella, an old photo with his colleagues, and naturally, text documents everywhere. But it’s his email logs with “A.W.” (Ada, obviously) that will most reward anyone paying attention – particularly the line you still remember the code phrase?

In this version, ‘got a smoke?’ is still almost the first thing Luis says to Leon. But you might notice it’s also the first thing he says to Ada. And this time, we’ve got a whole new explanation as to why.

Admittedly, the execution is still a bit lacking. Luis calls Ada by her first name just a few lines after using his ‘code phrase’, and seems to know her well enough not to need a code phrase, so what's going on here? If Luis knew Ada herself was going to meet him, why try his code phrase out on Leon? Alternately, if he suspected Ada might have sent someone like Leon instead of coming in person, how did he know it was her when they met? Maybe we could still have used another draft. But it’s a otherwise a fun little easter egg to recontextualise something from the original in a creative way.

Much more has been added to Luis’ backstory hidden in documents from the village. You can find photos of 'a boy with his grandfather', an old diary left behind by said grandfather – and if you’re paying really close attention, a label on another copy of that photo naming the pair ‘Navarro’ – Luis’ last name. You might also notice that the boy in the story has Luis’ fixation on Don Quixote (another character trait added by the remake).

But young Luis’ story ends in tragedy, the conclusion picked up elsewhere in the village elder’s records: the grandfather is bitten by a wolf, begins experiencing what seem to be known symptoms, and tells the village elder "you know what to do." The old man is killed, and his cabin and everything in it burned to the ground so the infection can’t spread.

Now, the idea the village has been quietly dealing with plaga-infected wolves for generations despite the fact that the plaga were supposedly sealed under the castle until recently has problems of its own, but that’s a bit beyond scope. The more relevant problem is the idea that Luis comes from the same village where all the action takes place – why? What does this add to the story? With Luis’ new Umbrella-Europe-backstory, making the village his birthplace seems like little more than meaningless coincidence, thrown in without anyone thinking it through.

But there is one intriguing possibility buried in the subtext of Luis’ story, and it’s an angle I’d love to see explored.

The village records end with the scene of a young Luis watching in silence as his childhood home burns to the ground, his only family still inside, then walking away, never to be seen again. Now, suppose that’s the very moment that inspired him to go into medical research, driven to understand infectious agents like the one that took his grandfather’s life, that the people he grew up with only knew to treat with medieval superstition. Suppose that’s what made him seek out shady employers like Umbrella, the only outfits with the interest and funding to delve into that area. The drive to find cures, to find proof that what happened to his grandfather didn’t have to be treated like a ritual witch-burning could’ve fuelled a lot of denial in Luis about where the funding was coming from. And after Umbrella’s collapse, you can only imagine how he might jump at the chance to work on the same parasites that had infected that wolf from so long ago.

If that was the intent, though (and damn do I want it to be), I honestly think it’s a little too buried in layers of subtext to carry. I can only hope maybe we’ll be seeing more of Luis in DLC to come – in Ada’s Separate Ways, if not his own – that might expand on those parts of his history a little more explicitly. Or at least cover what he was actually up to all that time he keeps messaging Leon from different parts of the castle (did he genuinely run into trouble? Was Ada pushing him to keep Leon moving for her own purposes? How did he wind up down in the mines?)

The notion of Luis as a village native still has its problems though. The house you find him in seems to be the same one he grew up in – it’s a cabin by the lake, his grandfather’s diary and photo is there, etc. Only those old village records spell out very clearly that that cabin burned to the ground as part of a major character moment. Which is it, game? You can’t have it both ways.

Even if we ignore that awkward ‘burned to the ground’ detail, are we to take it the ganados caught Luis in his old house and left him tied him up in his own cellar? Wouldn’t they move a prisoner like him? Speaking of which, was that one guy banging on the floor supposed to be hammering the hatch shut? Why? Was Luis being left down there to die? Don’t they still need to question him about that sample he stole? This stuff does not stand up to scrutiny.

And the idea of Luis as a native still doesn’t completely work for me, because shouldn’t there have been some clue in the way he talks about the place? Chief Mendez is a man Luis knew from his childhood – when Luis sees him coming in a cutscene, his reaction betrays no more familiarity than ‘not this guy’. In that cabin siege scene, surely there must be faces in that crowd he’s firing on that he recognises. And fuck, how do you come back to the place you grew up, find its residents reduced to zombie slaves, and think, “sure, I could work for these people…”?

I do realise expecting this level of humanity out of characters in a Resident Evil game might be a little much, but this stuff throws me. It builds the impression the Luis who grew up in the village is a character that exists only in text files, largely independent from the cutscene-Luis of the rest of the game. When you expect your audience to notice minor details like a surname on a photo in order to put together a main character’s backstory, you’re demanding they pay close attention. And once you’ve demanded that much investment, it’s worth keeping track of whether the cabin by the lake was supposed to be burned down or not, why Luis should be able to call Ada by name but treat Mendez like a stranger, and other such confusing detail. And Luis’ story is still positively logical and consistent compared to that of Chief Mendez himself, or anything much else in the game’s lore.

Luis is genuinely one of my favourite parts of the remake – he’s complicated, interesting, and fun. But trying to make sense of him could be a more rewarding experience. Many things are improved from the original, but for my money, they could still have stood to go for a third draft.

#Luis Serra Navarro #Resident Evil 4 #Resident Evil 4 Remake #Resident Evil #meta #character analysis

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