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mangle-my-mind · 1 year

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Slash Ships to Get to Know Me

**Rules**: Name at least five (no upper limit) slash (M/M) ships you love. Each from a different fandom.

Thanks @autumnsup for tagging me! My brain immediately went haywire trying to think of this list. I might steal a few ships that you mentioned ;) also my definition of what constitutes slash is a pretty loose one. Some of these relationships I imagine as & instead of /, but I still froth at the mouth thinking about them so I'm including them here.

Velvet Goldmine - Jack Fairy/Curt Wild. This one isn't explicitly in the movie, but the dynamics of Jack and Curt just make it such a worthwhile relationship to explore. There's so much care and tenderness I can imagine between them, with Jack being there for Curt at one of his lowest points and the two of them working on music together. In my fic "In Berlin," I displayed their relationship as more or less platonic, but that doesn't mean I don't ABSOLUTELY LOVE the idea of them being together more intimately. There are some amazing gorgeous fics of Curt/Jack out there that I have read a million times over! (Close VG seconds are Arthur/Curt and Jack/Malcolm. Curt/Brian is important of course, and I love reading fic about it, but it's just too doomed for me to put my heart behind lol)

Our Flag Means Death - Ed Teach/Stede Bonnet. Oh my god. OH MY GOD. The way this show rotted my brain. The way these gay pirates seeped into my consciousness and won't leave. Their story so far has been so wonderful (and devastating - that goes without saying) and I'm so excited for their relationship to deepen in season 2. There's promise of more drama, more romance, and more spiciness! In the meantime, though, I'm eternally grateful to the literal tens of thousands of Ed/Stede fics that build on this love story. (Jim/Oluwande and Lucius/Pete are also incredible)

Beatles - McLennon. Okay, so this one is kind of wishy-washy for me because of the rpf element. There have been some McLennon fics that have given me everything I'd ever want and more. Then there have been fics that just made me uncomfy. This is a personal thing and not at all trying to hate on any fic writers; sometimes the spiciness gets too much when I remember John and Paul are real-life people. Regardless - McLennon is a love story. It is. They were in love, no matter how you look at it, and their relationship and how it manifested in their music and actions is such an interesting arc to observe. Ugh I just love reading their quotes about each other, seeing their studio interactions, analyzing their lyrics in songs directed at each other. And there have been so many fics that have captured this relationship between them so beautifully (whether or not it was accurate, it felt real enough to me). I've been in the Beatles fandom longer than in any other fandom, and even if I don't approach the John/Paul ship the way I do fictional ships, it brings me so much joy to learn about and read about and see art about their decades-long love story. (Another Beatles-ish relationship I've been loving lately is George/Bob Dylan. They are absolute girlies maximizing their joint slay)

Across the Universe - Jude/Max. This ship is kind of recent, though my love for the movie is years-old. On a recent rewatch, I realized that actually, no, Jude and Lucy aren't really right for each other, no matter how hopeful that ending seems for their story. And I love the dynamic between Max and Jude. And I've read some incredible fics recently covering just that. So yes, give me more Jude/Max please. And all Beatles fans should watch this movie btw. Also fans of trippy visuals and ambitious musical numbers and fun cameos (Bono? Eddie Izzard? Salma Hayek? Joe Cocker? sign me up)

Trainspotting - Renton/Sick Boy. Again a movie that has been a part of my life for so freaking long, but a ship that came a little later. I love their dynamic and how it changes through the films. In the 90s, they're kinda dicks to each other, but "he's a mate" so they tolerate each others' antics. The fics written about this era are so interesting, because on the surface there's a lot of shitty behavior to each other, but underneath there's always care and love. By the time they reach the 2010s, they've been estranged for twenty years, and yet they really do cling to each other. Part of that is just clinging to the past and trying to recreate some beautiful bygone days they're imagining, but still there's love between them. Anyway go read some Mark/Simon fic because it's always a good time.

Thanks again for tagging me! Anyone feel free to get in on this. I'll tag @moonage-xx-daydream @holy-loki - if you guys feel like doing it :)

#tag game #favorite slash ships #open tag

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katsidhe · 3 years

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15.17 Final Thoughts (2/2)

Part one here. OKAY, let’s Talk About Dean™, shall we?

Dean has been flatly angry this season—really, he hasn’t meaningfully moved past the place he was in at 14.20 or 15.01. This empty rage, clawing for moral high ground, searching for some vicious place of agency and righteousness, has manifested in ugly ways all season, from the way he’s treated Cas and Jack, to stuff like executing the vampire kid in 15.04 or the bar dude in 15.07. Sam has not been exempt from complicity in this pattern; we’ve seen a lot more unthinking hunts, like in 15.10 or 15.15, wherein the motive and the story is secondary to the necessity of the Success of the Justified Kill at the end of the book. The shorthand for hunting this season has been killing things, not saving people.

Dean saying Jack isn’t family: FINALLY. thank you. It’s true, it’s always been true, this has always been Dean’s opinion, since season 13: his affection for Jack has always been fundamentally conditional. And I’m so glad to hear him openly acknowledge it in a way neither Jack nor Sam can make excuses for. (even though poor Jack, bless his heart, still tries—in the sense that he understands Dean’s straightforward hostility in a simple way that is nearly a comfort. More on that in a separate post.)

Dean’s speech to Jack in the car: wowowowow. Dean pushing Jack to suicide SURE IS SOMETHING, ain’t it? Amazing. He tells Jack, with no sense of irony or illusion, thank you for killing yourself so that Sam and I can finally be free to have a life. What’s so FUNNY here is that Dean easily could have said many things that would have been more sympathetic—like, thanks for doing this to save the world. Instead, the way he contextualizes the worth of Jack’s sacrifice is in exactly the same terms Billie used last episode: what it means for him personally.

This is an unsightly peak of selfishness. Even during the sporadic times Dean tries in this episode and in 15.16 to contextualize his need to be free of Chuck as something for Sam’s sake as much as his own, his protectiveness is much more explicitly and significantly of Their Lives. And Their Lives are not equally Sam’s: their little world’s status quo, the car the hunt the music, belongs to Dean. The amount of ownership that Dean’s had? Made him more vulnerable to the revelation of Chuck’s control, and more unhinged as he seeks to win it back. Dean’s sense of self is much less relentlessly internal than Sam’s, going back even to childhood.

I know you feel that way about Chuck, Sam says, because he has known this feeling since season 5, the revelation that every choice he made, every tiny rebellion he thought he managed, was in service to a dark plan. He knows, and he knows Dean is not dealing well, and he knows why.

I’ve already written a lot about the rest of Sam’s speech, but I gotta repeat anyway how much I LOVE Sam’s stubborn insistence that, yeah, Dean, you definitely protected me from Dad and Lucifer both, and it is in fact the only thing I’m 100% certain of.

Dean threatens Sam with lethal violence. This is not the first time, obviously, but the way it happened actually is a pretty fascinating break from tradition!

For one, this is not a Moral High Ground Thing. Dean is making no judgment here; he’s not killing Sam For His Own Good. Sam isn’t on his knees. It’s not that Dean thinks Sam is in the grip of some dark power. Dean knows Sam is just, y’know, disagreeing with him over Jack’s suicide.

This is also not an Under the Influence thing. Dean isn’t a demon, he isn’t possessed, he isn’t bearing the Mark of Cain. This is straight up, unthinking rage and frustration, unleashed in destructiveness.

If Dean HAD gone through with shooting Sam here, I’m certain he would have regretted it instantly and view it as an awful mistake [and probably we’d be watching him castigate himself over this terrible sad unavoidable tragedy]. Ironically enough, Jack’s accidental killing of Mary in 14.17 would then be the closest point of comparison—and that’s being way too generous to Dean. Jack didn’t actually intend to point lethal power at anyone, whereas Dean very much chose to aim and cock his gun.

Dean…. isn’t really a very good agent of free will, historically. In times of crisis, Dean has a pattern of being willing to go along with the first plan that gives him some kind of autonomy or power, even if it takes away more of his or someone else’s autonomy in the long term (see: selling his soul in s2; signing up for Team Heaven in s4; nearly saying yes to Michael in s5; letting Gadreel possess Sam in s9; accepting the Mark of Cain in s9; agreeing to throw himself into space and kill Sam for Death in s10; saying yes to Michael to kill Lucifer in s13; nearly caging himself in the Ma’lak box in s14; nearly shooting Jack on Chuck’s orders in s14; going along with Billie’s plan in s15). He often finds himself willing to give up freedom for security. Which isn’t always the wrong decision, sometimes it’s prudent! But he’s much less of a contrarian than what he sells himself as.

Sam, actually, for all the times that he’s lost his autonomy, and for all that he is often narratively subordinated, is the one who’s the eternal spanner in the works. He talks Dean down from a bunch of the previous examples. He’s the guy whose dramatic speeches are ruining all of Chuck’s fratricide fics—expressions of Chuck’s issues with his own sister. It’s Sam who had the bullet wound connection to Chuck’s mind, and it’s Sam who paralleled Amara this episode. Sam is a placater, Sam is the guy that Chuck really, really has a problem with, and I want to see this explored more.

Dean threatened to kill Sam because Sam was refusing to accept his fate. The destiny that Sam refused was killing Jack, who has been Sam’s investment, Sam’s kid, and Sam’s parallel, to help Dean escape his destiny. This feels like a thesis, or something like it: it’s an encapsulation of how Sam and Dean’s fates are tied together not just by love, but by an undeniable core of violence and a chilling imbalance of emotional power: love and protection inosculated with harm. Dean’s angry, he’s breaking down, he’s going off the rails, and it’s in the face of this that Sam, with blood on his face, offers unity: he tearfully makes his pitch, insists that Dean is good, that Dean won’t sacrifice Sam, that his protection is true.

#spn spoilers #15.17 #final thoughts #I have even more to say probably #but I feel like I'm losing some coherence #I heartily invite discussion!!#I feel like I've still got things to sort out about this episode #and I think a major element to that is because it's so very endgame #sam and dean #dean and anger #dean and autonomy #dean and jack #Dean and free will #dean and chuck

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click2watch · 6 years

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I Can’t Believe This Blockchain Is Free

Michael J. Casey is the chairman of CoinDesk’s advisory board and a senior advisor for blockchain research at MIT’s Digital Currency Initiative.

The following article originally appeared in CoinDesk Weekly, a custom-curated newsletter delivered every Sunday exclusively to our subscribers.

As anger has grown over the power wielded by internet gatekeepers such as Facebook and Twitter, many blockchain advocates argue we could fix social media if it were built on decentralized, consensus-based networks instead of corporate-centralized platforms.

Some developers, such as those behind decentralized social media platform Steemit and the cryptocurrency-driven journalism solution Civil, have even started putting these ideas into practice.

Developers will still need to resolve thorny problems of privacy, identity and inefficiency if these new networks are to prove successful. Nonetheless, the principles behind the technology offer a framework for redesigning a broken system. This framework focuses the reform effort on the worthwhile goal of having more of the value generated by the content and data traveling over these networks accrue to those who produce it and less so to gatekeeping platforms such as Facebook or Twitter.

But to get there, we need to understand the nature of the problem. And, right now, there’s a huge misunderstanding across society, one that’s captured in this one tweet, from none other than Twitter itself:

I hate to break it to those who don’t yet get it, but we are most definitely paying for Twitter. In fact, collectively, you could say we are giving up the proverbial farm.

To be fair, the tweet was a winking reference to an in-joke among Twitter users, who often write “I can’t believe this website is free” when conversations on the social media platform take entertainingly absurd turns. (The anachronistic use of the word “website” to describe a service most users access as a mobile app is deliberate.)

But the fact that so many assume they are getting their yuks for free speaks volumes about how the information behemoths of the Internet 2.0 era have hoodwinked society – and perhaps their own staff, who may well believe they are giving away a “free” product. The good news is that the tweet gives us a nice way to home in on the nature of the problem.

To me, it’s encapsulated in the idea that, in 21st-century digital capitalism, data is a commodity, the most important commodity of all. We’re paying Twitter and other social media platforms with our data.

The gold of our era

Data is the gold of our era. It’s the core source of value in the online “attention economy,” and it’s bought and sold in a Wild West-like context.

Data is trafficked, ruthlessly acquired, repackaged and bundled, and then sold for other sources of value: audience, services, and fiat currency. And there’s precious little transparency on how that entire enterprise is being managed.

This data-commodity economy is dominated by opaque, centralized aggregators of information, most prominently by a group sometimes referred to as GAFA – Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple – but also involves smaller firms such as Uber, Netflix and, of course, Twitter.

These entities play a role not dissimilar to those other big centralized gatekeepers of valuable information: banks. And it’s in that context that the disruptive, disintermediating precepts of blockchain technology apply to this problem.

The goal is to decentralize the trade in this data-commodity, to create alternative models of trust that don’t require as much centralized coordination so that data’s value can be harnessed by those who create it. The objective for the user, to paraphrase a bitcoin saying, is to “be your own (data) bank.”

‘Mining’ the data

Other crypto analogies are useful, too. This data-commodity is “mined” into existence and we do the mining. We do so in two ways: 1) by producing and distributing content (posting and sharing tweets and status updates, uploading photos and videos, making comments) and 2) by allocating to certain content and ads a particular amount of a scarce, very important resource: our attention.

But we’re more like the indentured, impoverished miners of Bolivia than wealthy bitcoin miners with giant ASIC farms. After mining this data-commodity, we hand it over to the centralized data aggregators, no questions asked. They are the ones who extract all the downstream value from it by analyzing, bundling and repackaging all this information as a product to sell to their advertising clients, their real customers. (Remember, to paraphrase a famous quip from cybersecurity guru Bruce Schneier, “You, user, are not Facebook’s customer, you are Facebook’s product.)

Sure, the platforms do give something in return for this commodity: they deliver back to us a selection of content generated over their network and they create a sense of community and connectedness among all those sharing it. But the high valuation of companies like Facebook, Amazon and Google tells you that the price at which they “buy” this commodity is very low, a price defined by the amount of control they permit over the composition of the content and community experience.

We create our own follower and friend networks in the belief we are creating a desired stream of content and a tailored community for ourselves. But, to varying degrees, the platforms’ algorithms make a mockery of that “free” choice. They choose our newsfeed designs on our behalf and in so doing define the echo chambers in which we increasingly spend our online lives.

In truth, for most of its existence, Twitter paid a higher price for our data-commodity than, the more stingy Facebook. Its newsfeed was less manipulated, more of a raw, straight-up chronological stream of tweets, whereas Facebook went out of its way to create what its ad sales team called “like audiences.”

Facebook extracted users’ data to deliver a carefully selected mix of friends’ photos, corporate-promoted posts and sidebar ads to groups of people whose data trails had shown them to be highly likely to share that content with each other. These echo chambers, deliberately forged and explicitly marketed to advertisers, are the root cause of the “fake news” problem, more so than the fact that Russian operatives or Macedonian kids exploited them.

More recently, the disparity between Twitter and Facebook has narrowed as the former has manipulated its feed in response to shareholder demands and the latter has pared back its algorithmic distortions in response to the public outcry of data abuses. Regardless, these models persist for all social media platforms and most online applications in the attention economy. “What is your data play?” is a standard venture capital question to startups seeking investment.

The challenge, then, is to design an architecture that allows the producers of data – we, the users – to become less beholden to these centralized aggregators and create a more decentralized digital economy in which we can trust each other’s data and make better personal use of it. Having more say over what information is extracted, rather than just passively accepting the manipulated feeds and shopping tips of the social media platform, should, in theory, result in better economic and political decisions for all.

A blockchain mindset matters

This is where blockchain concepts might help.

To be sure, the instinct toward centralizing information flows will persist, since centralization establishes efficiencies and network effects. Nonetheless, blockchain technology raises the potential for a system that logs cryptographic proofs of existence and data about the authorship of media content in distributed consensus-based ledgers. This, in theory, would enable trustworthy peer-to-peer transfers of that content without the intermediation of a gatekeeper.

From there, the hope is that this blockchain-like structure gives more bargaining power to the creators of information and fosters a more reasonable distribution of the data-commodity’s value. This would not necessarily manifest as direct dollar payments, but could enhance users’ ability to extract insights directly from their data. The goal would be for users to have greater say in what information they read or view, and Facebook’s ad sales department less.

How information is curated on these more decentralized systems is still being figured out. Steemit and others are building cryptocurrency reward systems to incentivize story placement decisions that reflect the community, rather than advertiser interests. But they’re still figuring out how to get the reward and incentives system right, so that the interests of token-holding curators, who too often are solely interested in stories that support their favored cryptocurrency, are better aligned with those of readers.

There are also challenges regarding privacy and identity that will remain an obstacle to the development of real, decentralized social media solutions. How do you onboard real human beings and prevent bots from gaming the system without a centralized, permissioning authority?

Nonetheless, a blockchain mindset that identifies how, in the current model, centralized gatekeepers unevenly extract valuable information from our activity, is a powerful place to start when thinking about reform.

At the very least that mindset can help you call social media giants’ bluff when they tell you, even with a hint of irony, that their services are “free.”

Jack Dorsey image via CoinDesk Consensus archives

The leader in blockchain news, CoinDesk is a media outlet that strives for the highest journalistic standards and abides by a strict set of editorial policies. CoinDesk is an independent operating subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which invests in cryptocurrencies and blockchain startups.

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