#spiral politic

[dougielombax]

DON’T make me anchor your thread I swear to GOD!

#dougie rambles #personal stuff #my poor attempt at a joke #doctor who #faction paradox #flux #the book of the war #Christmas on a rational planet #intuitive revelation #gallifrey #Lawrence miles #what #no context #shitpost #highbrow shitposting #this sounded funnier in my head #VNAs #EDAs #spiral politic #anchoring of the thread #cacophony #carnival queen #dweu #rassilon #omega #the other

[a-wartime-paradox]

The Spiral Yssgaroth was fashioned similarly to the Spiral Politic (it is not a parallel continuum)

When I was initially reading The Book of the War, I fell victim to it's (an extension of the House's) propoganda idea that parallel universes do not exist. However, I needed to reconcile this idea with the fact that the metahistory of the FP universe is founded upon the fact that the Great Houses fought against the Yssgaroth from an entirely separate continuum. So I concluded that, as it is called a "spiral" like the Spiral Politic, it must have been built in a similar manor. I've since learnt that parallel universes do exist, but am holding on to this.

I just find it so neat. Before Urizen pulls together the forces of Gallifrey to bind time to his domain, the Mother-King of the Yssgaroth had already built up another metastructure of history, forming am existential noosphere around it, later called by outsiders the Spiral Yssgaroth. It just adds to the idea, started by the Osirians, that the Great Houses really aren't that Great and Singularly Almighty as the Book may claim.

The Mother-King of the Yssgaroth had a child, and as it was born outside the Spiral Politic, those without it called it Timeless, as they (or at least the Houses) did not understand alien time. This Child fell through a portal, only to be found, much later, by an explorer, who experimented on them to help Urizen find the way of regeneration.

And yes, if our Spiral has a version of Earth, the Yssgaroth's does also. But you wouldn't possibly recognise it...

#faction paradox #doctor who #Yssgaroth #spiral politic #the book of the war

[pl9090]

Abandoned fan project: Where?

Dead due to the hush hush audio developments and my inability to write it without help, (I can lay out a framework, explain scene atmosphere and tone, and suggest dialogue but thats it). I hoped to get this one off the ground but it was not to be and is probably stupid so instead of letting it gather dust, I've decided to post everything I came up with as someone might find it useful.

Constructive feedback is welcome.

General

Title: Where?

Format: Audio.

Duration: 4 x 15 minute episodes or a NuWho style 60 minute edit and a Next Time trailer for a never to be released Hallwoeen Special sequel.

Description: A Faction audio disguised as an 8th Doctor spin off to both add verismilitude to the Companion assumption and enable the stealth introduction of Faction elements to the larger Whovian fandom. If anyone asks it's an, "ultimate 8th Doctor audio" project exploring how the novel elements might be integrated.

Synposis

Ostensibly it's a companion going on a breif tour of the .F.P. Spiral Politic and the more compitable novel and NuWho elements while searching for the 8th Doctor, who's gone missing with help from a companion of her own, (unknown to her a Faction Cousin) she dubs, "The Assistant". Naturally it's more complicated then that.

She discovers that things she remembers doing with the Doctor didn't seem to have happened or maybe have been reversed and that certain people she met don't remember her. On top of that the situations they find themselves in aren't as, "nice" or, "resolvable" as those she's used to and gradually bring her around to a more Faction compatible mindset and on the brink of a possible mental breakdown.

After loosing her ability to walk, (and becoming cooped up in a crudely modified Dalek skirt salvaged from a battlefield) she finally catches up with her Doctor only to find out he doesn't remember her nor any of their adventures together seeming more interested/concerned about her companion whom he reveals to be a Factional, perhaps dismssing her as, "another Faction trick". The mental breakdown she has been able to keep at bay/compensate for with the hope of being reunited with him occurs at full force shattering her prompting her to quickly go back into the .T.T. capsule and start crying/wailing. The Assistant watches her go in then walks up to the Doctor ranting about how much she wanted to reunite with him and had had to go through to get back to him all for nothing followed by punching the Doctor in the stomach doubling him over then an upper cutting knocking him out.

The Assistant then goes into the .T.T. capsule, quietly sets the controls with his shadow and it demterialises. The Companion flashbacks to the instances where he showed more knowledge then he was supposed to have. The two have a frank emotional heart to heart in which she works through her feelings and confronts The Assistant about who and what he is. He gives a basic summary of what the Faction is emphasising the aspects that make it seem like a group of misfits/don't fit elsewherers but not lying. She decides to join the Faction and to do it, "properly", (ie: Killing her parents erasing herself from time and causing the whole mess but she doesn't realise it and it's not spelt out for the audience).

Episodes

Ep.1:

Ep.2: Weeping angels encounter and encounter.

Ep.3: Crippling incident then the combined brooding and salvaged Dalek skirt modification.

Ep.4: Finding the Doctor and the aftermath.

Characters

Titles only until the final episode. Organically, not forced or highlighted. (A play on the .F.P.'s need to use codenames).

No romance between the two humans, they are merely comfortable enough to snark at each other.

1.The Companion: A previously unknown 8th Doctor companion who has 4th Doctor's scarf from her alternate timeline. No Faction knowledge but ends up joining it which causes her erasure from time.

2.The Assistant: Goth male. Factional wearing a symbol ring instead of robes and a mask. Knows more about the Spiral Politic then he lets on, (makes some small slips not really noticed until the end) but is genuinely swept up by events.

3..T.T. capsule: One of the many the Master had hidden away, took the form of the 8th Doctor's Tardis using the Companion's memories of what would be expected/the most wanted).

Quotes

*Tardis turbulence and small console sparks*

Assistant: "Where are the seatbelts on this thing?".

*Console spark*

Companion (Laughing joyously): "There aren't any!".

*

*Companion kicks the Assistant on the ground*

Companion: "Are you dead?".

Assistant (sarcastically): "Only on the inside".

*Companion chuckles*

*

Assistant: Ideally we'd want something faster and more manoveurable then a wheelchair, perhaps with anti gravity if possible so you can clear obstacles. Do you know anything like that?".

The Companion (Sadly): Yeah.

*Dalek Civil War battle sound effects*

#faction paradox #fan audio #abandoned #8th doctor #eighth doctor #doctor who #spiral politic #bbc doctor who #dr who #whoniverse

[weepylucifer]

it is tempting to assume btw that harry is "the most mentally ill man in the world!!!!" or whatever, but he's probably the average level of mentally ill for people in his situation. he isn't this uniquely monstrous wreck who abuses more substances than anyone else ever has. in martinaise alone you can meet like 5 people who are doing even worse than harry. kim says several times that he's seen much worse than day one harry and i BELIEVE him. i think harry wasn't immediately fired from the police after the unsolveable case bc this stuff is relatively normal for cops to do in precinct 41. disco elysium isn't pointing at harry and going "gawk at this uniquely awful man for no reason!! isn't he horrible in a clownish way!!" they're making a point abt the effects of capitalism and imperialism on the disenfranchised poor

#disco elysium #posts by me #you can't really have the game without the politics i'm so sorry #you just know idiot doom spiral or the crab man have exactly as rich an inner landscape as harry. harry is just the one we see

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The surprising truth about data-driven dictatorships

Here’s the “dictator’s dilemma”: they want to block their country’s frustrated elites from mobilizing against them, so they censor public communications; but they also want to know what their people truly believe, so they can head off simmering resentments before they boil over into regime-toppling revolutions.

These two strategies are in tension: the more you censor, the less you know about the true feelings of your citizens and the easier it will be to miss serious problems until they spill over into the streets (think: the fall of the Berlin Wall or Tunisia before the Arab Spring). Dictators try to square this circle with things like private opinion polling or petition systems, but these capture a small slice of the potentially destabiziling moods circulating in the body politic.

Enter AI: back in 2018, Yuval Harari proposed that AI would supercharge dictatorships by mining and summarizing the public mood — as captured on social media — allowing dictators to tack into serious discontent and diffuse it before it erupted into unequenchable wildfire:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/yuval-noah-harari-technology-tyranny/568330/

Harari wrote that “the desire to concentrate all information and power in one place may become [dictators] decisive advantage in the 21st century.” But other political scientists sharply disagreed. Last year, Henry Farrell, Jeremy Wallace and Abraham Newman published a thoroughgoing rebuttal to Harari in Foreign Affairs:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/spirals-delusion-artificial-intelligence-decision-making

They argued that — like everyone who gets excited about AI, only to have their hopes dashed — dictators seeking to use AI to understand the public mood would run into serious training data bias problems. After all, people living under dictatorships know that spouting off about their discontent and desire for change is a risky business, so they will self-censor on social media. That’s true even if a person isn’t afraid of retaliation: if you know that using certain words or phrases in a post will get it autoblocked by a censorbot, what’s the point of trying to use those words?

The phrase “Garbage In, Garbage Out” dates back to 1957. That’s how long we’ve known that a computer that operates on bad data will barf up bad conclusions. But this is a very inconvenient truth for AI weirdos: having given up on manually assembling training data based on careful human judgment with multiple review steps, the AI industry “pivoted” to mass ingestion of scraped data from the whole internet.

But adding more unreliable data to an unreliable dataset doesn’t improve its reliability. GIGO is the iron law of computing, and you can’t repeal it by shoveling more garbage into the top of the training funnel:

https://memex.craphound.com/2018/05/29/garbage-in-garbage-out-machine-learning-has-not-repealed-the-iron-law-of-computer-science/

When it comes to “AI” that’s used for decision support — that is, when an algorithm tells humans what to do and they do it — then you get something worse than Garbage In, Garbage Out — you get Garbage In, Garbage Out, Garbage Back In Again. That’s when the AI spits out something wrong, and then another AI sucks up that wrong conclusion and uses it to generate more conclusions.

To see this in action, consider the deeply flawed predictive policing systems that cities around the world rely on. These systems suck up crime data from the cops, then predict where crime is going to be, and send cops to those “hotspots” to do things like throw Black kids up against a wall and make them turn out their pockets, or pull over drivers and search their cars after pretending to have smelled cannabis.

The problem here is that “crime the police detected” isn’t the same as “crime.” You only find crime where you look for it. For example, there are far more incidents of domestic abuse reported in apartment buildings than in fully detached homes. That’s not because apartment dwellers are more likely to be wife-beaters: it’s because domestic abuse is most often reported by a neighbor who hears it through the walls.

So if your cops practice racially biased policing (I know, this is hard to imagine, but stay with me /s), then the crime they detect will already be a function of bias. If you only ever throw Black kids up against a wall and turn out their pockets, then every knife and dime-bag you find in someone’s pockets will come from some Black kid the cops decided to harass.

That’s life without AI. But now let’s throw in predictive policing: feed your “knives found in pockets” data to an algorithm and ask it to predict where there are more knives in pockets, and it will send you back to that Black neighborhood and tell you do throw even more Black kids up against a wall and search their pockets. The more you do this, the more knives you’ll find, and the more you’ll go back and do it again.

This is what Patrick Ball from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group calls “empiricism washing”: take a biased procedure and feed it to an algorithm, and then you get to go and do more biased procedures, and whenever anyone accuses you of bias, you can insist that you’re just following an empirical conclusion of a neutral algorithm, because “math can’t be racist.”

HRDAG has done excellent work on this, finding a natural experiment that makes the problem of GIGOGBI crystal clear. The National Survey On Drug Use and Health produces the gold standard snapshot of drug use in America. Kristian Lum and William Isaac took Oakland’s drug arrest data from 2010 and asked Predpol, a leading predictive policing product, to predict where Oakland’s 2011 drug use would take place.

[Image ID: (a) Number of drug arrests made by Oakland police department, 2010. (1) West Oakland, (2) International Boulevard. (b) Estimated number of drug users, based on 2011 National Survey on Drug Use and Health]

Then, they compared those predictions to the outcomes of the 2011 survey, which shows where actual drug use took place. The two maps couldn’t be more different:

https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00960.x

Predpol told cops to go and look for drug use in a predominantly Black, working class neighborhood. Meanwhile the NSDUH survey showed the actual drug use took place all over Oakland, with a higher concentration in the Berkeley-neighboring student neighborhood.

What’s even more vivid is what happens when you simulate running Predpol on the new arrest data that would be generated by cops following its recommendations. If the cops went to that Black neighborhood and found more drugs there and told Predpol about it, the recommendation gets stronger and more confident.

In other words, GIGOGBI is a system for concentrating bias. Even trace amounts of bias in the original training data get refined and magnified when they are output though a decision support system that directs humans to go an act on that output. Algorithms are to bias what centrifuges are to radioactive ore: a way to turn minute amounts of bias into pluripotent, indestructible toxic waste.

There’s a great name for an AI that’s trained on an AI’s output, courtesy of Jathan Sadowski: “Habsburg AI.”

And that brings me back to the Dictator’s Dilemma. If your citizens are self-censoring in order to avoid retaliation or algorithmic shadowbanning, then the AI you train on their posts in order to find out what they’re really thinking will steer you in the opposite direction, so you make bad policies that make people angrier and destabilize things more.

Or at least, that was Farrell(et al)’s theory. And for many years, that’s where the debate over AI and dictatorship has stalled: theory vs theory. But now, there’s some empirical data on this, thanks to the “The Digital Dictator’s Dilemma,” a new paper from UCSD PhD candidate Eddie Yang:

https://www.eddieyang.net/research/DDD.pdf

Yang figured out a way to test these dueling hypotheses. He got 10 million Chinese social media posts from the start of the pandemic, before companies like Weibo were required to censor certain pandemic-related posts as politically sensitive. Yang treats these posts as a robust snapshot of public opinion: because there was no censorship of pandemic-related chatter, Chinese users were free to post anything they wanted without having to self-censor for fear of retaliation or deletion.

Next, Yang acquired the censorship model used by a real Chinese social media company to decide which posts should be blocked. Using this, he was able to determine which of the posts in the original set would be censored today in China.

That means that Yang knows that the “real” sentiment in the Chinese social media snapshot is, and what Chinese authorities would believe it to be if Chinese users were self-censoring all the posts that would be flagged by censorware today.

From here, Yang was able to play with the knobs, and determine how “preference-falsification” (when users lie about their feelings) and self-censorship would give a dictatorship a misleading view of public sentiment. What he finds is that the more repressive a regime is — the more people are incentivized to falsify or censor their views — the worse the system gets at uncovering the true public mood.

What’s more, adding additional (bad) data to the system doesn’t fix this “missing data” problem. GIGO remains an iron law of computing in this context, too.

But it gets better (or worse, I guess): Yang models a “crisis” scenario in which users stop self-censoring and start articulating their true views (because they’ve run out of fucks to give). This is the most dangerous moment for a dictator, and depending on the dictatorship handles it, they either get another decade or rule, or they wake up with guillotines on their lawns.

But “crisis” is where AI performs the worst. Trained on the “status quo” data where users are continuously self-censoring and preference-falsifying, AI has no clue how to handle the unvarnished truth. Both its recommendations about what to censor and its summaries of public sentiment are the least accurate when crisis erupts.

But here’s an interesting wrinkle: Yang scraped a bunch of Chinese users’ posts from Twitter — which the Chinese government doesn’t get to censor (yet) or spy on (yet) — and fed them to the model. He hypothesized that when Chinese users post to American social media, they don’t self-censor or preference-falsify, so this data should help the model improve its accuracy.

He was right — the model got significantly better once it ingested data from Twitter than when it was working solely from Weibo posts. And Yang notes that dictatorships all over the world are widely understood to be scraping western/northern social media.

But even though Twitter data improved the model’s accuracy, it was still wildly inaccurate, compared to the same model trained on a full set of un-self-censored, un-falsified data. GIGO is not an option, it’s the law (of computing).

Writing about the study on Crooked Timber, Farrell notes that as the world fills up with “garbage and noise” (he invokes Philip K Dick’s delighted coinage “gubbish”), “approximately correct knowledge becomes the scarce and valuable resource.”

https://crookedtimber.org/2023/07/25/51610/

This “probably approximately correct knowledge” comes from humans, not LLMs or AI, and so “the social applications of machine learning in non-authoritarian societies are just as parasitic on these forms of human knowledge production as authoritarian governments.”

The Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop summer fundraiser is almost over! I am an alum, instructor and volunteer board member for this nonprofit workshop whose alums include Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Bruce Sterling, Nalo Hopkinson, Kameron Hurley, Nnedi Okorafor, Lucius Shepard, and Ted Chiang! Your donations will help us subsidize tuition for students, making Clarion — and sf/f — more accessible for all kinds of writers.

Libro.fm is the indie-bookstore-friendly, DRM-free audiobook alternative to Audible, the Amazon-owned monopolist that locks every book you buy to Amazon forever. When you buy a book on Libro, they share some of the purchase price with a local indie bookstore of your choosing (Libro is the best partner I have in selling my own DRM-free audiobooks!). As of today, Libro is even better, because it’s available in five new territories and currencies: Canada, the UK, the EU, Australia and New Zealand!

[Image ID: An altered image of the Nuremberg rally, with ranked lines of soldiers facing a towering figure in a many-ribboned soldier's coat. He wears a high-peaked cap with a microchip in place of insignia. His head has been replaced with the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.' The sky behind him is filled with a 'code waterfall' from 'The Matrix.']

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

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

 — 

Raimond Spekking (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Acer_Extensa_5220_-_Columbia_MB_06236-1N_-_Intel_Celeron_M_530_-_SLA2G_-_in_Socket_479-5029.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

 — 

Russian Airborne Troops (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Vladislav_Achalov_at_the_Airborne_Troops_Day_in_Moscow_%E2%80%93_August_2,_2008.jpg

“Soldiers of Russia” Cultural Center (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Col._Leonid_Khabarov_in_an_everyday_service_uniform.JPG

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

#pluralistic #habsburg ai #self censorship #henry farrell #digital dictatorships #machine learning #dictator's dilemma #eddie yang #preference falsification #political science #training bias #scholarship #spirals of delusion #algorithmic bias #ml #Fully automated data driven authoritarianism #authoritarianism #gigo #garbage in garbage out garbage back in #gigogbi #yuval noah harari #gubbish #pkd #philip k dick #phildickian

[reasonsforhope]

Btw, if anyone cares to know, my position on Biden and the 2024 election is this:

Starting September* 1, 2024, I will be doing whatever I can to make sure that Trump does not get a second term as president

Until that day, I'm going to be doing whatever I can to push for an end to the genocide in Gaza and an immediate ceasefire, and that includes criticizing, protesting, and lambasting Biden for funding and providing weapons for Israel's genocide

ETA: I will still be posting about significant good things the Biden administration has done, though, because some of it is a really big deal that people deserve to know about

ETA: But I will not be defending Biden from any criticism around Palestine/Israel/war crimes

*This originally said October 1st but someone pointed out to me that there are a few states where early voting starts in late September, including a couple swing states, so I changed it because that's a very good point

I don't plan to tell anyone not to vote for Biden in the meantime, myself, because shitty two party system and I'm really serious about Trump not getting reelected

But I'm also not going to do anything to discourage people who are seriously rallying against Biden, because he is, you know, literally bypassing Congress to make sure he can fund crimes against humanity

I never want to diminish that reality.

And more than that: If we want genocide to actually be a dealbreaker for politicians and presidents... then we need to start acting like it could be.

--

Details/related thoughts:

I will still be posting about good things Biden and his administration are doing, because they are the ones running the US government and Congress is super deadlocked, so a lot of the national-level good news in the US has been done by his administration, and I'm not going to stop posting about that good news

Shout-out to the anon who accused me of being a US government propagandist with a whole PR team bc I posted about Biden a few days in a row. I promise you I'm blogging from my bed in my pjs and do not have a PR team lol

Also, for people who don't think we should be spreading serious criticism about Biden, for fear of Trump winning in 2024: I hear you--that's an incredibly valid fear. I've struggled with that myself, in the process of coming to this(/these) decision(s). But consider this: it's better that we really pile on the criticism and pressure now, because a) people are dying, and b) Biden's chances will be much worse if Israel is still bombing/decimating Gaza on election day

Relatedly, for anyone who's tempted to think Trump would be better when it comes to the Gaza genocide, again, it's really understandable to want to put your hope in any viable alternative. However, I promise you that is not going to happen. Joe Biden at least conditionally gives a couple shits about human life. Trump doesn't. Remember Trump's Muslim ban? In all likelihood, Trump would just tell Israel to bomb Gaza harder and ban Palestinian refugees from entering the US

Last thing on Trump: maybe this is naive of me, but for a lot of reasons, I'm not actually particularly worried about Trump winning in 2024. If I was, I might have made some different calls here. I have a few asks about this in my inbox and will probably make a post at some point about the reasons why, but yeah, Democrats have mostly been wanting to run against Trump instead of DeSantis or Haley or whoever for some very real reasons

You're welcome to disagree with me/this post in any direction, btw

Seriously, I'm just a random person who doesn't speak for anyone besides myself and my own blog. I'm not saying these are categorically the right answers, or that any of this is what everyone should be doing. This is simply the system I have settled on (right now) for how I personally want to handle all of this

You're welcome to disagree with me but please don't send me any angry asks about any of it. Not that I in any way get a lot of those, thankfully! But yeah, this isn't something I'm interested in debating, this is mostly for notification/explanation purposes

#palestine #cw war #cw genocide #us politics #biden #not news #me #reminder that all my posts related to the war/genocide are tagged as “palestine” and “cw war” #and if you need to filter reminders about all of this then you should #esp coming from you know a good news blog #Far better to engage with all of this news/info deliberately when/where you're in a place to handle it #then to keep spiraling and spiraling because it keeps surprising you in the middle of your dash #that's what I do actually I have several related tags filtered on here #and then when I'm up for it I go read a bunch of news articles and look up protest listings #and you know actually go to protests or post about it on here etc. etc.

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

Randomly thinking about “tolerate it” (narrator voice: it was not random) and how under the cloak of fiction it is ostensibly inspired by works like “Rebecca” (which Taylor said she read during the 2020 lockdowns I believe?), with the line of “you’re so much older and wiser” indicating that the speaker is significantly younger and inexperienced compared to the person she’s speaking to and a pretty direct reference to the plot of the book.

But I saw something somewhere once that stuck with me about how it might not be referring to relative age between the characters but chronological age as in the passage of time in a relationship. And that made me think about how in a contemporary context, it might not necessarily be referencing an actual age gap between the two characters, but rather a sarcastic or cynical response to the man’s claims that he has matured (“you’re so much older and wiser [than you were before/than you were when we met/etc.]”), which then made me think about that line in relation to the woman. And that it could be taken like, “you act like you’ve matured so much in our time together and like you know everything, while I’m supposedly still stuck as the girl I was when we first met.”

Which then made me think of the “right where you left me” of it all and did you ever hear about the girl who got frozen time went on for everyone else she won’t know it and the bit in Miss Americana where she talks about how celebrities get frozen at the age at which they got famous, and how she’s had to play catch up in a lot of ways not just in her emotional growth but kind of in general. (Which also made me wonder if she’s ever been called out for immaturity/lack of curiosity/lack of education about things in her life…)

Which then made me think about the rest of the song, and @taylortruther’s posts yesterday about “seven” and “Daylight” and the way Taylor idealizes her youth yet contrasts it with an almost sinister reality in its wake, and the line, “I sit by the door like I’m just a kid,” because the discussion raised that her relationship let her recapture some of the childlike joy and wonder she’d lost. So this line is a double-edged sword: the speaker sits by the door with childlike hope that the person will come home and cherish her, but on the darker side, feels like the child dealing with the monsters she doesn’t have names for yet and the feelings of isolation she felt as she aged.

I’m not saying the song is necessarily autobiographical; like most of the songs on folkmore, it’s clearly a fictionalized story based on media she’d consumed and created, but we know a lot of the fictional songs were infused with her own feelings and experiences and… This idea swirling in my head picked up steam and now I kind of can’t stop thinking about it. Sorry but I’m a little obsessed now.

Like maybe it might start to shed light on why she identified so strongly with the novel in the first place…

#the third eye has been opened #😵‍💫 #like tolerate it was always a difficult song #even when we learned it was based on Rebecca it obviously took on new meaning post-joever #and especially in light of ttpd #but the thought spiral i went on last night when i started thinking about all these connections #and the evermore of it all #I’m Charlie at the conspiracy board again #writing letters addressed to the fire #me thinking too hard about Taylor lyrics #evermore my beloved #tolerate it #i kinda gave myself the ick with all this 😵‍💫 #because of the ttpd of it all coming up #and i feel like i remember interviews where Taylor said joe was so well-read especially about like world events and politics and stuff #and supported her when she wanted to start speaking up (not getting into that) #but just based on ~vibes now I wonder if that was like a sore point too at some point #which again i have no proof of but just like… experience with pretentious millennial art bros lol #oh man oh man oh man #this feels like some sort of huge revelation at 1:00 am #when i started writing this lol #eta: when I queued this in the middle of the night i didn't see all the excellent discussion about the seven/folklore posts #so all of you who have been posting about them this morning consider yourselves tagged too!

[cryptiduni]

“white mourning.”

#‘‘A white mourning. A modern death. Divorce or something similar. All you can do is put more distance between you & him. make him smaller.’’ #jean is a very easy character to hate if you know nothing about him. & you know what they say. easy target doesn’t make for a good practice #judit literally compares harry to intellectually disabled man yet you don’t see ppl hating her because she is outwardly nice. #she’s polite yes but she doesn’t care as much as jean cares for harry #he is not perfect. he is mean. but loyal. if he truly didn't care he wouldn't hab come back to martinaise & coulda just reported harry’s as #he put up with du bois’ bullshit for years and built a toxic (totally straight) relationship with him yet always comes back. #he says he will leave you in the village to die but please understand harry isn't exactly a great person. especially pre-bender hdb. #planned a make up joke & put on a wig for hdb even tho he wasn’t the who started the whole fiasco #you can hate him all you want for leaving harry before & during tribunal but how could he have foreseen all this bullshit would have happen #his second leaving is kinda bullshit writing but #jv is dealing with his own demons too. clinical depression. partner almost died. job is shit. case spiraling out control #i do not blame the DE staff either. sometimes shit just happens. not everything needs a grand explanation. #but it definitely coulda been handled better. but i understand. resources were sparse. #i relate to ​jv. as someone with temper issues & attention problems i have to remove myself from the scene or i'll say shit i'd regret late #my man is having the worst week of his life. leave him alone. #kim is great but have u heard of a man who thinks he's old when he is only 30 & luvs horses & his commie boyfriend that he's divorcin' soon #disco elysium #de fanart #jean vicquemare #disco elysium fanart #jean heron vicquemare #jean posting #illustration #de #artists on tumblr #my art #I WANTED TO DRAW THIS FOR MONTHSSS YOU COULDN'T IMAGINE. HE LITERALLY HAUNTED ME IN MY SLEEP!!! #i love him normal amount. very healthy. much feelings #my little maiu maiu

[american-boyboss]

Tax the rich

#capitalism #eat the rich #political #so true #late stage capitalism #downward spiral #jerma

[wulfhalls]

1/2 When you stop and realize that Billy’s entire relapse during Chicago wasn’t just about Camila threatening to leave him but really stemmed from him being forced for the first time to acknowledge what he’s spent everyday of the last three years fighting to bury and ignore: that he’s deeply in love with Daisy. Because the morning of the Chicago show he starts off his day in his Daisy love bubble openly expressing his desire to spend the next 20 years by her side writing together, fighting together, making art together, and everything inbetween. It’s Daisy that first forced him to acknowledge that they’re in love with each other and the bubble bursts, because she’s finally addressing the elephant in the room: that she’s in love with him and she wants more, she wants more than to just be his creative partner and artistic muse, she wants to be his partner in all ways. And you can see in that moment when she says it that Billy just…deflates because deep down he realizes that nothing will ever be the same again. He can’t have both Camila and Daisy by his side forever, it’s not fair to either woman. He’s finally being forced to see that. Which is why he gets desperate and says that even though he wants that too, but won’t leave Camila, he wants he and Daisy to stay trapped in this purgatory of their own making: sharing their deepest, most intimate, and raw feelings with one another but only thru their music, never actually feeling it in the “real world.” He’s clinging on to whatever bullshit rationalizations he can try and make to himself to hold onto Daisy at that point that I don’t think he even realized how much he shattered her heart by asking her “isn’t this enough?” Isn’t it enough for us to just stay here in purgatory with one another because I would rather suffer here with you everyday and never fully have you than ever be without you? It’s only when Camila confronts him in Chicago that Billy realizes he can’t have both Daisy and Camila in his life like this anymore. He lies to Camila’s face, several times. First he insists nothing at all is going on it’s just an “act” and then he lies to her again when he says he kissed her but it meant “nothing.” But Camila knows none of it is true, she knows what Billy isn’t strong enough to admit to himself: that he’s in love with Daisy. As Daisy did earlier in the day, Camila forces him to admit to not only himself but to her, and it’s so incredibly painful for Billy to do that not only can he refuse to lie and say that he doesn’t love Daisy, but he can’t even look Camila in the eye while doing so. Daisy showing up at that moment in the hallway was the final straw for Billy because in that moment he could no longer run away from the reality of their situation: here are both Camila and Daisy standing in front of him and he has to let one of them go. Camila tells him she’s done and leaves which triggers all of his abandonment and daddy issues, which is why in that moment I think it was easier for him to revert to his baseline of “I told her the truth that nothing happened and nothing ever will” even though he knows it’s a lie, because he’s still clinging onto his desire to keep everything as it was, he doesn’t want anything to change because once it does he will have to lose Daisy, as by his own words “she’s my wife…I’m never gonna leave her.” So in typical Billy fashion he callously and cruelly tells Daisy they will never be more than what they are now and goes after Camila, because maybe if he can fix this, fix them, he can try and get this sinking ship back on course. When Camila ignores his phone calls, and doesn’t show up to the show on time Billy breaks and fully gives into his addiction, if his world is going to implode then he wants it to implode with Daisy by his side, he wants them to be “broken together.” But what Billy fails to recognize in that moment is that it will never be enough for Daisy. She doesn’t want to be broken with him, she doesn’t want to be with him because his life imploded. She wants to be whole with him. Whole, healed, and complete together.

2/2 It’s one of the most devastating moments I’ve seen written on screen. I honestly think that of all the times Billy broke Daisy’s heart, and there were plenty, that this….this was the one that hurt her the most. (And is actually something I would love to see addressed if they did make a Season 2). Daisy’s refusal to spiral with Billy is what finally snaps him out of it, and when they head onto the stage for Look at Us Now, Billy already knows that it’s over, that he’s already lost Daisy. But he still can’t bring himself to walk away from her until she forces him too. Billy loved Daisy so much he was willing to live in hell everyday for the rest of his life, torturing them both by not being together, but not being willing to stay away from one another. Daisy loved him enough to realize that wasn’t enough and that she needed to walk away and let him go because they both deserved so much more than this. So much more than being stuck. And ultimately this was the real root of Billy’s relapse that day, having to finally walk away from the possibility of Daisy. As TJR says in the book “I realized that I had been holding on tightly to the possibility…the possibility of Daisy…and I was suddenly having a very hard time with letting that go, of saying never.” The show did such a good job of conveying this moment from the book because on the surface it seems that all of his turmoil is over losing Camila and his family, when really the root cause was Billy having to finally accept that he has to say goodbye to Daisy. As he knew deep down he wouldn’t leave Camila and that they would probably be able to recover from this. But losing Daisy? His heart would never fully recover from that.

u said in this essay I will and in this essay u DID. yall just giving me these beautifully written novel length takes for FREE.

#im just out here saying the most inconsequential shit ever and u guys are just serving insight understanding and coherence #ur all so sexi and smart #ur really doing all of that while im just divorce blogging we are not the same ur so much better its unrealsjdjdjd #daisybilly #daisy jones and the six #djats #that tweet that was like he was a mess and spiralling because his wife knew how much he wanted daisy all the goddamn time. yeah.jpeg #cant wait for s2 and camila in her skylar white esque era lets go polite courtesy and icy silences #i fucked eddie :D

[mentallystable982]

So um stressing a lot js like fuck.

Like I was js thinking abt like my future in beings ✨trans✨ and js like tbh the situation’s so bad. Like I’ve never rly thought abt not transitioning cos honestly that’s the only thing that’s actually been keeping me ok (well relatively) rn. And like what if I don’t? Or if I can’t. like what if the situation in the uk doesn’t get better and pple like fucking Rishi sunak stay in power and we get our rights stripped from us. Like what if when it’s confirmed by a psychologist so I can actually get on the waiting list for hrt, the psychologist doesn’t believe me? Or I can’t get that or the waiting list js gets longer and I have to wait yrs and yrs and I’m never going to feel comfortable with myself. What if everything js goes wrong and I’m never rly gonna look like a girl, what if I don’t pass? …

Sry sry im spiralling aren’t I lol I’m js so scared. I want this sm, and it doesn’t look like it’s getting any better to get it. I js wanna be happy lol

Sry dw im fine u dotn have to respond if ur too tired or cba I get it lol

#vent #vent post #trans #transgender #transfem #trans hrt #hrt #lgbtqia #lgbt #politics #idk #lol #im fine #spiralling

[jerreeeeeee]

lou’s character work is always incredible but his choices for deli are so interesting and only work in this setting with this timeskipping plotline. starting out as this idealistic and driven young man who’s also a little inexperienced and naive and turning him gradually into a bloodthirsty warlord completely consumed by his own ambition to the point where he’s lost himself completely and the only way he can weather his transformation is by finding a savage joy in it is so appropriate for the ravening war setting its a tragedy but its inevitable that war turn him into this and the worst part is that he’s not even special. this is happening all over the world to all kinds of people because there are forces bigger than them that they desperately want to control and some of them, like amethar, are forced into it rather than following their ambition into that despair, but plenty of people, likely including belizabeth, focaccia, basha, and definitely karna in a different (although maybe more fucked up) way are following that exact same path

#love the difference between young and old (as in fully adult) pcs #amangeaux and raphaniel are falling apart everything theyve ever worked for is unraveling and theyre spiraling out of control #raphaniel in a way that’s manic and in denial and amangeaux just quietly resigned #also amangeaux’s LIFE is not ruined like raphaniels bc she’s not as consumed but her political situation absolutely is tanked for good #she went from QUEEN OF A NATION to a soldier in a minor noble’s army #meanwhile deli and karna are blasting full speed towards their own destruction #but they still have the energy and potential of youth enough to not even realize theyre heading toward ruin #anyway. colin is the only pc who will survive (physically or mentally lmao) #and he’s the softest! he’s choosing to be soft and weak by others’ standards and it will get him the farthest #the ravening war

[a-wartime-paradox]

Question for my Faction Paradox and Doctor Who followers, or anyone who sees this. How can the Homeworld/Gallifrey be located within the Spiral Politic/spacetime if the Great Houses/Time Lords created the Spiral Politic by the anchoring of the thread, and/or exist beyond time and space?

#faction paradox #doctor who #Gallifrey #great houses #spiral politic

[lichothemad]

Finished fanart of Micheal the Distortion from the magnus archives.

From the river to the sea Palestine will be free. Every country under imperial rule will be free.

Finished piece (different shadings)

Without shading

Insta versions

#tma micheal distortion #tma fanart #tmagp #tma podcast #tma michael #tma the spiral #tma the distortion #the magnus archives #the magnus archive fanart #fanart #political art #from the river to the see #from the river to the sea palestine will be free #free gaza #free palestine #from the river to the sea #queer artist #trans artist #digital art #digital illustration #digital painting #digital drawing #autodesk sketchbook #mine #my art

[zosonils-art]

look out, gooigi!

#zos draws #super mario bros #luigi's mansion #gooigi #mario boo #best of zos #i'm real pleased with how this turned out :] #burnout hits hard but my devotion to making everyone on this website look at gooigi hits harder #also i'm tentatively using one of those please for the love of god reblog my art banners again #i feel kinda bad using them so we'll see if it lasts but i think this one is politely worded enough that i will not enter the guilt spiral #anyway enough of that nonsense. look at gooigi :] #and also new icon pog

[arcalian]

Like fuck to say not only will we adapt scherzo but instead of anti-time creatures we will just imply these are the yssgaroth if you know

#specifically like. the edge of the universe #where the spiral politic ends #the invoking of vampirism #dw spoilers #scherzo #yssgaroth #spiral yssgaroth #anyways im so normal