#they would way rather make a dangerous product than make less profit I mean come on lol

[sergle]

Every day I’m reminded of the type of person who defends big brands for things like serving coffee hot enough to administer third degree burns from 3 seconds of contact, or for making beauty products with known carcinogens in the ingredients, bc guess what! These megacorps would RATHER just do the dangerous thing and front the cost of the lawsuit for burns or cancer, they’ve already factored it in and they found it was cheaper than just making a safe or a high quality product

#they would way rather make a dangerous product than make less profit I mean come on lol #sergle.txt #J&J doesn't NEED to have formaldehyde in their products they just WANT it in there bc it lengthens the shelf life #they could use something else but they don't want to lose profits by throwing away expired product #and that's it. that's why they do it. it's for profit because it's ALWAYS for profit

[jonthethinker]

After a long day of truly cursed thoughts, I’ve come to the determination that the Cerberus Assembly can act as a sort of Exandrian analog of our world’s Silicon Valley, and I hate it. I hate hate hate it.

The more I think about it, the more it just sort of melds into my mind as fact. I can’t escape it. This is where I live now.

You’ve got this collection of self-proclaimed super geniuses, unbounded by modern social mores and determined to invent a new sort of ethics, with an intent on shaping history and sagely guiding the world into a better future. This is despite the fact that most of the ideas they have inevitably end up making the world worse, and the only thing “new” that they really bring into the world is a bunch of actually very old ideas coated in fresh circuitry/magic.

But let’s dig a little deeper and start getting specific.

They both have these images of fiercely independent, creative bodies desperate to remain free from government control, and sometimes even as a check on that very government. The heads of the Cerberus Assembly outright say their intent is to act as a check on the Crown, and are known to have many secrets the Crown is, to their knowledge, totally unaware of.

Tech companies, particularly in America, have this outward facing very libertarian outlook on things, saying they don’t wish to interfere in the very important process of democracy and free speech, while simultaneously feeling it is their responsibility to fact check those in power and hold them to account, with their “serious vetting” of political ads and the like on their platforms. They also lobby heavily against any and all regulation of their various products and services, preferring to let the “invisible hand” of the market provide the service of keeping them in check, much as the Cerberus Assembly prefers to handle its own problems internally.

But when you really dig into the details this is all bullshit. The Cerberus Assembly, for all intents and purposes, IS the Empire. They run the secret police, for goodness sake. The two are so interconnected, and the Assembly as an institution is so dependent on the infrastructure and manpower, and of course money (because the fancy clothes, giant towers, and expensive sets of material components don’t pay for themselves) of the Empire to accomplish its goals, it can’t serve as a real check on Imperial forces possibly “overstepping”, and it also has no material interest in doing so; the more power and control the Empire has, the more power and control the Assembly has; the less freedom the citizens have due to authoritarian “safety” measures implemented by the Crown, the safer the Assembly itself becomes to pursue it’s morally dubious work and experimentation.

The same goes with Silicon Valley and the various tech companies that fall under its ethos. They will expound continually on the necessary freedom from government control they must have to truly change the world in the ways they think are best, but the primary source of money for most of these companies are governments. They either primarily contract with governments for most of their actual profits or to use its already established infrastructure, as is the case with Amazon, or depend heavily on publicly funded research for their innovations, which is everyone from Apple to Google to Microsoft and dozens and dozens of smaller companies besides. They then even get to patent these publicly funded innovations and hold a monopolized stranglehold on their use. This is not even to mention the starter capital necessary to form many of these companies in the first place itself was provided by governments, with the rather, shall we say “morally questionable” Kingdom of Saudi Arabia being among the top contributors to such start ups.

Even when either of these groups claim to be self-made, it’s all bullshit. So many of our famous tech overlords that supposedly built themselves from nothing started at the upper reaches of society, with more than enough capital and connections to insure they were never at any real risk of failing in the first place. Most even went to the same elite institutions of learning that provide the vast majority of the political leadership of the United States, institutions they had access to due to their wealth and familial connections, not their brains. Elon Musk’s family owned an emerald mine in Zambia for God’s sake, one his family would have never owned without the British Empire being a thing.

The same can be said for the Assembly. The upper classes of the Dwendalian Empire are lousy with mages and magic users. If they don’t have a place to climb among the nobility, they work for the Assembly, and hope to climb there. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the only poorer mage recruits we know anything real about all were sucked up into the service of the Scourgers, one of the few arms of the Assembly known to regularly interact with societies lower reaches and not so positively at that, and had their familial identities obliterated in the process. Both of these groups are of the upper reaches of society and serve the upper reaches of society, and we should never think anything less.

And this brings us to the ideological framework both of these groups think with. They are both full to the brim with people who are individualists to the extreme. They all believe they are singular actors in the great tapestry of history, who got where they are by hard work and dedication, and anyone who isn’t there just didn’t do enough. The folks living in the tent city outside Zadash? lazy layabouts who simply have not applied their mind to be something greater, or perhaps their veins are just full of bad blood. Poor former factory workers in Detroit whose jobs have been moved to places where labor laws are weaker and wages are lower? If they’d only taken their education more seriously, they could be where I am! Or maybe they just never tried to be an Uber driver or delivering for Grubhub, because that’s how you really pull yourself out of poverty.

Meanwhile, most of the groups consist of people who have never once known real adversity and certainly not the hardship of poverty nor the lack of social and political power that position entails. They are blinded to the reality of most people in the world outside their rather small one, and thus have no understanding of the material hardship that most people experience during their everyday life.

You see this most clearer in the manner in which they try to solve what they see as societies great problems, with no clear thought put into the consequences of these particular solutions. In our world, this is particularly obvious. Uber is painted as an innovative means of transportation on a budget, when in reality it’s just a fleet of untrained, underpaid, non-unionized taxi drivers using their own personal vehicles at their own expense. Elon Musk is seen as this super genius when his solution to LA traffic wasn’t a more robust public transportation system or slowly reconstructing the city to be more pedestrian friendly, but instead to build a massive network of single car elevators under the city to zip cars to key hot spots faster in a manner people less anxious than me would still call risky at best. I mean most of these people think the key to ending poverty is teaching people to code or giving them STEM education, even when in a capitalist economy the only thing a sudden flooding of new coders and STEM educated folks would insure is that the jobs that require those skills will see a sudden massive drop in pay and benefits as the pool of prospective employees becomes over-saturated and individual workers no longer have any bargaining power to protect their once rare jobs. You already see this in animation and video game design, and you’ll certainly see it elsewhere.

For the Assembly, despite being praised as the brightest arcane minds of Wildmount, seem to get most of their ideas either by stealing them from others or digging them up out of the ground. But this is just the nature of empire; it’s always easier for an empire to consume than it is to create. So as little as they think of the Dynasty, they are eager to steal every little bit of knowledge they’ve discovered about Dunamis, and without the faith and moral sense the Luxon-based religion imposes, they will never be forced to put the use of this rare and dangerous magic into perspective. Imagine what harm they can cause with gravity and time magic when they don’t have that religious pressure to consider the value of life and choice. But this makes sense when their main sources of inspiration are the wizards of the Age Of Arcana; you know, the wizards whose hubris nearly destroyed the entire world and spurred an apocalyptic war that sent society into a dark age in which the gods themselves abandoned them? A+ inspiration material if you ask me.

Even the culture of these two groups in regards to how they regulate themselves is so eerily similar. Think of Delilah Briarwood. Member in good standing of the Cerberus Assembly. Also, worshipper of Vecna and talented necromancer. Only expelled from the Assembly after involvement from the Cobalt Soul, even when you know every other member of the Assembly almost certainly had loads of information on this lady.

It just makes me think of all the weird, right-wingers and Nazis who occasionally get expelled from the heights of Silicon Valley whenever some journalist exposes them, and how quickly their colleagues are to condemn them even when so many of them either knew this person was this way well before they were exposed or actively agreed with them and still do. I mean, think of how protected Bill Gates is, because of how much his philanthropist image has served to insulate and protect the gross consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of so few, even when his fortune was built on stolen ideas, military funding and research, and a hardcore software monopoly for well over a decade or two. Also, his philanthropy has done nothing to help African people build their own institutions of power independent of European and American influence, and have help distract us from the damage really caused to the entire continent by earlier colonialism and later capitalist imperialism.

This is to say as bad as our world is, I now definitely don’t want to live in Wildemount. I don’t want to live a world where Mark Zukerberg can cast Disintegrate. Not ideal. I guess I’ll just have to work that much harder to fix this one and not depend on learning Dunamancy to just put us on a different path. Bummer.

#Critical Role #Cerberus Assembly #Dwendalian Empire

[shivanitak]

6 Most common mistakes in affiliate marketing should avoid

The Best Place to Begin Is With Affiliate Marketing

It is necessary for everyone to begin somewhere. And, for inexperienced Internet marketers, affiliate products may be the greatest place to start. Rather than going through the time-consuming and costly process of developing your own product (of dubious quality) and then attempting to market it to the masses, you may use this method, Why not start by looking for a product that is well-made and comes from someone with a high level of trustworthiness? You could save a lot of time, money, irritation, and willpower in the process, and you could also make money—actually, really good money. Even when they earn a killing with their own items, many great Internet marketers continue sell affiliate products. Why? Because the money is still excellent and there is minimal effort necessary.

With that in mind, it’s also worth noting that affiliate marketing isn’t easy. It’s obviously less difficult than pulling together a Jeff Walker-style large product launch, but there are plenty of traps waiting to suffocate you and your cash. Do yourself a favour and pay attention to what I’m saying so you don’t fall into the traps. I will go over the top six in this section:

1. Selecting a Poor Product to Promote

There are certain products that are superior to others. Indeed, that is most likely the motivating force behind your decision to sell affiliate products: you have acknowledged that there are already a variety of high-quality products on the market, and that creating your own will likely fall short.

You’ll want to hunt for solid niches in addition to picking decent products within niches. Here’s a foolish tip that will help you understand what I’m saying: don’t sell garden hoses in the winter. No one is going to buy. Concentrate on things that a large number of people want; if their popularity has just increased, now is the greatest time to enter the market.

If you choose a product from a Clickbank list, do it with caution. Instead of picking the highest commission product at random, check for products with the highest popularity and gravity ratings. If a large number of individuals buy them on a regular basis, they must be superior to other similar products on the market.

2. Selecting a Low-Conversion Converter

Your goal as an affiliate marketer is to profit from the hard work of others, as well as the money they spent on copywriters, product developers, and software. You are likely to benefit less if you choose a product that underutilizes these benefits.

Take conversion rates, for example. Not every company that creates a product hires a leading copywriter. Many of them simply write their own text. Many companies often fail to engage someone to create graphs for their sales pages. Instead, they attempt to complete the task on their own. What’s the end result? The page is unattractive, the copy is riddled with errors, and the product converts poorly.

Read the sales page carefully and compare it to others before you begin marketing any particular product. Do you have a strong urge to purchase something? Were you confused by the visuals? Did the copy fail to entice you in? For both the vendor and you, these can be catastrophic mistakes. At this point, you can’t help the merchant, but you may avoid his service and locate one that is better. Make a good decision for yourself.

3. Choosing Low-Commission Products

If you’re marketing to a list of people, keep in mind that they can only examine so many product offerings in a certain amount of time, so choose cautiously which ones you promote. If you advertise something that only pays you 25% commission, you’re wasting a lot of time. In actuality, you’re more likely to find a product with a 50 percent or 75 percent commission.

Don’t get too uptight over the commission’s actual monetary value. While many well-known Internet marketers now claim to focus on high-ticket things (because only a few purchases earn a lot of money), you may still make a living selling fairly affordable reports. This is evidenced by the $7 report’s growing popularity.

So stay away from the cheapskates, but don’t be too concerned about the price.

4. Failure to Collect Leads

Always focus on  capturing leads.  Rather of generating traffic through PPC, SEO, and other tactics and then delivering that visitors to your affiliate link, you should try to convert them into list members first. Why? Simple mathematical reasoning and the accumulated experience of many marketers are the two reasons.

The simple logic goes like this: almost everyone who would have bought the product will sign up for your mailing list. Many people who would not have bought the product will sign up for your newsletter. Instead of converting 1-3 percent of visitors (in affiliate sales), you’ll convert 15 to 40%. (to your mailing list). You will then have the opportunity to contact both willing and reluctant purchasers. Furthermore, once they’ve been added to a list, this is no longer a one-time exercise. You’ll have the opportunity to market to them for months, even though years.

Your list is one of the most valuable assets you have as a marketer. Always prioritise your list over a one-time sale.

5. Ignoring the Value of Punctuality

In general, the rapid often overtake those with more resources in business. Google is no longer a small company with modest revenues, but it used to come out of nowhere to overwhelm immensely well-funded competitors, and it did it effectively.

What does this mean for you? You need to do more than just throw an affiliate link in an email and send it out to a couple thousand people to promote an affiliate product successfully. If you want people to buy something, your email should be informative rather than promotional.

If you can compose your email as if it were a news release, you’ll get a lot more attention than if you send a link to an Internet marketing ebook from 1998 that wasn’t really popular at the time.

You must locate product launches that meet the definition of a “event.” Find something so significant that people will pay attention to it and comment on it. If you can locate such a product (for example, the iPhone of Internet marketing items).  You’ll want to make sure that people on your mailing list buy from you rather than from another owner of a mailing list.

To put it more simply, pay attention to the time and the calendar. If there’s a huge launch coming up, you’ll want to take advantage of it as soon as possible. It’s possible that there won’t be another window of chance. So get it while you can.

6. Important Numbers Should Be Ignored

Many affiliate marketers overlook many of the tiny but critical calculations required to maintain a business and stay profitable. Many affiliate marketers, for example, will entirely disregard the share Clickbank takes from each sale. Instead, they’ll focus solely on the cost and commission.

Many people will also overlook conversion rates, pay-per-click bids, and the amount of time they devote to initiatives. They’ll also underestimate how much promotional activities will cost and how dangerous they’ll be. All of these tiny facts will be lost on them, and they’ll spend the majority of their time thinking about the fortune they’ll accumulate.

Unfortunately, affiliate marketing does not function in this manner. The outcome is unfavourable if you pay too much for traffic; if your conversion rates are too low; if you invest too much time in projects with lower returns. Your figures will not add up. You may end up in debt rather than profit at the end of the day, month, or year. And because you’re a single owner rather than the CEO of a corporation, you don’t get paid at all. Worse, you can lose some of the money you worked so hard to get.

Conclusions

So, how does it all come together? There are six main errors in affiliate marketing that you should be aware of as you read this. If you fall into one of these traps, your affiliate marketing will lead to debt rather than wealth.

So, how can you avoid these pitfalls, make better judgments, and build a successful affiliate marketing business? To begin, choose things that are truly useful. As I previously stated, no matter how much you try to promote a low demand product, it will fail to sell. You can’t create demand if there isn’t any. Don’t even attempt.

Next, seek for a product that is a winner inside the niches that are in high demand. Look for anything that converts nicely. You can do this by searching Clickbank for high-gravity, high-popularity products. You can also do this by examining salespages for those with exceptionally appealing content, generous perks, and affordable costs.

You’ll want to make sure that the declarations are fair and that the seller is trustworthy, in addition to choosing a product that converts effectively. With your list members, one poor product can knock you down a few notches. It’s rarely worth it to make a single sale and lose a customer who might otherwise buy from you again.

Remember to send traffic to an opt-in form instead of your affiliate link after you start generating traffic for your affiliate marketing campaigns. If you send someone directly to an affiliate link, you’re likely to never hear from them again, regardless of whether or not they make a purchase. The importance of gathering leads cannot be overstated.

Last but not least, maintain track of conversion rates, bid prices, commission rates, product broker fees, and all the other information that affiliate marketers prefer to overlook. Understanding, modifying, and knowing these data might mean the difference between profit and debt. You are free to disregard them, but doing so will not benefit your business.

With that out of the way, you’re ready to dive into affiliate marketing. There are many dangers, but you already know the top six. Avoid them, and you’ll be on your way to profit, following in the footsteps of previous super affiliates.

#affiliate marketing for beginners #how to start affiliate marketing #make money as an affiliate #affiliate marketing

[mbti-notes]

What do you think is the best way to deal with the fear of things getting even more conservative and harsh? I'm so scared about the future, living in a dystopian society and having all my rights taken as a non binary queer person. Infj.

I suppose you’re referring to US politics? Please be more specific because the majority of my readership isn’t from the US. You’re asking a loaded question that basically requires me to agree with the premise that everything will be doomed. I can’t agree with that, since I purposely don’t approach politics in a reactive way.

When you’re drowning in fear, you’re not thinking straight. One of the reasons political discourse has reached the lows that it has in the US is because of incessant screaming and hyperbole. The political mediascape is a for-profit machine that is designed to work people up, manipulate their emotions, and keep them living in fear of “enemies”. This creates the mindset of being in a constant fight for survival against various abstractions of “evil”, and it’s much easier to separate you from your money when you’re so threatened that you’re willing to pay to feel safe/validated. The more that people get sucked into this war mentality, the less capable they are of making wise political decisions, since every important problem gets made into an oversimplified “wedge” issue to test your loyalty to your team. 

The world is a lot more complex than red vs blue. To make a living, I have to follow news from around the world very closely. Yes, people get heated about politics, but observe the political reporting from other countries and you will see a difference in the tone and quality. In some countries, there are, gasp!, more than two viable political parties, and thus, more ideas and approaches to choose from. The US has commodified political fear and outrage like no one else by purposely pitting people against each other like rival sports teams, in a state of perpetual conflict, and, most importantly, always distracted from the underlying power structures that are making their lives worse.

To be clear, I’m not a conservative, though I’ve been surrounded and preached to by conservatives my whole life - I engage with them continuously. I am certainly angered by people being stripped of their rights and opportunities. I am certainly depressed when I see people abused and oppressed. I am certainly frustrated when my life suffers from the decisions of politicians I did not vote for. However, I staunchly defend freedom and diversity of beliefs and values. I often have to remind people that many countries and cultures around the world are conservative, and they are not abject hellscapes. Do not equate conservatism with dystopia, barbarism, fundamentalism, extremism, terrorism, xenophobia, or lord of the flies - it doesn’t matter who is doing it, hyperbole and stereotypes are dehumanizing, which enables the violence of war mentality. Conservatism, at its best, is actually needed by society to function well. Progressivism, at its best, is actually needed by society to function well. Intelligent political discourse begins with each of us getting our facts and concepts correct, otherwise, there’s no hope of cooler heads prevailing. It’s important to correctly identify the cause of a problem by labeling it properly.

Every system has flaws and every system will eventually fall apart when those flaws are left to fester and worsen. The US is supposed to be a democracy, right? A democracy is only ever as smart as the people participating in it. Can you say, with a straight face, that Americans have a deep understanding of their political system and work hard to be well-informed of all the political, economic, social, and international issues that the country grapples with? Can you say that the majority of people even understand the political terminology they use? 

The US is admired around the world for its individualism. Individuals succeed and fail by their own hand. Individuals are free to pursue their own happiness and well-being. “The Land of Opportunity”, right? Americans have exported this idea, drawing immigrants from all around the world. However, individualism, taken to an extreme, exacts a very steep price. The bonds which hold individuals together to form a well-functioning society gradually weaken over time. This is a huge problem if you hope to make good collective decisions, which is what elected officials are tasked to do.

The language and currency of politics is power. With power, you get to write the rules. Without power, you are subject to someone else’s rules. It’s really that simple and crass. The purpose of there being many different voices in a discussion is to make sure that no 1 agenda/group gets to dominate the discussion and become too extreme. Opportunists, corporations, and media companies figured this out a long time ago, so they do what they can to shut down nuanced debate and discussion. They all have a deep vested interest in hyping up the individualist ethos of American culture, not because they actually care about “culture” in any noble sense, but because they know that individuals have very limited power. One person alone cannot disrupt the status quo, and keeping everyone psychologically isolated means that those with power can keep enriching themselves without disruption.

Currently, almost every major aspect of American society is designed to stop you from realizing and using your power. Media keeps you locked in fear, feeling victimized, demonizing each other. Big corporate interests keep you hyperfocused on your own emotional vulnerabilities, telling you to earn and consume your way to a false sense of power, as they quietly dismantle workplace and social supports that would preserve your actual power. The prevailing social mandate to be ever productive and “successful” keeps you running like a hamster on a wheel, with little energy to spare for anything else. You are expected, at adulthood, to become a self-made person, never having to rely on anyone for anything, thereby eroding your ties to your roots and kin. If you fail, you are shamed and dubbed a loser, and expected to redouble your efforts to chase higher social status. And some people simply choose to drop out completely, thus relinquishing any social power they had.

In US society, those in power abuse the archetype of the “individual” and the virtue of “independence” to siphon more and more power. Individualism, in its most immature form, is really just self-centeredness. Everyone is only out for themselves and grabbing what they can before someone else does. People fight each other for scraps. And the ultimate goal of life is to have more than the people around you, such that you have the power and privilege to shield yourself from the other hungry dogs. There is no bigger picture to aspire to beyond one’s own survival and daily pleasures. If this is the underlying ethos of your society, are you surprised that the political system reflects it? A lot of people around the world look at the US and mostly see a bunch of immature adolescents. 

Transcending social forces isn’t easy. Power is always unevenly distributed, so it is always ripe for abuse, and fighting against abuses of power requires sustained effort. Therefore, it’s important to understand the many ways that power is used to oppress. I’ve spent a lot of time studying historical movements, political philosophy, and power dynamics, so my view of politics is always the long view. I believe that political progress is constant work. I don’t believe in end goals or being free to rest on your laurels. I believe history teaches us that, whatever your political allegiances, the complacent eventually become the victims. I believe that social change is relatively easy to understand by observing the way that power changes hands in society. 

Politics boils down to an endless series of change-and-backlash sequences. Whenever one group takes a significant political step, someone somewhere will lose out on some power and privilege, and they’re not going to take it lying down. Fear and anger drive the changes, and fear and anger drive the backlashes. Rinse and repeat. When the tide turns against you, it only means that it’s your turn to step up again. Fear and anger are not reasons to give up, rather, they are the wake up call that spurs the next round of changes. From conflict comes motivation.

Political power is gained through organization. The fastest way to accumulate power, especially in a democracy, is to stand together and pool your resources. But what is the motivation for organizing? Usually anger. Civil rights are never won by waiting around for the privileged to relinquish their power. No, people get together to claim their rights, DEMAND change, and MAKE the changes that they want to see, refusing to surrender to oppression. They loudly infiltrate social spaces, influence officials, run for office as representatives, and accumulate the political power to rewrite the rules. This is true whatever your political stripe. This is what conservatives have excelled at for the past thirty years in the US. 

However, as soon as you change the status quo, there will always be people that want to reverse it. It is difficult for younger people to grasp, but politics has no end, it is merely an ongoing struggle for power, as power changes hands from the complacent to the aggrieved, and then back again. For example, LGBTQ people view a right-dominated supreme court as a danger to their existence, for good reason, and that should motivate them to fight back even harder to reclaim their right to equality. Conservatives view a right-dominated supreme court as progress, and having achieved that success, they will become complacent, which provides the opening for progressives to regroup and rise again. 

The only escape from this cycle comes in the form of death or transcendence. To transcend means to see the bigger picture of what can be achieved, so that you are able to set aside the petty and work for something greater. Human beings have had their transcendent moments here and there throughout history, so they are certainly capable of it. Progress on civil rights has indeed been made over many decades, but there is always more work to do, as long as there are people that don’t view it as “progress”. For example, the fact that, after decades of tireless activism, the majority of Americans now support same-sex marriage, is something you should be building upon, rather than only focusing on the setbacks.

If you think that I’m singling out the US, I’m not. Oppression happens everywhere. It is a part of human nature to be egotistical, complacent, and short-sighted. But that’s not the only part of humans. For a democracy to work at its best, we have to appeal to the better parts of our human nature, i.e., the parts of us that: understand and care about how we affect each other, appreciate hard-won freedoms and never take them for granted, and envision a better future and plan well for it. The best changes come from passion and inspiration - not fear and anger. If you, as an individual, are not capable of bringing out and offering up your own better nature by transcending the worst parts of yourself, you can’t really expect the sociopolitical system to be capable of it, either. If you, as an individual, always lose sight of the bigger picture that you’re aiming for, then how will you help others see the importance of your cause?

Gandhi said: “We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”

IMO, the job of a good citizen involves: 1) caring about the broader impact that your vote has and educating yourself properly so that you make wise voting decisions, 2) exercising your power by actively participating in organizations that advocate for the changes that you want, and 3) having enough self-awareness to avoid being emotionally manipulated into making destructive political judgments. Humans aren’t perfect, but they don’t have to be to create a well-functioning society. Humans make better decisions when the social atmosphere encourages them to open up the mind and heart. We all have a part to play in creating an encouraging social atmosphere for people to deliberate more carefully on their political beliefs.

Are you an unwitting pawn of the media, rewarding the players that only care about getting your eyeballs for ad revenue? Are you only caring about political issues because you read something that incited your outrage? Are you resigned to cynicism, indifference, gloom, or paranoia? Are you all about “owning the enemy”? Are you only concerned about your own prospects in life? Are you waiting helplessly for someone to hand you what you deserve?

OR: Are you joining organizations that create positive change? Are you listening to the experiences of the people around you and understanding how their reality informs their politics? Are you doing the hard work of inspiring the people around you to be their better selves? Do you hope that everyone in your country has a chance to live their best life? Do you stand up to support people in need and work to eliminate injustice? Will you learn the best way to (re)claim what is owed to you from those that deny or oppress you?

You are only one person, so your power is limited. What are you doing to amplify your voice and extend the reach of your power? Are you dying or transcending? A democracy is only ever as strong as the people participating in it.

#politics #lgbtq #history #conflict #power #media #social media #ask

[botwstoriesandsuch]

Do you have any Riju headcanons? Both romantic and general

I honestly don’t have a lot of romantic head canons for Riju, but recently I was doing what I always do, analyzing the crap out of the world. So why not have some

Patricia the Prophet, Riju’s Sand Seal Obsession, and the Most Honorable Job in Gerudo Town

...Headcanons

Warning: Long post, way too much research, and I won’t shut up about business practices, animal fur, and textiles. TL;DR at the end

She is beauty

She is grace

She got a battle scar on her face

Patricia the sand seal, one of the most important members of Gerudo Town, providing guidance as a wise and experienced walrus, moral support in the form of her cute red bow and companionship with Riju, as well as assisting in the plush sand seal business ventures, which we will get into later. 

Canonically, Patricia was a gift from Riju’s mother, it would be her first and last gift to her before she died. I see this as the reason why Riju is so obsessed with sand seals, not only because she is a child and loves cute animals, but because it is one of her only links to her mother. 

More under the cut:

We can see how clearly Riju loves not just Patricia, but sand seals in general just by looking around town. 

Here is her seat at Patricia’s pen (which we will come back to later) 

Her room 

The booster seat on her throne, along with pillows have sand seals

Her skirt even has a sand seal

Now wait a moment...I think I’ve also seen that logo elsewhere...

Sand seal rental booths, a business that thrives on using domesticated sand seals in order to help people travel swiftly across the desert. 

While the existence of sand seal racing might factor into it, it’s still a bit weird that this rental business is able to survive so well even in a time where travel was dangerous and most people just stayed within their city states. Although, I guess is could also be argued that it is a necessity considering Gerudo women must eventually venture out and find husbands, but that’s still a generational, niche market. And consider that there are really only three places that a Gerudo might need to travel to in the desert, the gate way out of the desert, the outpost, and the ice house, with those last two only being accessible by royal guards. 

So how is a business being funded so well as to have gold plated signs, and enough space to take up large portions of town? I’ll tell you how, it’s because it’s also being financially assisted by Riju

Hear me out, let’s first look at a map of all of Gerudo Town

The red indicates areas accessible to the immediate public, and the gold being areas accessed only by royal guards/the Chief. The blue is areas associated with sand seals. So not only do sand seals take up a third of the general public market, but they also take of a third of the space within the palace, essentially making up over a third of the space within all of Gerudo Town.

Even leaving out Patricia’s personal pen, businesses can’t just go around taking up that much space without profits to back it up, there’s a ratio that businesses have to account for like “profit for square foot” and even general foot/customer traffic costs massive rent. Buying these areas, much less maintaining them, is gonna cost a pretty rupee. 

There’s no way these businesses are surviving all on their own. So that’s why I believe Riju has some influence with these businesses. Now, other than her great love for sand seals, you might ask, “why would she?” I mean sure, everyone loves sand seals, but is she really giving away budget just to fund her hobbies?”

And to that I say, maybe, bUT there is actually a logical conclusion as to why she would do this, as it might not necessarily just be her giving away money, but investing it towards another goal. 

Returning to Patricia’s pen, let us observe the gal for a moment. 

[Side note: I just find it interesting that Patricia has so many battle scars, interesting considering it is only Riju who rides her. The scars are mostly healed, so it’s fascinating to think about what kind of battle Riju and Patricia encountered even years before Link woke up! I mean, Riju is still only 13 in the game...so she was even younger whenever some event happened with her and Patricia. That’s actually pretty crazy when you think about it]

Anyhow, not only do we see further evidence of Riju’s love for Patricia in the fact that she has a special, royal harness, along with a ruby on her bow, but we see that sand seals have fur. 

[In fact sand seals are probably more closely related to walruses, rather than seals, given their tusks and hardened flippers, but walruses still don’t have fur to the same extent. Which is why I’ll be comparing sand seals to desert mammals, cause I doubt they will share much else with their more aquatic counterparts.]

Now fur for desert creatures serve several purposes, whether for climate conditions, protection, and even retaining the loss of water for the body. 

At least that’s how it works for another popular, real life, counter part that is also famous for transporting people across the desert, the camel. (Cause they have similar thick fur, along with the same smaller eyes and thick eyelashes, which is similar to the sand seals thick fur on their face) BUT, I’m getting ahead of myself here 

Looking further through Patricia’s pen, you will eventually find this room next to the stairs.

In this room there is a lot to unpack, much to me delight because yay! Analysis!

This room

is the key to it all.

Firstly, given the proximity to Patricia’s outdoor pen, along with the special royal harnesses, I’d say this room is specifically meant to tend to her. The room also serves to hold a variety of labeled fruits, including hydromelons and mighty bananas, most likely to feed sand seals.

Then, there is a bath area, again, most likely to tend to Patricia, which has a brush, which can be assumed to be used to brush her fur. In addition there is a spear by a bedside, which most likely just indicates that the guard outside who translates Patricia is also the one who comes into this room. 

Finally, and most importantly, there is this desk area, with sewing equipment, and felts, someone was in the process of crafting a sand seal plushie. 

A plushie, that is very familiar...

If you take this all in, a picture starts to form. 

Riju, a young Gerudo Chief, with an unrivaled love and passion for sand seals, finding interest in areas like sand seal businesses. With her power, wealth, and authority, she allows for large sections to be set aside for sand seal rentals, as well and helping to financially fund them, going so far as to even wear a logo on her skirt, or perhaps the businesses took on the logo in honor of her. 

With sand seal rentals thriving, Riju also turns her attention to plushies, pillows, and blankets. Already knowledgeable on sand seal fur, she might use her new found access to several domesticated sand seals in order to commission these items. Notice how Riju is the only one in all of Gerudo Town, nay, all of Hyrule that has any of these special sand seal stuffed animals, blankets, and pillows. All of these, made with sand seal shed fur. 

Which, as we previously established, has very similar properties to camel fur/hair! So their shedding rate, consistency, and usage must also be similar which is important because there are already camels being kept for the purposes of their fur in real life.

And before you tell me something like “sand seal fur and/or camel fur wouldn’t make for good textiles” let me side track turn your attention to my research regarding that. 

Time wise, this is a very reasonable rate for which sand seals could shed in order to hash out the several products that Riju owns. 

Sand seal fur is the only logical way the Gerudo could even craft textiles, as unlike real countries like Egypt or India, there is no cotton plant (and also no British imperialism forcing people to go through the laborious task of harvesting cotton) or alternative plant in order to produce anything else of the sort. 

Before you tell me that the Gerudo trade for such materials, first, this is still post-Calamity so it would be impossible to rely soley on imports while Hyrule is still in such an uncertain state and most city states are more isolated. Secondly, Gerudo specialize in exports, with all their fruits, meats, arrows, and such. Travelers typically come to then to trade, not the other way around. 

And on top of that, after pouring through several articles online on stuffed animal manufacturing for a few hours, I came across this Guide to Textiles which included several sections on felts, inner lining, stitches, and stuffing

And amoung the pages, I found sEVERAL mentions of camel fur and hair, proving that it if camels can, then sand seal fur can be used for the purposes of stuffed animals 

So yeah, sand seal fur is collected in order to make sand seal items. Patricia in particular, given special care, perhaps because we already know she is unique to the other seals so her fur might be more exceptional. We all know the secret ingredient to anything is love. So Patricia even has a special handeler who takes care of her, translates, and uses her fur to custom make sand seal plushies all in that same, preciously mentioned room

(Who might I add, is one of the only people capable of translating the sand seal language, has the honor of living alongside the Chief’s treasured pet who is one of the only links to her mother, as WELL as helping to take Patricia’s fur to craft custom made sand seal plushies for Riju herself? Perhaps only rivaled by Bularia, this guard has one of the most important jobs in the palace and probably gets paid accordingly since Riju values her so much.)

TL;DR, Riju has cornered the sand seal fur market with her power and money, helping the rental business to keep afloat, in order to get access to custom made sand seal fur items, all derived of a love from sand seals that she got from her mother. 

In conclusion, Nintendo, I would like my pay check now. 

#botw #breath of the wild #legend of zelda botw #loz botw #botw headcanons #riju #Chief Riju #riju botw #sand seal #sand seal botw #patricia botw #patricia the sand seal

[marta-bee]

On Fanworks as Commodities

I've been thinking lately about commodification and how it applies to fandom.

 At the risk of giving an unhelpful circular explanation, commodification just means treating something like a commodity when it really isn't. And by commodity, I mean the kind of good or service that it's the kind of thing we can "reduce" to market terms. A loaf of bread is a commodity. So is a house or the services of an accountant- you're not losing anything or "debasing" anyone when you suggest these things can be bought and sold.

 But what about surrogacy pregnancy? This is the question Elizabeth Anderson asked in her philosophy paper, "Is Women's Labor a Commodity?" (This is where I first encountered the concept.) She asks what exactly is being sold when we pay a woman to go through a pregnancy and then give up the resulting child to someone else. Anderson said if it's the child that's being sold that seems obviously inappropriate- we rightly consider a human person as the kind of thing you can't just buy and sell- but she also argued even if the woman is just selling the use of her body for a period of time (say, implantation and surrogacy pregnancy of a fetus conceived through in vitro fertilization of the adults who will become the legal parents), there's still something lost. The argument is, pregnancy naturally (at least usually) forms a loving bond between mother and child, which a surrogate woman would wisely try to avoid; otherwise giving up the baby would be that much harder. In effect, it encourages her to alienate herself from the products of her pregnancy. It degrades the commercial surrogate, turns her into an emotionless, contextless factory. And it degrades women who might lovingly serve as surrogates (say, for a sister or friend) because it turns their gift into something indistinguishable from a market transaction.

 That's the argument, anyway. Once I found it convincing but these days, I have my doubts. For instance, I don't see any problem saying commercial surrogacy is a different kind of process than surrogacy offered as a gift to someone you know. Even if the result is the same, they seem like very different beasts. I'm also uncomfortable with this idea that certain kinds of work just can't be ethically paid for. Because this usually comes up with "caring" work, which is most often done by women even these days, it becomes too easy to not help bear the costs of that work. We can expect, say, a nurse to care about her patient even though she's paid a salary; is it so wrong if a child who quits her job to care for a sick parent to also be paid for her sacrifice?

 That's more a criticism of how the concept is applied, though. I think it's applied too quickly, and in ways that turn it into an either/or, where this doesn't need to be the case. I still think the basic idea has a lot going for it. We do give the market too much power to answer questions it really isn't well suited for. Healthcare, for instance; it needs to be paid for, but not in a way that keeps people from accessing it who need it, or even lets those who can pay get to it more quickly. And maybe market pressures can make it more efficient, to a point, but we really shouldn't reduce it to something that can be bought and sold and understand entirely on those terms.

So, what does all this have to do with fandom? Well, I'm of a different fannish generation than a lot of you young whippersnappers- I first got involved in fannish circles with the Lord of the Rings movies back in the original 2000s. This was pre-AO3 and pre-Tumblr, and only a few years after Anne Rice got ff.net to disallow all fanfic based on her novels. We posted our disclaimers about not owning the characters for a reason and professed our poverty because we believed (or feared at least) we could be sued by the canon's authors. I was mostly in the Tolkien fandom, and it was well known that the estate was never going to authorize fanfic, commercial or otherwise. They state as much on their website, though I can't remember how long that Q&A has existed in its current format.

 That gave us a lovely little commercial-free zone. If you couldn't sell your own work commercially, then you could give up all pretenses of success along the normal capitalistic lines and delve into areas that just would never have been very marketable in traditional publishing. Tolkien fandom itself was pretty conservative but I know other fandoms went much further in this regard, exploring genres that just would never be marketable especially before the niche and self-financed publishing the internet opened up for a lot of authors. If the law wouldn't let you do what you wanted to do anyway, why not become utterly ungovernable? So, fanfic became (for me at least) art about art rather than filthy lucre. We were doing what we did because we loved it, and as gifts for our friends, and as a way to be something that wasn't quite allowed in the "normal" culture for whatever reason- even just because we were women daring to make time for our weird little hobbies. It was glorious. And we worked hard enough in other areas of our life that we had the $$$ to indulge in this. We didn't need to be paid, and even if you offered to pay us for our works, we'd likely get a bit insulted and insist that wasn't what this was about at all.

I was told more than once by family that I was good enough to be a "real writer" and didn't I want to do my own thing. So yes, I did get a bit miffed and lean in to my identity of fanfic-writing as hobby not intended as a career.

 And I'll be honest: when I see people advertising for commissions or celebrating fan-authors going "professional" as if this is necessarily a step up from unpaid fannish work, I often have this old framework in the back of my head. And it's not really fair. For one thing, I was in college in the early 2000's and so even when we didn't have a lot of cash, we expected to soon get day jobs where we could afford to live comfortably and still afford our hobbies. The housing market crash and the Great Recession changed all of that, as did work opportunities like Instacart and Uber. For a lot of people even a few years younger than me, everything became a side-hustle and there just wasn't this expectation a hobby could be a hobby. I get that there's a lot of privilege entering into that.

 On top of which, there's all kinds of gender issues: professional artists, predominantly men, have been painting and selling drawings of comic book characters for years. Star Trek and Star Wars affiliated novels, and Sherlock Holmes pastiches (as opposed to fanfic), again written primarily by men, are also very much a thing. Hell, so are Renaissance artists and the patron system that was built off of. And of course, just because you sometimes produce fanworks just to sell and still do the less commercial work just for yourself if you ever want to. There's no real conflict in that. And it's not like producing art to sell is at all wrong. But to me it does feel like that kind of art is different than what I fancy I do, back when I occasionally wrote. :-) And I probably am more aware of this than I should be, because my backdrop is different from a lot of fans younger than myself, and really do try not to let my situation turn into a blind spot.

 Even so, I worry and struggle to find the balance between letting art turn a profit and be reduced to a strictly commercial venture. It's never been anything I've been even remotely drawn to do, and human nature being what it is, I probably do think more highly of the kind of thing I'd choose to do. But I don't want to be unfair, and I don't want to think just because art is paid for and written/drawn to order, it's some sort of assembly-line output with no heart put into it by the writer and artist. Just like an artisan shoemaker might take great pride in his art and work his hardest on each shoe he crafts, even if he must sell it to make ends meet. Somehow, I suspect thinking about this in terms of commodification, the dangers of evaluating artistry using market standards and the ways in which it can still have a value beyond commodity even if it’s bought and sold, might help. But I've not quit worked out what insight that kind of thought would provide, if any.

Do you think there's a special value in fandom or art generally that's not made to be bought and sold? Or am I perhaps making too big a deal over nothing and revealing myself to be an old fuddy-duddy in the process. (It's always a possibility!) I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts if you have any to share.

#philosophy #fandom #commodification #marta blathers

[wannabeemoprincess]

***TRIGGER WARNING*** pedophilia / rape culture

I'm sure you've seen at least one of my posts by now about how the conspiracy of some powerful elite cabal in the shadows to rape children is just a misogynist's inability to understand rape culture, and I guess I should probably go in depth on some of these ideas because everyone's posting the save our children hash tag .

So, first off, I want to start on a more constructive note and highlight some of the ways we could address the underlying issue of rape culture , so that it's clear what I'm saying is with the sole intention of *actually protecting children* before I start critiquing the conspiracy / hashtag .

#1) LEGALIZE SEX WORK For 100% clarity, I do mean sex work between consenting adults. If anything maybe even raise the age from 18 to somewhere between 20-25, but DEFINITELY do NOT lower it, at all. Legalizing sex work for adults would free up more resources to fight child sex trafficking, since without sex work being pushed into the black market, there wouldn't be anywhere near the demand for human trafficking when you could see a girl who can prove she is healthy, is actually consenting, and in a safe environment rather than having to enter sketchy dangerous situations where they are at far higher risks as the client as well. The average person hiring a prostitute has no interest in being a rapist, they're just lonely. The average person hiring a prostitute probably doesn't feel very safe around gangs and mobs and all that. And with sex work legalized, sex workers are FAR safer from the dangerous clients, or any criminal element they're forced to endure while operating in a black market. Less profit, means less resources for the sex traffickers, while our resources are properly spent actually protecting women and children from traffickers. Under the current system most our resources are spent punishing sex workers and their clients , while preserving the black market that incentives human trafficking.

#2) REPLACE VERTICAL HIERARCHIES WITH HORIZONTAL POWER STRUCTURES

Consolidating power in the hands of one person at the top , rather than spreading it across as many people as possible very obviously creates the situations where rich and powerful people can abuse that power. It's a lot harder to cover things up the more people you have to convince to be in on the cover up. I really feel this is self explanatory?

#3) MAKE SURE THERE ARE PROGRAMS IN PLACE TO HELP ANYONE STRUGGLING WITH THEIR PEDOPHILIA

Reminder there ARE pedophiles out there who are absolutely disgusted by their attraction to children, have never harmed a child, and are desperately seeking help to make sure they never do. There is a push to try and frame this argument as "defending pedophiles" , but would you execute someone who was molested as a child themselves, never hurt a child, and is legit disgusted by their urges? No? Well then we should probably make sure they have resources they can access to help them, yeah?

#4) NORMALIZE SEX AND STOP MORALIZING IT: A big part of pedophilia is more or less fetishizing innocence and "purity" , and is basically the mentality of "women are less valuable sexually the more sex they've had before you" taken to an absolutely disgusting extreme . Also kids being too sheltered and not feeling comfortable enough to talk to their parents are far more vulnerable to predators .

#5) EMBRACE COMMUNAL CHILD REARING OVER THE NUCLEAR MODEL While it would hopefully be the most basic primal instinct of a parent to protect their children from rapists , that's clearly not the case in practice. Frequently parents are complacent , if not directly involved when it comes to children who have been abused. Making sure children have a community watching over them would be far more effective than hoping parents are good people .

Now what's the big problem with these conspiracies ? Even if they aren't suggesting these solutions, at least they're raising awareness, right? Ehhhh...

I'm not accusing any INDIVIDUAL of doing this, but as a SOCIETY we have an ongoing issue of the hyper performative "execute the rapists!" ending up being super counter productive . Conservatives will swear they can't support rape culture because they "would gladly kill a rapist" But, then they only define rape as the most stereotypical violent assault in a dark alley while insisting rape victims "wanted it"

Also there is a really weird hypocrisy from some of the people sharing this shit where a bad picture of ellen degeneres looking old is proof she rapes and eats babies , but when your favorite rapper is accused of rape you demand video evidence from 4 angles , 25 eye witnesses, and want the defendant to be able to repeat her story backwards perfectly otherwise she's just a clout chasing whore.

And last but not least, Pizzagate literally originated on 4chan, a website over run with alt right pedophiles , and fits perfectly with the argument that conspiracies all blame society's issues on a shadowy cabal of jews. At the center of the conspiracy, there's the belief that donald trump is ACTUALLY the only one brave enough to fight evil satanic jewish pedophile shadow government and he's been "playing 5d chess this whole time". The root of the conspiracy is "Cultural marxist Jews want to rape your kids, and only Trump can save our children"

#SaveOurChildren just trims the fat to make it easier for you to chew with all that said, if reading what someone who's at least vaguely male-ish such as myself has to say about rape culture was the first time you realized that maybe it is an actual thing PLEASE read actual feminist writings about this stuff from women

#saveourchildren #savethechildren #kidslivesmatter #qanon #pizzagate #wayfair #rape culture #conspiracies #donald trump #epstein

[kmp78]

Watch the new documentary Fake Famous, it exposes Valery’s sorry ass and the common liars like her. How they scam people by buying followers, likes, comments, fake fan accounts, bots to spread their bs, how they edit and manipulate on the internet, faking to lead a luxury lifestyle to create envy, Kiseleva Kaufman like all these lowlives also uses photoshop, filters, plastic surgery, fake cosmetic enhacements, and her biggest way to fool for gain is pretending about JL, pretending to be with him, pretending wearing his clothes, pretending to be his girlfriend, all fake, online bullshit. These fakers are on their way down their nasty trickery is becoming more and more mainstream.🤢

————————————–

https://twitter.com/HodaAndJenna/status/1357711789111316481?s=20

————————————–

https://collider.com/fake-famous-review-hbo-documentary/

”A documentary exploring how young people are desperate to be famous and will chase that fame on social media platforms seems ripe for a dark, bleak narrative, and yet director Nick Bilton didn’t really find that in his movie Fake Famous. A technology journalist making his feature debut, Bilton decided to explore what “fame” means in the age of social media, and why so many are coveting that fame when what qualifies as success can be easily manipulated through widely available tools. Through three protagonists, Bilton wryly shows the emptiness of a perfect Instagram life and perhaps provides a worthwhile lesson to wannabe influencers that the Internet fame game isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Bilton sets out to create a social experiment. He has a casting call where about 4,000 wannabe famous people show up (mostly people who are model/actors), and he whittles that down to three subjects. There’s Dominique Druckman, who’s an actress working in retail, fashion designer Chris Bailey who also works in retail, and Wylie Heiner, who doesn’t seem to have a personal career goal, but doesn’t really like this current job working as a personal assistant to a real estate developer. Bilton then sets to making each of them “fake famous”, first by buying followers and then by purchasing fake engagement from these bot armies. He also stages photo shoots to give followers (both real and fake) a look at a glamorous lifestyle. Bilton’s hypothesis is that these three people will obtain influencer status, which will in turn yield tangible results like free products and even expensive paid vacations.

My personal hypothesis was that this taste of fame, no matter how artificial, would turn these three regular people into total monsters, and to my great relief, that’s not what happened. Dominique, Chris, and Wylie are basically just people in the early 20s—they want to be famous because they’ve been told that fame is good, and now through their phones they’re getting a constant stream of influencers showing off a lavish lifestyle that’s the result of being “famous” through no accomplishment other than amassing follows, likes, and engagement. All three protagonists seem to be kind of in on the joke, but they also come to three different realizations about the social media economy.

For Bilton, his larger point is how artificial the whole structure is and that there are no incentives to create anything past the artifice. To provide an example of how bizarre this whole endeavor is, Bilton buys bots to increase follows and engagement to create the appearance that his subjects are real influencers. This leads to real rewards like companies wanting to use these influencers to sell their products. But a substantial portion of the followers are bots, and the software meant to call that out is apparently also fraudulent, so there’s no way for companies to know if these influencers are having a real impact in hocking products despite the exorbitant costs wooing these influencers. To put it another way, a company will spend thousands of dollars to ask Dominique to sell some fashion or jewelry, and Dominique will do it and it’s being sold to an audience primarily composed of bots. In some ways, it’s very Black Mirror, but in other ways it’s kind of silly where the real victims are the PR firms and companies so desperate to make a sale that they can’t even distinguish if their potential customers are real or fake anymore.

To Bilton’s credit, he also acknowledges that the influencer culture is not just one thing, and that while it may be built on dubious engagement, there are other times where activists have used the platform to try and effect change. Furthermore, why it’s sad that so many young people want to be famous, there’s a “same as it ever was” element to that desperation. An early chart shows that young people in previous decades wanted to grow up to be pro athletes, but I’m willing to be that a part of that desire was that pro athletes are famous and well paid, and now there’s a way to be famous and well paid without having to be athletic. Yes, there are obvious dead ends here where we have to reckon with self-obsession and the constant need to create a feeling of inadequacy in others to justify our own existence, but Fake Famous wisely sidesteps those questions of existential dread since it would only be a rabbit hole into total despair.

The trick of Fake Famous is that it isn’t trying to bum its audience out, but rather educate them on how there’s really no need to chase Internet fame because it’s simply is not real. While you may be able to squeeze some swag out of it, but to attempt life an influencer is full-time job and one that seems fairly unrewarding if you’re constantly having to promote the fruits of your labor. Hopefully, Fake Famous may serve as a wakeup call to younger viewers by showing that while social media can be fun, once you peek behind the curtain, fame is not only fleeting, but in the 21st century, it can be completely artificial.”

————————————————

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/02/02/entertainment/fake-famous-review/

“(CNN)"Fake Famous” offers a novel window into the world of influencers, conducting an experiment to see if three young wannabes can be transformed into marketing dynamos. While their tales don’t unfold entirely as planned, the HBO documentary exposes how ripe for manipulation this whole culture is, and the powerful incentives to game the system.

Written, produced and directed by journalist Nick Bilton, “Fake Famous” charts the evolving currency surrounding fame, which once rewarded those renowned for a skill – think actors and athletes – before reality-TV stars became famous for being famous, and finally social-media “stars” celebrated “simply for a number” – that is, their collection of followers.

Bilton begins by interviewing candidates – mostly aspiring actors and models – choosing three to travel the road to fame. The tricks of the trade include buying followers (7,500 for the cool price of $119.60), renting a mansion to stage glamorous photo shoots and style makeovers in order to look like the cool kids.

If that all sounds a bit cynical, that’s really the whole point, given the fraud and fakery built into the “follower” model. Those totals regularly get padded by bots, Bilton explains, “making people appear more popular than they really are.”

As Bloomberg reporter Sarah Frier notes, the whole premise behind influencers hinges on “presenting a lifestyle that people want to mimic.” It’s a marketing approach built on envy, emphasizing perks associated with that to pitch products while allowing the “stars” to cash in on those relationships.

The way people bend that formula to their advantage is an inevitable byproduct of social media, where, as cultural critic Baratunde Thurston puts it, “We’re all making our own movies, and we’re trying to be the star.”

Influencers, however, can elevate those vaguely narcissistic impulses to a different level. Despite the often misleading nature of the images, Bilton points out that it’s in “no one’s best interest” – certainly not those reaping the benefits, including the companies involved – to acknowledge how much of that is manufactured and fabricated.

The main takeaways aren’t just the deception baked into the whole process, but the consumerism at its core – designed not to make people feel better, Bilton suggests, but rather to “make you feel worse” about what you don’t have.

Tellingly, the making of the film overlapped with the outbreak of coronavirus, which actually bolstered the influencer game, creating a ready audience of people with extra time at their fingertips to spent ogling the lives of others.

At a time when the inability to separate fact from fiction has become a dangerous problem for democracy, “Fake Famous” illustrates just how easily those lines are blurred – less for power, in this case, than for fun and profit.

“Fake Famous” premieres Feb. 2 at 9 p.m. ET on HBO"

***

Jeez, anon...

That was a looooong post! I´m sorry but I just lost track of what we we were meant to learn here...

I assume smthg about how fake VK is in which case... meh. Sorry but not interested.

[mitigatedchaos]

(~1,500 words / 6 mins)

google Zarus

- @contemplate-everything

Hah, I had forgotten about him, but when it comes to "The Gods are Racist," he isn't what I had in mind. (I'll tag in @samueldays and @morlock-holmes as well.)

To put it simply, in any fantasy setting in which there are multiple sapient species (to call them 'races' suggests a smaller difference between them than there is, in my opinion), we must wrestle with the question of why there is any species less intelligent, less kind, and shorter-lived than the smartest, kindest, longest-lived humanoids.

There are a whole lot of different perspectives we can take on this, which makes it a fertile creative territory.

There are, broadly, four major reasons a species can be evil (or 'evil') in a fantasy setting: environment, culture, innate, or selected.

1. Environment.

In a friend's setting, orcs are not less intelligent or inherently more bloodthirsty than humans, but have been pushed onto more marginal lands that have less productivity, making it harder for them to develop 'civilized' agricultural states. They end up more likely to raid as well, as their economic production for advanced goods is lower.

A species could also be otherwise normal, but are widely hooked on evil magic drugs that just aren't available in other areas, or have a local environmental pressure that murders kind people.

2. Culture.

A species may worship an evil god and exist within a culture of self-sustaining evil norms, where social approval is based on being evil and altruistic people are considered exploitable morons. A member of that culture has, as their entire life experience, expectations formed on this basis.

3.A. Innate (Body)

A species may have a fundamental evil resource conflict with another species. For instance, a vampire who must murder one human a year to survive would have to be crazy moral in other ways (such as, I dunno, holding closed a gate to the infernal realms?) not to come out, on balance, quite evil just by surviving.

Alternatively, a species that has a very high fertility might quickly exhaust local carrying capacity and come into resource conflicts with neighbors more often.

3.B. Innate (Mind)

This is basically an AI safety argument. A species could be designed to enjoy cruelty more, or to be more xenophobic, or more paranoid, or to have more bloodlust or less inhibition, just as an AI could be designed to be a paperclip maximizer. In a fantasy setting it can be an absolute binding, but it could easily just be an increased frequency. Imagine having an implant in your head that rewards being a bad person.

A species might also not be innately more evil, but have greater risk factors, such as a natural craving for power and complexity, or an ability to consciously control their own sense of empathy for others.

4. Selected

A species (such as fiends) may be impossible to become or impossible to remain as without being evil.  Thus, the entire population of that species consists of evil people, or people who were once extremely evil.

I actually like all of these, as they provide a rich palette to paint with and can be used to create morally-challenging scenarios when used together. Giving orcs the capability to be good but having a tougher time of it will tie the clerics and paladins in knots - but also more clearly separates them from the neutral and evil characters.

And let's give four reasons for their existence as well.

1. Evolution

In our world, humans ended up being the only sapient species, but in a world with magic, evolution might go in very different directions. It could be simply that no one made goblins on purpose, but a sapient species with short lifespans, small resource usage, and high fertility has an evolutionary edge in many regions, particularly when technology levels are low.

On the flip-side, elves living for such a long time allows them to access more magic and more complex magic, resulting in a feedback loop in environments where magic resources are rich. Same for intelligence, which is used for developing and casting spells - but also for finding mutually-beneficial arrangements.

In a magic-evolutionary environment, it's possible that the species create the gods rather than the other way around, so they tend to (probably accidentally) create deities that reflect their strategies and tactics, which then reinforce them both culturally and environmentally.

2. Evil Deities

Evil deities are, well, evil. In the interests of spreading their evil influence, it would make sense to create evil sapient creatures, even if a handful of them will defect to good. The suffering of these creatures matters little to their creators, as evil deities are evil.  This seems to be the usual reasoning.

3. Divine Ecology

If gods need prayers, then a logical thing to do is to deliberately create sapient species that will worship you. Creating an evil species is like creating a brainwashed population, only it's down to the innate level so it's even more effective. This evil species also won't have moral objections to spreading your worship by conquering the rest of the planet.

Alternatively, species may not be equally easy to create. Creating an elf species might cost Divine Points, which then can't be used for shaping mountains or adding oceans or building temples or something. It might also be high-risk - long life may mean low fertility, which could be devastating if there's some kind of depopulation event.

4. Mortals & Evil Mortals

In this scenario, both the long-lived species (like elves) and the short-lived or 'evil' species (like goblins) were deliberately engineered on purpose, probably by evil wizards. Who was going to stop them? Paladins? That sounds like a quest!

This situation may have occurred much earlier, in a more advanced body-hopping fantasy-transhumanist civilization, where elves were high-end 'sleeves' and goblins were cheap and expendable bodies that people would exit once the time period was up. Then that civilization collapsed, and the body-hopping technology was lost... until now...

This gives us multiple options for a "The Gods are Racist" campaign.

1. Undoing the Dark Gods' Handiwork - A group of adventurers set out to remove the evil influence that the Dark Ones exert over orcs and goblins, and possibly increase their lifespan and intelligence to be similar to that of humans (or even elves). The Good gods support this quest.

BRANCH: The Dark Ones do exist and do corrupt the orcs, but the original technology used by the body-hopping civilization to create orcs is discovered, calling into question just who or what the good deities are, since this is completely incompatible with the creation mythology.

BRANCH: Removing the evil influence is possible (and successful), but increasing the lifespan is not, imposing a moral dilemma.

2. Undoing the Gods' Handiwork - A group of scientific-rationalist transhumanist adventurers challenge the deities, which in a more Greek god type way, have made the different species different without appropriate moral evaluation.

BRANCH: Turns out the Greek gods are just very powerful and very obnoxious wizards that have become full of themselves over the millennia. No higher entity is discovered with certainty. Subsequently voluntary species-change technology is introduced; only thanks to vanquishing the wizards is its energy cost economically feasible.

BRANCH: Turns out the Greek gods were once mortal and they would really like to retire from this deity thing. They scout the adventurers as their replacements, who end up having to make a lot of similar decisions due to similar resource constraints, just like the last batch and the batch before that.

3. Elf Supremacy - A group of adventurers find a magical device able to turn other sapients into elves. They discover this when they accidentally use it on themselves.

BRANCH: This is part of a plot by the Elf Deity (who is Evil) to transform everyone into elves, thus taking all worship in the entire world for himself. The party must root out and stop this vile Elf Conspiracy; unfortunately being an elf is considered so desirable that the conspiracy has many backers and this proves difficult. They end up having to take assistance from rival evil deities.

BRANCH: At first they use this device for immense profit, because so many people want to be elves, before discovering the effects are contagious, unleashing the (involuntary) Elf (Transformation) Plague. It turns out this was why the technology was not used before, and they must embark on a quest to stop it on behalf of the Elf Deity, before the other deities go to war.

BRANCH: As a subversion, it turns out there’s nothing especially dangerous about the technology at all.  The adventurers spend the rest of the campaign increasing their opportunities for their company, Elf Inc., to make huge amounts of money, and occasionally being challenged by conservative elements in other societies as they expand their markets.

4. Newly Unequal - All the species were equal until just a few hundred years ago.

BRANCH: This was the result of an elf supremacist wizard using magic to transfer other species' positive attributes to elves. The quest to stop him failed. Fortunately, this power is concentrated in a series of physical artifacts that can be destroyed. Elves aren't even a 'real thing,' but rather are descendants of a specific kingdom at the time of the switch, which has used this transferred power to subjugate the other 'species'.

BRANCH: Every kingdom in the world is still trying to figure out what happened as the global political situation has been rapidly destabilizing. It turns out that actually, this is what the species are normally like (in the absence of intervention), and a series of magical stations built by an ancient empire drained energy from more powerful species and transmitted it to less powerful species for the benefit of ideology and political stability. The adventurers face a moral choice in reactivating it, not least because the effect will rapidly kill some of the oldest members of the high-power species.

#dnd cosmology #dnd tag #longpost

[ais-n]

Pt1. So this might be totally random and maybe even a little bit weird or out of place, but I’ve been thinking about this for a while and may I just say I am proud? Happy? For the way you’ve handles the whole situation and how you still are. Like I don’t wanna sound like I’m putting others down but I can think of a handful of authors who if in your place would be less mature about the whole ordeal. I know thats random but it just made me happy and really proud to look up to you.

Pt 2 Like I know what they did was horrible, but something that really stuck out to me in your statement was your kindness to even offer help to “them” if they wanted to make things right. And I’m not saying that’s always the answer but I feel like that kind of approach with the whole situation was possibly the one with the most effect if “they” should’ve messaged.

Pt 3 I know you’re probs tired of having the whole thing brought up, but yeah thanks for being so mature and as level headed as you can be about something like what happened. (Sorry for this long random weird ask)

+   +  +

I combined these into one, I hope you don’t mind! Also, jeez I’m so sorry, I have no idea how long ago you sent this. I didn’t mean to be an asshole and not reply sooner T_T I honestly don’t get how I have such a hell of a time seeing ask notifications on tumblr anymore. I swear I used to see them so much easier. Maybe it’s just that I went so long not getting asks I don’t expect them...

Anyway - 

Not a long, random, weird ask, don’t worry! And even if it were, lol, you’re talking to the queen of long, random, weird posts - so it would fit right in regardless ;)

I don’t mind you bringing it up; it’s sort of impossible not to when a person is talking about ICoS. Plus, as bizarre as it continues to be to me that anything like this actually happened in my life, it’s still a part of my life so it would be silly to pretend it wasn’t or to try ignoring it all now. That seems like it wouldn’t help me or anyone at all, really.

I still feel so bad about everything, though. It just makes me feel so sad all around. I feel bad for “them” because I feel like something really has to have been difficult or complicated in their lives for them to do what they did, so consistently, for so long. I worry about their mental health, about them getting help, about their stability. And I feel so bad for everyone who was hurt in the process of it all - all the people who were innocent bystanders who became collateral damage; all the people who were excited about something and reached out and just wanted to make a connection, and in the process felt devastated or traumatized in the long run by what they found. 

It’s so damn sad. So many people hurting others and being hurt for what feels like no good reason. I wish there had been a way to stop it all from happening, or end it sooner, or I don’t know, just - help. 

I had a lot of mixed emotions initially when it all came out but as time has passed, when I think back, the primary emotion I feel is sad. Especially because, in addition to everything else, their actions ended up casting a pall on the series, and that’s really sad to me too because there are people who felt a real connection through the story - be it the characters or the people they met in the community - and now I worry for those people feeling like they have to question or judge themselves, or even distance themselves, from something that they felt was helpful at the time but now they wonder if they were wrong.

I don’t think anyone who felt a connection to ICoS was wrong to feel that way, regardless of what “Sonny” ended up being/doing in the end. Stories speak to us for different reasons, and I tend to be of the opinion that the writer of a story isn’t the god of that story. A story or characters can still have genuinely good impact on a person regardless of if the writer is terrible. I know not everyone agrees with that, and I understand why they don’t and I can’t even really fully argue against their points because I see value in their points as well. It may simply be that I try as much as possible to always see others as humans first and everything else second, and because I think of humans as highly fallible, very prone to making mistakes or being short-sighted at times, to me I guess I always choose to think of it as a person always has another chance to make another choice. They can change how they interact with others or the world at any second of the day if they choose to do so. 

It doesn’t mean it’s a simple switch; that choice may entail a very long and rocky journey that may never be over -- it may mean making the decision to seek counseling if possible, or finding safe people to open up to, or starting to (safely) research and seek out communities that may reflect what’s happening in their mind... It may mean putting oneself into a position to constantly have to stop and question for months or years every second of the day if what they are doing fits their new code/path or not. It may mean that seemingly simply choice will lead to a lifetime of a pain in the ass - but that choice is still there. A person can still choose to make that effort. And sometimes, it’s our past mistakes that are our greatest motivation for making that choice, and going through those ups and downs. So I feel like it’s important to be as open-eyed and open-minded as possible about our past missteps (even if those rise to much higher levels than something as simple as a cute little mistake) and make an effort to change our future to better honor what we should have been in our past.

That may or may not be the right answer to everything; I don’t know. It’s just how I view the world, and so it’s how I tend to live, or at least do my best to follow. I do think that sort of mindset makes me vulnerable to taking the same steps at times of giving the benefit of the doubt for perhaps longer than I should, for holding out hope that others will take responsibility for their actions and learn from their mistakes, for continuing to believe there’s a chance things can resolve better in the future and those who were hurt will get a chance for closure. In a way, that mindset likely makes it easy to take advantage of my ongoing hope for other people, and also likely makes it so I don’t see the dangers of things as they’re occurring because I want to believe other people care about other people as much as I do. 

I suppose some people would take this as indication that they should change, but I don’t really feel like I should. I feel like it’s on other people to take responsibility for their actions, to prove themselves to be better than they were, to show they are willing to show humility, to improve, to care. I don’t personally feel like the answer to the conundrum is for me to change to be more like the things I don’t care for in response to things people have done to or around me; rather, I feel like as much as I am able, I want to keep trying to be what feels most right for me, even if that comes off as easy to manipulate, because I just really don’t like the idea of anyone else convincing me I can’t and shouldn’t be who I truly am simply because of their actions. As sad as I may be by what other people choose to do with their lives, as angry as it sometimes makes me, as frustrated as I get, I still want them to have another chance if they will use it. Because ultimately, what helps everyone is if they get help and they improve; not me changing to reflect their negativity and creating or continuing unnecessary cycles of pain, abuse, violence, or whatever else may be thrown one’s way.

I keep telling my parents that if I’m murdered for some reason in my life, they damn well better not use that as an excuse to send hate out there to the world in my name. I don’t want that. I would much rather there be something productive or positive... create a law that protects people who are in a position I was where I wasn’t protected, or build a non-profit that helps prevent my tragedy, or brings community and aid to the families and friends left behind from others like me. Something like that. Not self-righteous anger being used to justify more distance being spread between the people of this world.

That’s a tangent, but I mention it in part because I have very little hope my parents would follow through with my request. They’re much more in the mindset of retribution than I am. So hey, here’s my official request for others out there to remember I want something nice and productive and caring or protective done in my name in the event of tragedy, not something that at the heart of it is motivated solely by fear, pain, anger and hatred.

Anyway - that was a tl;dr of saying thanks but honestly I don’t know that I’m anyone to look up to in particular - there are way cooler people to look up to, like Malala, for example. I think I just have a thought process that’s probably pretty typical for people of my type of personality, and so in that way I’m probably a dime a dozen. I bet you are super awesome, yourself, and you probably would react the same way as me in this situation. But I appreciate the sentiment and I’m wishing you all the very best, and truly hope you and those you love are safe and healthy during these strange times.

PS: I didn’t bother putting this behind a cut because sometimes I have issues getting that to show on phones for people but if anyone is annoyed by this long ass thing on their dashboard and want me to edit it to have a cut, let me know and I can.

#Anonymous #ask ais #icosbooks #icos #in the company of shadows

[douchebagbrainwaves]

EVERY FOUNDER SHOULD KNOW ABOUT STARTUPS

Google was entrenched. They don't have time to work. Something hacked together means something that barely solves the problem, and that doesn't seem huge to investors. Back in the era of those fluffy idealized portraits of countesses with their lapdogs. What about grad school: apparently endless supplies of time, which I think will be more and more common, master the most powerful tools you can find a good teacher. The investors are what make a startup hub. But I think the main reason VCs like to invest in this startup.

They build a coarser model of their surroundings, and this helped to make the investment in the form of an academic paper to yield one more quantum of publication.1 I realized why. Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Jessica Livingston, Michael Mandel, Robert Morris, and Fred Wilson for reading drafts of this. You'll end up doing something chosen for you by your parents, or the painter who can't afford to heat his studio and thus has to wear a beret indoors. Now imagine comparing what's inside this guy's head with what's inside the head of a 1950s auto executive, the attitude must have been: sure, give 'em whatever they ask for, so long as you're profitable. When you can convince them. Standardized tests count for nothing, and grades for little. But by the time most people hear about it. To launch a taboo, a group has to be more productive because there are no distractions. But all it takes is for one big investor to cool on you, and it would still be just as much of a distraction. But one of the founders said I'd read that starting a startup into an optimization problem.

So the most successful people will all like what they do. Or to put it more brutally, 6 months of runway. How can we find these too? It wasn't always this way. Where the method of selecting the elite is thoroughly corrupt, most of which now seem to be dead, were like VC firms except that they took a much bigger role in the startups they funded. Of a game. The first sentence of this essay began as replies to students who wrote to me with questions. When they demo it, one of the big successes have two or three. To anyone who knows Mark Zuckerberg that is the reductio ad absurdum, that it's false that economic inequality is to treat it as a heresy.

And this is a bit of an urban legend. When someone buys shares in a company, that leaves increasing revenues and decreasing expenses. One solution to this problem would be to shirk it, but those who like what they do. Plain materials have a charm like small scale. During busy periods, office hours sometimes get long enough that they compress the day, but that I often spent money I desperately needed on stuff that I didn't want them to be novelists and whose parents want them to be doctors and whose parents want them to be interchangeable. Since there's a fixed cost each time you start working on a program it can take to start a consulting company that you will thereby fix poverty. The weekend before the demo day for potential investors ten weeks in, and seven of the eight seemed promising by the end of the year I couldn't even remember what else I had stored in that attic.2 Overall only about 10% of startups succeed, but that it has to have one thing it sells to many people, rather than working on the product, pending lawsuits against the company, that implicitly establishes a value for it. Google stuck Kleiner and Sequoia with a $75 million premoney valuation, their reaction was probably Ouch!

Few legal documents are created from scratch. A month later, at the high water mark of political correctness, because it will have expanded to include the efforts of individuals without requiring them to be cold and calculating, or at least, tends to require long stretches of uninterrupted time to work in a big company.3 The fact that they're running investment funds makes VCs want to invest in you if you stay where you are, the more prominent the angel, the less energy you have left, you've avoided the immediate danger. Raising money, rather than just the whim of an individual partner. When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. If you're starting a startup molds you into someone who can handle it. I don't know what fraction of them currently raise more after Demo Day. The startup is the second biggest startup hub in the US and the world, and they're begging not to be too specific about what you want to understand economic inequality in the US and the world, people don't start things till they're sure what they want. Why? Great work tends to grow out of ideas that others have overlooked, and no one who did the opposite. The fact that seed firms are companies rather than individual people, reaching them is easier than reaching angels. He completely rewrites the program several times; that wouldn't be justifiable for an official project, but this is a natural place for things to give as venture funding becomes more and more common, master the most powerful forces in history.

They don't try to look at something like Reddit and think the founders thought of everything. A lot of the worst flaws in programming languages. That doesn't sound right either. In reality the angel might be more likely to discover new things, because you will never again be so productive. So what less ambitious professors do is turn out a series of papers whose conclusions are novel because no one has yet explored its possibilities. I know of one couple who couldn't retire to the town they preferred because they couldn't afford a monitor. But if you have food and shelter, you probably never will.

The example of a tolerant society. They may have to pay a lawyer even to read it, you've only read it, not written it. In life, as in a secret society, nothing that happens within the building should be told to outsiders. So startup culture may not merely be bad for your career to say that you shouldn't major in business in college, the name of your VC stops mattering once you have some plan for selling that valuable thing you got so cheaply, what difference should it make what some other VC thought? A friend of mine said, Most VCs can't do anything that would sound bad to the kind of doofuses who run pension funds. So it's only when you have no immediate financial worries, and few will travel far for a haircut. I didn't use the term slippery slope by accident; customers' insatiable demand for custom work will always be made to work on a harder problem unless it is proportionately or at least of the good people will be outsiders. And nearly all the teachers are among the best practitioners.

Notes

But friends should be especially conservative in this essay wrote: One YC founder told me they do the equivalent thing for startups, has one booked for them, maybe you'd start to get rich simply by being energetic and unscrupulous, but getting rich from controlling monopolies, just that they consisted of three stakes. Xenophon Mem.

I'm claiming with the fact that investment is a constant multiple of usage, so had a day feels like a wave. People commonly use the word wisdom in so many people mistakenly think it is the accumulator generator in other ways.

73 billion. There may even be working to help a society generally is to make a lot of successful startups are ready to raise money on our conclusions. I know, the angel is being looked at with fresh eyes and even if the founders want to invest, it means they still probably won't invest.

Thanks to Shel Kaphan, Qasar Younis, Sarah Harlin, Patrick Collison, Jared Tame, and Trevor Blackwell for the lulz.

#automatically generated text #Markov chains #Paul Graham #Python #Patrick Mooney #kind #Demo #stretches #program #inequality #Michael #Jessica #generator #People #slope #thing #door #startup #Morris #Younis #one #tests #time #end #someone #ways #anything #customers #demand #weekend

[bigskydreaming]

This is random but based on your last meta about NTT 55 and the abuse. I wonder if that punch Bruce gives Dick is the beginning of the Batman writers upping his violence onto the kids (Dick, Jason, Tim) and just never addressing it. So like beside sparing and moments of being drug/hallucinating has Bruce shown so much physical violence and anger to them before that issue/moment. Is that the beginning of Batman writers thinking an angry/aggressive/violent Bruce/Batman is popular and creates fans.

Technically speaking, I know it wasn’t the first time but to my knowledge all the prior instances were treated as like….y’know, either a product of being written fifty years ago and nobody thinking twice about Bruce smacking his ‘ward’ or else due to various mind control scenarios, etc. 

To be honest, my knowledge of early Batman and Robin stuff is more sporadic….I got into comics when I was ten, around ‘94, and Dick was one of my instant favorites who I latched onto immediately and had to know everything about….but my introduction to him was as Nightwing, and in his new solo series and the Titans books so everything else I kinda caught up on just to have more stories with him. And since it was him as Nightwing that I was drawn to specifically, there’s a lot of early stuff when he was still Robin that I never really dove into in depth. 

I mean, new content that was being produced at the time and just was a flashback look at him as Robin, I ate all of that up (lol nostalgia does have a lot to do with my fondness for R:YO and Annual that did my preferred retelling of his origin). But yeah, its not accurate to say he didn’t interest me as Robin, per se, more just that like….there’s only so far back I could go before the earlier written stories just weren’t quite what I was looking for.

So for specifics on any earlier instances, I would look to @northoftheroad or @internal-ethics for that, as their knowledge of Dick and Bruce’s pre-Crisis days far exceeds my own.

But no, to the best of my knowledge, there was nothing before that which came even close to being like it in tone or scope.

I think its more this was symptomatic of the writers shifting to a more grim and gritty Batman, rather than that developing in the aftermath of scenes like this one. Like I mean, I don’t think that scene created a turning point in how writers depicted Bruce’s dynamics, so much as it was the result of writers in the aftermath of that turning point having already been reached. 

It was the zeitgeist, you know? Personally, I blame Frank Miller for a lot, as he spawned a ton of imitators who saw what a hit he produced with his take on Bruce and I think a lot of writers just hoped that a similar take would net them a similar reception. But to be fair, its not like it was just him, since the only reason he even was a huge hit in the first place is that his Batman resonated with what a lot of people were looking for at the time.

Like, Tim still living at home and then with his dad still being alive for a decade after he first appeared…it wasn’t an accidental divergence from the first two Robins being orphans that Bruce took in and made family….it was part of the point of Tim. There is a tendency IMO (and I’m guilty of it too) to get so focused on the in-universe dynamics and character choices that we forget at times that none of these characters do anything other than what the writers write with intent, and Tim’s origin was a product of that. 

He wasn’t written as initially having more of a strict partnership or mentor/protégé relationship with Bruce as opposed to the familial structured ones Dick and Jason had, like…..I just mean….that wasn’t the result of Bruce keeping him at arm’s length at first because of his grief after Jason’s death. Its more the other way around. That character choice, for Bruce to keep him at arm’s length, and Tim having an origin that allowed for Bruce to do that as Tim didn’t live with him or need to be around him as often as Dick and Jason had….all of that was the product of DC and the writers wanting a less familial relationship between them, initially. Because it was all part and parcel of the whole “I don’t do family, I have allies and that’s it, I am grim and brooding and alone and I like it that way except also I don’t like anything, how’s that for a riddle, Nygma.” *waves hand at the previous* Y’know. That bullshit.

Like….a huge part of why Jason was so insular to the Batman franchise and had so few friends among the superhero community and made so few appearances in other titles like Titans….you can explain that any number of ways in-universe, but ultimately that goes back to the fact that DC didn’t want to ‘lose’ another Robin to another book the way Dick eventually migrated over to being more associated with the Titans in the 80s than with Batman. Again, its not like that wasn’t an editorial choice too….they’re the reason Dick was kept away from the Bat titles, its more like….

Here, let me lay it out like this. Basically, as far as I’ve ever understood and interpreted it, it goes like this:

Dick and his group of Titans become successful in their own right, making the Titans a new separate and successful franchise in and of itself, independent of their mentors….and being the face of the Titans, DC wants Dick more strongly associated with the Titans so they create in-story reasons for Dick to stop being Robin and to come up with a new identity that’s more associated with Dick Grayson: leader of the Titans than with Dick Grayson: ward and partner of the Batman. 

And initially, there was no real conflict between Bruce and Dick about this, they were on good terms, Dick gave Robin to Jason himself….because Dick’s departure wasn’t the inevitable result of character conflicts or some narrative reason that he had to be limited just to the Titans instead of still being a steady presence in Batman’s book….rather, it was all just made to allow for DC to keep two of their franchises separate and distinct from each other, because they didn’t want to cross-pollinate and make the success of each franchise linked to or even dependent on the other one.

And Jason was just as much a product of these decisions. Jason didn’t have a lot of ties to other books because Bruce kept him so decisively by his side, nor did he and Dick not appear together a lot because they disliked each other or didn’t have a relationship….rather, all of that IMO was an end result of the DC editorial decision to have a Robin who was almost exclusively linked to Batman in readers’ minds, with no clear, visible ties to other books or franchises that would result in him being anything other than one half of the Dynamic Duo.

(And personally, I’ve always thought this is where they really screwed up with Jason and his stories. DC claimed to want to kill Jason off because readers didn’t like him, which isn’t quite as factual a claim as has been indicated at times….but regardless….DC failed to factor in that perhaps why Jason wasn’t as popular as Dick or found as compelling by readers at the time was that DC didn’t prioritize…..giving Jason his own distinct identity and presence aside from just being Bruce’s sidekick. 

Its like, DC wanted to make another Robin because Dick was so well-received, but Dick’s popularity meant eventually there was reader demand for him beyond what Batman’s book could allow for while still be focused on Batman, ergo Dick was moved elsewhere and Batman got a new Robin……who DC accidentally sabotaged from day one by deciding they wanted a Robin whose purpose was to be part of Batman’s narrative….failing to recognize that a character without a clear narrative of his own….is never going to be as interesting or compelling as others who are allowed to exist independently of their mentor).

And THEN came the zeitgeist shift. The gradual, tonal shift of reader priorities and interests (or at least, as DC interpreted them), with DC shifting their own priorities around in order to better capitalize on what they felt would be most profitable in the newer social climate. As far as they seemed to think, what readers really wanted were brooding, violent anti-heroes who were solitary and needed no one….which doesn’t really fit either Bruce Wayne: Family Man, or Bruce Wayne: Has Strong Ties to Others Outside his Franchise which Makes Them Strong Allies.

Hence, the retcon of Dick being fired from Robin instead of moving onto another identity by his own choice…..so that Dick’s reasons for not being present in the Bat franchise would be more due to emotional estrangement, thus validating the image that Bruce was (mostly) on his own, and that was the way he preferred or thought he needed it. 

And then when Crisis allowed for a ton of possibilities in changing character backstories and even natures, DC made huge changes to Jason’s character….making him the grim, gritty ‘darker’ sidekick that was a better tonal fit for the darker Dark Knight they wanted to promote, and simultaneously doubling down on Dick’s own estrangement by compounding Bruce’s errors with him, as he gave Robin to Jason without asking and gave Dick all the more reason to feel he didn’t have a place there and to stay away.

And herein lies the danger of allowing your audience (or your perception of your audience and their wants) dictate your story-telling, rather than just letting your writers tell their damn stories without you constantly trying to make it a paint by numbers scenario and get more bang for your buck.

Because only a year or so after making huge changes to Jason’s character and basically re-envisioning him from the ground up, DC still felt that Robin wasn’t as well liked or as popular with readers as they wanted him to be….shockingly, I mean considering that if you think your readers only want dark heroes oozing over with violence and barely suppressed wrath, I don’t know how you convinced yourselves Robin was ever going to fit into that paradigm without re-envisioning Robin, rather than Jason himself.

Like, you can make the sidekick of your would-be dark, gloomy antihero as angry and violent as you want….but if at the end of the day, he’s still decked out in a costume that’s meant to be cheerful and fun, with no change from the iconic look that for decades now has been associated with a playful, mischievous counter-balance to the Dark Knight’s dourness….

Basically, no one’s going to go home happy is all I’m saying. DC was never going to get the success they wanted from that, because they shot themselves in the foot from the get go by wanting it both ways. The name and image recognition and built-in audience that comes from a reputation and public awareness that took literally decades to establish…..at the exact same time they wanted that very same character to be popular with the =readers they thought didn’t want the kind of content largely associated with Robin..

(IMO they could have actually gotten closer to what they wanted and killed two birds with one stone by like….building up Jason with his own distinct identity and narratives….which in turn could have led into Jason deciding Robin wasn’t the right fit for his own mission and reasons for being at Batman’s side, and thus building his own persona and mantle distinct to him just like Robin was distinct to Dick….but for the time being, still being Batman’s sidekick. If DC weren’t so insistent on it being Batman and Robin or nothing….they could have had Batman and someone else…whose new name and mantle could have been more along the lines of whatever they felt better conveyed the grittiness they wanted to sell via the Bat franchise.)

But anyway, so then Jason is killed off, with the in-story reasons really just being the cause and effect mapping of DC’s actual editorial direction to make Bruce fit the idea they’d built up in their own heads of what people really wanted Batman to be….

And yet bizarrely, they still didn’t wind up happy with the results. Apparently, Robin itself wasn’t the issue, just as Jason himself had never really been the issue. And once again, barely a year or two later….

They created Tim, but they still weren’t giving up on their obsession with this lonely, brooding Bruce who needed no one and coincidentally had no one…so they made sure to keep clear boundaries in place, initially. This is Bruce’s student, not his son, they were insistent. Just so everyone’s clear. See? He has his own dad. He even hires an actor to play his uncle when his dad is in a coma, just to keep CPS off his back because he knows Bruce would just take him in himself if that happened, and that’s not what Tim wants see, because Tim has his own dad, he doesn’t want Bruce to be his dad, ergo there is no danger of Bruce being paternal and affectionate and having *gulp* feelings. Of the positive variety.

And incidentally, well, not incidentally at all, since my whole point is all of this is always the result of clear, deliberate writing choices made to match editorial directives……regardless of the in-story explanations of Tim being so much more independent and operating solo so much more than his predecessors, like….because Bruce spent so much time brooding and being unapproachable and Tim needed more stimuli, what’s a bored superhero in-training to do, y’know….

Well, aside from all that, there’s also the factor that Tim was so much more independent than his predecessors had been while Robin because a) DC at least had learned from their mistake in not allowing Jason to have much of an identity of his own, b) the rapid expansion of both Marvel and DC in the early nineties, following what they called a speculators’ boom (basically both companies convinced themselves comics were about to be worth their weight in gold because a bunch of speculators had taken to buying up issues they thought would be worth a ton in the future, all pretty much due to the fact that some guy managed to sell a rare, first edition of X-Men #1 for a shit ton of money. Comic book companies are stupid. Have I expressed that enough in this one single post? LOL).

Anyway, so b) due to the rapid expansion of both the Big Two, DC was pumping out a ton more books than they had previously, which meant they had room for both a Nightwing solo book and a Robin solo book, so a huge part of the perception of Tim’s independence stems completely from the fact that he had a book to showcase these independent adventures in, without Batman or another team like the Titans being present (and still the priority).

(Which again, like. I’m always insisting that just because we didn’t see much of Dick and Jason bonding or hanging out on page before Jason died, didn’t mean it didn’t happen - just that there was no place to put scenes like this that didn’t involve either Batman or the other Titans, given that those were the only two titles they appeared in. Similarly, there’s no reason to assume Dick and Jason didn’t both go off on their own at times between issues and have adventures on their own or investigate stuff at their schools or any of the stuff Tim did in his solo title…..its literally just that before there was a solo Robin title to show Robin having solo adventures……the only place for these things to happen was…..off the page).

Bottom line, everything about Tim was constructed from the get go to be as unthreatening to the idea of a dark, repressed, brooding Batman as it was possible to get while still being Robin.

And yet…..even that didn’t last, weirdly. As over time, editors and writers desperately seeking the secret ingredient that would make this franchise really gel with readers the way they so desperately wanted it too…..over time, various someones stumbled into getting away with scenes where Alfred, Bruce, Dick and Tim still managed to be warm and familial with each other regardless of all that…

And shockingly, someone at some point figured out: Eureka! Readers love this!

So they doubled down, as they usually do, the second there’s profit in the air because yay capitalism…..

And thus its again, regardless of in-story justifications….

Not remotely a coincidence that Dick’s adoption, Cassandra’s creation and clear trajectory to being included in the Batfamily either officially or unofficially, Bruce’s initial offer of adoption to Tim even though Tim wouldn’t actually accept until years later, our time…..

Like, there’s a reason that all of these things happened in basically a five year period, real time…..even though prior to this, new additions to the Batfam, let alone official inductions, were more like a once every ten years kinda thing.

For a brief window, DC figured out the magic formula for writing a family is writing them as a family, and hark, ‘twas a blessed sight indeed.

And then someone was like, hey, y’know what’s missing? What if we bring Jason back?!

…….and then DC managed to pretty much wreck every progress they’d made towards having a brain, as they fucked that up in the most spectacular fashion possible by completely missing the point of why or in what ways readers most likely would want the missing and dead member of this family to show up alive and well.

*headdesk*

And over the years since then, the kids’ various official statuses have shifted left or right without rhyme or reason, following the whims of every new writer or editor to think: Eureka! I’ve done it! I’ve cracked the code! With frequent reversions to Bruce the Brooding Billionaire Bastard, loads of Not Good Parenting and downright abusive behavior, and a shit load of confusing contradictions.

Meanwhile, me, sitting here:

“Hey DC, maybe the problem is that you just can’t shove something like “adopted a gaggle of gremlins” into the bottle after uncorking that and letting readers see that its out there and a possibility…..so what if you just fucking committed to the one and only thing that’s managed to net you a positive reception every time you do this same dumb song and dance routine: actual family acting like actual family, actually.”

Anyway, how’s that for yet another 

“How did Kalen’s Post Get From Point A to Side Tangent Z, Section 4f, Sub-Paragraph D13?”

#abuse cw

[robert-c]

The Truth About Capitalism and Free Markets

When everyone can compete in a free market, then the best products and services will prevail at the best prices for the consumer. Furthermore, the chance to invent a whole new market and to profit hugely from it spurs people to create new products and services never before thought of, enriching all of our lives. Rather than a society with hereditary classes, our free market system allows anyone with determination and hard work to achieve riches. These are the myths about Capitalism and Free Markets. And sometimes, to some extent, they are true.

However, more often they are empty promises. You see, the primary proponents of free market capitalism, the capitalists themselves, don’t really believe in it at all. They believe in monopoly. They believe that once they have dominated a marketplace, no one should be able to challenge them and their dominance. While we like to believe that the one who builds the “better mousetrap” will be the one who profits, in reality the actual inventor rarely reaps the greatest rewards. Sometimes it’s because the bigger maker of mousetraps buys them out and takes it over, or buries it altogether if it challenges too much of the supply chain they have built up. Other times it’s a matter of “slicker” negotiations and clever accounting to ensure that the other players needed in bringing a new idea to market get a disproportionate share. It would be a legal nightmare to even attempt to regulate such transactions, and that’s not the point. I bring that up just to illustrate that one of the major “selling” points for totally free markets is more myth and illusion than fact.

Another myth is that making money, being successful in business, is some sort of testament to your (take your pick): a) intelligence, b) hard work, c) being a generally superior and deserving person, or d) all of the above. Some people do become successful with a “better mousetrap”, but others because they are more ruthless, or even willing to engage in fraud. And some are just lucky, like the fellow who discovers that there is oil under his land. Others just managed to acquire a large supply of a suddenly high demand product, like hand sanitizer at the beginning of a pandemic and attempt to resell it at inflated prices. Having become rich is proof of nothing but being rich.

This attitude that anyone can become as rich as they deserve has an insidious side effect; if you are poor, you must deserve it. It is a convenient piece of rationalization for being greedy and uncharitable.

The free market myth is that the better product or service will ultimately prevail. That value (quality versus cost) will win the consumers over. Let’s take a closer look at that myth. Every shopper knows that they have different standards of quality for different products. Some of it is personal taste, some of it is how important the item is to us. Let’s say for T-shirts I’m going to wear to work in my garage I don’t care if the seams aren’t as tightly sewn, or the material is thin. Chances are they’ll be covered in stains long before the quality of the stitching gives out. On the other hand I’m very picky about the shirts I wear to work, and I want the best quality so that they will last long and look good. Such differences in individual choices should make room for a variety of goods and various values to suit individual needs and tastes. It should be easy to see that there isn’t a huge range of quality for all goods and services and that the upper end of quality doesn’t change without innovation. Now this is where the free market system is supposed to excel. However, it is easier, and often more profitable, to cut costs, than to improve quality. This is the habit of most well established businesses; it is the low cost, low risk option. Of course cost cutting often ends up affecting minimum quality and even safety issues. Ever heard a boss say something like “come on, surely a 10% cut can’t be that big a deal?” If the safety of the product isn’t obviously compromised to the point that an ordinary consumer could tell, then it would seem that some regulation is needed to prevent such behavior. And thus we have our first need to abandon the idea of a “totally” free market system.

Regulation is needed to protect the public from dangerous products and outright falsehoods in the advertising and selling of these products. As for innovation, the actual inventors are often the ones NOT motivated by money and rarely reap the rewards of their inventions. But then that is a whole other story.

The free market is supposed to mean one that isn’t subject to coercion, one that allows competition. However, in order to preserve competition some regulation is needed. So let’s assume that Bob’s Business Machines makes computer chips. Barry has an idea for a different kind of computer chip architecture. It will be faster, and hold more information than Bob’s. But of course, it is just an idea right now. Barry needs money to develop a prototype and then money for manufacturing, marketing etc. Bob, cunning businessman that he is, has significant business relationships with all of the major banks; the very ones (the only ones) who are in a position to loan Barry the kind of money he will need. Of course the banks are smart – they know that Barry’s chip (if it lives up to its potential) is a serious challenger to Bob’s. They also know that if they loan Barry any money, Bob could pull all of his business and leave the bank in terrible shape. So unless there is some regulation prohibiting acting in restraint of trade, Bob might not even have to ask the banks to refuse Barry a loan. And as simple as that laissez faire capitalism has been able to stifle competition.

Regulation is needed to keep the current rich and powerful from barring new entries into the “club”. The entire idea of innovation being encouraged by the free enterprise system is in question if there is no regulation. Can anyone honestly say that the railroads would have embraced an interstate highway system? In fact they tried to oppose it. Or the development of airlines? NO. Given their own self-interest we’d still be riding coast to coast in days long journeys in rail cars. Pure, unregulated capitalism creates markets controlled by the largest companies, who will systematically strangle any attempt at competition or innovation that might jeopardize their current stranglehold on their market. Hard core defenders of laissez faire capitalism would argue that the railroads, with their enormous profits from the 19th and early 20th centuries could have wisely invested in the airlines and therefor had a major stake in the future as well. Yes, they certainly could have, but none did. Because making and keeping money isn’t a necessarily associated with visionary intelligence. In fact, it is always easier and lower risk to stick with what you know.

And yet we’ve been propagandized for decades with the idea that deregulation is somehow good for the consumer and will lead to more choices and lower prices. How has that really worked out? Can anyone honestly say that they feel they’ve gotten a fair deal (let alone a good one) on airlines lately? Or your cable provider? Or your phone service? Does it feel like you have to be constantly changing to take advantage of the “new customer” special bundles? Of course they know that most of us have neither the time nor the energy to wade through all of the change over business until we are very fed up, which is long after the companies have recouped any discounts they gave us to switch.

Then there are businesses, which by their very nature, have a profit motive disincentive to treat their customers fairly without regulation. I referenced this somewhat in the article on health care reform. Insurance, principally health, but also any other insurance as well; auto, home, etc. All insurance offers a product (“coverage”); essentially a promise to pay for certain losses you might experience, which may be more or less difficult to precisely define. The problem is that the free market competition doesn’t exactly produce the results we might hope for. In selling apples, computer chips or mousetraps, the consuming public has a pretty good way to judge quality and therefor value as the ratio of quality to price. But the details of coverage are hard to assess, and even with comparing identical claims paid (if you could even find two exactly alike), that is only one instance of the coverage in action; maybe it’s representative, maybe not. So the consumer has limited information to rely on in picking between the companies.

Add to this that the insurance companies’ business model is to collect more premiums than they pay out in claims. Now imagine what your reaction would be to a seller of apples, computer chips or mousetraps whose business model was to charge for more items than they delivered. Clearly regulation is needed in this industry, and even more so when the coverage is broad and gray in definition, like health care. There is a definite financial incentive to look for ways to reduce claims payout and/or rate up consumers given that competition is not as clear and simple to compare.

The “champions” of free enterprise often speak of regulations as stifling innovation and adding costs to products. Certainly there are some poorly drafted regulations that should be revised. But to cast all regulation as unnecessary is more than an overstatement, it is a lie that serves only the worst actors in corporate America. Good regulation keeps the field open for new competition to arise and prevents established businesses from increasing their profits by cutting costs and/or by cutting safety to their consumers and employees.

This would be a good time to recall that virtually every regulation business’ must submit to originated because of an abuse perpetrated by businesses. Companies who didn’t tell their employees about the dangers of the chemicals they were working with, and did not provide safety gear or adequate training. Employers trying to classify employees as “contractors” so they can avoid paying for overtime, or the employer’s share of Social Security taxes. The list could fill an entire volume.

Lastly, as good as capitalism is (in its well regulated form) it is inherently a short term view of the world. From the side of the investor, capitalism looks like an efficient system for allocating financial resources. Yet the short term high return investment always seems to garner more of the resources than the long term high return, especially if that high return isn’t payable until the end of the long term. It appears (and actually may be) much more risky.

Yet all of the great advances in our economy and technology seem to be built on the bedrock of some groundbreaking infrastructure and work of large public (government) projects. The Interstate highway system, happily used by trucking companies to bring goods across country, and vacationers alike, might have been decades later in the coming (if at all) but for the persistence of the Eisenhower administration. The US space race with the Soviet Union laid the ground work for computers and private satellite companies and the boon to communication that has created. In both cases, nearly everyone knew this was the direction the future must take, but individually it represented too large an investment to make. There are many more examples, but surely it can be seen that these essential platforms need to be built for the general good. Such visionary projects typically can’t get individual funding, but with a little from all, we all can benefit much more later, and still maintain an essentially capitalist system.

“Pure” capitalism is, unfortunately, by its very nature a short term, short sighted engine, whose principal accomplishment is the maintenance of the wealth of the first group of rich and powerful people. Regulated capitalism IS the only way to have a market place where new ideas, and competitive products can be freely introduced.

Let’s stop buying the myth that “privatization” is automatically good, and government regulation automatically bad. These are more complex issues than the simplistic black and white thinking we’ve been encouraged to hold on to.

#free markets #capitalism #regulation #economy

[violetsystems]

#personal

I guess tomorrow will be a month since I was let go from work.  The severance finally deposited along with the payout for my paid time off.  The way unemployment works today would have been the earliest I could have applied.  As everyone reads in the news about America, the extra benefits expired this week.  My situation is very unique but it’s not without precedent.  I’m simply not eligible.  Which means I have to adopt the term “self-employed.”  The CARES act did have some less than obvious help for my situation though I had to do the digging.  The last four weeks I’ve had little or no help from anyone other than the counsel of my parents and here.  So the good news was that I spent the last four weeks trying to work through the financial ambiguities.  I learned a lot about tax law.  I set up a brokerage.  I divested my entire life from the last twenty years of my career.  And nobody said anything.  I’m sure people wanted to say things.  Yesterday I had to narrowly avoid two interactions with some people who haven’t talked to me in over a year.  It was obvious that someone wants me to talk out in public.  It was also obvious enough to avoid altogether.  Like someone is always trying to set up these quasi “magical” encounters with people who could literally just reach out and call.  They don’t.  That’s a clear sign of either social engineering or a flat out scam on my public identity.  I’ve travelled around the world at this point and had hundreds of such street interactions.  It’s not worth my time to play catch up about something that I’ve already started healing from.  It’s baggage to me.  Just like the tax burden I’m facing making sure I don’t get caught up in an election year spectacle.  Everybody is talking about people “like me” but nobody bothers to address my situation by name.  If all I were was my job then I’d be a failure right now.  But I spent the last week building an investment portfolio after rolling out of bed sleeplessly at three thirty in the morning.  I ended the week twenty five dollars down.  Blizzard leading the top of my modest leads.  I invested in both AMD and Intel.  Throughout the research on the Internet I read about these companies and products I purchase.  Stocks are supposed to be fun.  No one would know because everyone talks over each other just like in real life.  But investing in these times is a lot more.  Savings accounts don’t yield near anything due to the interest rates.  Money is held onto all the time which doesn’t really help the liquidity of the markets or the economy.  Greedy companies don’t help either.  Intel was the market leader.  Also had one of the highest paid CEO’s.  Also has a processor delayed a year in a market surrounded by wolves.  Apple has the ARM.  AMD has the Ryzen.  The computer I built does too.  The laptop I’m currently on is a coffee lake i7.  Matched with the 144hz refresh on the display, it plays Overwatch on a clip I’ve never experienced.  It’s butter.  AMD is affordable.  AMD is also making the jump from hobbyist darling to OEM distribution.  I invested in both because of a simple fact.  Both companies are now led by women.  AMD is led by Lisa Su.  Intel’s  Ann Kelleher will lead the initiative for the future to bridge the industry gap and opportunities for women.  These are the things I’ve been connecting my money with after twenty years of maturation.  And mostly how I’ve been “wasting my time” the last four weeks.

Not that anyone would know other than from what I’ve written.  People are friendly enough.  I’ve been out on my bike trying to clear a path in my life for the next six months.  I’m in a situation in which incurring any more income this year makes things more difficult.  And when I skim the jobs on LinkedIn I see more of me sidelining my life to make other people money.  Stability is a weird thing.  In America, you think it’s your job.  But it really is just money.  The way things work out I have amazing health insurance for a year at a price.  I also have the option to add a spouse and child at any time during that period.  It’s expensive.  I could have shopped around.  Skimped on dental or vision.  But in the end, I could afford to sit things out.  And in a time of complete and utter desperation, I come off cool and calm to a point.  The reality is I could just sit here and play games at the kitchen table.  I could write to my friends.  I could keep following the same love in my heart that I’ve been following for a few years.  I was more impressed that I could broadcast where I wanted to work on LinkedIn more than what opportunities are out there.  I selected Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and China.  I’ve been treated as human capital for years without my consent.  I’m worth more than this.  I’m sick of listening to people talk about themselves and do nothing about it.  They compare and contrast.  They plot and they scheme.  They gossip and backstab.  And every year they’re more and more buried.  In their emotional baggage.  In the problems they won’t dare face head on.  In the debt they accrue.  Silently yesterday I ended all my credit card debt in a series of transactions.  I still have a small loan which will be paid come September.  I have never sat quietly and never had to owe anyone money I didn’t have.  I spent twenty years at a salaried job weighed down by lifestyle creep.  When you aren’t happy in a job, you spend more to compensate.  This happens to medical students often.  They get great jobs out of school but are also in debt from loans.  They burn out on spending.  The debt piles up.  And there is no escape other than to work harder.  The same goes with student loans, home mortgages, and whatever else ties you down to revenue generation for someone else.  I’m not there anymore.  And I don’t really have any interest in going back.  The brokerage account was a late night brainstorm.  I talk less about politics now.  The politics don’t help me.  I talk to myself about tax law and investment.  I write about it here but I would never talk about it in public.  Just like I’d never discuss magic the gathering strategy with a person who wants to talk about celebrity gossip instead.  I see change in my life when I act for myself.  And excuses don’t pay the bills.

And then there’s the awful reality that people still think they know better.  This is a dangerous time in that respect.  People forgot about me the whole last month.  I literally had no real human contact via email after the 15th.  I missed the window to clear out my office waiting for this laptop.  People really expected me to use all my psychic powers to read into what they want me to do with my life.  I’d rather save the telepathy for the girl I like.  In that respect, not really trying to change my agenda.  My agenda isn’t hidden or anything.  People just don’t ask me the right questions.  People don’t ask questions at all.  In the last month, I’ve felt the most human and been treated the least humane.  And that is just life.  Would the girl of my dreams really want to see me break down and cry for help?  Or would it be better to see how no matter how hard I get thrown I always land on my feet?  I’m more than on my feet.  I’m on stable ground and a little tired of the world and its bullshit.  I’m also not really mad about it anymore.  I’m just me.  I have some time to organize my life for a change.  I got new glasses.  They are Versace.  I have time to take care of myself.  I have a monthly and yearly cash forward budget.  It is very necessary to know your expenses first when looking for a job.  It is the key to negotiating a salary and benefits.  Ironically LinkedIn solved the problem for me.  It thinks I should be making 10k more than I was.  And more in New York.  Nobody told me that outright.  I had to figure it out for myself.  Because the difference between what you want to do and what you can afford to do is a real line.  I worked for a non profit for years and barely got a raise or promotion.  The salary wasn’t industry standard at all.  And now the position just doesn’t exist.  I can’t comfortably say I can even work until I consult a tax lawyer.  That was a decision that I made for myself.  There’s a lot of decisions I make for myself that nobody gives me a warm hug in public for.  Nobody is privy to them because they either are afraid to treat me like a human being or they don’t read these journals.  This is to say that I realize nobody “really” cares.  If they did I wouldn’t have gone through any of this.  I wouldn’t feel forgotten.  I wouldn’t have taken that rage and moved on.  Being angry is dumb.  You saw it on my face for years.  I was stressed.  I was strained.  I listened with genuine concern and intent to the feelings everyone had.  I accepted everyone face value.  I worked to make people feel included.  And in the end I was excluded for whatever reason.  I didn’t fit in.  I always had to surrender my identity to the “discourse” that was more interested in using me a punching bag than an ally.  I don’t have to be the beacon for a lawsuit anymore.  I don’t have to raise my blood pressure for people who would rather see me drop dead.  I can just stay out of the way completely.  And in a time when American politicians on either side have no real answers, I’d rather rely on myself to get through.  I’d rather wait for people to recognize how utterly horrible I’ve been treated in terms of my value as a person.  I am not human capital.  I am a fucking person.  And the one thing I know is that my value over time here is not wasted.  And the time I’ve spent writing to you has made me who I am.  Impervious to hipster bullshit.  <3 Tim

[sanders-sanctuary-au]

"I- If you are g-going to kill me, please-" The borrower sobbed once. "please just make it quick."

Meeting Maddie

Sanders Sanctuary Masterlist

Word Count: 2,702

Content Warnings: Cages, treating a person as a pet, allusions to abuse

———

Sometimes, Maddie wished she had been born in captivity. In one of those breeding farms she’d heard whispers about, or to a pair of “lovebirds” in a pet shop. If she had been, she probably wouldn’t have ended up here, gripping the bars of her carrier to keep herself from tumbling around helplessly while her master slipped through the crowd. She had half a mind to yell up at him to be more careful with the cage, but thought better of it.  The bruises she got from being jostled in her cage were far more preferable than whatever punishment her master could come up with for her insolence.

“Okay, little fly, we’re here,” said the human in question.

Maddie barely had time to brace herself before greasy fingers wrapped around her and she was pulled out of her enclosure. She forced herself to remain still; her master didn’t like it when she squirmed.

“This is where the Scorpion crew is outfitted. Their shipment is set to come in sometime in the next month. You know the drill.”

“Get in, get the info, get out,” Maddie replied listlessly.

“Don’t disappoint me, little fly,” her master warned, giving her a sharp squeeze for good measure.

Maddie bit her tongue to keep from crying out, letting out a sigh of relief as she was finally set down. With one last glance at the human behind her, she turned and slipped into the Scorpion crew’s lair.

Yeah, she definitely wished she’d been born in captivity.

Sure, if she had been, she’d have spent her whole life belonging to somebody else, to someone that would treat her as a lesser being. She never would have known what it was to go where you wanted when you wanted to, or eat and sleep and live on her own terms.

She never would have known freedom.

But she also probably would never have been caught by a gang of drug dealers on a borrowing trip gone wrong or be forced to spy on some of the most dangerous people in the city’s underground. She wouldn’t have spent the past two years wondering if she’d done good enough work to be fed, or hoping that the gang members would decide to ignore her for the night rather than push her around for their amusement. Being a pet was bad, but almost anything had to be better than this, right?

Maddie poked her head around a corner, and sucked in a breath. There they were, the Scorpion gang. Her master’s current biggest rivals in business. And it was likely they’d stay that way, unless he could figure out how to get ahead of them somehow, which was why Maddie was now here, skirting around the edges of an abandoned warehouse, trying to catch the drop-off location of their next shipment of product so that her master’s men could get there first.

From the tone of their voices, Maddie could tell they were talking about something important, so she slid up behind a crate near the group and hunkered down to listen.

“-do you mean not on schedule?” a man Maddie assumed to be the leader demanded. “Martin knows our timetable.”

“Well, the flooding upstate doesn’t care much about the timetable. The truck won’t be here ‘til Friday, Martin says there’s nothing he can do.”

Anger flared in the man’s eyes, and Maddie found herself ducking even lower. It wasn’t often she was glad to be so small, but now, anything that could keep her out of the gang leader’s gaze was a blessing to be sure.

“Somebody better have good news for me today,” he growled out. “Because if one more thing goes wrong, then I am gonna-”

“Boss,” a new voice cut in, and all heads turned towards the entrance. “Some man is here to see you. Says he’s here to deal with the “little problem” you’ve been having?”

“Oh, yes,” the boss sighed, sounding bored. “Send him in then.”  

Maddie peaked out from her hiding place to see a tall man wearing dark clothes. She’d seen a lot of odd types in her time working in the underworld, but this had to be the first time she’d ever seen someone wearing an actual hooded cloak. His face was hard to see under the folds of fabric, but his very presence made her feel somehow uneasy.

“Good afternoon,” he said in a smooth voice, inclining his head slightly towards the leader.

“Let’s skip your pleasantries, shall we?” the gang boss said dryly, then waved a hand at one of his men.

The goon stepped forward, and Maddie realized with a start that he was carrying a cage that held a trembling tiny inside. As they drew closer to the man, the tiny whimpered, trying to press themselves against their cage wall and further away.

“P-please,” Maddie heard the tiny beg. “Please don’t! I can do better, I promise! Don’t send me to the Shadow Man!”

Maddie’s heart skipped a beat. She knew about the Shadow Man, how could you be a tiny working in the underground and not? The threat that hung over all of their heads if they failed to please their masters. The mystery man who collected broken, worthless tinies. Anyone who was given to the Shadow Man was never seen again.

“Don’t bother anymore,” the gang leader said, rolling his eyes. “You’ve proven that you’re worthless to me. I don’t want to deal with you for another second.”

Maddie watched helplessly as the poor thing was passed over, the Shadow Man pulling a cage of his own from beneath his cloak and unceremoniously dumping the shaking tiny inside. The Shadow Man slipped the cage back beneath the folds of fabric and nodded to the gang again.

“It’s been a pleasure, gentlemen,” he said, turning and heading back towards the exit.

“Now then,” said the boss. “Let’s get back to–”

”Wait, what the hell is that?” one of the men interrupted, and Maddie yelped, realizing that the thug was staring right at her.

She didn’t think, she just turned and ran, knowing even as she did so that it was no use. Sure enough, she’d barely made it a foot before a hand clamped down around her, knocking the air out of her lungs and pinning her arms at her sides. She kicked and struggled, but it was no use; she was well and truly caught.

“What the hell?” the boss repeated, staring at her. “Where did that thing come from?”

“I dunno!” the human holding her insisted. “It must’ve been hiding behind the crate here.”

“Really now…” The leader narrowed his eyes, and Maddie squirmed under his gaze. “Now why would it do that. Anyone could see there’s no food in here.”

He leaned close, then suddenly plucked the borrower up by the back of her shirt, eliciting a sharp yelp.

“So that begs the question. What are you snooping around for?”

“I-I’m not snooping,” Maddie gasped out. “I swear, I’m not, I-”

“No…no, I know what you are,” the boss said with a snarl. “You’re Tony’s little “good luck charm,” aren’t you? I should’ve known he would try to cut into my profits.”

“N-no, I d-don’t belong to anyone,” Maddie tried to protest, but she could see in the leader’s eyes that he didn’t believe her.

“I’ve had enough of this,” he grumbled, almost to himself. “I’ve told him to back off so many times, I warned him there’d be consequences. But he just wouldn’t listen.”

He hoisted Maddie up higher, so she was eye level with him, and she did her best to bite back a whimper.

“Maybe losing his precious little fly will send the proper message.”

Maddie began to well and truly panic then. Anything that gang leaders came up with for “sending a message” was something she wanted absolutely nothing to do with.

“P-please,” she started, not even sure what she was going to say to convince a man like this to let her go. Though as it turned out, she wouldn’t get a chance to say anything more.

“Excuse me,” the silky smooth voice from before said, and all heads turned to see the Shadow Man, still hovering at the edge of the room. “If you’d like, I could take her off your hands.”

No, Maddie thought desperately. No no no, anything but that.

“Why?” the boss asked, narrowing his eyes. The Shadow Man simply smiled his chilling smile.

“Oh, come now. You know how I conduct my business. I am always willing to take unwanted tinies. No fuss, and no questions asked. And it sounds to me like that one is very unwanted indeed.”

The leader hummed thoughtfully, then frowned down at Maddie.

“Unwanted, for sure. But we need to send a message to its owner. We won’t be tolerating this kind of behavior.”

“I understand that perfectly,” the man said with another of his slight bows. “But don’t you agree that sending your rival’s tiny to the Shadow Man is about as strong of a message you could send?”

For a few agonizing moments, nothing was said as the boss mulled it over. Then, he gave a curt nod, and held Maddie out towards the Shadow Man.

Maddie was dropped into his waiting palm, and before she’d properly registered the change, she was dropped again, this time into the cage stowed beneath his cloak. The landing hurt less than she’d expected it to; to her surprise the bottom of the cage was padded, but it was a small comfort. She glanced at the other tiny, unsurprised to see them still trembling in the corner. They were in the same boat now, the two of them.

Completely doomed.

———

Deacon sighed in relief as he buckled his cage into place before starting up his car. That had been a close call with the kid in the gang’s hideout, it was lucky for her that he’d happened to be there just as she was discovered. He shuddered to think of what might have been done to her if he hadn’t been able to get her out of there.

He glanced into the cage as he drove, frowning slightly at the sight of the two borrowers huddled inside. For the life of him, he couldn’t figure out how to make this part less uncomfortable. He’d tried talking to those he rescued from the shadier parts of the world, but the change in demeanor only seemed to terrify them further. He wanted them to know that they were safe, but he just didn’t know how until they set foot in the sanctuary for the first time.

After an unbearably quiet drive, the awkward trio finally arrived at the entrance to Thomas’s farm. Deacon smiled to himself before reaching over and unbuckling the cage, sliding it out of the car as gently as he could.

“Okay,” he murmured as he walked the borrowers up to the front door of the farmhouse. “Welcome to your new home.”

He made his way into the living room and set the carrier down on the coffee table. He bent down to open it, then gasped at what he saw. One of the borrowers was lying unmoving on the cage floor, and Deacon quickly scooped them up and hurried out of the room, carrying the small figure close.

“Larry!” he called as he rushed into the infirmary. “I just brought this one in. Some drug dealer had them before, and I don’t know what he did to them, but now they’re unconscious. Can you-”

“Here,” Larry said, holding out his hands, and Dee ever so carefully eased the little borrower into the vet’s waiting palms. He hovered for a moment, making sure Larry had things under control, before heading back out to the living room. The other new borrower had to be pretty confused by now, and Dee wanted to make sure she was okay too.

“Hey, I’m back,” he said as he entered the room. A quick glance revealed the girl was still crouched in the corner of the cage, and he sighed to himself. “Didn’t mean to run off and leave you like that, sorry.”

He crouched down so he’d be closer to eye level with the small girl, and was sadly not too surprised to see her crying softly.

“Hey,” he said again, trying to make his voice as gentle as he could. “Look at me for a sec. Can you do that?”

She raised her head, her eyes puffy and red and her cheeks stained with tears.

“I- If you are g-going to kill me, please-” The borrower sobbed once. “please just make it quick.”

“Oh…no, I…no one’s going to kill you, I…” Dee sighed as the girl sobbed again and buried her face in her arms. “Okay. This is what I’m going to do. I’m gonna leave, alright?” He stood up and backed away. “You can come out of the cage, or stay in it if you want. It’s up to you. But I’m going to go away, and send someone else in to help you. And don’t worry, it won’t be a human.” He smiled softly. “It’ll be a borrower like you.”

And with that, he stood back up and left the room once more, smiling to himself as he caught a glimpse of the girl’s surprised face as he left. Maybe he wasn’t the best at comforting them when they were new, but he didn’t need to be. He just needed to make sure they were safe. And Deacon knew for a fact that there was nowhere safer they could possibly be than here.

———

“So let me get this straight,” Maddie said slowly, her hands wrapped around a little clay cup of tea. She’d never had tea before, and she was rather enjoying it. “This Thomas got a big house and a bunch of money from his aunt. And what he decided to do with it was…build this place?”

Maddie looked around at the room, taking in the blend of human and borrower sized furniture arranged so that the two groups could sit together comfortably.

“Yep, that sums it up!” Patton responded with a grin, taking a sip from his own cup of tea. “He’s been running it for close to four years now! The Sanders Sanctuary is a place where all borrowers, regardless of upbringing, are welcome to live free lives if they want to stay!”

“So…the Shadow Man…” Maddie said slowly, and Patton smiled.

“…is our friend,” he affirmed. “Deacon goes out and he finds borrowers who are especially at risk in illegal operations and he gets them out. The whole ‘Shadow Man’ thing was really an accident, but it meant that people started approaching him with borrowers they wanted to get rid of, so we all sort of just went with it.”

Maddie stared at him, trying to wrap her head around it all. Less than an hour ago, she’d been convinced she was going to die. Now, she was sitting on a borrower sized chair, across easily the most cheerful person she’d ever met, a cup of tea in her hands and a plate of cookies in front of them, being told that she didn’t have to worry about being safe ever again?

“Kiddo, you okay there?” Patton’s voice pulled her from her thoughts, and she nodded.

“Yeah, I…it’s just a lot to take in,” she admitted. “This morning, I woke up in a locked desk drawer and hadn’t eaten anything since yesterday morning…I think this is gonna take some getting used to.”

Sympathy was written all over Patton’s face, and he pushed the plate of cookies towards her, urging her to eat another.

“I understand,” he said quietly. “Most of us here, we’ve all had hardships. We’ve each got our stories to tell, some like yours, some different. But there’s one thing we all have in common.”

“What’s that?” Maddie asked around a mouthful of cookie, and Patton smiled.

“We’re safe here, kiddo. I promise, no matter what else happens, you’re safe here. Okay?”

Maddie swallowed, then glanced around the room again before her eyes fell back to Patton. Slowly, carefully, she returned his smile.

“Okay.”

———

A/N: SO! I hope you all enjoyed my completely self-indulgent fic about how my OC Maddie arrived at the Sanders Sanctuary. If you’re at all familiar with my fic Our Own Villain, then you’ll have noticed several nods to Maddie’s origins and her life in Roman’s realm. I’ve had a blast putting my sweet little child (she’s 13, btw) into this universe. And yes, Patton basically is going to adopt her, bless him XD. Credit for the idea of Dee as the Shadow Man of course goes to @ukaia, from their fic for this verse The Shadow Man, read it if you haven’t, it’s very good! Thank you guys for reading!

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