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Melkor Rising

I finally finished it

I didn’t know if I want to keep the flames and the blue lava visible or not so as always there are alternate versions.

This was suppose to be before he fights Tulkas but i dunnooooo -shrugs-

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My partner, on the subject of Weyoun 5: "He looks like he belongs in Gundam Seed [pejorative]"

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Goby, friend of Mr. (and Mrs?) Trash Wheel

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The NLRB may or may not continue to exist; have some history about how workers can and do concern themselves with their own interests.

In the United States, the first Monday in September is celebrated annually as Labor Day. Born from the efforts of unions in the nineteenth century, the holiday stands today as a celebration of workers and fair labor practices across all industries.

A new JSTOR Daily round-up features stories about labor activism and workers' rights, agricultural labor, domestic workers, and global labor concerns.

Image: Picketers strike against Wentworth Manufacturing Company, 1968. Kheel Center, Cornell University.

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Radical juries

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/22/jury-nullification/#voir-dire

I don't know if you've heard, but water has started running uphill – I mean, speaking in a politico-scientific sense:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

By which I mean, the bedrock consensus of political science appears to have been disproved. Broadly speaking, political scientists believe that lawmakers and regulators only respond to the policy preferences of powerful people. If economic elites want a policy, that's the policy we get – no matter how unpopular it is with everyone else. Likewise, even if something is very, very popular with all of us, we won't get it if the super-rich hate it.

Just take a look at the gap between public opinion and policy outcomes: most people think "capitalism does more harm than good"; most Canadians, Britons and Australians aged 18-34 think "socialism will improve the economy and well-being of citizens"; 72% of Brits support a national job guarantee; the majority of Californians support permanent rent-controls; and most people in 40 countries want CEO salaries capped at 4X that of their lowest-paid employees:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/07/the-people-no-2/#water-flowing-uphill

The inability of the public to get its way isn't just an impressionistic view – it's an empirical finding, based on a representative sample of 1,779 policy outcomes, that politicians ignore the will of the people in favor of the will of billionaires:

economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B

And yet, all over the world, we're seeing these irrepressible outbreaks of antitrust policy, aimed squarely at shattering corporate power:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/28/mamdani/#trustbusting

It's a mystery. There's no policy that would be harder on billionaire wealth and power than vigorous antitrust enforcement (not least because preventing corporate concentration is key to preventing regulatory capture):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/05/regulatory-capture/

Certainly, there are a lot of merely obscenely rich people who are angry that the farcically rich people are screwing them over, and this class division between the 0.01% and the 1% has opened up some political space:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/09/elite-disunity/#awoken-giants

But that wouldn't be enough, not without the massive supermajorities of everyday people who are sick to the back teeth of being abused by corporations, and who are desperate for any outlet to strike back.

Take juries. Orrick is a big corporate law firm that represents the kinds of companies that might find their future in the hands of a jury in a state or federal courthouse. Orrick periodically surveys representative samples of people who show up for jury service to get a picture of their attitude towards the kinds of companies that can afford to hire a firm like theirs:

https://www.orrick.com/en/Insights/Groundbreaking-Jury-Research-Reveals-US-Jury-Attitudes-in-a-Polarized-Society

Their latest report contrasts the results of a pre-pandemic 2019 survey with a 2025 survey of 1,011 jurors in California, Florida, Kansas, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Missouri, Texas, New Jersey, and New York.

They found that jurors' trust in the court system has plummeted since 2019 (67% in 2019, 48% in 2025); hostility to cops has tripled (11% to 33%); anti-corporate sentiment is way up (27% then, 45% now). The percentage of jurors who believe that they should use the courts to "sent messages to companies to improve their behavior" has risen from 58% to 62%; and 77% want to award punitive damages to "punish a corporation" (up from 69%).

And jurors are notably hostile to pharma companies, energy companies and large banks, but they especially hate social media companies.

It's no wonder that corporations are so desperate to take away our right to sue them, and why "binding arbitration" clauses that permanently confiscate your legal rights are now part of every corner of modern life:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dogs-breakfast/#by-clicking-this-you-agree-on-behalf-of-your-employer-to-release-me-from-all-obligations-and-waivers-arising-from-any-and-all-NON-NEGOTIATED-agreements

The business lobby has been trying to take away workers' and customers' and citizens' right to seek justice in court for decades, ginning up urban legends like "A lady's coffee was too hot so McDonald's had to give her $2.7 million":

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/12/hot-coffee/#mcgeico

Don't believe it. The courts are rarely on our side, but the fact that sometimes, every now and again, a jury will seize an opportunity to deliver a smidgen of justice just drives plutocrats nuts. Billionaireism is the belief that you don't owe anything to anyone else, that morality is whatever you can get away with. You don't have to be a billionaire to contract a wicked case of billionaireism – but you do have to be stinking rich to benefit from it:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/billionaireism/#surveillance-infantalism

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No, no, and NO.

AO3 does not live in “the cloud” because that is other people’s computers, and other people’s computers are vulnerable to censorship.

AO3 is on its own computers. It does still have to be housed somewhere, and I suppose a determined enough hater could try to find that place and go after it, but it’s a lot harder than sending spurious complaints to Amazon or whomever going “BadWrong things are hosted on your cloud service!”

Owning the servers is a core tenet of OTW/AO3.

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okay so I've been playing a bunch of No Man's Sky, a game whose main unique feature is its mind-bogglingly huge universe of procedurally generated planets, most of which have still never been encountered by human players. when you make first contact with an undiscovered planet, it starts out with a random name. just today I've discovered Snesfin, Inkiew, and Roranbu-Anuki. but a minute ago I landed on a planet with, and I must stress this again, the randomly-generated name of:

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I feel like this has the potential for the greatest crossing of memes

(no, but seriously, the logo production tee, I am thinking of buying one to tie-dye? I think that'd be a lot of fun. or just the green-on-black tees, those all look baller)

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“I always remember having this fight with a random dude who claimed that ‘straight white men’ were the only true innovators. His prime example for this was the computer… the computer… THE COMPUTER!!! THE COM-PU-TER!!!

Alan Turing - Gay man and ‘father of computing’ Wren operating Bombe - The code cracking computers of the 2nd world war were entirely run by women Katherine Johnson - African American NASA mathematician and ‘Human computer’ Ada Lovelace - arguably the 1st computer programmer”

- Sacha Coward

Also Margaret Hamilton - NASA computer scientist who put the first man on the moon - an as-yet-unmatched feet of software engineering, here pictured beside the full source of that computer programme. #myhero

Grace Hopper - the woman that coined the term “bug”  

- @robinlayfield

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20 years ago, it was a scandal that Google started to track which links you clicked on the search-results page,

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I've been blasting the soundtrack to KPDH lately. I bought the digital release and it's been in my car and it's just so darn good. ...Lately, my car has also been beeping at me. It's sort of alarming (this car is relatively new to me, and it does have some funky features). It's been rainy, so I thought it might've been traction. Well. Then I twigged to what was playing at the time and (after feeling some minor embarrassment):

That's the beep, circled in black there. It's a distinctive beep at 2:32.1 during Your Idol. It stands out because it's only on one of the two stereo tracks (and most sounds in this show up as a series of lines, not just one, but that's not unique to this). Sounds almost exactly like my Toyota is none too pleased. This isn't a complaint--that's great, there are no issues with my car--but I am super curious. Is that a watermark? Doesn't make sense, you'd want to have a way to identify any part of the track, not just this one. But is it this way in the movie? Is this a mistake? Are there any other beeps in this OST I'm missing?

Ah; the horrors persist; but so do bits of weightless interest like this.

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We live in the dumbest, lamest cyberpunk dystopia possible.

So LA has been — and continues to — protest against ICE. These protests haven’t gotten any smaller or lost any momentum, but social media wasn’t reflecting it.

TikTok users, realizing that the platform/other social media are censoring/deleting/shadowbanning these protest videos, decided to find a workaround.

They’re calling it the LA Music Festival. Ice detention centers and other protest locations are “stages.” The hottest band is Rage Against the Machine. “Here’s what gear you should be bringing to stay safe at the LA Music Festival.”

And it fucking worked.

TikTok has become a proving ground for a lot of new music, meaning lots of labels and organizations have lucrative deals with TikTok to promote their new artists and music festivals. So they absolutely cannot censor the words “music festival” or train the algorithm to ignore it, or they risk endangering that very important revenue.

So now protest videos are flooding feeds again, but it’s the LA 24/7 Music Festival. Truly an incredible timeline we’ve landed in.

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Where did you get the ideas for wizard’s manual. What is the closest earth variant irl? And are there any assignments that wizards get just in passsing (like someone brings them a problem)

Where did the concept of the Manual come from? It was ... kind of an accident.

When I was initially training to be a psych nurse, I noticed (as so many other nurses continue to do, sometimes on a daily basis) how very, uh, clueless human beings could be about their own bodies, and the kinds of things you should and shouldn't do to them. (For example: I think it was Massachusetts General Hospital that once had, inside the entrance to its medical or nursing school, a big glass case full of things that people had put into their bodies and could not get out again without professional assistance. Some of them were mindboggling.*)

It was possibly in response to one of these situations that one of my colleagues, during my early months of practice, said, "God, don't you wish people came with, I don't know, some kind of instruction manual? So that they wouldn't do stuff like this to themselves." And we all laughed and agreed.

So time went by and I eventually gave up nursing and started writing full time. Initially, shortly after my first book came out, and more so after it quickly pulled down my first nomination for the Astounding award, people started asking me "What are you doing next?".

At that point I had no damn idea what kind of book was going to come next. (Especially as I was also then doing my first animation work for Hanna-Barbera—scroll down to the bottom of the list here to the entries for 1979, 1980 and 1981 and you'll see what I was up to.) But then, without warning, something changed.

It essentially started with a joke. The phrase "So You Want To Be A..." was a trope that originally went back to the once well-known series of career books published by Harper & Row in the 1950s and 1960s: "So You Want To Be A Physicist", "...A Dentist", "...A Teacher," etc etc. Every school library and public library had at least some of these.

And one day, under circumstances that I can no longer remember—because seriously, it's pushing fifty years ago now—that phrase came up for consideration for some reason, and the word "wizard" collided with it and attached itself to the end of it. "So You Want To Be A Wizard." Funny title, right?

Except that concept then somehow rear-ended the "manual for clueless human beings" concept... and the resulting crash compressed it into a different shape, and scattered fragmentary questions all over the landscape. What if there was a manual? Not just one that tells you the secrets of human life, tells you why things really happen, but also what you have to do to make them happen... if you're a wizard?

And if there was such a book, how did it work? Where did it come from? Who made it? Why did they make it? How did they make it?

...So I started writing the book that tells about that book. (Even then I couldn't resist playing around with meta. The version of SYWTBAW (and of the Manual) that Nita finds in her local library lists somebody called "Hearnssen" as the author... which is this guy. His dad, Hearn, is there behind him.)

...Writing the book took about six months in 1981-82. After the usual time spent finding it a publisher and getting the editing and other pre-publication work done, the book came out in 1983. But there's no question that the Young Wizards books' quick entry into publication was largely thanks to the success of the first of the Middle Kingdoms books: in which the characters have their own (if very different) style of wizardry. ...And writing for Scooby-Doo provided the money necessary to keep me afloat while that work was going on—which is why one of Kit's and Nita's local supervisory wizards is named after one of my story editors at H-B.

Now, as for other Manual-based issues: There are no IRL variants that function the way true Manuals do. In the print format popular in many places on Earth, Manuals change size and shape as required by the data they're carrying, and their interiors also change to reflect changes in the world around them. Our home reality being what it is, I would have some serious concerns if I observed a book behaving that way. ...Meanwhile, in terms of what we've seen in the series so far, even on Earth there are cultural differences in the way wizards get the vital information they need to use the Speech on the world around them. Some don't use "solid" manuals at all, but hear Manual data as speech or song (as whales do) or in-mind dialogue (as, for example, many Irish wizards do).

There's more information on this on the (admittedly presently incomplete) Wizard's Manual page at the now-being-revised Errantry Concordance wiki. (See also the section on "Contributions, assumptions, periodicals and plug-ins", which discusses how some Earth-based data is "assumed" into the Manual.)

Finally: absolutely there are wizards who've elected to do mostly consulting work. Like all their cousins, they naturally go where the Powers that Be send them when problems come up to which they're the preferred solution. But if they find they have a gift for assisting other wizards in solving problems that are proving unusually thorny, naturally the Powers encourage them to get right on with that as a sort of sub-specialty.

Anyway: hope all this has helped. :)

*The ones I could never really get my brains wrapped around at all were the light bulbs. Why would anybody do that to themselves??!!

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Given the THIRD TikTok I’ve seen this week where somebody has a dragon in their CAR, I think it’s time for another round of “what not to do during hatchling season”!!

Stop trying to get wild dragons to imprint on you. I don’t care what you saw on YouTube about “pure hearts and intentions”, call up your local emergency room and ask how many people get maimed every year.

Seriously, I saw somebody cuddling a juvenile bristleback on Twitter this morning. Do you want to keep all your limbs? Because that’s how you lose your limbs.

The whole “dragons love children and would never harm an innocent” thing is an urban myth. Northern bluescales do sometimes carry off human children without harming them, but that’s because they keep live prey close to their nests when their babies are learning to hunt. It’s not exactly a whimsical journey.

You are not equipped to nurse an injured hatchling back to health. They eat hundreds of dollars in meat on a weekly basis, they piss everywhere to mark their territories and it smells like burning hair, they bite, they screech at all hours, they start fires, and sometimes they just drop dead if they aren’t getting the right nutrients. Just call a rehab center.

If you live near a spawning ground, for the love of god, keep your pets inside. Your cat isn’t smart or quick enough to fight a COYOTE, let alone a beast of legend.

I’m still not over the bristleback thing. They eat people. Don’t hug them.

If you want to soulbond with a scaley friend, ground wyrms are right there. They’re totally domesticated! They like lettuce and having their horns scratched! You can litter train them and their magical aura repels ticks, fleas, and malicious fae! I know they aren’t as “unique” or “cool” as a wild dragon, but they also won’t tear off your fucking arm.

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Rules of DIY:

if it's a skill, there's rules you can learn

if it's an art, rules are not your concern

make it fucked up or you won't make it

if it's already broken, you can't break it

anything can be fixed with gorilla glue

except for pleather, and also you

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thinking again about that yoko taro quote