#Published:2023-09-13

[fuckyeah-beringandwellsfics]

Classification Error

submitted by: anonymous

Classification Error (11370 words) by harper_m Chapters: 2/2 Fandom: Warehouse 13 Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Myka Bering/Helena "H. G." Wells Characters: Pete Lattimer, Claudia Donovan Additional Tags: Fpreg Summary: Myka had told Helena that no good could come out of hanky-panky in the Warehouse. And look, here she was, pregnant and right.

Please tell us why you like this fic so much!

It's a beautiful story of Myka finding out she's pregnant shortly after the betrayal, and how she forgives Helena. Deals really nicely with all the range of emotions and lots of conversations and tears (the tears might be mine)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Google’s enshittification memos

[Note, 9 October 2023: Google disputes the veracity of this claim, but has declined to provide the exhibits and testimony to support its claims. Read more about this here.]

When I think about how the old, good internet turned into the enshitternet, I imagine a series of small compromises, each seemingly reasonable at the time, each contributing to a cultural norm of making good things worse, and worse, and worse.

Think about Unity President Marc Whitten's nonpology for his company's disastrous rug-pull, in which they declared that everyone who had paid good money to use their tool to make a game would have to keep paying, every time someone downloaded that game:

The most fundamental thing that we’re trying to do is we’re building a sustainable business for Unity. And for us, that means that we do need to have a model that includes some sort of balancing change, including shared success.

https://www.wired.com/story/unity-walks-back-policies-lost-trust/

"Shared success" is code for, "If you use our tool to make money, we should make money too." This is bullshit. It's like saying, "We just want to find a way to share the success of the painters who use our brushes, so every time you sell a painting, we want to tax that sale." Or "Every time you sell a house, the company that made the hammer gets to wet its beak."

And note that they're not talking about shared risk here – no one at Unity is saying, "If you try to make a game with our tools and you lose a million bucks, we're on the hook for ten percent of your losses." This isn't partnership, it's extortion.

How did a company like Unity – which became a market leader by making a tool that understood the needs of game developers and filled them – turn into a protection racket? One bad decision at a time. One rationalization and then another. Slowly, and then all at once.

When I think about this enshittification curve, I often think of Google, a company that had its users' backs for years, which created a genuinely innovative search engine that worked so well it seemed like *magic, a company whose employees often had their pick of jobs, but chose the "don't be evil" gig because that mattered to them.

People make fun of that "don't be evil" motto, but if your key employees took the gig because they didn't want to be evil, and then you ask them to be evil, they might just quit. Hell, they might make a stink on the way out the door, too:

https://theintercept.com/2018/09/13/google-china-search-engine-employee-resigns/

Google is a company whose founders started out by publishing a scientific paper describing their search methodology, in which they said, "Oh, and by the way, ads will inevitably turn your search engine into a pile of shit, so we're gonna stay the fuck away from them":

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

Those same founders retained a controlling interest in the company after it went IPO, explaining to investors that they were going to run the business without having their elbows jostled by shortsighted Wall Street assholes, so they could keep it from turning into a pile of shit:

https://abc.xyz/investor/founders-letters/ipo-letter/

And yet, it's turned into a pile of shit. Google search is so bad you might as well ask Jeeves. The company's big plan to fix it? Replace links to webpages with florid paragraphs of chatbot nonsense filled with a supremely confident lies:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/14/googles-ai-hype-circle/

How did the company get this bad? In part, this is the "curse of bigness." The company can't grow by attracting new users. When you have 90%+ of the market, there are no new customers to sign up. Hypothetically, they could grow by going into new lines of business, but Google is incapable of making a successful product in-house and also kills most of the products it buys from other, more innovative companies:

https://killedbygoogle.com/

Theoretically, the company could pursue new lines of business in-house, and indeed, the current leaders of companies like Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are all execs who figured out how to get the whole company to do something new, and were elevated to the CEO's office, making each one a billionaire and sealing their place in history.

It is for this very reason that any exec at a large firm who tries to make a business-wide improvement gets immediately and repeatedly knifed by all their colleagues, who correctly reason that if someone else becomes CEO, then they won't become CEO. Machiavelli was an optimist:

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

With no growth from new customers, and no growth from new businesses, "growth" has to come from squeezing workers (say, laying off 12,000 engineers after a stock buyback that would have paid their salaries for the next 27 years), or business customers (say, by colluding with Facebook to rig the ad market with the Jedi Blue conspiracy), or end-users.

Now, in theory, we might never know exactly what led to the enshittification of Google. In theory, all of compromises, debates and plots could be lost to history. But tech is not an oral culture, it's a written one, and techies write everything down and nothing is ever truly deleted.

Time and again, Big Tech tells on itself. Think of FTX's main conspirators all hanging out in a group chat called "Wirefraud." Amazon naming its program targeting weak, small publishers the "Gazelle Project" ("approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”). Amazon documenting the fact that users were unknowingly signing up for Prime and getting pissed; then figuring out how to reduce accidental signups, then deciding not to do it because it liked the money too much. Think of Zuck emailing his CFO in the middle of the night to defend his outsized offer to buy Instagram on the basis that users like Insta better and Facebook couldn't compete with them on quality.

It's like every Big Tech schemer has a folder on their desktop called "Mens Rea" filled with files like "Copy_of_Premeditated_Murder.docx":

https://doctorow.medium.com/big-tech-cant-stop-telling-on-itself-f7f0eb6d215a?sk=351f8a54ab8e02d7340620e5eec5024d

Right now, Google's on trial for its sins against antitrust law. It's a hard case to make. To secure a win, the prosecutors at the DoJ Antitrust Division are going to have to prove what was going on in Google execs' minds when the took the actions that led to the company's dominance. They're going to have to show that the company deliberately undertook to harm its users and customers.

Of course, it helps that Google put it all in writing.

Last week, there was a huge kerfuffile over the DoJ's practice of posting its exhibits from the trial to a website each night. This is a totally normal thing to do – a practice that dates back to the Microsoft antitrust trial. But Google pitched a tantrum over this and said that the docs the DoJ were posting would be turned into "clickbait." Which is another way of saying, "the public would find these documents very interesting, and they would be damning to us and our case":

https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/secrecy-is-systemic

After initially deferring to Google, Judge Amit Mehta finally gave the Justice Department the greenlight to post the document. It's up. It's wild:

https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-09/416692.pdf

The document is described as "notes for a course on communication" that Google VP for Finance Michael Roszak prepared. Roszak says he can't remember whether he ever gave the presentation, but insists that the remit for the course required him to tell students "things I didn't believe," and that's why the document is "full of hyperbole and exaggeration."

OK.

But here's what the document says: "search advertising is one of the world's greatest business models ever created…illicit businesses (cigarettes or drugs) could rival these economics…[W]e can mostly ignore the demand side…(users and queries) and only focus on the supply side of advertisers, ad formats and sales."

It goes on to say that this might be changing, and proposes a way to balance the interests of the search and ads teams, which are at odds, with search worrying that ads are pushing them to produce "unnatural search experiences to chase revenue."

"Unnatural search experiences to chase revenue" is a thinly veiled euphemism for the prophetic warnings in that 1998 Pagerank paper: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users." Or, more plainly, "ads will turn our search engine into a pile of shit."

And, as Roszak writes, Google is "able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics…supply and demand." That is, the company has become so dominant and cemented its position so thoroughly as the default search engine across every platforms and system that even if it makes its search terrible to goose revenues, users won't leave. As Lily Tomlin put it on SNL: "We don't have to care, we're the phone company."

In the enshittification cycle, companies first lure in users with surpluses – like providing the best search results rather than the most profitable ones – with an eye to locking them in. In Google's case, that lock-in has multiple facets, but the big one is spending billions of dollars – enough to buy a whole Twitter, every single year – to be the default search everywhere.

Google doesn't buy its way to dominance because it has the very best search results and it wants to shield you from inferior competitors. The economically rational case for buying default position is that preventing competition is more profitable than succeeding by outperforming competitors. The best reason to buy the default everywhere is that it lets you lower quality without losing business. You can "ignore the demand side, and only focus on advertisers."

For a lot of people, the analysis stops here. "If you're not paying for the product, you're the product." Google locks in users and sells them to advertisers, who are their co-conspirators in a scheme to screw the rest of us.

But that's not right. For one thing, paying for a product doesn't mean you won't be the product. Apple charges a thousand bucks for an iPhone and then nonconsensually spies on every iOS user in order to target ads to them (and lies about it):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

John Deere charges six figures for its tractors, then runs a grift that blocks farmers from fixing their own machines, and then uses their control over repair to silence farmers who complain about it:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

Fair treatment from a corporation isn't a loyalty program that you earn by through sufficient spending. Companies that can sell you out, will sell you out, and then cry victim, insisting that they were only doing their fiduciary duty for their sacred shareholders. Companies are disciplined by fear of competition, regulation or – in the case of tech platforms – customers seizing the means of computation and installing ad-blockers, alternative clients, multiprotocol readers, etc:

https://doctorow.medium.com/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse-3cc01e7e4604?sk=85b3f5f7d051804521c3411711f0b554

Which is where the next stage of enshittification comes in: when the platform withdraws the surplus it had allocated to lure in – and then lock in – business customers (like advertisers) and reallocate it to the platform's shareholders.

For Google, there are several rackets that let it screw over advertisers as well as searchers (the advertisers are paying for the product, and they're also the product). Some of those rackets are well-known, like Jedi Blue, the market-rigging conspiracy that Google and Facebook colluded on:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi_Blue

But thanks to the antitrust trial, we're learning about more of these. Megan Gray – ex-FTC, ex-DuckDuckGo – was in the courtroom last week when evidence was presented on Google execs' panic over a decline in "ad generating searches" and the sleazy gimmick they came up with to address it: manipulating the "semantic matching" on user queries:

https://www.wired.com/story/google-antitrust-lawsuit-search-results/

When you send a query to Google, it expands that query with terms that are similar – for example, if you search on "Weds" it might also search for "Wednesday." In the slides shown in the Google trial, we learned about another kind of semantic matching that Google performed, this one intended to turn your search results into "a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape."

Here's how that worked: when you ran a query like "children's clothing," Google secretly appended the brand name of a kids' clothing manufacturer to the query. This, in turn, triggered a ton of ads – because rival brands will have bought ads against their competitors' name (like Pepsi buying ads that are shown over queries for Coke).

Here we see surpluses being taken away from both end-users and business customers – that is, searchers and advertisers. For searchers, it doesn't matter how much you refine your query, you're still going to get crummy search results because there's an unkillable, hidden search term stuck to your query, like a piece of shit that Google keeps sticking to the sole of your shoe.

But for advertisers, this is also a scam. They're paying to be matched to users who search on a brand name, and you didn't search on that brand name. It's especially bad for the company whose name has been appended to your search, because Google has a protection racket where the company that matches your search has to pay extra in order to show up overtop of rivals who are worse matches. Both the matching company and those rivals have given Google a credit-card that Google gets to bill every time a user searches on the company's name, and Google is just running fraudulent charges through those cards.

And, of course, Google put this in writing. I mean, of course they did. As we learned from the documentary The Incredibles, supervillains can't stop themselves from monologuing, and in big, sprawling monopolists, these monologues have to transmitted electronically – and often indelibly – to far-flung co-cabalists.

As Gray points out, this is an incredibly blunt enshittification technique: "it hadn’t even occurred to me that Google just flat out deletes queries and replaces them with ones that monetize better." We don't know how long Google did this for or how frequently this bait-and-switch was deployed.

But if this is a blunt way of Google smashing its fist down on the scales that balance search quality against ad revenues, there's plenty of subtler ways the company could sneak a thumb on there. A Google exec at the trial rhapsodized about his company's "contract with the user" to deliver an "honest results policy," but given how bad Google search is these days, we're left to either believe he's lying or that Google sucks at search.

The paper trail offers a tantalizing look at how a company went from doing something that was so good it felt like a magic trick to being "able to ignore one of the fundamental laws of economics…supply and demand," able to "ignore the demand side…(users and queries) and only focus on the supply side of advertisers."

What's more, this is a system where everyone loses (except for Google): this isn't a grift run by Google and advertisers on users – it's a grift Google runs on everyone.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/03/not-feeling-lucky/#fundamental-laws-of-economics

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[slimedryer]

TO BE A FLY ON THIS WALL (or: time. pain.)

A 41 minute, 14 second compilation featuring the breakdown during every live, formal performance of "The Foundations of Decay" in 2022 and 2023, in chronological order.

(Many thanks to @sleepoutro and @angstics for their foundational data compilation work. More information, credits, and individual video details after the cut.)

During work on a separate Foundations video project, I decided the the breakdown footage wouldn't be used. Of course, it's an impactful moment every show — the footage shouldn't go unseen, and the most fun My Chem fans can have is finding parallels, noticing patterns, etc. So, that project was put on hold while this compilation was made.

Hopefully the final product looks deceptively simple. I'd estimate 150 hours of work including learning DaVinci Resolve, footage discovery (YT search is borderline useless now?), review, and editing. If, after all that time, there's any discrepancies in the data, links, or audio/video sync, let me know.

link to angstics masterlist: angstics.tumblr.com/post/714904480751206400/

link to sleepoutro masterlist: sleepoutro.tumblr.com/post/702020960719683584/

I also utilized the MCRchive Dropbox catalogue, but for this project didn't include any videos I wasn't able to source directly from YouTube (note: two videos from edmorris2191 were set to private between sourcing and publishing).

DATE (YMD) | VENUE LOCATION | UPLOADED BY | LINK TO FULL VIDEO

2023 03 26 | Intex Osaka, Osaka, Japan | kei-y | youtube.com/watch?v=GroVKRMiFrc

2023 03 25 | Makuhari Messe 9-11 Hall, Chiba, Japan | liveshowclips (video) | youtube.com/watch?v=1BrZ9Xj8deg (video) | maddhatter_yungho (audio) | youtube.com/watch?v=5lnNus6nZ-8 (audio) [The visual here was fantastic but the audio was better on an alternate recording.]

2023 03 20 | Qudos Bank Arena, Sydney, Australia | gin4918 | youtube.com/watch?v=p7Kw70LCkCQ

2023 03 19 | Qudos Bank Arena, Sydney, Australia | Australian_Satan | youtube.com/watch?v=GpttxJILB_k

2023 03 17 | Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne, Australia | xander85 | youtube.com/watch?v=H8gutfrqkTQ

2023 03 16 | Rod Laver Arena, Melbourne, Australia | kingswrestlingtalk4234 | youtube.com/watch?v=A95Fma0PocA

2023 03 14 | Brisbane Entertainment Centre, Brisbane, Australia | camosconcerts | youtube.com/watch?v=AdY6luAduWs

2023 03 13 | Brisbane Entertainment Centre, Brisbane, Australia | JBfromOZ | youtube.com/watch?v=rsUFHis8nLE

2023 03 11 | The Outer Fields at Western Springs, Auckland, New Zealand | Dirvinator | youtube.com/watch?v=0207hOpIFkA

2022 11 18 | Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, Mexico City, Mexico | wikiconcerts | youtube.com/watch?v=--ag8X-RhTM

2022 10 29 | Las Vegas Festival Grounds, Las Vegas, NV, USA | sirsuchil290 | youtube.com/watch?v=uZoEQeIjOC4

2022 10 17 | Kia Forum, Inglewood, CA, USA | deadhoarse | youtube.com/watch?v=4BSpQGxiFq0

2022 10 15 | Kia Forum, Inglewood, CA, USA | untamedb3ast813 | youtube.com/watch?v=YDiIztE4ZuY

2022 10 14 | Kia Forum, Inglewood, CA, USA | craiggaynier1565 | youtube.com/watch?v=pm-mWFCYZzw

2022 10 12 | Kia Forum, Inglewood, CA, USA | danszig77 | youtube.com/watch?v=ldIbzKhQkPk

2022 10 11 | Kia Forum, Inglewood, CA, USA | edmorris2191 | Video Made Private

2022 10 08 | Discovery Park, Sacramento, CA, USA | KobeA7 | youtube.com/watch?v=lTbVkbjqJKs

2022 10 07 | T-Mobile Arena, Las Vegas, NV, USA | Arguetil3am | youtube.com/watch?v=lmQzMFiFENk

2022 10 05 | Oakland Arena, Oakland, CA, USA | sorryimaiden | youtube.com/watch?v=oa4lUEn-B60

2022 10 03 | Tacoma Dome, Tacoma, WA, USA | BrandinoLee | youtube.com/watch?v=19UhkSGbQkI

2022 10 02 | Moda Center, Portland, OR, USA | Gravity.Prince | youtube.com/watch?v=La29nwYG3iQ

2022 09 30 | Ball Arena, Denver, CO, USA | feedbackmusicbar | youtube.com/watch?v=xXk9kfAuj0A

2022 09 28 | American Airlines Center, Dallas, TX, USA | osceola13 | youtube.com/watch?v=dfC-in1S9Z0

2022 09 27 | Toyota Center, Houston, TX, USA | ericrainey7143 | youtube.com/watch?v=giVqgehNAZk

2022 09 24 | FLA Live Arena, Sunrise, FL, USA | marcg.3333 | youtube.com/watch?v=HjUYgchyTO4

2022 09 23 | The Woodlands of Dover International Speedway, Dover, DE, USA | aleneb5712 | youtube.com/watch?v=z6NGn_L3uis

2022 09 21 | Prudential Center, Newark, NJ, USA | odetoanathema | youtube.com/watch?v=xr_V-hRH3Gs

2022 09 20 | Prudential Center, Newark, NJ, USA | jimpowers10411 | youtube.com/watch?v=Me2Zzrm1E4k

2022 09 18 | Ameris Bank Amphitheatre, Alpharetta, GA, USA | siberwolf | youtube.com/watch?v=A2hC7TZPplc

2022 09 16 | Douglass Park, Chicago, IL, USA | cynthiachang465 | youtube.com/watch?v=lienHKv6JFs

2022 09 15 | Xcel Energy Center, St. Paul, MN, USA | Kittycat12353 | youtube.com/watch?v=4WQ5zCETOs8

2022 09 13 | Little Caesars Arena, Detroit, MI, USA | i.i.i.1 | youtube.com/watch?v=EWeF7jkZAdE

2022 09 11 | Barclays Center, Brooklyn, NY, USA | tomsarchive3623 | youtube.com/watch?v=F1ARCm_tzzY

2022 09 10 | Barclays Center, Brooklyn, NY, USA | maes6050 | youtube.com/watch?v=5UvEJxDMXW0

2022 09 08 | TD Garden, Boston, MA, USA | Lilazzini | youtube.com/watch?v=bkJfbcaoNIU

2022 09 07 | TD Garden, Boston, MA, USA | wesleyjillson4810 | youtube.com/watch?v=6a0xlGlzAWU

2022 09 05 | Scotiabank Arena, Toronto, ON, Canada | Eddievanhello | youtube.com/watch?v=wSJPOrNWv8I

2022 09 04 | Scotiabank Arena, Toronto, ON, Canada | AruWindRabbit | youtube.com/watch?v=xUjfaf0da2U

2022 09 02 | Centre Bell, Montreal, QC, Canada | Nataly080186 | youtube.com/watch?v=cX9K9yTVwuY

2022 09 01 | Mohegan Sun Arena, Uncasville, CT, USA | kylestraveljournal | youtube.com/watch?v=UJ7F1Ps5RzE

2022 08 30 | MVP Arena, Albany, NY, USA | deterioration | youtube.com/watch?v=sYESfqGtbMo

2022 08 29 | Wells Fargo Center, Philadelphia, PA, USA | deadhoarse | youtube.com/watch?v=cEu8nRD2-H4

2022 08 27 | UBS Arena, Elmont, NY, USA | anonymousconcertwatcher7879 | youtube.com/watch?v=M8tbKjJQtPE

2022 08 26 | PNC Arena, Raleigh, NC, USA | divineproxie7736 | youtube.com/watch?v=CAqDdKQC5CE

2022 08 24 | Heritage Bank Center, Cincinnati, OH, USA | DatBlizz | youtube.com/watch?v=Y6CpUbyLeRk

2022 08 23 | Bridgestone Arena, Nashville, TN, USA | MoshPitChronicles | youtube.com/watch?v=Nks-iLsYPYk

2022 08 21 | AT&T Center, San Antonio, TX, USA | dragontype191 | youtube.com/watch?v=OVAEdXT3FqM

2022 08 20 | Paycom Center, Oklahoma City, OK, USA | xXspiraloutXx | youtube.com/watch?v=LIUrd6hYNxs

2022 06 18 | Kunstrasen Bonn, Bonn, Germany | edmorris2191 | Video Made Private

2022 06 17 | Kunstrasen Bonn, Bonn, Germany | starstrucklilly9024 | youtube.com/watch?v=rnu1LOWYGbY

2022 06 14 | Stora Scenen, Gröna Lund, Stockholm, Sweden | JulianneSands | youtube.com/watch?v=x2pXYuTMi5s

2022 06 12 | Velodrom, Berlin, Germany | cybeshi | youtube.com/watch?v=PA1DtnMdy5g

2022 06 11 | O2 arena, Prague, Czechia | matovkanal5361 | youtube.com/watch?v=yGh889k4Pj0

2022 06 09 | Letnia Scena Progresji, Warsaw, Poland | wiktoria.j | youtube.com/watch?v=OpdxyuvKFFU

2022 06 07 | Budapest Park, Budapest, Hungary | FMA4EVERX3 | youtube.com/watch?v=I2xoDB6Z3b8

2022 06 06 | Olympiahalle, Munich, Germany | gabrielaw.8449 | youtube.com/watch?v=thhZGzpYk4U

2022 06 04 | Arena Parco Nord, Bologna, Italy | EndlessNightMCR | youtube.com/watch?v=bAmJQL2RY3k

2022 06 02 | Ahoy, Rotterdam, Netherlands | Prinren | youtube.com/watch?v=ue_cUm1oYjQ

2022 06 01 | Accor Arena, Paris, France | parisandallthatjazz | youtube.com/watch?v=aoNzsPOe7Lc

2022 05 30 | The OVO Hydro, Glasgow, Scotland | DrFluffyNips | youtube.com/watch?v=0zqCiEMg0uA

2022 05 28 | Sophia Gardens Cricket Ground, Cardiff, Wales | visiblexperia6693 | youtube.com/watch?v=o5z_iYjLu1M

2022 05 27 | Victoria Park, Warrington, England | darrenquin317 | youtube.com/watch?v=Mxso0GJyjSE

2022 05 25 | Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin, Ireland | SelfishxRomance | youtube.com/watch?v=ucoez2VlGVo

2022 05 24 | Royal Hospital Kilmainham, Dublin, Ireland | calumharkness3932 | youtube.com/watch?v=SMLoZotO-S8

2022 05 22 | Stadium MK, Milton Keynes, England | MrDunky123456 | youtube.com/watch?v=DEOicrAKyuk

2022 05 21 | Stadium MK, Milton Keynes, England | ErynnHalvorson | youtube.com/watch?v=xWYsVgDNMMw

2022 05 19 | Stadium MK, Milton Keynes, England | owenpower03 | youtube.com/watch?v=L-notPaM_ow

2022 05 17 | The Eden Project, St Austell, England | keeleyduckworth500 | youtube.com/watch?v=lz5mywxeyoI

2022 05 16 | The Eden Project, St Austell, England | jannersontour8696 | youtube.com/watch?v=q9-GcMktJuA

[covid-safer-hotties]

“You may now become who you thought was disposable”: COVID-19 Politics and Ableism - Published July 4, 2024

Unpaywalled link available in the link to our archive! A taste below!

“You may now become who you thought was disposable”: COVID-19 Politics and Ableism Andrea Kitta Journal of American Folklore, Volume 137, Number 545, Summer 2024, pp. 321-330 (Article) Published by American Folklore Society For additional information about this article muse.jhu.edu/article/931461[37.228.238.33] Project MUSE (2024-07-09 12:59 GMT) American Folklore Society

This essay critically examines the intersection of COVID-19, Long COVID, ableism, and health care disparities in the United States, emphasizing the transformative impact of COVID-19 as a mass disabling event with a disproportionate impact on marginalized communities. I also bring an autoethnographic lens to my experi- ence of COVID-19 and Long COVID, underscoring the importance of recognizing the diverse and often untellable experiences of individuals with disabilities and challenging the prevailing ableist perspectives embedded in society. I raise ethical considerations of storytelling in the context of Long COVID and urge researchers to embrace empathy and a more inclusive approach that challenges traditional notions of objectivity and distancing within academic research. I call for a collaborative approach between disability studies and folklore studies, encouraging scholars to interrogate and explore the traditions shaped by experiences of disability.

On December 13, 2020, disability advocate Imani Barbarin created a TikTok where she stated in the caption: “COVID is a mass disabling event. Things will never be the same. Never. You may now become who you thought was disposable” (Barbarin 2020). Barbarin was not overstating what is happening in the United States. In addition to the overwhelming number of US-based COVID-19 deaths (1.07 million as of November 1, 2022, according to the New York Times COVID-19 Tracker [New York Times 2023]), there is also an alarming number of cases of post-acute sequelae SARS-CoV-2 infection (PASC) or, as it’s more commonly known, Long COVID. Long COVID happens in anywhere from 5 percent to 50 percent of COVID-19 infections (although most medical experts agree the rate of Long COVID is somewhere around 20–30 percent of all infections). Long COVID affects women at a 22 percent higher rate than men (Sylvester et al. 2022:1391), and one study of Long COVID listed over 200 symptoms (Davis et al. 2021). The most common symptoms are fatigue, shortness of breath, cough, chest pain, brain fog, sleep disturbances, depression, joint pain, and dysautonomia (a dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system that typically presents as the inability to control temperature, breathing issues, and other things the body normally controls automatically).

Current estimates of those affected by Long COVID in the United States are between twenty and forty million. COVID-19 has also been shown to reactivate other viruses (Gold et al. 2021; Chen et al. 2022; Su et al. 2022), and one current theory is that Long COVID is the result of the COVID-19 virus continually being reactivated in the body (Klein et al. 2022). The latest research out of Yale University shows that COVID-19 cases entail cellular changes to the B and T cells, lower levels of cortisol, and that the virus can reactivate other viruses (Su et al. 2022:891–2). A recent study with more than 154,068 participants showed that “in the post-acute phase of COVID-19, there was increased risk of an array of incident neurologic sequelae including ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke, cognition and memory disorders, peripheral nervous system disorders, episodic disorders (for example, migraine and seizures), extrapyramidal and movement disorders, men tal health disorders, musculoskeletal disorders, sensory disorders, Guillain–Barré syndrome, and encephalitis or encephalopathy” (Xu, Xie, and Al-Aly 2022:2406).

Both COVID-19 and Long COVID exposed inequities in the US health care system, with Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) populations dying from COVID-19 at much higher rates than White people at the beginning of the pandemic. Compared to White people, Alaskan Indian or Alaskan Natives died at 2.1 times the rate, Black people at 1.7 times the rate, Hispanic or Latinx people at 1.8 the rate, and Asian Americans at 0.8 times the rate (CDC 2023). According to the Washington Post’s analysis of CDC’s statistics, the rate of White people dying from COVID-19 became equal to the rate of other groups beginning in October 2021, then (except for the Omicron wave) increased, primarily due to White people being unvaccinated. Strangely enough, the equalizing trend wasn’t because death rates dropped for BIPOC people, but rather was due to the rise of the White death rate. Tasleem Padamsee, Assistant Professor at The Ohio State University who researched vaccine use and who is a member of the Ohio Department of Health’s work group on health equity, stated: “Usually, when we say a health disparity is disappearing, what we mean is that . . . the worse-off group is getting better. . . . We don’t usually mean that the group that had a systematic advantage got worse” (quoted in Johnson and Keating 2022).

Additionally, at the time of this writing in Spring 2023, the pandemic has been declared as “over” despite the fact that around 400 people are still dying per day in the United States and that those dying tend to be people with disabilities and the elderly (New York Times 2023). It’s difficult to imagine a situation where 400 deaths a day are deemed acceptable, yet here we are. Many people are desperate to “get back to normal” and seem to care more about going maskless or dining indoors than they do about those who are dying of COVID-19. Those who are unvaccinated and unmasked also seem to not understand (or not care) that the longer they continue on that path, the longer the pandemic will take to dissipate. Simply put, the majority of people do not seem to care about people with disabilities, including those who are immunocompromised, and their increased health risks due to the pandemic.

People with disabilities are an unrecognized health disparity population, and they died at much higher rates during COVID-19 (Krahn, Walker, and Correa-de-Araujo 2015). The National Council on Disability found that 181,000 people with disabilities in long-term care facilities died from COVID-19 in the first year of the pandemic, making up one-third of COVID-19 deaths at that time (National Council of Disabilities 2021). The report is worth quoting at length.

In addition to disproportionate fatalities, key findings of the report include:

People with disabilities faced a high risk of being triaged out of COVID-19 treatment when hospital beds, supplies, and personnel were scarce; were denied the use of their personal ventilator devices after admission to a hospital; and at times, were denied the assistance of critical support persons during hospital stays. Informal and formal Crisis Standards of Care (CSC), pronouncements that guided the provision of scarce health care resources in surge situations, targeted people with certain disabilities for denial of care (National Council of Disabilities 2021).

Students with disabilities were denied necessary educational services and supports during the pandemic and have experienced disruption and regression in their behavioral and educational goals (National Council of Disabilities 2021).

The growing shortage of direct care workers in existence prior to the pandemic became worse during the pandemic. Many such workers, who are women of color earning less than a living wage and lacking health benefits, left their positions for fear of contracting and spreading the virus, leaving people with disabilities and their caregivers without aid and some at risk of losing their independence or being institutionalized (National Council of Disabilities 2021).

Deaf, Hard of Hearing, Deaf-Blind, and Blind persons faced a profound communication gulf as masks became commonplace, making lip-reading impossible and sign language harder (National Council of Disabilities 2021).

[mimicha-arts]

Date: 09/13/2023 In my previous post, I wrote that time in s2 is broken and dead. I was curious if this was true for s1, too… For me the main problem of the last month was the dates in the files (character intros), the date of Emma's death + September 9th mentioned in episode 3, so I tried to consider these as related things. I always was confused by April-September thing, I thought that it is a mistake, but. Probably not. So. Let's break down the first episode! It was a deep dive, I'm not sure how real any of this can be, but (c) Let's divide everything into three parts:

Сhronology

It's not about Quede

April is not April

WARNING: SPOILERS

Chronology

April 16, which we see hours later that day. Qiao Ling receives an order from an unknown customer.

The goal is to get financial core data of Quede company. Information has to be obtained by diving in Emma, during the last financial settlement meeting before the release of the financial report, 2 days ago, on the April 14th, photo was posted at 10 pm.

Additionally, it is mentioned that there was an earlier photo, but they start with the most recent one so that the information is not “outdated”.

Events take place from April 16th to 17th in the present for Lu Guang. From April 14th to 15th in the past for Emma and Cheng Xiaoshi.

April 14th: 10:00 pm - start of diving. As Emma, Cheng Xiaoshi lived through the events in the company's office and stayed for overwork.

April 15th: About 2:45 a.m. Emma's parents text to her, Cheng Xiaoshi decided to reply.

9-10 am, morning, the meeting began. A conflict situation occurs, the laptop falls, Emma!Xiaoshi is on the floor. Lu Guang records data from the screen - Cheng Xiaoshi returns to the present time.

Later this day. Somewhere later that day, information about the company is leaked, involved people are arrested (news from April 17th)

Before 10 pm: Emma comes home after this day, she realizes that the situation with Quede is a stain on her career, because she was Mr.Zhu's assistant, there is no way for her to find a job in this field anymore.

Lately she discovers messages (02:48, that Cheng Xiaoshi texted) with her parents - this becomes her motivation for a call. It's the same day, still today (今天）- April 15th. This is the reason why we know that the disclosure of the company's affairs occurred on the same day after the meeting.

After 10 pm, before 10:30 pm Emma goes to the train station but runs into Liu Min, agrees to go with him.

About 10:34 p.m Liu Min attacks Emma.

Somewhere between April 15th and 16th. An accident occurs, Liu Min will be left paralyzed.

April 16: At the moment of dawn, Emma jumps from the bridge.

Later this day, Quede Company was suspended (news from the 17th)

Later, Emma's body is found in the river in the evening (mentioned as "yesterday", news from the 17th)

April 17: present 9-10 am: Lu Guang gives instructions to Xiaoshi, they successfully obtain the information, Xiaoshi returns to the “present” time.” Evening, the same day: We receive information about the disclosure of financial fraud in the past tense until the 17th from the news at the end of the ep. Additional note: in these events, there is another Cheng Xiaoshi from the "future" (events of October 22-23), who hides first in Liu Min's trunk, and then on the bridge with Emma. The chronology of events can be written as follows:

So it's clear - Lu Guang himself receives the necessary information about the company on the 17th at 10 am. By that time, Mr. Zhu had already been arrested 2 days ago and the company's activities had been suspended 1 day ago. Precisely because of financial fraud.

Also his reaction to Emma's death is interesting. Okay, that's a guess, but I always had the feeling that he knew she was dead from the very beginning of the case.

2. It's not about Quede

And so, we know that data about the company and financial fraud were already published on the 15th. The question remains simple - why did the mysterious unnamed client need the data, since he would have received it only on the 17th, after information about the fraud in Quede was already made public before they (the client) offered this task/job. So what other events are happening on nearby dates? They're not in the episode, they're in the characters intro. Obviously, the unknown client was unknown for a reason. As we also know, there is a character (or characters, there are 2 signatures on the documents) who are collecting dossiers on the main trio. There is a high chance that all of this is connected. This event takes place from the 14th to the 17th in total. Date on Qiao Ling's file: april 8th Lu Guang's file: april 10th Cheng Xiaoshi's file: april 12th

Documents for Lu Guang should be destroyed on the 17th, for Xiaoshi - on the 19th. This timing is kinda perfect. In my opinion, this task/job came as part of an "investigation" so that the unknown could better study the process of trio's work, understand the abilities of Cheng Xiaoshi and Lu Guang, probably, what their time limits are. So, yes. If we look at it from this side, this is not about Quede, it is not about financial fraud, it has never been about it. This research is to answer questions about the abilities of Cheng Xiaoshi and Lu Guang that remained on the files.

3. April is not April

April is a lie. Events take place in September. Although it’s more likely that the time has already been broken since the first season, and we technically don’t know which one is correct. Although Lu Guang's watch and documents (character dossiers) point to April, real events cannot possibly take place in April for many reasons.

1. 3rd financial quarter This is the main reason. This is stated in the first episode by Qiao Ling, and should immediately raise questions. The third quarter cannot possibly be April, absolutely. Because the following months are considered the third quarter: July, August, September.

2. News, 3rd ep Qiao Ling listens to the news on her headphones. We are not given a name, but the circumstances are the same - we learn that Emma's "suicide" was most likely a murder. Once again, it's September.

3. Cold weather is coming Emma's parents arrive to bring Emma warm clothes and mention that it is getting colder. If it were April, on the contrary, it would only get hotter, but everything is different when it comes to autumn.

4. Murders I am firmly convinced that the numbering of victims does not correspond to the real chronology. Yes, we know that there were more victims, and Emma was never "first", I mean those cases that were consolidated by the police and are in Xiao Li's documents. We have dates for an early murder in April, Emma being somewhere in the middle of that "break", since she was killed in both “April” and “September”, and there were murders after her, where the month was not indicated. Which once again points to the fact that something is wrong with these two months. Now things are going to get confusing, we consider April like September here. I can't see and understand details, so I'm only able to find the dates, since the numbers can at least be distinguished. Emma is considered the first murder only by number (died "April-September" 16th), but number 4 (Zao Cai, a blond man) died before her, "April-September", 2nd. In the folder, her documents go after his case. I think the fact is that initially the police believed that Emma committed suicide; at first, her case was not classified as a part of a series of murders, so police did not assign a chronological fifth number, but later, with new clues, simply moved her old documents in the "correct" chronological order to fifth place.

This technically makes Emma a 5 case… Or even a 6th. Because case 6 (Nan You) is also not without mysteries. The date of death is 14. I'm not sure why they put her file after Emma. Maybe they're unsure of the date or something and it's just an estimated date? So her date of death also “fell out of space.” But if 14 is correct, then this girl died 2 days earlier than Emma herself, and Emma technically becomes case 6.

The eighth case (Zhao Lin) occurs on 25th. The mystical 7 case is somewhere before that date, but we don't know how much of this is actual April or September.

In addition to mysterious 7th case, we also have 3 other earlier victims. They had to die before "April-September" 2nd, so the time of their death is roughly "March-August". We haven't seen their documents, but we know about their cases because of the photographs (the girl in the pink suit is probably the girl with the dog from ep11, since the BG is the same)

And also Xu Shanshan.

Who technically didn't die due to the time loop, but most likely "died" (since Lu Guang was thrown out) in the original events, which was still visible for Lu Guang in the unaltered photo.

I mentioned this in the post about s2 - the interesting thing is that Xu Shanshan's phone, as shown in s2, does not have a single photo from May to the end of October (current events with unknown date), which is quite. Strange.

All the murders had to happen with the similar style and certain time frame that they could be connected as a series. Given the news about Xu Shanshan: it was written - no new murders had occurred for several weeks (数周未出现新的受害者), which fits the September-October period (s1 ends at October 23). So we know for sure that the last cases with unspecified months should have occurred in September.

So. Obtaining financial information as a goal does not make sense, "someone" studies our main characters at the "perfect time", and all the dates are intertwined and have inaccurate implications. Like, almost half a year was literally “stolen” from time? Or something similar. The dates are so deliberately strange that I am speculating solely that time was broken from this point already, not even in s2 - what happened can only be speculated for now until we are told the background of Lu Guang's story. And who is the real 7th victim if April and September are mixed up, and the time has been “changed”. The funny thing is that everything also connected to the birthdays: April 15th - Cheng Xiaoshi's birthday September 16th - Qian Jin's birthday October 23th - the day Lu Guang was stabbed, exactly before his birthday Maybe I understand something incorrectly and I'm going down the wrong path altogether. No conclusions. My CPU is blown up. Thank you @wrathyforest for discussing this with me, trying to find connections, completing everything with time points, you are the best!

[foodsies4me]

Ao3 wrapped [writers edition - 2024]

Tagged by @demy85, thank you! 💜💜💜

All the mentioned fics and statistics are for Shadowhunters and more specifically Malec. I've also placed this under a read more because with my rambling this post got rather long.

01. How many words have you written this year?

190.269 (Published)

383,264 (Total)

02. How many works did you publish this year?

I published 13 new works and finished 1 I started in 2023!

03. What work are you most proud of (regardless of kudos/hits)?

That would either be Learning to Know - Knowing to Learn or Remember today you are loved.

04. What work of yours has the most hits?

Overall the work with the most hits is All Was Golden (clearly I peaked with my first fic lol).

If we look at fics I wrote and finished in 2024 then it would be Learning to Know - Knowing to Learn.

05.  What work of yours got more feedback than you expected?

Midnight scales and sunlit smiles - A short one-shot I made for @fuzdog for Fandom Trumps Hate 2024. I didn't expect that story to get as much love as it did.💜

06. Favourite title you used?

We made universes out of bitten lips and Remember today you are loved

Each time I can use a The Amazing Devil lyric as a title is a win in my book.

07. If you use song lyrics, which artist’s songs did you pull from the most?

The Amazing Devil. I mostly keep it to song titles, but I do also write a lot while listening to their music.

08. Pairing you wrote the most for this year?

Malec (not that I really wrote anything other than Malec)

09. Favourite pairing you wrote for this year?

Unsurprisingly the answer to that question is also Malec.

10. What work was the quickest to write?

A Sunday Afternoon

As the title suggests I wrote it in one afternoon. It was a Wednesday and not a Sunday though.

11. What work took you the longest to write?

Bridges Over Lakes Of Salt closely followed by Apollo: Blood Wars neither of which I've managed to finish to date. I hope to finish at least one of the two in 2025, but we'll see.

12. How many WIP’s do you have in your docs for next year?

Too many to count, please send help.

13. What’s your longest work of the year?

Updated/worked on: Bridges over Lakes Of Salt with 79,234 words.

Written and Finished in 2024: Learning to Know - Knowing to Learn yet again with 14,013 words.

14. What’s your shortest work of the year?

Yet Another Sapphire - 1445 words which is unusually short for me.

15. What WIP are you taking into next year with you?

I'm taking three WIPs into 2025: Bridges Over Lakes of Salt, Apollo: Blood Wars and Remember today you are loved.

16. What’s your most common “Additional Tags” tag?

Probably Alec Lightwood is Good With Kids because I can't stop throwing kids at him for him to babysit.

17. Your favourite character to write this year?

Magnus Bane and Alec Lightwood, although I also had a lot of fun writing from Catarina's POV!

18. The character that gave you the most trouble writing this year?

Ragnor Fell, I feel like I just can't get his voice quite right.

19. What’s one pairing you want to explore next year?

Romantic pairing - not really any new pairings I want to explore

Friendship pairing - there are a couple of Raphael and Alec as friends fic I would love to start working on. The snark and salt is just too funny.

20. Which work of yours have you reread the most?

Overall it has to be a tie between Of Truths And Lies (even though I should probably edit it because it was one of the first fics I wrote and it shows) and Of Mistakes and Regrets (which suffers a similar fate).

If I pick a work from 2024 then it has to be Crow's no good very bad day

21. How many kudos in total did you get this year?

I have no idea. I checked on AO3 but it only counts the number of kudos on the works that were last updated in 2024, not the kudos received so I don't know.

22. Which work has the most comments?

Works solely written in 2024: Learning to Know - Knowing to Learn yet again.

Overall: All Was Golden

23. Did you do any collaborative work this year?

Nothing that has been published yet, but I started writing something with a co-author that we plan to publish in 2025. (If everything goes well that is)

24. Did you write any gifts this year?

So Many! Partially because I had several people who prompted a bunny and I gifted the story to them when it became an actual fic. However, if we're only counting gift exchanges and so on, then I have four.

Twelve little kids went out to play - I wrote for Fandom Trumps Hate 2024 as a gift for @fuzdog. This was and remains my scariest fic to write to date, solely because the trainees are the "main characters' and I was really worried I would annoy people because of that.

Midnight scales and sunlit smiles - A fic I also wrote for Fandom Trumps Hate 2024 and that was also a gift for @fuzdog. This fic was fun to write because of how adorable tiny!dragon Alec is.

A Sunday Afternoon - My last of three Fandom Trumps Hate 2024 fics. This one was written for someone SandyWormbook and was surprisingly tricky to write for how short it is.

Through veils of mist and crashing seas - Yes this isn't the full title but the full title is ridiculous. Anyway, this fic was made for a Secret Santa-ish Gift Exchange called Gifting Gremlins and it was very fun even if I went slightly overboard with the metaphors in that one.

25. Did you receive any gifts this year?

I diiiiiid! Not as a gift exchange because for the Secret Santa I participated in I got an Alec-themed playlist (which was so goooood). But I got several gifts all of which were lovely and deserve some love so:

Bridges Moodboard from @kalalab.

Several gift fics by the ever-talented @to-the-stars-writing

A gift fic that was NOT FLUFFY despite me trying to pick the fluffy option for a Tumblr word prompt game by @fiyaerrigan

I also got some lovely mood boards and pieces of fanart by people who know who they are, but given these were given in DM I won't be sharing those unless/until the concerned people feel comfortable enough doing so themselves.💜

26. What’s your most common category?

M/M

27. What do you listen to while writing?

Depends on what I want to write - angsty songs for angsty fics, happy songs for happy fics, and complete ridiculous chaos whenever the trainees are involved.

28. Favourite work you wrote this year?

I don't think I have a favourite, I like all of them. Most fun to write has to be Crow's no good very bad day just because of how ridiculous and unhinged his POV is.

29. Favourite line/passage you wrote this year?

"Are you from Mags' glitter?" Crow blinks. "What?" "Are you from Mags' glitter," the kid repeats, acting as if saying it a second time would make the words make any more sense. "What the fuck's a Mags?"

What can I say Crow's POV is delightfully unhinged.

30. Biggest surprise while writing this year?

How much fun Catarina's POV is! I liked her on the show, but with how little we saw of her I wasn't certain I'd be able to ever write anything in her POV and yet it's so fun and easy.💜

I have no idea who already participated and who didn't, but anyone who sees this from me and wishes to participate is welcome to! 💜💜💜

[wrath-beyond-reckoning]

Fan Fiction Rec / Tracking

Chance Encounters (are what keep us going) by Viokaea

Dream SMP - Technoblade-Centric - Space Fic

Summary:

Techno slammed his fists against the transparent wall of his prison, trying his best to break it down. His captors backed up, whistling anxiously to each other. He gave the barrier another loud crack, delightedly watching as they scrambled away in abject terror. Nodding in satisfaction, he turned around to meet the eyes of two other prisoners that had been thrown into his cell. He froze. Right. There were now aliens in his cell. And he probably just scared the hell out of them.   Or: Humans are a dangerous race feared by all on an intergalactic scale. Techno, a human ex-soldier that was abducted by aliens 18 months ago, is biding his time in captivity. This changes when two young aliens are sent into his cell to die.

Published: 2023-06-01 Completed:2023-08-01 Words: 70,785 Chapters: 13/13

Read: 2023-09-23

Notes: Really enjoyed this one lots of effort and lots of fun! The action scenes are enticing and well paced loved the descriptors used in this one

[justawanderer]

Ao3 wrapped [writers edition - 2024]

Tagged by @foodsies4me , thank you!😊

01. How many words have you written this year?

Published in 2024: 100,221

I didn’t even realize how many words until right now! Wow!

02. How many works did you publish this year?

I published 9 completed works in 2024 and added 10 chapters to my WIP started in 2023.

03. What work are you most proud of (regardless of kudos/hits)?

Contingencies my baby, part 1 of my MO for Malec.

But in terms of whole works for 2024:

Why don’t we go Somewhere only we know this was a beast in its own right.

Is was created for a bang and i appreciated the collab. Also there is a ton of world building.

04. What work of yours has the most hits?

Contingencies overall

For 2024 completed works:

Party Ready

05.  What work of yours got more feedback than you expected?

A Visitor and Effort

They are season 3A reaction fixit fics and were written to appease my own wants from the show. I love both of them. I just didn’t realize others would as well.

06. Favourite title you used?

The Mage’s Keep: A Magical Sanctuary for those Burnt Out on Life

I love when stories have disproportionately long names, especially since this was a crack fic written in response to a post by Harry shum jr on ig.

07. If you use song lyrics, which artist’s songs did you pull from the most?

My collab partner and I decided on Keane’s some where only we know for our Bang fic. So by stats that’s the group and song used most.

08. Pairing you wrote the most for this year?

Malec 🥰

09. Favourite pairing you wrote for this year?

Malec!

Honorable mention to Jace/Simon which I wrote a gift fic for for Xmas. It was fun to step outside my Malec comfort zone.

10. What work was the quickest to write?

Party Ready

Is the first smut I’ve ever written. Whole thing was written and published in 45 minutes driving home from my birthday weekend. (Which is why it’s unedited.)

11. What work took you the longest to write?

Why don’t we go Somewhere only we know

I had 10k words written, realized it was 100% backstory and unnecessary so i scrapped it and then it was like pulling teeth to get the rest of it together.

12. How many WIP’s do you have in your docs for next year?

3+ finish contingencies write and complete one of the two companions and start the other. Also I just assume there will be more smaller fics, most likely more 3A argument fix it’s, because I can’t help myself.

13. What’s your longest work of the year?

I added more to Contingencies than everything else combined, but Somewhere only we know is longest completed work.

14. What’s your shortest work of the year?

Becoming Magnus Bane at 1,210 words. It’s more of the concept of a fic than a fic.

15. What WIP are you taking into next year with you?

Contingencies!

16. What’s your most common “Additional Tags” tag?

AU-Canon Divergence

In this house, we fix the continuity errors of the show and make it more Malec.

17. Your favourite character to write this year?

I love both Magnus and Alec, but I identify with Alec so much and his voice is so easy.

I also really enjoyed writing Simon this year.

18. The character that gave you the most trouble writing this year?

Jace- I just can’t get the hang of it. Which is bad because he has two big chapters coming

Izzy-there’s a reason I’ve never added her pov. I can’t get her voice right.

19. What’s one pairing you want to explore next year?

Malec! With maybe Simon/Jace added in!

20. Which work of yours have you reread the most?

Contingencies-i am writing this for myself. It’s the fic I’ve wanted to read since I got into the fandom so I reread it for enjoyment and also to keep up on plot threads I started.

21. How many kudos in total did you get this year?

I don’t keep track. I write for myself. It’s always lovely to see that people like my work. Also amusing to get notifications on random fics months after writing.

22. Which work has the most comments?

For 2024:

I would be the best boyfriend. Which is delightful because this was such an angst fest.

23. Did you do any collaborative work this year?

Yes.

Somewhere only you know was in collaboration with Better_than_Chocolate.

It’s a quest fic with enemies to lovers Malec that takes place in the UnSeelie realm.

24. Did you write any gifts this year?

I wrote 2!

Best laid Christmas plans for Cor321

This one is Jace/Simon Xmas fic

And I Dare You Pretty Boy for @just-add-butter

This one is instant marriage ooey-gooey Malec love

24. Did you write any gifts this year?

I did! I got

Santa Tell Me from @demy85

26. What’s your most common category?

M/M

27. What do you listen to while writing?

I am not the type to listen while actively writing, but while brainstorming in the car I usually have pop-punk on and flesh out fic ideas.

Muse, Marianas Trench, and the Punk goes Pop albums mostly

28. Favourite work you wrote this year?

I dare you pretty boy, which is my most favorite trope.

Effort because it’s the essence of what I think Malec is and will be.

29. Favourite line/passage you wrote this year?

I have a couple, but the singular line I’ve gotten the most feedback on is

“Magnus has just finished cleaning the kitchen, or well, the two burner stove, accompanying tiny oven and equally child-sized refrigerator and single square foot of counter space, when the door opens and God walks in. “ from I dare you pretty boy

30. Biggest surprise while writing this year?

How easy it was to maintain consistency while writing and updating. The more you do it!

I have seen so many of these. I believe im the last person. But if you see this and want to play, then feel free!

[philologicalbat]

ao3 wrapped [writers edition]

thank for tagging me @exitvelocities! I'm sort of afraid to find out how much I posted this year. If you're mentioned in this, consider yourself tagged if you want to be.

01. How many words have you written this year?

checking ao3 stats, it's 98,298 words (wtf). some of that was written in the tail end of 2023 and some of it was old wips, buuuut there's probably enough unposted in my wip folder to make up for it.

02. How many works did you publish this year?

19! I know that without checking because I'm desperately hoping to write a 20th just to hit 20. It was...a prolific year. That's an all-time high for me, I think.

03. What work are you most proud of (regardless of kudos/hits)?

This is so hard because there are so many fics I would absolutely go to bat for this year. Not only was this a productive year, but I really, really loved writing so many of these fics. I'm actually going to give it to Attic Wife Guy because that's the fic that got me writing again after 4+ months of not writing at the end of 2023. It's the first sequel I've written in years. I don't actually know that it works tonally as a sequel, but it meant a lot to me to get it posted at the time.

04. What work of yours has the most hits?

Hilariously, it's My Strange and Sad Desire's Keen with 3,221 hits. I wrote that sitting on my balcony in a daze after watching the first 4 episodes of Meet You at the Blossom. When I posted it, there wasn't even a canonical fandom tag.

05. What work of yours got more feedback than you expected?

Domestic Cats, the only Word of Honor fic I posted this year. It's catboy fic in the jianghu. I underestimated how much the people wanted to read about barbed catboy dick, clearly.

06. Favorite title you used?

I don't knoooow. I feel like I did a great job with various bonkers titles this year, which is always my goal. My favorite is probably how good is that pussy, babygirl? because I think it's hilarious and thematically appropriate for that fic, but "Attic Wife Guy" is a close second.

07. If you use song lyrics, which artist’s songs did you pull from the most?

I almost never use song lyrics because I don't hear them. I've started using poetry this year, which has been passingly weird.

08. Pairing you wrote the most for this year?

huaibao! They're the only pairing that got five fics because I'm more of a multishipper in my other fandoms.

09. Favorite pairing you wrote for this year?

Fanghua. I can't be normal about them. I don't want to be normal about them. I want to make them your problem.

10. What work was the quickest to write?

I wrote "rose colored glasses" for the bit in...probably less than 2 hours? At considerably more length, I wrote "My Strange and Sad Desire's Keen" and edited it in an afternoon.

11. What work took you the longest to write?

I posted 3 different fics that I started in 2021 and 2022, actually. I had to check this, but the winner among those is Mother, May I?, which I started in March 2021.

12. How many WIP’s do you have in your docs for next year?

I think I have 4 wips that I might realistically finish in 2025:

the last part of "The Slippery Nature of Truth"

The Things We Can and Cannot Say

one last married huaibao fic for myatb

this really weird difanghua fic that I'm not going to own up to in public until it's drafted

13. What’s your longest work of the year?

If we count posted, it's "Attic Wife Guy" at 12k. If we're including what's drafted, it's The Things We Can and Cannot Say, which is somewhere over 20k. I'm sitting on a finished 3rd chapter, a partially drafted 4th, and then...a bunch of other scraps for the remaining 20-odd chapters.

14. What’s your shortest work of the year?

"rose colored glasses"! It's 500 words because almost all the fics in wick's series are in round 100-word increments and I wanted it to fit the bit.

15. What WIP are you taking into next year with you?

The only one that's posted is "The Things We Can and Cannot Say" and that's the only one I feel like I can guarantee I'll keep working on. I love writing that fic, even when I'm making myself crazy about it. The whole experience is very sickos dot png.

16.What’s your most common “Additional Tags” tag?

It's a tie between "First Time" and "Alternate Universe - Modern Setting" at four separate uses each. Long time Bats watchers will be relieved to know that I tagged 3 fics with "Rimming" this year.

17. Your favorite character to write this year?

A tie between Li Lianhua and Jing Beiyuan. I love a chatty liar.

18. The character that gave you the most trouble writing this year?

Di Feisheng. As a POV character, I really struggled with him. He doesn't work terribly well with my natural writing style.

19. What’s one pairing you want to explore next year?

Difanghua. It's the pairing I should want to write most for mlc, so I'm going to try to honor that energy and make it work. We'll see.

20. Which work of yours have you reread the most?

I'm not counting re-reading while I'm drafting because that gives a huge boost to fics I got stuck on, so I'm giving this to go down sweetly, my lovingly unhinged dihua fic. (Have you ever wanted to read a fic about Li Lianhua fingering Di Feisheng's wound and then roleplaying Li Xiangyi while domming him? No? Well, look, I did.)

21. How many kudos in total did you get this year?

AO3 stats says 2,088, which I assume is just for works posted this year.

22. Which work has the most comments?

I'm going by comment threads here since I reply to comments, but am not currently caught up on replies. Unsurprisingly, it's "The Things We Can and Cannot Say", which is chaptered, with a close second place tie from "My Strange and Sad Desire's Keen" and "how good is that pussy, babygirl?"

23. Did you do any collaborative works this year?

Yes! @saki-the-cup-bearer-blog and I posted a dihua collab. She did gorgeous art for my fic A Place Not Unlike Home, which she also betaed. I'm also working on a dihua fic with @exitvelocities about Di Feisheng and Li Lianhua's jianghu road trip adventures.

24. Did you write any gifts this year?

YEAH GIRL you know I did. This was a year for writing for other people, actually.

"Domestic Cats" for Shu

The Care and Keeping of Your Wife for @leavethepuddle

Mother, May I? for @thefearofcod

how good is that pussy, babygirl? for @guzhufuren

rose colored glasses for @thewickling

Tall Drink of Water for @bettercostume

25. Did you receive any gifts this year?

Saki drew a couple pieces inspired by my work (one linked as our collab, the other here).

26. What’s your most common category?

M/M for sure.

27. What do you listen to while writing?

The sound of silence. Sorry, I'm weird like that.

28. Favorite work you wrote this year?

"I don't like playing favorites," I say as I point directly at "The Things We Can and Cannot Say." Honestly, I love at least 75% of what I wrote this year. There are several fics I wrote that I loved that haven't made it into this round up, so I want to give an honorable mention here to Not Unlike Him in Form and Shape, the fic I couldn't wait to finish mlc to start writing. It's the pure distillation of the moment when I thought to myself, "Hooboy, I'm not gonna be normal about this show."

29. Favorite line/passage you wrote this year?

I was going to pick something lovely and thoughtful, but no, it has to go to this iconic quote from "how good is that pussy, babygirl?", which is both very funny and very in character:

“Are you a man?” Xiaobao asks, half shouting to be heard over the din. “No.” “Are you a woman?” “No.” Xiaobao frowns, brow furrowing. “Can I keep touching you?”

30. Biggest surprise while writing this year?

It was really strange to say goodbye to Qiye and the larger Zhou Zishu cinematic universe after spending more than 2 years with various parts of it. But also committing to posting a wip as I write has been exciting and terrifying in equal parts.

I'm tagging everyone who got @'ed above as well as @dytabytes and @orchisailsa for this one (no pressure ofc!) And if you want to do it, dear reader, consider yourself tagged.

[usafphantom2]

U.S. Navy declares IOC for its new UAS reconnaissance MQ-4C Triton

Fernando Valduga By Fernando Valduga 09/15/2023 - 14:00 in Military, UAV - UAV

The U.S. Navy officially declared the initial operational capability (IOC) of Northrop Grumman Corporation's MQ-4C Triton multi-manned unmanned aircraft on September 14.

Since its Early Operational Capability (EOC) milestone in May 2020, the MQ-4C Triton has operated within the U.S. Navy Pacific Fleet, conducting maritime intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions in the area of responsibility of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command as the Navy's only unmanned, high-altitude, long-lived aircraft.

The MQ-4C Triton, manufactured for use by the U.S. Navy and the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), supports a wide range of missions. These include maritime patrol, signal intelligence, search and rescue operations, as well as communications relay tasks.

According to the producer, these aircraft offer persistent surveillance capabilities, assisting in predicting opposing actions and facilitating more effective joint military efforts and enterprises.

Operating at altitudes above 50,000 feet and boasting a 24-hour resistance, the Triton serves as a continuous communications retransmission center, ensuring connectivity between dispersed Navy units, while allowing commanders to operate with a shared operational overview.

“The Triton proved to be invaluable for the maritime patrol and reconnaissance mission in the Indo-Pacific. Now that the system has reached its initial operational capacity, commanders will be able to take full advantage of Triton's powerful set of sensors to detect and stop potential opponents around the world," said Rho Cauley Bruner, director of the Triton program at Northrop Grumman.

"The persistent global maritime awareness is fundamental to deter, or compete and win, our opponents. Triton ensures that we are making informed decisions and operating effectively anywhere in the world," added Captain Josh Guerre, manager of the U.S. Navy's persistent unmanned aircraft systems program.

Northrop Grumman provided the U.S. Navy with a total of five Triton aircraft equipped with multiple intelligence capabilities, with the most recent delivery occurring in June 2023.

Tags: Military AviationNorthrop Grumman MQ-4C TritonUASUSN - United States Navy/U.S. Navy

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Fernando Valduga

Fernando Valduga

Aviation photographer and pilot since 1992, he has participated in several events and air operations, such as Cruzex, AirVenture, Daytona Airshow and FIDAE. He has work published in specialized aviation magazines in Brazil and abroad. Uses Canon equipment during his photographic work throughout the world of aviation.

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[vocaloidrecommend]

People Mania ・人マニア

by Haraguchi Sasuke featuring Kasane Teto!!

People are starting to publish their covers and I'm starting to see Hito Mania making rounds!! If the vibe of this song feels like someone losing their mind, you'd be right! lol There's are full lyrics with a translation in Read More below!

People Mania in this case is social trends and expectations. The gist of the song is about feeling shitty cause you're never doing enough while being forced to live in a box of expectations for others.

Japanese and English Lyrics

興奮してきた　人様の業で センター分けのつむじ刺す Excitement came again, With A Person's Work Set my hair whorl in the center

アホの吐血見てると チョキで勝てる気すんな 手抜くぞ　すぐ抜くぞ スポーツスポーツ腰抜けよ Seeing an idiot vomit blood I'll win with Scissors, I can feel it I'm ready to throw! Throw it right now! (Rock-Paper-Scissors) Sports, Sports, Spineless!!

子達の前で　着ぐるみを脱ぐ 『な〜〜んだ？』 A. 私 In front of the kids, taking off the costume "What's thaaat?" A. It's me.

ビバ良くない! ただ物足りない! うん、小さくなってく器で トびたい！トびたい！トびたい！ It's not 'Viva' Good! It's just not enough! Yeah, put me in a smaller box, I want to fly! Want to fly! Want to fly!

ポリエステル仕事　はムリか 金で殺して　愛を買うね。 すまんね。 You can't work a Polyester job? Kill it with money, Buy love instead. Oh, Sorry

晩年。 Past our prime.

爆破ソロ(0.5秒) Explosion Solo (0.5s)

あ…消した。環境の為に。 Xだけの"人マニア" 罠の　墓穴見てると 塩を　かける傷！ Ah…It's gone. For the sake of the environment. "People Mania" is all you see on Twitter I'm seeing a grave of traps Putting salt in the wound!

恋人の前で　血まみれになる 『な〜〜んだ？』 A. お前 In front of my lover, I end up covered in blood "What's thaaat?" A. It's you (You prick)

ビバ良くない! ただ ? ? ? ? ? ? うん、小さくなってく器で トびたい！トびたい！トびたい！ It's not 'Viva' Good! It's just-just-just- ????? Yeah, put me in a smaller box, I want to fly! Want to fly! Want to fly!

ポリエステル仕事　はムリか 金で殺して　愛を買うね。 すまんね。 You can't work a Polyester job? Kill it with money, Buy love instead. Oh, Sorry.

ああ…すまんね。 最高だよ　本当！本当！ 小さく成ってく冠婚葬祭 蹴りたい！蹴りたい！蹴りたい！ Uh…Sorry. You're the best! For real! For real! Family gatherings are getting smaller. I wanna put my foot down! Put it down! Put it down!

生きろ。悪意も恥も償いも 全毒　背負って くたばらにゃいかんね。 Living Life. Malice, shame, redemption. All this poison on my shoulders. Why don't you go shove it. *NOTES* 09/10/2023 - Updated: Until I heard covers, I wasn't sure if it was Twitter or Star (as in Asterisk). Nah it's just X (formerly known as Twitter). 13/10/2023 - Updated: I had a fun silly time writing these English lyrics initially, but after sleeping on it, I wanted to make this into better, more proper reference material. So phrasing is now more functional than based on vibes lol

[fuckyeah-beringandwellsfics]

Catalysis

submitted by: anonymous

Catalysis (13708 words) by @winged-mammal Chapters: 4/4 Fandom: Warehouse 13 Rating: Explicit Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Myka Bering/Helena "H. G." Wells Characters: Myka Bering, Helena "H. G." Wells Additional Tags: Artifacts Made Them Do It, POV Second Person, Podfic Available Summary: Myka keeps accidentally having sex with H.G.. She's not okay with this. (Except for the part where she totally is.)

Please tell us why you like this fic so much!

just a phenomenal example of sex artifact fic

Is there something else about the fic that you'd like people to know?

You can also listen to an audio version of this. Which is awesome.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

There’s no such thing as “shareholder supremacy”

On SEPTEMBER 24th, I'll be speaking IN PERSON at the BOSTON PUBLIC LIBRARY!

Here's a cheap trick: claim that your opponents' goals are so squishy and qualitative that no one will ever be able to say whether they've been succeeded or failed, and then declare that your goals can be evaluated using crisp, objective criteria.

This is the whole project of "economism," the idea that politics, with its emphasis on "fairness" and other intangibles, should be replaced with a mathematical form of economics, where every policy question can be reduced to an equation…and then "solved":

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/28/imagine-a-horse/#perfectly-spherical-cows-of-uniform-density-on-a-frictionless-plane

Before the rise of economism, it was common to speak of its subjects as "political economy" or even "moral philosophy" (Adam Smith, the godfather of capitalism, considered himself a "moral philosopher"). "Political economy" implicitly recognizes that every policy has squishy, subjective, qualitative dimensions that don't readily boil down to math.

For example, if you're asking about whether people should have the "freedom" to enter into contracts, it might be useful to ask yourself how desperate your "free" subject might be, and whether the entity on the other side of that contract is very powerful. Otherwise you'll get "free contracts" like "I'll sell you my kidneys if you promise to evacuate my kid from the path of this wildfire."

The problem is that power is hard to represent faithfully in quantitative models. This may seem like a good reason to you to be skeptical of modeling, but for economism, it's a reason to pretend that the qualitative doesn't exist. The method is to incinerate those qualitative factors to produce a dubious quantitative residue and do math on that:

https://locusmag.com/2021/05/cory-doctorow-qualia/

Hence the famous Ely Devons quote: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

The neoliberal revolution was a triumph for economism. Neoliberal theorists like Milton Friedman replaced "political economy" with "law and economics," the idea that we should turn every one of our complicated, nuanced, contingent qualitative goals into a crispy defined "objective" criteria. Friedman and his merry band of Chicago School economists replaced traditional antitrust (which sought to curtail the corrupting power of large corporations) with a theory called "consumer welfare" that used mathematics to decide which monopolies were "efficient" and therefore good (spoiler: monopolists who paid Friedman's pals to do this mathematical analysis always turned out to be running "efficient" monopolies):

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/20/we-should-not-endure-a-king/

One of Friedman's signal achievements was the theory of "shareholder supremacy." In 1970, the New York Times published Friedman's editorial "The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits":

https://www.nytimes.com/1970/09/13/archives/a-friedman-doctrine-the-social-responsibility-of-business-is-to.html

In it, Friedman argued that corporate managers had exactly one job: to increase profits for shareholders. All other considerations – improving the community, making workers' lives better, donating to worthy causes or sponsoring a little league team – were out of bounds. Managers who wanted to improve the world should fund their causes out of their paychecks, not the corporate treasury.

Friedman cloaked his hymn to sociopathic greed in the mantle of objectivism. For capitalism to work, corporations have to solve the "principal-agent" problem, the notoriously thorny dilemma created when one person (the principal) asks another person (the agent) to act on their behalf, given the fact that the agent might find a way to line their own pockets at the principal's expense (for example, a restaurant server might get a bigger tip by offering to discount diners' meals).

Any company that is owned by stockholders and managed by a CEO and other top brass has a huge principal-agent problem, and yet, the limited liability, joint-stock company had produced untold riches, and was considered the ideal organization for "capital formation" by Friedman et al. In true economismist form, Friedman treated all the qualitative questions about the duty of a company as noise and edited them out of the equation, leaving behind a single, elegant formulation: "a manager is doing their job if they are trying to make as much money as possible for their shareholders."

Friedman's formulation was a hit. The business community ran wild with it. Investors mistook an editorial in the New York Times for an SEC rulemaking and sued corporate managers on the theory that they had a "fiduciary duty" to "maximize shareholder value" – and what's more, the courts bought it. Slowly and piecemeal at first, but bit by bit, the idea that rapacious greed was a legal obligation turned into an edifice of legal precedent. Business schools taught it, movies were made about it, and even critics absorbed the message, insisting that we needed to "repeal the law" that said that corporations had to elevate profit over all other consideration (not realizing that no such law existed).

It's easy to see why shareholder supremacy was so attractive for investors and their C-suite Renfields: it created a kind of moral crumple-zone. Whenever people got angry at you for being a greedy asshole, you could shrug and say, "My hands are tied: the law requires me to run the business this way – if you don't believe me, just ask my critics, who insist that we must get rid of this law!"

In a long feature for The American Prospect, Adam M Lowenstein tells the story of how shareholder supremacy eventually came into such wide disrepute that the business lobby felt that it had to do something about it:

https://prospect.org/power/2024-09-17-ponzi-scheme-of-promises/

It starts in 2018, when Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffett decried the short-term, quarterly thinking in corporate management as bad for business's long-term health. When Washington Post columnist Steve Pearlstein wrote a column agreeing with them and arguing that even moreso, businesses should think about equities other than shareholder returns, Jamie Dimon lost his shit and called Pearlstein to call it "the stupidest fucking column I’ve ever read":

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/06/07/will-ending-quarterly-earnings-guidance-free-ceos-to-think-long-term/

But the dam had broken. In the months and years that followed, the Business Roundtable would adopt a series of statements that repudiated shareholder supremacy, though of course they didn't admit it. Rather, they insisted that they were clarifying that they'd always thought that sometimes not being a greedy asshole could be good for business, too. Though these statements were nonbinding, and though the CEOs who signed them did so in their personal capacity and not on behalf of their companies, capitalism's most rabid stans treated this as an existential crisis.

Lowenstein identifies this as the forerunner to today's panic over "woke corporations" and "DEI," and – just as with "woke capitalism" – the whole thing amounted to a a PR exercise. Lowenstein links to several studies that found that the CEOs who signed onto statements endorsing "stakeholder capitalism" were "more likely to lay off employees during COVID-19, were less inclined to contribute to pandemic relief efforts, had 'higher rates of environmental and labor-related compliance violations,”' emitted more carbon into the atmosphere, and spent more money on dividends and buybacks."

One researcher concluded that "signing this statement had zero positive effect":

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/companies-stand-solidarity-are-licensing-themselves-discriminate/614947

So shareholder supremacy isn't a legal obligation, and statements repudiating shareholder supremacy don't make companies act any better.

But there's an even more fundamental flaw in the argument for the shareholder supremacy rule: it's impossible to know if the rule has been broken.

The shareholder supremacy rule is an unfalsifiable proposition. A CEO can cut wages and lay off workers and claim that it's good for profits because the retained earnings can be paid as a dividend. A CEO can raise wages and hire more people and claim it's good for profits because it will stop important employees from defecting and attract the talent needed to win market share and spin up new products.

A CEO can spend less on marketing and claim it's a cost-savings. A CEO can spend more on marketing and claim it's an investment. A CEO can eliminate products and call it a savings. A CEO can add products and claim they're expansions into new segments. A CEO can settle a lawsuit and claim they're saving money on court fees. A CEO can fight a lawsuit through to the final appeal and claim that they're doing it to scare vexatious litigants away by demonstrating their mettle.

CEOs can use cheaper, inferior materials and claim it's a savings. They can use premium materials and claim it's a competitive advantage that will produce new profits. Everything a company does can be colorably claimed as an attempt to save or make money, from sponsoring the local little league softball team to treating effluent to handing ownership of corporate landholdings to perpetual trusts that designate them as wildlife sanctuaries.

Bribes, campaign contributions, onshoring, offshoring, criminal conspiracies and conference sponsorships – there's a business case for all of these being in line with shareholder supremacy.

Take Boeing: when the company smashed its unions and relocated key production to scab plants in red states, when it forced out whistleblowers and senior engineers who cared about quality, when it outsourced design and production to shops around the world, it realized a savings. Today, between strikes, fines, lawsuits, and a mountain of self-inflicted reputational harm, the company is on the brink of ruin. Was Boeing good to its shareholders? Well, sure – the shareholders who cashed out before all the shit hit the fan made out well. Shareholders with a buy-and-hold posture (like the index funds that can't sell their Boeing holdings so long as the company is in the S&P500) got screwed.

Right wing economists criticize the left for caring too much about "how big a slice of the pie they're getting" rather than focusing on "growing the pie." But that's exactly what Boeing management did – while claiming to be slaves to Friedman's shareholder supremacy. They focused on getting a bigger slice of the pie, screwing their workers, suppliers and customers in the process, and, in so doing, they made the pie so much smaller that it's in danger of disappearing altogether.

Here's the principal-agent problem in action: Boeing management earned bonuses by engaging in corporate autophagia, devouring the company from within. Now, long-term shareholders are paying the price. Far from solving the principal-agent problem with a clean, bright-line rule about how managers should behave, shareholder supremacy is a charter for doing whatever the fuck a CEO feels like doing. It's the squishiest rule imaginable: if someone calls you cruel, you can blame the rule and say you had no choice. If someone calls you feckless, you can blame the rule and say you had no choice. It's an excuse for every season.

The idea that you can reduce complex political questions – like whether workers should get a raise or whether shareholders should get a dividend – to a mathematical rule is a cheap sleight of hand. The trick is an obvious one: the stuff I want to do is empirically justified, while the things you want are based in impossible-to-pin-down appeals to emotion and its handmaiden, ethics. Facts don't care about your feelings, man.

But it's feelings all the way down. Milton Friedman's idol-worshiping cult of shareholder supremacy was never about empiricism and objectivity. It's merely a gimmick to make greed seem scientifically optimal.

The paperback edition of The Lost Cause, my nationally bestselling, hopeful solarpunk novel is out this month!

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/2024/09/18/falsifiability/#figleaves-not-rubrics/a>

[demy85]

Ao3 wrapped [writers edition - 2024]

Tagged by @la-muerta, thank you! 💗

All fics mentioned are #Malecfics

01. How many words have you written this year?

88740

02. How many works did you publish this year?

I published 8 new works and finished one I started in 2022

03. What work are you most proud of (regardless of kudos/hits)?

That would be Drawing you in. A lovely collaboration project with @kasper-tag

04. What work of yours has the most hits?

Loved you even before we met. Also a collaboration project, but with @la-muerta from 2023.

If we look at works I wrote solely in 2024 it's 'Drawing you in'

05.  What work of yours got more feedback than you expected?

The discovery of having a kink - A little ficlet I wrote for 'By The Angel Bingo 2024'

06. Favourite title you used?

I had a dream - I got everything I wanted

Not only because I love the song, but also bc it was the first time I wrote a gift-fic

07. If you use song lyrics, which artist’s songs did you pull from the most?

I don't usually use song lyrics. Sometimes I take inspiration from songs for fiction titles, but it's really random and there's no artist I favor on those occasions.

08. Pairing you wrote the most for this year?

I have only written Malec fics so far

09. Favourite pairing you wrote for this year?

Malec 🤭

10. What work was the quickest to write?

Going to a bar - finding something new

Also a little ficlet I wrote for 'By The Angel Bingo 2024'

11. What work took you the longest to write?

Absentia - which is based on the series of the same name in a modified form and features the characters from the Shadowhunter TV series and is still not finished - so 🤫

12. How many WIP’s do you have in your docs for next year?

I few I'm already working on - but many more ideas; sometimes only a sentence. We'll see what comes of it.

13. What’s your longest work of the year?

Again: Drawing you in - 28,365 words

14. What’s your shortest work of the year?

The discovery of having a kink - 657 words

15. What WIP are you taking into next year with you?

Absentia

16. What’s your most common “Additional Tags” tag?

Alternate Universe - Human

17. Your favourite character to write this year?

Magnus Bane and Alec Lightwood

18. The character that gave you the most trouble writing this year?

Jonathan Morgenstern

19. What’s one pairing you want to explore next year?

So far, I haven't considered writing for any pairing besides Malec. (Apart from minor side pairings in my Malecfics)

20. Which work of yours have you reread the most?

I read all of them once in a while - I'm not sure which one I read the most.

21. How many kudos in total did you get this year?

I don't keep track of that - I don't write for the kudos, though it's really nice to get them 💗💗💗

22. Which work has the most comments?

Works solely written in 2024: Drawing you in

Overall: Absentia

23. Did you do any collaborative work this year?

Drawing you in - Collaboration with @kasper-tag

I wrote this fic for the art he made.

24. Did you write any gifts this year?

I had a dream - I got everything I wanted - I wrote this for 'MWG Secret Santa 2024' and it's a gift for @thelightofthebane

Santa, tell me - I wrote this for the 'Shadowhunters Gift Exchange 2024' and it's a gift for @justawanderer

25. Did you receive any gifts this year?

I did and I loved all of them 💗

I got two from @carry-on-my-waywardshadowhunter and one from @onetimetwotimesthreetimess

26. What’s your most common category?

M/M

27. What do you listen to while writing?

Depends on my mood and what I want to write.

28. Favourite work you wrote this year?

no favourites - I enjoyed writing all of them

29. Favourite line/passage you wrote this year?

The silver disk seemed to wrap the surrounding landscape in an almost magical aura. Alec found himself in the cool night air and enjoyed the view that presented itself to him after he had gently opened the patio door and stepped out onto the porch. He was careful not to make any noise so as not to wake the other two men sleeping inside. The smell of forest and damp earth filled the air, while a faint whisper of wind blew through the trees. The moonlight reflected off the lake, creating a glittering ribbon of light that broke the surface of the water. The lake lay there like a sparkling jewel as if caught in the land of dreams. Alec couldn't help but stop for a moment and enjoy the silence, broken only by the occasional sound of animals. The atmosphere was calm and peaceful, and for a brief moment, the world around him seemed to stand still. It was like a balm for his battered soul.

30. Biggest surprise while writing this year?

The gift exchange I took part in. It was a exhilarating experience

--

No-pressure tagging if you want to play: @carry-on-my-waywardshadowhunter; @foodsies4me; @kasper-tag; @cinberella

[daily-coloring]

Best of 2024 - Films

Strange year behind us, I watched move TV than ever, but visited the cinema at least once a month too (3x in January). The only thing I regret, that I haven't cried more and louder when All of us Strangers ended. Still couldn't re-watch it and since then I just can't listen Frankie's The Power of Love. I just can't.

01. All of Us Strangers - 2024 - Dir. Andrew Haigh

02. Foe - 2023 - Dir. Garth Davis - "Junior has been selected as a candidate for off-world colonization. Nothing will happen just yet, the couple are promised, but of course — to skip ahead to Terrance’s second visit, a year later — something does. Junior’s advancement to the next round means that Terrance will need to move in with them, to probe Junior like a lab rat. Also, don’t worry! While Junior is away, Hen will live with a biological replacement — a replica that has living tissue and Junior’s memories. It’s the high-tech equivalent of leaving a war wife with a photograph, Terrance explains, except that this photograph can live and breathe. All to help their marriage survive, naturally." - NY Times

03. French Exit - 2020 - Dir. Azazel Jacobs

04. The Promised Land - 2024 - Dir. Nikolaj Arcel

05. The Substance - 2024 - Dir. Coralie Fargeat

06. Strange Darling - 2024 - Dir. JT Mollner

07. Uncle Frank - 2020 - Dir. Alan Ball

08. The French Dispatch - 2021 - Dir. Wes Anderson

09. Poor Things - 2024 - Dir. Yorgos Lanthimos

10. DogMan - 2023 - Dir. Luc Besson - "It’s a lot to handle and also a bit silly, but Besson often pulls it off — thanks in no small part to a commanding performance by the chameleon-like Caleb Landry Jones (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri), who manages to be touching and slightly terrifying at the same time. He carries a film that’s too offbeat to achieve the mainstream success of the Taken and Transporter franchises, which helped turn Besson’s EuropaCorp into a major international studio a few decades ago. And yet, as a sort of personal artistic statement — and one where Shakespeare crosses paths with Marlene Dietrich, and deadly hounds with drag queens — Dogman is worth a look. - The Hollywood Reporter

11. Unicorns - 2024 - Dir. Sally El Hosaini & James Krishna Floyd

12. Snack Shack - 2024 - Dir. Adam Rehmeier

13. Femme - 2024 -Dir. Sam H. Freeman& Ng Choon Ping

14. Passages - 2023 - Dir. Ira Sachs

15. My Old Ass - 2024 - Dir. Megan Park

16. Wicked Little Letters - 2024 - Dir. Thea Sharrock

17. Furiosa: A Mad max Saga - 2024 Dir. George Miller

18. Hit Man - 2023 - Dir. Richard Linklater

19. Marcel the Shell with Shoes On - 2021 - Dir. Dean Fleischer Camp

20. Beautiful Thing - 1996 - Dir. Hettie Macdonald - "At the centre of the story are shy, introverted Jamie and Ste, his neighbour on a tough London council estate. Jamie is picked on by his classmates; they seem to sense there’s something about him that means he will never quite fit in with their crowd. Ste, meanwhile, is more popular thanks to his love of sport; he is nevertheless miserable living with his brutish father and older brother, and seeks solace with Jamie and his no-nonsense but kind-hearted mother Sandra." - On: Yorkshire Magazine

21. The Holdovers - 2024 - Dir. Alexander Payne

22. The Zone of Interest - 2024 - Dir. Jonathan Glazer

23. Bonus Track - 2023 - Dir. Julia Jackman

24. Sick of Myself - 2022 - Dir. Kristoffer Borgli

25. Arthur The King - 2024 - Dir. Simon Cellan Jones

26. Suite Francaise - 2014 - Dir. Saul Dibb - "Irène Némirovsky's unfinished novel Suite Française, written shortly before her death in Auschwitz in 1942 but not published until 2004, was described by the French newspaper Le Monde as "a masterpiece… ripped from oblivion". It was as if, from beyond the grave, Némirovsky was giving a modern-day readership an intimate eyewitness account, harrowing and ironic, of the experience of the Nazi occupation for the French. She wrote about both good and bad behaviour, heroism and cowardice, in every stratum of French society." - The Independent

27. Good Grief - 2024 - Dir. Dan Levy

28. The Blue Caftan - 2022 - Dir. Maryam Touzani

29. American Fiction - 2023 - Dir. Cord Jefferson

30. Road House - 2024 - Dir. Doug Liman

[comicweek]

Arrowverse Netflix Engagement Report: July - Dec 2023

Netflix has published its second engagement report for 2023 cover July - December 2023 with some much appreciated addtions including runtime and views (total hours viewed divided by runtime) and separating films and series - Download Full Engagement Report - HERE

Unlike my first post: read HERE - I've just screenshot my own spread sheet after pulling the data from the spread sheet.

Arrow: Season 1 - No - 28,500,000 - 16:10 - 1,800,000 Arrow: Season 2 - No - 19,900,000 - 16:12 - 1,200,000 Arrow: Season 3 - No - 16,600,000 - 16:15 - 1,000,000 Arrow: Season 4 - No - 13,800,000 - 16:13 - 900,000 Arrow: Season 5 - No - 11,500,000 - 16:12 - 700,000 Arrow: Season 6 - No - 9,800,000 - 16:12 - 600,000 Arrow: Season 7 - No - 8,500,000 - 15:27 - 600,000 Arrow: Season 8 - No - 3,500,000 - 7:05 - 500,000

The Flash (2014): Season 1 - No - 51,200,000 - 16:20 - 3,100,000 The Flash (2014): Season 2 - No - 36,200,000 - 16:14 - 2,200,000 The Flash (2014): Season 3 - No - 31,200,000 - 16:13- 1,900,000 The Flash (2014): Season 4 - No - 27,500,000 - * - 1,700,000 The Flash (2014): Season 8 - No - 22,400,000 - 14:02 -1,600,000 The Flash (2014): Season 5 - No - 23,700,000 - 15:29 - 1,500,000 The Flash (2014): Season 6 - No - 18,200,000 - 13:23 - 1,400,000 The Flash (2014): Season 7 - No - 17,000,000 - 12:40 - 1,300,000 The Flash (2014): Season 9 - No - 8,200,000 - 9:09 - 900,000

Legends of Tomorrow: Season 1 - No - 8,300,000 11:19 - 700,000 Legends of Tomorrow: Season 2 - No - 5,700,000 11:54 - 500,000 Legends of Tomorrow: Season 7 - No - 4,200,000 9:06 - 500,000 Legends of Tomorrow: Season 3 - No - 5,300,000 12:41 - 400,000 Legends of Tomorrow: Season 4 - No - 4,200,000 11:16 - 400,000 Legends of Tomorrow: Season 6 - No - 3,900,000 10:34 - 400,000 Legends of Tomorrow: Season 5 - No - 3,800,000 10:35 - 400,000

Supergirl: Season 1 - No - 13,800,000 - 14:32 - 900,000 Supergirl: Season 2 - No - 9,600,000 - 15:30 - 600,000 Supergirl: Season 3 - No - 8,100,000 - 16:13 - 500,000 Supergirl: Season 4 - No - 6,600,000 - 15:31 - 400,000 Supergirl: Season 5 - No - 5,400,000 - 13:24 - 400,000 Supergirl: Season 6 - No - 5,300,000 - 14:05 - 400,000