#Trip Operator

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[sunlight-shunlight]

i feel like the most underrated Solas Lore, is that he straight up admits to not being sure if he was going to come back to skyhold after the wisdom spirit dies

it's completely valid for a normal apostate to say this, but when it's solas pride dreadwolf, who believes that he's The Only One who can complete his mission to end and/or save the world, then...? that means he just got so sideswiped by grief that he was genuinely like: "this sucks. what if i just hang out in the forest as a wolf for a few months/years. the orb and the veil and the next 2 blights can wait." before coming to his senses and remembering the fully apocalyptic stakes of his problem? even considering that for a "short time" is WILD.

[romantic-revolution-iv]

Cassian Andor isn’t from Fest or Kenari, it seems he’s from Neverland ✨

Forgive my sarcasm, but one of the strange aspects of the plot (in a show literally called Andor) is that we know almost nothing about Cassian’s childhood. In season one, we saw that little Kassa lived with his little sister in Peter Pan’s homeland, where (strangely) there wasn’t a single adult around. Apparently, after some unknown disaster at the mines, Kenari’s environment affected only adults in a fatal way. And you know what? Life in that “space Neverland” didn’t actually seem so bad, the kids had shelter and food, they didn’t look sick or suffering, and mostly just did whatever they wanted.

Tony Gilroy had 24 episodes (or about 19 hours of screen time) to clearly tell the story of the main character’s life, and yet we’re left with nothing but our own theories and questions. Who were Cassian’s parents? Did he even have a family, aside from the sister we also know nothing about? Does he remember his mother or father? And why doesn’t he grieve the loss of his real parents? All we know is that Maarva took Cassian as if he were a wild animal, making a choice for him, one he newer wanted.

[whetstonefires]

You know I'm realizing one reason you keep seeing mdzs modern AUs where the Jiang parents are alive mainly so they can dramatically fail and betray Wei Wuxian by cutting him off financially--defaulting on his college tuition or formally disowning him etc--isn't just that people want to translate the Burial Mounds II arc into modern terms while keeping Jiang Cheng clean of it.

(Despite the fact that the internal logic of Jiang Cheng's character is largely built around him being a person who would abandon someone he intensely cared about under these specific circumstances.)

It's because it's hard to set up a modern analogue for the way that Jiang Cheng is responsible for Wei Wuxian, as his Sect Leader.

We live in a highly individualistic society. People are trying to write Wei Wuxian Tragically Wronged, and because there's a normative expectation that people in the position of parents will provide you with resources, and certainly won't withdraw them without warning, but no such assumption that people in the position of siblings necessarily owe each other support, making this work in modern setting with Jiang Cheng in his canon role would require a lot of extra work, just to get a less readily resonant result.

But I keep thinking about it. Because something that's getting lost here is, not just the nuances of character and relationship, but like...it's sort of key to the story that cutting Wei Wuxian off was, in fact, Completely Socially Appropriate.

The level on which it was a betrayal is subtle, and deeply cutting. And intensely tied up in the very different opinions each of Jiang Cheng's parents had about what obligations existed in their family wrt Wei Wuxian, and what these meant.

The level on which it was the obvious, normal course of action is blatant. That is to a huge extent why it happens: because Jiang Cheng's instinct to conform is a survival instinct, reinforced by trauma, and Wei Wuxian's choices meant he had no coherently compelling reason not to obey it, and enormous peer pressure to do so.

The fact is that Jiang Cheng was making a reasonable choice, the actual thing 'anyone would do in that situation,' unlike Wei Wuxian and Jin Guangyao's respective wildly warped ideas about what that is.

Wei Wuxian wasn't betrayed by Jiang Sect like your foster parents cutting you off because you're disobedient. Wei Wuxian was betrayed by Jiang Sect like your brother refusing to drop fifty grand to bail you out of jail.

Of course Wei Wuxian tells him not to. And of course the fact that Jiang Cheng already chose in the moment not to pay a cent because Fuck You Wei Ying still stands there glaring, a precedent that can never be taken back.

And then later he's betrayed by Jiang Cheng like your brother cooperating with a police investigation into a manslaughter you really did commit, that's being handled like domestic terrorism. And then like your brother calling the cops on you. And then like your brother helping the cops find where you're hiding.

I'm personally fascinated by the way Jiang Cheng's lifelong resentment for the way Jiang Fengmian reliably bailed Wei Wuxian out of everything informed those decisions to do the normal thing, the way he's reacting against his dead father as well as against Wei Wuxian and the actual situation.

But even without that daddy issues angle, the fact that the person who made that choice was Jiang Cheng, and that it was simultaneously the reasonable appropriate normal upstanding citizen rational thing to do and so shitty Wei Wuxian would be entitled never to forgive it is sort of. The Point.

Of the scenario, and also to a considerable degree of the entire finely tuned narrative construct that is Jiang Cheng.

[maybebitterxox]

The pitch for Buffy The Vampire Slayer was probably just “What if there was a girl who could kill vampires. And she can Never Catch A Fucking Break”

[gurggggleburgle]

I need yall to understand how funny and terrifying it is that Luo Binghe was doing his shizun's paperwork before legally he could drive a car. This child was filing tax forms and making schedules. If he had Excell he'd have been a monster of logistical paperwork power.

Like we have no proof he wasn't grading papers.

But he could have been grading papers.

Like this child for all we know was influencing the curriculum of the entire peak and his shizun would just nod and say yes to 90% of it because he's such a been so cute and perfect of course Binghe knows best. He's the protagonist. And SIR! That is a child. He's like what 5 and smoll????? What does he know about academic curricular and proper cultivation techniques??? You left him and a bunch of other children alone for like half a year and I understand there are other teachers on the peak. Senior Disciples and all that but where are they getting the lesson plan? Who's determining classroom funds? What was the extent of our boy's power????? Could he have convinced Shizun to start a home ec class just to show off how much he's marrying material and prove he's better than everyone else? Did he spitefully give lower grades to people who looked at Shizun too long? What is the extent of his power and how little Shen Qingqiu understands about his own job. Is one guy who teaches the music lessons just getting 40 students while everyone else is in a classroom of 10 just because nobody is paying attention the to the course scheduling or because they can't enforce anything without the peak lord's signature. are the teachers filing out duplicate requests at An Ding Peak and driving Shang Qinghua insane because this is the fourth requests for new textbooks this year. WHY!!!!!!!

And then Shen Yuan took a depression sabbatical for 3 years basically followed by a 5 year nap. He's not qualified. That man is going to sit at his desk. Look at his paperwork. AND UNDERSTAND NONE OF IT. It's been like 10 years since he even pretended to look at his desk with interest and comprehension. Help. Like he can't even train a successor because that would require knowing what the fuck he's doing.

[invisible-b0nes]

HAPPY OPERATION BLACKOUT DAY!!!!

[fernflowerss]

finished ena a couple of hours ago and I'm perusing theories and whatnot and while I keep seeing the word "symbolism" everywhere I simply choose to believe that no, the world simply operates like that in game

[cassidysanne]

"When the world is such a mess it's hard not to feel depressed, getting stressed by what may come in time. But life is much more pleasant when you're living in the present so let's raise another glass and feel sublime!"

— Holly Sumpton as Ewen Monatgu in Operation Mincemeat

(© @lasagnatrades)

[kaiserouo]

If an operator and a warframe goes to an amusement park do they have to pay for one ticket or two

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Quinque gazump linkdump

On OCTOBER 23 at 7PM, I'll be in DECATUR, presenting my novel THE BEZZLE at EAGLE EYE BOOKS.

It's Saturday and any fule kno that this is the day for a linkdump, in which the links that couldn't be squeezed into the week's newsletter editions get their own showcase. Here's the previous 23 linkdumps:

https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/

Start your weekend with some child's play! Ada & Zangemann is a picture book by Matthias Kirschner and Sandra Brandstätter of Free Software Foundation Europe, telling the story of a greedy inventor who ensnares a town with his proprietary, remote-brickable gadgets, and Ada, his nemesis, a young girl who reverse engineers them and lets their users seize the means of computation:

https://fsfe.org/activities/ada-zangemann/index.en.html

Ada & Zangemann is open access – you can share it, adapt it, and sell it as you see fit – and has been translated into several languages. Now, there's a cartoon version, an animated adaptation that is likewise open access, with digital assets for your remixing pleasure:

https://fsfe.org/activities/ada-zangemann//movie

Figuring out how to talk to kids about important subjects is a clarifying exercise. Back in the glory days of SNL, Eddie Murphy lampooned Fred "Mr" Rogers style of talking to kids, and it was indeed very funny:

https://snl.fandom.com/wiki/Mr._Robinson

But Mr Rogers' rhetorical style wasn't as simple as "talk slowly and use small words" – the "Fredish" dialect that Mr Rogers created was thoughtful, empathic, inclusive, and very effective:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/07/09/the-nine-rules-of-freddish-the-positive-inclusive-empathic-language-of-mr-rogers/

Lots of writers have used the sing-songy fairytale style of children's stories to make serious political points (see, e.g. Animal Farm). My own attempt at this was my 2011 short story "The Brave Little Toaster," for MIT Tech Review's annual sf series. If the title sounds familiar, that's because I nicked it from Tom Disch's tale of the same name, as part of my series of stolen title stories:

https://locusmag.com/2012/05/cory-doctorow-a-prose-by-any-other-name/

My Toaster story is a tale of IoT gone wild, in which the nightmare of a world of "smart" devices that exert control over their owners is shown to be a nightmare. A work colleague sent me this adaptation of the story as part of an English textbook, with lots of worksheet-style exercises. I'd never seen this before, and it's very fun:

http://ourenglishclass.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2024/09/bravetoaster.pdf

If you like my "Brave Little Toaster," you'll likely enjoy my novella "Unauthorized Bread," which appears in my 2019 collection Radicalized and is currently being adapted as a middle-grades graphic novel by Blue Delliquanti for Firstsecond:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Childlike parables have their place, but just because something fits in a "just so" story, that doesn't make it true. Cryptocurrency weirdos desperately need to learn this lesson. The foundation of cryptocurrency is a fairytale about the origin of money, a mythological marketplace in which freely trading individuals who struggled to find a "confluence of needs." If you wanted to trade one third of your cow for two and a half of my chickens, how could we complete the transaction?

In the "money story" fairy tale, we spontaneously decided that we would use gold, for a bunch of nonsensical reasons that don't bear even cursory scrutiny. And so coin money sprang into existence, and we all merrily traded our gold with one another until a wicked government came and stole our gold with (cue scary voice) taaaaaaxes.

There is zero evidence for this. It's literally a fairy tale. There is a rich history of where money came from, and the answer, in short is, governments created it through taxes, and money doesn't exist without taxation:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

The money story is a lie, and it's a consequential one. The belief that money arises spontaneously out of the needs of freely trading people who voluntarily accept an arbitrary token as a store of value, unit of account, and unit of exchange (coupled with a childish, reactionary aversion to taxation) inspired cryptocurrency, and with it, the scams that allowed unscrupulous huxters to steal billions from everyday people who trusted Matt Damon, Spike Lee and Larry David when they told them that cryptocurrency was a sure path to financial security:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho

It turns out that private money, far from being a tool of liberation, is rather just a dismal tool for ripping off the unsuspecting, and that goes double for crypto, where complexity can be weaponized by swindlers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/13/the-byzantine-premium/

We don't hear nearly as much about crypto these days – many of the pump-and-dump set have moved on to pitching AI stock – but there's still billions tied up in the scam, and new shitcoins are still being minted at speed. The FBI actually created a sting operation to expose the dirtiness of the crypto "ecosystem":

https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/10/24267098/fbi-coin-crypto-token-nexgenai-sec-doj-fraud-investigation

They found that the exchanges, "market makers" and other seemingly rock-ribbed institutions where suckers are enticed to buy, sell, track and price cryptos are classic Big Store cons:

http://www.amyreading.com/the-9-stages-of-the-big-con.html

When you, the unsuspecting retail investor, enter one of these mirror-palaces, you are the only audience member in a play that everyone else is in on. Those vigorous trades that see the shitcoin you're being hustled with skyrocketing in value? They're "wash trades," where insiders buy and sell the same asset to one another, without real money ever changing hands, just to create the appearance of a rapidly appreciating asset that you had best get in on before you are priced out of the market.

This scam is as old as con games themselves and, as with other scams- S&Ls, Enron, subprime – the con artists have parlayed their winnings into social respectability and are now flushing them into the political system, to punish lawmakers who threaten their ability to rip off you and your neighbors. A massive, terrifying investigative story in The New Yorker shows how crypto billionaires stole the Democratic nomination from Katie Porter, one of the most effective anti-scam lawmakers in recent history:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/14/silicon-valley-the-new-lobbying-monster

Big Tech – like every corrupt cartel in history – is desperate to conjure a kleptocracy into existence, whose officials they can corrupt in order to keep the machine going until they've maximized their gains and achieved escape velocity from consequences.

No surprise, then, that tech companies have adopted the same spin tactics that sowed doubt about the tobacco-cancer link, in order to keep the US from updating its anemic privacy laws. The last time Congress gave us a new consumer privacy law was 1988, when they banned video store clerks from disclosing our VHS rental history to newspapers:

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

By preventing confining privacy law to the VCR era, Big Tech has been able to plunder our data with impunity – aided by cops and spies who love the fact that there's a source of cheap, off-the-books, warrantless surveillance data that would be illegal for them to collect.

Writing for Tech Policy Press, the Norcal ACLU's Jake Snow connects the tobacco industry fight over "pre-emption" to the modern fight over privacy laws:

https://www.techpolicy.press/big-tech-is-trying-to-burn-privacy-to-the-ground-and-theyre-using-big-tobaccos-strategy-to-do-it/

In the 1990s, Big Tobacco went to war against state anti-smoking laws, arguing that the federal government had the right – nay, the duty – to create a "harmonized" national system of smoking laws that would preempt state laws. Strangely, politicians who love "states' rights" when it comes to banning abortion, tax-base erosion and "right to work" anti-union laws suddenly discovered federal religion when their campaign donors from the Cancer-Industrial Complex decided that states shouldn't use those rights to limit smoking.

This is exactly the tack that Big Tech has taken on privacy, arguing that any update to federal privacy law should abolish muscular state-level laws, like Illinois's best-in-class biometric privacy rules, or California's CPPA.

Like Big Tobacco, Big Tech has "funded front groups, hired an armada of lobbyists, donated millions to campaigns, and opened a firehose of lobbying money," with the goal of replacing "real privacy laws with fake industry alternatives as ineffective as non-smoking sections."

Whether it's understanding the origin of money or the Big Tobacco playbook, knowing history can protect you from all kinds of predatory behavior. But history isn't merely a sword and shield, it's also just a delight. Internet pioneer Ethan Zuckerman is road-tripping around America, and in August, he got to Columbus, IN, home to some of the country's most beautiful and important architectural treasures:

https://ethanzuckerman.com/2024/08/29/road-trip-the-company-town-and-the-corn-fields/

The buildings – clustered in within a few, walkable blocks – are the legacy of the diesel engine manufacturing titan Cummins, whose postwar president J Irwin Miller used the company's wartime profits to commission a string of gorgeous structures from starchitects like the Saarinens, IM Pei, Kevin Roche, Richard Meier, Harry Weese, César Pelli, Gunnar Birkerts, and Skidmore. I had no idea about any of this, and now I want to visit Columbus!

I'm planning a book tour right now (for my next novel, Picks and Shovels, which is out in February) and there's a little wiggle-room in the midwestern part of the tour. There's a possibility that I'll end up in the vicinity, and if that happens, I'm definitely gonna find time for a little detour!

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

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:

[marimayscarlett]

Booked an accommodation for a Berlin trip next year 🤍 Now on to planning which sightseeing spots are important – including significant Rammstein-themed locations 🖤

[c1ittorus]

woke up bc i bit my lip in my sleep :(

[terasutetrad-ruikamishiro]

Aw man...

Anyway, she's gonna have to face everyone's negative feelings, so have fun dealing with that when she comes back. Probably after nearly getting murdered.

//Shoot.

...i don't want her to deal with my negative feelings, they almost killed me without the sekai...!

[iguessitsjustme]

Ter stop talking over and making decisions for Dee challenge 2k24. Y'all ain't even friends at this point you're just the annoying coworker go away

[westmeath]

the uk made me literally hate trains it's crazy and it's cruel how could you do that to an autist