#its basically a net but with stupider fundamentals

[pocketbelt]

Monster Hunter Wilds (PC {Ryzen 5800X, Nvidia RTX 3070, 64GB DDR4 3200 MHz RAM, Windows 10})

It was the best of Monster Hunters, it was the worst of Monster Hunters.

This feels like it had two teams working on it. One, whose goal was to improve the core combat and its mechanics from World without using Rise's wirebug mechanics, was successful, very much so, and the game is great for it.

The other's goal was to surround the core combat and all of the other non-combat mechanics and systems of World and Rise with Western AAA Ideas and Concepts, and they were, to the regret of everyone and to the damnation of the world, also very much successful.

On the one hand, Wilds is a significant improvement on World; ranged weapons (the bowguns and bow) have had their movesets and even controls revamped in ways that make them much better and more comfortable to use without sacrificing what makes them work, the basic movesets of most weapons have integrated some ideas from Rise (dual blades perfect dodge mechanic!), and the awkward and un-fun tenderising system of World: Iceborne has been redone as the Wound system, where just beating on specific parts of a monster (what you do already) will cause a wound to rupture open, boosting your damage for a bit or letting you "cash in" with a Focus Attack to instantly destroy the wound and stop/stagger/knock over the monster with an immediate damage burst. Dual Blades benefit a lot from this, and as my main weapon that pleases me greatly.

On the other hand the first 10-15 hours of Wilds are a fucking miserable slog with occasional spurts of joy (the battles) and even after that you are constantly, constantly, constantly besieged by Capcom's belief that you are a fucking unbelievable idiot, you have zero ability to remember things, and that you need to be prodded and jabbed constantly with vocal reminders pitched to be as annoying as possible to pick things up or build camps or use environmental objects. Control and tutorial pop-ups will flash at you, obscure monster animations and hide things you want to see to tell you how to use the fucking capture net or will override the Focus button to seize camera control to make you look at a campsite that you don't want anyway and it never fucking stops not even 70 hours in.

"Turn them off!" I did, you stupid asshole. There are two options for tutorials: one to merely reduce them, and one to stop repeats. If this is the reduced amount the normal amount must be so psychotic you can't even see the game or play it and the option for stopping repeats explicitly tells you there will still be repeats. Because Capcom wants the Sony First Party AAA audience and the 20 million people who already came in with World can fuck off and die, I guess.

Because Horizon: Zero Dawn was clearly the chief inspiration, as the characters never stop fucking whispering "hints" and "advice" and plain directives to do things you don't need to do or don't want to do but the developers have decided you have to and the "UX" team will start cutting themselves if you don't. Your Palico now constantly tells you to look at this or to do that, the handler barks at you to carve small monsters or pick up slinger ammo or on and on, and now your own hunter now speaks just to whisper at you to do shit you already do or don't need to, on top of combat barks and other shit they added in Rise.

At least Rise let you turn off the combat barks specifically: Wilds does not, not for any of this. You cannot stop the tutorialising and the hints and the suggestions that you're a fucking idiot who can't do anything without being told, and again, it's almost always pitched to be as annoying as possible. The hunter's own hints are always that aggravating, insanely infuriating whisper tone used in Horizon (I cannot believe anyone actually plays those games like that, I genuinely cannot understand it, I think something has to be fundamentally wrong with you as a person to tolerate it).

It got so fucking bad I turned off voices entirely. I set voice volume to 0 early in. This also applies to cutscenes but subtitles are forced on (which would be good except in this hellish circumstance) so I still could read the plot at least.

Palicos now default to human voice-acting instead of cat meows because they want you to hear more fucking "tips" - there's also no Monster Hunter Language dub, because that isn't Cinematic or Prestige and Sony would fire people who would suggest such things, so Capcom can't do it either. That's another thing with Wilds - in this AAA-ifying, Sony First-Party design-fronting process, the soul of Monster Hunter is clearly beginning to sheer off and the outer bits are starting to vanish here.

Tied to all of this is the first 15 or so hours being the Low Rank quests and the extremely forced story mode. You are tied to the railroad and attempts to wander off it are met with slaps: you will sit through walk-and-talk sequences where you must zoom in and look at things to proc dialogue and attempting to make your own way to a place will see you stopped, turned around and walked back because There Is Only One Ordained Road and the dev team is very upset that you will not take it. Just sit there and be spoken at by these cardboard cutouts babbling through chaff dialogue for this completely barebones story that nonetheless takes forever to go through and is committed to so hard that the game will do things like force you into back-to-back hunts with no warning or just remove the blacksmith for a while so you can't see or use the gear from monsters you just hunted for a while.

Incidentally, this has a bizarre knock-on effect, too: far and away one of the biggest criticisms of World, if not the single biggest, was that you could progress in multiplayer without doing really awkward shit. The devs set it up such that you had to see a cutscene with your hunter in it discovering each monster, and flagged it such that you were banned from letting anyone in til you saw the cutscene, whereupon multiplayer was opened. In other words, to do a quest with a new monster in multiplayer, you had to go in, see the cutscene, then quit the quest and gather up. The extremely baffling part is the obvious solution - just show everyone the cutscene with their own hunter - existed in the game for the big Zorah Magdaros setpiece quest but just wasn't applied to anything else.

Rise fixed this by just showing everyone the cutscene. Wilds is back to World's system of denying all entry until you've seen the cutscene, and the story railroading between Low Rank quests also makes that even stupider and fussier, and things like the back-to-back hunts also prevent it. They just made one of World's most touted problems worse, which means I do not feel good about their ability to understand player feedback or desires. I actually really dread what Wilds' sequel is going to be like, but we aren't going to see it until the 2030s anyway.

You are railroaded through a bad, braindead story with paper-thin characters for a dozen or more hours, the tutorials don't ever stop and actively hinder the experience, the characters never shut the fuck up because AAA games have this disease where silence is to be religiously feared and someone must be talking every 3 seconds, the game treats you like you can't do anything by yourself without being told, and the fun special elements of the series are slowly vanishing. The game launched with numerous issues, too, like a weird glitch where a floor triangle somewhere would flip out and start rapidly blasting all over the screen in a way that seemed like a genuine epilepsy risk, though that has been fixed, and its performance is fussy on all but the beefier hardware - not as bad as feared, but still too much for how the game actually looks.

Even with the core combat being great, and the experience when being freed from the rails is great (I'm going back after this to concoct a new armour, I'm Hunter Rank 102 and 70 hours in), it is a struggle to recommend Wilds at this point for anyone unless you've already devoured World and Rise to their fullest extent and are fiending for a new one, like me. Those two still being available and more cheaply for both PC and current consoles will always make a brand new MonHun a harder call for all but the dedicated, but Wilds' problems make it a hard call even for those.

It didn't have to be this way, but alas. At least Capcom will be updating and tweaking this for like four or five years, like with World and Rise, so we may well see the more odious elements walked back and fixed, but we'll see. My dearest hope now is just as Wilds is basically a "World 2", that the Switch 2 gets a "Rise 2" from whatever the second or other team config is in Capcom for MonHun games. Rise, certainly, is to be far more treasured now having seen what Wilds has done.

Now to make my new armour, and then set this on the backburner for the post-release monsters.

[bllsbailey]

Is Canada Brain-Dead?

As we survey the political landscape today, it is hard to escape the conclusion that a plague of mental catalepsy has swept the globe. One recalls the old multi-attributed adage: whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. Clearly, being rendered stupid would be just as effective.

In essence, we note there are two large demographic bodies that resemble one another in the extent of their cognitive impairment: brain-dead politicians and brain-dead electorates. They are not necessarily coterminous. In some nations, one predominates; in others, another. Sometimes the two dispensations are found in sync.

In European nations such as the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, and Romania, and of course in the higher echelons of the EU itself, the political class is plainly suffering from an access of both mental impairment and historical ignorance, receding into the very totalitarian past they were reconstructed to avert, imposing court-ordered repressive measures against public expression, imprisoning dissident individuals, and banning popular rival parties poised to triumph at the polls. The electorates themselves are generally in revolt, joining the surge of populist resentment and political protest.

In the U.S., the situation is somewhat more complex. The MAGA/Republican leadership and its loyal supporters enjoy a visionary lien on a productive and unfettered future, but nearly half the citizenry and its political representatives are firmly embedded in the dark ages of political evolution. The former are, for the most part, sane, intelligent and fundamentally decent; the latter are effectively brain-dead, which is to say, short-sighted, naïve and, frankly, incapable of reasoned judgment. And like their leaders, they are often prone to violence in word or deed. One might say that America is basically two countries, or rather, a cleanly bifurcate nation. In the MAGA wing, both leadership and electorate are vital; in the Democrat wing, leadership and electorate are reciprocally brain-dead.

Canada generally is far more unified in its dereliction than the U.S. It furnishes a unique example in which both an intellectually vacuous political cadre and a comatose electorate operate in approximately sibling tandem to pulverize the economy, enact oppressive articles of legislation, and plunge a once free and prosperous country into a debt-ridden, unproductive, ESG-indentured third world crater. The dominant political clade and the overwhelmingly left-voting electorate are twin aspects of the same moral and intellectual depravity. The politicians are brain-dead because they believe social and economic ruin is a planetary advantage. The people are brain-dead—at any rate, at least two-thirds or more of the voting public—since they are in general agreement with their betters and are just too stupid or indifferent to do their homework.

The issue has come to a head with the accession of globalist banker and Net-Zero fanatic Mark Carney to the prime minister’s office, and the alarming possibility that the Liberal Party, which enjoyed three successive terms in which to devastate the country, is poised to win yet a fourth to complete the job. Carney, who is far more crackerjack and dangerous than his hapless puppet Justin Trudeau, is just the man to make it happen.

As Action4Canada reminds us, Canadians don’t seem to care that Carney is an unrepentant globalist, a member of an oligarchic class that has “been contriving to create a dystopian future through fearmongering, misinformation, unscientific data, and manipulation.” Climate change must be fought, goes the mantra, even if it means the de-industrialization and impoverishment of the market-dominated economy. The Carneyesque project entails measures such as the six-year UN/WEF plan to reduce 

Annual meat consumption from 16kg of meat to zero

Annual dairy/milk from 90kg of milk to zero 

Number of clothing purchase/per person/per year from 8 items and then down to 3items

Car ownership from 190 vehicles per 1000 people down to zerovehicles

 That is the future that Carney is planning for Canada, which must reduce its comparatively miniscule emissions to zero even at the expense of its prosperity and possibly of its survival as a viable country. Obviously, the likelihood of planetary salvation is pitched too far into the future to provide a scintilla of evidence for the validity of the policy. But if the world were to be saved tomorrow according to Carney’s intention, Canada will have ceased to exist. The problem is that Canada’s sacrifice on the altar of Gaia would yield no demonstrable result.

But Carney has been given a free ride. People are impressed by his resume, a CV, apparently, confected to dazzle a dull-witted and unsuspecting public with red ribbon appointments, accomplishments and awards. People do not seem to understand that CVs may be deceptive, for two reasons. What is not included in a CV may be just as or even more revealing than what is. Additionally, much of what glitters therein is not gold but mica.

Nigel Hannaford at the Western Standard interviews an elderly female Carney voter who bears eloquent witness to this form of cognitive deficiency. “I like Carney,” she enthuses. “He has a good resume, you know. He was a banker.” Hannaford responds by asking her: “how do you feel about the fact that he wants to choke our oil industry? Or that as a professed church-going Catholic, he won't condemn abortion? That he wants to bring back the Online Harms Act? He's in thick with people who don't like people having too much freedom to travel or eat beef. He's all about making you use less electricity by making it more expensive.”

Her typically Canadian reply was about as predictable as Carney’s election appears to be:“I wouldn't know about any of that. But you know, he seems steady. Makes me feel safe. He's not going to change things.” It boggles the mind. In the words of Elizabeth Nickson, Carney is “a ghoul in a suit with the ethics of an alley cat.” The evidence that Carney is unfit for leadership is readily available to any citizen who is willing to perform even a modicum of research, to look into a prime minister’s past statements, enactments and commitments, or merely to observe the civil and economic ruination his party has caused over a lost decade. 

Such laziness and shallowness are common human properties, of course, but in Canada they are ubiquitous, the real pandemic. Any sentient and reasonably informed citizen will know that Mark Carney and the Liberal Party portend  economic desolation and diminished freedom of speech and action for all Canadians, irrespective of whom they voted for. It is, in effect, his plan for the West in large, but Canada is his chosen petri dish.

Sometimes you can tell a book by its cover. The cover image of Carney’s Value(s) tells us all we really need to know about Carney’s motives: the planet enclosed by a cage-like apparatus. The symbolism is no doubt meant to connote a scaffold of protectiveness, but the inadvertent suggestion of snared confinement is glaring. Carney’s values are tantamount to a prison sentence.

Despite the prognosis, all may not be lost. Perhaps a deus ex machina may appear at the last moment to defy the polls. After all, we have MAGA-like people among us, as well as younger folk who know they have been handed a raw deal—those who represent whatever hope may be waiting at the bottom of Pandora’s box. But the fact remains that Canada is one of those countries in which the majority of the electorate and the greater part of the political estate are equally brain-dead, which is why its future has become entirely problematic. It was different once, but Canada has changed. Barring the unforeseen, it is now a place where the mind goes to die.

[saraanseo]

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[dangoghz]

hello my friends! this is the weirdest thing i will ever ask of anyone! but here i am, nevertheless, asking it! (yes the banner says dangoghs but im danghosts rn it’s only for halloween so o well)

in june of 2017, i made a post (here if it’s after halloween when u see this) saying that whoever reblogged would get a picture of a cat with dan howell’s face photoshopped onto it. this got 2k notes. for two weeks, and may i remind you that my final exams were during those two weeks, i must’ve sent out about a hundred or more of these cats singlehandedly. it was hard work. i had no bots or anything to help me, and i didn’t want to repeat too much so i made over 60 (as well as some my friends made for me) dan cats, or dats. to this day about 1,000 people still have not received their long awaited prizes, and it pains me daily. 

it’s time to stop. it’s time for the dats to rise. it’s time for the apocalypse. and with your help, i can make it happen. here is my plan. pretty much everyone who applies to this will be accepted as long as they’re not a creep. everyone will be assigned a letter or group of numbers. you must search through the reblogs for every person with a url which starts with that letter or number, and send them their dat. obviously we’ll have a message or smth as a caption because no one will remember reblogging that on instinct lol. 

how will it work? basically, i will make a shared google photos album with everyone who applies, and place all 60 original dats in there. you are welcome to either use those or make you own to add to the collection. this folder will become a DATabase for everyone to use. and, it won’t be that much work because there’s so many people helping. as well we will have a gc on telegram! 

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reblog this post

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that’s all !! i will stop accepting applications on november 20th, which gives u a full month to apply. have fun! live love dats!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 24, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

On Monday, we learned that after last year’s election, John Eastman, a well-connected lawyer advising former president Donald Trump, outlined a six-point plan to overturn the outcome of the election and install Trump as America’s leader. They planned to cut the voters’ actual choice, Democrat Joe Biden, out of power: as Trump advisor Steve Bannon put it, they planned to “kill the Biden presidency in the crib.” This appears to have been the plan that Trump and his loyalists tried to execute on January 6.

That is, we now have written proof of an attempt to destroy our democracy and replace it with an autocracy.

This was not some crazy plot of some obscure dude in a shack in the mountains; this was a plan of the president of the United States of America, and it came perilously close to succeeding. The president of the United States tried to overturn the results of an election—the centerpiece of our democracy—and install himself into power illegitimately.

If this is not a hair-on-fire, screaming emergency, what is?

And yet, Republican lawmakers, with the notable exceptions of Representatives Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), have largely remained silent about the fact that the head of their party tried to destroy our democracy.

The best spin on their silence is that in refusing to defend the former president while also keeping quiet enough that they do not antagonize the voters in his base, they are choosing their own power over the protection of our country.

The other option is that the leaders of the Republican Party have embraced authoritarianism, and their once-grand party—the party of Abraham Lincoln, the party that saved the United States in the 1860s, the party that removed racial enslavement from our fundamental law—has become an existential threat to our nation.

Democracy requires at least two healthy parties capable of running a government in order to provide oversight for those currently in control of the government and to channel opposition into peaceful attempts to change the country’s path rather than into revolution. But Republicans appear to believe that any Democratic government is illegitimate, insisting that Democrats’ calls for business regulation, a basic social safety net, and infrastructure investment are “socialism” that will destroy the country.

With Democrats in charge of the federal government, Republicans are cementing their power in the states to support a future coup like the one Eastman described. Using “audits” of the 2020 elections, notably in Arizona but now also in Pennsylvania and Texas, Trump loyalists have convinced their supporters to distrust elections, softening the ground to overturn them in the future. According to a new poll by NORC at the University of Chicago, 26% of Americans now believe that “[t]he 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump and Joe Biden is an illegitimate president,” and 8% believe that "[u]se of force is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency."

Arguing that they have to stop the voter fraud they have falsely claimed threw the election to Biden, Republican lawmakers in 18 states have passed more than 30 laws to cut down Democratic voting and cement their own rule. Trump supporters have threatened election workers, prompting them to quit, and have harassed school board members and local officials, driving them from office.

Although attorneys general are charged with nonpartisan enforcement of the law, we learned earlier this month that in September 2020, 32 staff members of Republican attorneys general met in Atlanta, where they participated in “war games” to figure out what to do should Trump not be reelected. The summit was organized by the Rule of Law Defense Fund, the fundraising arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA), which sent out robocalls on January 5 urging recipients to march to the Capitol the following day “to stop the steal.” In May, RAGA elevated the man responsible for those robocalls to the position of executive director, prompting others to leave.

In states where Republicans have rigged election mechanics, party members need to worry about primary challengers from the right, rather than Democratic opponents. So they are purging from the party all but Trump loyalists, especially as the former president is backing challengers against those who voted in favor of his impeachment in the House in January 2021. Last week, one of those people, Representative Anthony Gonzalez (R-OH), announced he was retiring, in part because of right-wing threats against his family.

Trump loyalists are openly embracing the language of authoritarianism. In Texas, Abbott is now facing a primary challenger who today tweeted: “Texans deserve a strong and robust leader committed to fighting with them against the radical Left. They deserve a leader like Brazil has in Jair Bolsonaro…..” Bolsonaro, a right-wing leader whose approval rating in late August was 23%, is threatening to stay in power in Brazil against the wishes of its people. He claims that the country’s elections are fraudulent and that “[e]ither we’ll have clean elections, or we won’t have elections.”

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) today used language fascists have used in the past to stoke hatred of their political opponents, tweeting that “ALL House Democrats are evil and will kill unborn babies all the way up to birth and then celebrate.” Yesterday, the leader of Turning Points U.S.A., Charlie Kirk, brought the movement’s white nationalism into the open when he told a YouTube audience that Democrats were backing “an invasion of the country” to bring in “voters that they want and that they like” and to work toward “diminishing and decreasing white demographics in America.” He called for listeners to “[d]eputize a citizen force, put them on the border, give them handcuffs, get it done.”

Today, we learned that the 2022 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) will be held in Budapest, Hungary, where leader Viktor Orbán, whom Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson has openly admired, is dismantling democracy and eroding civil rights. When former vice president Mike Pence spoke in Budapest earlier this week at a forum denouncing immigration and urging traditional social values, he told the audience he hoped that the U.S. Supreme Court would soon outlaw abortion thanks to the three justices Trump put on the court.

Establishment Republicans who are now out of power are not on board the Trump train. They are quietly backing anti-Trumpers like Representative Cheney. Former House speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan, former Florida governor Jeb Bush—who was widely expected to win the Republican nomination in 2016, only to be shut out of it by Trump—and former president George W. Bush's former adviser Karl Rove have all donated money to Cheney to help her stave off a challenge from a Trump loyalist in the 2022 election. Next month, former president Bush himself will hold a fundraiser for Cheney in Texas.

Other establishment Republicans currently in power might be staying quiet about the party’s slide toward authoritarianism because they are simply hoping that the Trump fire will burn itself out. The former president is no longer commanding the crowds he once did, and his increasing legal woes as well as the investigation into the insurrection will almost certainly take up his time and energy. The mounting coronavirus deaths among his unvaccinated supporters also stand to weaken support for his faction.

But the fact that Republican lawmakers have ignored the Eastman memo, which outlines the destruction of our democracy, suggests that the party, which organized in the 1850s to protect the nation against those who would destroy it, has come full circle.

—

Notes:

https://bbj.hu/politics/foreign-affairs/world/budapest-to-host-cpac-in-2022

https://www.kptv.com/former-president-george-w-bush-to-hold-fundraiser-next-month-for-liz-cheney/article_8ba92a10-7103-5ee0-94ef-4bd813437e28.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/09/24/arizona-audit-just-destroyed-big-gop-lie-more-ways-than-one/

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2021/05/04/more-staff-flee-gop-attorneys-general-group-after-it-doubles-down-on-insurrection/

https://bbj.hu/politics/foreign-affairs/world/budapest-to-host-cpac-in-2022

https://abcnews.go.com/Lifestyle/wireStory/pence-hopeful-supreme-court-restrict-abortion-us-80185222

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/republican-ags-group-sent-robocalls-urging-march-capitol-n1253581

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/16/us/politics/anthony-gonzalez-ohio-trump.html

https://kansasreflector.com/2021/09/08/kansas-ag-aides-attended-war-games-summit-where-group-planned-to-combat-biden-win/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-08-17/more-than-half-of-brazilians-disapprove-of-bolsonaro-poll-shows

https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-deputize-citizen-force-put-them-border-order-protect-white-demographics

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/23/brazil-bolsonaro/

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[from comments]

Mobiguy

It is time to call this out as what it is - a well-documented attempt to overthrow the government, led by people too unconcerned or too stupid to worry about leaving a paper trail.

The January 6th sheep currently in court are not the problem. It's time to round up the ringleaders of this attempted coup and prosecute them on an open and shut case of treason.

Reasonable people insist on framing this coup as a robust political debate, but reasonable people are wrong. It is a naked power grab, an assault on the popular will, and blatantly illegal. Three evidence is there, in the seditionists' own hands.

A crime has been committed, even if it was unsuccessful. Failed bank robbers don't get to walk because they got no money. Failed murderers are still prosecuted. The evidence is there for all to see, and the alleged criminals aren't denying it. They're doubling down, and we're letting them. Either prosecute them, or remove the treason laws from the books since they're clearly meaningless and unenforceable.

In short: lock them up.

[mitigatedchaos]

Regarding Space Colonialism

poster in another thread

I just got fed up with how my call for people to maybe investigate the psychological aspect of WHY they want colonization-sans-genocide was turned into “Haha stupid anarchist thinks rocks can feel pain”

and later

Except this all started over my comment on @zennistrad post specifically saying that space colonization had nothing at all do do with that necessary yet regrettable colonization that enabled people like Elon musk to ever even think “what if humans could live off this planet” and my point was that historical colonization is VERY connected to the current moment and to every current ideology. There isn’t a white ideology that doesn’t carry the settler colonists meme

To answer more seriously...

Conquering somewhere, kicking out the existing inhabitants, and then settling the territory for yourself isn’t just a white people thing, or even a white people and the Japanese and the Mongols thing, or even quite an ideology thing (even though it can be an ideology thing) - it’s a strategy which descends from principles of evolution.

There are resources.  Someone else has those resources.  You kill or displace them, take those resources for yourself, and then build up fortifications to prevent the next guy from doing it to you.  Animals do this frequently.  (And on a more complicated level, it’s said that even chimps have territorial wars.)

It’s the break from this, which (in its latest incarnation) originated in the very societies that “won” (so to speak) the last round of settler colonialism, and then was pushed to being the highest-status ideology by one of the most settler colonialist societies becoming the global hegemon, that is unusual.  

The enormous amount of surplus generated by all those armies of energy-chugging machines limits the amount of “fight for resources or die” cases and effectively pays people not to fight, while the increasing dependence on complex production systems with greater specialization makes a typical fight more likely to result in a net loss of wealth rather than a net gain.

The liberalism itself also represents human beings reaching a new level of understanding, it’s just that the material conditions make it much easier to sustain.

The United States, despite all its imperialism and conquest and prior slavery, by opening the world’s sea lanes and making goods available to trade with mere money that, during previous eras, the old empires would have had to fight wars to secure (unity of economic and security policy), and taking most of the burden of military readiness onto itself from its supreme position holding almost an entire continent beyond two oceans, has essentially enabled wide-scale military demobilization by many countries.

This situation where borders almost aren’t moving at all is like government itself, simultaneously a real force and an artificial imposition, but I’m not sure that we should imagine it as having been inevitable.

Almost any organism would be excited about the availability of effectively-uncontested new resources.  History took a long path to reach here, including a lot of conquest carried out by people other than Europeans, and I don’t think we should view current interests in Mars settlement as somehow fundamentally tainted as a result.  By the standards that we would, it’s likely that every human would be tainted if we applied those standards evenly, and this is because humans are products of evolutionary processes rather than created beings - they are shaped by struggle and scarcity, and it is only gradually that they have been able to use their unique abilities for self-reflection to take their destiny more into their own hands.  And thus, of course, they are imperfect beings, and they build imperfect structures.

Ecologies and organisms generally don’t fix things by going back and undoing all their mistakes.  They heal gradually, through new growth, as part of their capabilities for adaptation, and this is part of what makes them resilient.

As such, I don’t think it’s unfair for human beings to be excited about a chance to ‘try again, but without all the murder this time’.  New generations not refighting all the old conflicts forever is part of both how humanity heals and how humanity advances.

And so, from my point of view, excitement over new resources is basically not unique at all and thus asking people to examine “why they are excited about colonization-sans-genocide” is essentially (through thinking it is unique and questionable) a dig at one or more specific groups, so I’m inclined to answer flippantly.

Now of course, in practical terms, Jeff Bezos or anyone suggesting that space colonization is the answer to resource shortages on Earth (aside from, perhaps, some rare element asteroid mining) in this century is underestimating the scale of the challenge.  A space colony is mostly a self-contained environment, and its long-term operation requires a lot of recycling and renewal if it isn’t going to be either gaining or losing mass.  Being in space mostly prevents loss through enemy military action, an asteroid hitting the Earth, or a nuclear apocalypse, but the theory of total recycling can be put into action on Earth much more cheaply and its early versions can be much more incomplete.

“Being in harmony with the land” has the potential to be much broader and more ambitious than it has historically been.

[theseerasures]

Conspicuous Media Consumption, 2019

i mean, everyone's doing these write-ups, right? might as well hop onto the bandwagon

towards the end of last year i had one of my typical existential crises about my media consumption: am i slowly disappearing up my own ass because i no longer care about most of the pop culture people like to discuss ad nauseam? but on the other hand, isn’t it more responsible to find the niche items made by non-mainstream and marginalized creators? on the third hand, wouldn’t i be much happier if i just watched FMA Brotherhood over and over again, preferably while starting a new Mass Effect playthrough at the same time?

the answer to all these questions is probably “yes,” but i decided to try something different going into 2019. for every week of the year, i would try to get through a year’s worth of content for some kind of media, be it comics, video games, TV, etc--they didn’t all have to be recent, or even new to me, but once i was done with that week i’d be done, even if i didn’t finish the content, and i’d make a judgement based what i’d seen on whether i want to continue. mostly, i was trying to avoid what happened to me with video games in 2018, when i was hating every second of playing Uncharted but still felt obligated to finish because everyone and their houseplant liked Uncharted or listlessly doing the Master Hunter achievement in RDR2 because the main quest made me miserable.

the actual outcomes of this Project(tm) are a little more complicated than anticipated--some media i could finish in a day, while trying to play through ALL THE CONTENT OF AN MMO understandably took much longer than a week--but it all kind of evened out. in the end i did 48 weeks of this, and used December as my catch-ups month to follow up on some things i didn’t get to finish. i thought i’d give my thoughts on each of the things i consumed this year as part of this project below in a concise manner--and yes, i know the people who’ve read even one (1) thing i’ve written are probably laughing right now, particularly given how long i took in this introduction just to get to me point, but i really am going to try!! it’s all an exercise in shameless self-indulgence, basically, but hey: if any of you want to chat at length about any of this stuff below, hit me up.

(quick note: you’ll only find media that i chose for this particular project below, so things i watched socially with friends--like certain film properties slorping me back into Disney’s gelatinous monolith--are not included)

Devilman Crybaby (anime, finished 1/5/2019): honestly i should have twigged onto what the year was going to be like when the first thing i drew from the metaphorical barrel was demon tiddies and apocalyptic existentialism. i was determined to dislike it for most of the year due to fundamentally disagreeing with its main thematic thrust, but i kept THINKING about it even months after. at this point i’ve kinda mellowed out. it’s definitely not a must love, but there’s enough queer metaphor and philosophical richness in it to make it worth checking out.

Attack on Titan (manga, 3 volumes finished 1/12/2019): this is the second time i’ve tried to get into this franchise and...yeah, no. i still don’t see the appeal. the fascistic overtones juxtaposed with absolutely no one having a sense of humor wigs me out to no end.

Young Justice (TV, 2.5 seasons finished 1/31/2019): honestly, what even is there to say? they’re my kids. they’re back and grown up and making even more terrible decisions. i screamed when i saw Babs in her wheelchair.

Black Leopard, Red Wolf (book, finished 2/10/2019): i tried VERY HARD to like this book, given how much i liked Brief History of Seven Killings, but it just...didn’t click for me. which honestly is fine, since i don’t think it was made for me either.

Dragon Age (3 games, finished 2/28/2019): i feel like there’s always a part of me that’s going to think of this series as “the other one,” but y’know. it’s good. it’s my second playthrough (as a mage for all three) and it’s good! i even went around killing all the dragons in Inquisition because Knight Enchanter was a blast. appreciate the higher queer content vis-a-vis Mass Effect, even though i couldn’t care less about any of the plot. Dragon Age II is the best one, do not @ me

Bitter Root (comic, 4 issues finished 3/1/2019): i love intergenerational dramas and i love stories about vampire slayers, so this was aces. my only complaint is the pacing was a little slow for a story that was going on hiatus after five issues.

Pearl (comic, 6 issues finished 3/3/2019): i know that he’s done great things and grudgingly admit that he’s probably a net positive in the industry but Brian Michael Bendis can suck my entire dick

Lazarus (comic, 5 trades finished 3/ 4/2019): i really thought this was going to clench the position for comic of the year. it’s Rucka doing Highly Relevant Dystopia! it’s a corporate Lannisters AU! it’s a highly personal story about a woman with high privilege and little agency! what more could you want

Immortal Hulk (comic, 2 trades finished 3/ 4/2019): i vibed with the horror feel, but i don’t honestly think it’s THAT exceptional. being set in 616-verse means there was still ton of baggage i didn’t know or care about, since i’ve now swung more to the DC side of things

thank u, next (album, finished 3/5/2019): didn’t Ariana Grande get canceled this year for some reason? oh well, i liked her album

When I Get Home (album, finished 3/13/2019): i vividly remember listening to this for the first time and feeling vaguely disappointed that it wasn’t more like Seat at the Table until i realized that i was covered in goosebumps. still don’t understand the magic but it is Good

The Bird King (book, finished 3/23/2019): pretty much everything you’d expect from a G. Willow Wilson book--spirituality, the female lead finding Themselves and the Answer and learning they’re the same thing, etc etc. i’m slightly resentful that her Wonder Woman was so lackluster while this was so good, but whatevs

Psychodrama (album, finished 3/29/2019): possibly my favorite album of the year? dense and emotionally raw in a way i really appreciate. Dave has a Mercury and he’s younger than me

Mass Effect (4 games, finished 4/7/2019): wow guys did you know that Mass Effect is good! it is. all of it is actually, even the Mass Effect 3 ending, another controversial finale to a big franchise that i will obstinately defend. even Andromeda, which isn’t AS good as the trilogy but still has a lot of heart. all its bugs have been exhaustively patched since launch anyway

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (TV, 4 seasons finished 5/13/2019): i’m...still kind of mad about this finale, but can’t exactly deny that this show is one of the best things to ever happen to me, or television probably. i didn’t even mind new!Greg that much! tho he was probably the nail on the coffin of me jumping onto the Nathaniel train.

Knights of the Old Republic/The Old Republic (3 games, finished 7/4/2019): did you guys know that KOTOR II was my first ever video game? i feel like that...explains a lot about me. anyway, the first game is a classic and the second is a deconstructive classic and playing either of them is basically a fun way for me to turn off my brain these days. even the MMO wasn’t as much of slog as i worried it would be. the Imperial Agent storyline had some nice surprises and i dig the general atmosphere of ruthless pragmatism and crushing loneliness.

Wanderers (book, finished 7/13/2019): Chuck Wendig is a very well-intentioned man in dire need of a strict editor. still good tho! some VERY punchy emotional bits and an ending that still leaves me with vague existential terror.

Code Geass (anime, 2 seasons finished 7/20/2019): i feel like this is on the polar opposite of the spectrum as Devilman Crybaby, because i don’t think Geass is GOOD on like, any basis, and i actually find its central moral message kind of abhorrent? but some part of my lizard brain LOVED the High Imperial Family Drama (it’s been a good year for me and Lannister types, hasn’t it? well, with the obvious exception of--never mind), so...yeah. have i discovered the true meaning of guilty pleasure

The Farewell (movie, finished 7/23/2019): how could i not a) watch this and b) love this and c) feel emotionally cold towards this at the same time because the situations depicted were so similar to mine that i ended up feeling kind of alienated

The Nickel Boys (book, finished 8/8/2019): i STILL haven’t read Underground Railroad, but here i am a book late and a dollar short to appreciate Whitehead’s new book. the man’s stylistic versatility is jaw-dropping and i appreciate the plotting in contrast to like, 90% of the litfic out there that’s just “protagonist sad in different milieu”

Durarara (anime, 2 seasons finished 8/31/2019): it’s fucking bonkers and i loved pretty much every second of it? even the second season, where i finally got the BruceNat AU i deserved??? the first anime i’ve seen where everyone was relatively soberly dressed. the answer was love and having feelings and asking your middle school best friend to hurl you like a projectile so you can chop your girlfriend’s head off with a demon katana

Lover (album, finished 9/1/2019): i feel like with all the Discourse surrounding Taylor Swift re: she’s the devil incarnate or re: she’s good, actually the fact that she makes fucking bops gets kind of lost in the conversation. i have no vested interest in her as a person but i liked Lover, even though London Boy was “what if Style but stupid”

Are You Listening (comic, finished 10/2/2019): my actual choice for best comic of the year if i were giving out awards like that. it’s coming of age! it’s grief! it’s queers! it’s trauma! it’s magical realism! it’s cats! it’s expressive gorgeous art! Tillie Walden has an Eisner and she’s younger than me

High School DxD (manga, 2 volumes finished 10/10/2019): i don’t even know how to talk about this series?? i actually kind of came around to the whole “main character is a perv but goes hard for consent” by the end of the second volume, but it’s still...bad. i only can have lingering conflicted feelings about one Japanese adaptation of Christian mythology per year

Ghosteen (album, finished 10/18/2019): much like Immortal Hulk i thought it was fine but over-hyped. it’s Nick Cave doing his Nick Cave ethereal music thing. i still can’t tell what any of the lyrics mean, except Jesus is there sometimes

Watchmen (TV, 2 episodes finished 10/29/2019): i am nOT FUCKING CAUGHT UP so please watch out for spoilers. it is on my high priority list of things to be caught up on tho--i appreciate that the plot is blatantly unsubtle but still manages to give me aneurysms and i appreciate the political overtones just kinda...balances on a razor thin wire and also gives me aneurysms. i wanna say i have no expectations and would be fine if it does a full dive into the horrible bland depths of the both-sides porridge, but i’m sadly a fool who wants to believe in Damon Lindelof

Syllabus/Making Comics (2 comics, finished 12/24/2019): it’s funny--even before Making Comics came out i was like “man i miss Lynda Barry” and then BAM. it’s incredible how her work just makes me feel taken care of, even when we’re wrestling with tough topics or she’s demanding that i draw a Batman in 30 seconds. kudos for immediately shooting to the top of my gift list for my sister also

Allegiance/Choices of One (2 books, finished 12/24/2019): fun and largely inoffensive, but i was honestly hoping for more. the level of Empire apologia going on was too much for me, someone who thinks Mara Jade is the best Star Wars character of all time (still?????? still). it reeked a little of Zahn believing his own hype as the only valid guy in Star Wars Legends of whatever

Aldnoah.Zero (anime, 1 season finished 12/24/2019): turns out i also can only have “trash but my trash” feelings about one Japanese mecha show with higher art pretensions and patriotism verging into jingoism per year, and this one ain’t it. it’s not as good as Code Geass and Code Geass ISN’T GOOD. at least Geass attempted character complexity and moved at enough of a breakneck pace to distract me from its questionable bits. Aldnoah is just...bland, and nothing gets accomplished or revealed in 12 episodes, except the baffling and contradictory motivations of the main bad guy.

Baldur’s Gate (game, unfinished): yet again something i really wanted to like, given *gestures at all the BioWare above*. i think it’s mainly the Seinfeld issue, where it actually predates my own experience with video games and was so formative for the Western RPG genre that what was innovative just comes across as kind of staid now. i didn’t DISLIKE it, and will probably play the sequel since it’s supposed to be more character-driven, but by the time i finished the vanilla campaign i just didn’t have it in me to squint at more tiny avatars on the screen, so the expansions ended up a no-go.

most prominent thing i noticed about this list is that only one 2019 movie made it on the list and ZERO 2019 video games did so. the former i’m okay with because i currently live with two film people with whom i’m happy to tag along to the cinema. the latter bums me out a little more, because there WERE a few things i wanted to play this year, but all of them came out just as my semester was reaching its catastrophic boil, so i had no time. maybe i’ll use my free time after the New Year festivities to catch up on those.

to conclude: this worked out pretty well! i ended up finishing all but one of the things, and only a few were bad enough that i have no interest in seeking out more content. i’ll probably do this again in 2020--we’ll see if the scheduling can withstand a full year of grad school hell

[bountyofbeads]

WE ARE LIVING IN A FAILED STATE

The coronavirus didn’t break America. It revealed what was already broken.

By George Packer | SPECIAL PREVIEW: JUNE 2020 Issue | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted April 21, 2020 |

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category.

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message.

Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos.

Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president. But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader. Some future autopsy of the pandemic might be called Strange Defeat, after the historian and Resistance fighter Marc Bloch’s contemporaneous study of the fall of France. Despite countless examples around the U.S. of individual courage and sacrifice, the failure is national. And it should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?

This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on September 11, 2001, came when Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war, and cold war remained strong. On that day, people in the rural heartland did not see New York as an alien stew of immigrants and liberals that deserved its fate, but as a great American city that had taken a hit for the whole country. Firefighters from Indiana drove 800 miles to help the rescue effort at Ground Zero. Our civic reflex was to mourn and mobilize together.

Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the sense of national unity and fed a bitterness toward the political class that never really faded. The second crisis, in 2008, intensified it. At the top, the financial crash could almost be considered a success. Congress passed a bipartisan bailout bill that saved the financial system. Outgoing Bush-administration officials cooperated with incoming Obama administration officials. The experts at the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department used monetary and fiscal policy to prevent a second Great Depression. Leading bankers were shamed but not prosecuted; most of them kept their fortunes and some their jobs. Before long they were back in business. A Wall Street trader told me that the financial crisis had been a “speed bump.”

All of the lasting pain was felt in the middle and at the bottom, by Americans who had taken on debt and lost their jobs, homes, and retirement savings. Many of them never recovered, and young people who came of age in the Great Recession are doomed to be poorer than their parents. Inequality—the fundamental, relentless force in American life since the late 1970s—grew worse.

This second crisis drove a profound wedge between Americans: between the upper and lower classes, Republicans and Democrats, metropolitan and rural people, the native-born and immigrants, ordinary Americans and their leaders. Social bonds had been under growing strain for several decades, and now they began to tear. The reforms of the Obama years, important as they were—in health care, financial regulation, green energy—had only palliative effects. The long recovery over the past decade enriched corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially government’s.

Both parties were slow to grasp how much credibility they’d lost. The coming politics was populist. Its harbinger wasn’t Barack Obama but Sarah Palin, the absurdly unready vice-presidential candidate who scorned expertise and reveled in celebrity. She was Donald Trump’s John the Baptist.

Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests. Republican politicians and donors who wanted government to do as little as possible for the common good could live happily with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they made themselves Trump’s footmen.

Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.

Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. The beneficiaries flocked to patronize his resorts and line his reelection pockets. If lying was his means for using power, corruption was his end.

This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future.

If the pandemic really is a kind of war, it’s the first to be fought on this soil in a century and a half. Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.

The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long. When tests for the virus were almost impossible to find, the wealthy and connected—the model and reality-TV host Heidi Klum, the entire roster of the Brooklyn Nets, the president’s conservative allies—were somehow able to get tested, despite many showing no symptoms. The smattering of individual results did nothing to protect public health. Meanwhile, ordinary people with fevers and chills had to wait in long and possibly infectious lines, only to be turned away because they weren’t actually suffocating. An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person’s face.

When Trump was asked about this blatant unfairness, he expressed disapproval but added, “Perhaps that’s been the story of life.” Most Americans hardly register this kind of special privilege in normal times. But in the first weeks of the pandemic it sparked outrage, as if, during a general mobilization, the rich had been allowed to buy their way out of military service and hoard gas masks. As the contagion has spread, its victims have been likely to be poor, black, and brown people. The gross inequality of our health-care system is evident in the sight of refrigerated trucks lined up outside public hospitals.

We now have two categories of work: essential and nonessential. Who have the essential workers turned out to be? Mostly people in low-paying jobs that require their physical presence and put their health directly at risk: warehouse workers, shelf-stockers, Instacart shoppers, delivery drivers, municipal employees, hospital staffers, home health aides, long-haul truckers. Doctors and nurses are the pandemic’s combat heroes, but the supermarket cashier with her bottle of sanitizer and the UPS driver with his latex gloves are the supply and logistics troops who keep the frontline forces intact. In a smartphone economy that hides whole classes of human beings, we’re learning where our food and goods come from, who keeps us alive. An order of organic baby arugula on AmazonFresh is cheap and arrives overnight in part because the people who grow it, sort it, pack it, and deliver it have to keep working while sick. For most service workers, sick leave turns out to be an impossible luxury. It’s worth asking if we would accept a higher price and slower delivery so that they could stay home.

The pandemic has also clarified the meaning of nonessential workers. One example is Kelly Loeffler, the Republican junior senator from Georgia, whose sole qualification for the empty seat that she was given in January is her immense wealth. Less than three weeks into the job, after a dire private briefing about the virus, she got even richer from the selling-off of stocks, then she accused Democrats of exaggerating the danger and gave her constituents false assurances that may well have gotten them killed. Loeffler’s impulses in public service are those of a dangerous parasite. A body politic that would place someone like this in high office is well advanced in decay.

The purest embodiment of political nihilism is not Trump himself but his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. In his short lifetime, Kushner has been fraudulently promoted as both a meritocrat and a populist. He was born into a moneyed real-estate family the month Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office, in 1981—a princeling of the second Gilded Age. Despite Jared’s mediocre academic record, he was admitted to Harvard after his father, Charles, pledged a $2.5 million donation to the university. Father helped son with $10 million in loans for a start in the family business, then Jared continued his elite education at the law and business schools of NYU, where his father had contributed $3 million. Jared repaid his father’s support with fierce loyalty when Charles was sentenced to two years in federal prison in 2005 for trying to resolve a family legal quarrel by entrapping his sister’s husband with a prostitute and videotaping the encounter.

[ Francis Fukuyama: The thing that determines a country’s resistance to the coronavirus]

Jared Kushner failed as a skyscraper owner and a newspaper publisher, but he always found someone to rescue him, and his self-confidence only grew. In American Oligarchs, Andrea Bernstein describes how he adopted the outlook of a risk-taking entrepreneur, a “disruptor” of the new economy. Under the influence of his mentor Rupert Murdoch, he found ways to fuse his financial, political, and journalistic pursuits. He made conflicts of interest his business model.

So when his father-in-law became president, Kushner quickly gained power in an administration that raised amateurism, nepotism, and corruption to governing principles. As long as he busied himself with Middle East peace, his feckless meddling didn’t matter to most Americans. But since he became an influential adviser to Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, the result has been mass death.

In his first week on the job, in mid-March, Kushner co-authored the worst Oval Office speech in memory, interrupted the vital work of other officials, may have compromised security protocols, flirted with conflicts of interest and violations of federal law, and made fatuous promises that quickly turned to dust. “The federal government is not designed to solve all our problems,” he said, explaining how he would tap his corporate connections to create drive-through testing sites. They never materialized. He was convinced by corporate leaders that Trump should not use presidential authority to compel industries to manufacture ventilators—then Kushner’s own attempt to negotiate a deal with General Motors fell through. With no loss of faith in himself, he blamed shortages of necessary equipment and gear on incompetent state governors.

To watch this pale, slim-suited dilettante breeze into the middle of a deadly crisis, dispensing business-school jargon to cloud the massive failure of his father-in-law’s administration, is to see the collapse of a whole approach to governing. It turns out that scientific experts and other civil servants are not traitorous members of a “deep state”—they’re essential workers, and marginalizing them in favor of ideologues and sycophants is a threat to the nation’s health. It turns out that “nimble” companies can’t prepare for a catastrophe or distribute lifesaving goods—only a competent federal government can do that. It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat.

The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.

We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention to the hospital workers holding up cellphones so their patients can say goodbye to loved ones; the planeload of medical workers flying from Atlanta to help in New York; the aerospace workers in Massachusetts demanding that their factory be converted to ventilator production; the Floridians standing in long lines because they couldn’t get through by phone to the skeletal unemployment office; the residents of Milwaukee braving endless waits, hail, and contagion to vote in an election forced on them by partisan justices. We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.

This article appears in the June 2020 print edition with the headline “Underlying Conditions.”

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We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

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GEORGE PACKER is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century and The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America.

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Why Some People Get Sicker Than Others

COVID-19 is proving to be a disease of the immune system. This could, in theory, be controlled.

By James Hamblin | Published April 21, 2020 10:41 AM ET | The Atlantic Magazine | Posted April 21, 2020 |

The COVID-19 crash comes suddenly. In early March, the 37-year-old writer F. T. Kola began to feel mildly ill, with a fever and body aches. To be safe, she isolated herself at home in San Francisco. Life continued apace for a week, until one day she tried to load her dishwasher and felt strangely exhausted.

Her doctor recommended that she go to Stanford University’s drive-through coronavirus testing site. “I remember waiting in my car, and the doctors in their intense [protective equipment] coming towards me like a scene out of Contagion,” she told me when we spoke for The Atlantic’s podcast Social Distance. “I felt like I was a biohazard—and I was.” The doctors stuck a long swab into the back of her nose and sent her home to await results.  

Lying in bed that night, she began to shake, overtaken by the most intense chills of her life. “My teeth were chattering so hard that I was really afraid they would break,” she said. Then she started to hallucinate. “I thought I was holding a very big spoon for some reason, and I kept thinking, Where am I going to put my spoon down?”

An ambulance raced her to the hospital, where she spent three days in the ICU, before being moved to a newly created coronavirus-only ward. Sometimes she barely felt sick at all, and other times she felt on the verge of death. But after two weeks in the hospital, she walked out. Now, as the death toll from the coronavirus has climbed to more than 150,000 people globally, Kola has flashes of guilt and disbelief: “Why did my lungs make it through this? Why did I go home? Why am I okay now?”

[ Read: The best hopes for a coronavirus drug]

COVID-19 is, in many ways, proving to be a disease of uncertainty. According to a new study from Italy, some 43 percent of people with the virus have no symptoms. Among those who do develop symptoms, it is common to feel sick in uncomfortable but familiar ways—congestion, fever, aches, and general malaise. Many people start to feel a little bit better. Then, for many, comes a dramatic tipping point. “Some people really fall off the cliff, and we don’t have good predictors of who it’s going to happen to,” Stephen Thomas, the chair of infectious diseases at Upstate University Hospital, told me. Those people will become short of breath, their heart racing and mind detached from reality. They experience organ failure and spend weeks in the ICU, if they survive at all.

Meanwhile, many others simply keep feeling better and eventually totally recover. Kola’s friend Karan Mahajan, an author based in Providence, Rhode Island, contracted the virus at almost the same time she did. In stark contrast to Kola, he said, “My case ended up feeling like a mild flu that lasted for two weeks. And then it faded after that.”

(Related Podcast: Listen to James Hamblin interview Kola and Mahajan on an episode of Social Distance, The Atlantic’s podcast about life in the pandemic)

“There’s a big difference in how people handle this virus,” says Robert Murphy, a professor of medicine and the director of the Center for Global Communicable Diseases at Northwestern University. “It’s very unusual. None of this variability really fits with any other diseases we’re used to dealing with.”

This degree of uncertainty has less to do with the virus itself than how our bodies respond to it. As Murphy puts it, when doctors see this sort of variation in disease severity, “that’s not the virus; that’s the host.” Since the beginning of the pandemic, people around the world have heard the message that older and chronically ill people are most likely to die from COVID-19. But that is far from a complete picture of who is at risk of life-threatening disease. Understanding exactly how and why some people get so sick while others feel almost nothing will be the key to treatment.

Hope has been put in drugs that attempt to slow the replication of the virus—those currently in clinical trials like remdesivir, ivermectin, and hydroxychloroquine. But with the flu and most other viral diseases, antiviral medications are often effective only early in the disease. Once the virus has spread widely within our body, our own immune system becomes the thing that more urgently threatens to kill us. That response cannot be fully controlled. But it can be modulated and improved.

One of the common, perplexing experiences of COVID-19 is the loss of smell—and, then, taste. “Eating pizza was like eating cardboard,” Mahajan told me. Any common cold that causes congestion can alter these sensations to some degree. But a near-total breakdown of taste and smell is happening with coronavirus infections even in the absence of other symptoms.

Jonathan Aviv, an ear, nose, and throat doctor based in New York, told me he has seen a surge in young people coming to him with a sudden inability to taste. He’s unsure what to tell them about what’s going on. “The non-scary scenario is that the inflammatory effect of the infection is temporarily altering the function of the olfactory nerve,” he said. “The scarier possibility is that the virus is attacking the nerve itself.” Viruses that attack nerves can cause long-term impairment, and could affect other parts of the nervous system. The coronavirus has already been reported to precipitate inflammation in the brain that leads to permanent damage.

Though SARS-CoV-2 (the new coronavirus) isn’t reported to invade the brain and spine directly, its predecessor SARS-CoV seems to have that capacity. If nerve cells are spared by the new virus, they would be among the few that are. When the coronavirus attaches to cells, it hooks on and breaks through, then starts to replicate. It does so especially well in the cells of the nasopharynx and down into the lungs, but is also known to act on the cells of the liver, bowels, and heart. The virus spreads around the body for days or weeks in a sort of stealth mode, taking over host cells while evading the immune response. It can take a week or two for the body to fully recognize the extent to which it has been overwhelmed. At this point, its reaction is often not calm and measured. The immune system goes into a hyperreactive state, pulling all available alarms to mobilize the body’s defense mechanisms. This is when people suddenly crash.

Bootsie Plunkett, a 61-year-old retiree in New Jersey with diabetes and lupus, described it to me as suffocating. We met in February, taping a TV show, and she was her typically ebullient self. A few weeks later, she developed a fever. It lasted for about two weeks, as did the body aches. She stayed at home with what she presumed was COVID-19. Then, as if out of nowhere, she was gasping for air. Her husband raced her to the hospital, and she began to slump over in the front seat. When they made it to the hospital, her blood-oxygen level was just 79 percent, well below the point when people typically require aggressive breathing support.

Such a quick decline—especially in the later stages of an infectious disease—seems to result from the immune response suddenly kicking into overdrive. The condition tends to be dire. Half of the patients with COVID-19 who end up in the intensive-care unit at New York–Presbyterian Hospital stay for 20 days, according to Pamela Sutton-Wallace, the regional chief operating officer. (In normal times, the national average is 3.3 days). Many of these patients arrive at the hospital in near-critical condition, with their blood tests showing soaring levels of inflammatory markers. One that seems to be especially predictive of a person’s fate is a protein known as D-dimer. Doctors in Wuhan, China, where the coronavirus outbreak was first reported, have found that a fourfold increase in D-dimer is a strong predictor of mortality, suggesting in a recent paper that the test “could be an early and helpful marker” of who is entering the dangerous phases.  

These and other markers are often signs of a highly fatal immune-system process known as a cytokine storm, explains Randy Cron, the director of rheumatology at Children’s of Alabama, in Birmingham. A cytokine is a short-lived signaling molecule that the body can release to activate inflammation in an attempt to contain and eradicate a virus. In a cytokine storm, the immune system floods the body with these molecules, essentially sounding a fire alarm that continues even after the firefighters and ambulances have arrived.

At this point, the priority for doctors shifts from hoping that a person’s immune system can fight off the virus to trying to tamp down the immune response so it doesn’t kill the person or cause permanent organ damage. As Cron puts it, “If you see a cytokine storm, you have to treat it.” But treating any infection by impeding the immune system is always treacherous. It is never ideal to let up on a virus that can directly kill our cells. The challenge is striking a balance where neither the cytokine storm nor the infection runs rampant.

Cron and other researchers believe such a balance is possible. Cytokine storms are not unique to COVID-19. The same basic process happens in response to other viruses, such as dengue and  Ebola, as well as influenza and other coronaviruses. It is life-threatening and difficult to treat, but not beyond the potential for mitigation.

At Johns Hopkins University, the biomedical engineer Joshua Vogelstein and his colleagues have been trying to identify patterns among people who have survived cytokine storms and people who haven’t. One correlation the team noticed was that people taking the drug tamsulosin (sold as Flomax, to treat urinary retention) seemed to fare well. Vogelstein is unsure why. Cytokine storms do trigger the release of hormones such as dopamine and adrenaline, which tamsulosin can partially block. The team is launching a clinical trial to see if the approach is of any help.

One of the more promising approaches is blocking cytokines themselves—once they’ve already been released into the blood. A popular target is one type of cytokine known as interleukin-6 (IL-6), which is known to peak at the height of respiratory failure. Benjamin Lebwohl, director of research at Columbia University’s Celiac Disease Center, says that people with immune conditions like celiac and inflammatory bowel disease may be at higher risk of severe cases of COVID-19. But he’s hopeful that medications that inhibit IL-6 or other cytokines could pare back the unhelpful responses while leaving others intact. Other researchers have seen promising preliminary results, and clinical trials are ongoing.

[Read: The best hopes for a coronavirus drug]

If interleukin inhibitors end up playing a significant role in treating very sick people, though, we would run out. These medicines (which go by names such as tocilizumab and ruxolitinib, reading like a good draw in Scrabble) fall into a class known as “biologics.” They are traditionally used in rare cases and tend to be very expensive, sometimes costing people with immune conditions about $18,000 a year. Based on price and the short supply, Cron says, “my guess is we’re going to rely on corticosteroids at the end of the day. Because it’s what we have.”

That is a controversial opinion. Corticosteroids (colloquially known as “steroids,” though they are of the adrenal rather than reproductive sort), can act as an emergency brake on the immune system. Their broad, sweeping action means that steroids involve more side effects than targeting one specific cytokine. Typically, a person on steroids has a higher risk of contracting another dangerous infection, and early evidence on the utility of steroids in treating COVID-19, in studies from the outbreak in China, was mixed. But some doctors are now using them to good effect. Last week, the Infectious Diseases Society of America issued guidelines on steroids, recommending them in the context of a clinical trial when the disease reaches the level of acute respiratory distress. They may have helped Plunkett, the 61-year-old from New Jersey. After three days on corticosteroids, she left the ICU—without ever being intubated.

Deciding on the precise method of modulating the immune response—the exact drug, dose, and timing—is ideally informed by carefully monitoring patients before they are critically ill. People at risk of a storm could be monitored closely throughout their illness, and offered treatment immediately when signs begin to show. That could mean detecting the markers in a person’s blood before the process sends her into hallucinations—before her oxygen level fell at all.

In typical circumstances in the United States and other industrialized nations, patients would be urged to go to the hospital sooner rather than later. But right now, to avoid catastrophic strain on an already overburdened health-care system, people are told to avoid the hospital until they feel short of breath. For those who do become critically ill and arrive at the ER in respiratory failure, health-care workers are then behind the ball. Given those circumstances, the daily basics of maintaining overall health and the best possible immune response become especially important.

The official line from the White House Coronavirus Task Force has been that “high-risk” people are older and those with chronic medical conditions, such as obesity and diabetes. But that has proven to be a limited approximation of who will bear the burden of this disease most severely. Last week, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released its first official report on who has been hospitalized for COVID-19. It found that Latinos and African Americans have died at significantly higher rates than white Americans. In Chicago, more than half of the people who have tested positive, and nearly 60 percent of those who have died, were African American. They make up less than one-third of the city’s population. Similar patterns are playing out across the country: Rates of death and severe disease are several times higher among racial minorities and people of low socioeconomic status.

[Read: What the racial data show]

These disparities are beginning to be acknowledged at high levels, but often as though they are just another one of the mysteries of the coronavirus. At a White House briefing last week, Vice President Mike Pence said his team was looking into “the unique impact that we’re seeing reported on African Americans from the coronavirus.” Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has noted that “we are not going to solve the issues of health disparities this month or next month. This is something we should commit ourselves for years to do.”

While America’s deepest health disparities absolutely would require generations  to undo, the country still could address many gaps right now. Variation in immune responses between people is due to much more than age or chronic disease. The immune system is a function of the communities that brought us up and the environments with which we interact every day. Its foundation is laid by genetics and early-life exposure to the world around us—from the food we eat to the air we breathe. Its response varies on the basis of income, housing, jobs, and access to health care.

The people who get the most severely sick from COVID-19 will sometimes be unpredictable, but in many cases, they will not. They will be the same people who get sick from most every other cause. Cytokines like IL-6 can be elevated by a single night of bad sleep. Over the course of a lifetime, the effects of daily and hourly stressors accumulate. Ultimately, people who are unable to take time off of work when sick—or who don’t have a comfortable and quiet home, or who lack access to good food and clean air—are likely to bear the burden of severe disease.

Much is yet unknown about specific cytokines and their roles in disease. But the likelihood of disease in general is not so mysterious. Often, it’s a matter of what societies choose to tolerate. America has empty hotels while people sleep in parking lots. We are destroying food while people go hungry. We are allowing individuals to endure the physiological stresses of financial catastrophe while bailing out corporations. With the coronavirus, we do not have vulnerable populations so much as we have vulnerabilities as a population. Our immune system is not strong.

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We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

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JAMES HAMBLIN, M.D., is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is also a lecturer at Yale School of Public Health and author of the forthcoming book Clean.

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[joshversus]

... Holiday Gaming, Year 5

It is absolutely batshit that I’ve been running these stupid Risus one-shot adventures every December for half a decade.  And yet, here we are, and once again I close out a year’s tabletop RPG play with a chaotic mess of wild improvisation and half-baked ideas loosely themed to midwinter celebrations.  You can read about previous years adventures here, here, here, and here.  

This year formed a direct sequel to last year’s game, which was itself a semi-sequel to the first holiday one shot.  

Following a lawsuit alleging image infringement, trademark violations, defamation, and mail fraud (among other charges), Lucifer settled out of court.  As a result of the arbitration, Lucifer (Satan) is legally obligated to fulfill those letters intended for Santa which, due to misspelling, have been delivered to the Infernal Pit instead.  The letters from Good Children, in particular, must be fulfilled on Christmas Eve as is the expected contract with Santa.  Of course, Lucifer himself is embedded waist-deep in Cocytus, the frozen lake at the bottom of Hell, and anyway you don’t get to reign over the entire Inferno without delegating, so the work has been farmed out to lesser demons.  The easy letters are dealt with by imps and various minor servitors, but there remain a few more problematic missives, and the Devil has appointed these to five of the lords of Hell to handle before Christmas morning.  

Our player characters are:

HAAGENTI, President of Hell, governor over 33 legions, in the shape of a winged bull. (Polymath 4, Boozehound 3, Demon 2, Alchemist 1)

AMDUSIAS, Duke of Hell, governor over 29 legions, in the shape of an upright unicorn. (Magical Musician 4, Treebender 3, Booming Voice 2, Demon 1)

BARBATOS, Duke of Hell, governor over 30 legions, in the shaped of a devilish bearded man. (Demon 4, Dr. Doolittle 3, Treasure Hunter 2, Fortune Teller 1)

FURFUR, Earl of Hell, governor over 26 legions, in the shape of a hart with a fiery tail. (Cupid 4, Thunder and Lightning 3, Demon 2, Soothsayer 1)

MARCHOSIAS, Marquess of Hell, governor over 30 legions, in the shape of a winged wolf with a flaming mouth. (Rowdy Boy 4, Demon 3, Fundamentally Honest 2, Flamethrower 1)

(Our demonic cast is directly but loosely based off their attributes as recorded in The Lesser Key of Solomon.)

Lucifer lays out the deal: Get this done before dawn. They’ve got to follow the rules Santa laid on in arbitration:

No teleporting inside the residence.  They can teleport to it, but must get inside physically.

No damage.  No blasting the walls down with hellfire or the like. Santa doesn’t do property damage.

No getting seen, unless being seen fosters belief in Santa Claus and the Magic of Christmas.

If milk and cookies or other snacks have been left out for Santa, they must be consumed.

Letters from Good Children must be fulfilled.

There are five Good Child letters left. Lucifer has provided them with a magic sack which will provide the next letter as each is fulfilled, and also potentially provide gifts or other useful tools (no guarantees).  The letters are revealed first with names and locations, and only once the party is at the residence is the child’s request made visible.  It is also established that the demons all basically have a roughly 13th-16th century European level of understanding.

LETTER ONE comes from Jimothy Sanchez of Passaic, New Jersey.  Jimothy lives with his father Oliver, stepmother Alanis, and his older stepsister Quinn. Jimothy is eight.

The demons arrive via teleportation outside the two-story suburban home of the Sanchez family.  They are confused by the environment, but immediately begin debating how to get in.  Examination of the letter reveals that Jimmy wants a “fidget spinner” and to “go to space like an astronaut.”

Barbatos begins interrogating a nightbird for information on how to get inside. “You’re tellin’ me you want to get in there to give a little boy a ‘present’?  You fuckin’ pervert,” the thickly-NJ-accented bird replies.  Eventually, the bird summons some pigeons, who attack Marchosias.  Furfur responds by summoning lighting to strike the bird’s tree, which splits and bursts into flames.

This wakes the father inside, who (as can be seen through the window) calls the fire department, although the demons are unclear on what’s happening.  Barbatos turns himself into an approximation of Santa (long white beard, red sharkskin suit, curling ram’s horns) as the fire department arrives. Marchosias and Haagenti teleport back to Dis to visit the infernal library and attempt to unravel the word “astronaut”. Amdusias attempts to pull a key out of the magic sack, but gets a viper instead, which she discards on the ground where it almost immediately bites a fireman.  Oliver Sanchez comes outside, and Barbatos introduces himself as Santa, leading to a great deal of confusion.  Marchosias and Haagenti return, and Haagenti attempts to sell the Santa con by turning into an elf, but succeeds only in turning into an Elf on the Shelf, all of which causes Mr. Sanchez to faint.  Barbatos picks up the EotS and they and Marchosias go inside.  After getting the rundown on what “astronaut” means, Barbatos attempts to get a book on Space from the bag, and gets a book about NASA.  Amdusias downs the milk and cookies, and is revolted by the lack of parasites.  Based on the book, he goes to the Moon, where he attempts to collect a footprint left there by astronauts.  Since it’s all moon dust, he just gets a fist of dust.  He brings that back and stuff it and a wooden top (provided by the sack in response to a request for a fidget spinner) into the stocking labeled Jimothy, and the demons collectively bug out while the firefighters attempt to revive their envenomed compatriot.  

LETTER TWO comes from the children of St. Guinefort’s Home for Disadvantaged Children, an archaic Catholic orphanage in NYC’s Lower East Side.  Surprisingly, the children have not requested anything unreasonable, but have requested a badminton set so they can play together.  Haagenti and Barbatos teleport to the roof of the building in search of a chimney, and finding one Barbatos tosses Haagenti (still in stuffed elf form) down it.  Haagenti hits a metal barrier and finds himself trapped.  Furfur joins them and drops a steaming, acidic load of demon poo down it, burning a hole through the closed flue and dumping Haagenti into a disused storeroom.  Barbatos turns into a rat and follows him down.  Haagenti attempts to take the form of a child and only manages to become a naked, horned baby with a devil’s tail, but is at least able to crawl around.  Barbatos goes for Santa mode again, but this time ends up worse, appearing gaunt and skeletal in his red garb.  Barbatos stuffs the baby Haagenti into the magic bag, a transimensional experience which shatters his mind and that of Furfur, who was scrying on their progress at the moment.  The two have a close encounter with and narrowly avoid the notice of a nun doing the rounds, and manage to quickly locate a room full of sleeping children, where a sad, Charlie-Brown-esque tree sits with no presents around.  Outside, Amdusias attempts to prevent any undue attention by summoning the sound of a traditional Christmas carol, but unwittingly makes everyone in earshot lose Whamageddon instead, followed by Fairytale of New York.

Back inside, Barbatos extracts the extremely dazed Haagenti from the sack, and then attempts to get a badminton set out of it.  The sack provides everything required: net, rackets, shuttlecocks, posts, post-hole digger, cardboard tube forms for pouring concrete anchors for the posts, bags of concrete, a backhoe and steamroller for flattening the court, turf, grass seed, chalk, a spreader, etc.  The room is very full, and the tree is entirely obscured.  

The demons retreat to Central Park, where they have a brief altercation with some hoodlums, before heading to the next home.

LETTER THREE was from Emily Chen of Hollywood, California, where she lives with her mother Amy and three brothers Ted, Leo, and Bobby in a three-bedroom apartment on the fifth floor of a walk-up building.  Emily, as the letter reveals, wants a pony.

Amdusias’s tree-bending bends a palm over the fence and lets everybody past the gates of the building, and the demons gather around the door to apartment.  Barbatos uses his treasure-finding skills to locate a key.  It is inside the apartment.  A cat is sensed inside, and Barbatos attempts to convince the cat to let them in.  The cat explains that even if it wanted to, it can’t work the lock.  A bribe of fish is offered if the cat will retrieve the key and push it under the door - the cat agrees if they will give it sushi.  A key is pushed under the door.  It does not fit in the lock.  Haagenti turns it into a more ductile metal to make it fit into the keyhole, and then attempts to firm it up so it can be turned, but in doing so ends up fusing it into the keyhole.  The cat demands sushi, which when extracted from the bag is revealed to be a piece of tamago nigiri.  An offer of salmon is made, but the cat again points out they are not capable of working the locks.  One of the demons tried to turn the cat into a human.  The locks click, the door opens, and a very sexy, very naked, and entirely testicle-less human man is revealed, demanding salmon.  The salmon is given, but the former cat asks for its balls back in exchange for letting them in and not just blowing up their spot right then and there.  Magic succeeds in restoring the man-cat’s genitals, and after garbing himself in a child’s gym shorts and some flip-flops, the cat leaves into the Hollywood night and the demons are free to enter. 

The living room bears a silver metallic tree, which confuses them, but they quickly and successfully extract a full-sized live pony and a bale of moist hay form the sack, the demons depart.

LETTER FOUR comes from Bethany-Ann Mayweather of South Carolina.  Bethany, it turns out, lives in a heavily-fortified survivalist compound in the woods with her dad (Steve), two brothers (Jesse and Dave), and two sisters (Katie and Donna-Lee.  The entire place is surrounded by an electrified fence topped with razor wire.

Emily would like to go to school like other children.

Things get weird.  Amdusias bends a tree over the fence, and Furfur drops down to discover that the clear ground between the fence and the building itself is heavily mined, exploding instantly (but non-fatally, because demon).  Lights are going on at the compound as Furfur starts bouncing around setting off mines and motion-sensing lamps.

Marchosias has the idea that the humans at the first house had somehow summoned that metal chariot in response to the burning tree by talking into that weird curved oblong shape, and that if they do the same maybe the metal chariot will help them get in.  Reaching into the bag extracts a banana.  Marchosias holds it to the side of his head and says hello.

“Hello?” says a sleepy voice from the banana.  “Who is this?”

“Uh, Mark,” responds Marchosias, who is Fundamentally Honest.  “Are you the...cops?  There is a little girl and there is a lot of gunpowder and fire and explosions.”

“What?  No, this is Raffi.  How did you get this number?  Is this a prank?”

It is established that this is not a prank (”Did Steve put you up to this?” “There’s a Steve here but no.” “From Blue’s Clues.” “I don’t know who or what that is.” “Mark, I’m looking at this caller ID here, and it just says ‘banana’.  What’s going on?”).  Barbatos teleports to this ‘Raffi’, the shock of which causes Raffi to suffer a heart attack and die. Barbatos resurrects Raffi as an undead revenant, and after difficulty (”Raffi, how do we call the police?” “RING.  RING.  RING.  BANANAPHONE.”) manage to extract the magical incantation “911″ from the former children’s entertainer.  Marchosias invokes this to the banana and connects to emergency services, and after a very complicated discussion (and some light aerial reconnaissance to pinpoint a location) succeeds in convincing them that there is a dangerous, heavily-armed incident at the compound and a child is in danger.  SWAT is being sent.  Meanwhile, Furfur is drawing gunfire from the survivalist dad, and Amdusias uses spectral music to distract him while they slip inside.

The six-foot-tall unicorn-headed naked figure reaches the crude two-dimensional paper Christmas tree inside the survival bunker and attempts to eat the dry saltines and rehydrated powdered milk that has been left out.  They are interrupted by the sleepy-eyed and tow-headed Bethany-Ann, who asks who they are.  Amdusias explains that they’re subbing in because Blitzen is sick.  Blitzen is Bethany-Ann’s favorite.  Amdusias tells her she’s going to get to go to school soon, and after a hug sends Bethany-Ann to hide under her bed until some nice people come get her.  Furfur attempts to use his lightning powers to dash Blitzen-like over the compound to drive home the Christmas-ness of it all, and instead burns holes through a number of trees as he accelerates to an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.  The remaining demons depart as militarized police descend on the compound.

THE FINAL LETTER is from Marcus Fitzwilliams III, son of Buck and Nancy, brother to Samantha, of Casper, Wyoming.  Marcus is ten, and he would like “a fortnite”.  The demons gather outside the ranch-style suburban home and debate what that means.  Eventually, they decide this means he wants to spend a night in a fort, and locating the Fort Caspar Museum nearby they plan to liberate the child from the house and take him there.  They decide against a plan to bring the fort to the house on the grounds that this might cause property damage.  Everyone but Marchosias goes to the backyard; Marchosias, who at this point looks like Bea Arthur because of reasons, remains out front with the banana to allay suspicion.

In the backyard, Barbatos again attempts to find a key, but fails.  He does detect a dog, and attempts to convince the dog to let them in.  The dog declines. “Stranger bad.  Bite stranger.”  An offer of bacon is made, and raw bacon pulled from the sack.  “Bacon good.  Bite bacon.  Bite stranger.  Good dog.”  This goes back and forth for a bit, and the dog starts barking.  Barbatos attempts to turn into a dog to sell the bit, and turns into a massive, ebon mastiff with glowing red eyes.  The bacon falls on the ground.  Furfur is now hiding in trees behind the house, joined by Amdusias, who attempts to keep things under control by bellowing “somebody let that dog out for a walk”, which comes out in a titanic demonic shout which rattles windows and kills the azaleas.  Lights come on.  The backdoor opens and Buck, carrying a rifle, looks at the giant demon dog and Haagenti, who is still a demonic baby, and the pile of bacon.  In the trees, the flaming tail of Furfur glows. 

“MA, GET UP AND CHECK THE FRONT, I THINK THE METHHEADS ARE TRYIN’ TO ROB US.”

Shit goes sideways quick.  Nancy opens the front door and sees Bea Arthur standing in her yard talking into a banana, and confirms the meth suspicion to buck.  The dog escapes into the yard and eats the bacon.  Baby Haagenti jumps on mastiff Barbatos’ back and the two dash into the house as Buck fires wildly at them and the intruders in the trees.  Nancy shoots the bananaphone and the side of Bea Arthur’s face.  Inside the house, Haagenti and Barbatos dodge bullets semi-successfully.  Haagenti scarfs cookies while Barbatos abandons the original plan and reaches into the bag while thinking “Fort Night”, pulling forth a card with a download code for Minecraft.  Furfur pulls his lightning-assisted flight trick over the house while Amdusias tries a bellowing “HO HO HO” so loud and infernal it shatters windows in houses throughout the neighborhood.

The list complete, the demons depart for Dis, where they are quickly met by Asmodeus, who tells them the boss wants to see them. The demon lords report total success, but receive a thorough chewing-out from Lucifer, who details the many, many violations they have committed and the agonies he is going to inflict on them for their failure.  

“You know the ring where we bury people up to their face in flaming shit?”  “Yeah, that one’s great.”  “Not for the humans.  I’m going to turn you all into humans and stick you there for the next thousand years.”

The demons attempt to portray their actions in a favorable light, and Amdusias protests and attempts to get the sounds of Michael Bublé’s Let it Snow to play and encourage the spirit of the holiday to earn them some clemency. However, it turns instead into Snow’s Informer as Belial reveals himself from behind Lucifer’s torso and tells them he was following and reporting on them the whole time, everyone gets in a Christmas “no, fuck you”, our heroes are consigned to flaming shit, and credits roll. Happy Holidays, everyone.

[deltaengineering]

Summer Anime 2018 Part 1: Nurupo

I feel bad for calling last season weak now, since that turned out okay, what with Megalobox, Hinamatsuri and Rokuhoudou (the best show you didn’t watch). Maybe this is a lesson to not be so negative, but all the positivity in the world can’t make this season look good. To balance it out, I’ll be bringing along some hot opinions from people getting paid to see the bright side this time.

P.S. Part 2 is here.

Island

What: A very Frontwing version of When They Cry, apparently. Awesome McCooldude wakes up on an island full of pliant girls and/or dark secrets.

✅  looks alright

❌ story is tryhard mystery nonsense based on convenient amnesia, very unlikely to deliver

❌❌ an absolutely terrible cast of generic VN characters, enjoy your common route hijinks with them

❌❌ Frontwing being Frontwing, please see picture.

ANN sez: “This episode accomplishes the two things that it absolutely must for the series to have a chance of succeeding: it makes the main trio of girls endearing enough and layers on some intriguing mysteries.”

Hanebad!

What: Some girls take badminton very seriously. Somewhere between genocide and extinction level event seriously.

✅  well animated and directed

✅  there appears to be more to the characters than nothing at all, so the overbearing presence of the drama llama might actually pay off

❌ has a tendency to wallow in ostentatious KyoAni-style presentational kitsch

❌ speaking of which, making the cast of Euphonium look like a bunch of carefree slackers by comparison is not a good thing

ANN sez: “From the lush colors of their school's flowers to the alienating saturation and long shots of their gym hallways, every mood HANEBADO strives for is captured perfectly through its visual storytelling, and solidified through fundamentally sturdy dialogue and plotting.”

Senjuushi

What: Touken Ranbu with firearms.

❌ This is a cute boys doing cute things anime set against a backdrop of global thermonuclear war and combining the ultra seriousness of ufotable TR with the slice of life tone of Doga Kobo TR makes for a very, let’s say, “uneven” experience. 

❌  Unsurprisingly, it has the production values of neither of the above and looks like crap instead.

❌❌ The localized title is “The Thousand Musketeers” and given the reckless pace in which it introduces pointless characters, it might actually hit that number in 12 episodes.

❌❌ Mobile game character designs must be stopped, for fuck’s sake

ANN sez: “The story itself has some promise, especially if you're a fan of antique guns.“

Shichisei no Subaru

What: VRMMO light novel garbage about MMO newtypes.

❌ High tier light novel tropes like “u die in the game u die 4 real”, grade schooler magical girlfriends and demigod abilities

❌ Yes, the characters start as grade schoolers and then there’s a timeskip where they become high schoolers. They don’t change at all, which is either cutting commentary on arrested development or an indication of how good this show’s writing is.

❌ Ideas like permadeath in an MMO and giving good players a stake in the game company are hilariously stupid even by this genre’s standards.

❌ You’ve seen this exact cast of characters before, likely in better shows.

❌❌ There’s really no single egregiously bad aspect, but the stank of mediocrity is so overwhelming as to deserve a double minus all of its own.

ANN sez: “This episode banks heavily on the appeal of its mysteries, but those mysteries actually are pretty appealing, and I ultimately respect this episode's choice to introduce so much of its world and characters before getting to the real conceit.”

Banana Fish

What: A well regarded classic manga about New York’s seedy gang underbelly of drugs and violence. And BL.

✅ ✅   Looks good. Like actually, legitimately good. Animation, character design, directing, this show is quality.

❌ Updating the setting to contemporary times seems like a not so great idea since everything about this is deeply steeped in the mid-80s gang violence and drugs panic, no matter how many smartphones get used.

♎ The pacing is ultra fast. While I will admit that I’ll take that over a snoozefest (especially in a seasonal rundown), if this wants to be a legitimate high tier anime it needs to let the atmosphere breathe more. 24 episodes isn’t much for a 19-volume manga.

❌ I’ve praised MAPPA for promising first episodes before, and then I got the likes of Yuri on Ice and Virgin Soul out of it. This is not an anime original so it will be harder to fuck up, but life finds a way - especially given the need for condensing the story as noted above.

❌ Ultimately, just being a classy production with proven writing isn’t the be-all-end-all; quality aside, I still have to like what it does, and I’m not sure what amounts to a homoerotic 80s crime B-thriller is exactly in my wheelhouse.

✅ What else are you gonna watch this season?

ANN sez: “The one negative I can foresee is that one character is portrayed as a fairly stereotypical gay sexual predator, and this story pitches itself consistently as a seedier exploration of its boys' love subject matter, so it's reasonable to expect these kinds of details going forward.”

Yume Oukoku to Nemureru 100-nin no Ouji-sama

What: Girls get their wish-fulfilment isekai nonsense too, it’s just a pretty pointless definition when you can just say “basic otome harem” instead. But sure, nondescript girl wakes up in fantasy dream universe where she has a magical trait that makes a large number of princes desire her. Call it what you like.

♎ Successfully avoids the most obnoxious otome harem and isekai tropes, but that just makes it even more bland

❌ lots of exposition about an universe that is hardly complicated and transparently an excuse anyway

❌ Main character is agreeable but exceptionally boring

❌ The princes are all generically princely and very little else

❌❌ combine that with sluggish pacing and this might be the most boring show so far, which is not an easy feat

ANN sez: “There were also some neat details here and there that I particularly appreciated, like the fact that our heroine is actually a working adult, as well as the idea that rather than being “trapped in a new world” she's in truth been returned to her home.”

Back Street Girls

What: A trio of yakuza thugs get a forced sex change because their boss wants to be an idol producer. It’s funny, laugh.

❌ This is not the warm, fuzzy trans acceptance anime you’ve been looking for, to put it mildly. I am not easily offended, but it would have to be pretty darn good to outrun this premise. Yeah, about that...

❌❌ runs its one joke (idols are not supposed to be thugs, like, at all!) into the ground before it exceeds a 3-minute short runtime; is actually 24 minutes long anyway. Hope you really like that joke.

❌❌ the execution of said joke is the pits of anime comedy, nothing but reaction faces and shouting

❌❌ production values are basically non-existent, at most you can say that they took the time to color in those manga panels

❌ learning that Chiaki Kon is directing this pile is just sad, put THAT in your auteur pipe and smoke it.

ANN sez: Nothing, since western licensors mysteriously chose to skip this one. Really a shame because I was looking forward to the outrage.

Isekai Maou to Shoukan Shoujo no Dorei Majutsu

What: It has “Isekai” and “Maou” in the title so what do you fucking think. What it doesn’t tell you is that it’s also about an MMO, for the full LN shitter nuclear triad.

❌❌ It’s about a loser otaku who gets trapped in his MMO wherein he has the mostest hax, complete with complementary slave pettan catgirl and slave oppai elf

❌❌ This is meant to be funny because he’s too much of a dweeb to put his penis where his mouth is.

❌ Technically better executed than Death March or Isekai Smartphone, so it gets one single minus for effort.

ANN sez: “The idea that Takuma is so insecure about talking to other people that he can only comfortably speak in the voice of his demon lord character is ingenious in a dramatic sense and endearing in a personal one, while Takuma's clear understanding of his personal failings makes him far more sympathetic than the genre's usual snarky protagonists.”

Satsuriku no Tenshi

What: Early teen girl checks herself into Silent Hill General Hospital for grief counselling.

✅  Atmosphere works reasonably well; it’s creepy where it needs to be, which is everywhere and all the time.

❌ The girl is a nonfactor blob and the tough guy she gets paired up with is an annoying chuuni edgelord (it is called 𝔄𝔫𝔤𝔢𝔩𝔰 𝔬𝔣 𝔇𝔢𝔞𝔱𝔥 after all), which is not promising for the long run

❌ So obviously based on a run-of-the-mill spoopy RPGmaker freeware game you can practically see the floor tiles.

❌❌ 24 solid minutes of Getting Cornered By A Rape Metaphor quickly goes from unsettling to incredibly tedious.

❌❌ There’s really nowhere for this to go, given how unoriginal everything is; at best it’s going to be “it was all a dream”, at worst “everyone was dead all along, please feel sad now”.

ANN sez: “The design of the facility is one of those fanciful every-level-is-a-different-setting worlds, but the artistic effort strongly pushes the creepiness factor with a design aesthetic that suggests age, decay, and neglect.“

Harukana Receive

What: Girls play beach volleyball in scenic Okinawa, some light sports drama seems to be on the horizon.

✅  Looks just good enough

✅  Girls are just cute and likeable enough

❌ the sports aspect is weak; maybe I’m just spoiled on Emiya-san’s incredible beach volleyball scene right now, but even when not compared to a top tier studio ostentatiously flaunting the budget of their fucking cooking short the match here isn’t very compelling.

♎ where Hanebad has a bad case of the cereals, this may have the opposite problem of being too cotton candy to be worth it

✅  “good enough” is not a ringing endorsement, but counts for something when being just okay will net you a third or possibly second place of the season.

ANN sez: “This is, of course, all just conjecture right now. ”

Chio-chan no Tsuugakuro

What: We took Nichijou and replaced the surrealism with video game references and the production values with donkey dung. Let’s see if delta notices!

❌❌ Production values are not optional when you want to be Nichijou; it being astoundingly over the top and imbued with impeccable timing is a (or even the) main part of Nichijou’s appeal. Without them you’re left with basic reactionface manzai over awkward situations, the king of comedy.

❌❌ Suffice it to say, this show is 100% trying to be funny, while also 100% not succeeding at being funny.

❌Asscreed is a more original tentpole to rotate your first episode around than the usual Dragon Quest, but not by much.

♎ neurotic nerd main character that is little more than a bundle of social anxieties will be #relatable to anime professionals, observe:

ANN sez: “Chio's overthinking in this situation is both hilarious and painfully true-to-life, with her furious strategizing coming across as both absurd and very familiar to anyone who's not comfortable in conversation.”

Planet With

Wat: Appears to be a tokusatsu/crypto-mecha show aimed at the younger set, with the gimmick being that our protagonist is (initially?) on the side of the villains(?).

✅  Pretty wacky, actually. It definitely doesn’t neatly fit in your square notions of what an anime is, man (unless you’ve watched FLCL).

❌ It seems very uncertain whether the wackiness is in service of anything. It might be To Be Heroine, or it might just be Heybot with fewer fart jokes.

♎ Furthermore, it wants to be intriguing and sort of is, but merely being intriguing is not that hard - you just make no sense and hope for the best. This has the not making sense part down, do you feel lucky?

❌ tries to build up characters by immediately going for the sad flashbacks, which I never like, especially if the rest of the show is eIDLIVE-level nonsense.

❌ Looks mostly fiiiiiine, but is also full of subpar CG

ANN sez: “So if the heroes are fighting against someone who just wants peace, then what does that make them? And more importantly, if they find out that the bears aren't evil, will they stop?”

Hataraku Saibou

What: A cutesy educational comedy about the workings of a human body.

✅  Well made, characters are cute, topic is interesting.

❌ Educational aspect can get in the way; I’m not suddenly giving heavy exposition a pass just because it’s trying to teach me something, especially if it’s things I basically already know.

♎ Will have to show if it can keep coming up with good scenarios. The lung infection in episode 1 was alright and so will probably be the skin cut in the preview, but beyond that I’m not sure what’s left for red and white blood cells to do. I’m not expecting a show with this tone to tackle things like retroviruses, if you know what I mean.

♎ An actual storyline seems like too much to expect, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but not a positive either.

✅  Doesn’t rock my socks off but is an easily watchable show with a fine idea and high production values, which again is hard to say no to right now.

ANN sez: “But since it culminates in one of my favorite scenes from the manga, visualizing sneezing as shooting a torpedo out your nose, I can forgive the random gendering of cells.”

Ongaku Shoujo

What: DEEN are getting in on the idol mobile game anime biz too.

✅  The main character’s gimmick is that apart from being A Honk, she can’t sing for shit; this is moderately funny.

❌ It might have counted for more if that hadn’t come out seconds before the episode ended. Even if it isn’t a momentous twist, it was more of a point of interest than the incredibly bland leadup to it had.

❌  Yeah, “Ongaku Shoujo” is an entirely indicative name of how generic this show is: Music + girls, indeed. I assume “Idols” was taken.

❌ I’m still not sure what the ideal cast size of a show like this is, but 12 idols is Idolmaster turf and as such too many. They have personalities? I think?

❌ a very small handful of cuts aside, woeful production quality; I know picking on DEEN is 2ez but this is not their finest work. Animation snobs can feel proud that there’s no CG dancing here, for the rest of us it’s an object lesson on why CG is the lesser of two evils.

✅  Tumbling SR cards in the ED (which is probably actually the OP) made me laugh; this show can’t even afford URs.

❌❌ Overall, just another idol show. Large cast plus presence of a P-san marks it as Im@s-type – but if you're in the market for an Idolmaster clone with bad looks, I would recommend Wake Up Girls instead because that’s at least pretty real at points.

ANN sez: They’re out for the weekend, ask again later. I suspect it’s nothing funny.

[davids69811]

Utilizing Leading Degree Domains to Create a Popular Domain Name

Everyone knows that an excellent, brief and also simple to remember domain deserves a lot of cash. The domain name is the most fundamental part of the site. Since the site is advertised and also advertised via the domain name, a lot of effort has been put into the choice of best domains. One repercussion of this is that many popular words or word expressions are already signed up. Best Domain Reseller Program 2017

An additional trend in domain registration is to utilize the top degree domain name as part of the name. There are couple of preferred nation domain names like me (Montenegro), it (Italy), in (India), fm (Federated States of Micronesia), and also lots of others. As a result, if your preferred domain is "kiss me" you can just register name kiss under the me top domain. Of course, numerous such names have actually already been signed up. And there is one not so unimportant downside of such domains. Considering that these top domains come from private countries it is thought that the websites also come from these nations. This is shown with positions in online search engine. However, given that such names are extremely easy to bear in mind it is expected that most customers will type them directly into browsers Domain Selling Websites.

The latest approach in domain is personalized top domains. ICANN (Web Company for Assigned Names and Numbers) has introduced that they will certainly begin permitting new personalized leading degree domains. Naturally, the price of such domain name will certainly be out of grab ordinary customers, but lots of huge firms will certainly go for it. By doing this you could, at least theoretically, remove com, net, org and comparable domain names. Yet due to the number of existing links, these domain names will probably last for very long. Due to the fact that site positions mostly depend on the variety of links indicating specific web page, it makes no sense to abandon established and also decent domains. We will have to wait to see exactly how these domain names will certainly be used.

You've probably came to the scenario where your recommended name is already registered with all basic function top level domains. What are the alternatives? You can either slightly customize you call by adding a word prior to or after your picked name or you can put dashboards in between words. While the last choice is not prominent because this strategy is utilized by lots of spammers, the first option is supported by several registrars. When you experience a registered domain they attempt to recommend you some similar Domain Selling Websites.

Is the Domain Gold Rush Over? Not by a Slim chance!

We are possibly all acquainted with the picture of a team of males straining to listen to the starter weapon as they prepare to rush off and also attempt to claim an item of 'Goldfield'. For those who had strong legs, or simply an inordinate amount of the stupid good luck, the race to their 'insurance claim' was possibly one of the most rewarding couple of hundred actions they have actually taken in their entire lives. Lot of money were made by planting your white flag at simply the best place.

A similar Gold Thrill has been happening on the web over the previous couple of years below the emphasis was not a lot on physical realty however on having an edge of the internet sure to be gone by great deals of virtual feet. I am obviously describing the rush to get domain names that link in with what individuals would naturally enter as they look for products and solutions on the internet Domain Selling Websites.

In the domain name enrollment race many people initially saw it as a bit of a 'totally free for all' to get the most effective domain. A favourite strategy of some people in trying to participate the action of this newest Gold Rush was the practice of 'Cybersquatting' where people got the domain related to business names or advertising and marketing slogans of popular business. They then held the companies (and often even people) over a barrel by requiring big sums for the launch of the domain name. Nowadays the typical law and the proprietary rights of businesses to their names as well as marketing slogans are well recognized in a lot of jurisdictions. In the United States as an example Anticybersquatting Customer Security Act (ACPA) of 1999 makes it feasible for companies to take so-called cyber squatters to court in order to retrieve what is considered as their intellectual property. Several other countries consisting of the UK, Australia as well as Canada have similar regulation in position Domain Selling Websites.

Does this mean that the domain Gold Thrill is well as well as truly over? Not by any methods! There are still substantial quantities of money to be made by selecting a domain ensured to pull in traffic and then either building an internet site on it or selling it on to a 3rd party. Take into consideration the following:

1) In most areas of economic task they are typically a multitude of players that have most likely all registered their organization names as domain names. What is extremely frequently not 'taken' nevertheless are domain names associated with general descriptors of the products and/or solutions because location. To use a spurious instance: When you consider the area of "Paper Clip Straighteners" it may be that 'Acme Straighteners', 'ABC Straighteners' and 'Straight as a Rod' have all registered domain names in their own name. However what happens if a person wishes to do a little bit of rate comparison or study the field in general? This is where something like paperclipstraighteners comes in (it is offered in situation you are interested)! The owner of this domain name can utilize this piece of Net realty to establish a cost contrast site, an advertising website, a site that reroutes web traffic to stores on a compensation basis or even offer it to among the businesses mentioned over. Somebody who is willing to do his research can make a huge quantity of cash in this way. For instance the domain name pizza was sold for 2.6 million bucks after its owner acquired it for $20 fourteen years previously! There remain in all chance a lot more such gems concealed somewhere on the web all set to be extracted by those that are willing to place in the research Domain Selling Websites.

2) We reside in a quickly changing globe, with vast quantities of brand-new items and services entering the marketplace each and every single year. In addition the social environment is in a state of consistent flux with new trends and styles arising faster than we can offer names to them! One of the implications of this is that items of Internet real estate that were widely valuable in the past are quickly coming to be useless while the blue-chip addresses of the future still need to be coined. If you question this fact, simply invest time thinking about exactly how to family member worths of faxmachineparts and also ipodgadgets must have fared over the previous couple of years. If you are someone that has an eager eye on advancements within pop culture, or within a particular specific niche market, you possibly currently have a great suggestion of emerging patterns. Doing some research and investing in a domain name pertaining to those fads can be a hugely lucrative investment. I am rather sure, as an example, that the individual that registered speeddating still can not think his/her all the best.

3) There has actually been various efforts to open domain enrollment and also the body appointing domain be slowing towards permitting business to establish in register their own leading level domain names. This suggests that they will then be able to place any kind of identifier behind the 'dot'. Establishing such a system will nevertheless be extremely costly and will only be open to the largest of the international business. Moreover people are utilized to the system that has been in place considering that the creation of the Web and having a valuable piece of property will possibly always place a smile on the face of your financial institution supervisor.

So exactly how can you get an item of this action? The all-natural primary step would certainly be to maintain your eyes and also ears wide open and try to detect certain items of Internet property that might gain good-looking revenues in the future. You need to secondly not hesitate to hypothesize. Not every domain name that you will certainly acquire will be plated with gold dust but it is fairly most likely that with some there will certainly be quite a bit greater than dirt around! Finally there are one or two important devices that you will require. The initial is an item of software able to do numerous domain name searches and also maybe a lot more importantly something to keep an eye on domain about to end. This is maybe where the most significant opportunities lay. It is fairly likely that there are some very beneficial domain names in your area of passion that have actually been signed up ages back by somebody that is simply 'resting on them' waiting for the correct time to sell. Extremely commonly these names expire due to the fact that their proprietors are not taking an active daily rate of interest in them. This truth means there are literally numerous beneficial domain running out everyday without their proprietors recognizing the reality. If you can handle to find several of these and also to swoop on them when the moment is ideal it can be equal to putting a claim-flag in the paydirt Domain Selling Websites.

Many Effective Domain on the net

If you are attempting to construct a business that has an online visibility, which nearly every company in this day and also age does, probably you have actually thought about getting the appropriate web site name as well as address for your firm. That is due to the fact that this address at which both longtime and future clients and customers can discover you online might not be more important to your company's achievement. If it is excessively complicated, as well long, or simple to puzzle with an additional site, you could be cutting yourself off from a lot of prospective business. The most successful Internet-based companies have actually gotten this part of their company model right. They have selected domain that are memorable and simple to spell, as well as capture the imagination of the customer and customer. If these organizations had selected to register various domain names, that recognizes if they would have been almost as effective? If you are looking to build a winning website, you would be wise to make note of what these companies have finished with their online existence. There are a lot of excellent lessons to discover. Without more ado, here are a few of the most effective domain names in Internet history!

1. eBay

Now, everyone as well as their mommy has bought something from this online auction site. Founded in San Jose, California in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar, a Frenchman of Iranian beginnings, the site was initially called AuctionWeb. Despite having this rather confusing domain, it still began to expand slowly over the following two years, organizing two million public auctions in January of 1997 alone, less than a year and a fifty percent after the business's founding. However the web site really blew up when its name was transformed in September of that year to eBay. Legend has it that Omidyar intended to call the website Echobay, as the online public auction website was actually owned back then by his speaking with business, Echo Bay Modern Technology Group. Yet that domain name was already possessed by a gold mining firm named Echo Bay Mines, so Omidyar needed to sign up the shortened variation of it: eBay. This great website name is brief, appealing, simple to bear in mind and also lead to: the excellent mix. So the production of the name ebay.com may have been a mishap, but its capability to develop success for its company was no fluke.

2. Facebook

Anybody who has actually seen the hit film The Social Network could already recognize this story, but for those who have not, they may be stunned to discover that the web site was initially called TheFacebook. Mark Zuckerberg, the site's founder, had never ever thought to call it anything else, till an eventful meeting with Sean Parker, the young coding whiz that founded Napster. Parker suggested reducing the name in laid-back, off-the-cuff comment, to make it cleaner. And the rest is background Domain Selling Websites.

3. YouTube

Started just 6 years back, YouTube has become one of one of the most crucial sites in the world. Customers have the ability to upload their own videos, whether they be pirated clips of their preferred TELEVISION shows, or homemade tv shows. And also the domain is simply ideal, with the assonance in the internal vowel appears making it roll off the tongue completely.

Blunders You Need To Prevent When Picking a Domain

Top 3 Mistakes You Have To Avoid When Picking a Domain Name

You ought to always try to find a domain name that's brandable, memorable and also unforgettable. If you're company relies on your individual brand name, make sure you register your full name - mine for example is Randy Charach, so my initial top priority in choosing a domain name was to get the expansion, which I did a very long time ago. As a matter of fact, I possess most other major expansions for my name and firm name, Synergy Domain names, too. Okay, those are a pair DO's, however this short article is about DONT's, so right here are the top 3 mistakes to prevent when choosing a domain Domain Selling Websites.

Mistake # 1) You should steer clear of from utilizing hyphens and also numbers in the domain name

Hyphens and also numbers in a domain reason confusion and additional explanation when the domain name is being defined verbally. Pick a reasonably brief domain name with as few letters and words as possible. This way there's likewise less chance of punctuation mistakes for your potential internet site visitor.

Error # 2) Inadvertently selecting names with greater than one meaning

Be really careful not to make the same mistakes these website owners made when picking their domain:

therapistfinder

pensiland

Blunder # 3) Registering your domain at a much less than trustworthy registrar

See to it you register your domains at a reputable and well established Registrar where that offer fair rates on domain names in addition to extra free features such as domain name forwarding and 24/7 phone assistance. Please don't shop on price alone as well as if you have not become aware of the firm previously as well as they seem little, do your due persistance or danger losing your Domain Selling Websites.

Is It Too Late To Change The Domain Name Of Your Site?

If you now realize that you've slipped up in choosing a domain name for among your currently established sites then there are 2 means you can go to repair this ...

You can create a new, appropriate keyword domain and web link it to your existing site, or place your existing site on your new domain name as well as point your old domain to the brand-new one. Ideally, you'll relocate the website to your new domain name as well as re-establish its existence there.

You'll intend to take into consideration whether there are back-links to your existing website so you don't lose your present web traffic as well as online search engine positions. If you do not know what I suggest by backlinkses and also do not recognize exactly how to relocate sites about, you might need to obtain somebody to do this for you or learn exactly how to do it on your own. None of this is very challenging; it just needs a little knowledge and a bit of time. If you do not want to find out as well as do-it-yourself, after that you can publish the job at a site where outsourcers will bid to do the benefit you.

[mentalisttraceur-long]

Any sufficiently high-level civilization will be generating countless virtual neural nets for a bunch of different stuff.

We're already doing the kind of thing, just at an infantile, low-power level. We do this thing where we generate countless AI, we make them compete against each other and/or compare them by some metrics, and then we take the best ones, copy those a bunch, and repeat, until the "survivors" countless "generations" later are good enough at doing something.

The only thing stupid about what I said is that if the current trends are any indication, most of us wouldn't get copy-pasted for anything, we'd just get deleted because we weren't good enough.

But I was thinking, back when AlphaStar results were first published...

See, AlphaStar plays StarCraft 2. Except of course AlphaStar isn't one AI, it's a selection of a few of the last generation of AIs out of myriad more - the last of a lineage of those that actually made it after each generation was made to play against each other some humanly incomprehensible amount of in-game time.

... so I was thinking it was such a profound waste, since a lot of those AIs probably had strengths and weaknesses in their play styles that might be great for certain human players to play against, either for genuine skill training or mental-reward maximization like giving players just the right level of beatable challenge so that they feel accomplished but really their victory was inevitable.

Now imagine you're a humanity, but you're a few more centuries along than we are currently, and you happen to have more usable ability to compute stuff, enough that you could simulate something that looks enough like our universe, and you want to train up AIs for stuff like emotional support and more in-depth friend/family/relationship surrogacy, medical and psychological diagnosing, software development, sex bots, policing, catching fraud, detecting the growth of ideas or organizing that you don't want on a social media platform, teaching, being a general-purpose digital assistant, etc.

Well you can't get an intelligence that can meaningfully hold a real conversation, or interpret natural language in its rich almost-entirely-context-dependent complexity, or discern requirements from human managers, or understand suffering enough to support someone through it, or innovate new solutions, or control critical hardware, all while being tightly intrinsically loyal (at least for a time) to the user or useful-to-the-user values.

..unless you raise them in a sufficiently complete simulation of life as a social animal in an environment that puts either selective pressures on the desired cognition, or generates enough mind interferometry data for you to measure with some confidence that the desired cognition is in there.

And of course if you're going through all the trouble, you might as well just throw a bunch of them into the same simulated environment, so they can stimulate each other and play off each other and have all sorts of interesting interactions. You're basically going to have to give them all exposure to other minds of their caliber anyway, might as well monitor all of them for useful results. And all along the way you're free to do anything you want and have the resources for - copy the simulation and change something, copy a single agent and replay just the stuff it could perceive, but change something along the way and see if you can get a usefully different result before the difference exceeds the computation you're willing to throw at that branch (once you have the one original recording you can in principle figure out some lazy-loading and other optimizations to compute deltas at less cost than the original).

And if your simulated AI happens to develop qualia, well that's fundamentally unknowable, so you can remain dismissively in denial about it as long as your conscience and philosophical incompetence will let you, and there's more market forces for generating more capable AI than for ethical compassionate philosophers.

It would not surprise me if what happens after we die is that our life history is analyzed to figure out how we think and feel and act, and then our mind gets copy-pasted into stuff for tasks it is deemed most useful for, because all along this was a virtual reality A.I. training farm.

[wittypenguin]

King Kong vs Godzilla (1964) [US Version]

There’s a fundamental problem with this film from the outset: the two studios involved are making it for entirely different reasons. Universal International was cashing in on the ‘Big Monster’ / kaijiu craze (The Blob, The Thing, The Creature from the Black Lagoon) by combining RKO’s character ‘King Kong’ with something exciting and foreign in Toho Studios’ property ‘Godzilla.’ Meanwhile, Toho Studios was using its big anniversary as a studio as an excuse to cram all of its popular actors and intellectual properties into one film, scattering logic to the four winds to accomplish it (it’s a wonder we don’t have Toshiro Mifune come strutting through brandishing a katana at some point). While those two driving forces don’t have to be at odds with each other, the US version takes the original, Japanese version and attempts to frame it in some sense of rational predictability, an approach which is inherently flawed. I’m going to try to ignore that part as much as I can here, but a subsequent viewing found me unable to stick with this version past the ½-hour mark, as the ‘framing device’ is so incredibly wooden and clunky. 

Be that as it may; on with the show!! 

COLOUR! WIDE SCREEN!! Questionable use of colour for lettering of credits!!!

We begin with a plate shot of Earth that looks a lot like the Universal International title card background did. While we slowly zoom in, we get… a Hamlet quote…? This seems a bit too much, but, okaaaaay…

Then we get a grainy UN building plate shot which we’ll see a couple of times, because this is also part of the ‘Americanization’ of the film. The UN has a News Service, and it’s telling us all about the various things happening in all the nations which are presumably united now. They beaming their broadcasts to us via the Universe Space Station in orbit around the planet. Shots of the USS are lifted from The Mysterians (1957), so we can also see alien flying saucers arriving at the station, but it’s never explained, so maybe this transfer is better than the film makers expected and we weren’t supposed to see them at all. 

Hey, the Chilean reporter is Victor Millan, the young husband / boyfriend from A Touch of Evil!

There are earthquakes in Chile, plus melting ice floes in the Bearing Straight, so the world is having a rough time of it.

The last time we saw Godzilla, he was buried in an avalanche, so clearly that’s where the big lizard will emerge from here. A recent increase in water temperature in the Bering Straight causes a US submarine with some researchers to be sent to take a look, and they debate their course of action in a large control room on the sub, which comes complete with an “undersea periscope.” I doubt that is an Actual Thing.

Buddy, you can call it any sort of exotic fruit from the Faroe Islands you feel like claiming it is, but it will still be a strawberry. — — — —

Meanwhile: King Kong is on Farou Island, where a berry is being grown which has non-addictive and narcotic properties that a Japanese pharmaceutical company wishes to incorporate into its product line (don’t ask, just accept it [we actually learned about this fruit during Mothra, but this is a different island near the Marshall Island H-Bomb testing range (I think)]). A team of Tokyo TeleVision people are sent to the island to get the berries plus the mighty Kong as a marketing stunt (ibid). 

“Hokkaido” is not pronounced like that. At. All.

Repeatedly, the English dubbing has Japanese characters pronounce it as “hawk-eh-EYE-doh,” not only mangling the name but adding an extra syllable into the bargain. The Japanese UNTV reporter, played by James Yagi, pronounces it properly as “ho-KAI-doh.” You would think someone might think to themselves ‘hey, maybe the Asian guy’s pronunciation is the right one…?’

The depiction of the natives of Faroe Island [above] are creations of racism. Not only are they in blackface, they carry African-style shields with similar markings, yet are South Sea Islanders located just off the Marshall Islands. Plus there is liberal use of feathers in headdresses which look remarkably similar to the people of the North American plains regions. Wow. There may have even been a bone through someone’s nose, I didn’t look that closely. Even allowing for early-60s comedy sensibilities, this is really bad; nearly “Andy Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s” territory. It’s important to view this as a stereotype of the time, as well as a depiction of a non-existent people (perhaps with the defence ‘so how could anyone be offended?’ well… uh…).

I’m stunned that Japanese trains not only do not have radios to receive a warning about Godzilla, they also lack a reverse gear to back away from him. Also, where did these buses to save all the rail passengers suddenly come from? If they were able to corral all of these motor coaches, couldn’t they have somehow got word to… never mind. 

Must so many O-scale model trains be made to suffer?

I want many of these cars. Most of the suits, also. 

There are massive leaps of ��logic’ here that I’m positive make more sense in the original Japanese version. Then again, it may be like the material above and we should stop looking for that. This is the problem with the American sections: they keep trying to root the story in half-real science and logic, but that should be avoided with every effort! ‘When will the fools learn…‽’ etc.

Kong looks more like an extremely badly made Sasquatch than King of the Apes. For one thing, his arms are (occasionally) much too long and the person inside clearly has their wrists at Kong’s elbows (but this detail oddly comes and goes). Also, he’s covered in some sort of steel wool or matted shag carpeting. His face is an awful excuse for any sort of simian form. It’s an embarrassment. 

Godzilla, on the other hand, is a happy, fun-filled dinosaur who is extra-mobile compared to his earlier appearances. He jumps up and down and claps his… paws? …claws? …hands? …front feet? He’s like a young child! Okay, a 300 foot tall child capable of throwing boulders bigger than houses, but he’s got that playful energy. 

The model work is really uneven: the ships, trucks, earth movers, and so on look ‘good’ to ‘great,’ but the human figures look uniformly like little plastic objects which can only described as ‘human adjacent.’ It’s like you described human form to a blind and stupid person, and they carved a figure out of Jell-O using a spatula. On a warm day. 

Why does the army try catching Godzilla in a pit and exploding dynamite around him when he survived an H-Bomb? They tried that with electricity-conductive nets in Mothra and he worked clear of them. Even with here adding an acid bath and burning gasoline, it seems…

Why does Godzilla now avoid encountering electrical lines when he basically conquered it before? Has he learned that it’s more hassle than it’s worth? Can Godzilla be considered this sentient?

Also, what’s that white guy doing in the Japanese army?

Sorry, I forgot that logic isn’t a part of these things… [:: heavy sigh ::]

When Kong grabs a girl and people shine lights at him, he does what he knows best: climbs to the top of the nearest building. In this case, it’s the Diet (Japan’s Parliament), and the top of the dome is about level with his shoulder, so it doesn’t really count as a huge visual statement or accomplishment. It would be like you standing on a chair: yes, you’re higher up, but it’s not exactly a K-2 level of accomplishment, is it?

Additionally, Godzilla actually destroyed that building in the first film, but they’ve had awhile to rebuild, I guess.

Where’d they get this awful quality of film showing people evacuating Tokyo (Chiba in the Japanese version) via the docks? Answer: Chikyû Bôeigun (1957), and there are a few other bits of footage that film supplies.

I swear the rocky area that’s supposed to be at the base of Mt Fujiyama was modelled on the big rock thing Star Trek TOS used all the time. 

Am I supposed to be rooting for Kong? I’m rooting for Kong here. Godzilla just seems like a real dick, frankly. 

Special effects director Eiji Tsuburaya deliberately gave King Kong a semi-comical personality, because he did not want Kong to frighten young children, and wanted the general audience to root for Kong over the more frightening Godzilla.

Ah. Good to know. 

The film features the Davy Crockett, a portable missile-launched nuclear weapon developed by the United States. At the time, this weapon was still classified.

Who would have expected this film to be a source of military secrets?

Late on, we see Kong practicing gavage using a tree! It’s actually a call back to a bit in an early production still from King Kong (1933) showing him doing that to a Tyrannosaurus Rex. 

Between Godzilla and King Kong, no historical monument will ever be left standing. 

Thanks to the English dubbing laying it on with a shovel, dialogue provides a fair few repeated statements about ‘electricity makes Kong stronger’ near the end. Thank goodness they do, as I certainly didn’t remember that from a few scenes ago and missed it the first five times time here. 

Godzilla disappears, presumed drowned…? Kong survives and we see him wading away from Japan, so the people of the Island Kingdom are safe once more! 

The best thing about this version is it leaves one with a strong desire to see the original version. 

★★★☆☆

[lligkv]

a fantasy of unselfconscious being

Natasha Stagg’s Sleeveless is a book of essays written about the NYC media scene of the 2010s. It’s a particular, hermetic scene, and NYC isn’t quite the cultural center it was in mid-century America. But it has given Stagg, who has worked in advertising, fashion, tech, and magazines, the benefit of close proximity to some crucial transformations in American life, like shifting definitions of privacy as social media, content creation, and the generation of data for corporations become increasingly prevalent; the rise of image-making and the personal brand as a fundamental and increasingly automatic element in life online; and the emergence of the quintessential “body trend” of the past decade: an “in transition” or “work-in-progress” body—a body that’s actively being altered and changed, through makeup trends and modification, with the changes being documented and turned into content as they happen.

“New ways of branding,” as she puts it, “are unquestionably informing the ways in which we think.” And it’s harder to think of ourselves as we did “before we were made to feel so implicit in advertising.” “ If I look at it in a dystopian way,” she adds, “this might be the last chance I have to thoughtfully speak on these subjects before I forget them, like a dream, because of their very own projections.”

In the essay “Right Place,” Stagg disputes a claim Kanye West made that Kim Kardashian is the Marilyn Monroe of our time and posits that she’s actually our Marie Antoinette: “unexpected, obliviously reckless, and destined for demise.” It’s an inspired comparison. But “destined for demise” seems a bit much. It seems very unlikely Kim will die, or do much more than she’s doing now. More likely Kim will remain as she is now: an object of gossip and takes, good and bad, as she keeps amassing the profit of her show, her endorsements, and her product lines, undeterred. (In that way, Kardashian occupies the same position as another cultural object people talk about a lot these days, the HBO show Succession—which could be a satire, as some argue, or a straight drama, as others do; which could be said to critique the milieu it portrays or replicate its dynamics. Either way, neither its intent or effect much matters in the end. What matters is that it gets HBO new eyes, more advertising dollars, and more “relevance,” that much stronger a presence in pop culture.)

And ultimately, there may not be much profit at all in searching for cultural symbols from the past to compare Kim to, if the internet, advertising, the brand, and its consequences for our selves’ construction is truly the enduring transformation that Stagg’s book suggests.

“As women,” she writes, “we are so controlled by the impulsive beauty standards set by consumerism, the only way to take back control is to become,” like  Kardashian, “the standard by which beauty is measured.” The claim evokes Mark Fisher’s notion of capitalist realism—the idea there’s no imaginable alternative to capitalism. It also evokes the notion of human capital as Malcolm Harris explores it in his book Kids These Days: the idea that every one of us is a “capital project,” and it falls to us to live in ways that reduce our risk and increase our value.

If you’re on the internet in the 2010s, there’s a system so much bigger than you that you have no choice but to participate in. And you try to win its game by cultivating the most human capital you can, the strongest brand. That’s the only way you can gain any kind of foothold as you’re caught up in its wave, the only way you gain any shred of power against the system’s own power.

But even then, that power is only the most comfortable form of oppression. At one point in “Right Place” Stagg cites bell hooks’s assertion, in 2016, that the power that female performers like Beyonce have is “pure fantasy”—and she disagrees. Beyonce will always be “more popular” than Jay-Z, she points out. To her mind, the power held by media figures (often female) is greater than the power held by government or even money, and so female power like Beyonce’s and Kim’s is stronger than male power like the kinds Jay-Z or Kanye West have—which was power amassed through music and fashion, too, as opposed to sheer fame like Kim’s.

And sure, you could see it that way. But media power is basically popularity. And what can popularity really do besides keep you in the public eye with some degree of public favor? Isn’t the power that, say, Trump is capable of, as president, simply more than the power Kim Kardashian has? And isn’t that why Kanye West aspires to run for president, as, Stagg argues, Kim Kardashian would never do?

I would be willing to grant that the power of the media star may entail less risk than that of the politician, or a more manageable kind of stress. And in that sense it makes sense Kim Kardashian would desire it more. But it also achieves less. The power of fame occurs within a system, and it yields a profit that redounds only to you. Meanwhile, the politician’s power, executed well—or even executed poorly, clumsily, almost inadvertently, as Trump’s case shows—can change that system, in that it can both profit you and oppress others.

What’s more, the power of fame comes at the expense of having to please people, and to deal with their prying eyes, scrutinizing every corner of your life…

The idea that all parts of your life might be open for you to broadcast and monetize, as they are for influencers—those who are paid to exhibit and endorse products or services on social media, in money or in more nebulous reward like attention or recognition—disturbs Stagg as it does me. Sleeveless is especially interesting when it engages with those who aspire to join the Kardashian ranks or to be the ones who might create new Kardashians; those who strike the Faustian bargain of privacy and integrity for fame with avidity. In a companion piece to “Right Place” titled “Right Time,” Stagg profiles Adam Rivietz, founder of #paid, an agency that manages the careers of influencers. When Stagg shares her fears about the all-encompassing nature of the project of fashioning your self as a brand, Rivietz seems to agree. “But if you’re on the founding side of it,” he tells her, “you can choose how you want to guide the industry, what governing bodies you’re going to work with to maintain standards.”

The comment suggests, again, that when capitalism becomes capitalist realism, we’re all helpless but to succumb. In fact, you’d be stupid to refuse the chance to make money off your platform, if the things you do on that platform would boost a company’s profits anyway. That’s the argument that influencer agencies like #paid make: “Your brand is already established, they coax. If you’re not making money from it, you’re working for free.”

As Stagg notes, that’s not really how economies work. It’s not a given that any social media activity you make is automatically a brand from which you should, if you’re smart, profit. Companies like #paid had to make the conversion of social media activity to a brand an economically attractive proposition. But the “brand”—which, at its core, is just the sum of the impressions of yourself that you leave behind anytime you use a social media tool, once those impressions become regular enough to be coherent as a product of their own—is just so integral to the self as it’s registered online, as all selves in the 2010s must be. And the project of creating a branded self is just so open to monetization now. In time it might become one of the last sure ways to make a lot of money, if that’s what you’re after, as industries like manufacturing, media, and retail all fall victim to offshoring or automation or monopoly. It’s all too easy to think of it that way.

Maybe the moment we created an image of our lives, online, that differed or just had the potential to differ from our lives as we live them, we crossed a Rubicon. The idea of the influencer became a threat. And then, throw in neoliberal conditions—sanction the consolidation of industries in service of the hypercapitalist pursuit of profit; get rid of the safety net that might make life less precarious and the need for money of some kind less pressing—and the influencer becomes an inevitability.

All this ties into something I’ve been thinking about for a long while: my sense, like so many others’, that “selling out,” which used to be such a thing when art and advertising were separate—when advertising and the market were a centrifugal force that orbited around “real,” “authentic” life—isn’t really a coherent concept anymore. When did that happen? When did that centrifuge collapse?

That’s the question Sleeveless explores—when did advertising, both the industry and of the self, take over everything?—and quite well. It provides no answers (and I wonder if any of us have those). But in the process of describing the fashion, media, advertising, and branding landscapes as she’s watched them evolve, Stagg gives you many small, sharp insights. For instance, when Stagg describes the way that advertising so often incorporates the tools people use to criticize it, like sarcasm or memes (think the Wendy’s Twitter feed), she writes: “Corporations, as they say, are people. And people, it seems, are corporations.” As I write that out, it sounds banal—but I also think, Of course. Why wouldn’t that maxim, corporations are people, cut both ways? And then we meet the kind of person-as-corporation she means: Torri Webster, one of #paid’s “content creators,” who’s the quintessential millennial subject by Harris’s definition—efficient, hypercompetent, devoted to cultivating her human capital. When Webster speaks, it’s like a job application statement come to life: “Being a creator is wonderful,” she says, “because it has given me the opportunity to gain interdisciplinary skills.” By the close of “Right Time,” she’s already preparing to shift her work away from writing paid posts for brands to meet the economy’s next permutation, whatever that will be.

Which leads me to the endpoint of all this. Do you accept the hell we’re in, like Webster or Rivietz, or do you squirm in it, as Stagg does?

And those are the options. Effective resistance is impossible. Especially now that the system that’s constituted by branding, advertising, and online self-creation has outpaced the language one might use to critique it, like “fake.” When a male model leaves a comment on Kim Kardashian’s Instagram accusing her and her carefully constructed body of being fake, Stagg sees his point; she also thinks, “None of this is real, so calling her ‘not real’ seems beside the point.”

If you tell an influencer she’s “not real,” the answer she gives you might be that of the competitor—putting you right on her same plane: “I know it’s not real. Are you jealous of what I have—what I’ve built?” (That’s the angle Kardashian seems to have taken—in a way. She accused the model of being critical because he was gay and therefore not attracted to her—which wasn’t true.) Or, the influencer might assume the role of the victim. “What did I do to you? I’m just minding my own business. I’m just trying to survive.” This too allows her to leverage her platform to subsume your criticism. In arousing the sympathy of her followers, she turns your criticism into another part of her brand’s narrative. Either way, it’s clear the influencer and her critic exist in the same world—and the critic’s criticism won’t get her out of it.

When self-knowledge emerges from self-creation, and when self-creation is about the way you brand and sell yourself, does self-knowledge become meaningless? Say you don’t participate in the influence economy, when the possibility of doing so is available to us and feels both natural and imperative. Does the thing that is “you” dissolve? Like a tree in the forest with no one to hear? At the end of the essay “Naming Names,” at the very end of the book, Stagg has a fight with her boyfriend. She writes, “I was so completely in love and heartbroken thinking that maybe it wasn’t the last time I would be.” And suddenly, she’s face to face with the paralyzing question we all have to deal with when we’re simultaneously selves and personal brands: Is anything she feels genuine, or is it all part of the image of herself she wants to construct?

I remembered being alone on my roof in the summer, single, and enjoying it. Had I enjoyed it, or had I taken photos of myself to feel distracted? I could be alone again, I thought, as long as I didn’t know that’s what I was.

First, there’s the memory. Then, there’s the doubt of the memory. Finally, there’s the fantasy of unself-conscious being. But the curse of this time we live in is that you’ll always have this sense of what you are.

[lesbianmakototachibana]

Heads UP - prospective death of social security - are republicans tilting at windmills?

Salon: Donald Trump is coming for your Social Security: How the GOP plans a bait-and-switch to cut taxes — and pensions - Republicans have not given up on their dream to kill the social safety net while cutting taxes

The Republicans will never give up on trying the destroy the safety net. It’s one of their fundamental organizing principles along with tax cuts. Other issues may come and go but these two are perennial. And according to the AP the administration has decided to scrap Trump’s previously announced tax plan in favor of a new “reform” agenda that will accomplish both the dismantling of the Social Security guarantee and their cherished tax cuts for the wealthy.

They are also, unsurprisingly, being dishonest about their intentions. Social Security expert Nancy Altman described it as a Trojan Horse but considering Trump’s ostentatious promises to protect the program, perhaps it’s better described as a garden variety bait and switch. Simply put, they are planning to completely abandon Social Security’s dedicated funding stream from the FICA payroll deduction and pay for the program with general revenues. They will sell this as a tax cut for workers, which is what it will look like on the paycheck.  But Trump’s rumored innovation is to replace the money with a form of VAT, which means that average workers, who spend most of their money on consumer goods, will still pay they will just lose their retirement guarantee. Rich people will get their tax cuts and don’t need Social Security anyway. It’s a GOP win-win.

What this means is that Social Security will become part of the normal budget process, subject to the whim of each congress as they appropriate money for wars and pet projects and their favorite form of fear-mongering nonsense, “deficit reduction.” It is inevitable that the basic contract all citizens have with their government — that they will commit a portion of their wages to the Federal Insurance Contributions Act (FICA) account and will be guaranteed a pension 40 years from now — will be declared null and void. That contract has paid out to several generations since its inception in the 1930s, no thanks to the Republicans who have consistently tried to find ways to dismantle it.

Although the assaults on the safety net programs have been relentless, at each turn Americans have fought back, the most recent example being the attempt by President George W. Bush to privatize the system by diverting the funds to Wall Street. That plan was thwarted by activism and organization and the epic stock market crash of 2007 took it off the table for the foreseeable future.

Historian Arthur Schlesinger has written about the final passage of Social Security:

“The federal government was at last charged with the obligation to provide its citizens a measure of protection from the hazards and vicissitudes of life. One hundred and ten years earlier, John Quincy Adams had declared that ‘the great object of the institution of civil, government’ was ‘the progressive improvement of the condition of the governed.’ With the Social Security Act, the constitutional dedication of federal power to the general welfare began a new phase of national history.”

It’s the GOP’s 75-year experience with Social Security and 40-year history with Medicare that made them lose their minds over the Affordable Care Act. They know very well that social insurance benefits are nearly impossible to take away once they are enacted. People want them and will pay for them. We just watched them meet that problem head on once again. And once again they were pushed back by citizens who believe they have a right to basic old age security and health care like every other industrialized nation on the planet.

But it looks like these Republicans, under the leadership of the fake populist and totally incompetent Donald Trump, may be stupid enough to take on Social Security again. They just love to tilt at this windmill and they get caught in the blades every time.

[entergamingxp]

What the Golf? is a jubillant middle finger to games that waste your time • Eurogamer.net

Over the festive break we’ll be running through our top 20 picks of the year’s best games, leading up to the reveal of Eurogamer’s game of the year on New Year’s Eve. You can find all the pieces published to date here – and thanks for joining us throughout the year!

What the Golf? (yes, there is a question mark in the title and I’m going to stick with it, sorry) is a simple game about nothing, and that is more than enough. It is, I think, the game that captures the big bang arrival of Apple Arcade better than any other. That moment was an explosion of creativity, a sudden, off-guard and off-beat arrival of fun. It was the best thing to happen to video games in the last year, I think, and at the core of it all was this silly, simple, endlessly enjoyable game about pinging things around for a laugh.

In What the Golf? you are a golf ball plonking around some zany science lab of an overworld, unlocking a path by completing the odd little golf courses that are really science experiments, or something, and occasionally getting told off by a big computer. Honestly it really doesn’t matter. The brilliance is the simplicity of its fun and the basic, fundamental pleasure of playing it.

This is not an original thought, but much of gaming has become an ordeal in recent years. It’s an ordeal to literally start a game, waiting for downloads, managing space, juggling performance – now a concern of console owners, sadly, as much as those on PC – and it’s often an ordeal to actually play them. Modern games’ desire to monopolise your time and attention seems to be rising perfectly in line with your lack of it. I am tired binging and junk gaming as an escape, tired of games demanding I work for my dinner, like fun is something to be earned, like I have to be worthy of it, like I must commit. I hate commitment! I have enough trouble with that as it is!

What the Golf? is, in a way, an antidote to it. I can turn to What the Golf? instead of Twitter or Instagram or Facebook, other gamifications of my mind and my time. I can turn to it instead of another god forsaken battle pass or end game, level-cap-only raid. It’s a snack, quick and easy and instantly gratifying, but somehow one that won’t ruin the inside of my gut or try to lace my brain with addiction. It’s good, clean fun, kids, full of guffawing stupidity and placative niceness. It is, in what feels like such a rarity, actually a funny game, without resorting to Whedonesque quippiness or memified, office poster self-reference. It is mercifully easy to pick up and put down anywhere. It’s built immaculately well for the mobile form, although if I worked anywhere but here I’d be downloading it on my office computer and pinging about in it on breaks too. It’s joy without guilt, strings emphatically unattached. An effortlessly pure game, without the vile aftertaste of what some consider “pure games” to be. Play it! Have fun. That’s all there is to it.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2019/12/what-the-golf-is-a-jubillant-middle-finger-to-games-that-waste-your-time-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=what-the-golf-is-a-jubillant-middle-finger-to-games-that-waste-your-time-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net