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#BUT IVE ALREADY READ THE BOOK ITS FINE
saltavenegar · 10 months
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Found a gem from years ago
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iknaenmal · 1 year
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Gonna go sleep now gn everyone :]
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my biggest grievance with the current wave of cutesy lgbt ya romance novel is tbh that theyre recycling the exact same premises as hit ya novels 10 years ago but everyones acting like those authors invented space travel cause its #representation now
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firebuug · 2 years
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I love the name julian i think i found the name of all time fr fr
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timeisacephalopod · 1 year
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Watch "A Brief Look at Harry Potter" on YouTube
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If you're feeling nostalgic for harry Potter watch this delightful breakdown of JKR's world done by a trans creator- seriously the breakdown of the politics of HP is brilliantly done. Watch it and let me know what you think of economagics 😂😂
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dryptid · 11 months
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ok this is hater talk...
#but the more i think about it the more MAD i am that theyre using flight of icarus for a stranger things book#as an iron maiden fan and also someone that knows this book is mostly just a cash grab for the eddie girlies....#im steamed lol#i just wanted to vent abt this lol but GOD#im not for gatekeeping metal and iron maiden is like. everyone knows it and if they dont theyd be like oh yeah i tink ive heard of that...#but like. ☝️ this is poser behavior#it rubs me the wrong way the same way people putting eyeliner on eddie. like this boy is clearly a thrasher#i dunno its like. using a song title from one of eddies favorite bands that he has a patch of? cool. fine. but only if the book will be good#i just KNOW the details will be lacking. the metal zines the demos sent across the country the start of thrash i just KNOW it wont b in ther#like there is so much you could do with late teen metal head eddie and i know they r making it about music already but im WORRIED that itll#just seem like cursory research and like. no real showing of what the early thrash guys were into#like i said this is HATER TALK and i just WANT to say it. so ignore me i do not care#like ok the thing is he needs to get money to record his demo for this paige person. and so hes gonna start dealing drugs....#DUDE. most of the cassettes sent back and forth were fucking tapes recorded at shitty live shows by some buddy of the band.#these stakes are so dramatized....#like. they could even borrow equipment from the school to do this ....#demo tapes dont have to be crazy good?? especially in the metal scene???#sorry this is what stranger things gets for dipping a toe into a subculture they thought looked cool#PUT IN THE WORK!!!!!!!!!!!!#i wont be reading this book 😌#ok hater talk over. if you read these tags... hi 👋
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opens-up-4-nobody · 1 year
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me-her-and-la-lune · 2 years
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going to re-read maximum ride (cry for help)
#ive already re-read the twilight books. i just finished the hush hush series. the only book series left in my adolescence hyperfixation#stage is maximum ride. there is something deeply wrong with me where i cant focus on other things except these books#i blame my career situation rn. everything is changing again and im overwhelmed and emotional and its time to cling onto the books that#would help me when i was younger.#also. btw. i know no one cares but i havent read the full hush hush series probably since finale came out#and like. the second book fucking makes me miserable LOL#i used to just skip to the parts that i enjoyed but i wanted to read it all the way through and i hated it so much. it was good but it#sucks** **its good in the way that i cherish it from middle school. its YA fiction. i love them but thats about it#anyway. lots of stuff going on. ill be fine but like. if no one got me i know nora and patch got me u kno#ALSO i used to be able to read books SO MUCH FASTER it took me like seven hours to get through finale. i used to be able to read that book#like. within four and a half/five hours#anyway. i stayed up until like four am last night reading silence and woke up at nine this morning and my brain wouldnt let me sleep#like it demanded i read finale. like ok brain were almost 26 we really dont have to be doing this#anyway! may or may not start reading maximum ride tomorrow. at least that series goes on for like eight or nine books or something#i have not read this series since the final book came out. lets see what it does to my mental state LOL!#okay anyway. sry. im just going through it and i dont wanna bother my friends with it bc like. theyre going through worse things than i am#oh tags we're really in it now#i just have felt weird for months and its coming to a head now and manifesting itself in me reading my middle school books. its weird#like. can i finish killing eve pls? can i finish the multiple shows and games i have on my plate? can i read NEW BOOKS?#the answer??? NO!!!!!!!!!!!!! im stuck to re-read YA bc its familar and comforting and somehow the stories still make my heart squeeze#I'M CRING oh sorry for yelling im cringeposting sry
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hevendor · 3 months
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bought more books today after i just bought more books last week ...
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The enshittification of garage-door openers reveals a vast and deadly rot
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I'll be at the Studio City branch of the LA Public Library on Monday, November 13 at 1830hPT to launch my new novel, The Lost Cause. There'll be a reading, a talk, a surprise guest (!!) and a signing, with books on sale. Tell your friends! Come on down!
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How could this happen? Owners of Chamberlain MyQ automatic garage door openers just woke up to discover that the company had confiscated valuable features overnight, and that there was nothing they could do about it.
Oh, we know what happened, technically speaking. Chamberlain shut off the API for its garage-door openers, which breaks their integration with home automation systems like Home Assistant. The company even announced that it was doing this, calling the integration an "unauthorized usage" of its products, though the "unauthorized" parties in this case are the people who own Chamberlain products:
https://chamberlaingroup.com/press/a-message-about-our-decision-to-prevent-unauthorized-usage-of-myq
We even know why Chamberlain did this. As Ars Technica's Ron Amadeo points out, shutting off the API is a way for Chamberlain to force its customers to use its ad-beshitted, worst-of-breed app, so that it can make a few pennies by nonconsensually monetizing its customers' eyeballs:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/chamberlain-blocks-smart-garage-door-opener-from-working-with-smart-homes/
But how did this happen? How did a giant company like Chamberlain come to this enshittening juncture, in which it felt empowered to sabotage the products it had already sold to its customers? How can this be legal? How can it be good for business? How can the people who made this decision even look themselves in the mirror?
To answer these questions, we must first consider the forces that discipline companies, acting against the impulse to enshittify their products and services. There are four constraints on corporate conduct:
I. Competition. The fear of losing your business to a rival can stay even the most sociopathic corporate executive's hand.
II. Regulation. The fear of being fined, criminally sanctioned, or banned from doing business can check the greediest of leaders.
III. Capability. Corporate executives can dream up all kinds of awful ways to shift value from your side of the ledger to their own, but they can only do the things that are technically feasible.
IV. Self-help. The possibility of customers modifying, reconfiguring or altering their products to restore lost functionality or neutralize antifeatures carries an implied threat to vendors. If a printer company's anti-generic-ink measures drives a customer to jailbreak their printers, the original manufacturer's connection to that customer is permanently severed, as the customer creates a durable digital connection to a rival.
When companies act in obnoxious, dishonest, shitty ways, they aren't merely yielding to temptation – they are evading these disciplining forces. Thus, the Great Enshittening we are living through doesn't reflect an increase in the wickedness of corporate leadership. Rather, it represents a moment in which each of these disciplining factors have been gutted by specific policies.
This is good news, actually. We used to put down rat poison and we didn't have a rat problem. Then we stopped putting down rat poison and rats are eating us alive. That's not a nice feeling, but at least we know at least one way of addressing it – we can start putting down poison again. That is, we can start enforcing the rules that we stopped enforcing, in living memory. Having a terrible problem is no fun, but the best kind of terrible problem to have is one that you know a solution to.
As it happens, Chamberlain is a neat microcosm for all the bad policy choices that created the Era of Enshittification. Let's go through them:
Competition: Chamberlain doesn't have to worry about competition, because it is owned by a private equity fund that "rolled up" all of Chamberlain's major competitors into a single, giant firm. Most garage-door opener brands are actually Chamberlain, including "LiftMaster, Chamberlain, Merlin, and Grifco":
https://www.lakewoodgaragedoor.biz/blog/the-history-of-garage-door-openers
This is a pretty typical PE rollup, and it exploits a bug in US competition law called "Antitrust's Twilight Zone":
https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken
When companies buy each other, they are subject to "merger scrutiny," a set of guidelines that the FTC and DoJ Antitrust Division use to determine whether the outcome is likely to be bad for competition. These rules have been pretty lax since the Reagan administration, but they've currently being revised to make them substantially more strict:
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-and-ftc-seek-comment-draft-merger-guidelines
One of the blind spots in these merger guidelines is an exemption for mergers valued at less than $101m. Under the Hart-Scott-Rodino Act, these fly under the radar, evading merger scrutiny. That means that canny PE companies can roll up dozens and dozens of standalone businesses, like funeral homes, hospital beds, magic mushrooms, youth addiction treatment centers, mobile home parks, nursing homes, physicians’ practices, local newspapers, or e-commerce sellers:
http://www.economicliberties.us/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Serial-Acquisitions-Working-Paper-R4-2.pdf
By titrating the purchase prices, PE companies – like Blackstone, owners of Chamberlain and all the other garage-door makers – can acquire a monopoly without ever raising a regulatory red flag.
But antitrust enforcers aren't helpless. Under (the long dormant) Section 7 of the Clayton Act, competition regulators can block mergers that lead to "incipient monopolization." The incipiency standard prevented monopolies from forming from 1914, when the Clayton Act passed, until the Reagan administration. We used to put down rat poison, and we didn't have rats. We stopped, and rats are gnawing our faces off. We still know where the rat poison is – maybe we should start putting it down again.
On to regulation. How is it possible for Chamberlain to sell you a garage-door opener that has an API and works with your chosen home automation system, and then unilaterally confiscate that valuable feature? Shouldn't regulation protect you from this kind of ripoff?
It should, but it doesn't. Instead, we have a bunch of regulations that protect Chamberlain from you. Think of binding arbitration, which allows Chamberlain to force you to click through an "agreement" that takes away your right to sue them or join a class-action suit:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/20/benevolent-dictators/#felony-contempt-of-business-model
But regulation could protect you from Chamberlain. Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act allows the FTC to ban any "unfair and deceptive" conduct. This law has been on the books since 1914, but Section 5 has been dormant, forgotten and unused, for decades. The FTC's new dynamo chair, Lina Khan, has revived it, and is use it like a can-opener to free Americans who've been trapped by abusive conduct:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge
Khan's used Section 5 powers to challenge privacy invasions, noncompete clauses, and other corporate abuses – the bait-and-switch tactics of Chamberlain are ripe for a Section 5 case. If you buy a gadget because it has five features and then the vendor takes two of them away, they are clearly engaged in "unfair and deceptive" conduct.
On to capability. Since time immemorial, corporate leaders have fetishized "flexibility" in their business arrangements – like the ability to do "dynamic pricing" that changes how much you pay for something based on their guess about how much you are willing to pay. But this impulse to play shell games runs up against the hard limits of physical reality: grocers just can't send an army of rollerskated teenagers around the store to reprice everything as soon as a wealthy or desperate-looking customer comes through the door. They're stuck with crude tactics like doubling the price of a flight that doesn't include a Saturday stay as a way of gouging business travelers on an expense account.
With any shell-game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. Corporate crooks armed with computers aren't smarter or more wicked than their analog forebears, but they are faster. Digital tools allow companies to alter the "business logic" of their services from instant to instant, in highly automated ways:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
The monopoly coalition has successfully argued that this endless "twiddling" should not be constrained by privacy, labor or consumer protection law. Without these constraints, corporate twiddlers can engage in all kinds of ripoffs, like wage theft and algorithmic wage discrimination:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men
Twiddling is key to the Darth Vader MBA ("I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it further"), in which features are confiscated from moment to moment, without warning or recourse:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure
There's no reason to accept the premise that violating your privacy, labor rights or consumer rights with a computer is so different from analog ripoffs that existing laws don't apply. The unconstrained twiddling of digital ripoff artists is a plague on billions of peoples' lives, and any enforcer who sticks up for our rights will have an army of supporters behind them.
Finally, there's the fear of self-help measures. All the digital flexibility that tech companies use to take value away can be used to take it back, too. The whole modern history of digital computers is the history of "adversarial interoperability," in which the sleazy antifeatures of established companies are banished through reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other forms of technological guerrilla warfare:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability
Adversarial interoperability represents a serious threat to established business. If you're a printer company gouging on toner, your customers might defect to a rival that jailbreaks your security measures. That's what happened to Lexmark, who lost a case against the toner-refilling company Static Controls, which went on to buy Lexmark:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/felony-contempt-business-model-lexmarks-anti-competitive-legacy
Sure, your customers are busy and inattentive and you can degrade the quality of your product a lot before they start looking for ways out. But once they cross that threshold, you can lose them forever. That's what happened to Microsoft: the company made the tactical decision to produce a substandard version of Office for the Mac in a drive to get Mac users to switch to Windows. Instead, Apple made Iwork (Pages, Numbers and Keynote), which could read and write every Office file, and Mac users threw away Office, the only Microsoft product they owned, permanently severing their relationship to the company:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay
Today, companies can operate without worrying about this kind of self-help measure. There' a whole slew of IP rights that Chamberlain can enforce against you if you try to fix your garage-door opener yourself, or look to a competitor to sell you a product that restores the feature they took away:
https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/
Jailbreaking your Chamberlain gadget in order to make it answer to a rival's app involves bypassing a digital lock. Trafficking in a tool to break a digital lock is a felony under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright, carrying a five-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine.
In other words, it's not just that tech isn't regulated, allowing for endless twiddling against your privacy, consumer rights and labor rights. It's that tech is badly regulated, to permit unlimited twiddling by tech companies to take away your rightsand to prohibit any twiddling by you to take them back. The US government thumbs the scales against you, creating a regime that Jay Freeman aptly dubbed "felony contempt of business model":
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/23/how-to-fix-cars-by-breaking-felony-contempt-of-business-model/
All kinds of companies have availed themselves of this government-backed superpower. There's DRM – digital locks, covered by DMCA 1201 – in powered wheelchairs:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/06/when-drm-comes-your-wheelchair
In dishwashers:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/03/cassette-rewinder/#disher-bob
In treadmills:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/06/22/vapescreen/#jane-get-me-off-this-crazy-thing
In tractors:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/
It should come as no surprise to learn that Chamberlain has used DMCA 1201 to block interoperable garage door opener components:
https://scholarship.law.marquette.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1233&context=iplr
That's how we arrived at this juncture, where a company like Chamberlain can break functionality its customers value highly, solely to eke out a minuscule new line of revenue by selling ads on their own app.
Chamberlain bought all its competitors.
Chamberlain operates in a regulatory environment that is extremely tolerant of unfair and deceptive practices. Worse: they can unilaterally take away your right to sue them, which means that if regulators don't bestir themselves to police Chamberlain, you are shit out of luck.
Chamberlain has endless flexibility to unilaterally alter its products' functionality, in fine-grained ways, even after you've purchased them.
Chamberlain can sue you if you try to exercise some of that same flexibility to protect yourself from their bad practices.
Combine all four of those factors, and of course Chamberlain is going to enshittify its products. Every company has had that one weaselly asshole at the product-planning table who suggests a petty grift like breaking every one of the company's customers' property to sell a few ads. But historically, the weasel lost the argument to others, who argued that making every existing customer furious would affect the company's bottom line, costing it sales and/or fines, and prompting customers to permanently sever their relationship with the company by seeking out and installing alternative software. Take away all the constraints on a corporation's worst impulses, and this kind of conduct is inevitable:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/
This isn't limited to Chamberlain. Without the discipline of competition, regulation, self-help measures or technological limitations, every industry in undergoing wholesale enshittification. It's not a coincidence that Chamberlain's grift involves a push to move users into its app. Because apps can't be reverse-engineered and modified without risking DMCA 1201 prosecution, forcing a user into an app is a tidy and reliable way to take away that user's rights.
Think about ad-blocking. One in four web users has installed an ad-blockers ("the biggest boycott in world history" -Doc Searls). Zero app users have installed app-blockers, because they don't exist, because making one is a felony. An app is just a web-page wrapped in enough IP to make it a crime to defend yourself against corporate predation:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/27/an-audacious-plan-to-halt-the-internets-enshittification-and-throw-it-into-reverse/
The temptation to enshitiffy isn't new, but the ability to do so without consequence is a modern phenomenon, the intersection of weak policy enforcement and powerful technology. Your car is autoenshittified, a rolling rent-seeking platform that spies on you and price-gouges you:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon
Cars are in an uncontrolled skid over Enshittification Cliff. Honda, Toyota, VW and GM all sell cars with infotainment systems that harvest your connected phone's text-messages and send them to the corporation for data-mining. What's more, a judge in Washington state just ruled that this is legal:
https://therecord.media/class-action-lawsuit-cars-text-messages-privacy
While there's no excuse for this kind of sleazy conduct, we can reasonably anticipate that if our courts would punish companies for engaging in it, they might be able to resist the temptation. No wonder Mozilla's latest Privacy Not Included research report called cars "the worst product category we have ever reviewed":
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/articles/its-official-cars-are-the-worst-product-category-we-have-ever-reviewed-for-privacy/
I mean, Nissan tries to infer facts about your sex life and sells those inferences to marketing companies:
https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/nissan/
But the OG digital companies are the masters of enshittification. Microsoft has been at this game for longer than anyone, and every day brings a fresh way that Microsoft has worsened its products without fear of consequence. The latest? You can't delete your OneDrive account until you provide an acceptable explanation for your disloyalty:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/8/23952878/microsoft-onedrive-windows-close-app-notification
It's tempting to think that the cruelty is the point, but it isn't. It's almost never the point. The point is power and money. Unscrupulous businesses have found ways to make money by making their products worse since the industrial revolution. Here's Jules Dupuis, writing about 19th century French railroads:
It is not because of the few thousand francs which would have to be spent to put a roof over the third-class carriages or to upholster the third-class seats that some company or other has open carriages with wooden benches. What the company is trying to do is to prevent the passengers who can pay the second class fare from traveling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich. And it is again for the same reason that the companies, having proved almost cruel to the third-class passengers and mean to the second-class ones, become lavish in dealing with first-class passengers. Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.
https://www.tumblr.com/mostlysignssomeportents/731357317521719296/having-refused-the-poor-what-is-necessary-they
But as bad as all this is, let me remind you about the good part: we know how to stop companies from enshittifying their products. We know what disciplines their conduct: competition, regulation, capability and self-help measures. Yes, rats are gnawing our eyeballs, but we know which rat-poison to use, and where to put it to control those rats.
Competition, regulation, constraint and self-help measures all backstop one another, and while one or a few can make a difference, they are most powerful when they're all mobilized in concert. Think of the failure of the EU's landmark privacy law, the GDPR. While the GDPR proved very effective against bottom-feeding smaller ad-tech companies, the worse offenders, Meta and Google, have thumbed their noses at it.
This was enabled in part by the companies' flying an Irish flag of convenience, maintaining the pretense that they have to be regulated in a notorious corporate crime-haven:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/15/finnegans-snooze/#dirty-old-town
That let them get away with all kinds of shenanigans, like ignoring the GDPR's requirement that you should be able to easily opt out of data-collection without having to go through cumbersome "cookie consent" dialogs or losing access to the service as punishment for declining to be tracked.
As the noose has tightened around these surveillance giants, they're continuing to play games. Meta now says that the only way to opt out of data-collection in the EU is to pay for the service:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/30/markets-remaining-irrational/#steins-law
This is facially illegal under the GDPR. Not only are they prohibited from punishing you for opting out of collection, but the whole scheme ignores the nature of private data collection. If Facebook collects the fact that you and I are friends, but I never opted into data-collection, they have violated the GDPR, even if you were coerced into granting consent:
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2023/11/the-pay-or-consent-challenge-for-platform-regulators.html
The GDPR has been around since 2016 and Google and Meta are still invading 500 million Europeans' privacy. This latest delaying tactic could add years to their crime-spree before they are brought to justice.
But most of this surveillance is only possible because so much of how you interact with Google and Meta is via an app, and an app is just a web-page that's a felony to make an ad-blocker for. If the EU were to legalize breaking DRM – repealing Article 6 of the 2001 Copyright Directive – then we wouldn't have to wait for the European Commission to finally wrestle these two giant companies to the ground. Instead, EU companies could make alternative clients for all of Google and Meta's services that don't spy on you, without suffering the fate of OG App, which tried this last winter and was shut down by "felony contempt of business model":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained
Enshittification is demoralizing. To quote @wilwheaton, every update to the services we use inspires "dread of 'How will this complicate things as I try to maintain privacy and sanity in a world that demands I have this thing to operate?'"
https://wilwheaton.tumblr.com/post/698603648058556416/cory-doctorow-if-you-see-this-and-have-thoughts
But there are huge natural constituencies for the four disciplining forces that keep enshittification at bay.
Remember, Antitrust's Twilight Zone doesn't just allow rollups of garage-door opener companies – it's also poison for funeral homes, hospital beds, magic mushrooms, youth addiction treatment centers, mobile home parks, nursing homes, physicians’ practices, local newspapers, or e-commerce sellers.
The Binding Arbitration scam that stops Chamberlain customers from suing the company also stops Uber drivers from suing over stolen wages, Turbotax customers from suing over fraud, and many other victims of corporate crime from getting a day in court.
The failure to constrain twiddling to protect privacy, labor rights and consumer rights enables a host of abuses, from stalking, doxing and SWATting to wage theft and price gouging:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/06/attention-rents/#consumer-welfare-queens
And Felony Contempt of Business Model is used to screw you over every time you refill your printer, run your dishwasher, or get your Iphone's screen replaced.
The actions needed to halt and reverse this enshittification are well understood, and the partisans for taking those actions are too numerous to count. It's taken a long time for all those individuals suffering under corporate abuses to crystallize into a movement, but at long last, it's happening.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/09/lead-me-not-into-temptation/#chamberlain
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Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg
CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en
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pinkie-pop · 6 months
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"We've Seen The Devil—He Was Hiding In The Mirror."
Part I Part II Part III Part IV
Featuring: Gender-Neutral Reader, Twisted Wonderland Various x Reader, Self-Aware AU, Yandere TWST
Synopsis: A promise as foolish as it is irrevocable. I hope you're happy with yourself. The real oath is made.
Word count: 3.1k
Includes: Drugging, magical branding, possessiveness, obsession, maggots/spider mention (briefly), murderous implications, manipulation
"You are no savior—nor purpose nor God. You are damnation—a phony and fraud."
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You nearly jump out of your skin as your instincts propel you backwards—right into the arms of the one you should be running from. 
"Y-Yuu! What...what's wrong with you?! You scared the life out of me…" Yuu chuckles, breath tickling the skin on your neck. They squeeze you a little tighter in their hold before finally releasing you. You stumble back, holding a hand to your chest as you try to calm your erratic heartbeat. 
"Oh! Sorry, did I frighten you?" Are they seriously trying to feign ignorance right now? Your train of thought is interrupted as they bend down, picking up the books you were reading (when did you drop those?) and examining them closely. They make a show out of turning each over, even going so far as to blow non-existent dust off of the covers. "Didn't I say it was rude to go through another person's things? Really, to read a poor maiden's diary while they're away, how shameless…"
"Your 'diary' is very clearly addressed to me," you retort, unfazed by Yuu's theatrics. Their innocent demeanor melts away, an all-too-familiar smirk popping up in its place. "Why shouldn't I read it?" 
"Aha, [Name] is so smart! You're right, it is addressed to you, and everything that is mine is yours. Even so, I recommend you don't go poking around in here."
"Well, why not?"
"Because…" Yuu looks away, a very uncharacteristic gesture. They mumble something incomprehensible, then snap their head back to you with a smile. "That's why!" 
You stare at them, unimpressed. They stare back at you with such intensity you feel near forced to look away—lest you get swept up in their gaze. You want to ask them to repeat themselves, but you know by now that asking things directly will never yield you answers. You have no choice but to participate in their mind games. 
"Well, if you don't want me to read it, perhaps you should have considered hiding it?" 
"The Wraith doesn't work like that, I'm afraid." You hold your breath, praying for them to continue. To give you any information onthe innerworkings of the bizarre encampment you’ve found yourself in. Yuu flips through one of the books you had been holding and sighs. "You already know about Wraiths, don't you? Fine, I suppose I can indulge your curiosity, just a little. This Wraith—our Wraith—is intrinsically tied to the both of us. If you look for something here, you'll be sure to find it. Many of the books here store memories, and they can't be taken out. Hence why I can't just hide my diary from you." That's…valuable information. Far more valuable than you had been expecting. 
You take a moment to dissect everything that you've just learned. Yuu waits patiently as you comb through the information. Every so often, you catch a glance from them. They never stop smiling, do they?
The place you're in now, the Wraith, is likely to be the second type mentioned in the book you had been reading. It's a place born from death, and it has a connection not just to you, but to Yuu as well. Does that mean that you're dead? What about Yuu? They first came here when they 'shut down', was that death? What about when you took their hand? What was that? Your head was starting to spin.
“Aw, I can see the cogs in your head turning; you must be thinking so hard!” Yuu’s cheerful voice annoys you, but you do your best to ignore them. “Do you want some help, little one? Do you want me to give you the answer?” Hesitantly, you peer back up at them, eyes full of suspicion. 
“What’s the catch?” If there’s one thing you’ve learned about Night Raven, it’s that there’s always a catch.
“All I ask for is your attention,” they say. When you don’t respond, they add: “You don’t have to love me—just promise that you won’t leave. I don’t know what I’d do with myself if you did.” There’s a hint of desperation in their voice, a panic that threatens to spill out of them growing louder with every second you remain silent. You don’t know what to say. What can you say? 
Yuu steps closer to you. 
“Promise me, okay? Promise that you won’t leave.” Their smile is gone, replaced with pure pleading as they press their body against yours. Their embrace used to feel like a python squeezing itself around you, like a spider encasing you in its web, but now, it’s different. Now it feels like the hug of a scared child. Their voice and body is shaking. Only a second ago, they were teasing you as if there was no tomorrow, now, they cling on to you as if you are the only thing left. The power between you two has shifted dramatically, causing you to wonder if their previous bravo was nothing more than a facade—a shield to hide their own feelings. You feel a little sorry for them. 
“Okay. I won’t.” 
“Do you promise?” They pull back to look at you, tears dotting their eyes. Your heart clenches at the sight. “I promise,” you say. In an instant, their tears are gone, replaced by a victorious smile as they drag you into yet another hug. Your heart drops, were they…tricking you? Were they only pretending to cry, just so you would feel pity and take their side? You are so wrapped up in these thoughts that you barely register the way they squeeze you tighter, tangling you in their arms like the tail of a python, like the web of a spider. You are so wrapped up that you do not even notice the prickling sensation on your wrist, as if you are being burned by something. 
“So, what do you want to know?”
“I want to know about you. What…what are you, exactly?” Yuu ponders the question for a minute, then hands you a book, you read the page they’re pointing to. 
Homunculus:
(Editor’s note: the following passage has no scientific backing and should be taken with a grain of salt.)
Literally “Little man”. A theoretical alchemical construct made to mimic human life. Technically biological, they are distinct from the Golem, which is made of non-organic material. This is often considered a moot pont, though, because homunculi are nothing more than fables…or so they say. The truth behind homunculi is far darker than what your textbooks would lead you to believe. In reality, homunculi can be created; they are not just theoretical. In fact, there have already been successful trials in their development. But, “why are you speaking of this in a book meant to be about ghosts?”, I hear you say. Well, my dear reader, that all comes down to how they’re made. As you likely know, alchemy is based upon the principal of equivalent exchange. So, how does one create a human body with alchemy, all while following the rule of exchange? 
Well, my dear reader, it’s rather simple: you just need a human. 
“You’re…a homunculus?” “No, sorry, wrong page.” They take the book back and flip to (presumably) the correct passage. "I was going to keep this from you, but you're just so cute, I can't help but bare my heart to you~" Yuu hands you the book again, then twirls around behind you, peeking at the page from over your shoulder. A bead of sweat runs down your back as you read the correct passage. You’d read it before, but scary stories are always scarier when the monster is standing behind you. 
“Lonesome Ghosts”
“You read this one, right?” You nod, trying not to let your fright show. “Well, this poem is about a face stealer—you already figured that out, though, didn’t you? You also figured out which character is meant to represent me, right?” You can’t see them, but you can feel the grin on their breath. 
“I was always…different from the other three. I don’t remember much from back then, but I do remember the weary glances the others would toss me from time to time. We didn’t get along, I think. Even so, I stuck around. Waiting for my purpose,” Yuu pauses, an unchracteristic tint of solemness in their voice. “I tried a bunch of different things, trying to spark a passion, but nothing ever worked. I was getting desperate, and ended up doing something unforgivable. The three cast me out, and I spent decades wandering the world, looking for my purpose. I never found it, so I thought I’d go back to the house, hoping time had taken the edge off our little squabble. That’s when I found them. A human in a coffin, whose lid was about to be blown off. Yuu.”
“It felt like I was seeing color for the very first time. Like I was alive. I had to have them—no, I had to be them. I had to take their skin and wear it as my own. I had to have what they did. And when I did, that was it. My purpose. What I had been waiting for all along. You.”
“My past washed away the second I entered their body. I became a blank slate with no past or history, but even so, I felt complete. The ghosts didn’t even recognize me when I came back, you know? I didn’t recognize them, either, though. I had forgotten everything. Maybe they did, too. But I didn’t forget forever. When I shut down and created the Wraith, my memories started to resurrface. You ruined me, you know? I lost everything when I met you. But, you know that I’m not angry about it, right? After all, the old me was broken. The old me didn’t have you. It was worthless. You gave me worth. It’s because of you that I’m anything at all.” 
“You took away my entire being, and replaced it with something better. Just like you did with everyone else.”
Yuu’s words start to blur together as your eyes loose focus. It’s hard to tell what’s going on, and even harder to tell what’s causing it. You think, briefly, that you are having a panic attack, but it is hard to tell. Your breathing is rapid and shallow, and you feel as if the whole world has run out of air. You don’t notice yourself stumbling towards the door, but you do notice the way you trip over yourself. You notice the way you are falling to the ground in slow, agonizing motion. You do not react. You can’t. It is over all too soon.
You think you hear someone screaming, but you pay the voice no mind. You get up, not wasting any time to brush off, and begin to run. You do not quite know why you are running, your body is merely in autopilot, but you run, regardless, and you do not stop until you hit something. 
You do not stop until you hit something with a thud! 
It is Ace, you realize, mind finally beginning to clear up. You are on the ground outside of Ramshackle, the dirt is cold and wet beneath your bottom, and the air is sharp against your skin. Ace and others stand before you. They seem surprised. You are the same. Why are they here? To torment you? To catch you, once and for all? 
They are getting closer, you realize with alarm. Azul is crying, but keeping his distance. Jamil is holding Kalim back from lunging at you. Rook is stalking closer to you. They’re all talking, but it is as if you have gone deaf. You cannot hear them. Your ears are ringing, your heart is pounding out of your chest. 
Someone touches you, and the world goes black.
———
You wince at the incoming light as white fluorescents flood your vision. Your head feels as though it has been filled with water, an oddly calm sensation washing over you. You blink up at the white ceiling from your place underneath the white sheets, trying to put the pieces of what brought you here together. 
“You’re awake,” Yuu says. Your body burns cold. That’s right, you remember it now. You had fainted earlier. “How are you feeling?”
“Not great,” you answer. There’s no reason to lie. 
“We didn’t get to finish our conversation from earlier. Let’s talk, now that you’ve been calmed down.” Something about the way they phrased it sets you on edge, but you have no time to question them, as their voice cuts your thoughts short. 
“You know, I was a little hurt when you tried to get rid of me. Sending me to school was just an excuse, wasn’t it?” “How did you…?”
“I’ve known all along. Remember, darling, no one knows you better than I do.” “If you knew it was an excuse then why did you go along with it?” “Because it was a request from you, dearest. How could I ever turn it down when it was you who asked it of me?” Your mind feels cluttered. Have they always been this heavy on the petnames? 
"And the reason you came back?"
Yuu smiles. "I just missed you." You aren't sure whether or not you can believe them. Where do the lies start and end? How can you possibly trust them, when their motives are so unclear? As if there is cotton in your ears and eyes, you are disconnected from what is happening around you. You realize that Yuu is talking, but they sound so far away. 
You are underwater, you try to listen, but bubbles fill your ears. You swim up to the surface, desperate, splashing and fighting against the tide. 
You are on land. You have not left the infirmary, you realize. Yuu is still talking. They sound so far away, but you can hear them just fine.
“My body?” You have no idea what they're talking about. Yuu flashes a grin, seemingly aware of your predicament without you ever having to explain it. “Do you remember how you died, little one?"
What…?
"How I…died?"
"Yes, you've been dead for quite some time, actually. Dying is an unfortunate but necessary part of transmigration—that is, in relocating your soul."
"Then…my body right now is—"
"Artificial, yes. I had wanted to use one of the particularly irksome students as the equivalent for your body, but the system intervened. I could never get an NPC alone, either—the cast was always too jealou. They’d step in before I could so much as say hello.
All those alchemy classes you had me take really paid off in the end, you know? I had to take the long route, unfortunately. That’s alright, though, because I found a workaround. The solution was right beside me all along.”
"The ghosts," You murmur, trying to will yourself to be horrified. Perhaps you are simply tired, but you are far less unnerved about the situation as you should be. 
Almost as if reading your mind, Yuu speaks up, “Sedatives,” they say, “for security.” You wonder what they could possibly mean by ‘security’, but they continue before you get the chance to ask. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of this earlier. You’re so much more compliant with these.” They stroke your cheek while gazing fondly at you. You feel as if maggots are writhing underneath your skin where they have touched you. 
Your hands go numb.
You glance down at them, if only to make sure they’re still attached to your body, when you spot something on your wrist. A glowing symbol—two Triquetras placed together, with a dot in between. 
“Ah, are you looking at our mark now, dear one?” Your blood freezes in your veins. “Our what?” Yuu raises their own arm, revealing the very same symbol on their wrist. 
“It’s called a Serch Bythol, and it represents everlasting love.” There’s a giddiness to their voice that sets you on edge. 
“When did you…?” “You promised yourself to me, don’t you remember? We’re practically married now,” Yuu says, kicking their feet with excitement. “The seal is made with alchemy, so you can’t remove it. That shouldn’t be a problem, though, right? After all, you have no reason to break your promise.” A chill runs up your spine. They marked you? You should be scared, but you feel little more than a vague sense of unease. Damn those drugs. 
“What…what does the mark do?” “Are you sure you want to know that, darling? You aren’t looking so well…” Excuses, excuses. Anger bubbles beneath your sedated state; you can’t quite feel it, but you know it’s there. Every word coming from that wretched mouth is just another excuse. 
“I’m fine,” you say through gritted teeth. “Tell me what it does—and stop calling me that.” Yuu sighs.
“When we made a pact, our souls bound together.”
“Meaning?” “Meaning that we’re now more in-tune with what the other is feeling. We can’t lie to or hurt one another other, either—physically, I mean.If you don’t believe me, then go ahead and try lying. You could attack me, too.” 
You try lying, first, but your mouth stays firmly shut. You try again, but nothing happens. You try saying something that is almost true, but exaggerated. Still, no dice. Finally you decide to try saying something that’s true, but misleading, but Yuu starts talking before you can come up with anything.
“I know that you’re angry, but even so, aren’t you glad?”
“Glad? What could I possibly be glad about right now?” You think the sedatives are starting to wear off, as a freshly lit kind of rage sparks itself into your chest.
“Wouldn’t you rather I be honest with you?” 
“I’d rather you do that without tricking me into it.” Yuu feigns a sigh.
“It could be worse, you know? This is nothing compared to what the others had planned.” Your first instinct is to assume they’re lying, exaggerating, or otherwise, but your tests from earlier prove your instincts wrong. “Do you want to know what they would have done, had the hunt never occurred?” You nod. 
Yuu fills you in on everything. Every plan, every passing musing or idle comment. Everything. The things these people would have done, had the guilt of nearly killing you not gotten in the way…You almost feel grateful for the hunt—no, you do feel grateful. The fates they would have forced upon you, had you not almost died by their hands would have been far worse than death. Demons…They're demons! They cannot possibly be human! But…what does that make you? The ones who demons revere, the one who they worship as if they are God?
There is no longer any hiding from it, you know the answer. An odd sense of peace washes over you at the realization. You stand up, finally ready to confront your wayward worshippers.
You know what you are.
The devil sits upon heaven’s throne, and they are the ones who placed you there.
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faggotmox · 1 month
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something wonderfully important has happened! my "wrestling dad" josh shepard got his book of wrestling erasure poems published & it is up for sale (either 10$ or "name a fair price"). this is incredibly important to me as im one of the first people to have gotten the privilege to read these poems as josh wrote them. josh is incredibly important to me as a friend, he is the guy who introduced me to wrestling & gave me a deep, unrestricted passion for it.
josh is so fucking talented, & creative. he is also my favorite poet, not just bc he's my friend. the book's flow is dedicated to the flow of a wrestling match, following all the hallmarks (the lock up, big heat, the comeback, ect) with the themes of his poems to create a match like narrative for the book.
there are like three specific poems in the batch that i want tattooed on me, a stone cold one, a mick foley one, & a briscoe brother's piece. the aj lee pipebomb poem moved me to actual tears, even when i read it now. the macho man poem abt being bipolar struck me so hard i rethought my own feeling on my mental health. josh pushes impressive themes of capitalism, mental health, poverty, & family theoughout many of his poems. i know ive got a few wrestling fans here, & if you're also into poetry please considered josh's work. or just if you want to support a friend of mine.
a cool way to support josh's work is by requesting it at your local library! even suggesting to bookstores that have poetry sections or interacting with the work thats already published. following/reposting josh's work for exposure also is great.
bruiser zine said this:
The second volume in the BRUISER Zines series, Cutting Promos is a collection of pro wrestling erasure poems by the Oklahoma City poet Josh Shepard. Printed and assembled in Baltimore, this limited edition zine collects 26 poems previously published in BRUISER, HAD, The Daily Drunk and many other fine publications.
After being laid off at the onset of the pandemic, Shepard found comfort and inspiration in the glow of professional wrestling and its performers—their violent struggles, fighting spirit, and electric language—and from their speeches and promos that have inspired wrestling fans across the globe he delivers Cutting Promos, a collection of erasures that echoes the personalities, pursuits and perseverance of pro wrestling’s greatest, standing as a testament to life lived during Hard Times and deliverance through them.
[ IN CASE YOU MISSED THE LINK ABOVE TO BUY JOSH'S BOOK ] [ JOSH'S TWITTER | INSTA | LINKTR.EE* ] *a lot of the links don't work bc the publications went under :( but there's still quiet a few up for free here
support my kayfabe father!!! i watched him turn his hard times into beautiful pieces. even in the beginning when he only had 3 or 4, before he even thought he could make the book i saw his passion for these pieces. i was there for every heart wrenching rejection letter & every hard earned spot. every time he was working late at the library sending me new ideas bc he couldn't watch dynamite. every single wrestling poem josh has written has now been published & that is a huge success. he puts in the work like a wrestler puts in the work in the ring. hard hitting, gritty, & beautiful.
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amphibimations · 29 days
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okay so idk how much people have already told you but anime boy Heathcliff seems to be in that 3-year timeframe in Wuthering Heights where he disappears to become rich and he stole some hair coupons to make his hair look nice for when he sees Cathy again. Unfortunately the coupons belonged to a high-ranking member of one of the biggest gangs in the world so he got the shit beat out of him. He's fine now though. He also has parallels with anime girl Ishmael which is interesting because she had parallels with Captain Ahab who had a thing about obsession... also anime girl Don Quixote had the idea to go track down Santa and steal his clothes and Heathcliff went along with it (they did not succeed)
Yeah!! I’ve had a few people tell me about that 3 year theory i think thats very interesting!! It makes a lot of sense for them to use that time frame because literally the book just goes ‘idk what he was doing for those 3 years, it could be anything!!!’. Perfect opportunity to add their own anime heathcliff story in there. And after heathcliff gets back from being away for 3 years he just starts getting more and more evil so it would be harder to use him as a protagonist at that point.
Ive never read moby dick but just from the vague things i know about it, yeah the whole obsession thing sounds like a really cool parallel to make… :0
Its fun that even just by hearing broad details about anime heathcliff’s story i can see the connections they’re making to the book, like people helping him look nice for cathy. I wonder if they’re going to have an anime nelly dean when it gets to heathcliff’s chapter…
ALSO YEAH… SOMEONE ELSE ALSO TOLD ME ABOUT THE SANTA THING … APPARENTLY THEY WERE GOING TO GET HYDRAULIC PRESSED INTO CHRISTMAS PRESENTS?!?!??!??????? THATS THE FUNNIEST THING I HAVE EVER HEARD IN MY LIFE…
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communistkenobi · 2 months
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im an undergrad student who was thinking about specializing in studying fascist movements in North America for my masters and ive really enjoyed reading your book commentary - you connect things that I'm not always aware of in ways that are really comprehensive and appreciate
Do you know of any researchers who are moving things on the topic right now (most of the books ive read are around 20+ years old, unfortunately)?
(sorry if any of this is unclear/grammatically incorrect/weirdly worded - I'm super sick rn)
thank you! I'm really glad to hear that :)
For contemporary writing, I'm currently working through some of Alberto Toscano's work - he has a really interesting article from 2021 on fascism from a Black radical/Marxist perspective where he summarizes various historical analyses of fascism from Black (particularly US) thinkers and activists. One thing I especially appreciate is that he complicates Aime Cesaire's formulation of fascism (i.e., "european colonialism come home") as incomplete when applied to settler colonial contexts, especially the United States - one of Cesaire's articulations of fascism is that (to paraphrase) "one fine day, the prisons begin to fill up, the Gestapo gets busy" and so on, and Toscano, working through Angela Davis and George Jackson, responds with (again I'm paraphrasing) "the prisons are already full! The Gestapo is already here!" etc. Toscano also has a new book that just came out in 2023 called Late Fascism, which explicitly addresses the current moment. I only have a physical copy of that so I can't share a pdf unfortunately, and I still need to get around to reading it lol.
These are also a couple random articles I found insightful:
Carnut (2022). Marxist Critical Systematic Review on Neo-Fascism and International Capital: Diffuse Networks, Capitalist Decadence and Culture War - does what it says on the tin
Daggett (2018). Petro-masculinity: Fossil Fuels and Authoritarian Desire - talks about car culture as a site of modern reactionary political movements, links climate denialism with (proto-)fascist movements
Parmigiani (2021). Magic and politics: Conspirituality and COVID-19 - this one does not mention fascism explicitly, but imo the intersection between new age spirituality, anti-vaccine sentiment, and qanon/q-adjacent conspiracies are pretty important to understanding contemporary fascist social movements, so I'd still recommend reading this
Finally, this isn't an article but I found this recorded lecture about the history of Qanon pretty interesting. I don't think the author gives particularly insightful answers on how to solve the problem of far right conspiracies in the Q&A portion but I found it to be a helpful summary
Otherwise I've been focusing a lot on decolonial scholarship more so than fascist scholarship - this is again guided by Cesaire's argument that Europe/The West broadly is inherently fascist. These works aren't contemporary, but you can look at this post for some of the readings I linked on decolonial scholarship if you want to go that route. Those are serving me more for theoretical frameworks to guide contemporary analysis, not analysis of contemporary events directly
also idk if I need to put this disclaimer, but just in case this leaves my blog: this isn't a full throated defense of/apology for everything in these articles, I'm not claiming they're sufficient to understanding the present moment, these are just some of the things I've been reading recently and have found helpful in some way or another. a lot of contemporary work I have read (much of which isn't linked here because I don't think its very good/do not have it on hand) focuses on populism and authoritarianism as central analytical terminology, which i think does a lot of work to exceptionalize and mystify fascism as a historical and political process/project originating from European colonialism & Western imperialism, but these terms are endemic to the field so you have to contend with them no matter what
good luck with your studies!
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Okay, second post, this ones mostly about Feyre because honestly, as of chapter 3 I havent really noticed Tamlin being out of character and from what Ive heard his character assassination was supposed to happen very quickly. Idk, right now he just seems like the same guy but traumatized although I'll fully admit that I didnt care that much for him outside of the Feylin romance (which was pretty sweet but too boring for me) so maybe I just didnt pay enough attention to him to fully grasp his character
Feyre is frustrating to me right now because I dont think shes out of character either, right now shes also just the same woman but traumatized, but like, I already know the extent to which her character will be bent for the sake of Rhysand. In these first three chapters she literally thinks something along the lines of "What's there for me to do but sit at home and spend Tamlin's money" Tell me, what does she end up doing in the night court huh????
Another thing thats frustrating is that Feyre clearly has issues communicating her feelings and wants, I know because I also had issues with that, and instead of learning that very valuable skill of telling others about your inner world and trying to work on her relationships (with both Tamlin and with her sisters), shes just gonna end up with a guy who can read her mind so theres no need for her to challenge herself and grow in any way. Yay. One thing especially stuck out to me in this regard was her attituide towards wearing dresses. Feyre does not like wearing dresses, its not like she never got to wear them back at home even though she wanted to, she just doesnt like wearing them in her day-to-day life, but she feels like she has to because she thinks its what Tamlin wants and because she thinks that if she wears pants its gonna somehow signal to the citizens of the spring court that something is incredibly wrong. But again, she doesnt tell anyone this, she doesnt ask Tamlin if he can just explain to everyone that everything is fine and that Feyre just has an unconventional way of dressing, which he would probably be fine with if its still the same guy from the first book. And it doesnt even seem like Tamlin directly made any kind of comment to her about the dresses she wears, she just saw that he was happy when he saw her wear them, which couldve well been him being happy to see her in general but she doesnt even consider that
Theres also the fact that its very unclear what she wants/what her problem is. Now, this actually isnt something that bothers me that much on its own, Feyre is traumatized and lost, obviously she doesnt know exactly what she wants at this point beyond "the situation Im in sucks and makes me feels bad, I want to get out", I think what bothers me is mostly the knowledge that Tamlin is gonna get blamed for a lot of this stuff when its really not his fault.
And I do want to make it clear that I dont think hes doing a great job handling this situation, I know a lot of people in the acotar critical sphere find his actions understandable and justifiable from his perspective and thats true, but hes still doing a bad job handling Feyre's emotional state. Like, one of your beloved's main issues is that she feels horrible because she feels trapped at home, for the love of god just let her go outside on her own. Maybe send her to village thats far inland or close to the border to the mortal realm, surely those monsters are not gonna manage to come that far if youre all going on patrols to kill them as soon as possible. And even if they do, the people of any village are gonna bend over backwards in order to protect their capital c Cursebreaker, shes gonna be fine
But, to get back to my original point, even if Tamlin was a daemati or whatever like Rhys and could read her mind the way she needs it to be read, he would still not be able to figure out what exactly Feyre needs right now because she doesnt know it herself! I literally read all of her thoughts and I dont know! Does she want to help others and be responsible for a whole bunch of people because its what shes always known to do? Does she want to avoid resonsibility for now because she wants to recover from her traumatic childhood of having the responsibility of keeping her family alive on top of all the new UTM-trauma? Its hard to say and that makes sense for Feyre at this point in her life, but she cant just blame people for not understanding her when she doesnt properly understand herself and refuses tl verbalize her feelings
Anyway, thats it for today, hope you enjoyed this
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3liza · 4 months
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joey mellen wrote bore hole, hughes wrote mechanism of brainbloodvolume (i did not know there were two of these guys lol)
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i know! those photos are alternately attributed to either of them, i still dont know who actually is in the photo because they were all white englishmen the same age.
and there were THREE. these guys were their own little trepanation cult polycule for a while in the 60s and 70s. as usual the woman, (Countess) Amanda Feilding (sic), is the one who gets forgotten, even though shes the one who made the actual gore movie of herself drilling a hole in her head for real: Heartbeat in the Brain (1970), which is considered "lost media" by that kind of person but i dont think it's actually lost, it was screened in 2011 and i think the fact that its about someone drilling a hole in their face is lending the footage more mystique than it actually possesses. looking for citations for this post is the first time ive heard it referred to as "lost", i dont think media is "lost media" just because it isnt on youtube but whatever
anyway Feilding ran for parliament several times. "Feilding ran for British Parliament twice, in 1979 and 1983, on the platform 'Trepanation for the National Health' with the intention of advocating research into its potential benefits; she advocated the provision of the procedure by the National Health Service.[3]" her parents were second cousins btw the english peerage is so fucked up it is unbelievable
she has spent her post-trepanation life advocating for drug policy reform, which is based, but unfortunately her son is also in politics and is a tory piece of shit
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i have a Special Interest in trepanation and will probably eventually get it done somehow, i just have a feeling of fate about it or maybe dysmorphia. reading about idiopathic intermittent intercranial hypertension and hypoperfusion recently sounded real familiar. doctors dont like to talk about this stuff though, to them everything inside your skull is a schroedinger's cat that is assumed to be completely fine and normal until you prove to them via feats of strength that you have a Brain Problem of some kind, which heretofore is forbidden from mention
edit: trepanation doesnt actually do anything to your brain unless you have a pressure issue and the hole will just heal over anyway and reseal your brain, none of the Bore Hole claims or beliefs are anything except placebo
to people other than wumblr, who i assume has already read it: Bore Hole is an EXCELLENT book and will act as a fast and easy history lesson on how the counterculture boomers actually lived. their economy was unbelievable, americans and english used to be able to just "go to india" and hang out, things just did not cost a lot of money for a while there and this has permanently altered the part of their brain that makes cost calculations
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