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noassallclass · 5 years ago

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So my roommate spent all of today writing up a report for Critical Role as a company and I really don't know much about business stuff but I think it is fascinating. Read to the end for a wild ride.

"Okay here is my idea of how Critical Role is actually structured based on what public information exists:

At Geek and Sundry, “Critical Role” as an entity was essentially a partnership between all cast members. The only asset this partnership had was the intellectual property of CR and the only Revenue it took in was licensing that IP to Geek and Sundry. This is because Critical Role Partnership was adamant about maintaining ownership of the IP. This license then pays out between the partners. Percentage

ownership of Critical Role Partnership is divided based on money put in, and previous work done. I would be very surprised if Mercer did not own at least 25% but probably not more than 50%, and the others are probably more or less even. At this point, the cast members both draw a salary from geek and sundry as employees (or contractors), and collect drawings from the licensing of the IP and also royalties as actors. When Orion leaves, the others almost certainly force him to sell out his ownership portion and he probably gets royalties from Geek and Sundry (and later CRPLLC). At this point, this licensing agreement is the only transaction that the entity “Critical Role” actually conducts.

Geek and Sundry pays to produce, distribute, and market the show, and takes all profit. It also takes some aspects of creative control, but probably not that much, though this is listed as the reason to leave Geek and Sundry. At this point, Critical Role continues to license with Geek and Sundry’s parent company Legendary Digital Networks and incorporates their partnership into a Limited Liability Corporation “Critical Role Productions”.

The ownership split is probably kept mostly the same, unless someone decides to sell portions of their shares, but I don’t see why they would. The shareholders (or owners) at this point hire a bunch of employees. Some roles they hire themselves, like Willingham as CEO and Mercer as CCO, and some they hire outsiders like COO Ed Lopez, SVP of Marketing Rachel Romero, and VP of Business Development Ben Van Der Fluit. Those who take additional roles will take salaries for those roles, as well as a salary for acting and writing, and dividends from profits. It is likely that Lopez got a certain amount of shares because C-Suite Executives often do as bonuses because it’s non-taxed income until he sells it and it incentivizes maximizing profits because that would increase his dividends. The other employees probably did not receive shares, so as not to dilute the percentage ownership further.

Critical Role seemingly has no board of directors (it’s possible they have one which is not public), which only happens when there are so few shareholders that they can all convene and take votes (Usually less than 20 owners), implying they don’t use investors to raise cash, which is consistent with a desire to retain creative control. This also means that it is up to all of the shareholders to vote on decisions about the managers of the company instead of a board. That means the only way they could fire Willingham as Chief Executive Officer is if all of the shareholders convene and vote for his firing. Without a board of directors, which often has independent outsiders, this is typically seen as bad for the company’s interests, but is legal in this case because it’s a limited liability corporation and they do not trade on an exchange .

Over the next year or so, CRPLLC makes a new studio and Geek and Sundry gradually relinquishes the distribution rights to older episodes. At this point everyone who works towards the function of the production and distribution of shows is an employee of CRPLLC and not Legendary or Geek and Sundry. For the past couple of years, Critical Role has licensed various brand crossover products like Funko Pops and The Darkhorse Comics. Funko Pop pays CRPLLC for the character likenesses and keeps all profits. CRPLLC also produces its own merchandise like t shirts and that sexy calendar that they pay manufacturers to produce and CRPLLC makes the profit in that scenario. They also have advertising revenue, which is a straightforward revenue stream.

Throwing back to two paragraphs ago, if they don’t use investors to raise cash, how can they afford to embark on a new expensive project that wouldn’t pay out until the future? Well, they could take out a loan (ew interest), save more money in retained earnings forgoing development in other areas (what do you mean we can’t afford to redo our website?) OR

They could do an 11 million dollar kickstarter! This would allow them to retain ownership of both the company and the product, because kickstarter is essentially just buying really expensive merchandise! People will buy a 30 dollar mug if it also comes with the promise that if enough people do it, they’ll make a tv show. Kickstarter money is revenue, not financing and it’s actually against kickstarter’s rules to promise equity for backers. Instead, kickstarter backers assume the risk that investors take (albeit on a smaller individual scale) with none of the benefit besides knowing that they helped make something exist. Compare this to if I, Callie invested $11 million into CRPLLC.

If the Legend of Vox Machina completely bombs and bankrupts CRPLLC which was kickstarted: CRPLLC would have to sell off all of its assets, resolve its liabilities (pay people for work done before laying them off, pay off bank loans) and whatever is left over would be split between the owners. Do they owe you, the kickstarter backer, for not making the show? Legally no. You chose to give us that money and had to trust we would spend the money well to make a good show and we spent all our money making sure our tree leaf animation looked good and could only afford to make 2 episodes.

If the Legend of Vox Machina completely bombs and bankrupts CRPLLC and it was Calliestarted: It would still be the same, except now Callie, the person who put in a lot of money for this show, is also an owner, and at least gets a slice of that money after the debts are paid off.

If the Legend of Vox Machina is really successful and it’s kickstarted: Good job, you did it! You got a fun tv show and like a t shirt! Fun!

If the Legend of Vox Machina is really successful and it’s Calliestarted: Not only do I get my fun tv show and probably also every piece of merch that exists, I got mad paid as an owner, not just from the show itself, but as we sell more and more merchandise because I’m a part owner of the company. I then continue to make money from literally everything else the company does until I decide to sell my shares or the company goes bankrupt.

And even better news! Amazon Prime bought the streaming rights for two seasons, so now I, Callie, have even more money from that sweet sweet licensing money.

Speaking of which, it is likely that the Amazon Deal is structured as follows: Amazon pays CRPLLC to license LoVM, with the stipulation that kickstarter backers can access the first 10 episodes legally. CRPLLC pays, with Kickstarter and Amazon money, Titmouse Inc. to produce LoVM. CRPLLC makes the difference between what they paid Titmouse (variable cost, depending on ultimate cost of animating) and what Amazon paid them. Amazon makes the difference of what they paid CRPLLC and what they make at market with LoVM. Amazon is the only company that stands to profit directly from the actual product of LoVM doing well. If it does poorly, there’s the possibility it gets cancelled, meaning that CRPLLC (and maybe Titmouse if CRPLLC already commissioned the work from them) will still get paid by Amazon, but never released. It’s possible that other companies could buy the license from Amazon in this scenario. This is the risk of selling your show to another company.

CRPLLC also has one subsidiary and one associated foundation: Darrington Press LLC and The Critical Role Foundation

Darrington Press LLC is an imprint of CRPLLC created to design and produce card and board games with the Critical Role IP. DP has 3 listed employees, Ivan Van Norman as Head of Darrington Press, Darcy L. Ross as Marketing Manager, and Mercer as Creative Advisor. As a subsidiary, it is wholly owned by CRPLLC. DP pays manufacturers and contractors to design and manufacturers games and pays for its own advertising, as a separate entity from CRPLLC. DP will likely sell its products to games distributers and the Critical Role Store. If the Critical Role Store sells DP games it’s because CRPLLC bought them from DP. The relationship between DP and CPRLLC is that when DP makes a profit and pays dividends, the recipient is CPRLLC. If DP goes bankrupt and cannot pay its debts, CPRLLC is not required to pay them. CPRLLC also chooses DP’s Board of Directors, which is probably just the owners of CPRLLC. This is all very ordinary. DP has four announced games set to release in 2021, but as of yet has not released any products or made any revenue.

The Critical Role Foundation is a registered non-profit and legally distinct from CRPLLC with seemingly no employees, with Johnson as President, and 4 other Board Members: Mercer, Lopez, Romero and another person named Mark Koro, who is a figure very closely tied to critical role I will outline later. Lopez and Romero are also in a long-term relationship or perhaps marriage. It is usually considered a bad idea to have two partners on a board of directors, as a conflict of interest can arise easily. As a registered non-profit CRF’s projected breakdown of donations is 85% grants to other non-profits, 10% emergency fund allocation, and 5% admin costs (this would be where possible future employees’ salaries would come from). Board Members on non-profits traditionally don’t take salaries, but can use their role as a board member to calculate donated time as a charitable donation for tax purposes. This all seems pretty normal. It’s not stated if or how much CRPLLC itself donates to CRF, including its initial endowment, besides the donation of free advertising, as no donation matching or any other programs seem to be advertised. In terms of an initial endowment, it seems that the only money put in was immediately spent on filing fees and legal fees, meaning the initial endowment was less than $5000. As a result, CRF operates from donors and possibly is not funded at all by CRPLLC. Any money that is donated from CRPLLC’s profits to CRF would be a charitable donation and lower CRPLLC’s taxable income amount. CRF began collecting non-taxable donations in May 2019, and as of December 8, 2020 CRF has yet to publish their 2019 financial statements, so not much is publicly known of how much money is raised by CRF and if they achieved their desired breakdown.

Now to talk about Mark Koro. Koro is an executive of Governmental Affairs (some places list director and others list VP) at Qualcomm, a telecommunications technology company with an annual profit of $7.67 Billion, and is estimated to make $20 per smartphone sold. Every smartphone. Qualcomm has been sued by China, South Korea, Taiwan, the EU, and the USA for anti-competitive behaviour. Koro’s department of Governmental affairs is responsible for negotiating and bidding with governments for contracts and rights to airwave frequencies, and also lobby and develop proposals for telecommunications legislation and policy. Before this, Koro worked at the National Security Agency in their corporate relations department liaising with defence and intelligence contractors. Before this, he worked in the George H.W. Bush administration as The National Security Advance Representative. This entails preparing logistics and security for Presidential events and dispatching Secret Service Agents to respond to Presidential Threats and continued in this capacity under following administrations until 2008. Koro was also an advisor to The Deputy Director of the NSA (the second highest position in the Intelligence Agency), and was a consultant to The Lawrence Livermore National Library, which is

“self-described as a ‘premier research and development institution for science and technology applied to national security.’ Its principal responsibility is ensuring the safety, security and reliability of the nation’s nuclear weapons through the application of advanced science, engineering, and technology.”

These positions are all listed on Koro’s biography on the The United Nations website for the International Telecommunications Union Radiocommunication Sector (accessed Dec. 8, 2020). Mark Koro has no public associations with Charitable Work.

There is little online about Koro’s association with Critical Role, besides an article stating that Koro, as a fan of the show, in 2016 matched $50,000 worth of donations to 826LA. Koro’s associations with a monopolistic technology company, the NSA, Nuclear Weaponry, and multiple presidential administrations would be cause for alarm for many of CR’s fans, but if it were a purely professional relationship, it could be excused as including him for his business accumen, but Mark Koro is mutuals on twitter with all of the cast members and Brian W Foster, Britney Walloch-Key. This might seem like normal professional courtesy, but there is a lot of interaction between Koro’s account and Critical Role Employees’ personal accounts that reflect at least a close personal relationship between people that he would not interact with regularly just as a board member of a legally distinct organization."

P.S. 100% of Critical Role's Chief Officers are men in relationships with female subordinates.

#critrole critical #long post #i wont be able to answer too many questions as i am not a business major like my roommate is #its about the transparency for me #also theres more but this post is so long as it is

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monkeyspawnskydiamond · 4 years ago

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Transcript of Interview

Q: What do you see as the origins of violence against women? Is it cultural? Is it biological?

I believe that the origins of violence against women are completely in systems of gender inequity. In systems of basically male supremacy and although many proponents of male supremacy would have us believe that this is always existed on the planet, that it's biologically endemic, that it's inevitable, there's nothing we can do about it, etc., that's not true at all. Patriarchy is a relatively new institution, the last five thousand years or so. And you can find a lot of evidence for this in archaeology, in myth, in legend, things that are discredited by contemporary modes of knowledge which have to be understood as patriarchal in and of themselves.

The emphasis on rationality of this kind of direct evidence that myth is seen as just a fable, something that never existed. For examine, in the very area here, New Mexico, the creator of all is spider grandmother who thought, spun, dream wove the world into being. And there was a whole different system, that Allen writes about very eloquently in her book, The Sacred Hoop, which she calls a gynecentric system, in which the emphasis is not on competition, power over, domination, but rather on equality, harmony, balance, tolerance for a wide diversity of life styles, the centrality of powerful women, being absolutely necessary for society to function well, not any kind of belief in corporal punishment of children, extremely low incidence of rape, no idea of an institution of prostitution or pornography because sex as sacred and not associated with any kind of negativity. So, these systems did exist on the planet everywhere, in Europe. When I was a child all I wanted to read was myth, and stories of goddesses or I knew that this betokened another kind of reality, that this one that we live in now is not permanent and it was not here always forever.

Q: What causes men to be violent against women? Does it boil down to an underlying inequality between men and women? Does this mean that the answer is equality between the sexes?

What causes men to be violent then is basically an enforcement. That if you have a system of oppression, one group is being subordinated, in this case we're talking about women, and in some way you can propagandize and brain wash the subordinated group into agreeing to this. Well, I really am more passive, I really am subordinate. You know, we're given those messages all the time through the mass media, through religion, in which we're told that women are premordally evil, etc. But obviously, that's not going to work completely, we're going to resist. And we're not going to buy into all that ideology so the second level of enforcement is violence, actual violence. So I see the whole gamut from sexual harassment on the streets, in the office, through rape, through battery, through incest, through sexual murder, through a level of enforcement, to keep women in our place, to tell us that we can't speak out against atrocities and to serve as a lesson to all of the women. This is what will happen to you. You are prey in this culture, you are an object, you be obedient or you're off basically, so I see that violence serves an absolute function. It's not a deviation, it's not a monster from Mars. We have to look at it as absolutely functional to keeping the status quo going, to keeping the system of male supremacy working.

Q: You've said abusive men aren't abnormal or deviant, but the norm. Can you explain? What about rape in the home? You've made an interesting comment that these behaviors are not taboo, that it's talking about them which is taboo.

In that violence, it's not the norm in that everyone does it. It's just I think that there's some deception going on about it that we don't really want incest to happen. There's really an incest taboo. According to a 1992 government finance study, 36 percent of all rapes of women in this country are rapes by a family member. There's some deception going on. What is really taboo is speaking out about that, saying that the nuclear family is not really this haven of comfort and warmth, but that really according to the FBI women are nine times safer on the street than they are in the family. That's where you're most likely to be beaten, most likely to be raped. Eleven percent of all rapes take place of girls under the age, I mean, excuse me, 67 percent of all rapes are under the age of 18. About 29 percent of the girls under the age of 11 -- these are taking place in the home. Eleven percent of all rapes are rapes by a father or step-father. People who talk about family values, it's really a code word for a racist, sexist enforcement of family values, gender inequality, the idea that women and children are the property of the father. These are the values. It's really about control.

Q: What about the theory that violence is an inherent part of male biology?

I think the real stress on biological essentialism right now saying that men are born this way, women are born this way and we also see it in term of racism. For example, when something like the Bell curve, saying that whites or Africans are necessarily more, less intelligent, whites a little bit more so, the Japanese the highest. They put that in to make them not look like white racists. But, you know, all this kind of stuff is a backlash to thirty years of activism saying the culture is responsible for these kind of differences. That even I would argue that what we understand as biology is filtered through our cultural preconceptions. For example, think of the scenario that we all see, whether it be in a movie like "Look Whose Talking" or just what we've understood through education, of when a woman gets pregnant. The sperm is seen as this kind of heroic warrior, traveling up through this dangerous territory to penetrate and conquet the egg. We see that all the time. Really, why don't we look at that as the egg as this magnificent huge dominant fascinating force that draws the sperm to her, etc. We understand biology through cultural lenses. And what is, what was biology in the 19th century is now understood as scientific racism. The sciences of, for example, measuring skulls to prove that women of all races or Africans or Native Americans had smaller skulls and therefore lesser intellectual capacity. I would say that what's happening right now in all this emphasis on men are innately more violent and women are innately more passive and stuff like that is scientific sexism, nothing more.

Q: What sort of role has religion played? Does religion teach that men are superior to women, that female sexuality is linked to evil?

Religion is one of the most important sources of violence against, of the ideology for violence against women. It first gives us this idea of sex negativity. That sex in which women are really always implicated as the sex, we are the sexual ones. Be we mothers or prostitutes or temptresses or whatever. The whole story of Adam and Eve, that Eve was the one responsible.

Religion is absolutely fundamental in perpetrating violence against women. It is one of the key ways to communicate the ideology of male supremacy. First of all, God is male. There is no female principle. It was the people who demanded that Mary even in the Christian religion be given a place of honor. The cathedrals in Europe were built to her to recognize people's understanding that there is something feminine about the divine as well. But patriarchal religions would have us believe that all divinity is male and only male. And that coupled with the idea that female sexuality in women is evil, as for example in the Garden of Eden myth and that it is up to men to dominate both women and the earth, give us a script for all kinds of violence against women, which, of course, I connect up with violence against the earth in that the earth and women are seen as passive, as submissive, as out of control and thereby need to be controlled, dominated, etc. God tells Eve, "This is your husband, Adam, you will submit to him, he will lord it over you and basically you'll love it.” Yeah, right. That's the Bible.

So, religion often promotes an ideology of male supremacy, which as I said I see as the root of violence against women. We also get this whole idea of sex negativity. That sexuality is sinful, that the body is shameful. Then of course women are the sex, so it is our bodies that are seen as somehow contaminated, that we are seen as somehow kind of filthy. And so therefore you're given the choice to be this Madonna, this absolutely pure virgin mother or whatever or the whore, the one who epitomizes sex. These are of course both aspects of one persona. So it seems to me that therefore, it's also Christianity that even though, for example, fundamentalist Christianity rails against pornography that pornography is really Christianity's evil twin, to use soap opera jargon, that it's really the same thing. That both of them depend upon women and the idea of sex negativity, that the body and sexuality is somehow obscene, filthy and dirty. You don't have pornography without that, you don't have Christianity without that. On the submission of women, on a rather deadness, a kind of loss of the sacred involving sexuality that I see in both, in Christianity, the only kind of sex you can possibly have and then you're not supposed to enjoy it too much except as marital heterosexual procreative sex. No idea of ecstasy, of communing with the Universe, in any kind of sacred sexuality which characterizes what are seen as pagan cultures. So, pornography is of course the off-shoot of this terrible negativity, of sex as really just objectification, filthy, obscene, behavior.

Q: Doesn't this also lead to eroticizing the forbidden?

Okay, so what I see as happening in the Garden of Eden Myth is that sex supposedly was the sin that Adam and Eve committed. So then there's this injunction like that's considered to be the forbidden fruit. So we have this whole notion of the forbidden as being something that is also extremely desirable. And it seems to me that what patriarchal culture is about is about eroticizing the forbidden and therefore sanctioning taboo violation, making taboo violation itself an act of sex. An act that someone's supposed to get off on in a way which I see therefore as feeding, for example, incest. It's the forbidden that actually becomes more appealing, it's the violation of innocence. You're really acting out the culture's dicta. I mean, think of "Star Trek," to boldly go where no man has gone before. So there is no limit. No taboo, we just sort of march in uninvited and I think that's an injunction that is tied to this idea of the taboo. That rules are made really to be broken. It's thrilling to march in without invitation, justifying everything from incest to manifest destiny to all kinds of cultural imperialism.

Q: And so we have incest as an ultimate taboo?

Well, as I talk about incest in the nuclear family, obviously incest is not a real taboo. It's committed at an alarming rate. And that's just what is reported. We all know that these kinds of crimes are grievously unreported because of ideas of shame, because of pushing the memories so far back you don't have ready access to them, etc. So, incest in the nuclear family or child sexual abuse by priests, has been hushed up forever. You know, it's not really taboo. Everybody knows it's going on. But the taboo of silence is breaking up. That's what the feminist movement has been about. Breaking that conspiracy of silence: be it against child sexual abuse, wife beating, etc.

Think of what happened to Sinead O'Connor when she was on "Saturday Night Live." That time, I think it was in 1992, when she ripped up a picture of Pope John Paul II. And she was making a political statement. She was protesting the church's complicity in covering up incidences of child sexual abuse by the priesthood. She was excoriated for that in the press and the very next week Joe Peshi comes on and says, "I'm Italian and thank God it's Columbus Day.” And then goes into saying how he wants to smack her around and the crowd is roaring its approval of him smacking her around. So clearly here we see what I'm talking about -- about violence against women as enforcement of women staying in their place. Not speaking out and naming the atrocity, that's the taboo, not committing it. And I find it very interesting that when feminists are always accused of censorship, here's a real incident of censorship, in that when Saturday Night Live repeats these episodes, they censor Sinead O'Connor. They do not censor Joe Peshi advocating battery as a solution to women speaking out against abuses.

Q: What of the inherent differences between the sexes? Doesn't it all boil down to gender difference? Can we discuss these things without discussing gender differences?

I think absolutely we have these ideas that there are these genders, masculinity and feminity and that masculinity is something that all beings with certain kind of hormones and male genitalia have and there's this femininity. I think that differences between men and women, this whole creation of the opposite sex is a way to create male supremacy. You create difference and then you repress one-half of it and you create enmity, you create this kind of opposition. So, I really look at and then everybody says it's nature and it's innate. But why do we have so many cultural, so much cultural brainwashing to make it happen. Little boys, what you wear, how people can speak to you. You know the whole masculine or feminine conditioning which begins right at birth if not before. How you know now that everybody's finding out the sex of their child and probably even treating it differently in the womb when it's a fetus. But okay, what were we going on? I'm thinking, okay, the cultural construction of masculinity.

It seems to me that masculinity in all of the culturally approved avocations of masculinity is somehow associated with force and violence. That men are suppose to be identified by their bodily strength and that almost all the male initiation rights, all the whole culture of masculinity, the heros that we see be it Indiana Jones or Rambo or John Wayne or Charles Bronson, or whomever, they're all predicated on some kind of violent action. Therefore we understand that to be a man and that being a man, you're not born a man, you become a man according to how the culture says what a man is. The culture makes you into a creature who is ruled by a commitment to violence and that male heroes and male villains, be they cops, be they criminals, they're all bonded by their commitment to violence. And so I think what we really need to do is deconstruct masculinity, destroy notions of cultural masculinity and femininity. I would be much more in favor of a world in which we didn't see ourselves as opposite sexes but as existing on a continuum in which the feminine within men as well as within women was honored. And there would be women who be more traditionally masculine even than some men, etc. Understand that we're on a co-continuum, we have much more in common than we have separating us.

Q: What do you think of Robert Bly and his theories?

Robert Bly. I mean, I find him interesting in that I basically like his response of going back to the old tradition, but my liking of it stops about there. He goes back to an extremely sexist fairy tale in which the guy becomes a hero by basically winning in war and then capturing as his prize a princess. I mean this is absolute sexism. Violence initiation, and then you know the princess as object trophy prize. So, the women is a sex object. I think what he preaches basically is that women are inadequate. That men need to find themselves in a separatist community with other men. And I find historically that men having separatist communities, and even right now culturally male fraternities, male sports, etc. These are the sites of some of the worst violence against women. And that's where I think men are suppose to, the way in which one becomes a man in this culture is by rooting out the feminine within the self. By denying the mother, which Robert Bly is all about. Bonding with the father and rooting out all traces of the feminine within the self which he says you can only do in all male communities. That's completely the patriarchal root to manhood. And women are inadequate for this. What Sheri Hite's research shows is that boys who grow up in households run by single women are far more respectful to women, show lower incidence of violence, etc. So you know, I think that's absolute nonsense that women can't really create men. So what my problem with Bly is that I think he's profoundly misogynist. Women are again a lesser contaminating presence and need to be conquered or overcome in order to actualize manhood. That's again the patriarchal script.

Q: Hasn't violence against women been legally sanctioned for centuries?

It's been different throughout the history of patriarchal culture. For example, we talked about patriarchal religion in the early modern period, around the same time as the voyages to the new world, beginning with the use of Africans in slavery, you had the European and the whole enlightenment, the whole ascendence of rationality. You had the burning of women as witches, throughout early modern Europe, and some men. Probably anywhere from 300 thousand to a million. And this was completely legitimated by both church and state. So violence against women there was the law. You had to do it, it was absolutely approved.

Now a'days, we live in this time of that kind of pseudo taboo I was talking about. It's supposed to be taboo but we all know that on "General Hospital" when Luke raped Laura. It makes it glamorous, it eroticizes that kind of violence against women and it makes it appear consensual. As if women seek this out and want it. It makes it extremely normal as well. Let me just think of a few examples. I mean, we all know the notorious "General Hospital" where Luke raped Laura and then later married her, so it made it seem as though rape was some kind of courtship ritual (laughter). I mean Calvin Kline sells this obsession and gives us these very erotic images of a man, of a naked man carrying a naked woman over his shoulders.

It's underscoring both male dominance but also the idea that love is somehow synonymous with obsession. I mean that's what leads to four women in this country every day being killed by men who say they love them (chuckle) but most women in the country who are killed are killed by men who say they love them. That's really obsession and we should never confuse the two, obsession and feeling that the woman is somehow your property. But we're taught this all the time. And "Pretty Woman" considered a light-hearted flick and Richard Gere decides that he wants to marry Julia Roberts after he realizes that marriage is really ownership, he's not just renting her as a prostitute any more. He can actually own her. Remember the scene where he looks at the jewelry and says, "Oh, I don't have to just rent this, I can own it.” And he's talking about her too. So, I think in all kinds of ways it's made to seem either very normative, very happy and beneficial, or very erotic, a very heroic, be it these constructions of masculinity as violent enforcer, such as Rambo, etc.

Q: So, does the media contribute to these notions or merely reflect them?

Well, I think it's a dialogic process. The media both sells us what we want but also decides and conditions us to want what we want. So it's a two-way street. It's always going back and forth. And it's not just sort of an injection, but media puts these things in our heads. But it shapes what we want as well as then satisfying that want.

We all react differently to those messages. That's a real common theme in contemporary cultural studies, that people can negotiate meanings and take something out of it that somebody else didn't get out. For example, and you'll see that argument used to justify pornography all the time. Well, I read pornography and I haven't raped anyone, etc. etc. But what we need to do is take collective responsibility that, for example, the most common sexual activity of serial murders according to the justice department is using pornography. And that even if an individual can look at a particular type of pornography and not cultivate a desire to go out and sexually murder, we have to take responsibility for that a significant portion of the population does use this material to feed those fantasies and to provide a script for carrying out that kind of behavior. And so it's not a question, I think that a capitalist consumer culture always emphasizes, we have this kind of liberal emphasis on individual rights, my rights, my rights, my rights. How about cultural responsibility. Again I think that's a feature of a gynesophical or gynecentric system. That we really do have to look for a common good in some way and take some responsibility. Understand, set some limits. And again, we live in a culture in which limits are there only to be transgressed.

Q: Is the solution censorship?

I would veer away from censorship. That's why I like the law that Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnin drafted that would make it that a woman or anyone injured by pornography could sue in civil court. So I would never give the police power to seize materials and to prohibit because I think that we could go into the kind of society that Margaret Atwood describes in the Hand Maid's Tale in which you have what I talked about as the right wing side of the women oppressive agenda that sort of the Christian woman as object, woman as reproductive breeder and maybe whore on the side and that's it. Right, that kind of circumscription of women's freedom. But I don't want the purely pornographic libertarian you know, all the women getting raped and incested that we have right now either. So, we're allowed to swing back and forth between modes but never to get beyond them. I'd like to get beyond that. So no, I'm not in favor of censorship.

I'm in favor of one kind of collective responsibility, maybe suing in civil court, there's some legal remedies that have been proposed but I'd never give the police power to seize materials. That would be immediately abused. What I think we need is to really create an alternative consciousness and to create change in the culture through what I call in psychic activism, through generating alternative forms of eroticism, alternative forms of erotica, alternative myths, narratives, symbols, stories. And I think what I would call upon women to do is to reverse the kind of sex negativism. Part of our oppression has been to tell us that we're either these pornographic whores or we're completely asexual. To demand and exercise our sexual autonomy, to become what I think of as bawdy women. You know, were really to speak. I mean we're not really suppose to express our sexual desires outside of pornography. Its seen as some how very lacking in taste, a very unlady like or whatever. I think whenever we criticize pornography we have to do it in a bawdy way to affirm sexuality, to reverse the kind of sex negativism of that strain of patriarchy of the Christian side. To be vulgar in the sense of like bawdy, earthy, in touch with our sexuality. And therefore, I think we break those false opposites of sex negativism or pornography. And move into a new paradigm.

Q: There's some controversy as to whether rape is a crime of violence or a crime of sexuality? How are violence and sex intertwined?

I think it's really specious to separate violence and sexuality. I would disagree with some of the early feminists who you know we all change our minds as the theory gets worked out, who would say rape is a crime of violence, not a crime of sex. Because unfortunately in this culture, sex is completely interfused with violence, with notions of dominance and subordination. As I said, I believe our gender roles are constructed so we have these two constructed genders, masculine and feminine that are defined by one being powerful and one being powerless. And so therefore, powerlessness and power themselves become eroticized. And in that violence becomes eroticized. Domination, subordination become eroticized so that whether you know somebody is actually exerting dominance in a sexually explicit way as in pornography or doing it in a mainstream way, for example. That's seen as somehow sexual. Because the domination itself, the violation itself has become sexual according to this gender hierarchy system.

I realize that there are some biologists that would say that violence is just a means men use to get sex as if sex were just this sort of innate thing that we're all born knowing what it is and wanting. Rather I see sex as a culturally constructed in the way our sexuality is expressed. For example, the idea that intercourse between a man and a woman is sex. Right? Preferably with him on top penetrating and thrusting and her lying still. Right? I mean that's a cultural notion and one induced by male supremacy. So this sex that he's getting is really a model to justify, that he's saying is innate, is a model to justify a very oppressive male dominant form of sexuality that is completely culturally conditioned. Rape is sexual, yes in that force and domination of women has been sexualized. That's how it's both violent and sexual at the same time. We need to recognize how they work in tandem.

Also, I mean, some theorists who I would see as whether consciously or not in complicity would rape would say, "Well, it's just that there's this very attractive woman and rape is the only way I can get her or something like that,” that this justifies. But that in no way speaks to the reality of rape in which extremely old women who are seen in this country or in this culture again in a patriarchal culture as completely undesirable are raped, in which little babies are raped, in which it's just a question of which woman is most vulnerable at a particular time, is most easy to be preyed upon. That theory doesn't jive at all with the way that rape is actually promoted. It's based on there's an available victim that I can intimidate and conquer at this particular point.

Q: What do you think about developing alternate notions of eroticism?

Anything that I talk about with pornography, I stress the needs of developing an alternative notions of sexuality alternative notions of erotica. I think we have to have a counter culture. I know Newt Gingrich has declared war on the counter culture. But that's because I think that's the reason he does it, I think is because that's where the most powerful force is for change. If we change cultural attitudes, behaviors, desires, I mean, all these things are culturally constructed to begin with. Male dominance is a cultural construct. It can be deconstructed and changed and we do that through every day acts, through subversions, as a title of a book by a woman I don't know but it's a good title, Every Day Acts in Small Subversions. That we don't believe them that it's inevitable. And that power is only exercised from the top to the bottom. That we recognize that creation is ongoing every day.

There's a social construction of reality that we participate in and that we can become the creators of an emerging alternative reality. It's happening now. Thirty years ago you would go to medical journals and find no references to wife beating. Not its they're trying to put it back they're trying to say incest is all false memory, etc. They can't completely put it back in the box, we have broken that conspiracy of silence and we're not going to shut up. And not only do we have to tell the truth about the abuses that are heaped on us, but we have to articulate a new emerging consciousness in reality and practice of sexuality that is not based upon that sex negative norm of what the heterosexual monogamous procreative couple, etc. We have to encourage sexual experimentation, the wiring and production of erotic materials, the infusion of the resacrilization of sexuality. Understanding that is why I really hate porography because it teaches us that the life force can be commodified, packaged and sold.

There has been a division in the feminist movement between feminists who are opposed to pornography and feminists who say we shouldn't concentrate on that because it's antisexual. But I see and I think they have a point but I think we need a medium ground here and I understand that pornography is anti-sexual, its about destroying packaging containing exploiting, abusing the life force. Pornography teaches us that the life force can be consumed, used and abused. Then women, children can be consumed, used, abused, the planet can be consumed, used and abused, etc. I see pornography as paradigmatic of other kind of abuses that are taking on. So I think some of the solutions would be to treat, to teach notions of respect for other life forms whether they are human or not, to understand that if you don't treat the life force with respect, understand that you cannot take without giving back, that you have to respect limits, boundaries. The life force will strike back at you. We're always told that there's no limits, that we can boldly go where no man has gone before, a dictum that I see justifying both incest and manifest destiny. I might have said that already.

Q: So how do we begin to change things? How do you inculcate a sense of respect for all life?

This notion, celebrated on "Star Trek," that we can boldly go where no man has gone before, recognizing that's a dictum that justifies everything from incest to manifest destiny, and that what we really need to understand is that we can't go everywhere, that we need to expect an invitation, to understand that you can't take something without giving back in equal measure. That we need to respect, not only other human beings, but all creatures in the land, the land, I would say herself. And then if we don't, the life force will strike back. We talk about with such arrogance that humans can save the planet or not. I mean, you know, we'll only destroy ourselves if we go on in this way. I see all this violence against women as very apocalyptic in some way. I mean it is about destroying and contaminating the future and the life force itself and it's folly. An absolute folly!

Some people say that for things to change the punishment for crimes against women must be severe. What do you think?

Oh, punishment. I have to say in terms of punishment, I mean yes, I think that some abusers are so far gone they're just going to keep doing it and they have to be kept away from the rest of the population. While I certainly agree that we have to say this is not allowable, you know clearly many rapists get off, I mean, it's not a highly prosecuted and convicted crime rate, etc. Batterers continue to do this, people see it as just a lover's quarrel. We do have to change cultural attitudes about that. I'm not in favor of any kind of police state idea of avenge, punish, torture, etc. I'm much more in favor of a model that if somebody cannot change, if somebody is really a danger they should be banished in some kind of segregated way. They have to be, and all modes should be put toward prevention. I mean, I just see sadomasochism and even like punishment itself has become so sexualized under the parent of patriarchal pornographic role view that I'm seeing, that I think we need to really break with all those kind of attitudes.

Q: So how do we break with all those attitudes?

Remember I talked before about grandmother spider creating the world through telling stories, story-telling is what creates consciousness and through consciousness reality is created. And, so the media is our contemporary story teller, and it's in a way, very much like religion. It gives us parables, it gives us values to live by, it gives us role models to emulate, saints or whatever. If you will, new deities almost whom we worship, as in celebrities. So the media has to be recognized as the cultural story teller and understand that it is there to enforce the status quo. We can resist it occasionally. For example, in horror films are where you'll see the most vehement critique of family values. I mean, families are always insane and the father's always out to kill everybody in families, if you think about it, he's like the step father.

I think some people talk about teaching media literacy and I would completely agree with that, that we need to be able to critique the advertising , recognize when there's pictures of little girls posed like Marilyn Monroe when they're four years old. Recognize that images of rape in the ads selling us jeans or something like that so we are consciously aware of them, and I think they lose some of their power over us. But I think on the other hand, we have to get beyond that because these images are meant to appeal like cocoa, he says, they're going to the back of your mind, to your subconscious and we are programmed by our culture to respond to certain things, to react in certain ways and what we as activists have to do is reprogram, recondition, create, and that is through generating what I talked about before, these alternative myth narrative. If we give people an alternative erotica which I see in some women's communities, a lot of lesbian erotica. There's something like Four Fat Dikes, and it's this movie in which women, fat lesbians, who are despised by this culture, right, who are seen as everything a woman should not be, celebrate their bodies and their sexuality. That to me is fabulous and it is also erotic. And it is about celebrating the life force. So those are the direction I think we need to move in as well.

Q: Tell us about your book, The Age of Sex Crime.

The Age of Sex Crime is my first book in which I analyze the phenomena of how serial sex killers have become hero figures in this culture, which goes back to my argument that these are not deviants, these are not monsters from nowhere, they're actually performing a cultural function in enforcing misogyny in showing that women are prey, etc. and acting out masculinity in totally dominating the feminine. So that's the base, and what I mean by that is that the characteristic act of the serial sex killer like Jack the Ripper, sort of the founding father of the movement was the mutilation of a woman's body. And leaving her out for display and it seems to me that the mutilation, particularly of the sex organs is a paradigmatic, a model for the other kinds of abuses that are going on. Be it splitting the atom, be it raising an entire old growth forest or whatever, that kind of again destruction focused on the life force, the generator.

I think particularly in native American philosophy, we're taught that you can only go so far with that before retaliation sets in, that the life force will not let you, the life force does strike back. So do women. Can I say something about "Thelma and Louise?" Why was that movie hated so much? It was one movie in which women bonded, and in which women fought back. They killed one man, who had initiated the violence. But it was seen as this terribly violent movie. And I think that shows about the power of the kind of narratives that I'm talking about. The power to just as Jack the Ripper has become legend, we hear that "Thelma and Louise" live forever on the T-shirts or the bumper stickers. So we've projected into that legendary realm and are able to fight at that level too.

Q: Not all men obviously are violent and they all grow up in the same culture. So, why do you think some men are violent?

As to why individual men are violent, there isn't just one cause. I mean patriarchal science would tell us there's cause and effect and you have to be able to scientifically study it and link it, well experiment on all these college students and see if after watching pornography they'll go rape or something. That's nonsense. That's not how it works. Listen to the anecdotal stories of narratives of people who have lived through violence and abuse and there's always different kinds of reasons. I mean, we can all watch a beer commercial and some of us will go out and drink beer and some of us will even become alcoholics, so there's complex reasons - what happened in the boy's childhood, how much violence he was exposed to. How susceptible he was to images from the media, how strong an influence his mother was in his life, etc. and I mean usually the influence of the mother is a good one generating respect for women as opposed to what movies like Psycho, Alfred Hitchcock's patriarchal narratives, would have us believe. Does that answer it well enough?

What of the media? How does its portrayal of women reinforce certain notions,particularly in advertising?

We see these kinds of advertisements everywhere. I mentioned Calvin Cline's Obsession. There are adds for jeans in which women are shown licking the floor. That's a common technique in domestic violence, not just hitting the woman, but humiliating her. Either with words or through making her perform demeaning acts, etc. Lots of images of couples seeming to tussle and the woman on high heels ready to topple over which we're told again. It normalizes violence, it makes it seem as just a love spat, etc. What other ones did I talk about? Movies? Movies, even if you go back. "Gone with the Wind” is of course classic in that we do see a scene of marital rape and the woman is made to smile as if seeming to enjoy it. Now, hopefully race, consciousness of racist oppression has made us realize that the slaves weren't really enjoying life on the plantation as "Gone with the Wind” shows. I think we should also recognize that Scarlet would not in actuality have enjoyed being raped.

Another movie I love to hate (and I found profoundly distressing because so many children see it and see it uncritically), it's Disney, it's "Beauty and the Beast." If you look at that movie, a young girl, no mother, there's never any mothers in these movies. She lives alone with her father, she ends up getting taken prisoner by the beast. She's literally a prisoner, all the household help conspire to hide the fact of how violent he is and then he actually turns violent on her, breaking furniture, threatening her, a scene of absolute domestic abuse, but we're told that she just loves him enough, he can change and the beast will turn into a prince. That is an extremely dangerous myth to give young girls. That if you just love a man enough you can change him. It also says that it's men's nature. They're beastly. The bestial nature. Not a cultural construction that makes men violent towards women. So I think the movie is deceptive on all these counts but also in particularly in telling the young girl, if she just loves the beast enough, he'll turn into the prince and that keeps a lot of women waiting around, hoping, hoping he'll change. And he keeps telling her that.

We see this also graphically in an adult movie, "Internal Affairs,” in which the character played by Andy Garcia, and both these movies are very racist. The beast when he turns into the prince changes from being bestial into being like Apollo or something like that. This blonde god and the darkness and the bestial is associated with I think people of color very graphically. Andy Garcia in "Internal Affairs” beats his wife in public. And then, he breaks into Spanish right after beating her in public which makes it seem as if you know this hot Latino kind of thing. So again, it's somehow associated with race here, not with just male supremacy and privilege. And then he goes home the next day and she fights back. She's angry at him for beating her in public and he tells her he's jealous of her and he's seen her with another man and he's saying....He goes and spends the night drinking and with women of color are whores, so again the racism and I mean whores, oh, I'll have to start again. He beats his wife in public and she of course is a blonde, white trophy kind of desirable woman in a racist-sexist culture. He goes and then spends the night with the so-called despised women, women of color who are then whores. He then goes home the next day and confronts her and starts accusing her of sleeping with other men, etc. and tells her if you ever do that I'll kill you, I'll kill you!. At this point they fall to the floor and make passionate love while he keeps reminding her - I'll kill you, I'll kill you. This is not foreplay, these are not words of endearment. When women hear that they should get out and not be told by the movies that this is a prelude to the greatest sex you're ever going to have.

Q: What about portrayals of women in music videos and elsewhere?

Guns and Roses in, for example, Axl Rose has been accused by two of his former wives and/or girl friends of beating them. And he shows women being beaten and murdered by himself, by him in many of his videos including "Don't Cry,” "November Rains,” etc. So, very clearly there's this idea that it's completely normal and acceptable for a heroic figure like Axl Rose to beat women. What else on MTV? I know because I've done some of these.

Q: It goes all the way back to Shakespeare. Think of "Othello."

I've never read "Othello," so I can't tell. Again, you know you're getting into this where it's so much easier for a racist culture to select out men of color and say they're the ones who are doing this. They're the rapists, they're the beasts, etc. And I'm saying that men of color don't abuse women, they do. I'm just saying they're given disproportionate attention in a racist media. And its all, they're scapegoated. It's all put on. They're the ones who are doing it. And then women we're told, we're sex objects, white women particularly young, blonde white women are said to be the trophy objects, the objects to claim and of course, the most common reason men give for abusing and/or killing women is the jealousy and the idea that if I can't have her, no one can. She's my property. There's a T-shirt that's actually sold that says, "If you love something, set it free, and if it doesn't come back, gun it down and kill it." Yeah, which I see as like the mantra for the abusive generally femicidal man.

But think how often in the media that when we're taught that when a man begins to show jealousy, that's when he's in love, no that's when he's obsessed and use you as property. And you should get the hell out. But you know "Pretty Woman,” that's one where the minute Richard Gear begins showing jealousy, the audience says, Oh good, he loves her. You know, that kind of thing and that's again one way we're seduced to these attitudes that condone, legitimize and endorse in this case wife beating.

Q: How does the mass media make women sex objects?

Women being sex objects and what we mean by that is that we're reduced to things. Property, objects to consume, to use, to abuse, to own. Which is related obviously to the issue of jealousy. But if you look at the mass media you'll see an endless supply of women being portrayed as what I call fem-bots, these kind of sex robots. For example, there's a very famous, not famous, it's famous on college campuses because it shows, it's up so much in the men's dorms. It's an ad for a motorcycle that just shows a woman's body fused into the motorcycle. And her rump is where the man sits and drives her. So woman as the object that you can own and use at your pleasure, at your will, that image says it but all the kind of rituals in which women are -- the cheese cake things. The cultural rituals or the images that show us as objects, that we are there to be looked at, that we are there. Let me think of some other images I have that show this kind of objectification going on. But see when I'm saying that, I can give you some images of women as that motorcycle image -- the woman as yeah, that we are therefore, we're not recognized as significant human beings. We are rendered soulless when actually it's the ones who are soulless who are trying to portray women as like these kind of simple dolls, objects, puppets, and it's very curious. Ted Bundy, and many people think that he wasn't, that he was just copying this idea that pornography made him do it the last minute. He talked about that since he was caught in 1979 how pornography, not just pornography but Coppertone ads in which women were just shown as display items, were used, you know, draped on cars, that he became identified with the car. That women were literally sex objects to them. He says he never talked about the women as she but as the object, the puppet, the doll.

Q: Can you think of responsible portrayals of women?

"Thelma and Louise" Let's see. It's harder to come up with responsible portrayals of women I think that we can certainly find some. I think Allison Anders film, "Gas, Food and Lodging" is a very complex, it's a female initiation story. It's a female coming of age story. There's a movie called "Desert Bloom,” that's again interesting. I think "Thelma and Louise” is genuine feminist art. "Daughter's of the Dust” by Julie Desh which is, she the first African-American female filmmaker to make a feature film. You know which shows the combined racism and sexism in the system that thus far there have been, she was the first just 19, just three years ago I believe. Ah, the responsible portrayals of women.

Roseann. I think Roseann is marvelous. I mean, you know obviously I'm going to quibble sometimes, but Roseann proclaims her autonomy, her power, her sexuality. The show deals with complex issues. I love it.

I'm going to surprise you with this, but I think that sometimes in soap operas, because they are pitched toward a women audience, that you will find, for example, on the "Young and the Restless,” more responsible treatments of date rape, battery. For example, in movies like "Sleeping With the Enemy,” we see a woman stranded. She's being beaten by her husband and she has nowhere to go. She's completely on her own. There is no social system to support her. On the "Young and the Restless” there are friends who intervene. She goes to a battered woman's shelter and talks about her problem. They all give her the support to leave her husband. So that I consider that to be a genuine feminist portrayal. And another instance of a treatment of a date rape on the "Young and the Restless,” the sexual harassment, excuse me, an episode of examining sexual harassment on the "Young and the Restless,” which again has a lot of problems. I'm not portraying it as pure feminist intentionality or anything like that, but there was a very interesting treatment of sexual harassment in which the male lawyer harassing the younger female lawyer at the end tells her, "You know, just between me and you, you really wanted it, you really desired it. And you know you secretly were yearning for it.” She faces him down and says "Absolutely not. You were trying to use your power to dominate me. You get off on power. I don't get off on powerlessness.” something to that effect. I'm not quoting her exactly. Again, these kind of shining feminist moments on soap operas. Which is, of course, seen as a degraded women's kind of form of amusement.

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egoat · 4 years ago

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mad men show notes s01e01

i have an obsession with the tv series “mad men”. i have watched in in its entirety from start to finish more times than i can even remember. i have bought the blu ray collectors edition boxset after i watched it so i could watch it again with the dvd commentaries. i kept the coasters that came with the boxset for many years, even though they were functionally useless.

i will be attempting to document some of my stray observations about the series in a sort of livebloggy-manner. let’s start with the pilot, which, while ultimately good, starts the series off a bit awkwardly. it has a lot to do, because it’s tasked with the pilot’s role of being a “proof of concept” for the show at large, but mad men is an immensely hard-to-summarize idea. it does, for most part, a pretty good job, but it makes a few awkward missteps along the way.

the first scene in particular, which has the painful task of establishing that don is not a racist. there’s a lack of grace here that you wouldn’t normally expect from a mad men episode- don talks to a black bartender, ostensibly to appreciate the depths of his soul but actually to gather data about cigarette habits, a guy comes over to be racist, and don puts his foot down and says, no racism here.

the reality is that this show centers on white men at the height of corporate power in new york city who all live in the suburbs in the year 1960 - buddy, they’re all racist. the show really never tangles with race in a meaningful way - it comes up in minor ways throughout the show’s run, mostly in the later seasons - and i can’t help but feel like this is a sort of studio executive friendly-decision to tame down the overwhelming bigotry of the time period a bit. most of them can be racist, but at least give the main character some time off.

it comes off as a bit funny because the following scene introduces the rest of the main cast by having them unload uzis of sexism all over the elevator. as i’ve said, i’ve watched this many times, but the initial volley of, let’s call it period establishment, is never any less brutal. i’ve showed this show to multiple friends and i can’t say it leaves a great impression, especially since it only gets poured on heavier in the coming scenes (the ob-gyn one in particular).

that brings us to the first major character moment of the series - campbell is unrelenting in his petulant harassment of peggy, so much that don stops it. she never makes any indication of enjoying it- and yet, she lets him in at the end of the episode, and in the future at least has somewhat of a real crush on him, at least for a little bit. what’s the message here? that you should just harass women and eventually they’ll fall in love with you? that peggy really wanted to just try out her birth control? i feel like it’s not telegraphed well simply for there being a surprise that it happens, which is again unusually sloppy.

the actual main thrust of the episode is of course don, who has a complicated soul and personal life yet has brilliant ideas. it’s really weird how much the pilot makes this seem like one of those cable shows about a guy who’s unusually talented at his job, like suits or something, when mad men is really not about that at all. i was surprised to rewatch the first few seasons of the show and realize how little the “creative process” ever even functions into the main plot at all. it happens here, in “the wheel”, and largely doesn’t even come up again as a regular device until season 4, where it starts happening more regularly. in fact, at a certain point, don’s talent dries up completely - he’s seen as a hack and is visibly less talented than his employees. it’s great! i’ve had enough of being impressed at competence.

but yes, this episode does center on a piece where don’s infinite wisdom allows him to save a pitch-gone-wrong by suggesting a revolutionary ad for a cigarette that basically says nothing. fun fact: lucky strike really did use the slogan, “it’s toasted!” but it had done so since 1917, and had nothing to do with reverse psychology-ing people out of knowing that smoking is bad for you. i don’t really know what to make of this centerpiece - it really worked for me the first time, and i think what this episode is saying about smoking and the repressive psychological state of the 1960s does work, but it didn’t click for me logically at all this time around. people are supposed to glean a health benefit from “it’s toasted”? i just don’t see it!!!

we get a bit of hinting around the ~mysterious nature of don’s past~ already - he pulls out a purple heart with the name dick whitman on it. i’ll just address it now - ultimately, all of the mystery buildup around the don draper situation in season 1 isn’t that great. once the show has gone through the trouble of making a show at establishing what happened, it pays off as you start to feel what’s really going on with don, a character out of place, but the path to get there, and especially the stuff with adam, isn’t particularly well-executed.

what else? whenever jon hamm and john slattery have a scene together, it’s really funny - it’s because they really just are that funny. they do some of the dvd commentaries together and it’s great. the ritual of their characters having a little session in don’s office to whine at each other happens a lot in the first few seasons, and it’s always great when it happens - it sadly disappears around season 2 and never really comes back as the characters’ relationship becomes, and stays, contentious and resentful. it hurts my heart to see it. just let them be together!

does the twist where don comes home and he has a wife and children work? yes, i think so. as i’ve been watching again, i’ve been trying to come up with a definitive answer to why don cheats. the later seasons of the show give it away - it’s because he has a yearning loneliness in his soul from being an orphan, and probably sexually traumatized in some way, and thus he needs to fill it with constant companionship and yadayada. there’s a bit more to it though, at least. being with madge lets him be hedonistic and honest, and perhaps more of his “true self”, but also lets him be in her world, someone in nyc’s other society, the village, among artists, rejects, outsiders. ironically, he’ll be rejected even there, but that’s getting ahead of myself. bye!!

#mad men

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semi-imaginary-place · 4 years ago

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rewatching decadence

ep1: so... indoctrinating kids that they life their life in service to an upper class. also like, the way deca dence takes care of giant gadoll is to punch it like no giant sword or laser canon or anything just the power of a giant mountain sized fist. this show actually has some good foreshadowing from seeing Natsume from the perspective of Kaburagi’s hud, to Natsume’s dad (Muno) finding the Solid Quake logo at the beginning of the episode and the logo again being shown in the last shot at the announcement signs off with have a profitable day which is a weird public safety announcement but makes sense as a company slogan. I’m still not sure what the “TIME 1:00 POINT SE,07,G” means. I didn’t write it down last time because I was unsure of myself, but my first thought when the cyborgs showed up was VR chatroom for the upper class.

ep2: yeahs that’s totally an advertisement that plays right after natsume realizes the human costs of war as the tankers pay respects to the fallen. I realized what it was with the cartoony designs, the bright colors and patterns, the funky shapes of all the structures aboard the space ship, it looks like a tv show for toddlers. inoffensive and deliberately cheerful to distract from the horrors of a corporation owning your person. the eng subtitles are confusing here it should be “real death(simulation) awaits” in that the company is advertising being able to experience death but not have any of its permanent consequences as a feature of the game. The cyborgs are corporate wage slaves being compensated for their labor in company credits and the only other things we seen them do outside of work is play the company’s mmo, or recreational drugs. “I should be proud of my function and to be scrapped” as property of the company. aaaa that’s terrible. aaa. what are cyborg cores??? and why are they valuable. Solid Quake has no control over the core, only the cyborg’s housing. Is it that they cannot produce more? Considering the others on the team got executed for sentenced to an eternal forced labor camp with appalling conditions, Minato really did pull some strings for Kaburagi. ooh so “time until scrapping” and “operational limit near are two different warnings. the first is a general reminder of lifespan and the second is because oxyone levels are low. now its “TIME 20:00 POINT SE,05,I”. all those new gadoll events probably wreck havoc on the tanker economy. its 400c now and i think it was 500 for 2 earlier. First time through I wasn’t paying attention and totally thought kaburagi was an assassin, but no he’s just clean up crew. ahh yes, come spend you wages at the company run stores. micro transactions... wait so where were people getting the number 13 from?

ep3: ah yes Solid Quake charges to use the media center, truly a micro transaction hell. Natsume’s character arc is about whether to push herself or not. Here Fei acts as part of a continuing dialectic saying that Tankers have no place outside of Deca-Dence, that sooner of later Natsume will die from it, and once again highlighting Natsume’s right arm. In the other level of this though, tankers shouldn’t go outside because that’s not their role in the solid quake mmo, and those who would disrupt the mmo are killed. I like how you can see Kaburagi switch from videogame logic (oh she’s low level so let’s just stick her in the tutorial zone) to real life (what skills and experiences would help in fighting). So several corporations took advantage of desperate people to sell them a service that would augment them with mechanical parts. I get that pipe in a little outfit is funny, but does no one really realize its a gadoll, i meant natsume recognizes it instantly. like the scene where Natsume talks about her right arm, the anime does a good job of showing how her feeling about it are complicated. She’s lived with that arm for years, but it also hinders her sometimes, and people will comment about it. there’s this specific type of humor that pops up in this show and given how its the same joke, my guess is that its the same person behind it. The “joke” being that Natsume is put in a position that references sexual assault. The first is with fennel where she makes up an excuse of having to go see kaburagi to get away from him. And then there’s this episode. There’s also a few stray lines here and there that alarm me in that they imply Natsume has dealt with the threat of assault before. Since they didn’t do anything meaningful with this, I’d rather it just not be there. Minato is in on the secret of Pipe’s existence and by the way the two talk, they’ve called each other before in the last 7 years. Its good to know that Kaburagi wasn’t JUST brooding for 7 years and that the two of them stayed in contact.

ep4: Natsume after having gained confidence in herself takes down several gadoll and earns her place in The Power. Its a fulfilling payoff after seeing her train for several episodes. Natsume is where she always wanted to be, fighting gadoll in the Power. gahh It really is a patch release trailer. Ohh so I assumed that the other structures on the cartoon earth were other corporations, but in this episode we see one of them (the white and red striped cone thing opposite the deca-dence dome) and the cyborgs there are talking about the game (MMO LARPing lol), so either Solid Quake owns multiple of those structures, or these cyborgs are customers not owned by Solid Quake and playing of their own volition. that would makes the cone cyborgs where solid quake is deriving its profit from since its not like it pays its workers. reading comments online, a lot of people missed that because a ranker was found to be cheating (mikey), the rankings were abolished. In the present time, gears/players are not ranked. Ah so Kaburagi was transferred to the maintenance department from the warrior department. Wow reassignment is so much better than the poop jail. I remember it being said, armor repair, doctor, and weapon shop could be employee(cyborg) run so I wonder if the medics and that one armor shop guy are tankers or not. So this anime already snuck in a sex joke with the when the poop gang swapped kaburagi’s avatar with a sex toy, so i wonder if the safetyprivatemode was made so that the mods wouldn’t have to listen to robot sex. I really wish this show could have had 24 episodes. The trend for the past 20 years has been shorter and shorter shows so I know it would have been likely impossible to get the clearance and funding for 24 eps but oooh in som alternate universe maybe... i brought up fleshing out minor characters and character relationships before but there also stuff like Natsume’s right hand almost clamping on ... Mindy? Which usually would be a narrative flag but is completely dropped because of the episode limit. And the confidence Natsume gained last episode come to work against Kaburagi trying to keep her from the suicide mission. Its only from this point on that Kaburagi starts to really change, as of this point he is still a loyal cog to a machine that does not care about him. Kaburagi and Natsume in the 2nd half of the episode continue the same dialectic that runs through the whole of the show, about giving up and learning to try again, about pushing your limit, about why someone bothers trying. On the collectivist versus individualist spectrum, Deca-Dence is on the individualist side with assertions of the importance for deciding for yourself what you will do with your life. Its an interesting counterpoint to The Twilight Mirage (Friends at the Table) which I am currently listening to in that The Twilight Mirage is a western production and strongly collectivist with one of the antagonist being sort of kind of an embodiment of independence/individualism while japanese works as a whole tend to be more about the whole over the individual than western ones. Kurenai talking about why she fights is very good and very important for 2 reasons, first it help flesh out not only her but offer a very needed other opinion on what its like to live as a Tanker, second it segues nicely into Natsume’s memories of her dad telling her about the outside world and him being the only one to believe she can do it (fight in The Power) as contrasted with flashbacks of all the other characters telling her she can’t. This culminates in Natsume gathering her resolve to fight not because of something grand like changing the world or the fate of humanity, but something very personal scale: changing herself and proving to herself that she can do it. The is also the climax of her character arc, the point of no return.

ep5: If last episode was natsume’s point of no return, then either this episode or episode 7 is Kaburagi’s. Rationally speaking, the optimal scenario would have been for Kaburagi to stall long enough for the Tankers to escape before pulling back himself, but emotionally and narratively, there’s no way he couldn’t. After all the build up of deciding for yourself how to live and pushing your limits. Its appropriate that here in defense of the girl that inspired him to live and choose for himself rather than just continue existing in the default of what Solid Quake demands of him, that Kaburagi chooses to release his operational limiter (literally pushing him limit) and derail the company’s plans. How did no one realize purple dude was breaking imprisonment to play on a hacked avatar. Like he’s still as purple and bloodthirsty as ever. He acts and speaks the same. Someone would have totally seen him and gone “eyyyyy [i forgot this guy’s name] is back” and talked to people about it and someone should have heard. So I remember reading comments from various idiots who were mad because they mistakenly thought the anime took place in a virtual space and that Natsume was made of lines of code. And first off even if that was true there’s a difference between objective reality and the lived experiences of a person and what’s to say her experiences and emotions would be any less real than yours. And second, did everyone forget The Hunger Games? Like its just another game that plays with real lives and doesn’t care who gets killed. Solid Quake is just using humans as a stage prop. Man this episode is jam packed. Its like getting punched in the face 4 times. The pacing of the last 4 minutes was really good. The quiet scene as dawn breaks acts in direct contrast to the high energy of the Stargate takedown that preceded it. After time and against not listening to him, Minato still calls Kabu to check in with him. There’s also his certainly that it was Kaburagi that saved the Deca-Dence mech (i need to be clearer when I’m talking about the physical fortress city mech, the mmorpg game, or the deca-dence system itself). And then when the world state gets reset is just so good because it make it clear that the gadoll were never the true enemy. The tankers could kill as many gadoll as they want and nothing would change. Kaburagi’s at an interesting point here, in that he’s no longer in a state of having given up like he was in episode 1 just waiting to die and following along with Solid Quake’s orders, as of this episode he has deliberately gone against the company’s rules, and yet he’s still believes that nothing will actually change. He’s broken a rule and resigned himself to punishment instead of say for example getting rid of the punishment all together. He’s still a good little employee that hasn’t rebelled against the system. And then the “Take care of Pipe” and Natsume turns around and he’s already gone, is sooo good. The final shot too of his avatar face down in the snow! The “This world needs bugs” is in direct contrast to Hugin/Fugin(?) repeating that this world must be rid of bugs, and the same phrase Kaburagi repeated 7 years ago when he was transferred to the Maintenance Department instead of being killed. I wonder how much the cyborgs feel in their original bodies vs. how much they feel in their Gear avatars. Kaburagi doesn’t seem to care about food and no food stalls were shown in the Gear area so maybe they doesn’t have much sense of taste? The avatars also have a lessened sense of pain. And then the limit release sequence shows connections increasing between the two bodies so does it make the cyborgs more attuned with the avatar’s senses?

ep6: eh so this is another example of what I mean when I say some of the humor in this show is in bad taste. They probably put the oxyone port where the ass would be just to make this joke. But this is better then doing to it Natsume. The animators even had a gleam censor for the over where the capsule was inserted as if it wasn’t obvious enough what it was suppose to look like. Spurned on by the the promise that one day if they work hard and behave (”rehabilitated”), the cyborgs will get let out when in actuality its a forced labor camp so that Solid Quake can squeeze just a little more labor our of the cyborgs for even less compensation. The cartoony style here helps offset just how horrific there working conditions are. And Kaburagi still the good little employee (iiko) tries his hardest to play by the rules and win. Except in this game, there is no “win’ written into the rules. So finally he is forced to move outside of the system Solid Quake has made. I still can’t believe they let Donatello keep the gun... Maybe cyborg cores are brains. In 5.5 Kaburagi’s core is in the top half of his metal case, and Donatello’s is also in his head. I’m still not sure what that sequence where Kaburagi takes the head fin and an image of a cyborg core is overlayed, means.

#deca-dence #deca dence #anime #i think too much #reviews #writing

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fatehbaz · 6 years ago

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Hello, I hope you're well. Do you have any recommendations about where to start with decolonization theory? I've heard a bit about it but nothing substantial.

Hey, thanks for the question. Before I start rambling, I’ll just give a really short, blunt response: Despite all the jargon-heavy academic content written about decolonization, especially as a trend in the past 15 years, I think that the way to learn about decolonial thought and practice is to read the work of people living in the Global South; the work of marginalized environmental activists and agricultural workers, especially in the Global South; and the work of Indigenous scholars, knowledge holders, and activists who are explicitly willing to share their knowledge with non-Indigenous people. That said, I’m not too well-versed in technical decolonial theory per se, and instead I try to read more of the ecological/environmental, social/anthropological, and activist writing of Indigenous people and people from the Global South, what you might call decolonial thought. Rather than focusing on the technical theory and writing of wealthy Euro-American academics, I prefer more radical decolonial writing that integrates local/Indigenous cosmology, environmental knowledge, and ecology alongside the social and political aspects of radical anticolonial resistance. Something that I’m really interested in, regarding decolonial thought, is the importance of Indigenous and non-Western cosmology (ontology, epistemology, worldviews) because these ways of knowing actually provide frameworks that stand in contrast to extractivist thinking, suggesting alternatives that could be implemented. So, below I’ve listed just a couple of the most accessible authors that I’ve been reading recently, and I’ve split recommendations into four categories: (1) Indigenous authors writing about sovereignty and ecological consequences of colonialism; (2) technical decolonial theory and Indigenous resistance; (3) decolonial theory and ontology; and (4) synthesizing technical decolonial theory with writing on Indigenous worldviews and environmental knowledge. This definitely isn’t meant to be an extensive or definitive list of resources; and I know other people might have some better or different recommendations to make. But I hope this helps, if only a little bit, as an introduction!

Y’know, I think there’s a tendency among a lot of Euro-American academics to make the concept of decolonization much more mysterious, obtuse, and complicated than it needs to be; there’s an awful lot of discourse about metaphysics, ontology, and other intellectualized aspects of decolonization that are probably less important right now than concrete actions like reforestation and revegetation projects; healing soil integrity, health, and biodiversity; dismantling monoculture plantations; ending industrial resource extraction; ending de facto corporate control of lands, especially in tropical agriculture; allowing local Indigenous autonomy; preserving and celebrating Indigenous languages and ways of knowing; etc.

So, I’m not all that knowledgeable with technical decolonial theory. Instead I mostly just try very hard to read the environmental, anthropological, activist, etc. writing of Indigenous and minority communities, people from the Global South, and Indigenous traditional knowledge holders. Often, this kind of writing doesn’t always take the form of “theory.” A lot of decolonial theory - that I’ve seen, at least - is concerned with discussing trends/currents in academia and Euro-American discourse about the Global South. (In other words, a lot of decolonial theory written by white authors seems more concerned with talking about what decolonization means for academia and discourse, rather than actually exploring the worldviews of Indigenous peoples and the Global South.) Instead, the kind of stuff that I try to read explores Indigenous and non-Western resistance, community-building, and ecology; and so the resources that I recommend might not qualify as decolonial theory but they are decolonial, if that makes sense?

In my experience, some of the works that best demonstrate or embody decolonial thought are not works of theory, but are instead works of social history, nature writing, natural history, or works that explore bioregionalism, food, and local folklore. I also like to note that there is a trend among activists and scholars in Latin America to use the term “anticolonial” instead of “decolonial” or “postcolonial.” These latter two terms might imply that existence or identity in the Global South is doomed to always be defined by its relationship to Europe, the US, or imperialism generally. However, “anticolonial” might connote a more active role; you may still suffer the effects of imperialism, but you’re also an active opponent of it, living and thinking outside colonialism, with a unique worldview that exists autonomously rather than being defined always in reference to colonial actions or standards.

Indigenous authors writing about sovereignty and ecological consequences of colonialism:

So here are a few Indigenous scholars that I read, who write not just about decolonial thought, but also about place-based identity, environmental knowledge, and how decolonial theory can often be Eurocentic:

– Zoe Todd: Metis scholar and environmental writer, who famously criticized academic discourse about decolonization for itself being Eurocentric and colonial; here’s a nice interview (from 2015) about decolonial theory, where Zoe Todd criticizes Western academics and the ontological turn in anthropology.– Kyle Whyte: Potawatomi scholar, who writes about Indigenous sovereignty, Indigenous food systems, colonization, contrasts between Indigenous and Euro-American worldviews, and preservation of Indigenous enviornmental knowledge; here’s a list of Whyte’s articles and essays, most available for free.– Robin Wall Kimmerer: Potawatomi ecologist, bryophyte specialist, and educator, who discusses contrasts between Indigenous and Euro-American ways of knowing; here’s one of my favorite interviews with Kimmerer.

Technical decolonial theory and Indigenous resistance:

And here are two recommendations on more technical anticolonial/decolonial theory. These texts are both a bit dense:

– Boaventura de Sousa Santos wrote a wonderful work of decolonial/anticolonial theory and thought, titled Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide (2014). This work is a bit technical but very interesting and thorough, and explores how a major function of imperialism is to deliberately dismantle Indigenous worldviews, ways of knowing, and environmental knowledge, to replace Indigenous ecological relationships with “extractivist” and “industrial” mentalities.

– Arturo Escobar wrote a good work of anticolonial theory in direct response to de Sousa Santos’ work; Escobar’s text is called Thinking-feeling with the Earth: Territorial Struggles and the Ontological Dimension of the Epistemologies of the South (2015).

Both of these texts and authors explore the Global South’s active resistance to industrial/extractivist worldviews; they both also largely focus on Latin America and reciprocity, communal relationships, agroecology, and active resistance in Latin American communities.

Decolonial theory and ontology:

The ontological turn in anthropology is kiiind of a manifestation of decolonial theory, though it’s kind of problematic and often Eurocentric, popular among wealthy academics. The Metis scholar Zoe Todd, referenced earlier in this post, has written about the problematic aspects of the ontological turn. The ontological turn was big news in academia around 2008-2012, happening alongside the rise in popularity of Mark Fisher, “capitalist realism,” and Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology. Basically, I guess you could summarize the ontological turn as an effort to decolonize thinking in anthropology departments of Euro-American universities, to better understand the the worldviews/cosmologies of non-Western people. Here’s a summary by environmental scholar Adrian Ivakhiv, which references the role of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Phillipe Descola, two anthropologists working adjacent to decolonial theory.

Synthesizing technical decolonial theory with writing on Indigenous worldviews and environmental knowledge:

– Phillipe Descola: A renowned anthropologist whose work inspired much of the decolonization trend in US anthropology departments and the ontological turn in anthropology; Descola’s work deals with epistemology and ontology (so it’s often pretty dense) and takes a lot of cues from the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, the Brazilian anthropologist who popularized the study of Amazonianist cosmology. Other Euro-American anthropologists who write about technical decolonial theory: Bruno Latour (kind of problematic); Isabelle Stengers.

– Eduardo Kohn: An anthropologist focused on decolonization and Indigenous worldviews; Kohn also takes cues from Viveiros de Castro and Descola. Kohn authored How Forests Think, which is a study of Indigenous Amazonian worldviews and how Amazonian people perceive nonhuman living things and the rainforest as a community. You can look up interviews with Eduardo Kohn

– I don’t know if you saw this post I made recently, but it shares a fun publication called The Word for World is Still Forest, which is an exploration of the cultural importance of forests from decolonial and Indigenous perspectives, and it’s a good example of decolonial theory being explored by visual artists, geographers, poets, anthropologists, and activists.

So, these are just the first examples that come to mind. I’m sure other friends/readers/followers might have some better recommendations. [ @anarcblr ?]

Often, I feel like a lot of technical decolonization theory is written by white professionals and academics, and I, personally, don’t think it’s important to have a white academic acting as a “middle man” whomst “translates” the thinking of Indigenous theorists and people from the Global South. In my experience, there’s a lot of “decolonization theory” content in journals, books, etc., over the past 20-ish years, mostly written by white academics who seem to have just recently “discovered” the “utility” of decolonization theory for “improving their field” or something. Discussing the “utility” of Indigenous knowledge is itself a kind of colonialist way of thinking, since it sees the knowledge as profitable or valuable or something to be employed like a machine, a way of thinking that is itself extractivist. (I’m not anti-intellectual, and anti-intellectualism is a problem, especially in the US. But I’ve not really found academics willing to just straight-up say radical things like “capitalism has to be confronted if we’re going to be serious about decolonization.”)

Like, they write about decolonization as if it’s major benefit is its practical/pragmatic application to improving science, metaphysics, conservation, or climate crisis mitigation. One example of this behavior is a huge amount of headlines in mainstream US news sources and environmental magazines, from late 2018 and 2019, that say some version of “Indigenous knowledge may be the key to surviving the climate crisis” or “planting trees might be the single best defense against global climate collapse, and Indigenous peoples’ knowledge can help us implement it” And this just doesn’t sit well with me. Firstly, because it frames Indigenous knowledge as an inanimate resource to be “tapped,” appropriated, employed, “put to use.” And secondly, because this not news. This - the role of vegetation and healthy soil microorganism communities in mitigating desertification, biodiversity loss, and local adverse climate trends - has been well-known to Indigenous peoples for centuries or millennia, and has also been very well-known to Euro-American environmental historians and academic geographers for decades.

I guess I’m saying that the current Euro-American discourse of decolonization has a lot of issues.

Anyway, the theory that I personally like best isn’t too academic or jargon-heavy; I like the work that which synthesizes human elements (anticolonial; anti-imperialist; anti-extractivism; anti-racist) with ecology (cosmology and folklore; traditional environmental knowledge; place-based identity), since ecological degradation and social violence and injustice are inseparable issues, and this is an interconnected relationship that decolonial theory and Latin American worldviews seem to understand very, very deeply.

And, I guess another element to the kind of decolonial writing that I enjoy is the importance of Indigenous and non-Western cosmology (worldviews, epistemology, ontology, ways of knowing) to providing alternatives to imperial, colonial, and extractivist mentalities. This is how decolonial thinking is not just about finding ways to defend against further imperial violence, but also proactive in promoting healthier alternatives that can be implemented.

I hope that some of these recommendations are useful!

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elliepassmore · 5 years ago

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The Golden Compass Review

5/5 stars Recommended if you like: fantasy, adventure, magic, steampunk, talking animals, corporeal souls His Dark Materials is an interesting world because it combines fantasy + technology in a way that makes it seem like it could be steampunk, but without the typical gears and grime associated with steampunk. So you've got grand universities, zeppelins, and flying spy/attack bugs, but you've also got shapeshifting souls, a 'magic' powered truth teller, and witches. I like the interplay between outright exposition and the slow unfolding of the rules this world has--institutional functions we get and main relationships we get to know about almost right away, but things like dæmons are explained more slowly. This book contains three main settings, each with varying interplays of technology and fantasy: Jordan College (Oxford), the fens, and the North. Jordan College pays the most attention (overall) to technology, being a college and all, though there's a healthy dose of what they call 'philosophy' but which is really the study of magic. I think this setting has the most warmth out of all of them, simply because Lyra knows it the best and is able to introduce us to the College and surrounding areas not only via current actions, but also through memories and anecdotes. I will say, though, that it's a fantasy novel and there's literally zero reason why there can't be female scholars without them being looked down upon (yes, I'm aware this is set in an alternate late-1800s, early 1900s, but still). The next major setting, the fens, really takes place in more than one location but can be grouped together under 'fens.' Lyra spends some time with her sort-of friend's family while she's on the run and before they venture up North. Where Jordan College had a sense of warmth, the fens have a sense of family. Everyone takes care of one another and are willing to help one another out--and even though Lyra is an outsider when she's taken in, they still protect her even before it becomes about the Gobblers. I will say, I wish we could've seen a bit more resolution for the gyptians Lyra was traveling with. I know they're mentioned briefly at the end, but I would've liked a little extra info about how everything turned out. The final setting is the North and, like the fens, is actually more than one setting that fit under this category. In the North, we see the port town Lyra and co. stop in upon arriving and where they pick up Iorek Byrnison, an armored bear, and send word to a witch acquaintance. The next setting is really just them traveling farther up to Bolvangar, where the Gobblers have taken kids. Next is Bolvangar, which reminds me a bit of the re-education center in Silver Shadows by Richelle Mead, but with more experiments and less re-educating. It's really quite creepy if you think about what they do in Bolvangar and how they do it with such nonchalance. Svalbard is the next major North setting and is where the armored bears are stationed. The group does, in fact, mean to go there, but naturally it doesn't work out the way they planned and Lyra ends up a prisoner. Pullman balances the fierce warrior nature of the armored bears with the gilded opulence of their new king and I enjoyed reading about the juxtaposition of the two. The main set of characters comprises of: Lyra and Pantalaimon, Iorek Byrnison, John Faa, Roger, Lord Asriel and his dæmon, and Mrs. Coulter and her dæmon. Lyra is a precocious, fierce girl whose age I've put at about 11. She enjoys running wild about her home at Jordan College and the surrounding area and is quite the little leader of a pack of kids. Like most kids who grow up running wild with 'neighborhood' kids, Lyra prefers to be outdoors exploring rather than sitting still and listening to adults drone on about one thing or another, and Lyra's curiosity and adventurous nature get her into places she shouldn't be, even before this book's adventure begins. Pantalaimon, Pan, is her soul and, of course, also likes exploring and being wild, but he's the more reserved of the two. He also works to help her think things out, talk her way out of trouble, and admonish her when she does stuff that gets them into trouble. As precocious and wild as Lyra is, she's also deeply loyal and determined to see things through, as shown by her love and fear for Iorek Byrnison and her fierce commitment to saving Roger. Iorek Byrnison is an armored bear Lyra and co. hire when they travel to find the Gobblers. He's gruff and a bit down on his luck when they find him, and though he grows no less gruff, he does form a companionship with Lyra and Pan and seems to genuinely care about them. As much as he cares about Lyra and Pan and is willing to protect them, he also has his own place in the plot of the story. Iorek was banished from Svalbard and risks trouble when the plot takes the group back to it. But Iorek's main character plot is found there and his journey begins to separate from Lyra's at that point. Roger grew up alongside Lyra at Jordan College and is shown to be her closest friend. The two of them often get up to mischief, though it's shown Roger is a tad more reserved than Lyra. Despite being somewhat quieter, he's similarly loyal to Lyra and willing to go along with her schemes, even when they're risky. John Faa is the leader of the gyptians and comes across as jolly and warm, but fierce. He leads the expedition up North to rescue the stolen kids and seems to regard Lyra as both someone to care for and look after as well as someone to respect and listen to, a nice balance from most of the other adults in the book thus far (though to be fair, most of the adults in the fens have the same attitude). He's one of the gyptians I would've liked a little more resolution for, as we get to see him a little bit a couple hundred pages from the end and we know what he's doing next, but beyond that we don't get any insight into how he and the others are actually doing. Lord Asriel is Lyra's uncle and comes to visit Jordan College when he's not off exploring. He's shown as being an arrogant, controlled person who has occasional explosions of anger. He has an interesting life and the things he talks about are revolutionary and are a fantastic way to draw the world and plot to the characters and readers. But he's also equally dismissive of others in a way that, combined with his other traits, makes it difficult to like him. He's especially an ass at the end of the book, but that's neither here nor there. Mrs. Coulter is another explorer, though she's a new character in Lyra's life, and thus is far more interesting to Lyra than anyone else. Lucky (?) for Lyra, Mrs. Coulter offers to take Lyra in and teach/rear her during her young adult years, offering to make Lyra her assistant. Unlike Asriel's dæmon, who is really just there but doesn't have a huge role, Mrs. Coulter's dæmon is somewhat of a demon. Pan almost immediately dislikes him, and thus Mrs. Coulter, warning Lyra to be wary, but Lyra likes Mrs. Coulter and doesn't pay too much attention to the woman's associated soul, much to her and Pan's chagrin later. Something I greatly enjoyed about the book is how expansive the plot is. It's not just that Lyra's world has been somewhat disrupted by children she knows going missing and that undercurrent of fear that takes over as they do, nor is it just that she's plucked from Jordan College's care and placed under the care of Mrs. Coulter instead, but all of those changes and winds in the plot lead to the bigger plot of the Gobblers and Dust and what, exactly, each is. Each small stream of subplot or problem leads to the next one, which all feed into the river of the main plot, each thread, however benign, seemingly mixing together. All of them, of course, feed into the trilogy's overarching plot and this book with all its little intricacies becomes a mere branch of the larger river. I like the complication of it all and how everything seems to relate to each other before the characters or readers know it. Obviously I enjoy and recommend this book. It's a book that can be read by children, teens, and adults with equal enjoyment and no sense of it being immature plot or character-wise, a bit like A Wrinkle in Time. The first book is fine on its own or it can be read along with the rest of the trilogy. If you want to share it with non-readers, the original 2007 movie is pretty good, and I know HBO has a series that's following the greater His Dark Materials world, which contends with the rest of the series as well as Lyra's World and (I believe) The Book of Dust trilogy.

#book #book review #book recommendations #the golden compass #philip pullman #his dark materials #lyra belacqua #iorek byrnison #lee scoresby #pantalaimon

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mdrkb030 · 5 years ago

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Poor Signal? Setup Your Wi-Fi Extender Now!

Wi-Fi extension has gotten cheaper, but the systems to install are still tricky. There are tips for positioning your extender in order to expand the coverage of your Wi-Fi network.

Although you usually have more than ample coverage from your standard router to fill an apartment or a small house with Wi-Fi, it cannot cover a larger house. Dead spots will eventually arise in larger homes to relax with Netflix's movie in your favorite easy chair while barbecuing on the patio, listening to your favorite stuff on Spotify and offering internet access for visitors in the attic bedroom.

My wifi ext setup, with the aid of a Wi-Fi extender you will be able to fill the gaps by taking a Wi-Fi signal from your router and sending a new signal to the home of unconnected nooks and scanners. Extender can still be difficult to configure, though it has become cheaper and easier to use. They need not only some forecasts and plans, but also some trial and error.

· The best Wi-Fi extension for signal extension

· Upgrade: the best wireless Internet routers you can purchase

· The best mesh Wi-Fi routers cover the entire building, larger and bigger.

Here are tips and tricks for Wi-Fi extensions, which allow you to place your data anywhere in the right location.

The secret to better signal is positioning

When you bring the extension device into it, keep your eyes open and be prepared to move the extension device if the results are misleading. Start with a map or drawing from your residence marked with the location of the router, the dead zones, and the AC outlets. Mywifiext net, request a power outlet between the router and where you want the Wi-Fi signal of the extender to go. Please plug the extender into the box and follow your router directions. Go to the dead zone once it is worked and check if its Wi-Fi animated.

I pre-examine the network with the Okla. Speed Test for online bandwidth calculation before the extender is opened. When the extender works, go to the dead zone and check if it is wireless. If so, search your Speed test bandwidth. Your pace will not be as fast as the host, but it will be a step forward.

Hide and seek – find the right placement

You may need to use an AC extension cord to get an extender to the best position if you can't find a suitable position for the extension. Place the extender on a bookshelf or on an armoire, for example.

You can reposition the extensor to get the best signal if the antennas are adjustable. Perhaps more importantly, if you have removable antennas in the wireless booster, you might try to turn them into more sensitive antennas or amplify them. Alternatively, you can either use a Wi-Fi reflector or make an aluminum foil or empty soda to direct the Wi-Fi signal to where it should go.

Have to avoid obstacles

Avoid artifacts that either reflect the signal (such as mirrors or large metal parts) or absorb it (walls, closets or supports for the masonry) when choosing your extender spot. Another major Wi-Fi extender disruptor are stray radio frequency signals that interfere with Wi-Fi signals. Microwave ground, cable telephones, fridges or even baby surveillance are the key culprits here.

Assisting

There are likely to be a software supplied for each expander you buy to optimize their role and efficiency. Often, however, this program is secondary to standalone applications for Wi-Fi research.

To mywifiext net login, you have to visit www.mywifiext.net also for newextendersetup. This is where one can do mywifiext netgear setup.

How does a Wi-Fi booster, repeater or extensor differ?

Wireless Internet boosters, repeaters and extender are all the same – Wi-Fi-enhanced computers. The distinction between devices identified by corporations as 'repeaters' and devices identified as 'extender devices' is not well established. All Wi-Fi Extensions do not work in the same way, however. Several different types of appliances are available, and we want to clarify these distinctions and their functionality so you can choose the best Wi-Fi repeater.

How Does A Wi-Fi Repeater Work?

Mywifiext.net not working: A Wi-Fi Repeater basically consists of two wireless router, like your home or office wireless router. The current wireless network can be found on one of these wireless routers. To setup go to mywifiext.net. It then moves the signal to the other wireless router, where the boosted signal is transmitted.

Is my laptop / mobile computer automatically switching between networks?

Only when the first network is fully out of control. A second network is set up by a Wi-Fi repeater. You can connect your computer to the second network if your first is not available. But you can detect both networks simultaneously in certain parts of your home. This means you have to detach and switch from the original network to the enhanced network.

Is the repeated network safe?

Yeah. The same degree of protection is required for Wi-Fi repeaters as for standard Wi-Fi routers (WEP, WPA, WPA2, etc.).

Visit @ http://wifiextendersetup.us/

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jubajohn-blog · 5 years ago

Text

Need the best signal? Set up your Wi-Fi extender now!

Wi-Fi extension has gotten cheaper, but the systems to install are still tricky. There are tips for positioning your extender in order to expand the coverage of your Wi-Fi network.

Mywifiext local, with the aid of a Wi-Fi extender you will be able to fill the gaps by taking a Wi-Fi signal from your router and sending a new signal to the home of unconnected nooks and scanners. Extender can still be difficult to configure, though it has become cheaper and easier to use. They need not only some forecasts and plans, but also some trial and error.

· The best Wi-Fi extension for signal extension

· Upgrade: the best wireless Internet routers you can purchase

· The best mesh Wi-Fi routers cover the entire building, larger and bigger.

New extender setup, here are seven tips and tricks for Wi-Fi extensions, which allow you to place your data anywhere in the right location.

The secret to better signal is positioning

When you bring the extension device into it, keep your eyes open and be prepared to move the extension device if the results are misleading. Start with a map or drawing from your residence marked with the location of the router, the dead zones, and the AC outlets. Mywifiext net ac750, request a power outlet between the router and where you want the Wi-Fi signal of the extender to go. Please plug the extender into the box and follow your router directions. Go to the dead zone once it is worked and check if its Wi-Fi animated.

view

Hide and seek – find the right placement

visit

Have to avoid obstacles

Avoid artifacts that either reflect the signal (such as mirrors or large metal parts) or absorb it (walls, closets or supports for the masonry) when choosing your extender spot. Netgear Wi-Fi extender n300 setup, another major Wi-Fi extender disruptor are stray radio frequency signals that interfere with Wi-Fi signals. Microwave ground, cable telephones, fridges or even baby surveillance are the key culprits here.

Assisting

There are likely to be a software supplied for each expander you buy to optimize their role and efficiency. Netgear_ext, often, however, this program is secondary to standalone applications for Wi-Fi research.

How does a Wi-Fi booster, repeater or extensor differ?

Wireless Internet boosters, repeaters and extender are all the same – Wi-Fi-enhanced computers. The distinction between devices identified by corporations as 'repeaters' and devices identified as 'extender devices' is not well established. Netgear extender reset, all Wi-Fi Extensions do not work in the same way, however. Several different types of appliances are available, and we want to clarify these distinctions and their functionality so you can choose the best Wi-Fi repeater.

How Does A Wi-Fi Repeater Work?

Mywifiext.net not working: A Wi-Fi Repeater basically consists of two wireless router, like your home or office wireless router. The current wireless network can be found on one of these wireless routers. It then moves the signal to the other wireless router, where the boosted signal is transmitted.

Is my laptop / mobile computer automatically switching between networks?

Is the repeated network safe?

Yeah. The same degree of protection is required for Wi-Fi repeaters as for standard Wi-Fi routers (WEP, WPA, WPA2, etc.).

Visit us http://www.wifiextendersetup.us/

1 note · View note

agentravensong · 6 years ago

Text

The Hallmark Movie Musical: A Parody

At last, as I promised, here is my pitch for the ultimate homage & critique of the corporate tradition that is the Hallmark Channel’s annual Christmas movies.

I’m sure your first question is, why a musical? For one, this story is way too complicated for a 90-minute movie. For two, I like musicals, shut up. For three, I feel like the upcoming meta stuff works best in a live format. But mainly, the idea is that this project is being billed as “the culmination of the Hallmark holiday movie tradition”, an idea we’ll get back to later.

The Plot

The play starts with a big old “It’s holiday season in the city” number, centered on our Protagonist, a white (probably blond) woman who I’ve taken to calling Karen. The song quickly introduces us to her current occupation and general goals, as well as our Main Man, who for now I’m calling Chad. As it winds down, we meet Karen’s Best Friend, Sandra (derived from Cassandra), a very smart and observant woman who’s always there to support Karen in her endeavors (even at her own expense) and offer her relationship advice.

Plot twist #1, Sandra is the musical’s actual protagonist. See, she starts to catch on pretty quickly that she’s living in a cheesy, generic, soulless Christmas movie, the kind she’s always derided even as Karen appreciated them. As you can imagine, she doesn’t take the revelation well. For one, she knows that Karen would never want to rush into a relationship, and yet, as the Protagonist of this story, she’d bound to end up soulmates with Chad within the next week or two. So Sandra does everything she can to try and convince Karen of the truth of their reality, or otherwise derail the plot, going so far as to seek help from Chad’s ex-girlfriend, who we’ll refer to as... uh, Vicky, I guess.

In my mind, this makes up most of Act 1, with plenty of opportunities for Sandra to deconstruct tropes along the way. However, during this, Sandra also starts to kind of appreciate the cheesy wholesomeness of her situation. Maybe her life was kinda sh*tty before this started, and now the sh*tiness has entirely faded into the background. So when Karen reveals in a song that she’s figured it out, but that she’s accepted it, because it means her relationship will be perfect for her and she’s guaranteed to be happy for the rest of her life... Sandra can see where she’s coming from.

But Sandra doesn’t trust that this will all work out perfectly. Who’s to say happily ever after will continue after the “movie” ends? And what about everyone else, the “side characters” in this story? Will their lives just stagnate once their role in Karen’s arc is over? Surely Karen can see it isn’t fair that she gets to be the center of the universe, right?

And that’s where plot twist #2 - or rather #3 - comes in. Remember how I said that this project is billed, even in the opening number itself, as “the culmination of the Hallmark holiday movie tradition”? Well, as formulaic as these movies are, you can’t fit every single cliche into one movie. And so Act 1 ends with Sandra’s attempts to sabotage the plot essentially causing an emergency system reset. The closing number of the act has some characters excited that it will soon be “their turn”.

We find out what the heck that means in Act 2, where the characters’ roles have been switched around. Vicky is now the Protagonist. She has a small group of friends instead of just one Best Friend. One of those friends is another former protagonist, maybe one of them was Karen’s ex in the previous timeline...

And the other friend is Sandra. Functionally, her role has hardly changed, unlike everyone else. Her mission from the start of the act (once she figures out what’s up) is to search for Karen, but she also can’t help but wonder why she’s stuck in the same position.

We find out part of the reason why in plot twist #4, which would have been pretty heavily foreshadowed up to this point. Like, maybe Karen made a joke about how weirdly good Sandra is at helping her with relationships when, as far as she knows, Sandra’s never been in a serious one. She’s certainly never seemed that interested in boys. Or maybe at one point, Sandra made an offhand comment to Karen about how all her previous relationships with guys have ended poorly, has she ever considered dating outside that pool? Karen’s just like no, Sandra shrugs, and the conversation moves on.

Yes, Sandra’s a lesbian. That’s why she’s never gotten to be the lead (though apparently, the company is looking to start producing movies with LGBTQ+ characters? So maybe we’d frame it like “well maybe you could have been now if you hadn't also ruined things last time?” Depends.) I’m not sure whether it would be best to have her be crushing on Karen during the events of the play; it almost seems too obvious, and I don’t want Sandra’s motivations for trying to free their reality from the Hallmark movie constraints to be superseded by her just wanting to date her friend. But I think it would be nice to have Sandra get with someone by the play’s end, and not just a rando.

Sandra (and maybe the other members of the friend group) sing a song about how not conforming to society’s mold of the “average”, “normal” person has made them feel alienated, how they don’t get these kinds of fairytale endings, even in fiction. From there, she and the gang of not-quite-lead-material formulate a plan to change the plot. I haven’t thought out the details of all this yet, but long story short...

It goes wrong. Really wrong. When it looks like the story is going to reset again, the characters give their all to stop it, but that just causes the world itself to collapse. We’re left with just Sandra, and maybe Vicky, on stage.

Then Karen reappears. She reveals the reason she was absent from the last retelling of the story was that she essentially gave up her role so that Sandra wouldn’t be punished for going against the script. Of course, that’s now become voided by Sandra’s actions, and Karen’s upset about it. She and Vicky guilt Sandra over having ruined things for everyone.

Here’s where things get tricky. I laid out what I want the message of the musical to be in a post yesterday, but figuring out how to implement it in the play itself has been puzzling me. I think I’ll save going over that for its own section. In the meantime, I can really only imagine one of two endings for the musical:

A. The characters reboot the musical themselves, bringing in the side characters and giving them equal creative control, so they can create stories for everyone.

B. The characters escape the restrictions of their reality, entering back into the “real world”. Maybe add an epilogue-type scene where we see Sandra has gotten into the movie-making business, where she makes fun, lighthearted movies featuring diverse casts.

The Characters

This section is for elaborating on aspects of Sandra and Karen’s characterization and development that would have slowed down the flow of the plot summary.

Sandra

As previously mentioned, Sandra is basically your stereotypical Ravenclaw, witty almost to the point of pretentiousness. She’s meant to be the surrogate for all the people who think the Hallmark movies are nothing more than soulless, indistinguishable, products, the person who would only watch these movies to roast them.

That being said, she also has a lot of Hufflepuff qualities. She’s hardworking and supremely loyal to her friends, always looking for ways to help them with their relationships and their careers, even at her own expense. Spending time helping Karen with projects instead of studying for her own exams, giving up opportunities so her friends have a shot at them, etc.

As a result, Sandra has learned to roll with the punches and make the most of the worst situations, to the point where she gets enjoyment and pride out of it. She’s always looking for new opportunities but has the patience and forethought to think them through before jumping on them. As long as she can make life easier for her friends and give them more options, she can handle any personal repercussions. They find ways to pay her back eventually, but she really doesn’t need it... at least, that’s what she tells herself.

This is part of why she’s ticked off at the reveal that Karen is happy to be the Protagonist of a Hallmark movie. The idea that you’d want to give up your agency entirely to follow a set script so that you don’t have to try anymore; Sandra can’t imagine ever taking that opportunity, even after warming up to the idea of Hallmark movies as a fun thing to watch. And it’s not like Karen’s life was that difficult before, in comparison to her’s at least. Can she really not handle it, even with everything Sandra sacrifices for her best friend? How can she be happy, while being explicitly complicit in her friends getting sidelined?

As the musical goes on, Sandra acknowledges her desire to be in the spotlight more of the time and becomes more of a self-advocate, taking a leadership role in Act 2′s friend gang and factoring her own wants more into making decisions (like when she abandons the story to search for Karen). With the realization that part of the reason she can’t be in the spotlight within the constraints of her reality is something innate about her that can’t be changed, her ire towards the system becomes more focused and less petty, which is what convinces the other members of the friend group to take a risk in trying to change the story.

Again, I’ll save the ending for another section. In short, Sandra’s arc goes like this:

Starts out hating Hallmark movies, and always willing to concede to her friends

As soon as she realizes what her life has become, she fights against it in petty ways

Starts gaining an appreciation for Hallmark movies as a form of fun escapism, but still can’t imagine it being her whole life

Post reset, she becomes more of a self-advocate

After plot twist #4, she directs ire back towards the Hallmark-ness of her world, but this time because of how it excludes people from its fantasy

Works with the friend gang to change the direction of the story to try and make their world more just (but maybe she gets a bit dictatorial herself? The classic “protagonist goes too far” thing?)

After things go wrong, she admits that she was initially kind of an ass to Karen and that her initial actions were not committed with the best intentions, but she still stands up for her actions in Act 2 (or most of them, depending on how much of an ass she was to the friend gang)

By the end, she’s learned to appreciate cheesy movies, but more importantly, to self-advocate; she’s still committed to helping her friends, but now she’s also looking at how to do so on a systemic level

Others

Karen is your typical Hallmark movie protagonist: a white, middle class, cis woman who loves Christmas and Christmas movies. As I briefly touched on earlier, she’s benefitted from a lot of privilege, and the support of her large pool of family and friends. She doesn’t have any long-term aspirations, partly because she tends to stress out over the littlest things.

That being said, she’s definitely had hardship in terms of love; she tends to get invested in relationships super quickly, and so when she realizes the guy she’s dating isn’t right for her, things get messy. She’s spent years looking for the perfect man, and when she first meets Chad, she would never have considered him an option. At least on a conscious level. But after their first meeting went poorly, she finds him growing on her quickly... too quickly.

It doesn’t take much of Sandra’s meddling for Karen to figure out what’s up. At first, she isn’t sure how to feel about it. But she comes to see that being in a Hallmark movie, for her, basically means she’s living a slightly-improved, practically stress-free version of her life, where she’s guaranteed her soulmate. Even if she found a way to give it up, why would she ever want to? Sandra seems to be the only person who’s upset over it, and she is her best friend... but if they really are best friends, then surely Sandra will learn to just accept it and be happy for her, right? It’s not like this will make Sandra’s life actively worse, and she’ll always been willing to take a step back so Karen could succeed. Why would this time be any different?

As you might be able to discern from all that, Karen’s arc is learning not to take her friends for granted and to not see herself as the center of the universe. That being said, she also has to learn a form of self-advocacy, to become more willing to take risks on her deeper desires rather than just settling for “good enough”. Some of this growth happens while she’s absent during Act 2 (maybe there could be a small scene where we see just her, observing the story as it unfolds and giving some commentary?) and the rest happens after the friend gang’s failure.

I honestly haven’t thought much at all about what Chad is like, other than the same obvious basic factors, so we’ll just move past him. Vicky is similar to Karen on a basic level, hence why she gets to become Protagonist in Act 2, except that she’s the Protagonist stereotype who’s all business and thinks Christmas cheer is *gasp* overrated.

I’m not sure yet where Vicky should be on the hero-villain spectrum. Does she sympathize with Sandra from the start, but temporarily become somewhat power-hungry when she gets to be Protagonist? Or was she always just waiting for it to be her turn again? Is she tired of the cycle, or is she glad to benefit from it? Who even is her love interest in Act 2? And then there are all the members of the friend group to consider... I think I’ll just cut myself off here, this is already way too long.

The Message

I told you we’d get back to this. Gonna start by copy-pasting what I put in yesterday’s post:

There’s definitely a place for lighthearted, straightforward stories that end in a happily ever after. BUT it would be cool if, without changing that, they A. didn’t churn out 30+ of the things a year, instead putting that extra time & effort into making each individual film stand out a little more, and B. weren’t almost always about the same white, middle class, cishet women, even if those people are currently the main demographic.

Or to put it another way, “These movies are fun, but they could be more interesting and meaningful if not for capitalism.”

...The question becomes, how do we get across all this nuance in this hypothetical show? For one, there’d probably need to be some critique of the capitalist ideas that lead to these problems with the movies woven throughout the plot. How much of our criticism should be focused on the flaws of the Hallmark Channel brand in particular, and how much should be more generalized?

And then we get back to the climax. Karen is angry at Sandra for letting her hatred of Hallmark movies ruin things for everyone else, and Vicky is angry at Sandra for wanting to make the story all about her. Sandra’s response to them is going to have to convey her development, how she has grown to appreciate those kinds of cheesy predictable stories... but she’s still critical of how they’re mass-produced to appeal to a specific demographic and aren’t that inclusive. A part of her would like to be the hero of one of these movies, just once, but she’s far from the only person left out by these stories.

Where do we go from there? You’d probably have to address the “why not make your own story instead of taking over ours” argument, and... you see, it’s difficult to be nuanced and entertaining.

Of course, this is just my first or second draft of how to put together a story based on these ideas. If I ever actually made this a thing, the final plot would probably be structured very differently. For one thing, I’d need to watch a lot more Hallmark movies. In the hour of research that I did yesterday, recorded in this document (which y’all are free to comment on and add suggestions to), I discovered a podcast that discusses several individual Hallmark movies that I might just have to binge over the upcoming winter break. So that’s where we’re at now. I hope somebody enjoyed reading my ramblings about a project that will never come to be.

#musicals #christmas #hallmark movies

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ethospathoslogan · 6 years ago

Note

Omg I would probably die from happiness if you did a sanders sides superhero au. Like I'm really curious about your take on the characters and their roles. Tbh I just love how unique you make the characters while staying true to their personalities. Also your aus are absolutely fantastic and I adore them.

anon this is... an incredibly sweet and heartwarming message (that also means a lot to me bc i know i’ve been kinda........ lacking in my AUs recently) so!!! you’ve inspired me to actually go through and at least bang out some headcanons omg

so, for some general background stuff, i was inspired by the adventure zone: commitment to make this!! kinda like how taz balance inspired a lowkey fantasy AU except this one is so much easier to do bc i can be inspired by commitment w/out actually being like “okay so logan would be [insert character] and roman [insert character] and etc etc etc”

basically the part that i really liked and that really got me thinking abt the AU is that, in commitment, the heroes don’t get their powers by dumb luck or birth or anything, but they’re given them scientifically through a corporation? like their powers are basically implanted in them by this scientific heroic organization and they don’t have a choice in what powers they get, and i thought that was really interesting!!!

also again idk if this is gonna be an Actual AU just bc my writing life has been crazy really, but if anyone is actually interested in this AU after reading this, i’ll happily accept questions/prompts :)

also also, i have to get ready for work, but i got mad excited abt this, so below the cut are roman and logan’s characters, if people want patton and virgil, i’ll reblog with them, too!!

**this is an AU in the making. aka, im really intrigued w/ this idea but im still working on the general outline of it. so, if i actually continue with it, some things might change or become more structured.

roman prince:

age: 26

so i picture this AU taking place in a city, and i feel like roman is the son of a very wealthy businessman within that city

he def has a balling penthouse that overlooks the city skyline

he’s charismatic and outgoing and definitely has a bit of an edge to him. like, there’s a bite to him, but it’s more like “i’ll smile and play nice and smile while tearing you to shreds if i need to”

like, don’t get me wrong, he’s a nice guy!!! an overall good person, just he’s not afraid to start shit and call people out on his bullshit if he has to. this has gotten him into trouble more than once.

he’s an aspiring performer and he’s incredibly talented in singing, acting, and dancing, but none of his roles ever felt Right bc it was obvious that the casting directors chose him to appeal to his father

which was always concerning for roman because he has a...... complicated relationship with his father

he actually got involved with the Scientific Organization because of his father

his father, the CEO of Prince Corp., started a partnership with the CEO of Sanders Institute. while Prince Corp. deals with finance along with more artistic fields, like films and fashion, Sanders Institute deals more scientifically, like with researching and developing new technologies. together, they formed almost an alliance of sorts.

so, Prince Sr. was told by Sanders Sr., “i have a new idea that could change the way the world functions” and, almost instantly, Prince Sr. offered Roman

when roman finally arrived at the Sanders’ Scientific Organization that will definitely have a name if and when i work more on this, he thought he was just going to be trying out new technologies or taking a couple fitness tests or trying some new serum or something

he didn’t expect that, after multiple screenings and tests, he would be told that he’d be receiving superpowers

or, more so, the scientists told him that he would become “an enhanced, more powerful version of himself,” which everyone knows translates to “kickass superpowers”

it’s not that he’s reluctant at first, but he’s almost disbelieving. like, things like this happened in movies and comic books. not in his life. but, then again, he knew that technology was advancing along with science, and it seems very possible...

needless to say, he became very enthusiastic very fast

his powers: pyrokenesis and he can put people under a type of thrall with his voice

pros of his powers: he can command people at will. he can set shit on fire.

cons of his powers: people know that they are being controlled and can fight against it. even if they fail in fighting it, they will know once the thrall wears off that they were controlled. he can set shit on fire. cue moral dilemmas on whether or not he’s toeing the line of superhero/supervillain bc of the devasation his powers, both physical and mental, can have.

this will be logince bc im logince trash

logan sanders:

age: 28

the son of Sanders Sr., and twin brother to thomas sanders

his entire life has been science. when thomas went to college for environmental engineering, he went for biology. outside of school, both brothers got very involved in technology. they’ve been exposed to their father’s science from a young age.

it was always expected that they would inherit Sanders Institue together and expand it with their fields of study

however, even logan and thomas didn’t know what their father was planning with this new Scientific Organization. they knew that Something was going on, but they thought perhaps a new technology was being developed, or a new experiment was taking place

well... they were partially correct

logan and thomas were both brought into the experimentation. they were the first ones to undergo the process, actually. they were told that it was because they deserved to receive this enhancement first, but they’re smart, they knew the real reason: to their father, science came first, and that meant using his sons as guinea pigs

now, logan is an incredibly analytical and logical man. where thomas was trusting and compassionate, always looking to help his father, logan was skeptical. what if something went wrong? what if the experiment didn’t work? it didn’t take long for him to learn that they were planning for other people to be brought in; what was the criteria?

why were they enhancing people like this?

“because people like you will be able to help the entire world,” his father had said, a smile plastered on his face. “you and thomas are both boys of science, and the people we plan on recruiting are just as beneficial. don’t you want to be of assistance to the world?”

logan did and, so, convinced by his father and intrigued by the science around it and interested in what these enhancements could be, he agreed.

plus, there was no way in hell he was going to let thomas go through this alone. if something happened... it happened to both of them. they were a package deal, and an experiment wasn’t going to take it away.

even though logan had his doubts, as time grew closer to when the enhancements would take place, he grew more and more excited. he loved science, lived for it! and he was truly about to become a man of science! everything for their world was about to change (logan never said it outloud, but he knew it: they were going to be heroes) and logan was going to be a part of that.

he always wanted to be a part of something that did good.

his powers: he can tap into any and all electronic devices and basically take total control over them. he also has lightning/electricity powers.

pros of his powers: can access any information in electronical databases. can shoot lightning beams.

cons of his powers: just how you can burn out a fuse by putting too much power in it, logan can “burn out.” electrical storms can actually be painful for him bc of how much electricity is in the air, and if he taps into too many devices in a short amount of time, he actually shorts out and basically electrocutes himself. it’s nonlethal but, nonetheless, painful, and leaves him powerless for a little while. all the electrical powers make him feel a bit too... robotic sometimes.

#roman sanders #logan sanders #sanders sides #thomas sanders #headcanons #stuff i write #answered #Anonymous

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robin-hood-for-freedom · 6 years ago

Link

Apparently this article was written a while ago. But I just recently came across it. So yea, my answers as a libertarian to these questions. I’m skipping most of the filler because frankly its too much bullshit to wade through for my taste and it would make this WAY too long for anybody to read. If someone else wants to tackle that stuff, feel free. I’m just gonna answer the questions.

So our first hypocrisy test question is, Are unions, political parties, elections, and social movements like Occupy examples of “spontaneous order”—and if not, why not?

Political parties and elections are certainly not. Since they involve coercive violence(I suppose you could conceive of a world where elections are not coercive, but thats certainly not the reality of the world we live in now). Unions could be considered as such in principal. But in practice theres a fair bit of coercive violence behind the scenes. And to the extent they are, they are one of the least interesting imo. I would give more-or-less the same answer for OWS(that really dates this article doesnt it?)

Which gets us to our next test question: Is a libertarian willing to admit that production is the result of many forces, each of which should be recognized and rewarded?

Well, duh. Have you ever read I, Pencil?

Is our libertarian willing to acknowledge that workers who bargain for their services, individually and collectively, are also employing market forces?

Again, duh. Is this supposed to be some kind of ‘gotcha’ question?

victims of illegal foreclosure are neither “freer” nor “more prosperous” after the government deregulation which led to their exploitation. What’s more, deregulation has led to a series of documented banker crimes that include stockholder fraud and investor fraud. That leads us to our next test of libertarian hypocrisy: Is our libertarian willing to admit that a “free market” needs regulation?

I quoted a bit more than the previous questions to give some context. And my answer here is that you are talking out your ass. There was no ‘deregulation.’ If you disagree then please cite what was deregulated and how that led to illegal foreclosures and banker fraud.

I can accept that the banking sector is corrupt as fuck. Its also THE single most heavily regulated area of the economy. I dont think thats a coincidence.

Does our libertarian believe in democracy? If yes, explain what’s wrong with governments that regulate.

I dont have any particular attachment to democracy. Though I’m not necessarily opposed to it in all circumstances. That said, I think the US is WAY too large and diverse for democracy to be effective. Thats just a recipe for people in one area to fuck over people in another area.

But how did Peter Thiel and other Internet billionaires become wealthy? They hired government-educated employees to develop products protected by government copyrights. Those products used government-created computer technology and a government-created communications web to communicate with government-educated customers in order to generate wealth for themselves, which was then stored in government-protected banks—after which they began using that wealth to argue for the elimination of government.

By that standard, Thiel and his fellow “digital libertarians” are hypocrites of genuinely epic proportion. Which leads us to our next question: Does our libertarian use wealth that wouldn’t exist without government in order to preach against the role of government?

Again quoting more for context. And well the assumption that things like education, computing technology and banking(which I thought was deregulated?) wouldnt exist without government is an assumption that I think is unwarranted, and you dont even make an attempt to justify. That said, I’m not even close to Peter Thiel levels of wealth.

Many libertarians will counter by saying that government has only two valid functions: to protect the national security and enforce intellectual property laws. By why only these two?

I know I said I wasnt going to deal with most of the filler. But I just cant help pointing out that I dont think any libertarian has said this. More often you get national security and courts or law enforcement. There are libertarians who accept ip as valid. But not all, and I’m not one of them.

If the mythical free market can solve any problem, including protecting the environment, why can’t it also protect us from foreign invaders and defend the copyrights that make these libertarians wealthy?

Does our libertarian reject any and all government protection for his intellectual property?

Yep. Intellectual property rights are not legitimate property rights, but the government coercively restricting what people can do with their own property.

Does our libertarian recognize that democracy is a form of marketplace?

No because democracy, or more specifically democratic governments(which if you look at the context is what he’s talking about) involves coercive violence.

Does our libertarian recognize that large corporations are a threat to our freedoms?

Yes actually. Part of this is large corporations teaming up with government to protect their interests(at the expense of everyone else). But even setting that aside I think that this is one reason why an absence of government is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a libertarian society. You also need(among other things) a significant portion of the population to have an entrepreneurial outlook. So that rather than simply complaining or boycotting large corporations, they are actively trying to build alternatives.

I’m skipping the question about Ayn Rand. I personally have a lot of issues with her. And frankly she’s a lot less important to the modern libertarian movement than most people think. So that takes us to the final question:

If you believe in the free market, why weren’t you willing to accept as final the judgment against libertarianism rendered decades ago in the free and unfettered marketplace of ideas?

For starters we dont have a free and unfettered marketplace of ideas. Kids are forced into government controlled schools(even private schools have to meet state requirements) until they are 18, and the bulk of media sources are partnered with and to at least some extent dependant on the government(this is especially true of old media which is directly controlled by the FCC).

But even leaving that aside, the free market doesnt mean everybody always does the right thing(in fact it actually kind of means the opposite). Smoking is bad for you but cigarettes are available on the free market. Beyonce cranks out some of the most annoying and insipid music I’v ever heard, and yet she makes millions selling her music.

#libertarian #freeblr

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betsynagler · 7 years ago

Text

The Next Thing We Don’t Get To Talk About

Adolescence was kind of a mystery when I was a tween. Actually, we didn't call tweens “tweens” in the late 70s/early 80s, sort of the Iron Age of coming up with clever, merged names for stuff, and there were lots of other things of whose names we did not speak. My mother was a full-fledged feminist at that point, but a large part of her era’s brand of feminism was about minimizing the differences between men and women. Maybe this is why I didn't know anything about getting my period — heck, I don't think I even knew it was going to happen — until I read Are You There God? It's Me Margaret. In fact, there's a fair amount I wouldn't know about the world if it weren't for Judy Blume. Not that I enjoyed her books, which also included vivid details about wet dreams (Then Again, Maybe I Won't) and teenaged sex (Forever, a book of which I think I may only have read the “good” pages — the ones my friends dog-eared so they could share them, or maybe read them over again alone in their rooms, which was something that never occurred to me to do since masturbation was another thing nobody ever told me about). I didn't like them, partly because even at that age I could tell that “literary” was not a primary value considered by the dog-ear-and-share teen set, but mainly because those books scared the shit out of me. I was an immature kid, a year younger than most of the girls in my grade, and I’d been very happy in the dark, thank you. I didn't want to know about any of this stuff, which seemed entirely gross and overwhelming. Trying to figure out why girls wore skirts when they could wear infinitely more comfortable shorts or overalls was way too complicated for me, I certainly couldn't imagine celebrating when I started bleeding out of my vagina. In fact, I don't know anyone who did, in spite of what Judy wrote. And while my mom was helpful about it when I finally had it (late. I was 14 or 15, which seemed eons after everyone else), she didn't use tampons, so I still had to figure all of that out by myself. But to me, being a teenager was basically about feeling stupid nearly all the time, so to have this one additional thing I was utterly clueless about just seemed normal.

Little did I know how many more holes there were in my knowledge (a lot of it, coincidentally, regarding orifices). I didn't start masturbating until my 20s, since I basically didn't even know I had a clitoris until I was introduced to it by my first real boyfriend at age 21, so I guess that's when I started to understand and pay attention to my sex drive, but I still didn't notice any connection between it and my cycle. Once I got on the pill, I was very regular, and didn't have period symptoms like moodiness or bloating or cramps, so, aside from taking birth control and my uneventful annual gynecological checkup, I never had a need to think about what was going on in my uterus at all besides the usual monthly messiness. Until, that is, my 30s. That's when the hormones hit the fan. It didn't help, no doubt, that my mid-30s was when my midlife crisis started — and yes, I do mean this one, the one that's still going on. I know that probably sounds precocious, and I certainly don't have plans to die at age 68, but that's when I started thinking about my biological clock — or, once again not at all precociously, even realized I had one. So that's when I really had to start considering what the heck I was doing with my life: what my current relationship was all about, where my career was going or not going, and how I was going to make the rest of my life happen — the one that I'd always imagined would start when I sold my first screenplay or made my first feature and then continue successfully from there to all the other things I wanted like kids, money, property ownership. Because it clearly was not happening so far.

As you might imagine, the first step in all that was therapy, and it was my therapist who introduced me to the term “perimenopause.” As in, “Maybe part of the reason you’re moody and depressed is that you're going through perimenopause.” Which is not something that a woman who is hoping to have several more years of fertility wants to hear, even if she doesn't know what it is, exactly, because it has the word “menopause” in it, and that is definitely bad. So my gynecologist gave me tests for my hormones and everything looked normal, but still, I could feel that it wasn’t — or at least, not the normal that I’d been used to. If I wasn't having perimenopause, I was definitely having something, because all of this stuff was happening to me. For one thing, my sex drive had definitely gotten stronger. I wanted sex every day, if not more than once a day, even if my boyfriend didn't. Which was weird. I hadn't been taught that that degree of desire would ever be, well, me. Yes, I'd missed regular sex during the nine years I hadn't had a boyfriend, and that was why I’d learned to masturbate and occasionally made bad choices about men. Still, my need to get laid had never been so strong that I’d made really bad choices, like I knew it drove a lot of other people to do. Now, suddenly, I felt like I could relate a little more to those who felt driven by their genitalia. I had chalked it up to the fact that I was having good, regular sex, after being starved of it for so long, but I was starting to realize that there was more to it than just the horniness. I was also a lot moodier — depressed, anxious, irritable — and it was indeed a lot worse around my period.

I resisted the idea that this was happening for a long time, because it’s the worst type of stereotype that women are ruled by their cycles and made irrational, “hysterical” by our hyster-areas, rather than the way that society beats us down and makes us hate ourselves. But it was impossible not to notice that it wasn’t just these outside forces having an impact on me, something was going on inside me too. And it did seem like, finally, some of my friends were talking about it — like we were finally realizing, in our 30s, it was time to pay attention to what was actually going on with us, rather than what everyone told was supposed to be going on. And of course there was the Internet, although, as usual, whether that was helping or hurting was something of a toss up. You sure could find a lot about how women were at their sexual peak in their 30s, because that was hot, but scientifically established research about all of this other female hormonal business? Not really. So this became my major introduction to the fact that not just my body, but the mind and emotions attached to it, that I always thought of as wholly independent and under my control, were going to change as I got older whether I liked it or not. I could pretend it wasn't happening, or I could accept it and find ways to cope.

Little did I know that there was to be even more stuff for me to find out, a lot of it had to do with having babies, or not having babies. The pain women go through during childbirth, the likelihood of maternal mortality, how many things can go wrong — these were all things I only discovered when friends started having children or trying to get pregnant. I found out only long after it happened that two of my friends had come pretty close to dying during childbirth — and then they each went on to have more kids! This floored me. Then I had four miscarriages/non-viable pregnancies myself and wrote about it, and all my friends were suddenly telling me about their experiences with that. I mean, it was as if these were things we were all just supposed to go through and then shut up about, because nobody wanted to hear the gory details. Post-#metoo, it strikes me as being very similar to sexual harassment and assault. Women have always just been expected to suffer through all sorts of things and never complain, never talk. Because a large part of our value was in how well we lived up to all of the roles of womanhood — ingenue, sex kitten, helpmate, housewife, caretaker, subordinate but necessary breadwinner — without letting our personhood get in the way.

And now, finally, menopause. Which is like all of these things but also worse, because it also has to do with getting old, and that is something, as women, we can never talk about. Again, it's supposed to be each woman’s dirty little secret, hidden by hair dye, Botox, and plastic surgery. Aging is a process that happens to literally every human being, but yet again, women are made to feel like there's something wrong with us when we can’t stop time. And then, to add insult to injury, we stop being fertile, which means we lose the final thing we had going for us if we weren't hot or good cooks: we could at least make babies. Then, we get all of the fun symptoms that go along with that: hot flashes, lowered libido, dry vaginas, mood swings, irregular periods…You thought you hated your period before, but at least with most of us it was predictable, now it's not even that. Some women bleed a lot more, some bleed more often, like every three weeks or so instead of four, but not exactly, so you always have to be prepared, carrying your not-so-little bag of tampons and mini-pads around basically 24-7. And the moodiness becomes practically a month-round thing too (and it's not just grumpiness at never knowing when you're going to start bleeding — although can you imagine men putting up with that? Offices filled with middle-aged, menopausal men — upper management at any corporation, perhaps the entire insurance industry — would basically cease to function).

All of this is normal for women, but you'd never know it from popular culture. Except for the occasional joke about hot flashes and the movie Something's Got To Give, menopause doesn't exist there. So how are we supposed to know that what we're going through is what everyone else is going through? Not just to get advice or support, but even to get a sense whether or not something is wrong. I mean, how soon you're supposed to call your doctor if you have a Viagra mishap? We all pretty much know that now because it's been the punchline in so many rom coms and sitcoms and other kinds of coms. Menopause? Still too icky to make jokes about, apparently. If men don't experience it, I guess it's not “universal” enough to be funny.

I think some of this has changed. My friends who have girls certainly talk to them about a lot more than we talked about with our parents. But I still think the message of our culture is that our experiences of womanhood, the good and the bad, the sad and the fucking hilarious because it's so terrible, are not worth sharing — unless they‘re a turn-on, which, I’m sorry, most things in life just aren’t. I have to wonder, when are we going to stop internalizing the message that what happens to us just doesn't matter as much as what happens to them?

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