#IP Reviews

[webzazes]

THE WHIMSY THE THE WHIMSY

LITTLE GUY ALERT?? SQUISHY LITTLE SILLY BUDDY,!!!??!???

I would destroy the world and all rules ever made for him

he deserves some scritches.. im adopting him he’s my son now as wellacjagajcjjagak

SO GLAD TO HAVE THIS SPARK OF SUNSHINE

he’s not obligated to get me out of any bind though he can chill

(no i did not loop rambley review while going to sleep)

[necromanticram]

Another indigo park animation! This time of Rambley!! I love the animations for this cute raccoon so I wanted to try animating one of his lines myself. :)

[the-meme-monarch]

hi so I’m making this post bc tumblr wants a link for when you report harassment, and well it’s spanned 8 months now. they’ve been bothering me asking me to draw and sometimes just showing me their fetish after I said no, to leave me alone, several times. they block evade every time to do this. contacting me on my side blog. following me to other platforms such as my youtube and discords. both of their discords are different accounts. im pretty sure they have More accounts than what i’m showing now that i just don’t know about.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Underground Empire: Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman's must-read account of "How America Weaponized the World Economy."

I'm coming to Minneapolis! Oct 15: Presenting The Internet Con at Moon Palace Books. Oct 16: Keynoting the 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing.

At the end of Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman's new book Underground Empire, they cite the work of John Lewis Gaddis, "preeminent historian of the Cold War," who dubbed that perilous period "The Long Peace":

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250840554/undergroundempire

Despite several harrowing near-misses, neither of the two hair-trigger, nuclear-tipped arsenals were ever loosed. When the Cold War ended, the world breathed a sigh of relief and set about refashioning itself, braiding together economic and social interdependencies that were supposed to make future war unthinkable. Nations that depend on one another couldn't afford to go to war, because they couldn't hurt the other without hurting themselves.

The standard account of the Cold War's "Long Peace" is that the game theorists who invented Mutually Assured Destruction set up a game where "the only way to win was not to play" (to quote the Matthew Broderick documentary War Games). The interdependency strategy of the post-Cold War, neoliberal, "flat" world was built on the same fundamentals: make war more costly than peace, victory worse than the status quo, and war would be over – if we wanted it.

But Gaddis has a different idea. Any effect Mutually Assured Destruction had on keeping fingers from pushing the buttons was downstream of a much more important factor: independence. For the most part, the US and the USSR had nonintersecting spheres of influence. Each of these spheres was self-sufficient. That meant that they didn't compete with one another for the use of the same resource or territory, and neither could put the other in check by seizing some asset they both relied on. The exceptions to this – proxy wars in Latin America and Southeast Asia – were the disastrous exceptions that proved the rule.

But the past forty years rejected this theory. From Thomas Friedman's "World Is Flat" to Fukyama's "End of History," the modern road to peace is paved with networks whose nodes can be found in every country. These networks – shipping routes, money-clearing systems, supply chains, the internet itself – weave together nearly every nation on Earth into a single web of interdependencies that make war impossible.

War, you may have noticed, has become very, very possible. Even countries with their own McDonald's franchises are willing to take up arms against one another.

That's where Farrell and Newman's book comes in. The two political scientists tell the story of how these global networks were built through accidents of history, mostly by American corporations and/or the American state. The web was built by accident, but the spider at its center was always the USA.

At various junctures since the Cold War, American presidents, spies and military leaders have noticed this web and tugged at it. A tariff here, a sanction there, then an embargo. The NSA turns the internet into a surveillance grid and a weapon of war. The SWIFT system is turned into a way to project American political goals around the world – first by blocking transactions for things the US government disfavors, then to cut off access for people who do business with people who do things that the US wants stopped.

Networks tend to centralization, to hubs. These central points are efficient, but (as we learned during the covid lockdown) brittle. One factory fails and an entire category of goods can no longer be made – anywhere. When it comes to global resiliency, these bottlenecks are are a bug; but when it comes to US foreign policy, these chokepoints are a feature.

Farrell and Newman skillfully weave a tale of individuals, powers, circumstances and forces, showing how the rise and rise of world-is-flat rah-rah globalism created a series of irresistable opportunities for "weaponized interdependence." Some players of the game wield these weapons like a scalpel; others (like Trump) use them like a club.

This is a chronicle of the dawning realization – among US power-players and their foreign adversaries, particularly in China – that the US lured its trading partners into entrusting it with financial clearing, IP enforcement, fiber landings, and other chokepoints, on the grounds that American wouldn't risk the wealth these systems generated by turning them into engines of coercion.

But then, of course, that's exactly what America did, from the War on Terror to economic sanctions on Iran, from seizing Argentinian reserves to freezing Russia's cash. Sometimes, the US did this for reasons that I sympathize with, other times, for reasons I am aghast at. But they did it, and did it, and did it.

America's adversaries (and frenemies, like the EU) have tried to build alternative "underground empires" to offset the risk of having their interdependencies weaponized (or to escape from an ongoing situation). But therein lies a conundrum: world-is-flat-ism has ended the age of indepedence. Countries really do need each other – for energy, materials, and finished goods. Independence is a long way off.

To create new interdependency networks, it's not enough for countries to agree that they don't trust America as neutral maintainer of their strategic chokepoints. They also have to agree to trust one of their own to operate those chokepoints. Lots of countries have come to mistrust US dollar-clearing and the SWIFT system – but few are willing to allow, say, China to run an alternative system that carries out settlements in Renminbi. The EU might be able to suck in some "friendly" countries for a Euro-clearing system, but would China trust them? How about Iran?

Farrell and Newman make a good case that US's position at the center of the web is a historical accident, and possibly a one-off, contingent on the ascendant post-Cold War ideology that said that markets and the interdependencies they create would neutralize the threat of handing a rival nation that much power.

Which leaves us in a world of interdependency in conflict. If Gaddis is right and the Long Peace was the result of independence, then this bodes very ill. The only thing worse than a world where no one can depend on anyone is a world where we must depend on entities that are hostile to us, and vice-versa. That way lies a widening gyre of conflict that felt eerily palpable as world events unfolded while I read this excellent, incisive book.

Political science, done right, has the power to reframe your whole understanding of events around you. Farrell and Newman set out a compelling thesis, defend it well, and tell a fascinating tale. And when they finish, they leave you with a way to make sense of things that seem senseless and terrible. This may not make those things less terrible, but at least they're comprehensible.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/10/weaponized-interdependence/#the-other-swifties

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

[blackcloudbyjuly]

well guys... 😬

[waterparksdrama]

hi there!! i'm newer to the realm of waterparks stuff (only really got into them during greatest hits) and based on the response to ip2 i guess i didn't realize a lot of people did NOT like ip?

when i listened to ip it def felt a bit incomplete/not as strong as their other stuff thematically or lyrically, so with ip2 i was hoping for a completion to the current 'story'. i'm anticipating that ip2 is just a wrap-up, and afterwards they'll continue with their alphabetical titles.

as someone who is more removed from waterparks fan spaces, i'm wondering what do you/other fans generally dislike (or like) about ip & how it compares to other albums? what kind of things are you hoping for future productions? i'm just interested to know! :)

i think a lot of the qualms older fans have with ip is that it’s so consumed by its insane lore that it barely makes sense just even with the first half of the album. it’s all tell but no show with shoehorned references to religion and “hypersexual” lyrics you could probably find on pop radio. not to mention the whole lamenting over fame thing again when he’s not even that famous he just has insane fans who track him online as much as he tracks them.

it’s like. the album isn’t as groundbreaking as awsten thinks lyrically and musically. the way he writes is so blunt sometimes they sound more like tweets than lyrics and sometimes blunt lyrics can work but he is definitely not someone that pulls off the sort of sardonic flat delivery that straightforward lyricists usually have when awsten is over-enunciating each word at max volume. and besides each song instrumentally just sounds like a parx song produced by zakk cervini; like you hear all these big elements that they love putting behind awsten’s overprocessed voice and it’s not really that interesting a lot of the time because of how expected it is from years of listening. and even when they do have more interesting songs like ritual, real super dark, or a night out on earth, they just kinda come off as toned down songs from greatest hits.

okay so maybe to understand where i’m coming from, i should probably make my comparisons of ip to double dare and entertainment. both dd and ent, while maybe a little less instrumentally experimental than their later albums, feel a lot more precise with their lyricism. dd establishes a lot of the themes parx repeat over the years with lyrics about falling in and out of love and obsession and learning the faults of the music industry firsthand. entertainment describes the on and off again feeling of a doomed relationship. both albums use unique imagery supported by a delivery that lets the listener pick up on those ideas (like how i can’t say jacket pocket without sounding like awsten in it follows). everything sounds more intentional than awsten just wailing about how he can’t fuck someone on ip.

my hope for other albums? awsten gets something different to write about. or at least doesn’t repeat the same 5 topics like a broken record or at least find something new to say about these things other than another song about “ugh my fans hate me ugh i hate the music industry im in love with this person actually no im not i lied”. also i think he needs to work with new producers instead of with new writers. i don’t need waterparks to sound like a one direction knockoff i want them to sound like a xiu xiu knockoff (if you can even imagine that). i think vincente void would be a cool producer for parx and id hope he’d lead them in less of the pop tryhard route they’ve been going and more towards something more unique - iz

[willosword]

WAAAAAAAA i wanna watch the next episode of invincible right neow ;_;

[tsreviews]

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[moviewarfare]

My Top John Wick Movies

John Wick 4 recently came out on digital and it is a great finale to the story. Unless, they decide to milk it like the Fast and Furious franchise

4 - John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum (2019)

John Wick 3 Review

3 - John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017)

John Wick 2 Review

2 - John Wick (2014)

John Wick Review

1 - John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023)

John Wick 4 Review

[irrigos]

i think it's really funny that a lot of the positive reviews of motr are like "well the negative reviews ARE correct but i like the setting/fbg so big thumbs up from me!"

i forget what video its from, but theres a line from a jenny nicholson video that rattles around in my brain a lot, thats like "if you love something unconditionally, you don't love it more, you just love it sadder"

[shego1142]

Listen I kind of hate adding my voice/opinion to the atrocity that is Velma but as far as I’m concerned the only legitimate “adult Scooby Doo”

(editing this to say that I mean this in the context of like, if we’re not allowed to consider the previous cartoons/Scooby movies “adult” for whatever reason, personally I think the cartoons and the live action movies are equally for adults as much as they are for kids)

worth any merit has always been The Cabin in the Woods.

Which was, for anyone who didn’t know, actually a really cool and interesting plot line about very close and loving college friends (a stereotypical jock who actually is a sociology major, a stereotypical popular girl who is a pre-med student, a nerdy/dorky football player, a super smart pothead with an extendable bong, and a secretly badasss shy girl)

They’re kind of like if all of the Scooby Gang members traits were put into 5 people (except Marty is a one to one for Shaggy tbh)

And they did a really cool thing either the trailer way back when it first came out where they made it seem like just another stereotypical teen slasher flick but then you watch it and realise it’s basically Scooby Doo meets SCP meets The Evil Dead. Sure, there’s still no talking dog, and sure horrible things happen to the characters but tbh they all have a more dignified existence than any of the characters in “Velma” not that that’s saying much tbh

Also it literally gave us this gif:

Which is a gif I imagine we will be seeing a lot of once the Velma show gets thrown in the trash or Matthew Lillard decides to use 0.1% of his power against the team behind it.

[owlsong74]

anyway for the next haunted mansion adaptation that requires a proper plot, they make constance a morally gray villain or antihero kind of character.

that or make it a goofy animated hijinks comedy using the ballroom and graveyard ghosts more prominantly and using the medium to portray the ghosts as accurate to the ride stylizations.

i will take either

[nerdybouquetpeanutworld]

Monitor LG 24MP400: Vale a Pena o Investimento?

https://tecparatodos.com/monitor-lg-24mp400/

[pocket-pal-salt]

I will never understand the logic that comes with approvals, because some designs that are based on IPs get passed yet a pal with colors lifted from a store gets denied. There's even fast food-themed pals that rip off the colors from the establishments they're based on...

ミ★

[blackcloudbyjuly]

i just got off a 12 hr shift and waterparks album drop lets go!!!

[thejaymo]

Why Don Quixote is So Great | 2336

“Don Quixote” by Miguel de Cervantes, is hailed as the first modern novel. A unique blend of humor, tragedy, and critique nestled within a meta-narrative on chivalry and storytelling. Jay reflects on the enduring relevance of Don Quixote’s adventures through the lens of modern fan fiction and intellectual property debates.