#Recognizing Trend Reversals

[politijohn]

It’s now or never for the Democratic Party

Will they debut a radically working class platform, conceding that progressive policy wins elections?

Will they listen to younger generations demanding a change from the old guard?

Will they run candidates who can translate politics into inspiring messages that entices disaffected voters?

Will they respond to voter trends to the right and create tailored strategies to win back their base?

Will they recognize that the rules have changed and they must be willing to play a different game?

This could be their last chance to redeem themselves from an abysmal decline towards fascism. It’s time for radical change or to step aside for a new party that’s prepared to do what’s needed to reverse this dark path we’re headed down.

[luna-azzurra]

All those dreamy, reverse-fantasy ideas about being a writer? The whole “I’ll sit in a cute café with my Moleskine and write a novel that someone magically discovers and turns into a Netflix series”?

Utter, delusional horseshit.

This isn’t a movie.

There’s no background music.

No one’s discovering you by accident.

And writing sure as hell doesn’t feel like floating in a creative haze while the universe rewards your “passion.��

Being a writer means waking up with a knot in your chest, opening a blank page, and wondering if this is the day you finally realize you’ve been wasting your life.

It means sending out pitches or manuscripts and hearing nothing back for months. Or worse… getting a two-sentence rejection that feels like someone punched you through your inbox.

It means seeing someone get a six-figure deal for a book that reads like watered-down oatmeal, while your carefully built, soul-soaked story gets ignored because you don’t have enough followers.

It means people constantly asking, “Are you still writing that thing?” As if writing a book takes a weekend and a scented candle.

The Industry doesn’t care. It will not hand you anything for effort. You can write the most brilliant novel of your generation and it can still get passed over because the market is “oversaturated” or you’re not “fresh enough” or some intern fell asleep reading the first page.

And yet… You’re still here.

Still writing. Still showing up. Still choosing this brutal, chaotic, often unrewarding life because you have to. Because there’s something in you that won’t shut up until you get the words out, even if no one else ever reads them.

That’s not weakness. That’s not delusion. That’s strength—the ugly, persistent, scrappy kind that most people don’t even recognize.

So yeah, the dream version of being a writer is a lie. But the real version?

The one where you keep showing up, with no promise of success, no guarantee of praise, no applause? That’s the kind of story worth living.

Please, don’t stop. Never.

Not because it’s easy. Not because it’s pretty. But because it’s yours.

And no industry, algorithm, or trend gets to take that away from you.

[blackfilmmakers]

I think the other annoying thing about the way (usually white) people reduce stories to just TV Tropes-style tropes is how they then somehow end up being even more reductive beyond that - so after reducing every vampire story to 'vampires', they further reduce it to 'vampires are inherently queer and always about being gay', and that's how you get (white) fandom deciding that both Sinners, a Black movie about Black culture and cultural theft by whiteness, and Dracula, a racist and xenophobic reverse invasion story about the East defiling white Christian women, are both somehow actually about queerness and sad gay white boys yearning for love (before anyone starts, I know Stoker probably a closeted gay, but that's not the main premise of the novel).

Exactly

I love a good monster love story as much as the next person, but this whole trend of labeling every story under a fandom trope stops us from actually engaging and appreciating the works.

And then these same people would be astonished that conservatives complain that everyone sees Victor Frankenstein as the true monster, like you guys are doing the same thing. You are laughing at the people analyzing why those curtains were blue

You dont need to reduce everything under fandom lens just to feel good about the characters and the story. If the story makes you feel uncomfortable, examine that. Is that what the creator wanted you to feel? Did it hit too close to home? Could you not relate to it but see others do?

There's plenty of queer vampire love mediums out there, but you have to recognize when that's the case for appropriate discussion. Even though Interview with the Last Vampire(the series) is partly based on navigating queer relationships, it's also a story that heavily revolves around race relations. Unfortunately from what I hear of the fandom, they choose to ignore that major aspect for the sake of their enjoyment and not risk feeling uncomfortable. Which very much mirrors how the community interacts with its Black members and Black people overall. It's not pleasant to talk about so if you bring it up you're causing trouble

[internetgiraffekid1673]

AU Chloé Bourgeois from @princess-of-the-corner

I've been trying out new drawing tools, since I finally gave up on the random bare-bones program I downloaded back in high school, and a coworker recommended procreate. To familiarize myself with it, I decided to draw some of Cornerverse's alternate universe Chloes! Here are the drawings, with the AU explanations under the cut:

Honeybee (Hero Chat) and Lady Luck:

These are Corner's two main AUs. Hero Chat has the heroes set up a group chat back in season 3 to avoid miscommunications, and canon divergence ensues from there. Chloe and Kagami have both pulled a Catwalker there, but everybody does get a design update (I yoinked the pose, since this was the first one I drew and I didn't want to think too hard).

Lady Luck is a pretty standard fare Kwami Swap AU where Chloe gets the Ladybug, and most other characters' miraculous are also shuffled around, since Chloe is doing the picking. Corner's designs here!

Forged AU

After the events of Miracle Queen, Chloe gets a kwami from a different Miracle Box--Miirzan, the bear Kwami of Fire---and makes protecting the exposed heroes her personal mission, since nobody did it for her.

Chloe takes an interesting route for her hero costume in this AU. The first time she went out, she was actually just trying to use the glamour to not get recognized as a civilian, which meant she went with understated clothing that was functionally a palette swap of what she was wearing that day (pictured on the left). While she continues with this trend in the story, I also wanted to give her a proper hero costume, perhaps after she gains some more stability, so I made one myself ;) (pictured on the right).

Double Trouble

After Miracle Queen, Chloe and Ladybug talk and realize taking away an exposed heroe's only means of protection and benching them won't actually keep them safe. Instead, Ladybug permanently hands out the Miraculous, but shuffles them around so it looks like they picked a completely new team. At the same time, Chloe starts working as a double agent against MothBalls and Mayura (who think she's a double agent for them), and gets paired up with Lila. Some Sonic Adventure 2 fandub jokes go a long way to easing that particular relationship, and the future gets a whole lot brighter.

While the whole AU was built on Sonic fandub jokes, Chloe doesn't ACTUALLY say the "I HAVE AN ANNOUNCEMENT" line. That honor goes to Alya in Hero Chat. But, I figured it was fitting just for the drawing. I ever so slightly adjusted Corner's horse!Chloe design to be an even more explicit Nightmare Moon reference.

Bee, Wasp, and Hornet:

In an effort to explain the massive personality retcons between season 1-3 Chloe, and season 4-5 Chloe, a theory was proposed that 4-5 Chloe (Joé/Hornet) is actually a sentimonster created by Hawkmoth and 1-3 Chloe (Bee) is somewhere else entirely. She comes back sometime in the middle of season 5 and is pissed as all hell about her replacement, but Zoe (Wasp) considers both of them her sisters and is determined to make things work.

While this AU is sometimes combined with Corner's Isekai!Chloe AU, sometimes she's just yeeted someplace out of the way so she can't be involved in the plot for a bit. Personally, I like the idea that she ended up camped out in the ReVerse and was only able to return after the Paris Special.

(I did lightly redesign Zoe here, just to cater more to how I picture her in my head. Joé's design is just canon!Chloe, but I got to put AU Chloe in whatever the hell I wanted, so I went whole hog on my thing about putting her in blue and giving her the curly hair Corner and I both headcanon as her natural hair texture).

Princess Bee:

After the Season 5 finale, the dust didn't quite settle as it did in canon. Chloe, now with hard evidence that neither of her parents cared about her, worked her butt off to get into law school with no assistance from them and cut ties completely, down to changing her last name. While there, she befriended the world's most generic dude John Doe, who later married the world's most generic chick Jane Doe and they settled down on a horse farm in Kansas. After some therapy, Chloe decided she wanted a kid, but in vitro would be too much of a hassle, and John agreed to help her out. This is the family photo.

Back in Paris, things got. Complicated. During the final fight, LB and CN ended out having to make a Wish to defeat Hawkmoth. The price was that neither Ladybug nor her allies were able to use the Miraculous ever again.

This meant that when Lila started her grand vengeance plan using the butterfly, she got straight up ghosted. So instead, she just hung on to the butterfly for ~20 years doing low scale cons (and becoming friends with Chester Fester, the best character ever), aimlessly drifting as she grapples with her undiagnosed clinical depression.

Zoe, after witnessing how Andre was willing to up and replace his bio daughter when a shinier new replacement showed up, decided she wanted no part of it and called her dad to help her sort things out. She basically ended out living alone in an apartment in France sponsored by Mr. Lee with him as her legal guardian on paperwork, and more or less avoided talking about the whole situation with the rest of the Miraculous Gang.

Somewhere around the 20 year mark, after everyone has grown up, had kids, and moved on with their lives, everything goes to shit. Andre, who hasn't updated his will in all that time, finally kicks the bucket, and Chloe is dragged kicking and screaming back to Paris (with her daughter Dawn in tow) to deal with the defunct hotel she just inherited.

At the same time, the Adrienette kids finally find the Miraculous stowed in their house, and decide to take them out for a joyride in a burst of teenage stupidity. They immediately end up on the news and Lila comes out of the woodwork to address some unresolved grudges. With the original Miraculous Team incapable of using their powers, and with no other options readily available, the next gen kids are now unfortunately Holders who have to stop her.

Oh, and of course Dawn miraculously (heh) ends up going to the same school as Adrienette's kids and she and Emma are gay as fuck for each other. Their parents are unaware of the connection to their past for a comedically long period of time.

Basically, the next gen kids are in a Magical Girl Anime, Chloe is unwillingly playing Homescapes with the hotel, and the OG Miracuclass are watching the mistakes of their past come back to haunt them :).

Everyone remember to go check out Corner's tumblr and their ao3, there is so much fun fuckery (not just ML fuckery either) going on over there! Thank ya and goodnight!

[bisexual-engineer-guy]

Alright, for context I’m the bf that ended up getting tumblr just to ask you some questions. @cringe-culture-is-dead-99 more specifically.

I can’t even remember what all I was going to ask you at this point but I’ll preface by saying that this might be one of the more psychoanalytical posts you’ve seen. Also don’t take anything I’m saying too seriously, as far as it matters I’m just a random internet bozo.

That being said, I’m really curious to know your story. From what very little I really know about you, it’s as though you’re the version of me that was exposed to unlimited social media access at a formative age. I say that since I didn’t have continuous access to internet until 15-16 years old. As well as the notion we have a very similar pool of knowledge.

My overall take on your gender is that you don’t feel particularly strongly about it in general. As in you currently recognize yourself as cis but don’t see enough of a reason to consider yourself trans. You’ve mentioned in passing that you don’t have the body type to adequately wear revealing fem clothing. I’d assert that you would feel fem, if you looked more fem. Suggested by the repeated mention of taking estrogen. Furthermore, since you have an overarching neutrality with being cis, it makes it much easier to be cis. I say that to mean you naturally trend toward being cis since it’s the easiest appearance to maintain (you know, given your body is doing it for you). My reasoning would lead me to suggest that your gender is predominantly tied to your appearance. I’d have to listen to you talk and observe your mannerisms to get a better take, but I think this is my best surface level interpretation.

That’s my current take. But my prediction (assuming that you find obtaining and funding estrogen to be a reasonable and repeatable task) is that you’ll start on E once the curiosity outweighs the physical downsides. Then you’ll mention it in your blog but in an indirect and cryptic way so that people won’t be able to fully confirm whether or not you’re taking it. Once you really start to feel the effects, (assuming you do have a positive response to the changes) you’ll quietly admit to yourself that female connotations would adequately apply to yourself. You’re going to then admit it on tumblr, but before you post the reveal, realize that you won’t be able to get more attention for being in the “is he isn’t she” circumstance your in. (I’m making this guess assuming you really like it when people try to figure out your gender). Some time is going to pass and maybe it happens after a lot of repeated pressure from followers asking, or maybe it’s just a really slow day where no one’s said anything particularly interesting. But you’re gonna cave and drop the news. Immediately after, you’re gonna reload the post repeatedly, waiting to see the tsunami of love and support you’re going to get. Even so, it’s not going to change your persona whatsoever. Since you’ll likely still feel the same then as you do now in this instance. Like, in this hypothetical at this point, you would still be able to see yourself as “bisexual-engineering-guy”, but going by “bisexual-engineering-girl” also is applicable. I feel pretty confident about this prediction but I’d have to be around you to really get the full picture. That said, I’d still bet 5 dollars, that’s right 5 whole doubloons, that something vaguely following the likes of this paragraph happens.

I know one of the things that really got me considering E was an increase in emotional output. But that’s just because I need to go to therapy. For you I imagine it’s different but follows along the same lines of it being more of an experimental process. Henceforth your caution with the permanent and reversible characteristics of E that you’ve previously posted about.

I really feel for you by the way. God knows I fuckin hated the workload in polymer science so I can think back to similar situations I’ve been in based on the commentary in your posts. If you’ll humor me, try out privately cross dressing before you fully commit to E. The main thing is to find something comfortable and form fitting. It also needs to cover up any part of your figure that feels “mannish” for lack of a better word. For me that means opaque tights (since I have ugly ass hairy ass legs) and a long sleeve dress (that accentuates my snatched waist). Also, you can go to cvs and get these things called “silicon cover-ups”. They work really great for me since it adds a touch more volume to my breast and gives the illusion that I have an AA cup size. (I can follow up with a picture, but I won’t in this post since it’s long enough.) I spent some time wearing clothes like this in private (whenever I actually felt like it so not all the time) and came to the conclusion that I really enjoyed the temporary perception of femininity. However I surmised that constantly being fem wouldn’t be for me. Originally my plan was to take E until I got to my desired breast size then stop. Then I would’ve bound them down with tape or something whenever I would go out in public. In this case, I had only ever planned to present as female on rare occasions.

Anyway, I’d love to know what your steam friend code is. I really want to see if we both have any good multiplayer games in common. Though feel free to ignore this, I can imagine it’s quite forthputting after the damn essay. I have no idea how tumblr works or if this message is even going to be readable since I wrote it all on mobile. Regardless,

Best wishes - Jello

Wow. You've really been paying attention. This is honestly an incredible read and you really hit the nail on the head with most of this stuff (I just didn't have pretty much any unsupervised internet until I was like 14-15, and the only social media I really used back then was Reddit. I got on Tumblr two years ago). I would love to give you my Discord! I don't really use Steam much anymore these days, so I'm not sure how useful my Steam friend code would be, but I could send it anyways. I like your ideas on gender. I definitely have tried a bit of private crossdressing--although not quite crossdressing, more femboy aesthetic--so I definitely want to try out some more regular clothes before I make a move. I'm thinking of also just adding some lowkey things to my wardrobe, just like fem-fitting shirts and getting a girl haircut, and also I'm getting in better shape where I like my body more in general. When I'm not living in someone else's house--in a few weeks--I'm gonna go ahead and go to the mall with some friends and pick out a dress or two that actually fit me and my frame well, and then I'll probably nab some Amazon shapewear and just see how I feel about my body when it's got more of a female figure. Like I said, you really hit the nail on the head about my gender. Girl doesn't fit quite right, guy doesn't fit quite right about 50% of the time. I could start estrogen and it wouldn't change much about me. I would still be bisexual-engineer-guy, still be he/they, still use the men's restroom, still wear jeans and a t shirt and combat boots almost every day, but I'd have a more fem figure underneath all that and I think it'd be happier that way. I'd also probably get laser and lose my small gut lol. I definitely agree with your assessment of being cis because it's the lowest possible energy state, and i think that's why the idea of going on E is so attractive to me--I get to keep my low energy state, wearing whatever workwear is appropriate for the shop and whatnot, but being able to have the undertones I want to appear with. Yes, my gender is quite tied with my appearance to me. I think if I start estrogen I'll probably just tell y'all though haha i'd be too excited to try out this experiment. honestly the two potential outcomes I could see are that I either do it and and like it and keep it at a super low dose, not enough to become a girl, but enough to become the guy i want to be; or that i do it and realize that i've made a huge mistake and stop. who knows. there's always time. I don't have to wait for a good time socially because i'm never going to transition like that. i'm just going to become a girlshaped boything, if that ends up being what I want. anyway, i've gotta go to work. chat ya later :3

[wachinyeya]

Shorebird populations across the Americas have declined by nearly 50% over the past four decades, facing increasing threats from habitat loss, climate change, and human disturbances. Against these odds, the American Oystercatcher has made a stunning comeback, with populations rebounding by 45% since 2008. The recovery is credited to a collaborative, science-based conservation initiative led by Manomet Conservation Sciences, in partnership with the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

The American Oystercatcher, a striking coastal bird known for its bright red-orange beak and distinctive yellow-rimmed eyes, plays a vital role in salt marsh and barrier beach ecosystems. By 2008, its numbers had dropped to just 10,000 birds. Recognizing the urgency of the situation, Dr. Shiloh Schulte, Senior Shorebird Scientist at Manomet, launched a data-driven conservation effort focused on habitat restoration, predator control, and protection of nesting sites.

Schulte’s comprehensive population surveys—spanning from New York to Texas—provided critical insights into roosting patterns and breeding success, enabling conservationists to implement effective recovery strategies. Targeted interventions and sustained collaboration have reversed the species’ decline, offering a model for future shorebird conservation efforts.

A $10 Million Investment in Coastal Conservation

Recognizing that shorebird conservation requires a coordinated, large-scale approach, Manomet and the American Oystercatcher Working Group spearheaded a decade-long $10 million funding initiative bringing together 35 coastal conservation organizations. 

The combined efforts have contributed to the restoration of coastal ecosystems, benefiting numerous shorebird species. According to Dr. Stephen Brown, Vice President of Science at Manomet, long-term migration studies have played a role in highlighting the broader shorebird crisis. His research contributed to the November 2024 update of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List, which revealed that 15 migratory shorebird species in the Americas are now classified at higher risk levels.

Manomet’s ongoing mission extends beyond research, actively engaging local communities, conservation organizations, and policymakers to implement science-based solutions. By prioritizing hands-on habitat restoration and protection, the organization remains at the forefront of shorebird conservation efforts.

Expanding Conservation Efforts: From Oystercatchers to Whimbrels

The success of the American Oystercatcher conservation model is now being applied to other threatened shorebirds, including the whimbrel—a long-distance migratory bird that travels between the Arctic and South America. With whimbrel populations declining in recent decades, conservationists are using the same science-driven strategies to help reverse these trends.

To increase public awareness and engagement, the First Inaugural Shorebird Festival will take place on Tybee Island, Georgia, from February 20-22, 2025. This event will bring together citizen scientists, conservationists, and bird enthusiasts, providing a unique opportunity to learn about shorebird conservation efforts. Dr. Abby Sterling, Director of the Georgia Bight Shorebird Conservation Initiative, will be among the experts discussing ongoing restoration initiatives.

Despite ongoing environmental challenges, the resurgence of the American Oystercatcher proves that with the right scientific approach, funding, and collaboration, shorebird populations can recover and thrive. 

[eevylynn]

WIP Wednesday

I was tagged by the lovely @whimsicalmeerkat a while back (which is why I'm posting this on a Tuesday night, but hey, it's Wednesday somewhere in the world)

This is from my Booktoker Derek story. I needed a break from working on my Sterek Reverse Bang, so I figured I'd work on this for a bit

*~*~*~*~*~*

It started unsurprisingly: Stiles was procrastinating doing his essay by doomscrolling on TikTok. He had probably wasted almost half an hour of countless videos of ADHD hacks, the latest dance trend, a few badass women wielding various medieval weaponry, and some weirdly satisfying carpet cleaning videos.

After liking a neat heart-healthy recipe that he’s thinking of trying sometime soon, Stiles scrolled on to the next video.

The first thing he registered was SKIN.

Then, to the beat of the latest trending thirst trap song, the shot zoomed out to show a shirtless man from his large, corded shoulders down past his rippling abs, reading some book that Stiles had seen mentioned by countless women on booktok before.

The camera panned up, revealing more until—

“Holy. Shit.”

It was Derek Hale.

Stiles froze, his thumb hovering above the screen as his brain struggled to catch up with what he was seeing. Derek, perfectly disheveled with stubble framing his jaw and brows furrowed in concentration, was reading the book. His kaleidoscope eyes swept across the page as if genuinely engrossed in the story.

Looking at the bottom of the screen, Stiles saw the username @howlinghemingway.

Well, shit.

Forget his essay, this discovery was much more important. It wasn’t like his essay was even due tomorrow. Stiles still had a week to work on it. Besides, the longer he puts it off, the harder the ADHD procrastination adrenaline will hit, and it’ll probably still be one of the best in class.

With that in mind, Stiles clicked the username to see what other videos Derek had posted as he stood up from his desk chair to make himself comfortable in his bed before he dived on in.

Each video drew him deeper into the rabbit hole. There were videos of Derek discussing plot twists, sharing his favorite steamy scenes, giving writing tips, all while showing Derek in various states of undress while recommending different books. Books Stiles didn’t even know Derek knew about much less owned. Stiles was mesmerized by the way Derek’s sharp cheekbones caught the light, the way his jaw clenched while talking about a particularly gripping part of a story.

One video in particular caught Stiles’ attention. Derek was casually lounging in what Stiles recognized as the library in pack house, the same location as most of Derek’s videos . He was dressed in grey sweatpants and a soft burgundy sweater. Stiles can’t remember ever seeing Derek look so damned soft. That sweater even had thumbholes! Thumbholes! Derek in thumbholes was a level of cozy Stiles wasn’t emotionally prepared for.

But that wasn’t the real kicker.

Derek held up a hardcover novel, his thumb grazing over the title: Crimson Moon by Samuel Blackwolf. Stiles squinted at the screen, confused for a second, until Derek’s smooth voice filled the air.

“Imagine ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ meets ‘Hamlet’, but way steamier. ‘Crimson Moon’ continues Cyrus and Rowan’s forbidden romance. An ancient curse threatens their bond, all while they uncover Cyrus’s dark family secrets. And yes, it’s as spicy as ever,” Derek said, grinning salaciously. “Think forbidden love, secret rendezvous, and intense passion. Unlock the secrets yourself.”

Stiles’ jaw dropped.

Derek Hale, brooding werewolf extraordinaire, was not only a BookToker, but also a secret smut author with multiple books published?!

WHAT?

*~*~*~*~*~*

No pressure tags: @renmackree @endwersed @thotpuppy

[beatmyfeet]

Female Supremacy

A New Chapter for Humanity

Throughout the centuries, gender roles have seen significant transformations. Female supremacy, perceived as an evolution of power dynamics, does not necessarily imply the domination or subjugation of men. Instead, it represents the emergence of women as influential leaders in various domains of public and private life. It's the story of a world finally recognizing the vast potential of over half of its population.

The rise of women to positions of power has become increasingly visible. In politics, women are leading some of the world's largest countries, shaping national and international policies. In business, we see women heading multinational corporations, driving innovation, and influencing global economic trends. In academia, an increasing number of women hold high-ranking positions, shaping education and research on a global scale.

This new reality holds the potential to bring about substantial shifts in how our world operates. Historically, patriarchal societies have often favored conflict, competition, and exploitation of the environment. As women gain power and influence decisions, we observe a trend towards fostering collaboration, equity, and sustainability.

Female supremacy is not a threat to gender equality but rather a significant step towards realizing it. It doesn't aim to reverse gender roles, but to balance power, so that women have as much influence and opportunity as men.

However, it's essential to note that female supremacy is not a panacea for all the world's problems. Like any form of power, it can be misused, and it's necessary to ensure that all people, regardless of their gender, are held accountable for their actions. True gender equality requires a fair share of power, responsibilities, and opportunities, regardless of gender.

Female supremacy is a new chapter in humanity's story, an era in which we recognize and value women's contributions at all societal levels. This era offers hope for a more balanced and just future where men and women can work together to tackle global challenges.

[probuccalfat]

I think buccal fat is attractive on women but as a man with probuccalfat am I allowed to get surgery :)

thank you for asking it’s like i’m the commissioner of buccal fat and a recognized authority. to be honest, babes, it’s up to you—fully. you have total autonomy. other people’s reactions are just that—other people’s reactions. i personally think we should all hold onto our buccal fat forever—i find it really cute, warm, vibrant—and i’m freaked out by the permanence of cosmetic surgery like what if i do it and i miss my old face and i can never go back? it’s en vogue to look super sharp and severe and snatched rn, but trends change all the time, so i can’t do anything to myself that i can’t take back unless it’s something i would have done anyway like getting tattoos.

buccal fat removal will not change your bone structure, it will just remove fullness from your face and it is not reversible. bear that in mind. if looking youthful matters to you, know that it’ll age you. if you’re really struggling with liking your features, look in a mirror and try to find positive things about how your buccal fat looks on your face. you may realize you love it.

[noneedtofearorhope]

Closer than ever: It is now 89 seconds to midnight

In 2024, humanity edged ever closer to catastrophe. Trends that have deeply concerned the Science and Security Board continued, and despite unmistakable signs of danger, national leaders and their societies have failed to do what is needed to change course. Consequently, we now move the Doomsday Clock from 90 seconds to 89 seconds to midnight—the closest it has ever been to catastrophe. Our fervent hope is that leaders will recognize the world’s existential predicament and take bold action to reduce the threats posed by nuclear weapons, climate change, and the potential misuse of biological science and a variety of emerging technologies.

In setting the Clock one second closer to midnight, we send a stark signal: Because the world is already perilously close to the precipice, a move of even a single second should be taken as an indication of extreme danger and an unmistakable warning that every second of delay in reversing course increases the probability of global disaster.

In regard to nuclear risk, the war in Ukraine, now in its third year, looms over the world; the conflict could become nuclear at any moment because of a rash decision or through accident or miscalculation. Conflict in the Middle East threatens to spiral out of control into a wider war without warning. The countries that possess nuclear weapons are increasing the size and role of their arsenals, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons that can destroy civilization. The nuclear arms control process is collapsing, and high-level contacts among nuclear powers are totally inadequate given the danger at hand. Alarmingly, it is no longer unusual for countries without nuclear weapons to consider developing arsenals of their own—actions that would undermine longstanding nonproliferation efforts and increase the ways in which nuclear war could start.

The impacts of climate change increased in the last year as myriad indicators, including sea-level rise and global surface temperature, surpassed previous records. The global greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change continued to rise. Extreme weather and other climate change-influenced events—floods, tropical cyclones, heat waves, drought, and wildfires—affected every continent. The long-term prognosis for the world’s attempts to deal with climate change remains poor, as most governments fail to enact the financing and policy initiatives necessary to halt global warming. Growth in solar and wind energy has been impressive but remains insufficient to stabilize the climate. Judging from recent electoral campaigns, climate change is viewed as a low priority in the United States and many other countries.

In the biological arena, emerging and re-emerging diseases continue to threaten the economy, society, and security of the world. The off-season appearance and in-season continuance of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), its spread to farm animals and dairy products, and the occurrence of human cases have combined to create the possibility of a devastating human pandemic. Supposedly high-containment biological laboratories continue to be built throughout the world, but oversight regimes for them are not keeping pace, increasing the possibility that pathogens with pandemic potential may escape. Rapid advances in artificial intelligence have increased the risk that terrorists or countries may attain the capability of designing biological weapons for which countermeasures do not exist.

An array of other disruptive technologies advanced last year in ways that make the world more dangerous. Systems that incorporate artificial intelligence in military targeting have been used in Ukraine and the Middle East, and several countries are moving to integrate artificial intelligence into their militaries. Such efforts raise questions about the extent to which machines will be allowed to make military decisions—even decisions that could kill on a vast scale, including those related to the use of nuclear weapons. Tensions among the major powers are increasingly reflected in competition in space, where China and Russia are actively developing anti-satellite capabilities; the United States has alleged that Russia has tested a satellite with a dummy warhead on it, suggesting plans to place nuclear weapons in orbit.

The dangers we have just listed are greatly exacerbated by a potent threat multiplier: the spread of misinformation, disinformation, and conspiracy theories that degrade the communication ecosystem and increasingly blur the line between truth and falsehood. Advances in AI are making it easier to spread false or inauthentic information across the internet—and harder to detect it. At the same time, nations are engaging in cross-border efforts to use disinformation and other forms of propaganda to subvert elections, while some technology, media, and political leaders aid the spread of lies and conspiracy theories. This corruption of the information ecosystem undermines the public discourse and honest debate upon which democracy depends. The battered information landscape is also producing leaders who discount science and endeavor to suppress free speech and human rights, compromising the fact-based public discussions that are required to combat the enormous threats facing the world.

Blindly continuing on the current path is a form of madness. The United States, China, and Russia have the collective power to destroy civilization. These three countries have the prime responsibility to pull the world back from the brink, and they can do so if their leaders seriously commence good-faith discussions about the global threats outlined here. Despite their profound disagreements, they should take that first step without delay. The world depends on immediate action.

It is 89 seconds to midnight.

[mariacallous]

As the United States nears its consequential November election, concerns about the impacts of artificial intelligence on the country’s electoral integrity are front and center. Voters are receiving deceptive phone calls mimicking candidates’ voices, and campaigns are using AI images in their ads. Many fear that highly targeted messaging could lead to suppressed voter turnout or false information about polling stations. These are legitimate concerns that public officials are working overtime to confront.

But free and fair elections, the building blocks of democratic representation, are only one dimension of democracy. Today, policymakers must also recognize an equally fundamental threat that advanced technologies pose to a free and open society: the suppression of civil rights and individual opportunity at the hands of opaque and unaccountable AI systems. Ungoverned, AI undermines democratic practice, norms, and the rule of law—fundamental commitments that underpin a robust liberal democracy—and opens pathways toward a new type of illiberalism. To reverse this drift, we must reverse the currents powering it.

Liberal societies are characterized by openness, transparency, and individual agency. But the design and deployment of powerful AI systems are the precise inverse.

In the United States, as in any country, those who control the airwaves, steer financial institutions, and command the military have long had a wide berth to make decisions that shape society. In the new century, another set of actors joins that list: the increasingly concentrated group of corporate players who control data, algorithms, and the processing infrastructure to make and use highly capable AI systems. But without the kind of robust oversight the government prescribes over other parts of the economy and the military, the systems these players produce lack transparency and public accountability.

The U.S. foreign-policy establishment has long voiced legitimate concerns about the use of technology by authoritarian regimes, such as China’s widespread surveillance, tracking, and control of its population through deep collusion between the state and corporations. Civil society, academics, and journalists have recognized the threat of those same tools being deployed to similar ends in the United States. At the same time, many of today’s AI systems are undermining the liberal character of American society: They run over civil rights and liberties and cause harm for which people cannot easily seek redress. They violate privacy, spread falsehoods, and obscure economic crimes such as price-fixing, fraud, and deception. And they are increasingly used—without an architecture of accountability—in institutions central to American life: the workplace, policing, the legal system, public services, schools, and hospitals.

All of this makes for a less democratic American society. In cities across the United States, people of color have been arrested and jailed after being misidentified by facial recognition tools. We’ve seen AI used in loan refinancing charge more to applicants who went to historically Black colleges. An AI program aimed at preventing suicide among veterans prioritizes white men and overlooks survivors of sexual violence, who are much more likely to be women. Hidden behind computer code, illegal and unfair treatment long banned under federal law is becoming harder to detect and to contest.

To global observers, the trendlines of AI in American society will look familiar; the worst harms of these systems mirror the tenets of what has been called “illiberal democracy.” Under that vision—championed most famously by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a darling of the U.S. right—a society “maintains the outward appearances of a democracy … but in fact seeks to undermine all the institutions and norms that give democracy meaning,” scholar Susan Rubin Suleiman wrote in 2021. This doesn’t have to look like canceling elections or dismantling a sitting legislative body; instead, the vision takes the form of a more subtle assault—foreclosing the ability of individuals and minority groups to assert their rights.

As powerful new AI products are born and come of age amid a growing political alliance between far-right ideologues and some of the most powerful leaders in the technology industry, these foundational threats to free society could accelerate. Elon Musk, amplifying alarmist narratives on migrants and dehumanizing language about women and LGBT people, has said he would serve in a potential second Trump administration. Elsewhere in Silicon Valley, a growing cadre of venture capitalists are boldly betting the house on Trump in the belief that their portfolios—brimming with crypto and AI bets—may be better off under a president who is unfazed by harms to the most vulnerable and who challenges the exercise of fundamental rights.

Simply studying these tools and their effects on society can prove difficult: Scientific research into these systems is dominated by profit-motivated private actors, the only people who have access to the largest and most powerful models. The systems in question are primarily closed-source and proprietary, meaning that external researcher access—a basic starting point for transparency—is blocked. Employees at AI companies have been forced to sign sweeping nondisclosure agreements, including those about product safety, or risk losing equity. All the while, executives suggest that understanding precisely how these systems make decisions, including in ways that affect people’s lives, is something of luxury, a dilemma to be addressed sometime in the future.

The real problem, of course, is that AI is being deployed now, without public accountability. No citizenry has elected these companies or their leaders. Yet executives helming today’s big AI firms have sought to assure the public that we should trust them. In February, at least 20 firms signed a pledge to flag AI-generated videos and take down content meant to mislead voters. Soon after, OpenAI and its largest investor, Microsoft, launched a $2 million Societal Resilience Fund focused on educating voters about AI. The companies point to this work as core to their missions, which imagine a world where AI “benefits all of humanity” or “helps people and society flourish.”

Tech companies have repeatedly promised to govern themselves for the public good—efforts that may begin with good intentions but fall apart under the pressure of a business case. Congress has had no shortage of opportunities over the last 15 years to step in to govern data-centric technologies in the public’s interest. But each time Washington has cracked open the door to meaningful technology governance, it has quickly slammed it shut. Federal policymakers have explored reactive and well-meaning but flawed efforts to assert governance in specific domains—for example, during moments of attention to teen mental health or election interference. But these efforts have faded as public attention moved elsewhere. Exposed in this story of false starts and political theatrics is the federal government’s default posture on technology: to react to crises but fail to address the root causes.

Even following well-reported revelations, such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal, no legislation has emerged to rein in the technology sector’s failure to build products that prioritize Americans’ security, safety, and rights—not to mention the integrity of U.S. democracy. The same story has unfolded in the doomed push to achieve data privacy laws, efforts that have stalled out in committee ad infinitum, leaving Americans without the basic protections for their personal information that are enjoyed by people living in 137 other countries.

The Biden-Harris administration decided to push harder, through initiatives we worked both directly and indirectly on. Even before ChatGPT vaulted AI to the center of the national discourse in November 2022, President Joe Biden’s White House released an AI Bill of Rights proposing five key assurances all Americans should be able to hold in an AI-powered world: that AI technologies are safe, fair, and protective of their privacy; that they are made aware when systems are being used to make decisions about them; and that they can opt out. The framework was a proactive, democratic vision for the use of advanced technology in American society.

The vision has proved durable. When generative AI hit the consumer market, driving both anxiety and excitement, Biden didn’t start from scratch but from a set of clear and affirmative first principles. Pulling from the 2022 document, his 2023 executive order on AI mandated a coordinated federal response to AI, using a “rights and safety” framework. New rules from the powerful Office of Management and Budget turned those principles into binding policy, requiring federal agencies to test AI systems for their impact on Americans’ rights and safety before they could be used. At the same time, federal enforcement agencies used their existing powers to enforce protections and combat violations in the digital environment. The Federal Trade Commission stepped up its enforcement of digital-era violations of well-established antitrust laws, putting AI companies on notice for potentially unfair and deceptive practices that harm consumers. Vice President Kamala Harris presided over the launch of a new AI Safety Institute, calling for a body that addressed a “full spectrum” of risks, including both longer-term speculative risks and current documented harms.

This was a consequential paradigm shift from America’s steady state of passive technology nongovernance—proof-positive that a more proactive approach was possible. Yet these steps face a range of structural limitations. One is capacity: Agencies across the federal government carrying out the work of AI governance will need staff with sociotechnical expertise to weigh the complex trade-offs of AI’s harms and opportunities.

Another challenge is the limited reach of executive action. Donald Trump has promised to repeal the AI executive order and gut the civil service tasked with its implementation. If his first term is any indication, a Republican administration would reinstate the deregulatory status quo. Such is the spirit of plans reportedly drawn up by Larry Kudlow, Trump’s former National Economic Council director, to create “industry-led” task forces, placing responsibility for assessing AI tools’ safety into the hands of the powerful industry players who design and sell them.

And Biden’s measures, for the most part, guide only the government’s own use of AI systems. This is a valuable and necessary step, as the behavior of agencies bears on the daily lives of Americans, particularly the most vulnerable. But the effects of executive actions on the private sector are circumscribed, related to pockets of executive authority such as government contracting, civil rights enforcement, or antitrust action. A president’s pen alone cannot create a robust or dynamic accountability infrastructure for the technology industry. Nor can we rely on agencies to hold the line; recent Supreme Court decisions—Loper Bright, Corner Post, and others—have weakened their authority to use their mandated powers to adapt to new developments.

This, of course, is the more fundamental shortcoming of Biden’s progress on AI and technology governance: It does not carry the force of legislation. Without an accompanying push in Congress to counter such proposed rollbacks with new law, the United States will continue to embrace a largely ungoverned, innovation-at-all-costs technology landscape, with disparate state laws as the primary bulwark—and will continue to see the drift of emerging technologies away from the norms of robust democratic practice.

Yet meaningful governance efforts may be dead on arrival in a Congress that continues to embrace the flawed argument that without carte blanche for companies to “move fast and break things,” the United States would be doomed to lose to China, on both economic and military fronts. Such an approach cedes the AI competition to China’s terms, playing on the field of Chinese human rights violations and widespread surveillance instead of the field of American values and democratic practice. It also surrenders the U.S. security edge, enabling systems that could break or fail at any moment because they were rushed to market in the name of great-power competition.

Pursuing meaningful AI governance is a choice. So is the decision, over decades, to leave powerful data-centric technologies ungoverned—a decision to allow an assault on the rights, freedoms, and opportunities of many in American society. There is another path.

Washington has the opportunity to build a new, enduring paradigm in which the governance of data-centric predictive technologies, as well as the industry that creates them, is a core component of a robust U.S. democracy.

We must waste no time reaffirming that the protections afforded by previous generations of laws also apply to emerging technology. For the executive branch, this will require a landmark effort to ensure protections are robustly enforced in the digital sphere, expanding enforcement capacity in federal agencies with civil rights offices and enforcement mandates and keeping up the antitrust drumbeat that has put anti-competitive actors on notice.

The most consequential responsibility for AI governance, though, rests with Congress. Across the country, states are moving to pass laws on AI, many of which will contradict one another and form an overlapping legal tangle. Federal lawmakers should act in the tradition of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, issuing blanket protections for all Americans. At a minimum, this should include a new liability regime and guarantee protection from algorithmic discrimination; mandate pre- and post-deployment testing, transparency, and explainability of AI systems; and a requirement for developers of AI systems to uphold a duty of care, with the responsibility to ensure that systems are safe and effective.

These AI systems are powered by data, so such a bill should be accompanied by comprehensive data privacy protections, including a robust embrace of data minimization, barring companies from using personal information collected for one purpose in order to achieve an unrelated end.

While only a start, these steps to protect democratic practice in the age of AI would herald the end of America’s permissive approach to the technology sector’s harms and mark the beginning of a new democratic paradigm. They should be followed forcefully by a separate but complementary project: ensuring that individuals and communities participate in deciding how AI is used in their lives—and how it is not. Most critically, more workers—once called America’s “arsenal of democracy”—must organize and wield their collective power to bargain over whether, when, and how technologies are used in the workplace.

Such protections must also extend beyond the workplace into other areas of daily life where technology is used to shape important decisions. At a moment of weakening democratic norms, we need a new, concerted campaign to ease the path for anyone to challenge unfair decisions made about them by ungoverned AI systems or opt out of AI systems’ use altogether. This must include a private right of action for ordinary people who can show that AI has been used to break the law or violate their rights. We must also open additional pathways to individual and collective contestation, including robust, well-resourced networks of legal aid centers trained in representing low-income clients experiencing algorithmic harms.

We can bring many more people into the process of deciding what kinds of problems powerful AI systems are used to solve, from the way we allocate capital to the way we conduct AI research and development. Closing this gap requires allowing people across society to use AI for issues that matter to them and their communities. The federal government’s program to scale up access to public research, computing power, and data infrastructure is still only a pilot, and Congress has proposed to fund it at only $2.6 billion in its first six years. To grasp that number’s insufficiency, one needed only to listen to Google’s spring earnings call, where investors heard that the tech giant planned to spend about $12 billion on AI development per quarter. Next, the U.S. government should invest in the human and tech infrastructures of “public AI,” to provide both a sandbox for applied innovation in the public interest and a countervailing force to the concentration of economic and agenda-setting power in the AI industry.

These are some of the measures the United States can undertake to govern these new technologies. Even in an administration that broadly supports these goals, however, none of this will be possible or politically viable without a change in the overall balance of power. A broad-based, well-funded, and well-organized political movement on technology policy issues is needed to dramatically expand the coalition of people interested and invested in technology governance in the United States.

Ushering in these reforms begins with telling different stories to help people recognize their stake in these issues and understand that AI tools directly impact their access to quality housing, education, health care, and economic opportunity. This awareness must ultimately translate to pressure on lawmakers, a tool those standing in the way of a democratic vision for AI use to great effect. Musk is reportedly bankrolling a pro-Trump super PAC to the tune of tens of millions per month. Andreessen Horowitz, the venture firm led by anti-regulation founders, increased its lobbying budget between the first and second quarter of this year by 135 percent. Not only are the big corporate tech players spending millions of dollars on lobbying per quarter, but each is also running a political operation, spending big money to elect political candidates who will look after their interests.

The academic, research, and civil society actors whose work has helped change the tech policy landscape have succeeded in building strong policy and research strategies. Now is the time to venture further into the political battlefield and prepare the next generation of researchers, policy experts, and advocates to take up the baton. This will require new tools, such as base-building efforts with groups across the country that can help tie technology governance to popular public issues, and generational investments in political action committees and lobbying. This shift in strategy will require new, significant money; philanthropic funders who have traditionally backed research and nonprofit advocacy will need to also embrace an explicitly political toolkit.

The public interest technology movement urgently needs a political architecture that can at last impose a political cost on lawmakers who allow the illiberal shift of technology companies to proceed unabated. In the age of AI, the viability of efforts to protect democratic representation, practice, and norms may well hinge on the force with which non-industry players choose to fund and build political power—and leverage it.

A choice confronts the United States as we face down AI’s threats to democratic practice, representation, and norms. We can default to passivity, or we can use these instruments to shape a free society for the modern era. The decision is ours to make.

[darkmaga-returns]

11/05/2024•Mises Wire•Tho Bishop

Today, in theory, will conclude the 2024 presidential election, one of the most bizarre in American political history. From inner-party coups to assassination attempts, Kamala’s Brat summer social media trend to Trump’s courting of comedian podcasts, the campaign cycle has been saturated with the unconventional. It has, of course, also seen its expected share of shallow, political, rhetorical rhetoric and general economic illiteracy, which are the cornerstones of modern democracy.

The general superficial nature of mainstream political discourse, though, should not distract us from recognizing foundational truths about the state of modern American politics. No matter the outcome, the legitimacy of American democracy is broken.

In 2020, this was in full display, as was the response from Donald Trump and his supporters. Fueled by the unprecedented changes to the election under the shadow of covid, President Trump refused to concede the election. Polls showed the majority of his supporters agreed with him, and from that seed of distrust grew renewed concerns over illegal voters, manipulable voting machines, and rising awareness over the security of vote-by-mail ballots. To this day, large portions of the country continue to believe the Biden administration was illegitimate.

How would Democrats have reacted in the face of a similarly close race resulting in a Trump victory last election? While the counterfactual is impossible to consider in practice, hints were already publicly available before election day 2020. In Biden campaign war games, John Podesta, a long-time Democrat operative, outlined a strategy quite similar to the one Trump embarked on. As reported at the time, this included Democrat-swing state governors being pressured into promoting friendly alternative electors to vote in the electoral college under the guise of reversing Republican “voter suppression” efforts. Unlike the Republican response in 2020, this appeal would have been strengthened by blue-state secession threats should Trump have been inaugurated.

Would Joe Biden have followed through with this strategy if this alternative timeline had played out? We will never know. Nor can we know the potential effectiveness of this strategy, though it is likely such efforts would have been treated quite differently than Trump’s response.

Still, as we look forward, what is clear here is that the willingness for either side to accept, without question, the basic machinery of American politics has broken down significantly. The centralization of power within Washington, which consistently elevates the stakes of national politics, coupled with significant ideological shifts (particularly on the left), and the perceived danger Trump represents to American political institutions, regardless of his demonstrated ability to follow through after 2016, has created a dynamic where the incentives to concede power for the alleged “national good” have all but broken down.

Each side is motivated by a spirit of self-preservation, not politics.

[realjaysumlin]

Why Is the U.S. Dollar Declining? | Charles Schwab

My frustration with the current administration and its unwavering supporters is profound, and while I could express it with a range of unflattering terms, I will refrain for now.

This president is engaging in actions unprecedented in American history, seemingly without consequence. What troubles me even more is the failure of many to recognize the decline in the value of the American dollar, a trend I have observed since Trump assumed office.

However, my primary concern lies not with the dollar's depreciation but with the Black American community's missed opportunities. We should be exploring alternative currency rates that could significantly benefit us, yet I struggle to convey the importance of seizing this unique chance to uplift our communities and secure a brighter future for generations to come.

[adarkrainbow]

Spooky season fairytales (1)

I have been covering it these past weeks, and it is a perfect fit for Halloween: Hansel and Gretel.

This is one of the creepiest "popular" fairytales, that has terrified many children. The witch in the gingerbread house not only exemplifies so many bogeymen that caused children's nightmares, but is also one of the two most famous examples of witches in fairytales - and we know Halloween is one of the witchy holidays. And the whole story revolves around a house made of sweets - in modern day interpretations, Hansel and Gretel is THE candy-fairytale. And Halloween is THE holiday for treats and sweets.

Despite being an obvious choice to make fairytale horror movies, and the fairytale having inspired several great horror classics (the scene I posted before in Stephen King's IT involving the witch of Hansel and Gretel), the tale doesn't actually have a lot of treatment in the world of horror... Yeah, it is surprising, but the first true "horror movie" about Hansel and Gretel would be the Korean 2007 movie of the same name, that was recognized as a great Korean horror piece and a very touching tragic story, but is not an actual retelling of "Hansel and Gretel" - or rather it is a twisted, reversed-retelling that mostly uses Hansel and Gretel as a motif and reference rather than actual plot material.

To have "Hansel and Gretel" REALLY enter the horror movie world, we would have to wait for the year 2013, and a dual release. The first one is a famous movie by fairytale enjoyers, that is still quite popular online: "Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters". This movie is what the 2005's "Van Helsing" movie was to Dracula.

What to say about this movie? It is a dark fantasy, action-movie acting as a sequel to the original fairytale and depicting the two protagonists as gun-and-arbalet-wielding witch hunters. It is everything you except from a a big studio classic action gritty-fantasy movie. In fact, that's the main flaw of the movie: it is extremely generic, formulaic and "by-the-book". There's no real inventivity or uniqueness in terms of plot, setting or characters. If you played dark fantasy action video games, you watched this movie already. It didn't even invent the concept of Hansel and Gretel as witch hunters - Fables for example had done it already by making Hansel a fanatical Puritan witch hunter in the style of the Salem witch trials. As a result, what could have been a really good, inventive, interestng movie is just... a neutral, generic movie. The kind you can watch and enjoy but that won't transcend anything and isn't groundbreaking in any way.

Not that the movie is bad, it has some highlights and qualities to it that avoid making it bad. For example, several of the actors in this movie are really good and give their best despite playing bland or generic characters (and in fact it sames some flat characters, who are given depth by their actors' work) ; and there is a true visual work, with some fascinating designs. This all makes the movie enjoyable in several aspects - but just having good actors and good visuals won't make the movie good given how generic it is in plot and style, and how incoherent the worldbuilding and the tone feels, tiptoing around anachronisms for the sake of "let's make it cool and steampunk", and failing to find a balance between dark comedy and serious movie. (Oh yes and it also dreadfully suffer from the awful "3D movies" trend of the time)

And to this movie answered another movie: 2013's "Hansel and Gretel", aka The Asylum's Hansel and Gretel. A movie which is the perfect twin to "Witch Hunters" - in fact you could say they are the yin and yang to each other.

This movie is a full horror movie, not a dark fantasy/action piece. This movie is a retelling of the original story, not a sequel to it. This movie takes place in modern day, the 21st century, instead of a fantasized Germany of unclear era. And whereas "Witch Hunters" kind of fails at meeting the hype it built up, and is a neutral, average, not-good not-bad big budget movie, this movie is... surprisingly good for what it is, and ends up much better than what it should be.

If you do not know The Asylum, the group behind this movie, they are well-known producers of mockbusters, unofficial sequels and B-movies, and very proud of it. In fact it is their goal: make mockbusters to propose a cheaper alternative to big-studio movies, and turn the making of "second-rate" movies into a true art. They make their movies very fast, they release them against big studios movie they openly took inspiration from, they use cheap special effects, they select for actors either "no-names" or "has-beens"... I think I can sum it up enough by the fact they are the makers of the "Sharknado" movies. As a result, this movie was probably going to be an utter mess and ridiculous schlock...

... But it was surprisingly good. Better than what it should be. Of course The Asylum's marks are still there. The movie opens and closes on two very ridiculous scenes (the first victim's flight in the night ; the explosion of the house), there is some cheap "sexy-horror" audience-appeal (it is no mistake the only victims to be eaten are women that are forced in underwears before being pushed in the oven), and the plot is basically Hansel and Gretel X The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. BUT all that being said, this movie actually works! In its own, small-budget, no-real-ambition way. It doesn't try to be too snobby or arrogant - it knows it is a small, derivative, B-horror movie, and it stays in its lane. There are some interesting scenes and concepts (such as the drugged-colorfed nightmares). They do manage to create some disturbing elements - while also purposefully breaking several horror stereotypes and cliches. They try to keep a "maybe magic, maybe mundane" approach to the story in their own clumsy way but that is interesting. And more importantly - the character of the witch is SO GREAT!

I can't say enough how I enjoyed the witch (Lilith) on screen, and I do believe that this is due to the incredible work of her actress. Because she is played by none other than Dee Wallace (a horror movie regular who began her career with E.T.) - and she manages to make the character entertaining and disturbing. It really works, and I suspect that if a bad actress had been placed there, the role might have felt flat and generic. But she brings extremely well the disturbed state of mind, the humanity of the monster, and the true descent into horrible madness of the character. They are notably the first movie, to my knowledge, which actually acknowledges and reflects upon the special relationship between Gretel and the Witch, invoking elements that would later become common in "Hansel and Gretel" retellings, such as the witch wanting to make Gretel her "heir", or seeing her as a daughter substitute.

Beyond the year 2013, of course, now, you hit "Hansel and Gretel - horror" in any web research system, and you get the recent horror movie by Oz Perkins, the 2020's "Gretel and Hansel".

I do believe that this movie, and The Asylum's movie, truly reflect the two sides of horror movies and how one same story can be treated under these two lenses. The Asylum's is a gory, brutal, low-budget but decent and interesting horror movie, that still works in its limitations and intends to be just your random "fun little horror slasher movie" ; this movie is the artistic, big-budget, much more stylized and psychological disturbing horror movie that veers more into dark fantasy sometimes and tries more to be an actual nightmare, in the most abstract and eerie sense.

Personally, I did enjoy the movie as a whole and I think it is a good Hansel and Gretel movie. I do think they did a good job at mixing the fairytale with the entire Christian myth of the witch as built by the witch-hunts and other countryside superstitions (they weaved in the story for example the topics of the magical ointments and the idea of witches feasting on the dead) ; and I did love the dark twists and reveals at the end ; and I also liked very much the subtle references to other fairytales slid in the story (Little Red Riding Hood, and The Juniper Tree).

However it is not a movie without flaws - and I would never call it a perfect movie. It got the ideas, the visuals, the will, the inspirations, but... sometimes it does too much, there's unecessary things that could have been cut out and do ridiculize a bit the movie (the first third of the movie is filled with unecessary and random moments like the bizarre hostile man in the abandoned house, or the "mushroom" scenes, which clearly were not needed - there's also jumpscares that are just... there, for jumpscare sakes, when this movie clearly does NOT need jumpscares). There is also the fact that while often it manages to drive its themes, messages and topics in subtle or clever ways (the dialogues of Gretel and the witch, about things such as power, womanhood, the world, are all very well done), a few times it becomes suddenly very clumsy and awkward (one particular moment was the line of Gretel about "the system" in her very first scene, which felt definitively too political and modern to fit in the context).

I do remember the so-called "debate" there was when this movie was released, and the so-called "scandal" of putting Gretel's name first. But it makes full sense when you understand that Gretel here is the main character, that we are told the story through her, and that it doesn't try so much to be a Hansel and Gretel retelling, as rather a dark and morbid fantasy movie that uses the Hansel and Gretel tale as a driving plot to explore more things - the European witchcraft myth, the theme of "Faustian deals", etc, etc... And despite some clumsiness here and there that do flaw the movie (I haven't mentionned it, but the choice of the tattoos for the witch's "final" form seemed very random and ill-thought, which is one of the several little details that don't work ; balanced by details that do work, such as the idea of having a more modern architecture for the witch's house), it still works for most of its course.

To conclude this post, I need to talk about one last "Hansel and Gretel" movie. A movie which American audiences are not actually familiar with. Because it is a German movie, that got released around Europe (I saw it in French), but to my knowledge never crossed the Atlantic. Made by Anne Wild and written by Peter Schwindt, this movie is probably the eeriest Hansel and Gretel adaptation I have seen. It is not "disturbing", "shocking" or "horrifying" - it is just creepy and unsettling. It is not a rewrite or a "retelling" per se, because it stays faithful to the original tale and barely changes anything. Out of the five movies I present you, this is the most faithful movie when it comes to adapting the brothers Grimm fairytale.

EDIT: I originally wrote this part thinking the movie was very hard to find... TURNS OUT IT WAS POSTED ON YOUTUBE! The full movie is on Youtube - in its original German though

This movie made the fairytale eerie with two things. 1) Little unsettling and creepy details in terms of style and movie editing. This movie actually has several things in common with the 2020's Gretel and Hansel - such as the heavy use of the forested landscape to make one feel both lost and trapped at the same time (helped by the fact the protagonists are here played by actual children), and bizarre camera angles and movements (including disturbing close-ups and brutal cuts). The score also includes eerie songs and creepy children whispers, that add to the general spookyness. 2) A work on the realism on the tale. There's still magic and supernatural in there, definitively. But overall it is all... "realistic" in style, making it all more unsettling. Hansel and Gretel behave like actual children - and are in fact often unaware of the danger they are getting themselves into. The color palette is drab and lightless.

Don't get me wrong: this is not an adult-aimed movie, it is not a horror movie. It is still a kid-oriented, fairytale movie, with some moments of humor (though it is mostly dark humor, such as Hansel, blissfully unaware of the witch's plan, coming to enjoy his life in a cage eating good food all day long), a happy ending, and many beautiful visuals (the witch's bedroom is especially interesting - slight spoiler but there is the beautiful visual of the witch keeping petrified birds and butterflies in her room, that come back to life once she is dead). It has poetry to it - but it is definitively not a Disney movie and not what we usually think of as "fairytale movie for kids". It is a quite dark one.

One good illustration of this would be the family dynamic at the start of the tale, and how this movie slightly changes the whole abandonment episode. In this movie, the character of the mother is actually sick - and having her suffering from what will be a deadly disease puts her entire character into a very different light. Another major change they did is that the second time the children are abandoned - the parents do not hide the fact they are abandoning them. Hansel and Gretel know it, and the parents don't bother lying or even pretending, but there is still this sort of untold shame as they don't openly admit it and flee from their crying children... It hits hard.

The creepiest part of the whole movie is however, without a doubt, the witch. By gosh, this is one of the creepiest incarnations of the character I saw. She is a perfect embodiment of the uncanny valley: she is not some cartoonish monster, she is just this pale middle-aged woman that never blinks. She does perform magic, but her magic keeps with the "realism" style of the movie - no flash, no music, no smoke. When she teleports, she is just here one moment, another the next. She prevents Gretel from leaving by casting a spell that makes it so that each time she walks away, she ends up finding herself in front of the house - despite it being impossible. Her rhyming "Who's nibbling on my house?" is actually a disembodied whisper in the ears of the children as they see nobody, making their answer "It's just the wind" an actual comforting sentence they say to themselves thinking they imagined it all. Her bedroom cannot actually exist because it is located in an impossible part of the house that does not appear from the outside. And there are those little details that do hint at her maybe not being actually human but just looking like a human - when she moves sometimes her bones crack, and other times her voice seems to double itself in a strange echo... And when she is pushed into the oven (light spoilers too) - she doesn't scream. She doesn't make a sound. Once she is pushed and the door is closed, it is dead silence, and that makes it even more disturbing than if she actually screamed in agony.

And there are other little morbid details in the movie - too many for me too count. But one thing that does stick with me was the way Gretel pieced up together the witch's real intentions for Hansel (because of course she didn't tell them she was going to eat them), by noticing little details straight out of Pan's Labyrinth - such as Gretel noticing the witch's wind-chimes is made of bones and hair ; and the witch keeping in her house a closet filled with an ungodly amount of toys in various states of aging. This latter detail was notably taken back by "Gretel and Hansel", where the first hint of the witch's previous victims are toys scattered in the wilderness around the house. In fact, I do wonder if Perkins didn't take some inspiration from this 2005 movie, because there is definitively something similar between the two.

And with this, you have to my knowledge the perfect Hansel and Gretel movies for the spooky season.

The supernatural tragedy inspired by, and a famed piece of Korean horror. The surprisingly good B-horror movie that turns the story into a new "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre". The dark fantasy action-packed blockbuster that is just halfway there. The recent, heavily stylized, witch-hunt inspired artsy/socio-political horror movie. And the eerie, unsettling, faithful retelling as a dark German children movie.

[stevetonyweekly]

SteveTony Weekly - November 12

Happy weekend, friends! I’ve got a short list for you this week, which tbh, is gonna be the trend for a while. Work is increasingly busy, as are family commitments, and grad school is scheduled for January. Sorry about that. Anyway--enjoy these recs and be sure to leave a comment/kudo for your fic authors! 

~*~

stellar collision by Pandemic

He turns sixteen in front of his bathroom mirror with a chill across his skin, goosebumps on his arms, and a burn across his sternum. A wet laugh bubbles up from his mouth, too close to tears, as he watches avidly as ink pours across his skin. He thumbs the mark, presses into it, and gasps when he feels his stomach twist and a feeling he can’t shake that his soulmark is somewhere out there doing the same.

"I loved them instantly. It’s remarkable. Where was that love before? Where did you acquire it from? The way it is suddenly there, total and complete, as sudden as grief but in reverse, is one of the wonders of being human.”

Dedicated to You by mariana_oconnor

Steve Rogers is happy with his life. He runs a small bookshop, has good friends, and he fervently believes that the printed page is not obsolete. He's not expecting Tony Stark, billionaire inventor of the best e-reader on the market and perennial prey of the gossip magazines, to walk through the door.

His friends think he's crazy not to at least get the man's number, considering he's had a crush on Tony for years, but as luck would have it Steve might just get another chance.

A Notting Hill AU.

it's a small world after all by earliebirb 

“Great speech.”

Smiling at the compliment, Tony turns around. “Thank y—”

And nearly drops his champagne flute.

His world comes to a stop.

They had only spent a night together, but Tony would recognize those baby blues anywhere.

It’s Steve.

Steve from Tony’s London business trip. Or, as Rhodey has become accustomed to calling him—The Soulmate That Got Away.

Selvage by elwenyere

When a mysterious knight is wounded in battle while protecting King Anthony Stark, it's hard to tell who's more frustrated: the king, who has so far failed to discover any clues to the missing man's identity, or the king's personal attendant, Steven Rogers, who can't believe King Anthony took the field in the first place.

What Lies Inside by Penumbren

When the Avengers discover Captain America in the Arctic sea, they find more than just a new team member: Tony Stark discovers his fated mate. The problem is, Steve Rogers is a man out of his own time and apparently straight, and Tony's not about to force anything on the man he loves--even if it means his own death. Besides, Tony's spent his entire life keeping secrets. How can he possibly tell Steve that he's really Iron Man, let alone a werewolf?

this is the long haul by meidui

It takes them eleven years to go on a first date.

the steve rogers rating system by meidui

Tony has an internalised Steve Rogers rating system, but it’s not standardised. It’s also not a foolproof system because Steve behaves in ways that crash it all the time.

Advice for the Modern Merman by KandiSheek 

It's been ten years since technological advancement finally allowed merpeople to join the regular human society. Steve never thought he'd be dating the man who made it all possible.

Or Call Me Something Else by FestiveFerret

There are things Steve Rogers doesn't like about the future - see: Instagram - and there are things Steve Rogers loves about the future - see: hot, wild, no-strings-attached sex with Tony Stark. That is, until Tony drops the "b" word, and Steve realizes that what he thought was casual fun was something much more serious to the other man.

A platform for love by BladeoftheNebula 

Single parent Steve has a scary moment on the subway, but thankfully a handsome stranger saves the day.

Can't Write One Song (That's Not About You) by FestiveFerret 

Ten years ago, Tony fell in love with his roommate: funny, handsome, kind, smart Steve Rogers, who also happened to be the lead singer and guitarist of a band, The Howlies.

Then The Howlies made it big, Steve moved away, and Tony vowed to avoid any mention of the band, their songs, and the man he missed his chance with.

But chance has a way of giving you exactly what you need, even if you don't know it yet...

you'll be mine and i'll be yours by complicationstoo 

Five words ruin Tony's life.

“He doesn't love me back,” Steve says, and Tony feels his world crumble to pieces at his feet.

Steve loves someone, and Tony knows it isn't him.

The warmth of your cheek against mine by BlossomsintheMist

Steve's hurt. Tony looks after him. Established relationship.

I'll turn hours into gardens by nanasekei

Every week, a plant arrives.

Double or Nothing by RurouniHime 

One of these days, they're actually going to get that sleepover.

Steve's patient, Tony's determined, and Bucky is... wait, what's the opposite of helping? (otherwise known as the sex-filled sequel to Place Your Bets)

Sugar Seeking Sugar by NotEvenCloseToStraight

After Howard kicks Omega!Tony out, Tony is left to raise baby!Peter by himself. Working a crappy job and barely surviving, the Omega is desperate for help. When Omega!Clint suggests a Sugar Daddy, Tony is first horrified then resigned to what might be his only option to keep food on the table.

Alpha!Steve has a career, a big house, and money but is lonely every day of his life and doesn't know how to change it. When Alpha!Bucky suggests a Sugar Baby, Steve is first scandalized and then hesitantly open to at least trying.

The Sugar Seeking Sugar Agency matches Tony and Steve, and sparks fly right away between the pair. One date leads to two, then shopping trips and sleepovers, and Tony has money for bills, diapers and baby clothes while Steve is happy with the company and quickly falling in love.

Alphas usually don't want to deal with another Alpha's kid, so Tony keeps Peter a secret as long as he can but eventually he has to tell Steve about his past, his complicated life and what it might mean for their relationship.

Will the truth put a stop to their slowly progressing romance, or is a family with Tony exactly what lonely Alpha!Steve has always wanted?

[tonedeafmusiq]

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