#a waste of everyone’s time

[brainrothawks]

i’m never complaining about horikoshi ever again. fuck gege akutami tho, may he never know peace

[starspilli]

did a number on you, oh vienna

[egophiliac]

some (extremely) quick doodles to celebrate the glorious return of glorious masquerade! I haven't had a chance to do much personal drawing lately, but I didn't want to let it go by without doing something!

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

Does

Does Barnaby

Does Barnaby tell the others to get off his lawn when he's angry

psh, who do you think he is, an old man? he'd Bark, like any lively young dog

[mixtercandy]

made bookmark designs for a zine that got canned :/

[aenslem]

#he was not wrong though

[fantastic-nonsense]

I know in my heart that Chip Zdarsky could save Tim Drake if he was handed a solo maxi but he's too busy fucking over Bruce and the rest of the Batfam to do it 😭

[kirby-the-gorb]

[crunchchute]

Sam and Max if they were cool /j

[stuckinapril]

the neurologist i shadow is so funny bc she has a valley girl accent and yet she's the smartest person in the room. this woman was casually doing case consenus ab a man w frontotemporal dementia in the highest girliest voice imaginable. i want to be her i think

[linkyu]

tell me about your defense contract pleage

Oh boy!

To be fair, it's nothing grandiose, like, it wasn't about "a new missile blueprint" or whatever, but, just thinking about what it could have become? yeesh.

So, let's go.

For context, this is taking place in the early 2010s, where I was working as a dev and manager for a company that mostly did space stuff, but they had some defence and security contracts too.

One day we got a new contract though, which was... a weird one. It was state-auctioned, meaning that this was basically a homeland contract, but the main sponsor was Philip Morris. Yeah. The American cigarette company.

Why? Because the contract was essentially a crackdown on "illegal cigarette sales", but it was sold as a more general "war on drugs" contract.

For those unaware (because chances are, like me, you are a non-smoker), cigarette contraband is very much a thing. At the time, ~15% of cigarettes were sold illegally here (read: they were smuggled in and sold on the street).

And Phillip Morris wanted to stop that. After all, they're only a small company worth uhhh... oh JFC. Just a paltry 150 billion dollars. They need those extra dollars, you understand?

Anyway. So they sponsored a contract to the state, promising that "the technology used for this can be used to stop drug deals too". Also that "the state would benefit from the cigarettes part as well because smaller black market means more official sales means a higher tax revenue" (that has actually been proven true during the 2020 quarantine).

Anyway, here was the plan:

Phase 1 was to train a neural network and plug it in directly to the city's video-surveillance system, in order to detect illegal transactions as soon as they occur. Big brother who?

Phase 2 was to then track the people involved in said transaction throughout the city, based on their appearance and gait. You ever seen the Plainsight sheep counting video? Imagine something like this but with people. That data would then be relayed to police officers in the area.

So yeah, an automated CCTV-based tracking system. Because that's not setting a scary precedent.

So what do you do when you're in that position? Let me tell you. If you're thrust unknowingly, or against your will, into a project like this,

Note. The following is not a legal advice. In fact it's not even good advice. Do not attempt any of this unless you know you can't get caught, or that even if you are caught, the consequences are acceptable. Above all else, always have a backup plan if and when it backfires. Also don't do anything that can get you sued. Be reasonable.

Let me introduce you to the world of Corporate Sabotage! It's a funny form of striking, very effective in office environments.

Here's what I did:

First of all was the training data. We had extensive footage, but it needed to be marked manually for the training. Basically, just cropping the clips around the "transaction" and drawing some boxes on top of the "criminals". I was in charge of several batches of those. It helped that I was fast at it since I had video editing experience already. Well, let's just say that a good deal of those markings were... not very accurate.

Also, did you know that some video encodings are very slow to process by OpenCV, to the point of sometimes crashing? I'm sure the software is better at it nowadays though. So I did that to another portion of the data.

Unfortunately the training model itself was handled by a different company, so I couldn't do more about this.

Or could I?

I was the main person communicating with them, after all.

Enter: Miscommunication Master

In short (because this is already way too long), I became the most rigid person in the project. Like insisting on sharing the training data only on our own secure shared drive, which they didn't have access to yet. Or tracking down every single bug in the program and making weekly reports on those, which bogged down progress. Or asking for things to be done but without pointing at anyone in particular, so that no one actually did the thing. You know, classic manager incompetence. Except I couldn't be faulted, because after all, I was just "really serious about the security aspect of this project. And you don't want the state to learn that we've mishandled the data security of the project, do you, Jeff?"

A thousand little jabs like this, to slow down and delay the project.

At the end of it, after a full year on this project, we had.... a neural network full of false positives and a semi-working visualizer.

They said the project needed to be wrapped up in the next three months.

I said "damn, good luck with that! By the way my contract is up next month and I'm not renewing."

Last I heard, that city still doesn't have anything installed on their CCTV.

tl;dr: I used corporate sabotage to prevent automated surveillance to be implemented in a city--

hey hold on

wait

what

HEY ACTUALLY I DID SOME EXTRA RESEARCH TO SEE IF PHILLIP MORRIS TRIED THIS SHIT WITH ANOTHER COMPANY SINCE THEN AND WHAT THE FUCK

HUH??????

well what the fuck was all that even about then if they already own most of the black market???

[larapaulussen]

[wintrala]

will never get over the fact that book!armand had beef with a literal 5 yr old vampire. did you really need to cook up this whole scheme just to get rid of her??? fucking drop kick her into the shadow realm. what's she going to do??? stop you??? she's like 42 inches tall

[xehanortsreport]

the subtle resignation in his expression at even bouncing with the context of his final words kinda destroying me ngl

[weirdwonderfulworld]

on trust, being a creative, and fan support

from what i can tell, the reality is that steven, ryan, and shane make content (primarily) for themselves. they make content they want to make. they're trying to make content they're really proud of and excited for. any creator/artist can tell you that being excited for your own work and being the #1 cheerleader of your work is the main driving force that 1) gets work done and 2) makes the art good. for a creative, passion is hugely important. and it is a very good thing that the boys are compelled to want to up the quality and production of their shows, because that means there's a passion there that they're trying to nurse.

now, if the content they want to make requires more money, they're allowed to ask for more money. even though success in their line of work requires views and a certain level of fan support, they're allowed to act for themselves and their own creations. they're allowed to advocate for the art they want to make, art that maybe the fans aren't asking for. yes, it does shatter the misconception that they're doing all this exclusively for the fans. but it shouldn't be viewed as a breach of trust for them to simply ask that of their fans. and imo it shouldn't even be that surprising since that's the main reason they left buzzfeed in the first place—feeling creatively stifled, and feeling like they could make things they're really passionate about, if only they could make the space for themselves.

i think with all that in mind, i would say a lot of the common arguments against the move are essentially rendered void and misplaced. in the end, if someone really hated the move and felt betrayed, they could've just packed up shop and stopped watching; a lot of people did not do that, and i think their inability to cut ties with something they didn't like and was generally harmless was a fault of their own. BUT the only argument that might still stand is this: the bottom line is that if watcher won't listen to what the fans want, watcher won't last.

you're right! they won't. that's probably why they backtracked on the move.

but then i ask you what you truly want as a fan. the main "want" i've heard from people is for watcher to cut down on production/quality, and just focus on the real magic, that is the humor and chemistry between our watcher boys.

but what if watcher knows this and they still decide that they want something else? again, what if watcher wants to focus on creating something larger than two guys cracking jokes on a crappy handheld camera? if they only ever followed the fans' desires over their own, and all their videos from now on was just them shooting the shit on camera, maybe that would be just fine for you! maybe you'd love that content! but would you really be supporting watcher in the end, or would you just be supporting the versions of themselves they molded for you? could you really be a fan of theirs if you denied them the mere attempt at becoming the creatives they truly wanted to be? is getting exactly what you want all the time worth making life shittier and more stifling for the people giving it to you? is that what you wanted when you first followed watcher from buzzfeed?

[edsbacktattoo]

ultimate question!