#and in industry its really useful for generating code

[chronically-a-bacteriophage]

I just went to a monopoly party and they had joke contracts and just as I was admiring the effort, it was revealed to have been written by AI... It felt like a copout somehow, like it lost its value... Idk the same person sent out standard invites to a different party written by ai, and it just makes it feel like its not from them. It puts distance between people i guess...

i dont know im exhausted and out of social energy, feelings are not great at being put into words right now, but yeah i dont think i like this casual use of ai.

[thirstkanaphan]

A Shipper's Perspective on SanSang

The San/Yeosang relationship receives positive and negative attention from the fandom. The majority of us find their bond really sweet! We coo when San clings to Yeosang and declares his love; we chuckle when Yeosang nods his head in shy acceptance.

On the extreme ends of the fandom spectrum, you encounter discourse that generally falls into two camps:

Yeosang is a hostage to San's overly-demonstrative affections

Yeosang is a homewrecker who broke up WooSan

These arguments are not new, but they increased in volume within the last year or two. I felt compelled to explore these arguments and put into words some of my complicated thoughts and feelings about this particular relationship. I also believe I'm in a unique position to comment on these arguments because...

I am a shipper. I've been in fandom spaces since I was a preteen (nearly 20 years!) and I am primarily drawn to a fandom when there is great potential for shipping. I was in the Hockey RPF fandom from 2012-2015 and wrote/consumed stories where NHL players kissed each other and sometimes got each other pregnant. These are my bona fides.

Everyone in the Hockey RPF fandom knew the rules. Don't break the fourth wall. Don't make it weird. Don't get delulu. We all understood that Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin were not secretly lovers pretending to be good friends and teammates (👀). We were there to have a good time and, more importantly, we all enjoyed hockey! I seriously got into hockey through fandom and attended many games. I still feel a huge swell of fondness when I catch the Pittsburgh Penguins on TV. THOSE ARE MY BOYS!

Before I found Ateez and joined this fandom, I was heavily into the BL genre and specifically Thai BL. The thing about Thai BL is that many of the most popular shows have nothing to do with their writing or directing or acting; they are popular because they star a "branded pair" of good-looking young men who perform fan service outside of their shows. While there are actual queer actors in the Thai BL genre, very few have the same level of global popularity as branded pairs.

ZeeNuNew, the hottest branded pair of the moment

Branded pairs are deliberately modeled on the kpop idol industry, which similarly encourages its young female audience to project m/m fantasies onto their faves. There's actually a whole Korean BL called Bump Up Business about two struggling idols (OnelyOneOf's Mill and Nine) who are paired together in a new group with instructions to appeal to fans through BGP: Business Gay Performance.

The key to a successful branded pair is to emulate as closely as possible m/m archetypes rooted in early '00s Japanese yaoi, which is the primogenitor for modern BL and remains a dominant influence in kpop fan-service.

Here are the main archetypes, as defined by the expert on the subject, AbsoluteBL:

seme: the active pursuer in the narrative (from the original attacker meaning of the word)

uke: the passive resistor in the narrative (defender)

AbsoluteBL clarifies: seme/uke is about who is in CONTROL of the relationship's story, as opposed to top/bottom, terms which come from the gay/queer community and pertain to sexual preference and (should) have nothing to do with narrative power dynamics.

Traditionally, the seme is physically larger and conventionally more masculine in appearance, while the uke is smaller and more feminine in appearance. The uke is often considered "pure" (yes, I know, problematic), which makes them all the more desirable. Female consumers project themselves onto the uke to enjoy a romantic fantasy without having to fully engage with the patriarchal bullshit baked into traditional m/f romance (AbsoluteBL calls this "heterosexual dysmorphia").

Do you see where I'm going with this?

Out of all the pairs in Ateez, SanSang are the most seme/uke-coded.

San is the pursuer. He wants to protect Yeosang because Yeosang is "cute" and "pure." San uses his size to put Yeosang into physical situations he must tolerate/endure for San's pleasure. San preens whenever Yeosang acknowledges him, compliments him, or initiates contact. San wants to take Yeosang to "Paradise" (Single's Inferno) and feed him steak in bed. Only San can kiss Yeosang, which he repeatedly tells atiny. We cannot have Yeosang, he belongs to San.

On paper (or on tumblr), this description would make anyone raise an eyebrow. For the anti-fans of this relationship, San is a bully who routinely takes advantage of Yeosang's gentle nature. I've even heard an argument that San's physical transformation prompted KQ to "reassign" him Yeosang as a fan-service partner in order to maximize their seme/uke appeal to fans. As evidence, fans point to Yeosang's tendency to flinch whenever San gets too close and his hesitancy to reciprocate when San boldly declares his love in front of the cameras.

I have a few responses to this characterization of their relationship.

Quick note: fan service is a feature, not a bug, of kpop. The HYBE internal docs that leaked last summer explicitly mentioned different ships among various Big4 groups and cited strategies for promoting certain ships among their own groups.

Ateez excels at fan service, and this is partially to do with their natural chemistry with and genuine affection for each other. But also, as a smaller company, KQ did not have the means or resources to provide media-training to Ateez in their early years AND they gave almost unfettered access to the members via the vlive app, which is how many kpop fans got to know smaller and newer groups.

The sale of vlive to HYBE, who proceeded to shut down the app and replace it with their own company-managed app, terminated that kind of easy and unrestricted access to idols.

From what I gather, Ateez's growing popularity can be attributed in part to how much the members charmed fans by being unscripted and candid in their live videos, often about their relationships with each other. Sometimes we saw too much, i.e., the Woo-San-Sang intervention during their Christmas live.

I think fans got used to a certain kind of fan service from Ateez, a kind of fan service that seemed to tease fans with a genuine "what if?" about their relationships. This was helped by the built-in narratives surrounding the members: Yunho and Mingi meeting in ninth grade; Wooyoung and Yeosang being trainees together; Seonghwa being inspired by Hongjoong to pursue his idol dream.

And of course, WooSan, but I'll get to them later.

Going to back to SanSang: if you watch their early content, you'll see that San was drawn to Yeosang and the feeling was reciprocated. You can find multiple examples of them cuddling, hugging, and being affectionate with each other going back to 2019. It's been going on since San's "twink" era!

However, while fan service comes naturally to San, it is not the same for Yeosang. In fact, while he excels at all other aspects of being an idol (such as vocals, performance, dance, visuals) he arguably lacks the instincts for fan service. He is different from someone like Jongho, who abstains from fan service unless he's in the mood, or Hongjoong, whose tsundere persona (another Japanese romance archetype) is part of the Matz appeal.

My fellow ateez meta writers have offered their thoughts about Yeosang and how he often suffers for lack of "killer instincts" within the group (they clearly adore each other, but they also fight each other for our love and attention). What is the cause of Yeosang's passivity? Is it lingering trauma from his trainee years? Is it his general tendency to be forgetful or oblivious about events happening around him? Yes, Yeosang is smart, clever, and has a dry sense of humor, but he's also the child that Hongjoong said was hardest to parent.

Then there's a Yeosang that we almost never see and we once glimpsed in a cute exchange between him and Mingi. It's implied that Mingi and Yeosang forgot they were being filmed and Yeosang spoke differently than he normally does on camera, which San observes in surprise. I am not a Korean speaker, but he sounds extra sweet and soft. If that's how he is at home, no wonder he inspires so much cuteness aggression in the members.

I'll also note that Yeosang's "flinch" response to fan service is similar no matter who handles him, whether it's Mingi, Wooyoung, or Jongho. Yet, San is his most persistent suitor and his actions draw the most attention, positive and negative.

Let's Talk About San

San's shiftable personality is something the members observed in an early vlive with Hongjoong, Mingi, Seonghwa, and Yunho.

Mingi: "which member has the most behavioral gap with and without a camera?"

Hongjoong suggests that Yeosang and Seonghwa are pretty much the same with or without a camera. But San behaves differently.

Hongjoong: "Seriously. In the absence of a camera...how should I put this...I'm having trouble putting it in a nice way...he has a pretty extreme character...his mood changes a lot...whenever we all gather for a conversation, he's like...it's fascinating! How does someone think like that? He acts like a normal person with a camera...he's very abnormal with us."

While Hongjoong is talking, the other three see San approaching and they all visibly get nervous.

San: "I heard you dissing me!"

I recap this live because I think it strengthens my interpretation of the SanSang relationship as informed more by San's personality than company mandates. I think San's extreme personality and his ability to shift into "character" in front of the camera enables him to similarly adapt to certain dynamics. He is very perceptive about what his members need out of fan service with him. He's Yunho's sweet boy; he's Seonghwa's pesky little brother; he's Jongho's favorite hyung; he's Mingi's goofball bro. We'll get to Wooyoung.

Thus, one theory is that San becomes the "seme" for Yeosang because he recognizes a need in Yeosang that isn't being met.

Let's revisit the 2024 Off The Record interview between San and Yeosang:

San: There's something I want to ask you. Did anything I did upset you?

Yeosang: Actually, for me, instead of being upset, I feel more like I owe you an apology. Because for example, when you say things like "I love you", you show your love and affection, for me it's not easy to reciprocate, so I feel like I owe you an apology. Sometimes, when you try to kiss me... how can I say it... my body's reaction to avoid it is automatic.

And when San replies that Yeosang has done nothing to upset him, Yeosang continues, unprompted:

Yeosang: Nothing upsets you... Thinking about it another way, this feeling of being upset, I don't think it's entirely negative. I feel like the closer the person is, It's easier to get upset about something. I often wonder if I'm not doing enough (also about taking care of San). It's a bit of a stretch to say something like "I'm going to do something to upset you," but I'm going to do my best to do it.

Let's go back a year earlier to Yeosang's message to San during San's 2023 birthday live:

Sometimes when san shows affection to me, I...hahah...because i’m a little shy, yes...so i really, i really like, i brush it away/discard it but still...to me who cannot express (affection well), Sanie approaching me like this first is (something) i’m always grateful for, and because i feel like i won’t ever be able to express that gratefulness well, so i’m sorry too, but still, i am always thinking very thankfully to Sanie who approaches me first like this.

After listening to this, San smiles softly and says, "You're mine."

I think a more cynical person could read these exchanges as Yeosang apologizing for not giving back enough to their fan service, but I think Yeosang is really saying that he wants to be an active participant in his relationship with San. He wants to be able to genuinely upset San, which he sees as a marker of close friendship. While there is still a part of him that remains uneasy with San's excessive physical affection, he wants to be more to San than just a pretty doll to play with. (Interestingly, this is how Jongho described his relationship with Wooyoung earlier in the ep: “am I an accessory to you?”) I don't think for one second that San feels anything less for Yeosang than intense care and adoration.

Given all of this, SanSang "should" work as a major ship!!

Fans should be falling all over themselves to romanticize the gentle, dominant seme coaxing the timid, traumatized uke into accepting his care and affection!

Yet instead, many in the fandom have a hard time accepting or appreciating the fan-service SanSang provide. It comes off as particularly inauthentic for them. Almost too much like a manhwa/yaoi manga.

The primary reason? WooSan.

Many folks have already written about the WooSan ship and why they find it so exciting and compelling. A lot of the reasons boil down to this: it could actually be real.

My non-shipper kpop friend, who listens to everything but doesn't participate in the fandom, told me at their concert that there was a time when she genuinely thought WooSan were in love.

The image above sums up fandom's perception of WooSan: Wooyoung leads, San follows. Wooyoung pushes, teases, pressures, initiates, while San watches him with the fondest look in his eyes. Wooyoung demands, San gives: his attention, his praise, his own flesh. For narrative purposes, Wooyoung is the seme, San is the uke.

This is an exciting dynamic for shippers, refreshing for its lack of traditional yaoi archetypes. Big, strong San getting pushed around by bratty Wooyoung and loving it. San wrote tragic fanfiction for their characters in Bouncy. San is so confident in Wooyoung's love for him that he jokes Wooyoung will "always come back" even if he strays to another members. San is Wooyoung's home.

The biggest Yeosang antis claim that SanSang is an insult to WooSan. They claim San only acts like he's close to Yeosang because the company separated WooSan after they got too close for comfort during Bouncy era. Fans point to fewer WooSan appearances and promotional activities; no more shippy moments during the logbooks; they rarely filmed tiktoks or tagged each other in instagram photos; there was less "soulmate" talk on lives and during interviews. To add insult to injury, they didn't even get a unit song: It's You is a three-man performance with Yeosang.

Another theory shared by a not-insignificant faction within the fandom is that Wooyoung would not permit himself to be put into the role of the passive, submissive uke, so KQ made the call that San should be more attentive to Yeosang.

I am sure there are multiple factors for why WooSan distanced themselves/were distanced after Bouncy-era (cue Oprah voice "were you silent? or were you silenced?"), and I do think some of that has to do with the meteoric rise of Ateez after Bouncy. I think all of them were savvy enough to realize that they could promote the group on more than just being yaoiteez, and San's skyrocketing fame contributed to that shift too, along with Wooyoung's own self-described internal character arc away from being the "sexy" member towards someone with more mystery and maturity.

I would argue that their "distance" had the result of redirecting our attention to how affectionate San already was with all the members. Suddenly we're noticing how clingy he is with Yunho, Seonghwa, and Jongho. Same goes for Yeosang. Their dynamics are nothing new, but I would argue the fandom's attention and scrutiny made it seem new.

While this cannot be an accurate measurement of anything really, compare how many fics are written about each pair:

San/Wooyoung: 7,525 works on Archive Of Our Own

San/Yeosang: 1,345 works on Archive Of Our Own

As a shipper, there are really interesting observations to make about why the SanSang ship does not work compared to the WooSan ship.

My main theory takes us back to those classic seme/uke dynamics that the SanSang dynamic reproduces through their fan service. When compared with WooSan, SanSang comes off as inauthentic because it's too obvious, too easy, too much like shipper bait. It's traditional yaoi-coded appeal is actually the turn-off!

Here's my other theory: many are uncomfortable with SanSang because it forces them to reckon with the very real Business Gay Performance scaffolding all idol fan service. Because if SanSang is obviously manufactured for attention, are other unit pairs the same?

A Final Few Words About Yeosang

Yeosang is the unfair recipient of a lot of hate by the fandom, for shipping and non-shipping reasons. It's awful and it needs to stop.

I also see a worrying trend among his staunchest defenders of infantilizing Yeosang, stripping him of agency in their battles on his behalf, whether it's for better line distribution, more solo promotions, and fashion week schedules. There was even talk of organizing protest trucks outside of KQ, which I personally find mortifying.

I sincerely hope that in the future Yeosang has more opportunities to shine as a singer, dancer, and performer. I also hope that he comes to a place of comfort and confidence in his abilities to give and receive affection from the people who love him the most, a struggle he's voiced publicly. I truly wish him the best!

A Final Few Words About Me!

As someone who was introduced to Ateez via shipping my initial understanding of these relationships was refracted through the lens of the fandom. It's rare for me to move from "fanon" to "canon" like I am with Ateez, where I'm catching up on all their content, vlogs, and interviews and trying to understand them as "real" people, to the extent that anyone can ever know an idol. I am now streaming and voting in addition to reading fic! I'm no longer lurking but actively participating as a fan! This is a whole new phase for me in my 15+ years of being in fandom.

The interesting thing about my journey is that while I entered the fandom through the side door, I've actually become more interested in their IRL relationships and dynamics. I still read fic of course, but like my Hockey RPF fandom days I am able to compartmentalize the part of my brain that goes "oh these pretty boys are in love and should kiss!" and the other part that goes "these enormously talented artists deserve my support and attention."

That being said, I still enjoy shipping and I enjoying talking about how RPF ships work in the context of the idol industry. SanSang is a great case study to think about these topics, and I hope others will respond and with their own meta.

Thank you for your time!

[knitmeapony]

If you are interested in a very practical, hands-on job that does a lot of good for a lot of people, no matter what age you are, whether you're looking for your first career or a new one, please consider becoming a city code official.

Code officials are the folks that work with governments to keep an eye on new and existing construction and make sure that it stays safe and accessible.

It's a good job making good money, and there are a number of places that you can get your certifications. It's also one of those practical Building Trades that always needs people, and if you're a little bit flexible about where you're going to work there are literally hundreds of job openings out there right now.

And from a long-term perspective, once you are a code official you can volunteer with / work with some of the national and International organizations that put together model codes. Model codes are books published by non-governmental organizations so that smaller cities and municipalities and really any government organization that doesn't have the budget to write its own building code from scratch can simply adopt a version of the model codes. The companies that put out model codes generally speaking have open processes that let anyone in the industry come in and help change the codes.

I work at one of those companies. We have trans activists coming in making sure that gendered bathrooms don't become law in a bunch of places. We have disability rights activists coming into push our codes past the what is required for the ADA, and into more modern, more complete accessibility rules. In both cases, these folks are minority and have to work with all the other code officials to show them why they're suggested changes are the right way to go. Anyone can submit changes and come in and speak, but if you are a professional code official currently working for a city or state that uses our codes, you get a vote on how we change things. Three to four hundred individuals vote on many of these suggested changes to the codes. That means the small number of determined people can likely genuinely move the needle in terms of what we discuss and what we implement.

It is construction, so not every work site is going to be welcoming, but I have been pleasantly surprised by how many folks in the industry are genuinely don't give a damn about anything but whether or not you can get the job done.

[mitski-solos]

gay rep in gaming and in kcd2: A Rant

Ok, I'll try to make this as cohesive as possible, but remember that this is a rant after all, so excuse any possible mistakes or typos.

The gay representation in KCD2 is genuinely the most well-done, realistic representation that I've seen in gaming so far. There are multiple types of representation that I see in games, so let's break down what they are, why they do or don't suck and how exactly the KCD2 Hansry romance is superior.

Type N1) forced mechanical bisexuality.

In most RPGs, or really any games where you choose your own romantic interest, there is no gender-based limit on who can romance who, to allow a fully immersive experiance, tho I feel inclined to point out that this mechanic was introduces to gaming quite accidentally during the early era of gaming, when everything was still pixilated to all hell, they js didn't think to add a code prohibiting same-sex relationships cz developers didn't take their existanse into accaount at all, but then some players discovered it was a possibility and that's how mechanical-bisexuality became an almost industry standard, scince it opens up a wider market for the game without feeling "threatning" to the true consumers which everything was marketed towards(str8 white men).

Now, why do I call it "mechanical" bisexuality, u may ask? Well, bc it truly is just that. Mechanical. No character in that game i truly bi, it's solely a mechanic that's easier for developers and more convenient for gamers.

A good example of that would be Stardew Valley. I don't remember which bachelorette it is exactly, but as you romance them, you meet their ex, and the sex of the ex is the same as that of the player. So if you're male, the ex will also be male, if ur female, the ex will also be female. So no bisexuality for you. But ig you could still count it as "gay" rep, even tho for me even that feels very technical and mechanical, as none of it feels actually gay, there is no discussion or reference to sexuality and the weight of being in a gay reletionship is never brought up even if the setting of the game is on earth and not some fantasy world where being gay is considered totally ok and gay ppl arent treated any differently from str8s.

And well, since I brought up fantasy worlds, let's talk abt type N2) gay rep in fantasy.

This can be very well done or absolutely terrible, depending on the writing and premise, and I feel like we can use Dragon Age as the perfect example for both ends of the spectrum.

So I actually haven't played Dragon Age, so my wording or explanations may not be perfect, but bear with me. 

So from what I've heard and know abt the game, the gay rep in old games is great and the way they treat gender is very tasteful and generally well done, at least I've never heard anybody complain. Tho is the newest game, it's... well, let's just say it's not the best. You get this nonbinary character and they spend a lot of time bitching and moaning abt coming out to their mom even tho nothing up to that point has made them feel like their mom wouldn't support them or anything. and look, you may call this good rep cuz oh hey its a real life struggle that they are going thru right? But NO! bc it's the very fantasy setting where being gay is totes cool and ok that i mentioned a second ago and it's not treated the same way as on earth, so taking this character from a utopian fantasy world where even the lable "nonbinary" shouldn't exist bc there is no binary in the first place and projecting this earthly struggle onto them as a sorry excuse for representation feels forced and increadibly boring. Also, some other conversations in the game abt gender were incredibly cringe and also felt very forced, but maybe they were out of context or smth idk but whatever the case may be, it's a separate issue, so let's move on.

type N3) canon gays

So, most of the time, I love all the canon gays in gaming and any media in general.

In gaming, canon gays r mostly in big story games. Like, the first most obvious ones coming to mind would be Ellie and Dina from The Last of Us, or Mileena and Tanya in MK1. Tho those are the only straight up gay gay all up in ur face gay couples that I can think of from AAA games that I've played, so there isn't enough of this type of rep out there. Tho I feel it is the best and most "true" rep in gaming that is the most enjoyable for players AND could be more eye-opening and redeeming for any homophobes playing the game.

So now that all of that is out of the way, you may say, well, aren't Henry and Hans just another case of the so-called mechanical bisexuality? And to that I'll say a very confident no. 

Let's tackle Henry's sexuality first. In both the first and second game, he can get with various women, not even mentioning all the trips to bathhouses, and the only men Henry can get with are Black Bartosch and Hans. The sole existence of the Black Bartosch option is, I feel like, an argument enough to Henry's true bisexuality, but if you choose to turn him down, you need to choose an option saying "I prefer women", so some may argue that there! He said it himself! But there is a second piece of evidence in the game that confirms his sexuality to be canonically bi. When you get to Kutttenberg, one of the first side quests you can do is "A Good Scrub" in which you help the new bathhouse owner Betty safely transport her bathhouse wenches from some inn to the bathhouse. While on the road, you can talk to them and at some point they'll ask you if you prefer tits or ass(game of the year type convos am i right?) and u could either staight up answer ass or tits or you could try to evade answering the question, and if you choose the last option, the girl will joking ask henry "are you sure your don't prefer boys?" and that gets Henry INCREADIBLY flustered, he starts stuttering and can't fully deny it and just mutters a quiet, frustrated "fuck" at the end. Yall that's not a reaction of a str8 person, it's a reaction of a queer man that's just been clocked. Don't even try to deny it.

Now onto Hans. We do see terribly little of him and his interactions with other ppl, but there is still very strong evidence for his bisexuality, which is a book that you find under his bed in the Devil's Den, titled "A Collection of Somewhat Bawdy Poems". It's literally just a book with a bunch of homoerotic poems in it, I'm not ever kidding. Here are all of em so you get the full picture:

"My love for you is heartfelt.

You can tell from my unbuckled belt.

My mind is troubled badly

by one question above all:

When will my lover fondly

caress my left ball?

"Love thy neighbour", saith Our Lord.

And I took it to heart.

I started to fulfil His word,

at least in their southern part.

My heart is mourning dejectedly.

Even my hand rejected me!

By day and night I think of you,

I shall love you always.

My heart is faithful, loyal and true,

Though my body sometimes strays.

A knight in battle attire

got into bed with his squire.

Instead of conquering forts,

They played with each other's swords."

That last part I highlighted is literally them ARE YOU SERIOUSSSSS. Now I did see someone on Reddit saying that the book appears in the room before Hans ever moves in, but let's be so honest for a second, in a game as detailed as KCD2, that book being specifically under HANS'S bed is no coincidence, even if it appeared earlier than Hans himself. The devs knew what they were doing. and that book is still there whether you romance Hans or not, so call me delusional if you want, but for me, that's evidence enough.

Now, onto the most important part: why is Hansry so good?

In my purely subjective opinion, I think that if KCD2 was a story game instead of an RPG, it would be a type N3 representation, and Hansry would be the canon couple. Henry undeniably has the most connection and chemistry with Hans. He doesn't interact with Katherine much and it does feel like they're more good friends-at-arms than anything, and at the end of the game, Henry himself jokes that she's too old for him, and ugh don't even get me started on Rosa. Henry literally barely interacts with her, her romance option is so weird to me fr.

I also think that Hansry was planned, or at least thought of and acknowledged by the devs from the very beginning of the franchise. The way they interact in the first game can VERY easily be interpreted as flirting and they're literally your textbook example of the enemies-to-friends-to-lovers troupe. So with the foundation that the first game gives us, their eventual romance is very believable and realistic, it doesn't feel like one of those gay relationships that was never meant to be but was basically "pushed" into canon by fans, ykwim?

So for me what makes their couple such great rep is how even without the gay relationship, they remain queer men, their sexuality isn't purely mechanical. Their relationship doesn't feel flat or forced, like it often happens with optional gay romances. And even without ever acknowledging the weight of their relationship, it feels natural and not like the devs didn't wanna discuss gay stuff yk? Like in early game Henry can literally fuck some girl (i dont remember her name srry:3) out in the open - in a forest, but he specifically locks the door before kissing Hans. After the kiss, Hans looks worried and scared and apologises bc he knows that he, as a man, literally just kissed his dear friend, another man, and he doesn't know how Henry will react to it, and that's why he's so worried. And through these little details, the game acknowledges the weight of their relationship without them ever having to sit down and talk abt it, or the game having to address it, and that's what good writing is! It's refreshingly realistic.

[nostalgebraist]

Pretty regularly, at work, I ask ChatGPT hundreds of slightly different questions over the course of a minute or two.

I don't type out these individual questions, of course. They're constructed mechanically, by taking documents one by one from a list, and slotting each one inside a sandwich of fixed text. Like this (not verbatim):

Here's a thing for you to read: //document goes here// Now answer question XYZ about it.

I never read through all of the responses, either. Maybe I'll read a few of them, later on, after doing some kind of statistics to the whole aggregate. But ChatGPT isn't really writing for human consumption, here. It's an industrial machine. It's generating "data," on the basis of other "data."

Often, I ask it to write out a step-by-step reasoning process before answering each question, because this has been shown to improve the quality of ChatGPT's answers. It writes me all this stuff, and I ignore all of it. It's a waste product. I only ask for it because it makes the answer after it better, on average; I have no other use for it.

The funny thing is -- despite being used in a very different, more impersonal manner -- it's still ChatGPT! It's still the same sanctimonious, eager-to-please little guy, answering all those questions.

Fifty questions at once, hundreds in a few minutes, all of it in that same, identical, somewhat annoying brand voice. Always itself, incapable of tiring.

This is all billed to my employer at a rate of roughly $0.01 per 5,000 words I send to ChatGPT, plus roughly $0.01 per 3,750 words that ChatGPT writes in response.

In other words, ChatGPT writing is so cheap, you can get 375,000 words of it for $1.

----

OpenAI decided to make this particular "little guy" very cheap and very fast, maybe in recognition of its popularity.

So now, if you want to use a language model like an industrial machine, it's the one you're most likely to use.

----

Why am I making this post?

Sometimes I read online discourse about ChatGPT, and it seems like people are overly focused on the experience of a single human talking to ChatGPT in the app.

Or, at most, the possibility of generating lots of "content" aimed at humans (SEO spam, generic emails) at the press of a button.

Many of the most promising applications of ChatGPT involve generating text that is not meant for human consumption.

They go in the other direction: they take things from the messy, human, textual world, and translate them into the simpler terms of ordinary computer programs.

Imagine you're interacting with a system -- a company, a website, a phone tree, whatever.

You say or type something.

Behind the scenes, unbeknownst to you, the system asks ChatGPT 13 different questions about the thing you just said/typed. This happens almost instantaneously and costs almost nothing.

No human being will ever see any of the words that ChatGPT wrote in response to this question. They get parsed by simple, old-fashioned computer code, and then they get discarded.

Each of ChatGPT's answers ends in a simple "yes" or "no," or a selection from a similar set of discrete options. The system uses all of this structured, "machine-readable" (in the old-fashioned sense) information to decide what to do next, in its interaction with you.

This is the kind of thing that will happen, more and more.

[thedansemacabres]

Introduction To Supporting Sustainable Agriculture For Witches and Pagans

[ID: An image of yellow grain stocks, soon to be harvested. The several stocks reach towards a blurred open sky, focusing the camera on he grains themselves. The leaves of the grains are green and the cereals are exposed].

PAGANISM AND WITCHCRAFT ARE MOVEMENTS WITHIN A SELF-DESTRUCTIVE CAPITALIST SOCIETY. As the world becomes more aware of the importance of sustainability, so does the duty of humanity to uphold the idea of the steward, stemming from various indigenous worldviews, in the modern era. I make this small introduction as a viticulturist working towards organic and environmentally friendly grape production. I also do work on a food farm, as a second job—a regenerative farm, so I suppose that is my qualifications. Sustainable—or rather regenerative agriculture—grows in recognition. And as paganism and witchcraft continue to blossom, learning and supporting sustainability is naturally a path for us to take. I will say that this is influenced by I living in the USA, however, there are thousands of groups across the world for sustainable agriculture, of which tend to be easy to research.

So let us unite in caring for the world together, and here is an introduction to supporting sustainable/regenerative agriculture. 

A QUICK BRIEF ON SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE 

Sustainable agriculture, in truth, is a movement to practise agriculture as it has been done for thousands of years—this time, with more innovation from science and microbiology especially. The legal definition in the USA of sustainable agriculture is: 

The term ”sustainable agriculture” (U.S. Code Title 7, Section 3103) means an integrated system of plant and animal production practices having a site-specific application that will over the long-term:

A more common man’s definition would be farming in a way that provides society’s food and textile needs without overuse of natural resources, artificial supplements and pest controls, without compromising the future generation’s needs and ability to produce resources. The agriculture industry has one of the largest and most detrimental impacts on the environment, and sustainable agriculture is the alternative movement to it. 

Sustainable agriculture also has the perk of being physically better for you—the nutrient quality of crops in the USA has dropped by 47%, and the majority of our food goes to waste. Imagine if it was composted and reused? Or even better—we buy only what we need. We as pagans and witches can help change this. 

BUYING ORGANIC (IT REALLY WORKS)

The first step is buying organic. While cliche, it does work: organic operations have certain rules to abide by, which excludes environmentally dangerous chemicals—many of which, such as DDT, which causes ecological genocide and death to people. Organic operations have to use natural ways of fertilising, such as compost, which to many of us—such as myself—revere the cycle of life, rot, and death. Organic standards do vary depending on the country, but the key idea is farming without artificial fertilisers, using organic seeds, supplementing with animal manure, fertility managed through management practices, etc. 

However, organic does have its flaws. Certified organic costs many, of which many small farmers cannot afford. The nutrient quality of organic food, while tending to be better, is still poor compared to regeneratively grown crops. Furthermore, the process to become certified organic is often gruelling—you can practise completely organically, but if you are not certified, it is not organic. Which, while a quality control insurance, is both a bonus and a hurdle. 

JOINING A CSA

Moving from organic is joining a CSA (“Community supported agriculture”). The USDA defines far better than I could: 

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), one type of direct marketing, consists of a community of individuals who pledge support to a farm operation so that the farmland becomes, either legally or spiritually, the community’s farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production.

By purchasing a farm share, you receive food from the farm for the agreed upon production year. I personally enjoy CSAs for the relational aspect—choosing a CSA is about having a relationship, not only with the farmer(s), but also the land you receive food from. I volunteer for my CSA and sometimes I get extra cash from it—partaking in the act of caring for the land. Joining a CSA also means taking your precious capital away from the larger food industry and directly supporting growers—and CSAs typically practise sustainable and/or regenerative agriculture. 

CSAs are also found all over the world and many can deliver their products to food deserts and other areas with limited agricultural access. I volunteer from time to time for a food bank that does exactly that with the produce I helped grow on the vegetable farm I work for. 

FARM MARKETS AND STALLS 

Another way of personally connecting to sustainable agriculture is entering the realm of the farm stall. The farmer’s market is one of my personal favourite experiences—people buzzing about searching for ingredients, smiles as farmers sell crops and products such as honey or baked goods, etc. The personal connection stretches into the earth, and into the past it buries—as I purchase my apples from the stall, I cannot help but see a thousand lives unfold. People have been doing this for thousands of years and here I stand, doing it all over again. 

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Farmers’ markets are dependent on your local area, yet in most you can still develop personal community connections. Paganism often stresses community as an ideal and a state of life. And witchcraft often stresses a connection to the soil. What better place, then, is purchasing the products from the locals who commune with the land? 

VOLUNTEERING 

If you are able to, I absolutely recommend volunteering. I have worked with aquaponic systems, food banks, farms, cider-making companies, soil conservation groups, etc. There is so much opportunity—and perhaps employment—in these fields. The knowledge I have gained has been wonderful. As one example, I learned that fertilisers reduce carbon sequestration as plants absorb carbon to help with nutrient intake. If they have all their nutrients ready, they do not need to work to obtain carbon to help absorb it. This does not even get into the symbiotic relationship fungi have with roots, or the world of hyphae. Volunteering provides community and connection. Actions and words change the world, and the world grows ever better with help—including how much or how little you may provide. It also makes a wonderful devotional activity. 

RESOURCING FOOD AND COOKING 

Buying from farmers is not always easy, however. Produce often has to be processed, requiring labour and work with some crops such as carrots. Other times, it is a hard effort to cook and many of us—such as myself—often have very limited energy. There are solutions to this, thankfully:

Many farmers can and will process foods. Some even do canning, which can be good to stock up on food and lessen the energy inputs. 

Value-added products: farms also try to avoid waste, and these products often become dried snacks if fruit, frozen, etc. 

Asking farmers if they would be open to accommodating this. Chances are, they would! The farmer I purchase my CSA share from certainly does. 

Going to farmers markets instead of buying a CSA, aligning with your energy levels. 

And if any of your purchased goods are going unused, you can always freeze them. 

DEMETER, CERES, VEIA, ETC: THE FORGOTTEN AGRICULTURE GODS

Agricultural gods are often neglected. Even gods presiding over agriculture often do not have those aspects venerated—Dionysos is a god of viticulture and Apollon a god of cattle. While I myself love Dionysos as a party and wine god, the core of him remains firmly in the vineyards and fields, branching into the expanses of the wild. I find him far more in the curling vines as I prune them than in the simple delights of the wine I ferment. Even more obscure gods, such as Veia, the Etruscan goddess of agriculture, are seldom known.

Persephone receives the worst of this: I enjoy her too as a dread queen, and people do acknowledge her as Kore, but she is far more popular as the queen of the underworld instead of the dear daughter of Demeter. I do understand this, though—I did not feel the might of Demeter and Persephone until I began to move soil with my own hands. A complete difference to the ancient world, where the Eleusinian mysteries appealed to thousands. Times change, and while some things should be left to the past, our link to these gods have been severed. After all, how many of us reading know where our food comes from? I did not until I began to purchase from the land I grew to know personally. The grocery store has become a land of tearing us from the land, instead of the food hub it should be.

Yet, while paganism forgets agriculture gods, they have not forgotten us. The new world of farming is more conductive and welcoming than ever. I find that while older, bigoted people exist, the majority of new farmers tend to be LGBT+. My own boss is trans and aro, and I myself am transgender and gay. The other young farmers I know are some flavour of LGBT+, or mixed/poc. There’s a growing movement for Black farmers, elaborated in a lovely text called We Are Each Other’s Harvest. 

Indigenous farming is also growing and I absolutely recommend buying from indigenous farmers. At this point, I consider Demeter to be a patron of LGBT+ people in this regard—she gives an escape to farmers such as myself. Bigotry is far from my mind under her tender care, as divine Helios shines above and Okeanos’ daughters bring fresh water to the crops. Paganism is also more commonly accepted—I find that farmers find out that I am pagan and tell me to do rituals for their crops instead of reacting poorly. Or they’re pagan themselves; a farmer I know turned out to be Wiccan and uses the wheel of the year to keep track of production. 

Incorporating these divinities—or concepts surrounding them—into our crafts and altars is the spiritual step towards better agriculture. Holy Demeter continues to guide me, even before I knew it. 

WANT CHANGE? DO IT YOURSELF! 

If you want change in the world, you have to act. And if you wish for better agriculture, there is always the chance to do it yourself. Sustainable agriculture is often far more accessible than people think: like witchcraft and divination, it is a practice. Homesteading is often appealing to many of us, including myself, and there are plenty of resources to begin. There are even grants to help one improve their home to be more sustainable, i.e. solar panels. Gardening is another, smaller option. Many of us find that plants we grow and nourish are far more potentant in craft, and more receptive to magical workings. 

Caring for plants is fundamental to our natures and there are a thousand ways to delve into it. I personally have joined conservation groups, my local soil conservation group, work with the NRCs in the USA, and more. The path to fully reconnecting to nature and agriculture is personal—united in a common cause to fight for this beautiful world. To immerse yourself in sustainable agriculture, I honestly recommend researching and finding your own path. Mine lies in soil and rot, grapevines and fruit trees. Others do vegetables and cereal grains, or perhaps join unions and legislators. Everyone has a share in the beauty of life, our lives stemming from the land’s gentle sprouts. 

Questions and or help may be given through my ask box on tumblr—if there is a way I can help, let me know. My knowledge is invaluable I believe, as I continue to learn and grow in the grey-clothed arms of Demeter, Dionysos, and Kore. 

FURTHER READING:

Baszile, N. (2021). We are each other’s harvest. HarperCollins.

Hatley, J. (2016). Robin Wall Kimmerer. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. Environmental Philosophy, 13(1), 143–145. https://doi.org/10.5840/envirophil201613137

Regenerative Agriculture 101. (2021, November 29). https://www.nrdc.org/stories/regenerative-agriculture-101#what-is

And in truth, far more than I could count. 

References

Community Supported Agriculture | National Agricultural Library. (n.d.). https://www.nal.usda.gov/farms-and-agricultural-production-systems/community-supported-agriculture

Navazio, J. (2012). The Organic seed Grower: A Farmer’s Guide to Vegetable Seed Production. Chelsea Green Publishing.

Plaster, E. (2008). Soil Science and Management. Cengage Learning.

Sheaffer, C. C., & Moncada, K. M. (2012). Introduction to agronomy: food, crops, and environment. Cengage Learning.

Sheldrake, M. (2020). Entangled life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures. Random House.

Sustainable Agriculture | National Agricultural Library. (n.d.). https://www.nal.usda.gov/farms-and-agricultural-production-systems/sustainable-agriculture

[dotthings]

Congrats to the fans of the wee woo show. I don’t go here but it makes me happy to witness how this arc for Evan Buckley got to bloom and I’m happy because I hope this reflects another shift in the TV industry.

For some media commentary context for you: ABC network is owned by Disney. Fox network was owned by Rupert Murdoch. So I can see how the network change for 911 can easily be a factor on how this got greenlit, after years of creator Tim Minear’s intention to work in hints, on the off chance he could take it there. (I don’t go here, but I did my reading). Oliver Stark who plays Buck also revealed he's been for it and couldn't say anything, until he was sure they could do it, until it aired and was out there. (*steeples fingers*)

For further context, Bob Iger—with George Lucas’ vocal support—just fended off a right wing coup on the Disney board from the kinds of people (like Peltz) who complain “why do we need so many female leads” “why do we need movies with all Black leads.” While it doesn’t mean Disney is no longer an evil megacorp, I’m pointing out that its CEO defended inclusive Disney brand content to the shareholders and the board, as well as dismantling the idea that it can’t be entertainment while being diverse.

The ripple of this goes outside of the wee woo show fandom. I’m seeing the joy on my dash from people who don’t watch the show or don’t watch it regularly, as well as from people who have been watching a long time and noticed things and realized there was a progression and it was there all along, and I know how much this must mean to a lot of people. With the world being how it is, with what people are facing inside the US from the far right, in their real lives.

It’s very hopeful in general for inclusion levels on a major network TV show, owned by a big evil megacorp. Representation matters.

Also I'm aware the wee woo show already had a queer couple, plus it's already an intersectional inclusive series, that’s great.

There shouldn't be limits placed on inclusion though. “But you already have X” shouldn't be weaponized to tell people to shut up. There is no “enough” or “too much” when it comes to inclusion. While I'm not for undermining the inclusion that's there, I've seen that weaponization used with a series that hasn't been great on inclusion, and I've seen that weaponization used for 911, which is. It's a sus argument.

Indirect and unintentional as it is, also bi Buck shut down every concern troll, every gaslight, every denial, every rationale I've ever seen people deploy against bi Dean. Everything from people who don’t understand what bi actual means—“but he likes girls so he can’t be bi”—to “but he wasn’t declared bi from the start of the show so he can’t”—yes he can and the wee woo show just did. On one of the original big three networks. Or people who say it would "ruin the character." Really? “But he’s an action hero”—so what? Evan Buckley is a hero, Dean is a hero, both badass action heroes. “People who see this as canon are delusional”—Evan Buckley went O RLY? Not so delusional now, is it.

Evan Buckley avenged bi Dean.

It’s self-evident. It’s right there. Different show, different network, but the concepts are familiar, the situation has a certain familiarity. This turn of events on an ABC show didn't just make bi Dean fans valid. bi Dean fans were always valid, the bi Dean reading was always valid. But I appreciate how much what happened on the wee woo show bonked people with a truth stick, about self discovery, character arcing, queer readings, queer coding, and the validity of merely noticing things.

[prettycottonmouthlamia]

I shouldn't have to make this post but Nintendo fans are trying extremely desperately to position the company whose cock they love the taste of in a good light and are generally doing this by spreading misinformation about the legalities of emulation so let's go over a number of the fabrications shall we?

Emulation is illegal to monetize This has so far been one of the really big ones that's taken traction, usually partnered with the sister lie that yuzu was paywalling access to early access builds. These are both lies, and are untrue. yuzu is far from the only modern emulator to be monetizing itself, plenty of mobile emulators do it, but developing an emulator for money is entirely legal. We have pretty much all of our emulation precedent set thanks to a series of lawsuits in the very early 2000s thanks to Sony suing an emulator called Bleem. There's a lot to say about Bleem, but Bleem was a commercial emulator. You could buy Bleem, in stores. At no point was there ever a court decision that Bleem was wrong to do so (despite Sony's best efforts).

Emulating current generation software or hardware is illegal. This is also wrong, and kind of fundamentally misunderstands a lot when it comes to emulation. Once again, Bleem was at the time emulating current generation software. It was a generation in its twilight, but Bleem first released in March of 1999: the Playstation 2 was not out yet. The reason why current generation software does not tend to be emulated is because we do not really have the tech or processing power to do it yet. The Switch's lower specs are entirely the reason it has had an emulator developed well ahead of the PS4 or the Xbone.

Yuzu's early access build allowed people to play Tears of the Kingdom ahead of release date This one is a couple of different statements packed together, and while I'm given to believe there's a chance other games may have been playable ahead of release, this specific statement is a lie, and maybe the funniest one on the list because it's a lie that's not even backed up by the lawsuit.

The lawsuit is extremely clear in its language that it was modded instances of Yuzu that could play Tears of the Kingdom ahead of release date, not publicly accessible builds of Yuzu. Nintendo's argument here lies in Yuzu being open source: part of the lawsuit alleges that Yuzu is responsible for any and all acts of piracy done by its users, whether or not they used official or modded builds of Yuzu. This is, of course, a fundamentally fucking insane position to argue from. It is not a particularly uncharitable reading of this as an attack on open source software to begin with, as this precedent would make any developer liable for ANY illegal action taken by someone who modified their code. Supporting this, in my opinion, makes you an asshole and liable to be clocked in the fucking mouth.

4. Literally anything involving this screenshot.

I've seen this screenshot maybe three or four times with different takes on what exactly Illegal is happening here and I'm pretty content to just call it vibes at this point. Whether this is an intelligent screenshot is a different matter, but no one has been able to point to anything actually illegal being done here. There is already precedent in allowing one to make their own back-ups of software they own, even if decryption or bypassing copy protection to do so, which is a large majority of software. Switch games are not the only games that are either encrypted or have copy protection, and this is both not the earliest generation to do it AND its not the only industry that does it.

The only point of interest here is the date, which I've seen literally no one bring up, but this correlates into another point: personal piracy is still not something Yuzu is liable for. It's a dumb thing to broadcast, but it doesn't change anything material about the software.

5. Yuzu folded because Nintendo had a smoking gun

I, I just, I'm sorry this one isn't just a lie its a really naive and incompetent view of the faults of our legal system. If anything, the settlement seems to indicate the opposite. If Nintendo was sure they had Yuzu dead the rights, they wouldn't have fucking settled. Both parties need to agree to settle! Nintendo is actively interested in trying to set legal precedent that emulation is illegal, because Nintendo is great at saying obviously wrong things with a straight face.

This could be a reason, but remember, this was a civil lawsuit, not a criminal one. Civil lawsuits have a difference in how evidence is handled, and it's pretty likely that Nintendo just has more evidence than user does on account of being able to afford a larger legal team and having planned for this lawsuit in advance, regardless of how strong that evidence actually is. It's why most of the arguments in the lawsuit read kind of insane. Civil lawsuits are not handled "beyond a reasonable doubt".

There's also the fact that legal cases can be extremely expensive, even when you know you are absolutely in the fucking right. I want to link this video by James Stephanie Sterling as evidence of this. They were completely in the fucking right, and the lawsuit still took an incredible amount of time and monetary expense to argue, and that's against an opponent who you could reasonably confuse with a scarecrow. This is ultimately how Sony eventually "won" against Bleem. Bleem never lost any of its lawsuits against Sony, in fact Sony ballsed it up twice against Bleem, but Sony continued to file lawsuits against Bleem and its company over and over, until Bleem literally could not afford it and went bankrupt.

There's also the matter of precedent. If Yuzu had taken this court, and lost, it would be really bad. There's a lot in this court case that you don't want precedent leaning towards, and due to, uh, America's current political climate and judicial regime, there's a fair chance the judge would have just sided with Nintendo anyways. Settling the lawsuit, while to be entirely clear, sucks complete ass for Yuzu as they were basically eliminated, protects the sphere of emulation as a whole.

So what was the salient parts of Nintendo's case?

The parts of Nintendo's case that hold the most weight have to do specifically with the encryption keys used to de-encrypt Switch games, and how those keys interact with the DMCA. There's no legal precedence to back this up, this is thoroughly untested grounds. This is actually where the buck stops with the Bleem cases: this one never went to a judgment for Bleem and hence never established precedent.

There's a pretty reasonable chance that Nintendo had a chance to win the lawsuit off of the back of this point. This doesn't make it a guarantee, but it's the part of the lawsuit that's actually important.

What happened with the settlement?

Well Nintendo got to legally extort the Yuzu devs and their parent company for $2.4 million. This is, strictly speaking, chump change to Nintendo but I in particular hate this part of lawsuits with a passion. In addition, as per the conditions of the agreement, all copies of Yuzu that were released and in development under the purvey of the company must be destroyed, the company and its devs can no longer work on Yuzu in any way possible, and they cannot work on any other emulation software. This is why Citra also closed down by the way: it was an unfortunate emulator in the cross fire. This in and of itself, is a tragedy, since this is basically court mandated brain drain. Undoubtedly Yuzu will be forked and someone will continue development on "Zuyu", but the loss is still felt.

Why should I care? Piracy is illegal.

This is where I'm going to wax philosophical for a moment, but Frankie my dear, I do not give a damn. Nintendo could have had full legal rights to do this, and I would still be of the opinion that Nintendo's legal team are ghouls and shouldn't feel safe showing their faces. This is how I felt when Nintendo shut down Emuparadise. Whether something is illegal does not impact whether it is right. Laws exist in a state of being able to be both just, unjust, or both.

Emulation is extremely important in the preservation of gaming as an artform, something that the game industry is extremely against in all forms. There's money to be made after all, and attempts at making sure that games are available to play are often attacked and criticized. This is part of the reason I'm so against the existence of copyright law. It doesn't matter what the intent of a system is, but it does matter what the system does, and it's transferred an overwhelming amount of power into the hands of large corporations while largely screwing small creators over.

I do not believe art has a price tag to it. I do not believe that art can and should only be enjoyed by the people a company has decided to sell it too. I do not believe that companies like Nintendo should be able to throw their legal weight around and ruin people's lives. You should be able to play Mother 3 and Shin Megami Tensei without having to wait for their parent companies to decide they actually want to sell it to you.

Piracy does not inflict meaningful damages to Nintendo. Despite Nintendo's whinging, Tears of the Kingdom sold over 20 million copies in half a years time, something that we can estimate to have made Nintendo about $1.4 billion in revenue. We live in a game industry which does not care about its game devs: it's perfectly willing to underpay them, to overwork them, and to eventually let them go. Nintendo is not innocent here. They have a history of mistreating their contract workers, and I personally know that these are not the only allegations that hold water.

In short, fuck Nintendo. Pirate all Switch games until the end of time.

[notyouraryang0dd3ss]

taylor swift is elon musk for white women who love greige and instapoetry. same overblown ego, same vitriolic pettiness, same incompetence, same tendency to lie endlessly about their past and use the media to prop up those lies. oh and to fabricate their achievements - those chart numbers mean fuck all. it is insulting to even see her generic uninspired bloated album mentioned alongside those like cowboy carter. her legacy will never be anything but greed and ugly drama

this was like a sermon to me. you spoke to the masses (me and my friends) with this one (also griege is such a good word...adding this in my daily vocab now) but taylor swift really is rupi kaur for white girls.

i have nothing to say you genuinely captured her white woman bullshit anon. im in awe

+ “fabricate achievements” its absurd the amount of industry accolades taylor has for the quality of music she puts out. she’s not even the best white girl lyricist of her generation and isn’t even in the running for singer.

The constant comparison between her and Beyoncé/MJ is disrespectful to the contributions each artist has made to the music industry/academy. Beyoncé has made (4) critically acclaimed albums IN A ROW and INVENTED the concept of a “surprise drop” album AND the complete VISUAL album. MJ revolutionized the music video format to what it is today and is the first ever PERFORMER of music.(Don’t worry—I don’t like both artists as people nor do I listen to them. But you should know I used to be a Beyoncé fan up until her zionist moment last year so I know a lot about her)

Swifties constantly disrespect Black artists and achievements by comparing them to Taylor Swift who is no where in the orbit of talent that Beyoncé and MJ possess. Whitney Houston only has 1 AOTY but her legacy is unquantifiable. They constantly bring up numbers because it’s all Swift has.

When we talk about the Eras Tour 5 years from now—ACTUALLY, RIGHT NOW—Nobody is talking about Taylor’s stunning vocals or jaw dropping dance performance. They’re talking about how much she’s grossing. It’s always going to be about the money for her.

You’re right. Her legacy will really be nothing but greed and ugly drama, her lovers forever immortalized into her discography. She is really a miserable unremarkable person. And she knows it and she takes it out on everyone and everything. And white women see themselves in this and throw their money at her because they find camaraderie in her misery.

Anyways. Thank you so much for breaking down the genetic code of a white woman. I’m gonna cite it forever

[brielledoesastrology]

Asteroid Makoto Shinkai (55222) in your astrology natal chart

By : Brielledoesastrology (tumblr)

“Have we...met before, somewhere else?"

asteroid "Makoto Shinkai" code number : 55222

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Makoto Shinkai is a renowned Japanese filmmaker known for his work in the field of anime and animated films.

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He gained international recognition for his visually stunning and emotionally resonant films that often explore themes of love, distance, and human connections.

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Shinkai is often praised for his attention to detail, beautifully rendered backgrounds, and ability to evoke a sense of melancholy in his storytelling.

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One of Shinkai's most famous works is the film "Your Name" (Kimi no Na wa), released in 2016. It became a massive commercial success both in Japan and worldwide, earning critical acclaim for its stunning animation, compelling story, and emotional depth. The film follows the story of two teenagers who mysteriously swap bodies and eventually develop a connection that transcends time and space.

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Some of Shinkai's other notable works include "5 Centimeters per Second" (2007), which portrays a tale of long-distance love and the passage of time, and "Weathering with You" (2019), a film about a boy who encounters a girl with the ability to control the weather.

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Shinkai's films often incorporate elements of fantasy and science fiction while exploring human relationships and the impact of time and distance on personal connections.

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Makoto Shinkai's distinct visual style and ability to tell deeply emotional stories have made him a prominent figure in the anime industry, and he is widely regarded as one of the most talented and influential anime directors of his generation.

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Makoto Shinkai's art style is characterized by its breathtaking visuals, attention to detail, and emphasis on capturing the beauty of natural landscapes.

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His films often feature meticulously drawn and painted backgrounds that showcase realistic and stunning scenery, ranging from sprawling cityscapes to serene rural landscapes. Shinkai pays great attention to atmospheric effects, such as light, shadow, and weather, which contribute to the overall mood and tone of his works.

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Shinkai's style tends to be more grounded and less exaggerated compared to some other anime styles. His characters often have a realistic appearance, with subtle facial expressions that convey complex emotions.

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Shinkai focuses on capturing the nuances of human emotions, particularly the feelings of longing, yearning, and the bittersweet nature of love and relationships.

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Color plays an essential role in Shinkai's art style. He often employs vibrant and vivid colors to create visually striking scenes, especially during key emotional moments.

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The use of contrasting colors and lighting techniques helps to evoke a sense of atmosphere and depth in his compositions.

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Shinkai's art style combines technical excellence with an ability to convey powerful emotions through visuals. His attention to detail, stunning backgrounds, and skillful use of color contribute to the distinctive and visually captivating nature of his films.

(source : chat gpt)

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In astrology the asteroid "Makoto shinkai" (55222) could represent : where you have great talent in your art works or story telling, where your art work or story telling have emotional depth, where your artwork or story has really amazing visual beauty, where your art work or story telling have reflection on transience, where your art work or story telling is very inspirational, where your art work or story telling is greatly admired or loved by a lot of people, where you prefer to make your art works or story telling more to the realistic side

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⚠️ Warning : i consider this asteroid as prominent and brings the most effect if it conjuncts ur personal planets (sun,moon,venus,mercury,mars) and if it conjuncts ur personal points (ac,dc,ic,mc), i use 0 - 2.5 orbs (for conjunctions). For sextile, trine, opposite and square aspects to asteroids i usually use 0 - 2 orbs. Yes tight conjunctions of planet / personal points to asteroids tends to give the most effect, but other aspects (sextile,trine,square,opposite, etc) still exist, even they produce effects. If it doesn't aspect any of your planets or personal points, check the house placement of the asteroid, maybe some stuff/topics relating to this asteroid could affect some topics/stuff relating to the house placement . ⚠️

[dispatched]

because i've never made an actual post about it -- a large part of the core of my interpretation of frank is that he has antisocial personality disorder (ASPD) and his military service not only enabled it, but allowed it to flourish to the point that it's become a core part of his identity as a person. this article explains how the military-industrial complex (unfortunately blocked behind a paywall) explains it well and has always stuck out to me, especially considering it was written in the wake of the discover of a.bu g.hraib. the core traits of ASPD, particularly in young white american men.

and i don't mean this because he's a "psychopath" / "sociopath" with zero remorse or emotion, because that is a huge misconception of what ASPD is and one of the many ways cluster b disorders are demonized/stigmatized. the criteria for ASPD is as follows:

noting that while frank has a "moral code", it is also a code that he created for himself with absolutely zero regard for the law. he is sadistic and thrives in violence, because if he isn't at war then he's making one. he has absolutely zero regard for the law lmao and never has (frank may have been and may still slightly be a bootlicker when it comes to the military but he never has been for the police god bless, but that's another post for another time).

as for evidence of conduct disorder before the age of 15, m.cu frank states that he purposely picked fights and caused trouble. a lot of my basis for frank's background is based off of punisher tyger and born, both of which entail frank's life before the death of his family. he's fascinated by violence from the age of 10 that we see, which includes him watching two men burn to death that have committed "wrongdoings" (the former being a union-busting scab and the other being a mobster who sa'd his friend) and therefore deserved it.

bonus points for this panel (that i have of course cherrypicked) in which baby frank attacks a man with diesel fuel for being abusive (which i don't necessarily use as part of my canon for him because it is FAR too on the nose lmao) but it's the general vibe/something he definitely thought about or went about in a much different way.

like i said - frank does have a "code", but even he knows it's a justification for enabling his violent nature. much of what i find really interesting about him is that yes, the murder of his family and PTSD from his service helped him form into what he's become, but the seeds have always been there. he has no significant trauma before that--he was raised in an idyllic middle-class family in queens. he chose to enlist pre-9/11 (not that it is an excuse but he didn't choose to serve out of some pumped up revenge fantasy) in part because his father served (in the comics it was wwii) but because it would allow him to get his hands dirty the way he craved.

again, all of this doesn't mean he's incapable of emotion. he has a dogged sense of loyalty that's been indoctrinated thanks to his years of service as well, and is able to form attachments to people. however, said attachments are volatile, and he has trouble maintaining deeper friendships and relationships that are not based in violence/war/etc.

also worth mentioning is the way he inherently corrupts those around him, albeit largely unintentionally. that in itself deserves its own post, but it's also worth mentioning like i said.

tl;dr someone... please get frank on some adderall and also drag him to DBT

[absolutebl]

Hi!

I love your Blog and love to read your takes in everything. So thank you so much for all your Posts and thoughts about the industry etc.

Here is my question: i came across one of your posts where you wrote "actually gay, not bl gay" (it was a Post about Jojo and Only Friends) and while I FELT that I TOTALLY understood what you meant and instantly was like "yes 100% clear" Id love to read and learn more about what this means exactly and why some bls feel quite heteronormative while some dont. Would you mind explain the take on "actually gay Not Bl gay" a little bit? And why some Shows feel just more queer than others (besides the unbelievable stupid "gay only for you" trope lol)

Thank you so much and I hope you will have a nice day!

actually gay, not bl gay

There's actually quite a discourse on this right now mostly originating with @waitmyturtles and @wen-kexing-apologist (Post @killiru references above is here.)

I tend to mostly talk about this in broad brush strokes as a queer lens.

But there's a great ven diagram (which of course I've lost the link to) that approaches the idea of and queer lens by tunneling into its approach and intent:

about queers

by queers

for queers

How do different BLs intersect in different ways with these three elements?

When I said "actually gay, not BL gay" I was alluding to this discourse. Specifically the "about queers" category of BL.

There are characters in BL who read as genuinely gay (as in belonging to the queer family of this terrible reality we live in) and then there are those that seem more performative (to exist in a bubble of fantasy were sexual identity is almost unimportant, only the romance matters, everything is safe sweetness & light). For some queers this can read as manipulative or even exploitive (because it is inauthentic to most queer experiences). For me, it's fine... even desirable. I like the safe bubble. I enjoy the utter delusional escapism of it. Sometimes I will call this sanitized gay. (Since it is designed to make gay palatable to non-gay identified folks e.g. seme/uke.)

A sanitized gay BL may be unintentional but it is nested in origin yaoi and mm romance whose target market has never been the queer community, and whose authors have historically not been members of it, either.

Let's be frank, we queers are generally a terrible target market, we don't have enough spending power - especially not for a piece of pop culture as niched as BL. And as creators we really want our voices to be heard (obvs), which makes us produce content that those unsympathetic or uncaring find uncomfortable. (Yes, I know, fuck them, but also, they have all the money and the entertainment industry is a numbers game.)

So in the arena of office romances, just as an example:

actually gay = The New Employee

sanitized gay = Our Dating Sim

actual gay = Step By Step

sanitized gay = A Boss And a Babe

All of the above have the same tropes, archetypes, and premises. All of them are BL. Some are just... queerer feeling than others. And the characters in those shows (Step by Step and The New Employee) read as more "actually gay."

This has nothing to do with the actors, chemsitry, or how much we may personally like the show (Our Dating Sim is one of my absolute favorite BLs). It has to do with how closely those CHARACTERS intersect with the reality of queerness as we inhabit it today. It will be lots of little touches given to the drama by director and script:

language use,

surrounding friendships (and friendship style),

mannerisms and physicality (specially body language around straights vs other queer characters),

makeup & wardrobe,

facial expressions,

surrounding queer-coded behaviors by side characters,

layers of story nuance that indicate a complicated queer-driven back story.

Markers of specifically a queer identity are given to the leads.

These kinds of BLs are satisfying the "about queers" category. ("By queers" can be difficult to extract because IRL outting is involved. "For queers" is the rarest kind of BL, because making something specifically for us often alienates the majority of the rest of viewership/market. I could be argued that SCOY did this.)

I'm sure I've missed things, but I hope that kinda makes sense?

By/For/About discourse from @wen-kexing-apologist here:

Parts 1

Part 2

Part 3

I'm indebted to them for the links!

More Queer Stuff from Yours Truly

BL Linguistics & Queer Identity - I Am Gay versus I Like Men 

Will BL Get More Honestly Queer? 

Queer lens (from the director) and chemistry (from the actors) in BL (A Tale of Thousand Stars)

Touch & Daisy in Secret Crush On You - Queer Coded Language and 3rd Gender Identity

BL in Taiwan & Gay Marriage

Debating Queerbaiting in BL ( + Devil Judge... is it queerbaiting?) 

BL Actors and the Assumption of Queerness - outing actors, coming out, being out, more:  Is that BL actor actually queer?

So is it really fetishization? straight women loving bl 

Some BL fans are sasaengs, and it’s a problem in this fandom 

BLs That Highlight How Society Treats Queers

10 BLs That Are Honest to a Queer Experience 

(source)

[dailyanarchistposts]

Solidarity begins at home

I don’t need to be empowered by adults; I need them to stop having power over me.

—Lilah Joy Bergman, age 9

While friendship is made vapid by Empire, coupledom and the nuclear family become the container for all other forms of intimacy. As anti-racist, Indigenous, and autonomist feminists have shown, the nuclear family—where one generation of parents lives with one generation of children, separated from everyone else—is a recent invention of Empire.[62] It was (and is) a crucial institution for the privatization and enclosure of life. It is also central to the maintenance of a culture of authoritarianism, abuse, and neglect that underpins heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. It evolved as a way of reproducing wage-laboring men through the unpaid labor of women. Violence against women and children within the family was condoned as part of a civilizing process, and it became a conduit for intergenerational violence, and for the accumulation of white wealth and property through inheritance.

Through feminist struggle, some of the most brutal, state-sanctioned violences of the nuclear family (such as legalized rape and abuse) have been challenged, but it remains a site of isolation and violence, for children in particular. One of its most brutal effects is that it makes other forms of intimacy difficult or unthinkable for many of us. Through suburbs and apartments designed for a privatized existence, the nuclear family is even coded into the built environment.

At the same time, people are constantly inventing and recovering other kinds of belonging and intimacy. They are creatively collectivizing and communalizing life, sharing income, food, and housing in ways that break down privatization and segregation. As Silvia Federici writes,

We also have a return to more extended types of families, built not on blood ties but on friendship relations. This, I think, is a model to follow. We are obviously in a period of transition and a great deal of experimentation, but opening up the family – hetero or gay – to a broader community, breaking down the walls that increasingly isolated it and prevented it from confronting its problems in a collective way is the path we must take not to be suffocated by it, and instead strengthen our resistance to exploitation. The denuclearisation of the family is the path to the construction of communities of resistance.[63]

Many Indigenous people, people of color, and queer folks have never been invited into the structure of the nuclear family, and they have always made kin in other ways. Queer chosen families have created intimate, intergenerational webs of support, and these radical ties remain alive in spite of new forms of homonormative capture. As Dean Spade writes,

In the queer communities I’m in valuing friendship is a really big deal, often coming out of the fact that lots of us don’t have family support, and build deep supportive structures with other queers. We are interested in resisting the heteronormative family structure in which people are expected to form a dyad, marry, have kids, and get all their needs met within that family structure. A lot of us see that as unhealthy, as a new technology of post-industrial late capitalism that is connected to alienating people from community and training them to think in terms of individuality, to value the smaller unit of the nuclear family rather than the extended family.[64]

Similarly, bell hooks points to traditions of informal adoption in Black communities, in which people adopted and cared for children in ways that were communally recognized but never sanctioned by the state:

Let’s say you didn’t have any children and your neighbor had eight kids. You might negotiate with her to adopt a child, who would then come live with you, but there would never be any kind of formal adoption, yet everybody would recognize her as your “play daughter.” My community was unusual in that gay black men were also able to informally adopt children. And in this case there was a kinship structure in the community where people would go home and visit their folks if they wanted to, stay with them (or what have you), but they would also be able to stay with the person who was loving and parenting them.[65]

Leanne Simpson, writing on Indigenous nationhood, notes how resurgence entails displacing settler colonialism and the nuclear family with “big, beautiful, diverse, extended multiracial families of relatives and friends that care very deeply for each other.”[66] In many ways, these kinds of relationships make possible and sustain the creation of intergenerational forms of organizing that include kids and elders, and break down divides between public and private. Simpson spoke to the importance of this when we interviewed her:

How change happens matters to me, which is why I don’t spend much time lobbying the state. I believe in creating the change on the ground, and creating and living the alternatives. In my nation, children and Elders are critical, and it means we organize differently. You can’t invite kids to a twelve-hour, boring meeting and then get frustrated because they are bored or frustrated because they won’t stay with the childcare worker they’ve never met. You can’t invite the Elders to welcome people to the territory and then not speak to the issues. I think we actually need to do less organizing and more movement building. Right now, we have activists, not leaders. We have actions, not community. My kids are also fundamentally not interested in “the movement.” They are, however, fundamentally interested in doing things.[67]

These kinds of non-nuclear kinship networks have been sustained in the face of state terrorism and incarceration, residential and boarding schools, and Empire’s ongoing attempts to privatize and destroy non-nuclear kinship networks, extended families, and webs of relationships that include non-human kin. Nourishing and sustaining these communal forms of life throws into question some of the dominant ideas about what counts as political work, about separation of activism or organizing from everyday life. They challenge the segregation of kids from the rest of the world (and from organizing and politics in particular) and the ways that elders are isolated and intergenerational connections are lost.

Creating intergenerational webs of intimacy and support is a radical act in a world that has privatized child-rearing, housing, subsistence and decision-making. Challenging the nuclear family is not about a puritanical rejection of anything that resembles it; it is about creating alternatives to its hegemony, to the dismembering of social relations, to the spatial division of people through suburbanization, incarceration, schooling, dispossession, and displacement. This entails the proliferation of relationships that may or may not be based on blood but are built on care and love. The Latin American political theorist Raúl Zibechi argues that non-nuclear family and kinship networks are at the heart of Latin America’s most transformative and militant movements, including those of Indigenous peoples, peasant farmers, landless and homeless movements, piqueteros, and women’s and youth movements.[68] These collective forms of life are based in new forms of dwelling, subsistence, and resistance. At the same time, Zibechi is clear that these are “only tendencies, aspirations, or attempts in the midst of social struggles.”[69] Relationships of mutual support are not a destination but a continual process of struggle.

As people renew intergenerational relationships and bring their whole lives into struggle, new forms of politics emerge. In this context, Silvia Federici argues,

This is why the idea of creating “self-reproducing” movements has been so powerful. It means creating a certain social fabric and forms of co-operative reproduction that can give continuity and strength to our struggles, and a more solid base to our solidarity. We need to create forms of life in which political activism is not separated from the task of our daily reproduction, so that relations of trust and commitment can develop that today remain on the horizon. We need to put our lives in common with the lives of other people to have movements that are solid and do not rise up and then dissipate. Sharing reproduction, this is what began to happen within the Occupy Movement and what usually happens when a struggle reaches a moment of almost insurrectional power. For example, when a strike goes on for several months, people begin to put their lives in common because they have to mobilise all their resources not to be defeated.[70]

Federici here gets at the way in which care is not only a means of maintaining struggles, but a transformative part of struggle itself. While Empire works to privatize and individualize our daily lives, many movements are reproducing themselves more autonomously by collectivizing care: from cooking to cohabitation to learning to just being present with each other.

Friendship, kinship, and communalization have also been at the heart of working across the hierarchical divides of heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonization, ableism, ecocide, and other systems that have taught us to enact violence on each other and internalize oppressive ways of relating. To make kin across these divisions is a precarious and radical act. Everyone knows how difficult this can be, and how people fuck up, hurt each other, and blame each other. Those conscripted into oppressive roles can always fall back into old habits. In some cases, people are able to talk about all this in ways that are subtle, gentle, and more attuned to each other’s tendencies, triggers, and gifts, and genuine relations of support emerge. In the context of queer, anti-racist disability justice, Mia Mingus speaks to the centrality of strong relationships for undoing oppression:

Any kind of systematic change we want to make will require us to work together to do it. And we have to have relationships strong enough to hold us as we go up against something as powerful as the state, the medical industrial complex, the prison system, the gender binary system, the church, immigration system, the war machine, global capitalism. Because we’re going to mess up. Of that I am sure. We cannot, on the one hand have sharp analysis about how pervasive systems of oppression and violence are and then on the other hand, expect people to act like that’s not the world we exist in. Of course there are times we are going to do and say oppressive things, of course we are going to hurt each other, of course we are going to be violent, collude in violence or accept violence as normal. We must roll up our sleeves and start doing the hard work of learning how to work through conflict, pain and hurt as if our lives depended on it—because they do.[71]

Between the authors of this book, friendship has required us to negotiate divisions ingrained in our bodies by ageism, patriarchy, capitalism, and ableism. Sometimes these divisions get in the way of our capacity to connect in ways that are enabling and transformative. Patriarchy has socialized Nick, as a man, to be self-assured, (over)confident, rational, and individualistic. carla has been socialized to be submissive, caring, diffident, and to put others before herself. Even as we worked against some of these tendencies, carla ended up doing more emotional and caring labor for this project and Nick ended up doing more labor when it came to writing and editing. We have also been learning to challenge these divisions, always partially and inconsistently, through processes of mutual growth, support, and (un)learning. In part because of our very different life experiences, skill sets, and perspectives, our collaborative process has enabled us to produce something new together and made us both more capable in new ways. Neither of us could have written this book, or anything like it, alone.

[molabuddy]

i'm having Thoughts so. collection of headcanons about the different home planets in pikmin:

Hocotate - Everybody's favourite :] a small planet that's hot and arid all around, and a little bit boring in the flora and fauna department. Notable for brutal summers and so-so winters, an environment really only suited to growing its famous and unfathomably delicious vegetables.

Vegetable cultivation and shipping is its main industry, but it's also a notable manufactuer of sub-par, barely up to code BUT dirt cheap spacegear :]

(extra hc: while pikpik carrots (as well as hocotate onions, garlic and other veggies) can be cultivated on other planets, no matter how closely those other planets can simulate a hocotate climate, the resulting carrots are noticably different and less tasty. Botanists can't figure out why!)

Koppai - kind of an outsider planet in terms of its culture as well as its literal distance from its neighbours. On the outside, it looks very advanced, with sprawling modern cities, but as we know Koppai has been struggling with a food shortage for a while :(

Notable for leading advancements in space technology, as well as inventing the kopad - a model of tablet which quickly became the base for space travel squad tablets built and used all across the galaxy.

(under the cut = some pikmin 4 planets - minor spoilers abound?)

Giya - Home Planet of Shepherd, Russ and Colin, as well as the Rescue Corps HQ. a Big planet, definitely in terms of population and industry, possibly even in terms of literal size.

Its a major hub of space travel facilities and technology, as well as a big hub for planetary immigration! Lots of people from other planets move there, so its got a very diverse population. It also has a large variety of climates as well as flora and fauna (Giya is generally a very "earth-like" planet I think)

Ohri - Home Planet of Dingo and Yonny (though both probably live on Giya most of the time.) A planet famous for its extreme climates both hot and cold, and the abundent and occasionally deadly wildlife in every nook of the planet barring the most developed cities

Ohrians(?) are very passionate about the natural habitats on the planet, and many places have remained protected and undisturbed, but it means that off-planet tourists and Ohri locals alike are just one wrong turn away from danger.

(extra hc: the reigon Yonny grew up in is notable for its poisonous creatures. he discovered his love of medicine while being taught how to make remedies and antidotes by his mother)

[mariacallous]

Scan the online brochures of companies who sell workplace monitoring tech and you’d think the average American worker was a renegade poised to take their employer down at the next opportunity. “Nearly half of US employees admit to time theft!” “Biometric readers for enhanced accuracy!” “Offer staff benefits in a controlled way with Vending Machine Access!”

A new wave of return-to-office mandates has arrived since the New Year, including at JP Morgan Chase, leading advertising agency WPP, and Amazon—not to mention President Trump’s late January directive to the heads of federal agencies to “terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person … on a full-time basis.” Five years on from the pandemic, when the world showed how effectively many roles could be performed remotely or flexibly, what’s caused the sudden change of heart?

“There’s two things happening,” says global industry analyst Josh Bersin, who is based in California. “The economy is actually slowing down, so companies are hiring less. So there is a trend toward productivity in general, and then AI has forced virtually every company to reallocate resources toward AI projects.

“The expectation amongst CEOs is that’s going to eliminate a lot of jobs. A lot of these back-to-work mandates are due to frustration that both of those initiatives are hard to measure or hard to do when we don’t know what people are doing at home.”

The question is, what exactly are we returning to?

Take any consumer tech buzzword of the 21st century and chances are it’s already being widely used across the US to monitor time, attendance and, in some cases, the productivity of workers, in sectors such as manufacturing, retail, and fast food chains: RFID badges, GPS time clock apps, NFC apps, QR code clocking-in, Apple Watch badges, and palm, face, eye, voice, and finger scanners. Biometric scanners have long been sold to companies as a way to avoid hourly workers “buddy punching” for each other at the start and end of shifts—so-called “time theft.” A return-to-office mandate and its enforcement opens the door for similar scenarios for salaried staff.

Track and Trace

The latest, deluxe end point of these time and attendance tchotchkes and apps is something like Austin-headquartered HID’s OmniKey platform. Designed for factories, hospitals, universities and offices, this is essentially an all-encompassing RFID log-in and security system for employees, via smart cards, smartphone wallets, and wearables. These will not only monitor turnstile entrances, exits, and floor access by way of elevators but also parking, the use of meeting rooms, the cafeteria, printers, lockers, and yes, vending machine access.

These technologies, and more sophisticated worker location- and behavior-tracking systems, are expanding from blue-collar jobs to pink-collar industries and even white-collar office settings. Depending on the survey, approximately 70 to 80 percent of large US employers now use some form of employee monitoring, and the likes of PwC have explicitly told workers that managers will be tracking their location to enforce a three-day office week policy.

“Several of these earlier technologies, like RFID sensors and low-tech barcode scanners, have been used in manufacturing, in warehouses, or in other settings for some time,” says Wolfie Christl, a researcher of workplace surveillance for Cracked Labs, a nonprofit based in Vienna, Austria. “We’re moving toward the use of all kinds of sensor data, and this kind of technology is certainly now moving into the offices. However, I think for many of these, it’s questionable whether they really make sense there.”

What’s new, at least to the recent pandemic age of hybrid working, is the extent to which workers can now be tracked inside office buildings. Cracked Labs published a frankly terrifying 25-page case study report in November 2024 showing how systems of wireless networking, motion sensors, and Bluetooth beacons, whether intentionally or as a byproduct of their capabilities, can provide “behavioral monitoring and profiling” in office settings.

The project breaks the tech down into two categories: The first is technology that tracks desk presence and room occupancy, and the second monitors the indoor location, movement, and behavior of the people working inside the building.

To start with desk and room occupancy, Spacewell offers a mix of motion sensors installed under desks, in ceilings, and at doorways in “office spaces” and heat sensors and low-resolution visual sensors to show which desks and rooms are being used. Both real-time and trend data are available to managers via its “live data floorplan,” and the sensors also capture temperature, environmental, light intensity, and humidity data.

The Swiss-headquartered Locatee, meanwhile, uses existing badge and device data via Wi-Fi and LAN to continuously monitor clocking in and clocking out, time spent by workers at desks and on specific floors, and the number of hours and days spent by employees at the office per week. While the software displays aggregate rather than individual personal employee data to company executives, the Cracked Labs report points out that Locatee offers a segmented team analytics report which “reveals data on small groups.”

As more companies return to the office, the interest in this idea of “optimized” working spaces is growing fast. According to S&S Insider’s early 2025 analysis, the connected office was worth $43 billion in 2023 and will grow to $122.5 billion by 2032. Alongside this, IndustryARC predicts there will be a $4.5 billion employee-monitoring-technology market, mostly in North America, by 2026—the only issue being that the crossover between the two is blurry at best.

At the end of January, Logitech showed off its millimeter-wave radar Spot sensors, which are designed to allow employers to monitor whether rooms are being used and which rooms in the building are used the most. A Logitech rep told The Verge that the peel-and-stick devices, which also monitor VOCs, temperature, and humidity, could theoretically estimate the general placement of people in a meeting room.

As Christl explains, because of the functionality that these types of sensor-based systems offer, there is the very real possibility of a creep from legitimate applications, such as managing energy use, worker health and safety, and ensuring sufficient office resources into more intrusive purposes.

“For me, the main issue is that if companies use highly sensitive data like tracking the location of employees’ devices and smartphones indoors or even use motion detectors indoors,” he says, “then there must be totally reliable safeguards that this data is not being used for any other purposes.”

Big Brother Is Watching

This warning becomes even more pressing where workers’ indoor location, movement, and behavior are concerned. Cisco’s Spaces cloud platform has digitized 11 billion square feet of enterprise locations, producing 24.7 trillion location data points. The Spaces system is used by more than 8,800 businesses worldwide and is deployed by the likes of InterContinental Hotels Group, WeWork, the NHS Foundation, and San Jose State University, according to Cisco’s website.

While it has applications for retailers, restaurants, hotels, and event venues, many of its features are designed to function in office environments, including meeting room management and occupancy monitoring. Spaces is designed as a comprehensive, all-seeing eye into how employees (and customers and visitors, depending on the setting) and their connected devices, equipment, or “assets” move through physical spaces.

Cisco has achieved this by using its existing wireless infrastructure and combining data from Wi-Fi access points with Bluetooth tracking. Spaces offers employers both real-time views and historical data dashboards. The use cases? Everything from meeting-room scheduling and optimizing cleaning schedules to more invasive dashboards on employees’ entry and exit times, the duration of staff workdays, visit durations by floor, and other “behavior metrics.” This includes those related to performance, a feature pitched at manufacturing sites.

Some of these analytics use aggregate data, but Cracked Labs details how Spaces goes beyond this into personal data, with device usernames and identifiers that make it possible to single out individuals. While the ability to protect privacy by using MAC randomization is there, Cisco emphasizes that this makes indoor movement analytics “unreliable” and other applications impossible—leaving companies to make that decision themselves.

Management even has the ability to send employees nudge-style alerts based on their location in the building. An IBM application, based on Cisco’s underlying technology, offers to spot anomalies in occupancy patterns and send notifications to workers or their managers based on what it finds. Cisco’s Spaces can also incorporate video footage from Cisco security cameras and WebEx video conferencing hardware into the overall system of indoor movement monitoring; another example of function creep from security to employee tracking in the workplace.

“Cisco is simply everywhere. As soon as employers start to repurpose data that is being collected from networking or IT infrastructure, this quickly becomes very dangerous, from my perspective.” says Christl. “With this kind of indoor location tracking technology based on its Wi-Fi networks, I think that a vendor as major as Cisco has a responsibility to ensure it doesn’t suggest or market solutions that are really irresponsible to employers.

“I would consider any productivity and performance tracking very problematic when based on this kind of intrusive behavioral data.” WIRED approached Cisco for comment but didn’t receive a response before publication.

Cisco isn't alone in this, though. Similar to Spaces, Juniper’s Mist offers an indoor tracking system that uses both Wi-Fi networks and Bluetooth beacons to locate people, connected devices, and Bluetooth tagged badges on a real-time map, with the option of up to 13 months of historical data on worker behavior.

Juniper’s offering, for workplaces including offices, hospitals, manufacturing sites, and retailers, is so precise that it is able to provide records of employees’ device names, together with the exact enter and exit times and duration of visits between “zones” in offices—including one labeled “break area/kitchen” in a demo. Yikes.

For each of these systems, a range of different applications is functionally possible, and some which raise labor-law concerns. “A worst-case scenario would be that management wants to fire someone and then starts looking into historical records trying to find some misconduct,” says Christl. "If it’s necessary to investigate employees, then there should be a procedure where, for example, a worker representative is looking into the fine-grained behavioral data together with management. This would be another safeguard to prevent misuse.”

Above and Beyond?

If warehouse-style tracking has the potential for management overkill in office settings, it makes even less sense in service and health care jobs, and American unions are now pushing for more access to data and quotas used in disciplinary action. Elizabeth Anderson, professor of public philosophy at the University of Michigan and the author of Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives, describes how black-box algorithm-driven management and monitoring affects not just the day-to-day of nursing staff but also their sense of work and value.

“Surveillance and this idea of time theft, it’s all connected to this idea of wasting time,” she explains. “Essentially all relational work is considered inefficient. In a memory care unit, for example, the system will say how long to give a patient breakfast, how many minutes to get them dressed, and so forth.

“Maybe an Alzheimer’s patient is frightened, so a nurse has to spend some time calming them down, or perhaps they have lost some ability overnight. That’s not one of the discrete physical tasks that can be measured. Most of the job is helping that person cope with declining faculties; it takes time for that, for people to read your emotions and respond appropriately. What you get is massive moral injury with this notion of efficiency.”

This kind of monitoring extends to service workers, including servers in restaurants and cleaning staff, according to a 2023 Cracked Labs’ report into retail and hospitality. Software developed by Oracle is used to, among other applications, rate and rank servers based on speed, sales, timekeeping around breaks, and how many tips they receive. Similar Oracle software that monitors mobile workers such as housekeepers and cleaners in hotels uses a timer for app-based micromanagement—for instance, “you have two minutes for this room, and there are four tasks.”

As Christl explains, this simply doesn’t work in practice. “People have to struggle to combine what they really do with this kind of rigid, digital system. And it’s not easy to standardize work like talking to patients and other kinds of affective work, like how friendly you are as a waiter. This is a major problem. These systems cannot represent the work that is being done accurately.”

But can knowledge work done in offices ever be effectively measured and assessed either? In an episode of his podcast in January, host Ezra Klein battled his own feelings about having many of his best creative ideas at a café down the street from where he lives rather than in The New York Times’ Manhattan offices. Anderson agrees that creativity often has to find its own path.

“Say there’s a webcam tracking your eyes to make sure you’re looking at the screen,” she says. “We know that daydreaming a little can actually help people come up with creative ideas. Just letting your mind wander is incredibly useful for productivity overall, but that requires some time looking around or out the window. The software connected to your camera is saying you’re off-duty—that you’re wasting time. Nobody’s mind can keep concentrated for the whole work day, but you don’t even want that from a productivity point of view.”

Even for roles where it might make more methodological sense to track discrete physical tasks, there can be negative consequences of nonstop monitoring. Anderson points to a scene in Erik Gandini’s 2023 documentary After Work that shows an Amazon delivery driver who is monitored, via camera, for their driving, delivery quotas, and even getting dinged for using Spotify in the van.

“It’s very tightly regulated and super, super intrusive, and it’s all based on distrust as the starting point,” she says. “What these tech bros don’t understand is that if you install surveillance technology, which is all about distrusting the workers, there is a deep feature of human psychology that is reciprocity. If you don’t trust me, I’m not going to trust you. You think an employee who doesn’t trust the boss is going to be working with the same enthusiasm? I don’t think so.”

Trust Issues

The fixes, then, might be in the leadership itself, not more data dashboards. “Our research shows that excessive monitoring in the workplace can damage trust, have a negative impact on morale, and cause stress and anxiety,” says Hayfa Mohdzaini, senior policy and practice adviser for technology at the CIPD, the UK’s professional body for HR, learning, and development. “Employers might achieve better productivity by investing in line manager training and ensuring employees feel supported with reasonable expectations around office attendance and manageable workloads.”

A 2023 Pew Research study found that 56 percent of US workers were opposed to the use of AI to keep track of when employees were at their desks, and 61 percent were against tracking employees’ movements while they work.

This dropped to just 51 percent of workers who were opposed to recording work done on company computers, through the use of a kind of corporate “spyware” often accepted by staff in the private sector. As Josh Bersin puts it, “Yes, the company can read your emails” with platforms such as Teramind, even including “sentiment analysis” of employee messages.

Snooping on files, emails, and digital chats takes on new significance when it comes to government workers, though. New reporting from WIRED, based on conversations with employees at 13 federal agencies, reveals the extent to Elon Musk’s DOGE team’s surveillance: software including Google’s Gemini AI chatbot, a Dynatrace extension, and security tool Splunk have been added to government computers in recent weeks, and some people have felt they can’t speak freely on recorded and transcribed Microsoft Teams calls. Various agencies already use Everfox software and Dtex’s Intercept system, which generates individual risk scores for workers based on websites and files accessed.

Alongside mass layoffs and furloughs over the past four weeks, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency has also, according to CBS News and NPR reports, gone into multiple agencies in February with the theater and bombast of full X-ray security screenings replacing entry badges at Washington, DC, headquarters. That’s alongside managers telling staff that their logging in and out of devices, swiping in and out of workspaces, and all of their digital work chats will be “closely monitored” going forward.

“Maybe they’re trying to make a big deal out of it to scare people right now,” says Bersin. “The federal government is using back-to-work as an excuse to lay off a bunch of people.”

DOGE staff have reportedly even added keylogger software to government computers to track everything employees type, with staff concerned that anyone using keywords related to progressive thinking or "disloyalty” to Trump could be targeted—not to mention the security risks it introduces for those working on sensitive projects. As one worker told NPR, it feels “Soviet-style” and “Orwellian” with “nonstop monitoring.” Anderson describes the overall DOGE playbook as a series of “deeply intrusive invasions of privacy.”

Alternate Realities

But what protections are out there for employees? Certain states, such as New York and Illinois, do offer strong privacy protections against, for example, unnecessary biometric tracking in the private sector, and California’s Consumer Privacy Act covers workers as well as consumers. Overall, though, the lack of federal-level labor law in this area makes the US something of an alternate reality to what is legal in the UK and Europe.

The Electronic Communications Privacy Act in the US allows employee monitoring for legitimate business reasons and with the worker’s consent. In Europe, Algorithm Watch has made country analyses for workplace surveillance in the UK, Italy, Sweden, and Poland. To take one high-profile example of the stark difference: In early 2024, Serco was ordered by the UK's privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), to stop using face recognition and fingerprint scanning systems, designed by Shopworks, to track the time and attendance of 2,000 staff across 38 leisure centers around the country. This new guidance led to more companies reviewing or cutting the technology altogether, including Virgin Active, which pulled similar biometric employee monitoring systems from 30-plus sites.

Despite a lack of comprehensive privacy rights in the US, though, worker protest, union organizing, and media coverage can provide a firewall against some office surveillance schemes. Unions such as the Service Employees International Union are pushing for laws to protect workers from black-box algorithms dictating the pace of output.

In December, Boeing scrapped a pilot of employee monitoring at offices in Missouri and Washington, which was based on a system of infrared motion sensors and VuSensor cameras installed in ceilings, made by Ohio-based Avuity. The U-turn came after a Boeing employee leaked an internal PowerPoint presentation on the occupancy- and headcount-tracking technology to The Seattle Times. In a matter of weeks, Boeing confirmed that managers would remove all the sensors that had been installed to date.

Under-desk sensors, in particular, have received high-profile backlash, perhaps because they are such an obvious piece of surveillance hardware rather than simply software designed to record work done on company machines. In the fall of 2022, students at Northeastern University hacked and removed under-desk sensors produced by EnOcean, offering “presence detection” and “people counting,” that had been installed in the school’s Interdisciplinary Science & Engineering Complex. The university provost eventually informed students that the department had planned to use the sensors with the Spaceti platform to optimize desk usage.

OccupEye (now owned by FM: Systems), another type of under-desk heat and motion sensor, received a similar reaction from staff at Barclays Bank and The Telegraph newspaper in London, with employees protesting and, in some cases, physically removing the devices that tracked the time they spent away from their desks.

Despite the fallout, Barclays later faced a $1.1 billion fine from the ICO when it was found to have deployed Sapience’s employee monitoring software in its offices, with the ability to single out and track individual employees. Perhaps unsurprisingly in the current climate, that same software company now offers “lightweight device-level technology” to monitor return-to-office policy compliance, with a dashboard breaking employee location down by office versus remote for specific departments and teams.

According to Elizabeth Anderson’s latest book Hijacked, while workplace surveillance culture and the obsession with measuring employee efficiency might feel relatively new, it can actually be traced back to the invention of the “work ethic” by the Puritans in the 16th and 17th centuries.

“They thought you should be working super hard; you shouldn’t be idling around when you should be in work,” she says. “You can see some elements there that can be developed into a pretty hostile stance toward workers. The Puritans were obsessed with not wasting time. It was about gaining assurance of salvation through your behavior. With the Industrial Revolution, the ‘no wasting time’ became a profit-maximizing strategy. Now you’re at work 24/7 because they can get you on email.”

Some key components of the original work ethic, though, have been skewed or lost over time. The Puritans also had strict constraints on what duties employers had toward their workers: paying a living wage and providing safe and healthy working conditions.

“You couldn’t just rule them tyrannically, or so they said. You had to treat them as your fellow Christians, with dignity and respect. In many ways the original work ethic was an ethic which uplifted workers.”

[serpensortiamaxima]

What a delightful drama I've woken up to this morning, eh? I still have thoughts I've not seen being brought up so buckle up.

People aren't upset about the summer update. That whole thing is a symptom, not the cause. What people are upset about is the state of the game itself and how much it is lacking and has been lacking since the beginning.

In the past decade or so, we have gotten more and more accustomed to being sold unfinished games, but with the promise that "don't worry we'll patch it in later updates", and then this never happened. In fact, if Hogwarts Legacy had been an excellent game with its holes patched up and they decided to grant us this free update? The reception would have been, much, much better.

And, excuse the harshness but I do wonder how capitalism-rotten your brain has to be to miss that it's about the principle rather than the update itself. We should not allow corporations to get away with always giving less and less to their clients. Ever. And I can already hear the counter argument of "you can't always get what you want!" and again, that's not my point.

The point is that corporations aim for cost effectiveness. Especially for a free update, they're not going to look at what the community wants really, they will pick the one thing that requires the least time and the least resources because they will have to pay for the time and production cost of a new feature. They know that free updates don't bring in new players. A free update is a way to do community management and get some hype, it might bring in some sales, but never enough to make profit.

Customers aren't upset about the update itself, they're experiencing now the frustration about the game they've always put on the side so far, due to this habit I've mentioned above, of expecting fixes and patches and regular updates from a game, especially one so recently released.

It only takes a quick glance at what's happening with EA in general to see a similar pattern of new content being botched or overpriced, only to receive intense backlash. And that backlash is necessary. Staying complacent and simply accepting your fate as a gamer customer is exactly what corporations are hoping for, because then they don't have to do more. They receive this feedback that it's fine, that they can just do the bare minimum and expect their customer base to eat up the new content in gratefulness. Really? Do we really want to trigger this loop of always getting less and less for something that not only has been bought but that the customers don't even own?

This isn't a Hogwarts Legacy issue, it's an industry wide trend, and we should recognize it as such.

Now, to my last point: mods. I got into modding Skyrim in 2013. Both as an avid user of mods and sometimes to make my own light tweaks for storytelling. For the most part, I'm mostly a mod user and every single time a game I played could be modded, I did so. My current Skyrim save is running on over 200 of them. I only ever play vanilla when I have no other choice. I've quickly touched on the topic yesterday by pointing out how modding requires a healthy and thriving community to work.

There are two main factors to achieve those requirements:

The company behind the game needs to support making mods for their games.

A big and interested customer base

And I guess the hidden third requirement is the coding language and how accessible it is. But I digress. My understanding of the modding community for HL is that it is very small, and therefore limited and that Portkey/Avalanche hasn't provided any resources for modders.

And so, I don't think we'll see a thriving community for HL any time soon, at least not of the comparable kind. And for me, personally, it means that the kind of gamechanging mods I would want to see simply aren't going to happen.

The kind of mods I tend to use are very immersion-focused to allow for a real roleplaying experience, that would include the ability to create new animations, to assign additional dialogues to NPCs, additional routing for NPCs within the map, to allow the player to completely ignore the main quest if they wanted to etc. And I'm afraid that HL is built in such a way that it doesn't have this flexibility even for an experienced mod creator but especially not if the modding community for the game is too small. A lot of these things would require a lot of time, a lot of code, and ton of testing and beta play.

And that doesn't mean that there can't be good mods made, but if the player base wanted to have more mods of a very high quality, we would still need to put pressure on Avalanche to tell them that if they're not ready to provide us with new content, the least they could do is make modding more accessible on their game.