#any kind of trade/industry training

[bandofchimeras]

hey poor kids, unsolicted advice btw: if don't know wtf to do with your life, if you can, go to trade school or technical college. rather than uni. or get an apprenticeship or work in something cool for bit. like a ship. or HVAC. a mechanic shop. you will feel so much better about yourself with a practical skill under your belt, and a career track to make enough money to address your loans. you will also have REAL SKILLS if shit goes down. and more likely access to a union! later, if you wanna go to uni for something more intellectual or specialized, you have a more solid financial foundation, community support, and confidence. universities have incredible opportunities & scholarships but often prey on young undecided teens and/or their parents and willingness to take out gov loans. this ESPECIALLY applies to queer kids & girls - if you think you can't do a trades bc its male dominated, GET SUPPORT & GO FOR IT! you may be being economically stunted by gendered narratives.

[whenmemorydies]

See this?

Carmy is about to pull this shit. He is really about to go in and likely blow up one of the only good relationships he has left from The Beef. After yelling at Tina from the pass. After stressing out everyone and their fucking dog cos he thinks this is acceptable behaviour if its all in service of a star?

This part of 3x03 Doors was such a jagged scene for me because of a few things (including what I've said above). What else got me:

Tina is someone Carmy knows, that Carmy loves (go back to their scene in 1x08 Braciole talking about Mikey. Go back to Carmy's soft "hey Tina you go ahead, you take the night off okay? I got you.");

Tina is an older woman of colour who has made the commitment to skill up so that she can work at The Bear after working at The Beef. Carmy has seen the work she has put in but in this moment, he pays none of it any mind. Imagine being T. Imagine how that would feel. Imagine how it would feel knowing all we know after watching Tina's journey in 3x06 Napkins. The thing is, Carmy doesn't need to know all of T's backstory to know his behaviour is unacceptable. The fact that he knows some of it and proceeds to act in this way is just more evidence of his white privilege showing its ass.

Carmy does not have the self reflexivity here to look at his young, white, male self yelling at this older WOC and see how fucked this is: how he's become another white guy in a litany of white men barking at workers of colour, not seeing Tina for the whole human she is but reducing her to a means of production. The racial dynamics on this show are so evident but don't get talked about nearly enough. I know the writers have crafted those dynamics on purpose because as beautiful a character as Carmy is, he's also a product of his environment as a white chef trained in a highly racially segregated field. This has repercussions for his relationships in season 3, particularly with the BIPOC characters in his life. @november-rising speaks about Carmy's behaviour in relation to Black women's experiences of love and professional recognition devastatingly here. Read their post and the reblogs.

While this shit made me so mad this season, it was also in character - as I've said here - for a white guy trained in fine dining to revert to established patterns of behaviour. Though, I'm gonna need the writers of the show to show US that they did this on purpose and have Carmy ATONE for this shit in season 4. Otherwise, what kind of redemption arc will this man have? This shit is hurtful to the BIPOC characters and BIPOC viewers of this show in no small part because white men the world over have a LONG history of using BIPOC people as a means of production and as a means of production alone. If you're unsure about this, please go look up the Transatlantic slave trade. Please go look up the history of colonial indentured labour. Please go look up The British East India Company. Please look up the forced labour regime in the modern prison industrial complex. Please go read a fucking book. And no I'm not saying Carmy is responsible for the slave trade (LMAO please hold fire if this is where your mind is going). I'm saying BIPOC folks carry with us a long ass history, an intergenerational history of this shit. But guess who else does too? White folks. So don't act like they dont.

This shit is also hurtful because we know how respectful Carmy can be. We’ve seen him in seasons 1 & 2. We know he knows what being a practical ally looks like (even if he may not have the language to name what he was doing) when he made sure to bring the staff of The Beef with him to The Bear and invested in them accordingly. We know he loves and respects them, none more so than Sydney. But there were so many times where he did not act like it in season 3. And when folks have got histories - not just personal but cultural too - as long and as loaded as we ALL do, actions account for a lot. What you do is the shorthand for who you are in the world, whether you like it or not.

Ok back to the scene.

Who comes in and simultaneously saves Carmy's ass and ANOTHER of his relationships? Who protects Tina and keeps the kitchen from exploding AGAIN?

Who supervises her sous chef like a fucking pro?

Sydney. Sydney. Sydney.

And who knows that he's in the presence of greatness but doesn't know how to articulate it cos he's not integrated, not by a fucking long shot. Who needs to attend some anti-racism training along with Al-Anon and therapy (so he can get the benefit of understanding his role in this system and get a better understanding of his own mind)?

Yeah you Carmen, you.

Better get on that shit before you lose the woman who is the beat to your whole heart another means of production to a chef who's going to pay her better, give Syd insurance from the jump and total creative control. Just saying.

[i-am-church-the-cat]

you want 917 words on clones and Logan Sargeant? yes you do, keep reading

--

Athletes are freaks of nature. Not everyone can be an athlete, even if they have the drive, passion, and opportunity. You can be too tall for a sport, too short, you shoulders could be too wide, your legs too long. There are a hundred and one genetic variations that can keep someone in competing professionally within the rules of athletics.

So why waste your time on chance? Why put all that money and time in if you can't be completely sure that it's going to be worth it? Wouldn't it be easier to just remove the unknown variable altogether? That way we can truly test how far the human body is able to go.

But when does it stop being human? When you can hand-select the color of a baby's eyes? When you pump the fetus full of drugs? How about when you grow it in a lab? Is it still human then?

Logan Hunter Sargeant was made for fighting. Sargeant Trading payed billions of dollars to create the perfect All-American soldier, the kind you'd find on posters. He was bred for speed, for strength, for durability. He was programmed to follow orders even if it limited his ability to think strategically. Logan was made to be the perfect weapon for the U.S. Government, and in exchange, gain Sargeant Trading back a hundred-fold what they shelled out for him.

But something when wrong in that lab, is what Logan's been told. That while the scientists could make his body perfect for fighting, they couldn't make Logan a perfect fighter. Because the problem with clones, at the end of the day, is that they're still fucking people. And people have feelings.

Weapons aren't supposed to have feelings.

So Logan was a failure. Is a failure, as his uncle likes to remind him. No, not his uncle, Harry Sargeant III has no relation to Logan, whose DNA was cultivated from a variety of donors. Just because Daniel Sargeant took a failed experiment in and raised him alongside his own son, doesn't mean Logan is a Sargeant where it matters.

But what does a weapon that isn't capable of being a weapon supposed to do? Logan can't escape the urge to push his body to its limits, can't ignore the pull towards things that get his adrenaline pumping. His body craves the thrill like an addict, not because of any choices that he made, but because his creators put him together that way.

Racing is the only thing he's ever done that soothed that itch. That kept him from unleashing all his pent up energy as violent outbursts that made him hate himself and scared of his own body. Being in a plane, in a boat, in a four-wheel kart spinning around the edges of a racetrack kept all his atoms soundly inside his body.

Logan couldn't be a soldier, but his body was made for being pushed to his limits. Racing was the only thing that met his threshold for physical activity. Unlike the other kids who had to train their bodies for the pull of gravity, Logan's body was made for it.

Sometimes it felt a little too perfect. Like someone had messed up and made him a racing clone instead of a fighting one. And other times - usually when he was slamming into some barriers and getting the wind knocked out of him - he knew it was all just a happy accident.

The FIA doesn't have any rules restricting clones from competing. Logan's pretty sure that's because no one really knows they exist. They're something from science fiction, maybe some abstract future concept, not a fledgling industry for the rich and ethically defunct. Logan can't imagine ever telling anyone what he is. The thought that someone might think he's a dangerous freak is second to the possibility that someone might think he was cheating, that he wasn't working just as hard as everyone else. Yeah, he lucked out by having a hand-coded body type and rich pseudo-parents, but that can be said for most of the kids on the Formula track.

When Logan wins the World Karting Championship, he knows this is more than just science, nothing like destiny. This was his choice from start to finish.

And he was certainly going to finish it now. He thinks about the sprouts of conversations surroundings clones in professional sports and has to laugh at the thought. If anyone wants to argue that being made for athleticism gave an inherent advantage to a person, they can just point them Logan's way. Billions of dollars went into him. He might have the speed and the strength and the dexterity, but he's a shit fighter and now, a shit racer, too.

Being made in a lab didn't help him when his car was fighting him every step of the way. It didn't help him retain information faster or track the most efficient route around the track. It just made him strong enough to take a hit. And the last two years have proved it. If there's anyone that could be kicked while they were down, it was Logan Sargeant.

He isn't sure what he would do with himself if he doesn't have racing. His body was made to fight but his heart couldn't handle it. His heart yearned to race but his brain couldn't handle it.

He was a twice-failed epitome of human strength. He was made in a lab somewhere. And it didn't fucking matter at all.

[hellkitepriest]

ee @ rough trade nottingham

finally getting to my little roundup several days later, hello. i must say going to nottingham was a real Choice for @shallowtboy and i, because it is not actually that convenient and close like liverpool is, and i mostly justified it with “well i went there to see dutch uncles in december so it’d be rude not to”. but we woke up and got on our stupid early train regardless.

went to an art gallery beforehand, found a copy of mark fisher’s capitalist realism in the gift shop — alex niven first read capitalist realism in january 2010, following a “head-on collision with the music industry”, did you know. saw a very cute pin of kraftwerk-style cats and nearly cried also.

when we queued up outside the venue (venue! it was Just A Shop) there were a good few people there already and we were glad we got down there when we did. doors were meant to be at 12, but they ended up letting us in half an hour later for some reason, which meant by the time we got in we had descended into some cold-induced madness that manifested in us humming the mad stone and bobbing up and down oompa loompa-style to keep warm for just. SO long. this bit would not cease.

we got in, and we weren’t Right at the front but we were close enough, and there was no barrier aside from the flightcases dumped on the ground, and i had to prepare myself for being waaay too close to jonathan higgs. which i WAS. i believe it was albie on here who said that if you’re in the first two rows at any of these shows you will end up making eye contact with this man, and yeah, that only gets truer if he already sorta knows who you are. EMBARRASSING.

it was a good show — not as rowdy and sweaty as liverpool, but what can you expect from a show at midday on a weekday, really. they played teletype at this one(!!! it’s not on my Playlist for nothing), and pizza boy, and i had a bottle of pepsi in my bag and turned to shallowtboy and took a big swig of it at the right moment because really i come to these gigs to have my own incomprehensible kind of fun with my best friend, and it was Funny. only then in the next chorus jon sang “you are afraid / that you’re a pepsi boy” which i did not really register until After, when shallowtboy pointed it out, and i had to contend with the fact jonathan higgs may well have seen me drinking my pepsi (i was about six feet away from him, he probably did,) and decided to make a thing of it. good god. gender win 🤷‍♂️

after the show it was signing time and we all verrry slowly shuffled out into a sort of queue. i took a photo of alex’s pedalboard on the way out, and said “i don’t know why i’m doing this, it’s not as if i know what any of these do”, and their guitar tech (who i have been mentally referring to as Clayton for various reasons, but i believe is actually called joe) overheard and went “neither do i, hah” and then i started chatting to him about what a shame it was that alex didn’t bring his little modular setup on tour this time round, and he told me all about pete’s ableton routing, and it was VERY FUN thank you claytonjoe for engaging with me. pls don’t find out i’m a massive gear poser.

SPEAKING OF— actual signing time. my rubiks cube was in my bag and i was NOT going to leave without it being signed. i managed to somehow barely interact with jon (cursing myself forever that i did not get to ask about the pepsi incident) but they all seemed fairly unsurprised by being asked to sign a rubiks cube, and all wrote their signatures very neatly in one of the little squares, minus jeremy for some reason. and Then.

i was wearing this shirt with the names of two modular synth brands smushed together, based on ONE decade-old post from this one forum that i had decided was the funniest thing in the world, yet another incomprehensible bit i am doing with myself, really, only turns out it’s the modular synth brands alex robertshaw uses the most. it came up on that podcast he did the other day. it was a real “oh for fucks sake” moment. so i showed him my shirt, and told him as much, and i expected there to be QUESTIONS about why the hell this shirt would exist, but he just thought it was great. (jeremy also approved, and said he saw me wearing it in liverpool. i did not interact with jeremy in liverpool. i was not even standing NEAR jeremy in liverpool.) alex then asked if he could take a photo to send to the guy he did the podcast with. YEAH OKAY SURE WHY WOULDN’T THIS NONSENSE BE HAPPENING TO ME. but he didn’t have his phone with him, i guess?? so he had to borrow mike’s phone???? so there’s a picture of me on mike spearman’s phone, i guess. hope the synth podcast guy did see it in the end.

writing this all out really does make it sound about twenty times more bizarre than it felt at the time. i love this ridiculous weirdo band. /\

[sepdet]

Candidates' Different Views on Labor Day

Their contrasting social media posts, with bonus federal law violation and (I think?) AI generated fake workers from Trump, are illuminating:

Contrast that with Trump and Musk joking about firing striking workers a few weeks ago:

Under Biden, Harris chaired Biden's pro-labor task force assigned to "promote [Biden's] policy for worker power, worker organizing, and collective bargaining." Here is the plan they created with specific proposals.

As I've noted, my intro to Harris was at a 2017 rally for the ACA organized by SEIU Local 721. As VP, she's done a lot of union outreach, like this speech celebrating collective bargaining to honor the Culinary Workers Union in Las Vegas.

---

Meanwhile, Trump's Labor Day email to his followers is a shill for illegal merch:

US Public Law 94-344, the Federal Flag Code: "Out of respect for the US flag, never

place anything on the flag, including letters, insignia, or designs of any kind. [...]

Use the flag for advertising or promotional purposes."

The Flag Code was a big deal in the 80s, Trump's favorite decade. Congress passed a law with a big fine and/or jail time for knowingly violating it. The Supreme Court rightly struck down those penalties as a violation of free speech, but the code remains.

Trump followed this email with Labor Day posts on his social media platform:

Happy Labor Day to all of our American Workers who represent the Shining Example of Hard Work and Ingenuity. Under Comrade Kamala Harris, all Americans are suffering during this Holiday weekend - High Gas Prices, Transportation Costs are up, and Grocery Prices are through the roof. We can’t keep living under this weak and failed “Leadership.”….

Workers an afterthought. Every time he calls Kamala "Comrade," I remember Russian news btoadcasts calling him "Comrade Trump."

….In my First Term, we achieved Major Successes to protect American Workers by negotiating Free and Fair Trade Deals, passing the USMCA (U.S./Mexico/Canada), and giving Businesses and their Workers the tools to thrive. We also invested heavily in Education and Job Training programs for those who wish to expand upon their abilities, and be successful in an Industry that they love. We were an Economic Powerhouse, all because of the American Worker! But Kamala and Biden have undone all of that. When I return to the White House, we will continue upon our Successes by creating an Environment that ensures ALL Workers, and Businesses, have the opportunity to prosper and achieve their American Dream. We will, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

Dismantling Obama's trade deals and putting in his own which raised tarriffs and prices and killed supply chains, making shit up, and taking credit for Biden's job training programs, par for the course. Labor Day? All about ME ME ME.

Someone on the Trump campaign realized that he probably needed a picture of himself with workers, since Kamala had posted one shaking hands with them.

However, there's something off about this image posted to his social media site at 5PM:

The suit and tie are so unnaturally smooth, I did a reverse image search to see if it was a real photo. Zero Results. What are the chances? Any photo like this should already be on the web. And there's what look to be AI artifacts (Eg guy on left missing half of vest, fragments of orange stripes).

TL;DR: I don't think he found a group of workers or cosplayers to loom in front of; I think he's embraced the AI generated crowds he falsely accused Harris of using.

[mesetacadre]

In view of this, the Party considered it necessary to help the regenerated nations of our country to rise to their feet and attain their full stature, to revive and develop their national cultures, widely to develop schools, theatres and other cultural institutions functioning in the native languages, to nationalise—that is, to staff with members of the given nation—the Party, trade-union, co-operative, state and economic apparatuses, to train their own, national, Party and Soviet cadres, and to curb all elements—who are, indeed, few in number—that try to hinder this policy of the Party.

This means that the Party supports, and will continue to support, the development and flourishing of the national cultures of the peoples of our country, that it will encourage the strengthening of our new, socialist nations, that it takes this matter under its protection and guardianship against anti-Leninist elements of any kind.

It is apparent from your letters that you do not approve this policy of our Party. That is because, firstly, you confuse the new, socialist nations with the old, bourgeois nations and do not understand that the national cultures of our new, Soviet nations are in content socialist cultures. Secondly, it is because—you will excuse my bluntness—you have a very poor grasp of Leninism and are badly at sea on the national question.

Consider, by way of example, the following elementary matter. We all say that a cultural revolution is needed in our country. If we mean this seriously and are not merely indulging in idle chatter, then we must take at least the first step in this direction: namely, we must make primary education, and later secondary education, compulsory for all citizens of the country, irrespective of their nationality. It is obvious that without this no cultural development whatever, let alone the so-called cultural revolution, will be possible in our country. More, without this there will be neither any real progress of our industry and agriculture, nor any reliable defence of our country.

But how is this to be done, bearing in mind that the percentage of illiteracy in our country is still very high, that in a number of nations of our country there are 80-90 per cent of illiterates?

What is needed is to cover the country with an extensive network of schools functioning in the native languages, and to supply them with staffs of teachers who know the native languages.

What is needed is to nationalise—that is, to staff with members of the given nation—all the administrative apparatus, from Party and trade-union to state and economic.

What is needed is widely to develop the press, the theatre, the cinema and other cultural institutions functioning in the native languages.

Why in the native languages?—it may be asked. Because only in their native, national languages can the vast masses of the people be successful in cultural, political and economic development.

In view of all that has been said, I think it should not he so difficult to understand that Leninists cannot pursue any other policy on the national question than the one which is now being pursued in our country— provided, of course, they want to remain Leninists.

Is not that so?

Well, then let us leave it at that. I think I have answered all your questions and doubts.

With communist greetings,

J. Stalin

The National Question and Leninism. J. V. Stalin, 1929

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

For many cooks, waiters and bartenders, it is an annoying entrance fee to the food-service business: Before starting a new job, they pay around $15 to a company called ServSafe for an online class in food safety.

That course is basic, with lessons like “bathe daily” and “strawberries aren’t supposed to be white and fuzzy, that’s mold.” In four of the largest states, this kind of training is required by law, and it is taken by workers nationwide.

But in taking the class, the workers — largely unbeknown to them — are also helping to fund a nationwide lobbying campaign to keep their own wages from increasing.

The company they are paying, ServSafe, doubles as a fund-raising arm of the National Restaurant Association — the largest lobbying group for the food-service industry, claiming to represent more than 500,000 restaurant businesses. The association has spent decades fighting increases to the minimum wage at the federal and state levels, as well as the subminimum wage paid to tipped workers like waiters.

The federal minimum wage has risen just once since 1996, to $7.25 from $5.15, while the minimum hourly wage for tipped workers has been $2.13 since 1991. Minimums are higher in many states, but still below what labor groups consider a living wage.

For years, the restaurant association and its affiliates have used ServSafe to create an arrangement with few parallels in Washington, where labor unwittingly helps to pay for management’s lobbying. First, in 2007, the restaurant owners took control of a training business. Then they helped lobby states to mandate the kind of training they already provided — producing a flood of paying customers.

More than 3.6 million workers have taken this training, providing about $25 million in revenue to the restaurant industry’s lobbying arm since 2010. That was more than the National Restaurant Association spent on lobbying in the same period, according to filings with the Internal Revenue Service.

That $25 million represented about 2% of the National Restaurant Association’s total revenues over that same period, but more than half of the amount its members paid in dues. Most industry groups are much more reliant on big-dollar donors or membership support to meet their expenses. Most of the association’s revenues come from trade shows and other classes.

Tax-law experts say this arrangement, which has helped fuel a resurgence in the political influence of restaurants, appears legal.

But activists for raising minimum wages — and even some restaurant owners — say the arrangement is hidden from the workers it relies on.

“I’m sitting up here working hard, paying this money so that I can work this job, so I can provide for my family,” said Mysheka Ronquillo, 40, a line cook who works at a Carl’s Jr. hamburger restaurant and at a private school cafeteria in Westchester, Calif. “And I’m giving y’all money so y’all can go against me?”

Ms. Ronquillo is also a labor organizer in California. She said that she had taken the class every three years, as required, and that she never knew ServSafe funded the other side of that fight.

As workers have become more aware of how their payments to ServSafe are used, something of a backlash is developing. Looking ahead to coming battles over minimum wages in as many as nine states run by Democrats, including New York, Saru Jayaraman of the labor-advocacy group One Fair Wage said she was encouraging workers to avoid ServSafe.

“We’ll be telling them to use any possible alternatives,” Ms. Jayaraman said.

The kind of class that these workers pay for, called “food handler” training, is offered by ServSafe or its affiliates in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. But an online database maintained by the National Restaurant Association show the vast majority of its classes are taken in four large states where food-handler classes are mandatory for most workers: Texas, California, Illinois and Florida.

Other companies also offer this training. But restaurant industry veterans say that ServSafe is the dominant force in the market — to the point that some restaurant owners said they did not realize there were alternatives.

“ServSafe is very much the Kleenex” of the industry — a brand that defines the business, said Nick Eastwood, who runs a competitor called Always Food Safe. “We believe they’ve got at least 70%+ of the market. Maybe higher.”

The president of the National Restaurant Association, Michelle Korsmo, declined to be interviewed. In a written statement, she said the group had sought to protect both public health and the financial health of the industry.

“The association’s advocacy work keeps restaurants open; it keeps workers employed, it finds pathways for worker opportunity, and it keeps our communities healthy,” Ms. Korsmo wrote. Her group declined to say how much of the training market it captures.

As money flowed in from the National Restaurant Association’s training programs, its overall spending on politics and lobbying more than doubled from 2007 to 2021, tax filings show. The national association donated to Democrats, Republicans and conservative-leaning think tanks, and sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to state restaurant associations to beef up their lobbying.

During the Clinton and Obama administrations, the association was a major force in limiting employer-provided health care benefits. And though pressure from liberal groups has grown and workers’ wages have fallen for decades when adjusted for inflation, the group helped assemble enough bipartisan opposition to scuttle a bill in 2021 to raise the federal minimum wage for all workers to $15 per hour over five years.

The association had also won a series of battles over state-level wage minimums, though its fortunes reversed last year. Both the District of Columbia and Michigan moved to eliminate the “tip credit” system — where restaurants are allowed to pay waiters a salary below the minimum wage, on the expectation that tips from customers will make up the rest. That was the first time any state had eliminated the tip-credit system in more than 10 years.

Legally, the National Restaurant Association and its state-level affiliates are a species of nonprofit called a “business league,” with more freedom to lobby than a traditional charity.

Since the 1960s, their lobbying has focused heavily on the minimum wage — arguing that labor-intensive operations like restaurants, which employ more workers at or near the minimum wage than any other industry, could be put out of business by any significant increase in employee costs.

Fifteen years ago, they had just lost a battle in that fight.

Over the association’s objections, Congress had raised the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour. Former board members said they were searching for a new source of revenue — without asking members to pay more in dues.

“That’s when the decision was contemplated, of buying the ServSafe program,” said Burton “Skip” Sack, a former chairman of the association’s board. “Because it was profitable.”

At the time, the ServSafe program was run by a charity affiliated with the restaurant association. The association bought the operation, transforming it into an indirect fund-raising vehicle.

After that, state restaurant associations in California, Texas and Illinois lobbied for changes in state law.

Previously, those states had required food-safety training for restaurant managers, which typically was paid for by restaurants themselves. After the association’s takeover of ServSafe, lobbying records show, the state affiliates pushed for a broader and less-common type of mandate, covering all food “handlers” like cooks, waiters, bartenders and those who bus tables.

The three state legislatures agreed, in lopsided votes.

In written statements, the state restaurant associations said they were not trying to raise money. Instead, they said they worked with other groups seeking to reduce food-borne disease.

“This law was happening with or without our participation in the process,” said the president of the California Restaurant Association, Jot Condie. California legislative records show his association was the sponsor of the bill that imposed the mandate.

ServSafe soon had waves of new customers, which in turn generated more money for the association and its lobbying efforts. Today, Florida, California, Texas, Illinois and Utah all have similar requirements. John Bluemke, a senior vice president for sales at ServSafe from 2002 to 2010, said there was little need to pursue mandates in smaller states: “Once you did the big states, who cares about Nebraska?”

“If you’ve got a million people going through that thing, do the math,” Mr. Bluemke said. The National Restaurant Association does not release figures about the cost of offering food-handler classes, but Mr. Bluemke said that — because they are generally offered online — the costs are low and the profits high.

“We always said the first course costs you a million dollars,” Mr. Bluemke said, for making the video. “And the rest are free.”

When managers take mandatory training, restaurant veterans say, the employer usually pays. But state websites say that restaurant employees should expect to pay for these classes themselves, and restaurant workers interviewed by The New York Times said that was their experience.

The restaurant association notes that some employers have covered the costs of getting certified and that employees are given lower rates in certain circumstances. So not all 3.6 million workers paid $15 each.

“The N.R.A. is different from most traditional trade associations in our business model,” Dawn Sweeney, the National Restaurant Association’s chief executive at the time, wrote to members in 2014 — reminding them of what a good deal they had.

Business leagues, which are tax-exempt, are generally allowed to run a for-profit business, as long as it advances the common interest of their broader trade. The National Restaurant Association contends that its business cleanly fits this standard.

“The rules the I.R.S. has passed are not always clear as to what is and is not allowed,” said Anna Massoglia, an investigations manager at OpenSecrets, a nonpartisan group that tracks the flow of money in politics. “This makes it easier for groups to exploit that lack of clarity. I’m not familiar with another group that has done it to this scale.”

The Internal Revenue Service declined to comment, citing taxpayer-privacy rules.

For restaurant workers, there is little clue that money paid to ServSafe supports lobbying — much less lobbying that tries to keep workers’ pay low. The only hint is a line on ServSafe’s website, saying it “reinvests proceeds from programs back into the industry.”

Even some members of the restaurant association — the beneficiaries of this arrangement — said they did not know how it worked.

Johnny Martinez, a Georgia restaurateur, said he supports a $15 minimum wage and pays at least that much in a state where it is still $7.25 per hour. And he describes his association membership as “the price of entry” for navigating the industry, “even though I disagree with them on a lot of things.”

But he expressed frustration upon discovering the connections between ServSafe and lobbying efforts, saying “it feels very wrong” to him.

“This is a certification that’s also wrapped up inside of a lobbyist,” Mr. Martinez said. “It is weird that the tests that they require the workers to pay for are being run by the same company that’s fighting to make sure those people don’t make more money.”

[venusstadt]

If you haven’t noticed already or are new to the world of art history and analysis (which, in that case, welcome!), aesthetics—whether they be architectural, industrial, sartorial, or music-related—are often inspired by the zeitgeist in which they arose. 

Take the visual hallmarks of the 1980s in the west: gaudy maximalist fashion and the Memphis interior design style. Both can be attributed to the “greed is good” ethos of the era, because the dominant perception was that the economy was booming and life was good. This perception inspired people to decorate themselves or their homes in a more maximalist manner.

Meanwhile, people became more aware of the excess of the 80s in the 90s, which shifted the aesthetics. More industrial designers and artists embraced minimalism, while regular people branched out into different modes of expression, the biggest example being Gen X teens and young adults in Seattle who shunned consumerism and embraced a sartorial aesthetic more rooted in the ethos of the working class.

But the 90s had a lot more than minimalism and a dislike of the 80s going for it. It’s specifically remembered as a time of prosperity and world peace, and many people at the time believed that things would only get better as societies and cultures increasingly became interconnected due to free trade and technology. This attitude was reflected in the aesthetic sensibilities of the decade as well, from things like world-inspired clothing and cafes to futuristic music videos.

Hi, and welcome to Venusstadt. I’m Jiana. This is part one of a two part series on globalism and its aesthetics throughout the 90s. 

Now, you might ask: why would you split this into two parts instead of doing one long deep dive as is en vogue nowadays? The answer is simple: I really don’t feel like editing a long video! I just can’t do it! 

Okay, on to the actual content. 

The 90s: America’s New Gilded Age

As far as globalization goes, there are many, many definitions that theorists can’t seem to agree upon. So I’m going with Manfred B. Steger’s concise definition of globalization as “the expansion and intensification of social relations and consciousness across world-time and world-space” (15).

Most people who discuss and critique globalization will point out that this phenomenon really isn’t unique to the late 20th century. There have always been interactions between people and cultures spread across vast swathes of geography (for example—the Silk Road, the Roman Empire, etc.); and technological advancement, such as in the form of the telegraph and the radio or trains, has always been a catalyst for these wanted or unwanted interactions (Steger 32-33).

One difference between the globalization of the 90s and the previous examples is the OBVIOUS jump in technology that had taken place. Like, sure, telegraphs are cool, but the Internet was and remains unmatched in its ability to connect people in totally different parts of the world.

ANOTHER difference is the concept of Western democracy. For a good forty-five years in the 20th century, the world was living under the shadow of the Cold War, the standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States that involved nuclear weapons and mutually assured death for everybody involved (History.com Editors).

Things finally changed between the late 80s and early 90s. The Soviet Union dissolved officially in 1991, but it was the fall of the Berlin Wall as part of the Revolutions of 1989 that really got that ball rolling (History.com Editors).

The fall of the Soviet Union left the U.S. as the world’s primary superpower (Bremmer) and led scholar Francis Fukuyama to declare the “end of history” (Fukuyama 3).

Basically, to Fukuyama, Western liberal democracy and capitalism were the end-all-be-all of humanity’s ideological evolution (Fukuyama 3), and things really couldn’t get any better than that afterward (Farago).

This concept was heavily criticized at the time and remains kind of odd and Western-centric in general. Nonetheless, there was a restlessness in the air as the West looked towards a future without its Big Bad.

Then came the Gulf War, which, thanks to advancements in media technology, was broadcasted directly into the living rooms of average people, allowing the U.S. government to show off the weapons they had developed during the Cold War in front of a live audience of millions (Brockmann 154; Lissner).

The spectacle of this digital war, the “targets, flashes, bulls-eye missiles taking off, homing in, exploding, all in the blue-ish glimmer of video light” (Brockmann 151), helped the U.S. government and military rid themselves of so-called Vietnam syndrome (Dionne) and helped the Western world feel like they were doing pretty alright.

While the 1980s tends to suck up all the attention for being a prosperous time thanks to its opulence, Weisburg notes that, despite the recession at the beginning of the decade, the United States’ poverty rate was lower throughout the Clinton-led 1990s than the Reagan-led 1980s (Weisberg).

There was also talk of a “New Economy,” in which white collar serviced-based jobs replaced traditional blue-collar industries (Alexander). 

Generation X, despite being lambasted by those before them as aimless, passive, “overly sensitive at best and lazy at worst” (Gross and Scott), quickly adapted to the loss of factory jobs to outsourcing, since they were most college-educated generation in U.S. history up to that point (Gross and Scott).

Combined with a falling incarceration rate, there was the general idea that things were getting better in one way or another (Weisburg).

This sense of prosperity, technological progress, and interconnectedness did wonders to boost what scholar Steger calls the global imaginary, “people’s growing consciousness of belonging to a global community” (10).

There was a fear—or hope, if you were someone like Fukuyama—that globalization would lead to “sameness” and the endless spread of Western culture (Steger 75).

Meanwhile, others saw the Internet as the “harbinger of a homogenized ‘technoculture’” (Steger 75).

As we know many years later, these fears or hopes did not materialize, and we experienced more of a hybridization between cultures than any total takeover (Steger 6), which is what brings us to the topic of global aesthetics.

Going Global

This next section comes courtesy of Evan Collins, Froyo Tam, and the rest of the curators and archivists over at Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute (CARI). Without their archival work, this video would’ve never been made.

For aesthetics that arose from the global imaginary, there are two camps they fall into: the “global village” aesthetics and the aesthetics of “eternity,” which, again, will be covered in the next part. 

The “Global Village”

The Global Village aesthetic in this video is anything inspired by the interconnectivity that arose because of technology. These, as you will see, focus more on multiculturalism, cultural exchange, and notions of world peace rather than focusing on the actual technology as the next section of aesthetics do.

This section can further be split into two subsections: non-Western and Western.

Also note that CARI goes more in-depth on the individual aesthetics, but for ease of analysis I’m grouping them all together.

One important thing to note here is that Gen. X, the group of people who were going into the workforce and thus being marketed to, were notable at the time for being more likely to hold off on careers to travel, specifically to non-Western countries like Thailand and India and Tanzania, unlike previous generations who would just go to Europe (Gross and Scott).

David Gross and Sophfronia Scott who wrote the TIME article that defined Gen X notes that this was a way for them to differentiate themselves from the “self-centered, fickle, and impractical” Baby Boomers by gaining “cultural enrichment” through “[escaping] from Western society rather than [seeking] further refinement to smooth their entry into society” (Gross and Scott).

Gen X was also viewed as being more open to different cultures thanks to their supposed “lack of original youth culture” (Gross and Scott).

That last claim would be disproven in the next few years as things such as grunge and the Riot Grrrl movement appeared, but the point is that Gen X was super into multiculturalism, which was another reason the Global Village aesthetics were a big deal back then. 

With these aesthetics, most of the motifs are pulled from different time periods: hieroglyphics, maps, compasses, simplistic humanoid figures, etc.

For the non-Western aesthetics, Western conceptions of the ‘East’ (aka Orientalism) are used most often, but there are also some hints of indigenous and African cultural motifs.

Before diving any deeper, let’s address the most obvious thing: a lot of this was cultural appropriation.

I think we’ve heard this term enough times to know why it’s bad, but an example from the 90s that comes to mind is within the world music genre, which as a whole just denotes any non-Western music style.

The French band Deep Forest, who are often dubbed ethnic electronica, had a song called “Sweet Lullaby” that used a recording of a woman from the Solomon Islands without permission from the woman or the ethnomusicologist who recorded it in the 1970s (Feld).

Deep Forest claimed their goal was a general desire to foster “the respect of this tradition which humanity should cherish as a treasure which marries world harmony” (Feld 155). Neither the ethnomusicologist nor the woman whose voice was used received a penny from the song, which would become a hit (Feld 157).

It’s worth mentioning that throughout history, textiles and art were often the first thing to be exchanged when new trade routes became available (Pozzo 3). But the cultural exchange that occurred through the Silk Road or even in the Roman Empire happened in a pre-white supremacist context and power dynamic that differed from the 90s, when a new sort of Western imperialism had begun thanks to outsourcing to ‘Third World’ countries and otherwise uninhibited neoliberal free trade (Collins, “Global Village Coffeehouse”). As Lucy Mulvaney mentions:

“Cultural appropriation cannot be divorced from the prevalent issues of institutional racism and discrimination. […] You can’t play dress-up with the reality of other people’s lives or what they consider sacred” (Pozzo 7).

Deep Forest’s debacle with “Sweet Lullaby” is also an example of the salvage paradigm. The term is used by anthropologists to critique the idea that non-Western people are too weak to preserve their own cultures from the sweeping changes of modernism (Gurney). Adding to that, Nicole Bennett, in her critique of Jean Paul Gaultier’s 1994 Global Village Chic collection, uses the term to refer to the idea that “most non-Western people are [perceived as] marginal to the advancing world system” (Bennett 35), thus rendering their aesthetics as “of the past” rather than able to continue fluidly into the present and future.

All the non-Western global village aesthetics reinforced the idea that what is non-Western is non-normative and of the past while that which is Western is normal and current (Bennett 29). Here, Western culture is the default and a symbol of modernity and advancing civilization, while non-Western cultures are exotified for consumption and rendered endangered relics, even though actual people were still taking part in the visual aesthetics of their cultures. As David Byrne said of the label ‘world music’ in a 1999 New York Times article:

“It’s a none too subtle way of reasserting the hegemony of Western pop culture. It ghettoizes most of the world’s music. A bold and audacious move, White man!” (Byrne)

Despite the professed good intentions behind these displays of cultural plurality, they did little to improve perceptions of the cultures they displayed, and instead reinforced them as pre-modern and marginal. Bell Hooks in 1992 wrote that constructions of otherness such as these just reinforce inequality and social hierarchy (Bennett 36), saying that “the hope is that the desires for the ‘primitive’ or fantasies about the Other” can perpetuate “the idea that ‘there is pleasure to be found in the acknowledgement and enjoyment of racial difference” without the effort to challenge these structures (Bennett 36).

Basically, people felt like it was enough to feel enriched by this exposure to different cultures and never felt the need to question the Western hegemony or white supremacy that caused these cultural displays to be less common.

Which brings us to the graphic and interior design aesthetics, specifically Global Village Coffeehouse. This aesthetic also played up the idea of the non-Western as pre-modern by focusing on natural motifs and “primitive” imagery with its amalgamation of various ancient cultures from Egyptian to Aztec to, in some places, Greek (Collins, “Global Village Coffeehouse Aesthetic”).

Interestingly, as Evan Collins who coined the term points out, the Global Village Coffeehouse aesthetic also contains a lot of colonialist imagery a la the Age of Discovery, through things such as “Mercator globes, compasses, rigged ships, maritime wheels, [and] heraldic moons and suns” (Collins, “Global Village Coffeehouse Aesthetic”). Juxtaposed with the non-Western motifs, including these symbols is startling, since it could be a nod to the perceived evolution of Western society and thus an indirect reference to the snuffing of these non-Western cultures.

Then we have the Western global aesthetics, all of which are reflections of a Western past.

Evan Collins identifies about three which were still en vogue around the 90s: Neoclassical Postmodernism, Renaissance Revival, and two others that are based on the Mediterranean and the Age of Discovery.

Neoclassical aesthetics, which are based on Greco-Roman art and architecture, have always been popular and remain the most popular style of architecture throughout the Western world. Greek philosophy and the Roman empire are considered the foundations of Western civilization by many (King 3). Today you most often see this architectural style on things like museums or state buildings because of the ethos of stateliness or officiality it imparts.

Neoclassical Postmodernism as presented by Evan Collins popped up in the late 1970s. The reason it came about again in the 1970s seems to be a reaction to Modernist architecture after World War II, which architect Donald McMorran referred to as a “dictatorship of taste” (Denison). I’ll get into the exact implications of this later, but just know it’s an early example of that whole weird REJECT MODERNITY / EMBRACE TRADITION thing that conservative incels like to use.

At any rate, this became popular again when a conservative movement was building in the late 70s, went through the 80s when the conservative movement was at its peak, and lasted until at least the early 90s in this iteration. As you can see, some of these pictures are pretty ironic; you have these relics of the supposed great Western past juxtaposed with these hyper-consumerist images of, like, gift shops. .

Again, the Roman Empire was proto-globalist: it included many cultures, created roads for travel and communication, and helped lead to a relatively brief period of peace which enabled population growth, even more trade, and the eventual spread of Christianity (Fernandes)—which, again, makes it an important Western cornerstone.

Neoclassical PoMo likely isn’t a direct response to 90s multiculturalism considering how it predates the 90s, but it would be a mistake I feel to ignore the irony of these existing at the same time.

Yes, all these aesthetics are alike in that they reference a bygone temporal space, but ancient Greco-Roman culture and aesthetics have been used to delegitimize those of non-Western cultures since late 18th and 19th centuries (King 3). Misreadings of Greco-Roman concepts of the Other—they did not know whiteness and anyone who wasn’t Greek (for the Greek empire) or Roman (for the Roman empire) was a barbarian—informed a lot of race theory  during and after the Age of Discovery (King 10). This would also shape Western constructions of modernity, in that race theorists justified colonialism and slavery as a good thing because it helped spread “superior Western values” to people deemed of a lower status (King 15). 

Remember these concepts, because they’re important for what’s coming up. 

Semi-Conclusion  

BUT this is where I’ll be splitting the video. The next part, of course, will cover the aesthetics that are more aligned with the technological advancements of the 90s, most notably Y2K. 

Until then, feel free to like this video and be sure to hit the subscribe button to be notified when the next part drops. I also make short-form videos on TikTok about women in arts, fashion, and culture. Feel free to also follow me on Twitter, where I reblog and post fun things. Thanks for watching! 

•••

SOURCES

Alexander, Charles P. “The New Economy.” Time, 30 May 1983, https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,926013-10,00.html. Accessed 7 April 2023.

Bennett, Nicole. “Global Village Chic: ‘Multicultural Fashion’ and the Commodification of Pluralism.” Alternate Routes: A Journal of Critical Social Research, vol. 14, 1997, pp. 21-44.

Bremmer, Ian. “These are the 5 Reasons Why the U.S. Remains the World’s Only Superpower.” Time, 28 May 2015, https://time.com/3899972/us-superpower-status-military/. Accessed 26 April 2023. 

Brockmann, Stephen. “The Cultural Meaning of the Gulf War.” Michigan Quarterly Review, vol. 60, no. 1, pp. 147-178, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0031.002:02. Accessed 22 April 2023. 

Byrne, David. “Crossing Music’s Borders in Search of Identity; ‘I Hate World Music.’” New York Times, 3 Oct. 1999, ​​https://archive.nytimes.com/query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage-9901EED8163EF930A35753C1A96F958260.html. Accessed 10 April 2023. 

Collins, Evans. “The Global Village Coffeehouse Aesthetic.” Are.na, 6 Sep. 2018, https://www.are.na/blog/the-global-village-coffeehouse-aesthetic. Accessed 5 April 2023. 

Dionne, E. J. “Kicking the ‘Vietnam Syndrome.” Washington Post, 4 March 1991, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1991/03/04/kicking-the-vietnam-syndrome/b6180288-4b9e-4d5f-b303-befa2275524d/. Accessed 10 April 2023. 

Farago, Jason. “The ‘90s: The Decade that Never Ended.” BBC News, 5 Feb. 2015, https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20150205-the-1990s-never-ended. Accessed 5 April 2023. 

Feld, Steven. “A Sweet Lullaby for World Music.” Public Culture, vol. 12, no. 1, 2000, pp. 145-71. http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/abeal/4classes/lullaby:feld.pdf. 

Fernandes, Fabio. “Wanderlust of the Ancients.” Aeon, 24 Nov. 2022, https://aeon.co/essays/the-roman-empire-was-a-cosmopolitan-network-of-adventurers. Accessed 7 April 2023. 

Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History?” The National Interest, no. 16, 1989, pp. 3-18, https://www.jstor.org/stable/24027184. Accessed 22 April 2023. 

Gross, David M, and Sophronia Scott. “Proceeding With Caution.” Time, 16 July 1990, https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,970634-9,00.html. Accessed 7 April 2023. 

Gurney, Jane. “The Salvage Paradigm.” Panya Clark Espinal, http://www.panya.ca/publication_salvage_paradigm_introduction.php. Accessed 11 April 2023. 

History.com Editors, “Cold War History.” History, 6 Dec. 2022, https://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/cold-war-history. Accessed 22 April 2023. 

King, Emily Anne. The (Mis-) Use of Greco-Roman History by Modern White Supremacy Groups: The Implications of the Classics in the Hands of White Supremacists. 2019. State University of New York, Honors Thesis. 

Lissner, Rebecca F. “The Long Shadow of the Gulf War.” War on the Rocks, 22 Nov. 2019, https://warontherocks.com/2019/11/the-long-shadow-of-the-gulf-war-2/. Accessed 10 April 2023. 

Pozzo, Barbara. “Fashion between Inspiration and Appropriation.” Laws, vol. 9, no. 5, 2020, pp. 1-26. doi:10.3390/laws9010005. 

Steger, Manfred B. Globalism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2009. 

Weisberg, Jacob. “In Defense of the ‘90s,” Slate, 1 Nov. 2001, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2001/11/in-defense-of-the-90s.html. Accessed 5 April 2023.

[dailyunsolvedmysteries]

John Edward Robinson, Sr., a.k.a. "The Slave Master". The First Internet Killer

Robinson was born in Cicero, Illinois. He started attending trade school to study radiology. Though he only spent two years there and didn't finish his training, he was still able to get a job as an X-ray technician at a children's hospital in Kansas City, Missouri by forging credentials. Though Robinson was convicted of theft, fraud, and embezzlement several times between 1969 and 1991, he was able to work for charitable organizations and as a civic leader. In 1977, working for a handicapped service organization, he managed to get on its board of directors and created a "Man of the Year" award as his first action and awarded it to himself.

When it was covered by the media, several people realized that Robinson had forged their recommendations. The press spent two weeks exposing Robinson as the fraud he was, though only his wife and children seemed to suffer. Robinson is suspected to have committed his first murder in 1984 when he hired 19-year-old Paula Godfrey to work as a sales representative for two shell companies he had made in order to create fake credentials for himself. After Robinson allegedly sent her away for some training, she was never seen again.

In 1983, Robinson's crimes escalated. His brother, Don Robinson, and his wife, Helen, had unsuccessfully been trying to conceive and formally adopt a child. Claiming to have connections in the adoption business, Robinson started looking for single pregnant women who could provide a child, presumably to enter the black market adoption business. Because he wasn't able to get any referrals from social services, he went directly to the source and approached 19-year-old Lisa Stasi, the single mother of a four-month-old baby, Tiffany, at a battered women's shelter in January of 1985. Using the name "Josh Osborne", he convinced her that he would take her into a training program in Texas that included daycare and job training. On January 9, he came to the home of Stasi's sister and picked up Tiffany. The next day, Stasi's family got a phone call in which a terrified-sounding Stasi said "they" had deemed her an unfit mother and that her mother, Betty, had said she wanted the baby. The last her family heard from Lisa were the words "here they come" over the phone before it was disconnected. No one saw or had any contact with Lisa after that. Two days later, Robinson handed Tiffany over to his brother along with forged legal documents about the adoption that claimed the child's mother had committed suicide. The same day, Stasi's family filed a missing persons report. Robinson was investigated on suspicion of violating the Mann Act, which originally prohibited white slavery and transportation of women across state lines for "immoral purposes". This was then changed to the word "immoral" was narrowed down to prostitution and other illegal sexual acts, such as sending Stasi and Godfrey over state lines for work. As Robinson's probation was re-evaluated, he became a major player in the underground sex industry, involved in S&M-related prostitution.

The FBI sent in a female undercover agent to pose as a potential prostitute for Robinson, but became so concerned that her life was in danger and pulled her out. An important witness in Robinson's trial for violating his probation was a prostitute named Teresa who worked for him and who was also his mistress. Robinson had threatened Teresa by sticking the barrel of a loaded gun into her vagina after she displeased a client. Teresa she was then taken into safe custody and Robinson was unable to face his accuser in court, thereby ending the proceedings in his favor. Not long afterwards, in 1987, he went to prison on a theft conviction and wasn't released until 1993. After his release, Robinson discovered the internet, which gave him access to all kinds of BDSM-related chat rooms and contact pages. Using the nickname "Slavemaster", he used the technology to gain access to many of his victims which lead him to being the first serial killer to use the internet to hunt for victims. In the meantime, his wife supported the family by taking a job as the manager of the trailer park the family had been forced to move into after losing their suburban home. Robinson's first victim during this period was Beverly Bonner, a prison librarian, whom Robinson seduced and convinced to leave her husband. After their divorce, Robinson got her to move to Olathe, promising to give her a job at one of his ventures. She disappeared almost immediately, but not before signing over her alimony checks to Robinson. Robinson continued to cash Bonner's checks, and when questioned by her former husband, told him that she had moved to Australia.

In 1994, he made contact with a woman named Sheila Faith on a social networking site. Faith's daughter, Debbie, was confined to a wheelchair. Promising to give her work and provide medical care for her daughter, Robinson convinced Faith to move to Kansas City, where he killed both mother and daughter and began cashing Faith's pension checks. In 1997, Robinson met Polish immigrant Izabela Lewicka at a BDSM contact site. She then dropped out of community college and moved in with Robinson. She then agreed to become a submissive for him and to become an intern at a non-existent publishing business he told her he ran. She signed a 115-year slave contract which gave Robinson possession of all of her belongings including her bank accounts. In 1999, Robinson killed Lewicka. Robinson's last known victim was Suzette Trouten, another submissive at a BDSM site who worked as a nurse during the day. Robinson convinced her to work for him as a caregiver for his elderly father. After agreeing to the job, Touten moved to Kansas and soon disappeared. To cover it up, Robinson sent her mother several type-written letters, all of which were written using much better spelling than Touten usually used, and were post-marked in Kansas.

By 1999, Robinson had become careless about covering his tracks and had attracted the attention of authorities in both Kansas and Missouri as a result of all of the missing person reports that were linked to him somehow. For some weeks after killing Suzette Trouten, he hijacked her email account and kept in touch with some of her online friends to keep up the appearance of her being alive, though the bluff wasn't hard to see through. One of the friends, a woman named Lore, started investigating Robinson, who went by "J.R. Turner" in his communication with them. He also began an online relationship with a laid-off psychiatrist named Vickie, who could very well have become his next victim. By then, the authorities were investigating Robinson. In the spring of 2000, Robinson wired some money to Vickie and arranged a meeting with her in a motel in Overland Park. Staked out in the next room, law enforcement officers heard Robinson force her into rougher sex than Vickie had agreed to (though they weren't aware of how badly she was treated at the time), making him guilty of sexual battery. After he was finished, Robinson left her alone in the room for days. He then sent her back to Texas, keeping the $700 worth of sex toys she had brought with her. Not long afterwards, Robinson repeated the process with Jeanna, an unemployed accountant from Texas, and left her behind as well. Out of fear, she contacted the police.

When Vickie also came forward and the 30-man Robinson task force found out that he had been seducing a woman from Tennessee and had convinced her to come to him and bring her 8-year-old daughter and the deed to her car, they secured an arrest warrant. On June 2, 2000, they raided his mobile home and found five chemical barrels, each of which contained one of Robinson's victims. Though the bodies of Lisa Stasi and Paula Godfrey were never found, the authorities did find evidence linking Robinson to them was as well as proof that he had sold Stasi's daughter to his brother. They also found blood in the apartment Lewicka had stayed in while she was in a slave relationship with Robinson. He was charged with the murders of Trouten, Lewicka, and Stasi, the first two of which would be punishable by death, and the kidnapping of Stasi's baby as well as dozens of fraud and forgery charges. He was ultimately found guilty and sentenced to death as well as life in prison for Stasi's murder. Afterwards, he confessed to his additional five murders. He is currently on death row at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas waiting for his sentence to be carried out. 

[dailyunsolvedmysteries-movedd]

John Edward Robinson, Sr., a.k.a. "The Slave Master". The First Internet Killer

Robinson was born in Cicero, Illinois. He started attending trade school to study radiology. Though he only spent two years there and didn't finish his training, he was still able to get a job as an X-ray technician at a children's hospital in Kansas City, Missouri by forging credentials. Though Robinson was convicted of theft, fraud, and embezzlement several times between 1969 and 1991, he was able to work for charitable organizations and as a civic leader. In 1977, working for a handicapped service organization, he managed to get on its board of directors and created a "Man of the Year" award as his first action and awarded it to himself.

When it was covered by the media, several people realized that Robinson had forged their recommendations. The press spent two weeks exposing Robinson as the fraud he was, though only his wife and children seemed to suffer. Robinson is suspected to have committed his first murder in 1984 when he hired 19-year-old Paula Godfrey to work as a sales representative for two shell companies he had made in order to create fake credentials for himself. After Robinson allegedly sent her away for some training, she was never seen again.

In 1983, Robinson's crimes escalated. His brother, Don Robinson, and his wife, Helen, had unsuccessfully been trying to conceive and formally adopt a child. Claiming to have connections in the adoption business, Robinson started looking for single pregnant women who could provide a child, presumably to enter the black market adoption business. Because he wasn't able to get any referrals from social services, he went directly to the source and approached 19-year-old Lisa Stasi, the single mother of a four-month-old baby, Tiffany, at a battered women's shelter in January of 1985. Using the name "Josh Osborne", he convinced her that he would take her into a training program in Texas that included daycare and job training. On January 9, he came to the home of Stasi's sister and picked up Tiffany. The next day, Stasi's family got a phone call in which a terrified-sounding Stasi said "they" had deemed her an unfit mother and that her mother, Betty, had said she wanted the baby. The last her family heard from Lisa were the words "here they come" over the phone before it was disconnected. No one saw or had any contact with Lisa after that. Two days later, Robinson handed Tiffany over to his brother along with forged legal documents about the adoption that claimed the child's mother had committed suicide. The same day, Stasi's family filed a missing persons report. Robinson was investigated on suspicion of violating the Mann Act, which originally prohibited white slavery and transportation of women across state lines for "immoral purposes". This was then changed to the word "immoral" was narrowed down to prostitution and other illegal sexual acts, such as sending Stasi and Godfrey over state lines for work. As Robinson's probation was re-evaluated, he became a major player in the underground sex industry, involved in S&M-related prostitution.

The FBI sent in a female undercover agent to pose as a potential prostitute for Robinson, but became so concerned that her life was in danger and pulled her out. An important witness in Robinson's trial for violating his probation was a prostitute named Teresa who worked for him and who was also his mistress. Robinson had threatened Teresa by sticking the barrel of a loaded gun into her vagina after she displeased a client. Teresa she was then taken into safe custody and Robinson was unable to face his accuser in court, thereby ending the proceedings in his favor. Not long afterwards, in 1987, he went to prison on a theft conviction and wasn't released until 1993. After his release, Robinson discovered the internet, which gave him access to all kinds of BDSM-related chat rooms and contact pages. Using the nickname "Slavemaster", he used the technology to gain access to many of his victims which lead him to being the first serial killer to use the internet to hunt for victims. In the meantime, his wife supported the family by taking a job as the manager of the trailer park the family had been forced to move into after losing their suburban home. Robinson's first victim during this period was Beverly Bonner, a prison librarian, whom Robinson seduced and convinced to leave her husband. After their divorce, Robinson got her to move to Olathe, promising to give her a job at one of his ventures. She disappeared almost immediately, but not before signing over her alimony checks to Robinson. Robinson continued to cash Bonner's checks, and when questioned by her former husband, told him that she had moved to Australia.

In 1994, he made contact with a woman named Sheila Faith on a social networking site. Faith's daughter, Debbie, was confined to a wheelchair. Promising to give her work and provide medical care for her daughter, Robinson convinced Faith to move to Kansas City, where he killed both mother and daughter and began cashing Faith's pension checks. In 1997, Robinson met Polish immigrant Izabela Lewicka at a BDSM contact site. She then dropped out of community college and moved in with Robinson. She then agreed to become a submissive for him and to become an intern at a non-existent publishing business he told her he ran. She signed a 115-year slave contract which gave Robinson possession of all of her belongings including her bank accounts. In 1999, Robinson killed Lewicka. Robinson's last known victim was Suzette Trouten, another submissive at a BDSM site who worked as a nurse during the day. Robinson convinced her to work for him as a caregiver for his elderly father. After agreeing to the job, Touten moved to Kansas and soon disappeared. To cover it up, Robinson sent her mother several type-written letters, all of which were written using much better spelling than Touten usually used, and were post-marked in Kansas.

By 1999, Robinson had become careless about covering his tracks and had attracted the attention of authorities in both Kansas and Missouri as a result of all of the missing person reports that were linked to him somehow. For some weeks after killing Suzette Trouten, he hijacked her email account and kept in touch with some of her online friends to keep up the appearance of her being alive, though the bluff wasn't hard to see through. One of the friends, a woman named Lore, started investigating Robinson, who went by "J.R. Turner" in his communication with them. He also began an online relationship with a laid-off psychiatrist named Vickie, who could very well have become his next victim. By then, the authorities were investigating Robinson. In the spring of 2000, Robinson wired some money to Vickie and arranged a meeting with her in a motel in Overland Park. Staked out in the next room, law enforcement officers heard Robinson force her into rougher sex than Vickie had agreed to (though they weren't aware of how badly she was treated at the time), making him guilty of sexual battery. After he was finished, Robinson left her alone in the room for days. He then sent her back to Texas, keeping the $700 worth of sex toys she had brought with her. Not long afterwards, Robinson repeated the process with Jeanna, an unemployed accountant from Texas, and left her behind as well. Out of fear, she contacted the police.

When Vickie also came forward and the 30-man Robinson task force found out that he had been seducing a woman from Tennessee and had convinced her to come to him and bring her 8-year-old daughter and the deed to her car, they secured an arrest warrant. On June 2, 2000, they raided his mobile home and found five chemical barrels, each of which contained one of Robinson's victims. Though the bodies of Lisa Stasi and Paula Godfrey were never found, the authorities did find evidence linking Robinson to them was as well as proof that he had sold Stasi's daughter to his brother. They also found blood in the apartment Lewicka had stayed in while she was in a slave relationship with Robinson. He was charged with the murders of Trouten, Lewicka, and Stasi, the first two of which would be punishable by death, and the kidnapping of Stasi's baby as well as dozens of fraud and forgery charges. He was ultimately found guilty and sentenced to death as well as life in prison for Stasi's murder. Afterwards, he confessed to his additional five murders. He is currently on death row at the El Dorado Correctional Facility in Kansas waiting for his sentence to be carried out. 

[theofficersacademy]

With peace comes prosperity. Fódlan appears to have reached a calm not experienced in many moons... Sike! With the recent discovery of their leading house's heir and the space to breathe, the Leicester Alliance finds itself hungry for the chance to show just how well it's doing in these conditions, pulling themselves up to such a degree of good tidings and growth that it just might be able to usurp both the Empire and Kingdom as a major power on this continent.

Where those two countries have been focused on finding ways to recuperate from their recent conflicts, the Alliance's various nobles have found exciting new discoveries and developed themselves to truly stand out over the last couple months and are far from calm! In collaboration with Garreg Mach to help introduce its many exchange students to Fódlan's radiance and might, Leicester invites the Golden Deer house to visit and see this splendor for themselves, each territory ready to accommodate the students and their plus ones.

Come and travel east, and experience firsthand just what the Alliance is all about!

Golden Deer Mission: Discover what Leicester has to offer!

GD Mission Task Board

House Riegan has long benefitted from holding lands and seas alike blessed with plenty and its manufacturers and traders are the cream of the crop when it comes to the Alliance. Its only weakness lies in its lack of mineral resources but no more! Recent sightings unearth a mine never before excavated. Quickly, the duchy moves to investigate it for if there might be anything of worth to fully cement it as unbeatable compared to all the other Alliance territories. However, it proves to be in a dangerous spot, leaving all curious onlookers to be unable to even get close as the company in charge of searching it blocks off all parties not hired for the mission. Perhaps the promise of something new and exciting tantalizes you to try and sneak past them anyhow, or could it be that you are concerned for the miners' sakes? Could this sudden mine be too good to be true? Only one way to find out... [Grants Axe +1]

The industrious House Gloucester prides itself on what it can do with its resources, touting itself as the leading commercial force in all of the Alliance. Come to Edgaria and see its blend of financial success as well as its great swaths of artistic talent all in one place! Merchants and artists of all sorts set up shop in the county's capitol, eager to show off its many one-of-a-kind pieces. For any undiscovered talents, you just might be able to catch the eye of a master here if you play your cards right...

The margraviate of House Edmund emphasizes fair use of its personal harbors, allowing for trade to flourish and build its margrave into one of the Alliance's leading men. However, such success inevitably catches the eye of the pirates swirling around its many islands. With such scoundrels, Sreng, and even the Almyran Navy all close by, Margrave Edmund has used his fortunes to build what he boasts to be the most fortified and intimidating sea vessels that have ever graced this earth all in the name of protecting his mercantile utopia. He is so confident in their glory that he invites those staying on his lands to take a joy ride out to the nearby waters and take out a few pirates themselves, if they so please! [Grants Heavy Armor +1]

Ailell, the Valley of Torment, is said to have once been used as a training grounds for monks as well as a place for the Goddess to burn corrupt maidens with her heavenly light, but few nowadays can attest to the veracity of such claims seeing as how almost nobody who treasures their own life dares to step foot anywhere near Ailell. However, new magical developments from House Daphnel have created a spell that allows a person to withstand even the hottest of flames so long as it's casted regularly! Brave souls are encouraged to see the miraculous effects of such magic themselves and trek into these once terrifying lands. With any luck, you might even run into one of these fabled, hardened monks yourself! Or perhaps you might be able to save a beautiful, wayward maiden from being burned from the Goddess' judgment? [Grants Faith +1]

Every fashionable noble worth their own salt on Fódlan wears jewelry made with rare gemstones sourced directly from House Goneril's duchy. Even outside of the Alliance, the subject of every party this past moon has been about the discovery of a new gemstone dubbed, 'The Goddess' Tears,' found recently in Fódlan's Throat. Appraisers, jewelers, and mages alike experiment with the new mineral, eager to all find out as much as they can about it and what applications it might be used in. For just the right idea, House Goneril is willing to offer a handsome sum of money to any particularly inventive minds with the brightest concept of what to do with it...

NEW! Though House Gloucester has outmatched House Ordelia the past few years, suddenly, the latter has taken back its crown as the Alliance's leading agricultural haven, boasting production numbers never before seen by any territory in the entire continent! You arrive just in time to see such a grand harvest with every street in the region offering up the finest produce and culinary delights this season. It's a heaven for any foodie, truly, but the new farming techniques used to encourage this growth are nothing to sneeze at either! Take a step through these fertile farmlands and see the return of House Ordelia's finest, and, hey, why not take a sip of their famous luxury spirits while you're here too? [Grants Lance +1]

NEW! While traveling through Edmund territory, your party discovers a funeral is being held for a local said to have been granted two lives. Well-liked by his neighbors, he was originally a man fighting underneath House Goneril before he was mortally wounded. Washed up along the sea in Edmund, he was saved by a mysterious woman after being given a vial of red liquid, but before he could thank her, his savior had disappeared. He supposedly spent his second life trying to track her down, but he never revealed whether or not he did. By pure coincidence, you overhear plans to ransack his home to try and find a hint to the woman and her life-giving vial. Shall you follow them to try and gain a chance to extend a person's life beyond what's natural? Or do you seek to protect a dead man's secrets? Or shall you leave behind this sorry tale, allowing fate to do what it shall, opposite of what that woman had done for the man with two lives?

NEW! The thing that sets the Leicester Alliance apart from the other two big powers of Fódlan is its system as a confederacy. Whenever an issue arises, the five most prominent house heads, otherwise known as the Five Great Lords, come to meet in a roundtable conference. For this month, they are opening their discussion to be spectated and assisted by the visiting students of the Golden Deer house to prove the strength of their wits and their political system in comparison to that of others. Here is the real battleground of the Alliance where the strength of many perspectives come together to clash and concede until the best possible solution to any problem arises! Do you have what it takes to keep up?

Non-Mission Task Board

An alumna of The Officers Academy, nostalgic for her final Ethereal Ball two years ago, returns to the monastery with an attempt to recreate the miracle invention that had captured her heart those many seasons ago: the photo-artifex! She has toiled away with her light magic and has at last made a replica of the machine, allowing for her to take "photos," magical images that capture a scene forever in physical form. She also has brought along her own version of the "artifex-box," a booth that fits only two people but creates a string of multiple photos. Eager to test it out to see if she might have her devices ready in time for the next Ethereal Ball, she puts out a notice in the monastery's dining hall for any willing volunteers… She promises those who do will get to keep the photos of their likenesses for free, of course!

With the hunting season coming in full swing, local vendors set up shop throughout many backroad towns and villages, chanting about their prices and deals on equipment and the lot of it. One vendor even declares that she carries with her a bow of a legendary Leicester hunter who felled a golden stag. She’s offering this bow at half price…if you can bring her an equally legendary creature of game as the legendary hunter once did. [Grants Bow +1]

The rat orchestra from last year's Ethereal ball is apparently back and looking for work again. That's the only explanation you can think of, anyway, when you start hearing rumors about rodents gathering in some out-of-the-way alley in town to play music on instruments stolen from the monastery. At the same time, a second rumor has started up: students have reported hearing a long C-sharp before going to bed at night, only to discover the next morning that one of their classmates has gone missing! That's three in the span of a week so far. Are these things related? The Knights won't get involved and the monastery staff appears unbothered, so you decide to take these matters into your own hands. [Grants Sword +1]

It's Club Rush at the Officers Academy! Some new clubs have popped up at the monastery and are looking to drum up new members -- cooking, equestrian, languages, to name a few. If you're looking to make some new friends, these are a great place to start! (Don't mind the hazing rituals!)

Partly as a way to recruit new members, and partly as a way to showcase their newest inventions, the Bewitching Oblivion of Magitransience Society (BOOMS, for short) has been holding impromptu magic shows that begin and end seemingly at random. The club specializes in lighting up the night sky with displays of multi-colored fire magic, and they wish to put on an unforgettable display for the whole monastery. Are you willing to help out with the launchers, rockets, and other displays? Or report them to the Knights for causing a disturbance? Whatever you choose to do, be careful that it doesn't explode in your face.

NEW! Nobody can seem to agree behind the why - is it pest control? a social experiment? renovations? - but the reality of the matter is: you've got a new roommate for the month, and you've little choice in the matter. Will you get along with your new pal, or are you going to be at odds the whole time?

NEW! A new pastime has cropped up within Garreg Mach as the days turn more peaceful: expeditions! Every day, more and more people invite an ally to a private outing, first taking a journey via horseback to a more scenic location like the plains, forest, mountains, or a waterfront. From there they dismount and have a little teatime for two. With the Ethereal Ball just around the corner, plenty use these expeditions to get in another person's good graces before the big night, but regardless of your motivation, it just might be a great way to increase your bond with someone you've had your eye on lately! [Grants Riding +1]

Frequently Asked Questions

How does the divided task board work?

This season’s mission is assigned to the Golden Deer muses. Therefore, tasks from the ‘Golden Deer Mission Task Board’ must be undertaken by someone that is affiliated with the Golden Deer house. However, they may choose to perform the task with someone who is not from their group as well. In logistical terms, this means that if you play a non-GD muse and want to do a mission task, you must ask someone who plays a Golden Deer muse to thread with you. All thread participants will still receive any skill point rewards. Tasks from the ‘Non-Mission Task Board’ have no house restriction and can be undertaken by anyone.

These aren’t the only threads I can do, right?

Of course not! These are just prompts to help give some ideas of possibilities. You’re always free and encouraged to make up your own threads.

If my muse is not a Golden Deer muse, can I still write an open starter for the mission tasks?

Yes, but only the non-mission tasks. Your character must be affiliated with the Golden Deer to write an open starter for this season’s mission.

How do I claim the skill points?

In order to qualify for the skill point, the thread must clearly allude to the listed task and preferably feature the task being completed. You do not need to message the masterlist to claim your skill point.

Can I only do one task?

Nope, you can do as many as you’d like with as many different partners as you’d like! You can do the same task with more than one person! However, you can only claim any skill points once.

What if my partner leaves or drops a skill point thread?

If the dropped thread has at least 2 reblogs and you have hit at least 400 words on your end, you may still claim the skill point. Remember to use (and track!) the #toa open tag for any open threads, and you can also post a link to your open thread on the appropriate Discord channel! If you have any other questions or concerns, shoot us a message through the masterlist or on Discord!

[cheerstotheelites-if]

Bugs

No, not those kind of bugs

• Winged Fae, or commonly known as "Bugs" to normal folk, are the 6 Kingdoms that rule the entirety of Reflection.

》 Earthshine (Monarch)

》 Moonglade (Webworm)

》 Smultronställe (Xylocopa)

》 Coachan (Scoldii)

》 Landskein (Lucanidae)

》 Woodnote (Tagalica)

• These types of Fae's true form are of a variety of butterflies, moths, bees, wasps, beetles, and cicadas

• Are well known for stealing names in deals with mortals or fellow supernaturals and adding them to their existing ones

• Sometimes mistaken for "Pests", or more commonly "Pixies", due to the similarity of their concepts

• Once a month, when the weather is fair and the may flowers are singing, the rulers of each kingdom are brought together to The Hands of Ectorius to discuss matters, be it personal or political

Monarch

• Butterflies

• Ruled by King and Queen Quentin and Allura Holmström

• No biological children, but there is a heir

• The most well known (and favored) of the Winged Fae due to numerous superstition that surrounds them

• Is the only kingdom to be interviewed by exploration Magi and have an encyclopedia dedicated to them

• A friendly and very hospitable kingdom, welcoming to most guests that enter the territory; often offering food as a gesture of welcome

• Strictly agricultural, with how much land they have in their territory; dabbles in the occassional trade with other kingdoms for resources

• Currently has rising tensions with Moonglade and Smultronställe due to territory issues

Webworm

• Moths

• Ruled by King Niven ███ █████ (he refuses to share his last name)

• No biological children or spouse, but there is a heir

• Nicknamed as "Earthshine's Shadow" since moths are the butterflies of the night, which is a comparison the people of Moonglade despise

• There is rampant and rising hatred for Monarchs in the kingdom as of late, which is slowly turning into hate crimes being done to any travelling, visiting, or imigrating Monarch

• A kingdom with elusive and wary residents that tend to whisper amongst themselves when a newcomer comes by

• Agricultural like Earthshine for similar reasons, though heavily dabbles in trade as well because of their silk industry

• Currently has rising tensions with Eartshine for territory issues, and Woodnote due to recent illegal trespassers crossing the border

Xylocopa

• Bees

• Ruled by Queen and King-Consort Alma and Demarcus Kuldvee

• No heir, though they have a son named Eztia

• The biggest and advanced kingdom amongst the six due to the ever continuous progression of technology and growing population

• A kingdom with mud houses stuck and stacked together, a housing practice that's held and kept since the Golden Age, whereas the rest of the kingdoms have adapted to modern fae housing conventions

• The kingdom is always awake and moving, rarely is there a day where all its residents are inside and streets are rendered quiet and empty and no longer cramped and narrow

• Agricultural for similar reasons to the former kingdoms, and are heavily industrial with how more technologically advanced they are. Due to this technology, the kingdom dabbles in the occassional trade because of this

• Currently has rising tensions with Earthshine due to territory issues, and Coachan due to recent raids caused by them on local villages

Scoldii

• Wasps

• Ruled by Queen and Queen-Consort Edith and Nimera Krasue

• There is an heir, Edith's adopted daughter named Minna, alongside two other children a daughter and son named Prudence and Viggo from Nimera's former marriage

• One of the more powerful kingdoms due to heavy emphasis on military and constant raiding of local villages to expand the territory

• Aggressive kingdom, where trespassers are almost always killed on the spot, and where issues are almost always end up in a fight

• Constant overflow of raid goods and crafted weapons of all types; spears and shields are most common however

• Barracks are almost always on every corner, housing and training new warriors for the next raids

• Has been recently breaching territories of Landskein, Woodnote, and Smultronställe and is having tensions because of it

• Has a huge rivalry with Smultronställe due to being in very close proximity with each other

Lucanidae

• Beetles

• Ruled by King and Queen Andrik and Nanette Skogr

• No heir nor children yet

• Another powerful kingdom with a militaristic society

• Has huge stone walls to keep away threats... as they should

• One of the most technologically advanced in weaponry, compared to Smultronställe's

• The people are disciplined and diligent, and very atheletic and fit

• Distinct individualistic culture and the only kingdom to have such, whereas the rest of the kingdoms are collectivistic

• Currently has tensions with Coachan due to the recent raids on their villages

Tagalica

• Cicadas

• Ruled by Kings Zaka and Aarifa Urrutia

• They have an heir named Tanashiri, a son from Zaka's former marriage, and an adopted daughter named Mahalina

• The smallest kingdom compared to their neighbors

• A very tight knit and colorful community because of their size

• Mining and agricultural kingdom, where minerals mined are traded with other kingdoms for resources in exchange

• A few strays have been seen illegally migrating to Webworm for reasons of better opportunity and because Webworm is the closest kingdom to them

• Tensions have been rising with them because of those strays

• Tensions with Coachan has also been forming due to the border proximity with them

[rosewriteswhump]

Mistake Lore and Law

Any changes will be updated!

note: liri renamed Dawn

Lore and Magic system

Pupil shape and magic powers

Gears: industrial Mechanics and inventing powers

Heart: Emotional, mental, and physical healing powers

Plant: Herbalist magick

Whisk/spoon: Baking and cooking. Whisk is baking based power for sweets. Spoons are spicy, savory.

Weapons: Combat powers, be it long range, maylay, or hand to hand combat

Elemental symbols: Air=tornado, Water=droplet, Earth=rock, Fire=flame

Opposing powers

Gear faeries can’t use any herbalist magick, they can create systems to help make plant care easier but have the ability of an average human ability and don’t think it is practical when you could form a trade. Like “I’ll build a system for ten types of plants if you help me plant mine properly”

Plant faeries can’t use magick for inventions, some have been able to build greenhouses but they need a guide and again have average human building ability without training themselves

Baking and Cooking Faeries don’t have a natural opposite, rather they are kind of a combination of Gears and Plants. However, they are not inventors or herbalists. They can use magic for cooking and plant poison checking but that’s it. They are pretty limited and often have difficulty in starting a business as many already have.

Heart faeries the most praised and idolized. They can find problems almost instantly and often take the jobs of first responders. Many of them become doctors, nurses, fire fighters, and therapists. They have no combat ability aside from learning self defense and knowing weak points in the body. Weapon fae are their opposite.

Weapon Faeries can’t heal themselves or others, often relying on a Heart faery to keep them alive should they get injured seriously. They tend to be stronger and bigger.

Human and fae relationships

It has always been rocky. The fae tried to share territory early on, however many were killed in an attempt to gain power. Eventually the world became split. Every state had its own territory for Fae and humans

TAG list

@nullb1rdbones

[littleeyesofpallas]

I know canonically Santa Prisca is supposed to be a stupid bundle of racist cliches about drug cartels and the political unrest of Latin America, but my personal interpretation has always been for it to be an unicorporated territory of the US, like Puerto Rico or the Virgin Islands. And rather than just being mexican alcatraz, make Peña Duros more of a direct Guantanamo Bay analog. That way it can be used as a critique of political loopholes of American territories, and the human trafficking problems in the American prison system.

The prison becomes a deposit in the ongoing American cup and ball game that is culpability for humanitarian crimes against the incarcerated; people get shuffled thru Pena Duros to keep abuses off official records of American prisons, and off "American soil." In this way Bane's upbringing can be accounted for as he sees a constant rotation of every kind of criminal come thru the prison and he can learn from them all in turn, mirroring Batman's apprenticeship, while also feeding him rumors from Gotham transfers about a certain crime fighting urban legend.

But a secondary business for an industrial prison is the buying and selling of prisoners; not only does Pena Duros become a very obvious auctionhouse for hitmen and slave labor, but by preying on the demands of privatized prisons in the US, sells its prisoners to fill cells in US prisons, artifically inflating prison populations to falsify government contract evaluations. And from this, gangs and governments use the ongoing prison trade to smuggle people and goods across the US boarder, both ways, with Pena Duros as the boarding station.

And in this way Pena Duros becomes the powerful multifaceted underworld enterprise that Bane is able to climb the ranks of and take over from the inside.

And then of course we can also toss in the patented supervillainy of weapons and tech smuggling and harboring fugitives and trading in political prisoners to rationalize why and how this prison complex was dabbling in super soldier serums (rather than just "mexicans sell drugs, wrassle man big, do steroids!") Pena Duros sold the human test subjects for venom, smuggled the chemicals in and the finish products out, harbored and traded scientists and whistle blowers, and in it all built their own working version of the drug... Just in time to test it on their own inmates, including one particular little boy born and raised inside the prison walls...

Bane himself I want to take more after Javert and Eugene Vidoq, as someone who turns his familiarty and mastery of criminal life into that of a enterprising jailer, so invested in having conquered and now weilding the power of a system that abused him and molded him into a monster that he can't ever let it be dismantled. (And on a perhaps more literal level, he literally can't let the prison not mass produce Venom, because no one else produces it, and he is so chemically dependent on it that he needs more of it than anything smaller than industrial scale production could supply him.)

But in any case, a proper Moriarty(Napoleonic empire of crime and all) to Batman's Holmes, as he was originally promised to be, yet not fully delivered on, not just on the personal mano a mano level, but organizationally: Bane's Pena Duros operation should be more than just another gang of faceless thugs, they should be highly and diversely specialized --recruited, trained, and when needed bought or pressganged to fill specific needs-- and comparable to the Batfam or Batman Inc.

And for that matter, he should also be giving Amander Waller's Task Force X a hell of a run for its money while he's at it. He and Waller should have a deeply familiar and bitter professional rivalry, yet both beholden a begrudging admiration.

Also as a tangent, I would rectify the egrigious mistake of calling his recently introduced protege "Vengeance" and not the infinitely more appropriate and obvious NEMESIS, as a distintly feminine synonym for "Bane."

[unseelie-grimalkin]

Hello, welcome to Grimalkin’s Flannán Conspiracy Board. This is an exercise in three basic principles:

Research

Shitposting

Screamming

Unfortunately, it’s not the normal kind of RSS feed, but hey. You’ve got this document. May it bring joy and brainworms in equal measure.

However, first: a disclaimer. Three of them, actually.

While I talk about topics here in the tone and diction of an expert, I am very much someone digging in old books and sharing like an excited raccoon. Most of my expertise lies in Hellenistic studies, Western medieval alchemy, Kemetic anatomy of the soul, and bits and pieces of Norse folklore. This document is very much me reconnecting with my heritage and going “HOLY SHIT” very loudly in a way that is (hopefully) comprehensible and enjoyable.

If I’m right about any of the contents in here, I do hereby solemnly swear that I will not turn around and go “THE DEVS, THEY STOLE FROM MY IDEAS”. This is a statement I have to write down as a show of good faith.

However much I sum up the concepts here, I do not expect the game to be 1:1 with the folklore, as that wouldn’t really give much of a story for the game to tell. Alas, talking about the inspirations though is fun AND brainworm-inducing, so I’m making this document.

Some trigger warnings:

Discussion of Bodily Autonomy and the Lack Thereof

Descriptions of Body Horror (unavoidable with scholarly discussion of Cú Chulainn, I’m afraid)

Implied Discussion of Grooming

So, let’s sum up Flannán mac Lugh.

His name means (roughly) Little Red, Son of Lugh.

His real life inspiration is Cú Chulainn. Put a pin in that, I scream about that later.

He is the only one of countless sons and daughters that Lugaid actually claimed as his own child, gaining the title of warrior-“prince”.

He has been trained to be a Jack of All Trades, with regard to weaponry.

He has things he’d like for himself in the future, but would not count on actually receiving.

He actively avoids situations where he would lose control of his body (avoiding sleep, refusing to drink to intoxication).

He is a sucker for children and those who cannot fight for themselves.

He took in THREE orphaned dogs in the middle of a war, where they would’ve died without his interference. THREE dogs is a LOT of food, a lot of time, a lot of SPACE. But he did that. He fucking did that.

Don’t talk to me, I’m soft.

He’s also real sensitive about receiving luxury at the expense of others, to the point where his room is extremely Spartan, refuses to have a favourite gemstone on account that he cannot separate the abusive mining industry from any stone’s appearance, and a lot of his favourite things in general fall into pattern of common everyday guy stuff, especially for the genre conventions NDM is going for.

He has a tragic past, this goes without saying.

Like we know his DND class/subclass would be Path of the Beast Barbarian, but his DND background might as well be HAUNTED ONE in glowing all capital letters, in Impact font. We joke that he’s straight out of Skyrim, but I would argue that Flan would feel right proper home in Barovia, just on account that the populace is just as haunted as he is (there are also lawful good wereravens there, making it a lovely vacation spot for Maeve, but I digress).

He has a LOT of dog jokes about him. Like. A lot. You cannot ignore this about his character, this is the TEXT of him, not the subtext.

He cannot drink hot chocolate without his stomach getting upset.

If this is simply a dev joke or actual fact remains to be seen. He doesn’t seem to follow the entirety of dog dietary rules, so it’s very up in the air if he’s 1:1 and I refuse to go down the list of “All Things Dogs Can’t Eat” in the askbox to find out. One of you can take the L, I’m not that desperate.

If he misses you, he will wait by the window and stare until you come home.

He gets excited by the merest touch and has to restrain himself to behave and not turn into a humanoid version of his own dogs (no thoughts, only cuddles).

Epitome of Scary Dog Privilege.

His love language combo is giving acts of service (doing tricks) and receiving words of affirmation (being told he is a good boy)/physical touch (head pats).

Simultaneously “uh oh” + mental tail wagging.

This man is a dog, your honour.

For the full text of this, please follow this link here to experience the full Flannán Conspiracy Board (breaker of hearts, left and right).

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What kind of makeup courses online are required in the field of makeup Industry?

First of all, let us tell you that a professional makeup artist classes online doesn't need to study a lot. It is best if you complete your 10th or 12th grade. 

It's crucial to possess abilities if you want to work as a makeup artist. A makeup artist must be knowledgeable enough to know which makeup item is best for each individual. 

Given that makeup is applied on the skin, using a poor-quality product can harm someone's skin. For people who are familiar with makeup and cosmetics, a job in the makeup industry makes sense in this scenario. The age to become a makeup artist is unlimited.

A range of professional makeup classes, some offered by several academies, are available at the makeup course near me.

1. Short-term Course

2. Certification Course

3. Diploma Course

4. Master Course

5. Specialized courses in areas such as bridal makeup, special effects, etc.

Building a Career in Makeup Artistry Through Online Training

Taking the best online makeup course to launch a profession in makeup artistry has several important advantages.

A makeup course near me allows aspiring makeup artists to explore various styles, study at their own pace, and practice new techniques in a convenient and approachable manner.

2. Through virtual workshops, guest lectures, and online forums, online training offers networking opportunities with industry leaders, allowing makeup artists to stay up to date on industry trends, engage with experts, and develop partnerships.

3. Making a great portfolio with assignments from the best online makeup courses enables makeup artists to present their abilities, originality, and adaptability to prospective employers and clients. Creating a varied portfolio will help you gain a reputation and draw in more business.

4. After finishing online training, you can use social media, networking events, and online job boards to find freelance employment and career prospects. Makeup artists can get work and have a successful career in the field by using relationships, building a strong web presence, and exhibiting success.

Conclusion

Convenience, adaptability, and accessibility are offered by the best online makeup courses to those looking to advance their professional abilities. It provides individualized, effective home learning experiences with excellent teachers and a wide range of tools.

Online cosmetics courses will become more engaging and immersive as technology develops, improving students' abilities and launching them into lucrative careers in the beauty sector.