#episode review on hold

[shiro-s2e2-erukinzu]

I don't know why, but I haven't been able to write about episode 35 (or episode 10 of season 2) of Spy X Family...

I still want to write about it, but there's just this constant feeling of not wanting to write about the anime in me right now. I don't know if it's because I push myself to write something about the new episodes as they come out even if I don't feel like it or if I'm just feeling burned out in general, but I think that I'm just gonna take a break from writing about the anime for a little bit... And though I really wanna write something special about episode 35, I'm a little worried that if I don't write about it soon, the review is gonna be stuck in procrastination hell like some of my other projects that I wanna do...

Anyway, I just thought that I should be a little more transparent with you guys about the way I've feeling about my Spy X Family anime reviews as of late... I hope that anyone out there that enjoys my anime reviews will understand and hopefully be okay with waiting for my review of episode 35...! But depending on how I feel, I may or may not write reviews for the remaining two episodes of the season...

So, I'll see you all in my manga review for sure next week (even though it'll be on Christmas Eve...!!) Goodbye for now...!! 👋

[steakout-05]

just heard about Wild Manes a few days ago, might check it out.... it looks really cute and i absolutely love the character designs!! the art style and cute girly aesthetic reminds me so much of MLP G3 and i like that they're short and sweet little stories that don't try to cram as much content into them as they can, especially in the age of kid's content trying to be as wacky as humanly possible to hold kid's attentions for the longest. i especially like Bailey, Cherie, Candi and Pearla's designs, they're really pretty :D

[funky-boat-zone]

if this post gets 1 (one) note i will finally write out my mini-essay about the tugs segment “the big birthday splash”

[thedreadvampy]

Got a paramount+ trial subscription. Just finished watching all of Strange New Worlds (review: solid star trek shenanigans, pretty much all bangers with the exception of the Spock-is-human episode which just suuuuuucked and the Klingon war trauma episode about which I have let's say Philosophical Reservations in that it could have been more Space M*A*S*H. not as gay as I was promised, in fact I would say disappointingly heterosexual. adore uhura, hemmer and la'an. cannot believe they gorned my boy 😢)

Off sick all week with COVID can't really do anything except lie around and watch TV.

[musical-chick-13]

Oh not me avoiding a wildly popular piece of media that I’d probably actually like out of sheer spite.

[lyril]

marcy & hunson is like, a god send of an adventure time episode for me specifically. it's one of my top favorites so far for just being really enjoyable in general, but it also because it has some of my favorite characters who already don't get to star in a lot of episodes, like hunson and peppermint butler, but ESPECIALLY chicle, like -- i watched this episode pretty early on to see hunson (and it's clearly the best hunson episode at that!) but i keep appreciating it more and more when bubblegum's family gets introduced so late and barely has any time to themselves outside of gumbald, and yet, here we are anyway -- an episode with chicle as the annoying little antagonist, just for little old me. there's even a gay ass marceline song and she gets not one but two killer outfits. it's such a funny episode, it's got so much stuff i want to see, and that's fucking right baby you BET your ass it even aired on my BIRTHDAY! !!!

[ghostmistdraws]

The Bad Batch 02x10 Review and Thoughts

I enjoyed this episode! It was a side quest, sure, but a necessary one! Loving the gonky love in this episode and Benni has massive Ezra Bridger vibes, as a Rebels fan I loved it.

I'm trying avoid negativity *cough twitter cough*, since it tends to dampen my mood on my current obsession. But I have seen the usual complaints, which I'm not surprised by. But I personally don't believe in filler.

I loved the parallels drawn between the Ipsium miners and the Empire. Because it's true, the same corruption on a smaller scale. I enjoyed seeing their reactions to what was going on and Omega's reaction especially. It had massive Rebels vibes and I loved it.

It may not have been the most plot driven episode, and you can't expect every episode to drive the plot hard when its a 15-20 episode season, but I had a lot of fun watching it and talking about it with my friend!

Can't wait for next week!

[lovehandelreunion]

i can't help but laugh when i watch the new p/jo show and it uses all of its effort not to deliver a good story, but to go out of its way to never use more of its vfx budget than absolutely necessary

finished episode 3 and not only do they turn medusa invisible to mime cutting her head off so they don't have to show it but they also have the turning a fury to stone be blurry through a window???

am i crazy? am i a hater?? am i living in an alternate reality where the show is just bad???

[misterradio]

turn-on is so hit or miss (mostly miss) but i love the music so much like for Real. and i love that wikipedia says that the computer noises are supposed to be the computer laughing (in place of a laugh track). that is so endlessly charming even if this computer has dubious tastes

[lmelodie]

The Final Stretch

Lunchtime review! Spoilers for the latest episode ahead!

I don’t particularly have any nostalgia bias for the first two movies in the trilogy so i am not a Bernard character authority, but like most things in this series, Bernards appearance was welcome! But ultimately mid lol I just wish he appeared in NOT THIS series because I LOVER BERNARD. Glad we got to see him again, but the explanation for his absence was utter bullshit. 

The aging conventions for the elves and the laws regarding being in the human/magical world is interesting in their own right. But I don’t think this particular bit of lore is my cup of tea. It’s a cool concept for sure, maybe if it was in a series that was better written and took itself far more seriously.

Surpassingly however i really liked the idea they went with in the Santa lineage lore. It turns the idea that all the Santa’s were human on its head by sayin, nope. It’s just you thats human, we wanted to experiment. And all the clauses are new! Just for him. This however begs the question if its literally just Scott thats the only human on the council. Does the passing down canonically happen with the other figures? Who knows

Speaking of passing down, I LOVE KRAMPUS! The costuming and makeup departments WENT OFF. I just think he’s neat! Reminds me a lot of a certain spooky blorbo I have...

Also i just find it real amusing at this point that THEY REFUSE TO MENTION THE ESCAPE CLAUSE BY NAME. I think it happens before this, but when Bernard is listing off the Clauses he goes Santa and The Mrs. AND THEN DOESN’T SAY THE ESCAPE. I will DIE on the escape clause hill.

[orionsangel86]

I know ive taken a break from Sandman meta to post and obsessively reblog Good Omens related stuff, but I will get back to Sandman stuff soon! I have a bunch of lovely meta asks to answer still and I promise I haven't forgotten them!

[fireh0es]

okay don't get me wrong, i love this show and 6b has been WAY better than the early seasons for this IMO, but as an EMT- please for the love of god let some of us on as consultants because the speed run compressions are so hard to ignore omg

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Red Lobster was killed by private equity, not Endless Shrimp

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

A decade ago, a hedge fund had an improbable viral comedy hit: a 294-page slide deck explaining why Olive Garden was going out of business, blaming the failure on too many breadsticks and insufficiently salted pasta-water:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/940944/000092189514002031/ex991dfan14a06297125_091114.pdf

Everyone loved this story. As David Dayen wrote for Salon, it let readers "mock that silly chain restaurant they remember from their childhoods in the suburbs" and laugh at "the silly hedge fund that took the time to write the world’s worst review":

https://www.salon.com/2014/09/17/the_real_olive_garden_scandal_why_greedy_hedge_funders_suddenly_care_so_much_about_breadsticks/

But – as Dayen wrote at the time, the hedge fund that produced that slide deck, Starboard Value, was not motivated by dissatisfaction with bread-sticks. They were "activist investors" (finspeak for "rapacious assholes") with a giant stake in Darden Restaurants, Olive Garden's parent company. They wanted Darden to liquidate all of Olive Garden's real-estate holdings and declare a one-off dividend that would net investors a billion dollars, while literally yanking the floor out from beneath Olive Garden, converting it from owner to tenant, subject to rent-shocks and other nasty surprises.

They wanted to asset-strip the company, in other words ("asset strip" is what they call it in hedge-fund land; the mafia calls it a "bust-out," famous to anyone who watched the twenty-third episode of The Sopranos):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_Out

Starboard didn't have enough money to force the sale, but they had recently engineered the CEO's ouster. The giant slide-deck making fun of Olive Garden's food was just a PR campaign to help it sell the bust-out by creating a narrative that they were being activists* to save this badly managed disaster of a restaurant chain.

*assholes

Starboard was bent on eviscerating Darden like a couple of entrail-maddened dogs in an elk carcass:

https://web.archive.org/web/20051220005944/http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~solan/dogsinelk/

They had forced Darden to sell off another of its holdings, Red Lobster, to a hedge-fund called Golden Gate Capital. Golden Gate flogged all of Red Lobster's real estate holdings for $2.1 billion the same day, then pissed it all away on dividends to its shareholders, including Starboard. The new landlords, a Real Estate Investment Trust, proceeded to charge so much for rent on those buildings Red Lobster just flogged that the company's net earnings immediately dropped by half.

Dayen ends his piece with these prophetic words:

Olive Garden and Red Lobster may not be destinations for hipster Internet journalists, and they have seen revenue declines amid stagnant middle-class wages and increased competition. But they are still profitable businesses. Thousands of Americans work there. Why should they be bled dry by predatory investors in the name of “shareholder value”? What of the value of worker productivity instead of the financial engineers?

Flash forward a decade. Today, Dayen is editor-in-chief of The American Prospect, one of the best sources of news about private equity looting in the world. Writing for the Prospect, Luke Goldstein picks up Dayen's story, ten years on:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-05-22-raiding-red-lobster/

It's not pretty. Ten years of being bled out on rents and flipped from one hedge fund to another has killed Red Lobster. It just shuttered 50 restaurants and declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Ten years hasn't changed much; the same kind of snark that was deployed at the news of Olive Garden's imminent demise is now being hurled at Red Lobster.

Instead of dunking on free bread-sticks, Red Lobster's grave-dancers are jeering at "Endless Shrimp," a promotional deal that works exactly how it sounds like it would work. Endless Shrimp cost the chain $11m.

Which raises a question: why did Red Lobster make this money-losing offer? Are they just good-hearted slobs? Can't they do math?

Or, you know, was it another hedge-fund, bust-out scam?

Here's a hint. The supplier who provided Red Lobster with all that shrimp is Thai Union. Thai Union also owns Red Lobster. They bought the chain from Golden Gate Capital, last seen in 2014, holding a flash-sale on all of Red Lobster's buildings, pocketing billions, and cutting Red Lobster's earnings in half.

Red Lobster rose to success – 700 restaurants nationwide at its peak – by combining no-frills dining with powerful buying power, which it used to force discounts from seafood suppliers. In response, the seafood industry consolidated through a wave of mergers, turning into a cozy cartel that could resist the buyer power of Red Lobster and other major customers.

This was facilitated by conservation efforts that limited the total volume of biomass that fishers were allowed to extract, and allocated quotas to existing companies and individual fishermen. The costs of complying with this "catch management" system were high, punishingly so for small independents, bearably so for large conglomerates.

Competition from overseas fisheries drove consolidation further, as countries in the global south were blocked from implementing their own conservation efforts. US fisheries merged further, seeking economies of scale that would let them compete, largely by shafting fishermen and other suppliers. Today's Alaskan crab fishery is dominated by a four-company cartel; in the Pacific Northwest, most fish goes through a single intermediary, Pacific Seafood.

These dominant actors entered into illegal collusive arrangements with one another to rig their markets and further immiserate their suppliers, who filed antitrust suits accusing the companies of operating a monopsony (a market with a powerful buyer, akin to a monopoly, which is a market with a powerful seller):

https://www.classaction.org/news/pacific-seafood-under-fire-for-allegedly-fixing-prices-paid-to-dungeness-crabbers-in-pacific-northwest

Golden Gate bought Red Lobster in the midst of these fish wars, promising to right its ship. As Goldstein points out, that's the same promise they made when they bought Payless shoes, just before they destroyed the company and flogged it off to Alden Capital, the hedge fund that bought and destroyed dozens of America's most beloved newspapers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print

Under Golden Gate's management, Red Lobster saw its staffing levels slashed, so diners endured longer wait times to be seated and served. Then, in 2020, they sold the company to Thai Union, the company's largest supplier (a transaction Goldstein likens to a Walmart buyout of Procter and Gamble).

Thai Union continued to bleed Red Lobster, imposing more cuts and loading it up with more debts financed by yet another private equity giant, Fortress Investment Group. That brings us to today, with Thai Union having moved a gigantic amount of its own product through a failing, debt-loaded subsidiary, even as it lobbies for deregulation of American fisheries, which would let it and its lobbying partners drain American waters of the last of its depleted fish stocks.

Dayen's 2020 must-read book Monopolized describes the way that monopolies proliferate, using the US health care industry as a case-study:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

After deregulation allowed the pharma sector to consolidate, it acquired pricing power of hospitals, who found themselves gouged to the edge of bankruptcy on drug prices. Hospitals then merged into regional monopolies, which allowed them to resist pharma pricing power – and gouge health insurance companies, who saw the price of routine care explode. So the insurance companies gobbled each other up, too, leaving most of us with two or fewer choices for health insurance – even as insurance prices skyrocketed, and our benefits shrank.

Today, Americans pay more for worse healthcare, which is delivered by health workers who get paid less and work under worse conditions. That's because, lacking a regulator to consolidate patients' interests, and strong unions to consolidate workers' interests, patients and workers are easy pickings for those consolidated links in the health supply-chain.

That's a pretty good model for understanding what's happened to Red Lobster: monopoly power and monopsony power begat more monopolies and monoposonies in the supply chain. Everything that hasn't consolidated is defenseless: diners, restaurant workers, fishermen, and the environment. We're all fucked.

Decent, no-frills family restaurant are good. Great, even. I'm not the world's greatest fan of chain restaurants, but I'm also comfortably middle-class and not struggling to afford to give my family a nice night out at a place with good food, friendly staff and reasonable prices. These places are easy pickings for looters because the people who patronize them have little power in our society – and because those of us with more power are easily tricked into sneering at these places' failures as a kind of comeuppance that's all that's due to tacky joints that serve the working class.

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

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

[wekillitwithfire]

this season of what we do in the shadows has been HITTING. like every episode has been so good i love when the shows i like are good

[fandom]

Normally we'd make a joke about Good Omens here but we're still too emotionally fragile about it to do so.

The long-awaited second season of Good Omens is finally out on @primevideo, and, well, it's gonna be a long wait for season three. Thanks to all the fan artists and fic writers who will hold us over until then. The Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir movie premiered on @netflix, and fans are delighting in drawing comparisons with the show. Five Nights at Freddy's Ruin DLC dropped, so we hope all y'all are enjoying all the new frightening gameplay. One of the most anticipated manga chapters of Jujutsu Kaisen was animated in the latest episode, while the manga itself has been a continual spiral of mind-blowing fights. The trailer for the film adaptation of Red, White, & Royal Blue is whipping fans into a tizzy. Finally, Twitter is X now. Sure. This is Tumblr's Week in Review.

Good Omens

Barbie

Twitter

Five Nights at Freddy's

Ineffable Husbands | Aziraphale & Crowley, Good Omens

Elon Musk

Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir

Barbenheimer

Crowley | Good Omens

The Witcher

Aziraphale | Good Omens

Oppenheimer

Artists on Tumblr

Margot Robbie

The Welcome Home ARG

Jujutsu Kaisen

Ryan Gosling

The Dragon Prince

Red, White & Royal Blue

Greta Gerwig

[kerink]

in light of people's confusion over cecil's longevity in @sexymanotd i wanted to document a bit of his history for those unfamiliar or nostalgic

welcome to night vale is a podcast written by joseph fink and jeffrey cranor. cecil gerschwin palmer is the main character and voiced by cecil baldwin.

it debuted on june 15, 2012 it reached its peak in popularity in 2013-2014

despite this, wtnv has been one of tumblr's top fandoms since staff started tracking fandom-related data in 2014

for the longest time the only thing we knew about cecil's appearance was: "He is wearing a tie. He is not tall or short. Not thin or fat." and that wasn't until episode 19 which aired march 15, 2013. for almost a full year we had no idea what cecil looked like. so tumblr's collective unconscious kicked into high gear and we did what we do best

we created a tumblr sexyman

from know your meme: "Defining traits of the archetype include skinny body type, trickster or villain role and dapper clothing."

know your meme identifies wheatley (portal 2, 2011) and the onceler (the lorax, 2012) as being likely tumblr's first sexymen. and the onceler fandom was at its peak in 2012-2013, the same time as wtnv. in addition to this, the hannibal fandom has been cited as one of the contributing factors to wtnv's success on tumblr.

so tumblr had created an archetype that worked and the wtnv fandom was made up of mostly hannibal fans - the foundation for putting cecil in a suit was there. and honestly? cecil's at work in the show, why wouldn't he be well dressed?

however, while this explains his attire it doesn't explain some of cecil's more unique sexyman features, namely the tentacles. for this we have to return to the 2014 fandom review analysis where you can see the most popular fandom at the time: homestuck

haven't you ever wondered why almost a quarter (189/923 at time of writing) of E rated wtnv fics on ao3 are tagged tentacles or tentacle sex? why cecil having tentacles for a dick is such a seemingly popular headcanon? well look no further then homestuck cultural hold over.

throughout all of this, the development of the sexyman archetype on tumblr and the rise of homestuck, one creator really stands out: kinomatika

kino was one of the most popular homestuck artists on tumblr at the time, popular for their eridan fanart. if you google image search "welcome to night vale" kino's art is still one of the first results you'll get

their design was so popular in fact it was featured in wtnv related articles from the time

and yes there were absolutely other artists giving cecil tentacles and moving tattoos at the time, but it can't be understated the reach kino had and the influence their homestuck roots had on their design choices

i recommend going through the archive of @nightvaleartclub to see how cecil used to be portrayed back in the early days. unfortunately the earliest fanart i've been able to find is july 2013 and i find it hard to believe it took tumblr a year to draw him. although, i started listening at episode 5 and didn't start drawing him until then myself so who knows...

cecil has had tumblr's heart in a vice grip since episode 1, with "20,000 posts, 183,000 blogs and 680,000 notes using the #Night Vale tag" during its first week. tumblr's love for wtnv has always been fairly genuine, from the impact the writing has had on tumblr humor and future story telling, to how wtnv paved the way for lgbt+ representation in indi media, to how it popularized podcasts as a medium for story telling, to the little comforts some of cecil's quotes still bring people today

cecil is not only a founding father of tumblr culture, but also a blorbo of the people. cecil the character in canon has a tumblr account where he posts his art and slash fanfiction.

although cecil's character has developed over time and we've come to see what a ditzy, eccentric, brat he really is, changing his status from sexyman to babygirl, cecil is absolutely a character you should embrace. and you know what... despite what i've said in the past

#cecilsweep

[ID: Images one and two are Google analytic graphs for the search terms "welcome to night vale" and "wtnv" between June 15, 2015 and January 27, 2023. They both depict very sharp spikes around 2013-2014 until the lines decrease greatly over time.

Image three is a drawing of Cecil from Welcome To Nightvale. He is white, with white hair, glasses, a third eye on his forehead, and he is wearing a suit. In the background is the silhouette of a neighborhood from the WTNV official art, a galaxy, and a moon. It is tinted purple. Image four is the always has been meme. Instead of the earth is the tumblr logo, and the text is: “a wtnv fansite?” “Always has been”. End ID] id thanks to @princess-of-purple-prose