#forthcoming 2022

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Autoenshittification

Forget F1: the only car race that matters now is the race to turn your car into a digital extraction machine, a high-speed inkjet printer on wheels, stealing your private data as it picks your pocket. Your car’s digital infrastructure is a costly, dangerous nightmare — but for automakers in pursuit of postcapitalist utopia, it’s a dream they can’t give up on.

Your car is stuffed full of microchips, a fact the world came to appreciate after the pandemic struck and auto production ground to a halt due to chip shortages. Of course, that wasn’t the whole story: when the pandemic started, the automakers panicked and canceled their chip orders, only to immediately regret that decision and place new orders.

But it was too late: semiconductor production had taken a serious body-blow, and when Big Car placed its new chip orders, it went to the back of a long, slow-moving line. It was a catastrophic bungle: microchips are so integral to car production that a car is basically a computer network on wheels that you stick your fragile human body into and pray.

The car manufacturers got so desperate for chips that they started buying up washing machines for the microchips in them, extracting the chips and discarding the washing machines like some absurdo-dystopian cyberpunk walnut-shelling machine:

https://www.autoevolution.com/news/desperate-times-companies-buy-washing-machines-just-to-rip-out-the-chips-187033.html

These digital systems are a huge problem for the car companies. They are the underlying cause of a precipitous decline in car quality. From touch-based digital door-locks to networked sensors and cameras, every digital system in your car is a source of endless repair nightmares, costly recalls and cybersecurity vulnerabilities:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/quality-new-vehicles-us-declining-more-tech-use-study-shows-2023-06-22/

What’s more, drivers hate all the digital bullshit, from the janky touchscreens to the shitty, wildly insecure apps. Digital systems are drivers’ most significant point of dissatisfaction with the automakers’ products:

https://www.theverge.com/23801545/car-infotainment-customer-satisifaction-survey-jd-power

Even the automakers sorta-kinda admit that this is a problem. Back in 2020 when Massachusetts was having a Right-to-Repair ballot initiative, Big Car ran these unfuckingbelievable scare ads that basically said, “Your car spies on you so comprehensively that giving anyone else access to its systems will let murderers stalk you to your home and kill you:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/09/03/rip-david-graeber/#rolling-surveillance-platforms

But even amid all the complaining about cars getting stuck in the Internet of Shit, there’s still not much discussion of why the car-makers are making their products less attractive, less reliable, less safe, and less resilient by stuffing them full of microchips. Are car execs just the latest generation of rubes who’ve been suckered by Silicon Valley bullshit and convinced that apps are a magic path to profitability?

Nope. Car execs are sophisticated businesspeople, and they’re surfing capitalism’s latest — and last — hot trend: dismantling capitalism itself.

Now, leftists have been predicting the death of capitalism since The Communist Manifesto, but even Marx and Engels warned us not to get too frisky: capitalism, they wrote, is endlessly creative, constantly reinventing itself, re-emerging from each crisis in a new form that is perfectly adapted to the post-crisis reality:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/31/books/review/a-spectre-haunting-china-mieville.html

But capitalism has finally run out of gas. In his forthcoming book, Techno Feudalism: What Killed Capitalism, Yanis Varoufakis proposes that capitalism has died — but it wasn’t replaced by socialism. Rather, capitalism has given way to feudalism:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/451795/technofeudalism-by-varoufakis-yanis/9781847927279

Under capitalism, capital is the prime mover. The people who own and mobilize capital — the capitalists — organize the economy and take the lion’s share of its returns. But it wasn’t always this way: for hundreds of years, European civilization was dominated by rents, not markets.

A “rent” is income that you get from owning something that other people need to produce value. Think of renting out a house you own: not only do you get paid when someone pays you to live there, you also get the benefit of rising property values, which are the result of the work that all the other homeowners, business owners, and residents do to make the neighborhood more valuable.

The first capitalists hated rent. They wanted to replace the “passive income” that landowners got from taxing their serfs’ harvest with active income from enclosing those lands and grazing sheep in order to get wool to feed to the new textile mills. They wanted active income — and lots of it.

Capitalist philosophers railed against rent. The “free market” of Adam Smith wasn’t a market that was free from regulation — it was a market free from rents. The reason Smith railed against monopolists is because he (correctly) understood that once a monopoly emerged, it would become a chokepoint through which a rentier could cream off the profits he considered the capitalist’s due:

https://locusmag.com/2021/03/cory-doctorow-free-markets/

Today, we live in a rentier’s paradise. People don’t aspire to create value — they aspire to capture it. In Survival of the Richest, Doug Rushkoff calls this “going meta”: don’t provide a service, just figure out a way to interpose yourself between the provider and the customer:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn

Don’t drive a cab, create Uber and extract value from every driver and rider. Better still: don’t found Uber, invest in Uber options and extract value from the people who invest in Uber. Even better, invest in derivatives of Uber options and extract value from people extracting value from people investing in Uber, who extract value from drivers and riders. Go meta.

This is your brain on the four-hour-work-week, passive income mind-virus. In Techno Feudalism, Varoufakis deftly describes how the new “Cloud Capital” has created a new generation of rentiers, and how they have become the richest, most powerful people in human history.

Shopping at Amazon is like visiting a bustling city center full of stores — but each of those stores’ owners has to pay the majority of every sale to a feudal landlord, Emperor Jeff Bezos, who also decides which goods they can sell and where they must appear on the shelves. Amazon is full of capitalists, but it is not a capitalist enterprise. It’s a feudal one:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is the reason that automakers are willing to enshittify their products so comprehensively: they were one of the first industries to decouple rents from profits. Recall that the reason that Big Car needed billions in bailouts in 2008 is that they’d reinvented themselves as loan-sharks who incidentally made cars, lending money to car-buyers and then “securitizing” the loans so they could be traded in the capital markets.

Even though this strategy brought the car companies to the brink of ruin, it paid off in the long run. The car makers got billions in public money, paid their execs massive bonuses, gave billions to shareholders in buybacks and dividends, smashed their unions, fucked their pensioned workers, and shipped jobs anywhere they could pollute and murder their workforce with impunity.

Car companies are on the forefront of postcapitalism, and they understand that digital is the key to rent-extraction. Remember when BMW announced that it was going to rent you the seatwarmer in your own fucking car?

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/02/big-river/#beemers

Not to be outdone, Mercedes announced that they were going to rent you your car’s accelerator pedal, charging an extra $1200/year to unlock a fully functional acceleration curve:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/11/23/23474969/mercedes-car-subscription-faster-acceleration-feature-price

This is the urinary tract infection business model: without digitization, all your car’s value flowed in a healthy stream. But once the car-makers add semiconductors, each one of those features comes out in a painful, burning dribble, with every button on that fakakta touchscreen wired directly into your credit-card.

But it’s just for starters. Computers are malleable. The only computer we know how to make is the Turing Complete Von Neumann Machine, which can run every program we know how to write. Once they add networked computers to your car, the Car Lords can endlessly twiddle the knobs on the back end, finding new ways to extract value from you:

https://doctorow.medium.com/twiddler-1b5c9690cce6

That means that your car can track your every movement, and sell your location data to anyone and everyone, from marketers to bounty-hunters looking to collect fees for tracking down people who travel out of state for abortions to cops to foreign spies:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7enex/tool-shows-if-car-selling-data-privacy4cars-vehicle-privacy-report

Digitization supercharges financialization. It lets car-makers offer subprime auto-loans to desperate, poor people and then killswitch their cars if they miss a payment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4U2eDJnwz_s

Subprime lending for cars would be a terrible business without computers, but digitization makes it a great source of feudal rents. Car dealers can originate loans to people with teaser rates that quickly blow up into payments the dealer knows their customer can’t afford. Then they repo the car and sell it to another desperate person, and another, and another:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/27/boricua/#looking-for-the-joke-with-a-microscope

Digitization also opens up more exotic options. Some subprime cars have secondary control systems wired into their entertainment system: miss a payment and your car radio flips to full volume and bellows an unstoppable, unmutable stream of threats. Tesla does one better: your car will lock and immobilize itself, then blare its horn and back out of its parking spot when the repo man arrives:

https://tiremeetsroad.com/2021/03/18/tesla-allegedly-remotely-unlocks-model-3-owners-car-uses-smart-summon-to-help-repo-agent/

Digital feudalism hasn’t stopped innovating — it’s just stopped innovating good things. The digital device is an endless source of sadistic novelties, like the cellphones that disable your most-used app the first day you’re late on a payment, then work their way down the other apps you rely on for every day you’re late:

https://restofworld.org/2021/loans-that-hijack-your-phone-are-coming-to-india/

Usurers have always relied on this kind of imaginative intimidation. The loan-shark’s arm-breaker knows you’re never going to get off the hook; his goal is in intimidating you into paying his boss first, liquidating your house and your kid’s college fund and your wedding ring before you default and he throws you off a building.

Thanks to the malleability of computerized systems, digital arm-breakers have an endless array of options they can deploy to motivate you into paying them first, no matter what it costs you:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/02/innovation-unlocks-markets/#digital-arm-breakers

Car-makers are trailblazers in imaginative rent-extraction. Take VIN-locking: this is the practice of adding cheap microchips to engine components that communicate with the car’s overall network. After a new part is installed in your car, your car’s computer does a complex cryptographic handshake with the part that requires an unlock code provided by an authorized technician. If the code isn’t entered, the car refuses to use that part.

VIN-locking has exploded in popularity. It’s in your iPhone, preventing you from using refurb or third-party replacement parts:

https://doctorow.medium.com/apples-cement-overshoes-329856288d13

It’s in fuckin’ ventilators, which was a nightmare during lockdown as hospital techs nursed their precious ventilators along by swapping parts from dead systems into serviceable ones:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/3azv9b/why-repair-techs-are-hacking-ventilators-with-diy-dongles-from-poland

And of course, it’s in tractors, along with other forms of remote killswitch. Remember that feelgood story about John Deere bricking the looted Ukrainian tractors whose snitch-chips showed they’d been relocated to Russia?

https://doctorow.medium.com/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors-bc93f471b9c8

That wasn’t a happy story — it was a cautionary tale. After all, John Deere now controls the majority of the world’s agricultural future, and they’ve boobytrapped those ubiquitous tractors with killswitches that can be activated by anyone who hacks, takes over, or suborns Deere or its dealerships.

Control over repair isn’t limited to gouging customers on parts and service. When a company gets to decide whether your device can be fixed, it can fuck you over in all kinds of ways. Back in 2019, Tim Apple told his shareholders to expect lower revenues because people were opting to fix their phones rather than replace them:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/01/letter-from-tim-cook-to-apple-investors/

By usurping your right to decide who fixes your phone, Apple gets to decide whether you can fix it, or whether you must replace it. Problem solved — and not just for Apple, but for car makers, tractor makers, ventilator makers and more. Apple leads on this, even ahead of Big Car, pioneering a “recycling” program that sees trade-in phones shredded so they can’t possibly be diverted from an e-waste dump and mined for parts:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/yp73jw/apple-recycling-iphones-macbooks

John Deere isn’t sleeping on this. They’ve come up with a valuable treasure they extract when they win the Right-to-Repair: Deere singles out farmers who complain about its policies and refuses to repair their tractors, stranding them with six-figure, two-ton paperweight:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/31/dealers-choice/#be-a-shame-if-something-were-to-happen-to-it

The repair wars are just a skirmish in a vast, invisible fight that’s been waged for decades: the War On General-Purpose Computing, where tech companies use the law to make it illegal for you to reconfigure your devices so they serve you, rather than their shareholders:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/01/10/lockdown-the-coming-war-on-general-purpose-computing/

The force behind this army is vast and grows larger every day. General purpose computers are antithetical to technofeudalism — all the rents extracted by technofeudalists would go away if others (tinkereres, co-ops, even capitalists!) were allowed to reconfigure our devices so they serve us.

You’ve probably noticed the skirmishes with inkjet printer makers, who can only force you to buy their ink at 20,000% markups if they can stop you from deciding how your printer is configured:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/07/inky-wretches/#epson-salty But we’re also fighting against insulin pump makers, who want to turn people with diabetes into walking inkjet printers:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/10/loopers/#hp-ification

And companies that make powered wheelchairs:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/08/chair-ish/#r2r

These companies start with people who have the least agency and social power and wreck their lives, then work their way up the privilege gradient, coming for everyone else. It’s called the “shitty technology adoption curve”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/08/21/great-taylors-ghost/#solidarity-or-bust

Technofeudalism is the public-private-partnership from hell, emerging from a combination of state and private action. On the one hand, bailing out bankers and big business (rather than workers) after the 2008 crash and the covid lockdown decoupled income from profits. Companies spent billions more than they earned were still wildly profitable, thanks to those public funds.

But there’s also a policy dimension here. Some of those rentiers’ billions were mobilized to both deconstruct antitrust law (allowing bigger and bigger companies and cartels) and to expand “IP” law, turning “IP” into a toolsuite for controlling the conduct of a firm’s competitors, critics and customers:

https://locusmag.com/2020/09/cory-doctorow-ip/

IP is key to understanding the rise of technofeudalism. The same malleability that allows companies to “twiddle” the knobs on their services and keep us on the hook as they reel us in would hypothetically allow us to countertwiddle, seizing the means of computation:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

The thing that stands between you and an alternative app store, an interoperable social media network that you can escape to while continuing to message the friends you left behind, or a car that anyone can fix or unlock features for is IP, not technology. Under capitalism, that technology would already exist, because capitalists have no loyalty to one another and view each other’s margins as their own opportunities.

But under technofeudalism, control comes from rents (owning things), not profits (selling things). The capitalist who wants to participate in your iPhone’s “ecosystem” has to make apps and submit them to Apple, along with 30% of their lifetime revenues — they don’t get to sell you jailbreaking kit that lets you choose their app store.

Rent-seeking technology has a holy grail: control over “ring zero” — the ability to compel you to configure your computer to a feudalist’s specifications, and to verify that you haven’t altered your computer after it came into your possession:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/30/ring-minus-one/#drm-political-economy

For more than two decades, various would-be feudal lords and their court sorcerers have been pitching ways of doing this, of varying degrees of outlandishness.

At core, here’s what they envision: inside your computer, they will nest another computer, one that is designed to run a very simple set of programs, none of which can be altered once it leaves the factory. This computer — either a whole separate chip called a “Trusted Platform Module” or a region of your main processor called a secure enclave — can tally observations about your computer: which operating system, modules and programs it’s running.

Then it can cryptographically “sign” these observations, proving that they were made by a secure chip and not by something you could have modified. Then you can send this signed “attestation” to someone else, who can use it to determine how your computer is configured and thus whether to trust it. This is called “remote attestation.”

There are some cool things you can do with remote attestation: for example, two strangers playing a networked video game together can use attestations to make sure neither is running any cheat modules. Or you could require your cloud computing provider to use attestations that they aren’t stealing your data from the server you’re renting. Or if you suspect that your computer has been infected with malware, you can connect to someone else and send them an attestation that they can use to figure out whether you should trust it.

Today, there’s a cool remote attestation technology called “PrivacyPass” that replaces CAPTCHAs by having you prove to your own device that you are a human. When a server wants to make sure you’re a person, it sends a random number to your device, which signs that number along with its promise that it is acting on behalf of a human being, and sends it back. CAPTCHAs are all kinds of bad — bad for accessibility and privacy — and this is really great.

But the billions that have been thrown at remote attestation over the decades is only incidentally about solving CAPTCHAs or verifying your cloud server. The holy grail here is being able to make sure that you’re not running an ad-blocker. It’s being able to remotely verify that you haven’t disabled the bossware your employer requires. It’s the power to block someone from opening an Office365 doc with LibreOffice. It’s your boss’s ability to ensure that you haven’t modified your messaging client to disable disappearing messages before he sends you an auto-destructing memo ordering you to break the law.

And there’s a new remote attestation technology making the rounds: Google’s Web Environment Integrity, which will leverage Google’s dominance over browsers to allow websites to block users who run ad-blockers:

https://github.com/RupertBenWiser/Web-Environment-Integrity

There’s plenty else WEI can do (it would make detecting ad-fraud much easier), but for every legitimate use, there are a hundred ways this could be abused. It’s a technology purpose-built to allow rent extraction by stripping us of our right to technological self-determination.

Releasing a technology like this into a world where companies are willing to make their products less reliable, less attractive, less safe and less resilient in pursuit of rents is incredibly reckless and shortsighted. You want unauthorized bread? This is how you get Unauthorized Bread:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/amp/

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

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

[Image ID: The interior of a luxury car. There is a dagger protruding from the steering wheel. The entertainment console has been replaced by the text 'You wouldn't download a car,' in MPAA scare-ad font. Outside of the windscreen looms the Matrix waterfall effect. Visible in the rear- and side-view mirror is the driver: the figure from Munch's 'Scream.' The screen behind the steering-wheel has been replaced by the menacing red eye of HAL9000 from Stanley Kubrick's '2001: A Space Odyssey.']

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[200-word-rpgs]

Tumblr 200 Word RPGs

This is a sideblog for the informal 200-word RPG jams organised by @prokopetz each November.

Next Event

2025's event will run from from 2025-11-01 through 2025-11-30; a link to the submission thread will be placed here while the event is active.

Past Events

2024 – Tumblr thread | Offsite archive (forthcoming) 2023 – Tumblr thread | Offsite archive 2022 – Tumblr thread | Offsite archive

Submission Guidelines

Each entry should be a complete, playable roleplaying game in two hundred words or fewer. Coming in lower is fine, though you're welcome to try to hit 200 words exactly if you want an extra challenge.

This is an informal game jam; entries are not curated or judged, no eligibility rules are enforced, no winners are chosen, and the organising parties explicitly refuse to define the terms "word" or "RPG". If you wish to participate, you can follow these steps:

Step 1: If you're unfamiliar with 200-word RPGs, read a bunch of previous years' entries (linked above), or browse the 200 Word RPG Challenge archives at https://200wordrpg.github.io/ to get in the proper headspace. (Note: this blog is not affiliated with the 200 Word RPG Challenge; its archives are provided for reference only.)

Step 2: Write your own 200-word RPG. If you're not sure of your word count, you can use the counter at https://200wordrpg.github.io/wordcount to check. If you disagree with how this tool defines "word", feel free to use a different counting method – adherence to the word limit is on the honour system anyway.

Step 3: Reblog the current event's main post (linked above when an event is active) and append your 200-word RPG in the reblog. Please do not submit your entry as a reblog to the post you are reading right now.

Step 4 (optional): If you wish to provide any author's notes on your entry, please place them under a "Read More" break to make it clear which part of the post is the game and which part is commentary.

Step 5 (optional): Indicate in your post whether you're okay with having your 200-word RPG archived off-site for posterity – if you don't say anything one way or the other, we'll assume the answer is "no". Please state this separately from any more general discussion of sharing or remixing permissions; don't make us guess!

Note: In previous years, we'd requested that folks refrain from discussing entries on the submission thread in order to avoid making them hard to find. Since we have a dedicated sideblog this year, that request is not being made this time around.

[soulrph]

chaotic unhinged lines from 2022-2023 (prompt edition).

basically in 2021 i made a list of prompts inspired by lines in tiktok videos and instagram reels that made me laugh so hard i cried! and now i have returned with another list! these may provide an alarmingly clear image of what my sense of humor is (aka broken) but i figure a little levity is always a good thing! more prompts are forthcoming, but in the mean time: bon appetit!

knowledge has always chased you, but you've always been faster.

no... no, that was mango apathy juice. from the farmer's market.

of all these people, you are the one i understand the least. i want to get to know you better, but like, not that much better.

i-i will CHEW YOUR MEAT!! WHAT are you doing?!

ooooh god, no, you wouldn't be long getting frostbit!

you are evil. like a hobbit.

WHY MUST YOU FAIL ME SO OFTEN?!?!!?

i have had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it.

AHEM!! fill my cup.

may god ignore you like you ignored my greetings.

i will avenge you mister van gogh.

call off work bestie, we need you to solve a murder. here's fifteen dollars.

you're not in love. you may think you are, you dumb fuck, but you're not.

go ahead and put the ranch away.

sadly, "hopefully" doth butter no parsnips.

forget school, i want to be an italian sandwich.

you shouldn't skip work, you are a lawyer and he is a hamster.

you can stop roleplaying now. you're free.

her coupon game was so fucking raw.

i'm sorry guys... he's making a salad.

you could get a straight guy here if you learned to make a good pasta. i'll teach you how to make a risotto that'll get you married and out of my basement.

hey, do you want me to get together a plate of roast beef and hide it in our room so we can have night meats?

it's not the most ethical thing in the world, but in a pinch you can hand off a cursed object to basically any baby.

no, children, you're wrong. once upon a time, there was a piece of wood.

and i'm not saying she deserved it, but i am saying that god's timing is always riiiiight.

hydrate or die-drate, ya DICK!

why did the monkey fall out of the tree? because it was DEAD.

new york city is a fictional place written up by someone with a sinister mind and a knack for comedy.

this is grindr my guy.

wait, i didn't finish teaching you the difference between human and wolf anatomy.

it's time to tell your grandmother that she was wrong. do not be afraid.

vanilla vodka... you fucking child.

without ash to rise from, a phoenix would just be a bird getting up.

you are fucking alive. do what you want.

why are you cradling me like a baby, friend? this isn't how guys of my generation hang out.

i hope a hedgehog shits in your cereal, you difficult person.

you know, i am not as mean as i would like to be. and i think people should appreciate that more.

see, i am not a kangaroo.

well, i'd like to help, but... you see... not as much as i'd like not to.

rest in peace you fucking onion fairy.

when god sings with all his creations, will a turtle not be part of the choir?

i fight for a seat in heaven, every. single. day.

map maker? can you find me somewhere on the map where this big man thinks he's the king?

you bald-headed demon...

so... there are 24 million pigs in australia... and 24 million people... so if you ever feel lonely, there's like, a pig out there that's sort of your cosmic twin.

remember, alcohol is god's apology for making us self-aware.

i'm straight!! stop CONFUSING me!!!!!

you guys want something to eat? because... i know we'll die if we don't eat.

he is a BIBLICALLY gorgeous man. i wanna feed him grapes. i wanna fan him with the frond of a date palm from the forests of Lebanon. i wanna find the alabaster vial of perfume oil that one woman broke for jesus and comb it through his hair. like... he's stressing me OUT.

i'm not sad! i'm freaking HUNGRY!

maybe, if we wait a little bit longer, a fuck will fall into my hand, and i can give it to you.

it's not my fault you thought you lived in this IKEA.

let's leave my mother out of this.

jason may kill people but he's not bad enough to kick a dog.

i run for LUMP!

oh no, i'm all out of caring, baby!

you don't think it mcbe that way... but it mcdo.

what is this enticing bowl of white?

serious question, do his nipples sparkle?

what in the reese's peanut butter fuck is going on here?

if your parents don't buy it, stop loving them!

i just hope you know just how much you've decreased productivity today.

that was poetry at its FINEST.

and if you let that motherfucker shenan ONCE, you best believe they're gonna shenanIGAN!

may god bless the dinosaur that died to make the fossil fuel that was treated to become petrol in the car that took her mom to the hospital to give birth to her.

that's modern milk for ya. what a time to be alive.

you have attachment issues. please fix it.

remember when people had secrets? we should bring that back.

the moon landing was an elaborate marriage proposal.

i don't like the cobra chicken.

i didn't know eggs were this expensive? it's time to lay my own, i fear.

so you're saying the reason i don't have a girlfriend is because i'm not a big enough threat yet.

god gave him a top lip, that's why he's so powerful.

it's a common mistake, but frankenstein was actually the author.

i finally got a pocket-sized diary!!! also i don't get the concept of life.

if a beautiful woman disagrees with me, i will immediately change my view. i've no principles.

how did you all end up married to such boiled potatoes?

if so much as one tear drops from their eye... i will slap you back into your mum.

you are ringing a phone that does not like to be rung.

look how Dr. doofenschmirtz had a fucked up childhood but didn't project his trauma onto his teenage daughter. he projected it onto a platypus.

it is mathematically impossible for you to get a wedgie.

i'm breaking up with you. i love you, it's just... i don't think you could protect me from a mummy.

if you can't do fractions....... you will fucking die.

that's right; in the year 1791, all of our bottoms were killed in a Big Bottom Massacre.

people always assume i'm mean. like CAN you BELIEVE THAT CRAP?! like WHAT would make you think i'm MEAN?! I'M THE NICEST PERSON ON THE PLANET!

the chocolate milk is strikingly overpriced and at the same time very easy to steal; another of god's little tests.

someone's gotta tell the waiter that i ordered mashed 'taters and it sure as shit ain't gonna be me.

if i had a week i couldn't list all the reasons that wouldn't work.

[vintagerpg]

Ahhh, Dice Men (2022). This is billed as the origin story of Games Workshop, and primarily covers the period from the company’s founding to the point in 1985 when Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson passed leadership over to Bryan Ansell (though they retained shares in the company until 1991). There’s a little bit about WFRP and Rogue Trader, but that is really a nod rather than anything in-depth. And while there is a good deal of business history here that is interesting, I caution readers from expecting a no-holds bar accounting; this is very much a celebration of a much-loved period of the company’s history and there is little here that is controversial or even a little bit prickly, even. That’s fine! I’m hear for the visual history, honest!

It’s rich! The book starts briefly with the manufacture of board game bits and gets right into the Owl and Weasel newsletter, showing all 25 covers, which is a treat (the version I crowdfunded came with a replica of #1, even)! There’s a lot of material on the import of D&D, as well as big chapters on White Dwarf magazine, Citadel Miniatures, Warhammer and Fighting Fantasy. All full of art and covers and photos of ephemera and even a too-brief catalog of painted miniatures.

The rest concerns business stuff, which has its own charm. Lots of vintage photos of warehouses and offices and folks painting miniatures and folks gathered at the storefronts. It’s all rather cozy, actually.

Highly recommended for GW aficionados, particularly those, like me, who appreciate the early period above all else. My interest whithers pretty much completely after 1991 or so (the Realm of Chaos books are the last to grab me), and this basically gives me everything I want. I’m keen to see what the publisher does with the forthcoming Fighting Fantasy art book (update: it’s fucking amazing), and how this account pairs with Grimdark: A Very British Hell.

[aaknopf]

Leila Mottley was regularly writing and performing poetry even before she published her novel Nightcrawling at only nineteen, in 2022; today we get an advance peek into her forthcoming first collection, woke up no light. Divided into hoods—sections on Girlhood, Neighborhood, Falsehood, and Womanhood—the poems instruct us, as here, in the art of noticing, speaking boldly, and feeling deeply.

what to do when you see a Black woman cry 

stop. hum a little / just for some sound / just for a way to fill us up it is streetlamp time / all moon-cheeked black girls are mourning / a wailing kind of undoing don’t mistake this as a tragedy / it is sacred don’t mistake this as a glorious pain / we hurt.

don’t tell me it will be alright. make me a gourmet meal and don’t expect me to do the dishes after don’t try to hug me without asking first if i slept last night / if i need some jasmine tea / and a bath in a tub deep enough to fit my grief

and if i say i want a hug don’t touch my hair while you do it / don’t twist my braids around your fingers or tell me my fro is matted in the back from banging my head on the wall of so many askings

you think we are sobbing for the men, but we are praying for the men / their favorite sweat-soaked t-shirts we are screeching for our thighs for our throats / and our teeth-chipping / for the terror and the ceremony / and the unending always of this sky

so if i let you see a tear drip / if i let you see my teeth chatter know you are witnessing a miracle know you are not entitled to my face crack / head shake / sob but i do not cry in front of just anyone so stop. hum a little / just for some sound / just to fill me up

More on this book and author: 

Learn more about woke up no light by Leila Mottley.

Browse other books by Leila Mottley and follow her on Instagram @leilamottley.

Click here to read Leila Mottley's curated list of recommended books about the San Francisco Bay Area. 

Leila Mottley will be in Brooklyn for a Poetry Night reading and conversation with Tatiana Johnson-Boria at Books Are Magic (Montague Street location) on April 24, 2024 at 7:00 PM. The event will also be livestreamed for free on Youtube. 

Visit our Tumblr to peruse poems, audio recordings, and broadsides in the Knopf poem-a-day series.

To share the poem-a-day experience with friends, pass along this link.

[asgoodeasgold]

Matthew Goode feet up

Carl Morck is lazy unbothered (zero f*cks to give basically) and likes nothing better that having a nap at his desk, feet up.

Extract from Department Q Book 1 Mercy:

"He shrugged. What the hell. It wasn’t really urgent, anyway. A man like him knew how to turn a force majeure to his advantage. If the electronics had decided to shut down, then it must be a sign that he should station himself in the basement and hold a profound dialogue with the coffee cups for an hour or two, his feet propped up on his desk."

I am hoping we will get some of that in forthcoming Netflix Dept. Q (29 May!) but, in the meantime, I wanted to check out other instances in Matthew's repertoire.

Here are Bob and Tony. I love the two completely different vibes, and no doubt Carl will give out his own personal 'feet on desk' energy.

Bob is super relaxed and 'king of Hollywood'. This is a man in charge, he is great at what he does and he knows it.

Tony is pure badass nonchalance with an added helping of smoke rings (he has left Princess Margaret downstairs waiting to be photographed, wondering what's going on - this is a ploy to destabilise her and break down her walls].

[I feel a smoke rings video coming on, but I digress.]

📷 Netflix The Crown (2016) s2:04 and Paramount+ The Offer (2022) deleted scene (bluray extras), my edits. Dept. Q key art from Netflix.

[mariacallous]

There was once a time when a performance career in New York progressed with, if not security, at least a path. An emerging playwright, director, or choreographer could hone their craft in a subsidized rehearsal space, apply for a residency somewhere in or near the city, or join a lab devoted to original works. Getting a single peer-reviewed grant, even a tiny one, would lead to others—each award conferring further legitimacy, bringing the artist to the attention of venues and large foundations. Money permitted more complex organizational structures, like companies and collectives, to form. In the happiest cases, a company could establish long-term funding relationships and receive predictable year-in, year-out operating support, thus becoming an institution, which could, in turn, offer its own new-work labs and programs. The cycle continued—or, at least, it did.

In the past half decade, whole strata of this intricate New York support system have been smashed. First, there was a drip-drip-drip of crisis: as costs everywhere rose, city, state, and federal monies faded away once COVID-era bailout efforts came to an end. According to a forthcoming study by the service organization A.R.T./New York, post-pandemic audiences for nonprofit theatre remain down eleven per cent, and, just in the year from 2022 to 2023, corporate giving dipped eighty per cent. Consequently, we’ve lost directing labs, nearby retreat centers for theatre and dance, and support spaces dedicated to new writing. There has been less ferment, less activity, less art. Already, financially strapped venues are producing far fewer shows—according to the Times, in the past five years, the number of Off Broadway productions eligible for the Lucille Lortel Awards has dropped by half.

And then, when the need seemed greatest, several private philanthropic foundations pulled out the rug. Three of the largest arts funders in the United States—the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Doris Duke Foundation, and the Ford Foundation—stopped supporting many components of the arts infrastructure in New York that they helped create. Their reasons were various, but the upshot was the same: extreme turbulence, which has affected organizations big and small. There were deep program and operational budget cuts at the Public Theatre, for instance, and Playwrights Horizons, where such critically acclaimed productions as Michael R. Jackson’s “Strange Loop” and David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic” premièred, lost underwriting for new play commissioning, as well as general operating support. The tiny rooms where such shows develop got hit, too. “It seemed like everybody lost their subsidized rehearsal space funding from Mellon at the same time,” Risa Shoup, a co-executive director from A.R.T./New York, told me.

Mellon and Duke overhauled their giving goals in accidental lockstep, with many of their changes hitting simultaneously in 2024. Longtime observers of the granting scene describe Ford’s lessening interest in connecting with performing arts organizations in New York—“I find them to be inaccessible in terms of having a conversation in terms of cultivation,” one New York program head told me—though this characterization has been contested by the foundation itself. Despite the timing, these shifts and defundings were not inspired by the incoming Trump Administration; they were set in motion, in some cases, years beforehand—it’s only a coincidence that they amplify the Administration’s fund-pulling chaos. I have heard these three foundations described as ecologies unto themselves. The pivoting of just one from its historical patterns of giving would be seismic; the pivot of all three at once has been cataclysmic.

One major consequence has been that several service organizations and granting initiatives—technically regranters, intermediaries who disburse monies from umbrella donors—have been forced to shut down or to retire grant programs. In late 2024, the National Dance Project and the National Theatre Project announced that Mellon was “concluding their decades-long funding arc” and the organizations, in their current form, would end. The MAP Fund, which in the past fifteen years or so was largely sponsored by Mellon and Duke, was, until recently, one of the country’s longest-serving regranters. In the years since its founding in 1988, MAP, originally called the Multi-Arts Production Fund, assembled panels to read tens of thousands of open-call applications, leading to the support of around twenty-five hundred artists and ensembles—including Suzan-Lori Parks, Adrienne Kennedy, and Anna Deavere Smith. With its regranting function zeroed out by both of its key donors so close together, this vital support system is no more. (MAP still nominally exists, though it has been reduced to its last surviving program, a coaching and peer-gathering initiative.)

Those fifteen years of collaboration did not protect MAP. In fact, longevity seems to have become a liability. For twelve years, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council operated a dance residency called Extended Life that provided basic-income stipends to mid-career choreographers and was directly funded by Mellon. In 2024, L.M.C.C. lost around two million dollars after Mellon chose not to renew its grant, and Extended Life, too, was forced to close.

Organizations did have warning. In 2023, Duke told around two dozen of its longtime beneficiaries—including MAP, Creative Capital, Theatre Communications Group, National Institute for Directing & Ensemble Creation, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures—that it would begin “sunsetting” its support throughout the next few years. The defunding in December still came as a shock, however, since many were still hoping for some reprieve. “Grantees were basically cut off at the knees,” as one operative at a smaller foundation put it.

“Since the nonprofit theatre movement solidified in the nineteen-fifties, we have faced government shifting, but not this kind of foundation retrenchment,” Niegel Smith, the artistic director of the Flea theatre (which continues to be funded by Mellon), told me. “When I entered the field, the sense was that you could work and prove yourself and then your company would win enduring support from the pool of foundations. That’s no longer the case.”

In the U.S., private philanthropic foundations—which are required to disburse five per cent of their net investment assets each year—have not only long provided the scaffolding of the arts system but have also been a bulwark against politicization. During the so-called culture wars of the nineteen-nineties, right-wing politicians such as Jesse Helms led a campaign to insert morality clauses into the funding guidelines for the National Endowment for the Arts (N.E.A.); he hoped to ban “homoeroticism,” for instance. While Helms’s specific language did not survive the ensuing lawsuits, the controversy permanently weakened the N.E.A., and its budget—which has never kept pace with inflation—has been used as a political football ever since. For decades, private foundations stepped into the resulting funding gap.

As devastating as recent philanthropic shifts have been, the funding changes of the past few years reflect, in many cases, an attempt on the foundations’ part to create greater equity. In 2017, a much-read study by the Helicon Collaborative, an arts-and-culture consultancy, showed that fifty-eight per cent of all contributed income was going to only two per cent of arts organizations, indicating a hoarding of resources by a few. Under Ford’s current head, Darren Walker, the foundation has seemingly addressed this imbalance, and, in Walker’s words, focussed its “efforts to address the societal drivers of inequality.” An artistic director told me that a Ford program officer was direct about that pivot, and its ramifications: “They said, ‘We’re looking at our impact across the nation, and New York is no longer a priority.’ ” (Ford points out the Foundation has doubled its performance-arts giving since 2018 in New York City. “Support for the arts has long been important to the Ford Foundation and that has not changed,” a spokesperson for Ford wrote. “Our grantmaking strategies operate under a long term cycle, with a focus on smaller groups and networks that lack access to philanthropic resources. These principles will continue to guide our work moving forward.”)

Such a rationale can be hard to argue with. And it’s not just the private foundations. Con Edison, after being a mainstay donor to the arts in New York, announced in late 2023 that it would be “re-aligning” its mission to combat climate change and advance social justice. These are both admirable goals. But creativity without the prerequisite of social efficacy was once touted by these same funders as being crucial to the common good. Certain benefits of the arts (like better community health outcomes) take decades to manifest, while others (like beauty and collective expression) remain stubbornly unquantifiable.

Tommy Kriegsmann, the co-producer of the Under the Radar festival, sees two reasons for the funding rug pull. “From a generational standpoint, we’re seeing a change in arts leadership,” he said. There has been tremendous turnover after decades of stasis, with new artistic directors at theatres including Second Stage, Performance Space New York, Lincoln Center, and Signature. But Kriegsmann may also be referring to the fact that key program staff at Mellon and both Duke’s president and C.E.O., Sam Gill, and Duke’s arts program director, Ashley Ferro-Murray, are relatively new. Kriegsmann acknowledged that “programs like the National Theatre Project, the National Dance Project, that have been around for fifteen or twenty years or more, are coming to a natural end.” Kriegsmann is not sanguine about the destruction, but he also sees the need for innovation. “So—while it’s vile and frightening, it does feel extremely necessary for us to be reënvisioning these programs and structures.” (Under the Radar got a million-dollar grant from Mellon this year, to help with succession planning.)

Mellon’s performing-arts spending nationally has actually risen from thirty-eight to seventy-two million dollars in the past seven years, and it is not abandoning New York. Rather, the foundation seems to be making changes to its giving in two ways: first, a stronger interest in allocating big sums to a comparably small group of individuals—what program officer Stephanie Ybarra has described publicly as “giving an inch wide, but a mile deep”—and second, a shift in its grantee pool toward organizations that haven’t been awarded before. For instance, Randi Berry, the executive director of the microgranting service provider IndieSpace, noted in an e-mail to me that “Mellon hadn’t funded us for the first decade + of our existence but IS in fact funding us now and is our biggest funder.” Still, by cutting loose such on-the-ground intermediaries as MAP, their award-giving will no longer be as decentralized, and some grants will rely on personal invitations. (The national network of regranters and their readers were many; the entire arts and culture staff at Mellon is only sixteen people.) “In recent years we have worked to serve the field even more fully and broadly,” Mellon’s arts and culture program director Deana Haggag, who took the role in January, said. “This has meant, since 2019, nearly doubling the number of grantees and the grantmaking dollars in the performing arts sector, focusing on those who had never received foundation support.”

Duke’s pivot, on the other hand, reflects a wholesale shift in the foundation’s chosen mission in the arts. Maurine Knighton, the chief program officer at Duke, told me that the public response to the funding changes seems inaccurate to her. “The main thing that sticks out to me is the notion that we are reducing or somehow eliminating our arts funding, which is just completely untrue,” she told me. She said that the quantity of available money has stayed the same—around fifty million dollars in giving per year—but the targets have changed. While Duke continues to award six individual artists’ grants (five hundred and fifty thousand dollars each), other monies that once underwrote a host of service and development initiatives will now focus on two major areas: advocacy for artists-as-workers (they plan to announce some programs, but could not yet share details) and new technologies, “not only for distributing creative work but also for producing it,” she said. “We see this as an essential way to future-proof contemporary dance,” Knighton said. She emphasized that Duke had always insisted on the impermanence of any support. “The notion that if you fund something for, you know, a period of time, you are then obligated to fund it forever, really isn’t a reasonable idea,” she said.

There seems to be a widespread distaste among philanthropies for grantees developing dependence on their support. “Indefinite funding is never philanthropy’s promise and should not be the expectation,” a spokesman for Mellon said. Foundations, contra the term, are not necessarily prioritizing stability, even now. The Playwrights Horizons artistic director Adam Greenfield told me that crucial “general operating” support funds have gotten harder to find as funders begin to favor project-specific grants. He thinks that the rise of invitation-only grant applications can “inadvertently privilege personal relationships.” He added, “If the arts are, as I believe, a tool of democracy and a powerful safeguard against oppression, then in this moment—considering the intersecting strains we’re facing (inflation, corporatization, federal cuts)—the stakes of arts funding couldn’t be higher.”

Private foundations are largely beholden only to themselves, and so, at any time, they could turn all these taps back on. But will they? It doesn’t seem likely. The Trump Administration has added yet more volatility to the situation. Earlier this year, in response to executive orders 14173 and 14168, the N.E.A. issued new compliance language, asserting that “the applicant will not operate any programs promoting ‘diversity, equity, and inclusion’ ” and that “federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology”—an echo of Helms’s not-so-long-ago efforts. Court injunctions and legal actions have momentarily left those directives up in the air, but federal funds now seem particularly precarious. Executive order 14173, in particular, takes aim at “foundations with assets of 500 million dollars or more,” threatening “civil compliance investigations” of the same type that have been levelled against institutions of higher education.

Attacks on granting foundations have already begun. Creative Capital, a twenty-five-year-old granting organization that describes itself as “the gold standard in artist support,” is now facing a public complaint from the activist lawyer Edward Blum’s American Alliance for Equal Rights asking the I.R.S. to “examine racial practices” at the organization.

The chance to create stability may have passed. Nonprofit foundations, especially those that prioritize climate and diversity, have been bracing themselves against rumors of a further slate of executive orders that might target their tax-exempt status. The Council on Foundations, a membership organization for philanthropies, published a statement of public solidarity, which as of this writing has some five hundred signatories, announcing a field-wide resistance against any attempt to limit their “freedom to direct our resources to a wide variety of important services, issues, and places.” The Times reported that, on April 22nd, a White House official said, “There are no such orders that are being drafted or considered at this time.” That may be true today. But we are clearly on rapidly shifting ground. Uncertainty, it turns out, is a terrible thing, and it can prevent even the well-intentioned from doing good. 

[keyofnow]

Paperback Writer

The Beatles’ 1966 single “Paperback Writer” is noteworthy for —

Its new driving sound...

Its surreal storytelling...

Its unprecedented international success...

Its lackluster domestic sales...

Serving as a harbinger of Revolver...

Providing the musical matrix for The Monkees...

Its deeper connection to a through-line (one of many) in The Beatles Story.

Painting testimonial pictures....

It's a guitar riff nasty enough to take the paint off the wall — yet played so fluidly and melodically that it almost sounds baroque in its articulation.

Add to that the newfound thickness of the drums and stunningly deep bass tone (courtesy of copious company rule-breaking by new chief engineer Geoff Emerick and his accomplice assistant engineer Ken Townsend).

But what really drives “Paperback Writer” is how the lyric gives the appearance of a cover letter from an aspiring novelist pitching the treatment for their new novel. Layers upon layers. Who does that? It's mad! And also short and to the point, so it doesn't ever become tedious. Like an ideal cover letter!

What's it all about?!

After its release the single went #1 in twelve countries (includo UK and US), the most simultaneous #1's of any artist ever perhaps. Maybe not, but certainly in the top three, and definitely the most of any band ever.

Despite topping the charts at home once again, domestic sales were apparently the most sluggish of any Beatles record since “Love Me Do”. Curious.

Nonetheless, in the mass consciousness it served to bridge the musical space between the sounds of Rubber Soul echoing through the spring of 1966, and the opening strains of “Taxman” that would inaugurate the musical cornucopia of Revolver later that summer.

The deeper you go....

In essence “Paperback Writer” was Paul's subtle plug for his girlfriend's brother's new boutique bookshop, and books and reading in general.

Completely incidentally, “Paperback Writer” also represents exactly one half of the template for “Last Train To Clarksville”, the made-to-order Boyce/Hart composition to be released a few months later as the debut single for the made-for-American-TV Beatles knock-off series The Monkees. The other half of that template is the final track on Rubber Soul, “Run For Your Life”. Along with the entirety of Rubber Soul and the forthcoming Revolver albums, “Paperback Writer” and its b-side constitute the core matrix of The Monkees sound that would emerge over the next two years across six albums and as many singles.

And in the end...

Deeper still, the most magical element of “Paperback Writer” is the much larger story surrounding it — involving Pink Floyd, Peter and Gordon, Marianne Faithful, Yoko Ono, and The Beatles themselves — a story that centres around one Indica Bookstore (and Gallery) in St. James, London...

🍏

[thebroccolination]

THE EX-MORNING Q23 - FILMING HAS OFFICIALLY WRAPPED!!! (EPISODE 1 AIRS MAY 22nd)

- SPOILERS! SPOILERS! SPOILERS! -

[source: @.kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk_kiat on Instagram]

As unbelievable as it feels to type it, KristSingto's comeback series has at last finished filming! At 23 Qs, "The Ex-Morning" is set to begin airing on Thursday, May 22nd, for ten episodes.

Just as a speed-run refresher for anyone joining, KristSingto debuted together in 2016 as the leads in GMMTV's first proper BL series, "SOTUS," and continued as a branded khuujin ("imaginary couple") while doing joint and solo projects until late 2022, when Singto began a temporary freelance career, and then he rejoined GMMTV officially in January of 2024, a few months before GMMTV announced "The Ex-Morning" in April of 2024. According to Aof, Singto called him at some point in 2023 and asked for a series for him and Krist, so Aof and Jojo collaborated to create an original concept for them.

And now we're only a little over a month from seeing that concept realized into a full series. :')

OKAY SO! Q23 was a lot, so let's dive in. :D

First off, we had Aou, Earn, and Jamie all check in:

Those of us who clocked Q22 as a potential proposal location had our eyes out for signs of a wedding in Q23, and that led to some extremely amusing shenanigans between the fans and the crew.

This already felt very promising.

Then we got these photos of who do very much appear to be wedding guests and a traditional band:

[source: Facebook]

This is all pretty solid, right? Well. Then this Instagram story popped up and caused absolute mayhem:

First of all, a bride and a groom? And what's "YK"??? I was at work, so I didn't give either of those things much thought, just went along with my day still assuming we were all happily basking in the forthcoming marriage ceremony of Pathapi and Tamtawan.

Then I got a message telling me the fandom was melting down and the crew were teasing them saying it wasn't their wedding, they were just guests. :)))))

Also, apparently that same account first posted that photo with the emoji of two men kissing, then quickly deleted it and re-uploaded the version above.

I imagine the crew were like, "Let's be gremlins," and frankly, I applaud that sort of sinister shenanigan.

Not to be tricked, though, fans began the kind of detective work that should both impress and intimidate:

Now, if you're like me, you probably zoomed in and thought, "I can't see anything," and moved on.

But if you look even more closely, you'll notice two salient details:

The PT of "Pathapi" and "Tamtawan" on the left, and their photo on the right. Also, can we discuss, in detail, how intimate that PT looks? Because damn.

So that was it, right?

I mean, that's quite enough to go by, right? To know it's their wedding? (Plus, y'know, the fact that Peraya would chop the Grammy building down with a very big axe if they used KristSingto's comeback series to marry off a different couple.)

WELL.

Fans also spotted Singto in the background of one of Jamie's videos wearing what seems to be a wedding garland.

Explained in this magnificent post by @thaifanfests:

Floral garlands, generally known as phuang malai (พวงมาลัย) symbolize respect and luck across Thai culture. Garlands and other forms of floral art were historically used in various royal and religious ceremonies and are traditionally made with fresh flowers. Garlands are handmade, with the garland highly symbolic of the patience and attention needed for the threading process. Today, you can find markets and stalls that sell garlands of all shapes, sizes, and arrangement types across Thailand. Some of the flowers used for phuang malai include jasmine, champaca, orchids, marigolds, and gardenias. 

So fans were content at that point that they'd been trolled by an endearing crew of gremlins and a repeat of "Ossan's Love: Love or Dead" (2019) wasn't in the making. (In which the movie did marry off a different couple. A straight couple no less. Of brand new characters. They made up for it in 2023 by having Maki and Haruta's actual wedding in the sequel series, but ooooh was I mad for those three and a half years in the middle there.)

And now, please join me in having so many feelings about these two pairs of formal shoes beside one another at the temple:

[Oh, this series is gonna make me cryyy.]

Filming continued elsewhere after the wedding and wrapped in what seems to be a pet shop with their cat daughter.

We have a few videos from different angles of the final wrap moment in the clips below, but I took some screenshots for y'all to enjoy as well:

After celebrating, KristSingto took commemorative photos:

And that was it! All that's left now is several weeks of postproduction and promotion, and then we'll officially have Pathapi and Tamtawan as the newest part of KristSingto's legacy. <3

But wait…

There's more. :>

We've also been getting some extra treats from the crew over the past twenty-four hours since filming wrapped, liiiike:

I'm gonna guess those could be flashback sequences to their uni days but I won't be sure until we see the show.

And now, the last assortment of clips! There's a ton in there this time, so have a li'l watch. The first clip is going to be in the series itself, I feel?

As I've said and won't tire of saying, I'm so very proud of them, and I couldn't be happier seeing how happy they are. Not only is it a comeback series, it's the first one I'm going to get to experience since I became a fan of them five years ago. I always knew they'd have another series together, I just thought it would be even farther in the future. It's really special knowing it's so soon, and that it's a series hand-crafted for them.

I know there's some disappointment that it's not airing on a Saturday and that it's ten episodes instead of twelve, but considering the rewrites it underwent in December and the fact that they are a legacy khuujin who had a pivotal role in the industry becoming what it is, I think this series is, more than anything, a love letter to their existing fans who waited for them all these years. They've said as much already. As long as it's a tightly written script worthy of them, I don't mind that it's two episodes shorter than I expected. As I've been saying to friends today, "SOTUS S" would be about eight episodes if you cut all the side couples.

I'm so excited to see this story, mainly because Big, Nuanced Emotions are KristSingto's wheelhouse, and the two of them have grown enormously as actors since the last time they acted opposite each other. They've both said they feel safe with each other, and their trust in one another makes working together easy. I think now that they've both had experience working with others, they probably appreciate that ease of working with each other even more. And I can't wait to see what they've created together. :')

Thank you all for joining me in recapping the past twenty-three filming days of "The Ex-Morning"! I'm hoping once the series begins we can use these posts as a reference to go back and connect the dots to when certain scenes were filmed. It's always fun to figure out the order something was filmed in. :D

I'll still be posting under the "#special reporter kiranokira" tag with all upcoming promotion and sneak peeks, so y'all haven't heard the last of me. :>

(I doubt anyone was under that impression.)

Special reporter Kiranokira out!

[austinkleon]

The notebooks of Orhan Pamuk

The novelist's Pamuk's notebooks will be published later this year in Memories of Distant Mountains: Illustrated Notebooks, 2009-2022.

Until the age of 22, Pamuk aspired to be a painter. His forthcoming book, Memories of Distant Mountains, collects images and text from his travel notebooks that capture his sketches and thoughts in Istanbul, Urbino, Mumbai, Goa, Granada, Venice, New York, Paris and Los Angeles.

Here's a presentation which includes slides of his notebooks:

The talk was described in an article about Pamuk and his notebooks, “Plagues and Painting with Words: Glimpses of Orhan Pamuk’s Writing Process.”

For his second talk, in the auditorium of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke, Pamuk explained the writerly process that rests at the intersection of image and text. The pages of Pamuk’s notebooks contain a running commentary on the labors of writing, as well as intimacies, confessions, and symbolic or poetic codes. They not only trace his travels in Istanbul, Urbino, Mumbai, Goa, Granada, Venice, New York, Paris, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, but also reveal what might be called the topographies of the writer’s mind. A piece of gossip sits next to an epiphany. A statement of nostalgia shares the page with news of publications or a simple accounting of the day’s expenses. That contrast, in which the profound cohabits with the quotidian, reveals the writer in the messiness of life. Pamuk’s notebooks are the calm eye of a storm of creativity. They are itinerary and raw thought, both meditative and marginal. For anyone interested in the inner workings of a brilliant mind, the notebooks are an addicting pleasure that lay bare the wellsprings of Pamuk’s writing. The images contained in his notebooks, which were projected on a large screen during the event, reveal ideas, visions, daily concerns, and snippets of conversation intertwined with vistas and landscapes. At times, the words actually constitute the “view.” As Pamuk writes, “There was a time when words and pictures were one. There was a time, words were pictures and pictures were words.”

[madamspeaker]

In an interview for a forthcoming book, Mrs. Clinton also suggested that if Donald Trump won in November “we may never have another actual election.”

Hillary Clinton criticized her fellow Democrats over what she described as a decades-in-the-making failure to protect abortion rights, saying in her first extended interview about the fall of Roe v. Wade that her party underestimated the growing strength of anti-abortion forces until many Democrats were improbably “taken by surprise” by the landmark Dobbs decision in 2022.

In wide-ranging and unusually frank comments, Mrs. Clinton said Democrats had spent decades in a state of denial that a right enshrined in American life for generations could fall — that faith in the courts and legal precedent had made politicians, voters and officials unable to see clearly how the anti-abortion movement was chipping away at abortion rights, restricting access to the procedure and transforming the Supreme Court, until it was too late.

“We didn’t take it seriously, and we didn’t understand the threat,” Mrs. Clinton said. “Most Democrats, most Americans, did not realize we are in an existential struggle for the future of this country.”

She said: “We could have done more to fight.”

Mrs. Clinton’s comments came in an interview conducted in late February for a forthcoming book, “The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America.”

The interview represented Mrs. Clinton’s most detailed comments on abortion rights since the Supreme Court decision that led to the procedure becoming criminalized or restricted in 21 states. She said not only that her party was complacent but also that if she had been in the Senate at the time she would have worked harder to block confirmation of Trump-appointed justices.

And in a blunt reflection about the role sexism played in her 2016 presidential campaign, she said women were the voters who abandoned her in the final days because she was not “perfect.” Overhanging the interview was the understanding that had she won the White House, Roe most likely would have remained a bedrock feature of American life. She assigned blame for the fall of Roe broadly but pointedly, and notably spared herself from the critique.

Some Democrats will most likely agree with Mrs. Clinton’s assessment. But as the party turns its focus to wielding abortion as an electoral weapon, there has been little public reckoning among Democrats over their role in failing to protect abortion rights.

Even when they held control of Congress, Democrats were unwilling to pass legislation codifying abortion rights into federal law. While frequently mentioned in passing to rally their base during election season, the issue rarely rose to the top of their legislative or policy agenda. Many Democrats, including President Biden, often refused even to utter the word.

Until Roe fell, many in the party believed the federal right to an abortion was all but inviolable, unlikely to be reversed even by a conservative Supreme Court. The sense of denial extended to the highest ranks of the party — but not, Mrs. Clinton argued, to her.

“One thing I give the right credit for is they never give up,” she said. “They are relentless. You know, they take a loss, they get back up, they regroup, they raise more money.” She added: “It’s tremendously impressive the way that they operate. And we have nothing like it on our side.”

Mrs. Clinton did not express regret for any inaction herself. Rather, she said her efforts to raise alarms during her 2016 campaign went unheeded and were dismissed as “alarmist” by voters, politicians and members of her own party. In that race, she had talked about the threats to abortion rights on the campaign trail and most memorably in the third presidential debate, vowing to protect Roe when Mr. Trump promised to appoint judges who would overturn it.

But even then, internal campaign polling and focus groups showed that the issue did not resonate strongly with key groups of voters, because they did not believe Roe was truly at risk.

Now, as the country prepares to face its third referendum on Mr. Trump, she offered a stark warning about the 2024 election. A second Trump administration would go far beyond abortion rights to target women’s health care, gay rights, civil rights — and even the core tenets of American democracy itself, she said.

“This election is existential. I mean, if we don’t make the right decision in this election in our country, we may never have another actual election. I will put that out there because I believe it,” she said. “And if we no longer have another actual election, we will be governed by a small minority of right-wing forces that are well organized and well funded and are getting exactly what they want in terms of turning the clock back on women.”

Mrs. Clinton described those forces and her former opponent as part of a “global phenomena” restricting women’s rights, pointing to a push by Xi Jinping, the Chinese leader, pressing women to focus on raising children; the violent policing of women who violate Iran’s conservative dress code; and what she described as the misogyny of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

“Authoritarians, whether they be political or religious based, always go after women. It’s just written in the history. And that’s what will happen in this country,” Mrs. Clinton said.

Mrs. Clinton viewed her remarks as another attempt to ring an alarm before the 2024 election.

“More people have got to wake up, because this is the beginning,” she said. “They really want us to just shut up and go home. That’s their goal. And nobody should be in any way deluded. That’s what they will force upon us if they are given the chance.”

But she also seemed to expect that many would dismiss her concerns once again. “Oh, my God, there she goes again,” she said, describing what she anticipated would be the reaction to her interview. “I mean, she’s just so, you know, so out there.”

But she added: “I know history will prove me right. And I don’t take any comfort in that because that’s not the kind of country or world I want for my grandchildren.”

Nearly eight years after her final campaign, Mrs. Clinton remains one of the most prominent women in American politics, and the only woman in the country’s history to capture the presidential nomination of a major party.

Her life encapsulates what could be seen as the Roe era in American life. She embodies the professional and personal changes that swept the lives of American women over the past half-century. Roe was decided in 1973, the same year Mrs. Clinton graduated from law school. Its fall was accelerated in 2016 by her loss to Donald J. Trump, which set in motion a transformation of the Supreme Court.

Had Mrs. Clinton won the White House in 2016, history would have turned out very differently. She would most likely have appointed two or even three justices to the Supreme Court, securing an abortion-rights legal majority that probably would have not only upheld Roe but also delivered rulings that expanded access to the procedure.

Instead, Mrs. Clinton said Democrats neglected abortion rights from the ballot box to Congress to the Supreme Court.

Along with her prediction for the future, Mrs. Clinton offered a detailed assessment of the past. For her, the meaning of the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization was clear — and devastating.

“It says that we are not equal citizens,” she said, referring to women. “It says that we don’t have autonomy, agency and privacy to make the most personal of decisions. It says that we should be rethinking our lives and our roles in the world.”

She blasted Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who wrote the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in the case, saying his decision was “terrible,” “poorly reasoned” and “historically inaccurate.”

Mrs. Clinton accused four justices — John G. Roberts Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett — of being “teed up to do the bidding” of conservative political and religious organizations and leaders — though she believed many Democrats had not realized that during those justices’ confirmation hearings.

“It is really hard to believe that people are going to lie to you under oath, that even so-called conservative justices would upend precedents to arrive at ridiculous decisions on gun rights and campaign finance and abortion,” she said. “It’s really hard to accept that.”

Yet, she also had tough words for her former colleagues. In the Senate, she said, Democratic lawmakers did not push hard enough to block the confirmation of the justices who would go on to overturn federal abortion rights. When asked in confirmation hearings if they believed Roe was settled law, the nominees noted that Roe was precedent and largely avoided stating their opinion on the decision.

Those justices “all lied in their confirmation hearings,” she said, referring to Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett, all of whom were appointed by Mr. Trump. “They just flat-out lied. And Democrats did nothing in the Senate.”

She added: “If I’d still been in the Senate, and on the Judiciary Committee, I think, you know, I hope I would have tried to do more about what were just outright prevarications.”

It is unclear how Democrats could have stopped those justices from reaching the bench given that they did not control the Senate during their confirmation hearings. When Mr. Trump took office, Republicans also had unified control of 24 state legislatures, making it all but impossible for Democrats to stop conservatives from pushing through increasingly restrictive laws.

For years, she said, Democrats failed to “invest in the kind of parallel institutions” to the conservative legal establishment. Efforts to start the American Constitution Society, she said, never quite grew as large as the better established Federalist Society, a network of conservative lawyers, officials and justices that includes members of the Supreme Court.

“I just think that most of us who support the rights of women and privacy and the right to make these difficult decisions yourself, you know, we just couldn’t believe what was happening. And as a result, they slowly, surely and very effectively got what they wanted,” she said. “Our side was complacent and kind of taking it for granted and thinking it would never go away.”

Mrs. Clinton was born in 1947, when abortion was criminalized and contraception was banned or restricted in more than two dozen states. In Arkansas, where she practiced law while her husband served as governor, she watched the rise of the religious right and the anti-abortion movement.

From the time she arrived in Washington as first lady, Mrs. Clinton fought openly for abortion rights. She famously declared that “human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights” in a 1995 speech at the World Conference on Women in Beijing. When she became a senator, Mrs. Clinton voted against the partial-birth abortion ban, unlike more than a dozen of her fellow Democrats. As Barack Obama’s secretary of state, she made a mission of expanding women’s reproductive health across the globe.

In 2016, Planned Parenthood endorsed her candidacy, the first time the organization waded into a presidential primary. In her campaign, Mrs. Clinton promised to appoint judges who would preserve Roe, opposed efforts in Congress to pass a 20-week abortion ban and pushed for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which banned the federal funding of abortions.

Even her language was updated. For years, when it came to abortion, she championed her belief in a phrase popularized by her husband during his 1992 presidential campaign: “safe, legal and rare.”

In a private, previously unreported meeting recounted in the book, campaign aides told Mrs. Clinton to drop the phrase during her 2016 run. Her staff explained that increasingly progressive abortion-rights activists thought calling for the procedure to be “rare” would offer a political concession to the anti-abortion movement. And with so many new restrictions being passed in conservative-controlled states, abortion was increasingly difficult to obtain, particularly for poorer women, making “rare” the wrong focus for their message. Abortion should be “safe, legal, accessible and affordable,” they told her.

“Well, that doesn’t make any sense,” she said in response at the time. “That’s stupid.”

In the interview, Mrs. Clinton said she quickly came to embrace the shift in language. What she and other Democrats had tried to do in 1992 with “safe, legal and rare” was “send a signal that we understand Roe v. Wade has a certain theory of the case about trimesters,” she explained. But by 2016, the world had changed.

“Too many women, particularly too many young women did not understand the effort that went into creating the underlying theory of Roe v. Wade. And the young women on my campaign made a very compelling argument that making it safe and legal was really the goal,” she said. “I kind of just pocketed the framework of Roe.”

Still, Mrs. Clinton felt like many of her warnings over the issue were ignored by much of the country.

When she delivered a speech in Wisconsin in March 2016, arguing that Supreme Court justices selected by Mr. Trump could “demolish pillars of the progressive movement,” Mrs. Clinton said that “people kind of rolled their eyes at me.”

Mrs. Clinton said she saw her defeat in that election as inextricable from her gender. As she has in the past, she blamed the former F.B.I. director James Comey’s last-minute reopening of the investigation of her private email server for her immediate defeat. Mr. Comey had raised questions about her judgment and called her “extremely careless” but recommended no criminal charges.Other political strategists have faulted her message, strategy and various missteps by her campaign for her loss in 2016.

“But once he did that to me, the people, the voters who left me, were women,” she said. “They left me because they just couldn’t take a risk on me, because as a woman, I’m supposed to be perfect. They were willing to take a risk on Trump — who had a long list of, let’s call them flaws, to illustrate his imperfection — because he was a man, and they could envision a man as president and commander in chief.”

Mrs. Clinton said she was shocked by how little the reports of Mr. Trump’s sexual misconduct and assault seemed to affect the race. They did not disqualify him from the presidency, at least not among most Republicans and conservative Christians. But his promises to appoint justices that would reverse Roe helped him win, she said.

“Politically, he threw his lot in with the right on abortion and was richly rewarded,” she said.

[notwiselybuttoowell]

Nasa announced on Monday it had eliminated the office of its chief scientist and shuttered two other departments including one covering diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA), as Donald Trump’s federal ‘efficiency’ crusade cut deep into the US space agency.

The office of technology, policy and strategy that advises Nasa on important leadership decisions was also shuttered and an unspecified number of workers laid off, according to a memo to employees signed by Janet Petro, Nasa’s acting administrator.

Petro, whose leadership position is soon likely to be taken over by the billionaire Jared Isaacman, Trump’s pick for Nasa administrator, urged workers to “embrace the challenge” as the cutbacks take effect.

She said the actions were taken in advance of a forthcoming and more comprehensive agency “reduction in [work]force and reorganization plan” resulting from Trump’s executive orders for cutbacks and the purging of DEI initiatives and programs at federal agencies.

Many will see the elimination of Nasa’s office of the chief scientist as an abrupt U-turn in the agency’s climate policy, and another attack by conservatives on science and evidence-based decision making.

The agency’s current chief scientist and senior climate adviser, Dr Kate Calvin, was appointed in January 2022 by the then Nasa administrator, Bill Nelson, a former Democratic senator.

“Climate change is one of the biggest challenges facing our nation and our planet. Nasa is a world leader in climate and Earth science,” she said at the time.

She took a senior role in advising Nasa leadership of all aspects of its science programs and science-related strategic planning and investments, especially as they relate to the climate emergency and actions of humans on global warming and rising sea temperatures.

The closure of the DEIA office represents a similar reversal in policy for an agency that as recently as September was promoting its partnership with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) to increase engagement and equity for underrepresented students in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

The third Nasa office cut on Monday – technology, policy and strategy – was established in 2021 within the office of the administrator to “bring together diverse, multidisciplinary experts to provide Nasa leadership with analytic, strategic, and decisional insights”.

It housed the agency’s chief technologist and chief economist, and its analysis of Nasa policies was recognized as a critical check and balance.

In a post to X, Grant Tremblay, an astrophysicist at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, conceded Nasa was in need of some reform, but wholesale elimination of departments was excessive.

“Nasa is small, but it is arguably the most legendary and globally beloved agency in American history. Its gutting has begun and the cuts to come are so massive that we won’t recognize it in a year,” he wrote.

“Many of these cuts are likely to be essentially irreversible. It’s hard to build something great from a pile of ash and rubble. The people you lose will not come back. When you lose a lead, you never recover it. Memory lost is lost for good.”

[aziraphales-library]

Hey! Thank you so much for all the amazing you do…!

I just wondered if you had any good recommendations for fics with audio options?

Thanks!!

Hello! I assume by audio options you mean podfics? We have a #podfic tag with a few. I don't listen to them myself, but here are some fics I've read and loved that have podfics available...

[Podfic] Petrichor & Parchment by Literarion (E)

“Mr. Crowley, I presume?” Aziraphale asked in lieu of an introduction, which was not forthcoming. The guy hadn’t even removed his sunglasses. Oh God, he had a tattoo on his face. Aziraphale wasn’t one to judge, but… what kind of gardener had a snake tattoo on his face?

[Podfic] Summer's End by Literarion (E)

2095. Britain is a post-apocalyptic wasteland ravaged by droughts, the collapse of civilisation, and hordes of the undead. Despite that, Aziraphale’s life is actually pretty good. He has his caravan, his books, and his work, offering his services to the men who stop by Tadfield on their arduous journey north. One day, a mysterious stranger knocks on his door. Crowley is charming and handsome and he appears to know his way around a vegetable garden. He comes with the tempting offer of a mutually beneficial arrangement. But it’s in Aziraphale’s best interest not to get too attached. A dystopian cottagecore sex worker AU.

[Multivoice Podfic] Choose Your Princes Wisely by Multiple (T)

“There’s an enchanted castle West in the Hellian slopes, and apparently it comes with a prince looking for a bride or bridegroom to free him from a dark fae’s curse.” “I see,” Aziraphale says finally, when he realizes both Gabriel and Uriel are staring at him expectantly. “You want me to marry a beast?” Gabriel's mouth flattens. “I want you to take this gods’ blessed opportunity to secure your family’s future for good." OR Aziraphale is a professional quest hero who just wants to sit by the fire and read a book, if his overbearing family will ever let him; Crowley is a serpent demon who needs a gullible hero he can con into gathering some critical ingredients for a human corporation spell. Hijinks and a lot of terribly inconvenient feelings ensue.

[Podfic] Something to do with these sacred words by nantook (T)

Crowley confesses early, and Crowley confesses often. Aziraphale never knows quite what to say.

[Podfic] Right Here by Im_Not_Occult (E)

Although Aziraphale has sensed Crowley's love for millennia, after their trials he decides to be honest about his own feelings. So desperate to finally be close, Aziraphale doesn't anticipate that physical intimacy might be rather overwhelming for an ethereal being in a human body. He has wonderfully transcendent celestial experiences that take him away from the moment with Crowley. Together, he and Crowley discover a new level of intimacy as they try to work out this issue--and the shape of their new Arrangement. Featuring: 16k words of unrepentant softness, open conversations about sex, ethereal and human intimacy, a certain promised picnic, and a little bit of bickering between hereditary enemies.

[Fic & Podfic] Press L in the Chat (for Love) by Multiple (E)

Bickering fan-content creators Aziraphale and Crowley only have three things in common — they are both avid fans of a new revolutionary TV series about pirates, they are popular for their fantastic fanfiction and fanart… and they are members of the same discord server. Neither of them likes the other, but across the chaotic virtual world of a discord chatroom, who knows what can happen when these two unlikely fans are paired up for an exciting collaboration? Us. We know ;) Discord Server AU — a collaboration between Phoenix_Soar (fic) and Djapchan (multivoice podfic organization & editing) for Pod-Together 2022

- Mod D

[transistoradio]

Four issues of Heavy Metal with cover art by Greg Hildebrandt: 1) HM #1 (forthcoming), 2-3) HM #320 (April 2023), 4) HM #318 (June 2022), and 5) HM #314 (February 2022).

[the-californicationist]

Okay, so I FINALLY had time to read the last chapter of Ursa Major, and as always, I wanna share my thoughts about that amazing story! I like to take notes while I read so I don't forget anything, so sorry if it seems a bit unorganized 😅

Is the part where Doc calls John my big bear inspired by that one scene in the bear or six ( I don't know the name of the TV show. I just saw that clip often for....science reason)? Also, I bet the pregnancy test was stolen because there is DNA in the urine. Is there a difference in hormones in her urine because she is a shifter that could be seen in an analysis, or does it not go that deep? 🤔 Your story is what put me on the whole shifter thing, so my knowledge is minimal.

What does the He-Wolf mean by not her? Who is the she that will guide them then???? I was so sad that Doc felt broken because she couldn't shift, but then BIG MAMA BEAR showed up to protect her loved ones. What a way to end this chapter.

Concerning the notes at the end of the chapter, I hope everything turns out okay for you and your family. Sending you love, thanks for still taking the time to share your amazing work with us. ❤️

Thank you so much for this incredible note, my friend!! I'm so glad you enjoyed the chapter 🩷🩷 Things are slowly getting better around here, so I really appreciate the support.

I think my favorite conversation that has come up lately is the "Is there DNA in dry piss?!" question. I am pleased to report that, according to Grignani, et al. 2022, the answer is definitively yes.

The he-wolf situation is so frustrating. When you get to be a few thousand years old, you get a little nonverbal, it turns out. He could definitely be a little more forthcoming. (But where's the fun in that 😅)

And yeah. Doc had to shift. I battled with it for a long time. Should she/shouldn't she? But I couldn't leave her out. She's one of the key elements in the end game plot line, so I decided to bring her out a bit early so we could have some bear fun!

Long form comments like this are so generous and I am really grateful for you taking the time to share your thoughts!! Thank you so much for reaching out to me. ❤️

[asgoodeasgold]

Matthew Goode on ITV this morning, July 2022

This is available on ITV website but I have also uploaded this interview on YouTube so that people outside of the UK can see it.

The highlights:

* All sheared (dog clippers again?🤣) ready for his family summer holiday in Greece.

* Telling (or rather miming) entertaining Bob Evans anecdotes and how he was cast in the role.

* Basking in the fantastic news of his then forthcoming project with Anthony Hopkins (Freud's Last Session).

* And being his usual adorable and engaging self.

📷 My edits from ITV This Morning interview July 2022.