#global labor standards

[alwaysbewoke]

[vamptastic]

ough ooough i need to learn more about agriculture

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Prison-tech company bribed jails to ban in-person visits

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in BOSTON with Randall "XKCD" Munroe (Apr 11), then PROVIDENCE (Apr 12), and beyond!

Beware of geeks bearing gifts. When prison-tech companies started offering "free" tablets to America's vast army of prisoners, it set off alarm-bells for prison reform advocates – but not for the law-enforcement agencies that manage the great American carceral enterprise.

The pitch from these prison-tech companies was that they could cut the costs of locking people up while making jails and prisons safer. Hell, they'd even make life better for prisoners. And they'd do it for free!

These prison tablets would give every prisoner their own phone and their own video-conferencing terminal. They'd supply email, of course, and all the world's books, music, movies and games. Prisoners could maintain connections with the outside world, from family to continuing education. Sounds too good to be true, huh?

Here's the catch: all of these services are blisteringly expensive. Prisoners are accustomed to being gouged on phone calls – for years, prisons have done deals with private telcos that charge a fortune for prisoners' calls and split the take with prison administrators – but even by those standards, the calls you make on a tablet are still a ripoff.

Sure, there are some prisoners for whom money is no object – wealthy people who screwed up so bad they can't get bail and are stewing in a county lockup, along with the odd rich murderer or scammer serving a long bid. But most prisoners are poor. They start poor – the cops are more likely to arrest poor people than rich people, even for the same crime, and the poorer you are, the more likely you are to get convicted or be suckered into a plea bargain with a long sentence. State legislatures are easy to whip up into a froth about minimum sentences for shoplifters who steal $7 deodorant sticks, but they are wildly indifferent to the store owner's rampant wage-theft. Wage theft is by far the most costly form of property crime in America and it is almost entirely ignored:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jun/15/wage-theft-us-workers-employees

So America's prisons are heaving with its poorest citizens, and they're certainly not getting any richer while they're inside. While many prisoners hold jobs – prisoners produce $2b/year in goods and $9b/year in services – the average prison wage is $0.52/hour:

https://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2024/0324bowman.html

(In six states, prisoners get nothing; North Carolina law bans paying prisoners more than $1/day, the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution explicitly permits slavery – forced labor without pay – for prisoners.)

Likewise, prisoners' families are poor. They start poor – being poor is a strong correlate of being an American prisoner – and then one of their breadwinners is put behind bars, taking their income with them. The family savings go to paying a lawyer.

Prison-tech is a bet that these poor people, locked up and paid $1/day or less; or their families, deprived of an earner and in debt to a lawyer; will somehow come up with cash to pay $13 for a 20-minute phone call, $3 for an MP3, or double the Kindle price for an ebook.

How do you convince a prisoner earning $0.52/hour to spend $13 on a phone-call?

Well, for Securus and Viapath (AKA Global Tellink) – a pair of private equity backed prison monopolists who have swallowed nearly all their competitors – the answer was simple: they bribed prison officials to get rid of the prison phones.

Not just the phones, either: a pair of Michigan suits brought by the Civil Rights Corps accuse sheriffs and the state Department of Corrections of ending in-person visits in exchange for kickbacks from the money that prisoners' families would pay once the only way to reach their loved ones was over the "free" tablets:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/03/jails-banned-family-visits-to-make-more-money-on-video-calls-lawsuits-claim/

These two cases are just the tip of the iceberg; Civil Rights Corps says there are hundreds of jails and prisons where Securus and Viapath have struck similar corrupt bargains:

https://civilrightscorps.org/case/port-huron-michigan-right2hug/

And it's not just visits and calls. Prison-tech companies have convinced jails and prisons to eliminate mail and parcels. Letters to prisoners are scanned and delivered their tablets, at a price. Prisoners – and their loved ones – have to buy virtual "postage stamps" and pay one stamp per "page" of email. Scanned letters (say, hand-drawn birthday cards from your kids) cost several stamps:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/14/minnesota-nice/#shitty-technology-adoption-curve

Prisons and jails have also been convinced to eliminate their libraries and continuing education programs, and to get rid of TVs and recreational equipment. That way, prisoners will pay vastly inflated prices for streaming videos and DRM-locked music.

The icing on the cake? If the prison changes providers, all that data is wiped out – a prisoner serving decades of time will lose their music library, their kids' letters, the books they love. They can get some of that back – by working for $1/day – but the personal stuff? It's just gone.

Readers of my novels know all this. A prison-tech scam just like the one described in the Civil Rights Corps suits is at the center of my latest novel The Bezzle:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle

Prison-tech has haunted me for years. At first, it was just the normal horror anyone with a shred of empathy would feel for prisoners and their families, captive customers for sadistic "businesses" that have figured out how to get the poorest, most desperate people in the country to make them billions. In the novel, I call prison-tech "a machine":

a million-­armed robot whose every limb was tipped with a needle that sank itself into a different place on prisoners and their families and drew out a few more cc’s of blood.

But over time, that furious empathy gave way to dread. Prisoners are at the bottom of the shitty technology adoption curve. They endure the technological torments that haven't yet been sanded down on their bodies, normalized enough to impose them on people with a little more privilege and agency. I'm a long way up the curve from prisoners, but while the shitty technology curve may grind slow, it grinds fine:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/24/gwb-rumsfeld-monsters/#bossware

The future isn't here, it's just not evenly distributed. Prisoners are the ultimate early adopters of the technology that the richest, most powerful, most sadistic people in the country's corporate board-rooms would like to force us all to use.

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/2024/04/02/captive-customers/#guillotine-watch

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[determinate-negation]

“This raises the question: if industrial production is necessary to meet decent-living standards today, then perhaps capitalism—notwithstanding its negative impact on social indicators over the past five hundred years—is necessary to develop the industrial capacity to meet these higher-order goals. This has been the dominant assumption in development economics for the past half century. But it does not withstand empirical scrutiny. For the majority of the world, capitalism has historically constrained, rather than enabled, technological development—and this dynamic remains a major problem today.

It has long been recognized by liberals and Marxists alike that the rise of capitalism in the core economies was associated with rapid industrial expansion, on a scale with no precedent under feudalism or other precapitalist class structures. What is less widely understood is that this very same system produced the opposite effect in the periphery and semi-periphery. Indeed, the forced integration of peripheral regions into the capitalist world-system during the period circa 1492 to 1914 was characterized by widespread deindustrialization and agrarianization, with countries compelled to specialize in agricultural and other primary commodities, often under “pre-modern” and ostensibly “feudal” conditions.

In Eastern Europe, for instance, the number of people living in cities declined by almost one-third during the seventeenth century, as the region became an agrarian serf-economy exporting cheap grain and timber to Western Europe. At the same time, Spanish and Portuguese colonizers were transforming the American continents into suppliers of precious metals and agricultural goods, with urban manufacturing suppressed by the state. When the capitalist world-system expanded into Africa in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, imports of British cloth and steel destroyed Indigenous textile production and iron smelting, while Africans were instead made to specialize in palm oil, peanuts, and other cheap cash crops produced with enslaved labor. India—once the great manufacturing hub of the world—suffered a similar fate after colonization by Britain in 1757. By 1840, British colonizers boasted that they had “succeeded in converting India from a manufacturing country into a country exporting raw produce.” Much the same story unfolded in China after it was forced to open its domestic economy to capitalist trade during the British invasion of 1839–42. According to historians, the influx of European textiles, soap, and other manufactured goods “destroyed rural handicraft industries in the villages, causing unemployment and hardship for the Chinese peasantry.”

The great deindustrialization of the periphery was achieved in part through policy interventions by the core states, such as through the imposition of colonial prohibitions on manufacturing and through “unequal treaties,” which were intended to destroy industrial competition from Southern producers, establish captive markets for Western industrial output, and position Southern economies as providers of cheap labor and resources. But these dynamics were also reinforced by structural features of profit-oriented markets. Capitalists only employ new technologies to the extent that it is profitable for them to do so. This can present an obstacle to economic development if there is little demand for domestic industrial production (due to low incomes, foreign competition, etc.), or if the costs of innovation are high.

Capitalists in the Global North overcame these problems because the state intervened extensively in the economy by setting high tariffs, providing public subsidies, assuming the costs of research and development, and ensuring adequate consumer demand through government spending. But in the Global South, where state support for industry was foreclosed by centuries of formal and informal colonialism, it has been more profitable for capitalists to export cheap agricultural goods than to invest in high-technology manufacturing. The profitability of new technologies also depends on the cost of labor. In the North, where wages are comparatively high, capitalists have historically found it profitable to employ labor-saving technologies. But in the peripheral economies, where wages have been heavily compressed, it has often been cheaper to use labor-intensive production techniques than to pay for expensive machinery.

Of course, the global division of labor has changed since the late nineteenth century. Many of the leading industries of that time, including textiles, steel, and assembly line processes, have now been outsourced to low-wage peripheral economies like India and China, while the core states have moved to innovation activities, high-technology aerospace and biotech engineering, information technology, and capital-intensive agriculture. Yet still the basic problem remains. Under neoliberal globalization (structural adjustment programs and WTO rules), governments in the periphery are generally precluded from using tariffs, subsidies, and other forms of industrial policy to achieve meaningful development and economic sovereignty, while labor market deregulation and global labor arbitrage have kept wages extremely low. In this context, the drive to maximize profit leads Southern capitalists and foreign investors to pour resources into relatively low-technology export sectors, at the expense of more modern lines of industry.

Moreover, for those parts of the periphery that occupy the lowest rungs in global commodity chains, production continues to be organized along so-called pre-modern lines, even under the new division of labor. In the Congo, for instance, workers are sent into dangerous mineshafts without any modern safety equipment, tunneling deep into the ground with nothing but shovels, often coerced at gunpoint by U.S.-backed militias, so that Microsoft and Apple can secure cheap coltan for their electronics devices. Pre-modern production processes predicated on the “technology” of labor coercion are also found in the cocoa plantations of Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire, where enslaved children labor in brutal conditions for corporations like Cadbury, or Colombia’s banana export sector, where a hyper-exploited peasantry is kept in line by a regime of rural terror and extrajudicial killings overseen by private death squads.

Uneven global development, including the endurance of ostensibly “feudal” relations of production, is not inevitable. It is an effect of capitalist dynamics. Capitalists in the periphery find it more profitable to employ cheap labor subject to conditions of slavery or other forms of coercion than they do to invest in modern industry.”

Capitalism, Global Poverty, and the Case for Democratic Socialism by Jason Hickle and Dylan Sullivan

[cheralith]

vogue — 「 boss/fashion designer!geto suguru x reader 」

synopsis ; even without much knowledge in the world of fashion, you decide that it's in your best interest to work for the country's fashion magazine powerhouse. however, you begin to second-guess your decision when you're faced with the grueling labor of its one and only editor-in-chief who expects nothing less of perfection. can your efficiency meet his standards or will you be out the door before you can even blink?

content tags/warnings ; gn!reader, use of they/them pronouns, mild language, traditional japanese basis of (l/n) (f/n) used, reader wears glasses, makeup, and heeled boots, some mild manga and jjk 0 spoilers (three minor characters from each are introduced), uhhh suguru being a dick lawl, some parts not edited/not beta read

contains ; editor-in-chief!geto, fashion designer!geto, assistant!reader, assistant turned ****!reader, platonic roommate!ino, modern au, mild angst, some crack if you squint

word count ; 10.2k

notes ; heavily inspired by "the devil wears prada" and "paradise kiss", so there'll be some references i've dropped within this—see if you can spot them! also the censored is spoilers so until then, hehe.

now playing ; seven days in sunny june - jamiroquai

It’d be foolish not to know the household name of Geto Suguru, the ultimate male muse of Jun Takahashi whose title has yet to be reigned by another. He was the ultimate breathing mannequin of the iconic Yohji Yamamoto piece he had worn on the Milan runway back when he was just a teenager. It was one of the most staple pieces of the new century that helped open the gates of the mixing of world culture and avant garde fashion—an England-Japanese punk fusion of an ashen and tattered kasaya layered under the contrasting statement piece: the earth-toned gojōu-gesa splattered with weaves of gold—and it was that very piece that rose him to the top of the fashion world as one of the most powerful names in global fashion.

And how could he not? At seventeen, he was scouted as a model for Gaulthier and became his muse at the ripe age of twenty before several other worldwide designers began to fight for his eyes. It was only a few shrewd years later that he��d open up his own successful fashion line, RIIKO, named in honor of his late sister, resulting in it becoming one of the fashion line pillars in the modern century. 

It didn’t take long after that, due to his fame and distinct education from Jujutsu University, rising to the top for Kaizen fashion magazine and ruling it with an iron fist and several cups of coffee with almost all his designs on display for all to see in the office. It was due to his work that Kaizen became the powerhouse of powerhouses of fashion editorials and magazines and it was solely his work that made fashion what it was in present times. 

Whether it was direct or indirect, Geto had impacted the industry in all sorts of ways. Be it blossoming an upcoming supermodel’s name or setting new fashion trends, everything could essentially be traced to Geto Suguru. 

So it’s understandable that many had called you a fool—a dimwit, even—for not understanding how big of a deal it was to become his junior assistant after lazily submitting your resume. Originally, you had just wanted to become a simple lifestyle journalist for papers like Sankei Shimbun or The Japan Times, but seeing how it was between a seemingly mysterious fashion magazine that mentioned, received gasps, or the measly and homely newspaper of The Hokkaido Tribune, a magazine you knew would only give new journalists the scraps of what they earned, the choice was obvious. 

Whatever gave you more money, you’d take. Survival of the fittest, was this world not?

“Do not tell me you’re going to your interview at Kaizen wearing that?” Ino barks out a laugh as he finishes his morning cereal for breakfast, scanning your outfit. “You’re going to work in a fashion magazine, not some dingy corporate office.”

You sneer at him as you shove on your loafers (don’t mind that the leather is peeling slightly on the side). You think that there’s nothing remotely wrong with your overused gauntlet gray matching set of trousers and blazer with a slightly wrinkled button-up underneath it. 

“Oh, please,” you roll your eyes at your roommate and parttime brother figure. “What on earth do you know about fashion?”

“Enough of it to know that outfit is atrocious for that type of environment,” he states simply as he shoves a donut in his mouth. He kicks his feet up on the table, making you cringe at their nakedness. “Trust me, change if you can. Make a statement for ‘em.”

Ino Takuma sighs and glances at your thick spectacles that you’ve worn since early college. “And at least change your glasses for your contacts. Heard they don’t like those sorta things over there. At least not the prescription kind.”

“Can’t find them,” you grunt when you feel the weight of your shoulder bag heave down your body. “I’m already late, anyway,” you sigh, “Listen, if I don’t come back alive, which I will by the way, then you can dance on my grave all you want.”

“I’m holding you to that,” he chants before he lets out a haughty snicker that gets muffled instantly when you slam the door on him. 

You throw insults at Ino in your mind, grumbling about how a mere job hopper like him wouldn’t even know the speck of fashion, how you refuse to take advice from someone who wears the same thing every day. There’s nothing wrong with the gray, you think. It’s safe and presentable, ordinary and professional, and you’d much rather blend in than stand out as you believe standing out and making yourself known is just a recipe for trouble. 

Stretching out a hand on the street, you call for a taxi and humbly enter as you smooth out your trousers. The taxi driver eyes you in the rearview mirror with a questioning glint in your eye. “Job interview?” he asks.

“Oh, um,” you nod your head. “Yep! I'm a little nervous, haha.”

“Really?” he says as he gratefully steps on the accelerator a little faster. “Better get you there quick, then. Would hate to have you late. Where are you planning on working?”

“Kaizen Magazine,” you declare confidently, an affirmative look on your face.

“Kaizen?” questions the driver slowly as his eyes go to scan your outfit in the mirror again, his brows raised. “As in the… the fashion magazine?” 

You nod with visible apprehensiveness. You think that maybe you truly were the only person in the world that didn’t know the impact of Kaizen, seeing as how a mere taxi driver even knew about the name and you didn’t up until a few weeks ago. 

“I see…” he mutters. The drive there is a mix of silence and everyday morning conversations, before he pulls up to the building that held the key to your dreams. “Well then, here’s your stop.” 

You let out a little gasp of excitement. “Thank you so much,” you reply as you shove some cash into the slot. 

“Hm, well,” the taxi driver counts the money carefully, barely looking just before you close the door as he mutters, “Good luck, Plain Jane.”

You turn back to the taxi, your hearing a little awry. “Sorry, what was that?”

But when you turn back to the yellow cab, all that’s left is a billow of smoke and cinders. Dazed and confused, you quickly shake those feelings off before you head inside to the building that was now your shining beacon of hope with a determined smile still plastered on your lips. White is the first thing that greets you when you enter the building as it was essentially aired out onto every corner. White marble counters, white tile flooring with white grout, white frames of fashion icons—the white screams pristine and perfection to you and its message went very much noticed. You haven’t even met Geto Suguru yet, but you understood already that he expected nothing but excellence.

You ride up the elevator quietly and alone, trying not to focus on how your anxiety increased with each ding of the passing floors. The elevator screen seems to almost taunt you as it closes in on your doom, the numbers getting closer to the designated floor until it slowly pauses and shone brightly the number 21 in stippled red.

The doors slowly open and the light seeps itself back to your vision, white flooding your senses again. You carry yourself carefully down the hallway whilst taking your time to admire the many framed pictures of past magazines, multiple runway models, and scraps of newspaper articles. One specific piece catches your attention, however; it was large, almost half your body size and framed in a gilded black frame. It was a picture of a mannequin wearing a tawdry gray-black robe with the kanji characters of “summer” painted with purple messily atop. Layered was a loose, but well-fitted piece of thick green and gold cloth that looked much more refined to the messiness of the other materials. 

You stare at it for what seemed to be forever whilst admiring the contrast and beauty of the work before your name is called out.

“(Y/N) (L/N)?”

Your trance breaks from the voice approaching you. You turn to see a short and young woman with dark blue eyes staring at you with a raised brow. “That’s you I presume?” she asks.

“Oh! Uh,” you nod furiously and smooth out your trousers again. “Yes… yes, that’s me. I assume you’re Manami Suda? The one I spoke with on the phone?”

She nods slowly, her eyes going to study your outfit which was a rather stark contrast to her own attire that highlighted an emphasis on shades of opal and navy. Her eyes have a similar glint in the way that Ino’s and the taxi driver’s had, further enunciating the message that your attire was rather… something.

“I see you’ve dressed up for the occasion,” she murmurs. Sarcasm going undetected by you, you grin as a response and think that a compliment from her was a sign you did something right. Her eyes go to rise back and meet yours again before she turns and redirects you to the end of the hallway where some rooms belonging to subordinal editors sat in, clacking away at the computers. There was one singular room that held the only door on the floor and it doesn’t take you long to assume who it belongs to considering the large letters of GS frosted onto the glass.

Two desks stood on each side of the door, one completely devoid of life and decorations. Manami guides you to the empty one and patted the top of it. “This will be yours if you manage to miraculously pass.” 

Manami taps on her clipboard a couple of times, listing off a couple of requirements that you were most likely going to need in the future: efficient time management, ability to fight for what Geto wants, sharp memory, quick feet…

“And uh…” Manami flickers her eyes to you and the details (or lack of, in this case). She mutters under her breath quietly, “... a good wardrobe.”

You turn to her, internally wondering if you were going deaf today. “Sorry, can you repeat that?”

“A good, warm…” she squints, obviously finding the right word to keep that ignorant smile on your face. “... welcome to start off his day.”

She succeeds in her task as you merely nod with the same blatant grin attached. “Got it!”

Manami tours you around the floor of the office, letting you say hello to your future coworkers that work in the cubicles that send you worried looks behind your back. They obviously seem too pitying of you, knowing that your fate would be sealed as Geto’s potential right hand man the moment you signed that employee contract.  

“This is Human Resources,” Manami gestures over to a room filled with chattering employees who seemed to be getting their gossip out before their day started. “You’ll contact them if you have any—” her phone dings suddenly. Casually, she pulls it out, only for all of her resolve to disappear in an instant. Manami then abruptly blows a whistle with her teeth, alerting everybody in the radius.

“Everybody! His morning facial was canceled!” Manami hollers. “Geto is coming in…” her phone pings again with another notification, and you can tell Manami’s heart instantly drops. “Oh God… he’s in the lobby! Everybody, places! You,” she snags the sleeve of your blazer and drags you along with her, your clunky loafers nearly tripping you. “Come with me.”

Manami takes back to where you first started and orders you to stand in the front of the blank desk with a look that screams both fright and anxiousness all in one. She lists off too many tasks that you need to do before he comes, but you’re so frazzled with trying to remember how to act in front of your future boss that you can’t even remember the first thing she told you. 

“Help me arrange the drafts of the magazines from most recent to least recent before he—”

The elevator dings and all goes quiet; Manami tosses the magazines over her shoulders and positions herself firmly in her place, gesturing for you to do the same. The doors open and unveiled from two bodyguards is a man—a tall man, around six feet or perhaps even taller—dressed in noir fitted pants and a matching button-up closed only halfway to reveal a silk navy turtleneck. Caped behind him is a black velvet trenchcoat that you’re sure is worth half your rent and a watch plated on his wrist that is well over your life savings. He’s slightly sunkissed, with blue-black tresses of hair with a soft bang sneaking through and large plated earrings to match. His eyes, however, show a tint of color—a sharp dark amethyst that you think could cut through you like crystals.

But he’s almost hauntingly attracting—like a spirit. Something about him was an enigma and his aura was nothing less than powerful. 

“Good morning, Geto,” Manami chants with an artificial happiness to her tone.

Geto doesn’t reply, just merely giving a silent blink before he sheds his coat off and tosses it aimlessly towards Manami. It proves to be heavier than anticipated, giving how she fights to groan from the weight of it. He’s handed his briefcase from one of the bodyguards and begins to open the door to his office until he pauses and turns and glances at you, the stranger.

“Hello,” you state with a slight bow. “I-I’m one of the interviewees for your junior assistant. My name is—”

“(Y/N),” Geto murmurs; his voice is soft and low. It’s all knowing, with indigo eyes boring into your own. “(L/N) (Y/N), I know. The one that graduated from Jujutsu University recently, yes?” 

 Adjusting your glasses to wave away the blurriness, you nod with anticipation. “Yes, that’s me.”

Geto turns back and opens the door, to which he only replies back, “In my office.”

You glance at Manami for confirmation, only given back with a jut of her head towards the door. All the unease you felt in the elevator comes hurdling back to you in an instinct and you feel as if you were no more than a peasant to someone that was essentially royalty in the fashion world. 

Geto turns his chair to face away from you, shuffling a few papers over each other that appears to be your resume, before he spins it slowly towards you. He kicks his feet up lazily on his desk. 

“It’s nice to have another Jujutsu alum to join us,” he says. His voice is still the same—a little baritone with a wisping edge of a whisper to it, but it almost sounds… bored. Unamused even. “A bachelors in print journalism… same as mine, hm. Tell me, is Professor Tengen still as loose as ever with their practices?”

You fight to fiddle with your glasses as you watch as Geto tangibly toys with his own, with his focus angled on the papers in front of him rather than you. “Um, I assume so. Though I believe they’re actually retiring this year.”

“Good,” he sighs in what seems to be relief. “Shame that the university had wasted time and money by hiring them. Truly, I hope they can find someone much better suited for their position.”

“Really?” you quietly question. You had only taken their class a few semesters ago and thought despite their rather… all too lenient disposition… you did learn quite a lot in their class. “I thought they were a rather alright teacher…”

Regret pools in your mouth from the moment you have finished your sentence. Geto finally goes to look at you from the edge of his glasses with a sharp look, narrowing his eyes ever so slightly. 

“Tengen was merely a sorry excuse for a professor. They were rather nothing but a nanny who gave their students too much leeway,” Geto declares. “Though, I’ll admit, I am pleasantly surprised that you managed to take something out of that class.”

A laugh that’s just dripping with nothing but nervousness leaks out of your lips. “I suppose I had learned just a few things…”

“Mmh,” Geto nod nonchalantly, eyes drawing back to the papers. “Well. Let’s start with the basics. Why exactly do you want to work here?” 

Geto already feels the cliche comments erupting. Had the person in front of him say at least one of them, he was ready to insert the papers he was holding into the nearby shredder. Or maybe out the window this time, he wonders—something nice for a change.

“I was inspired by your work.” 

“It’s been my dream to work at Kaizen.”

“Fashion is my absolute passion.”

“I want to—”

“I’m just in need of a job, really,” you say lifelessly. 

He goes to raise his head slowly from the packet and turns to you slowly. Geto doesn’t say anything, but his facial expressions indicate a blend of confusion and intrigue. A slithering tongue darts out to slick his lips, indicating you’ve piqued his interest. “Well, obviously. But why this job specifically? What about it stood out to you?”

You clear your throat. “I had learned recently that Kaizen is a rather prestigious mag—”

“‘Recently’?” Geto repeats quietly. “You hadn’t heard of us before?” 

Lips thinning, you shake your head slightly. His eyes go narrow again to your dread, serpent-like. “My specialty is more in newspapers rather than magazines, I-I’m not too knowledgeable in that area.”

Geto goes quiet and the silence makes the air go thick. It’s then that familiar glint sparkles in his sullen eyes when they go to examine your choice of clothing—it confirms Ino was truly right in the end, as he lets out a smile-less chuckle that doesn’t do much to ease your brain. 

“Continue,” Geto gestures and takes off his glasses to look at you, or you suppose your outfit, more properly. He folds his hands and places his chin on top of them. “You said you only learned about us not too long ago?”

“Yes, and I realized that perhaps working here for a while would, at least I hope, grant me access to other media houses,” you explain. It’s only then you realize that your declaration sounds absolutely ludicrous and almost disrespectful to the editor-in-chief of the most iconic fashion magazine in the nation. “Connections are quite powerful in this day and age, haha…”

“I suppose,” Geto mumbles with not much interest in your poor humor. “What about me? I do hate bragging but surely, you know about my name or at least my fashion line?”

Your hesitant countenance and silence tells Geto all he needs to know. He thinks that it’s almost some sort of marvel that no one has heard of him or his works before.

He sighs. “Do you have any experience working in any fashion-related activities at least?”

“Well, I once worked in a department store for a few months back in high school,” you say thoughtfully (and ignorantly).

Geto gives you a blank look. His blinks are apathetically slow.

“Um,” you clear your throat again and shake your head, timid. “N-no…”

“Then tell me,” he continues smoothly. “Why exactly should I hire you? You obviously have no taste in fashion and you hadn’t even heard of my name, let alone my magazine, until recently. What is there within that makes you want to work here other than you just… what was it that you said?” He air-quotes mockingly, “‘needing a job?’”

Your throat runs dry and limbs go stiff. A heat rockets to your face when you seemingly can’t get any words out to excuse yourself, much too caught up in the same of your ignorance towards Geto’s profession. And that’s all the response he needs to make his decision. 

His hand takes the packet again and to your horror that you fight to keep in, inserts it into the paper shredder. The groan of it rumbles through the room agonizingly and you realize that Ino is going to have the time of your life planning your doomsday. 

Geto gives you the mercy of breaking the thick silence first. “You may go.” 

With a swift flick of his wrist, Geto dismisses you with a slight edge to his murmuring as he puts back on his glasses to examine the morning newspaper to not waste any more incessant time in the day. 

You don’t even attempt to fight back with any poor excuses. Tears prick the corner of your eyes, the sting of them frustrating you to your wits end. Instead, you gather the last of your resolve and bid him through a strained throat good day and make your leave, humiliation and disappointment trailing not too far behind. 

You hope that Ino will give a nice eulogy, at least.

Out of all the miracles that await you in life, you do not expect the one that comes in the form of an early morning phone call that wakes you at the ass-crack of dawn. When you pick it up with sleep still very much embedded in your eyes, it dissipates in the instant you hear Manami’s voice. It’s only then that it hits you why on earth she was calling so early and why she was demanding to know your whereabouts, claiming you were going to be late on your first day of work. 

You think it’s some sort of cruel joke maneuvered by Ino, especially with how his comforts from last night were mixed with taunts. But when Manami’s voice finally registers in your brain, by some sort of miracle or stroke of luck, you have gotten the job as Geto Suguru’s junior assistant. 

You don’t know how, but you don’t waste any time questioning how on earth you landed in such a position because you leap out of bed at 7:23 a.m. and manage to do your morning routine in the matter of what you think is a record-breaking fifteen minutes. Your ruckus manages to wake up deep-sleeping Ino, who, when you excitedly tell him to postpone your funeral, gives a groggy thumbs up before drooling back into his pillow. It’s 7:38 a.m. when you shove on your shabby coat and you realize you only have a mere twenty-two minutes left until you have to officially clock in for work. 

At 7:40, you’re out the door and sprinting to the located coffee shop that thankfully wasn’t too far from where you lived.

At 7:47, you’re at the designated cafe whilst attempting to swim through the crowds of morning bustlers to pick up Geto’s coffee.

7:50, you’re sticking your hand out waving desperately for a taxi and tip extra to make the driver speed through as you attempt to make sure the coffees don’t spill out of their containers.

7:58, you arrive at the building and just barely make it into the narrow gap of a tight-fitting elevator, earning stares from the others from your rather… frazzled appearance.

At 8:02 a.m., you dash out the elevator and officially clock in for your first day at work at Kaizen Magazine amidst a birdnest of hair, clothes that were plucked out of your hamper, and what you pray to the heavens above are hefty layers of deodorant and perfume since you were given no time to shower.

When Geto comes in that day, all suave and composed, he takes one good look at you before sighing and focusing his attention to the more refined Manami and lets her take the gears for the day. The only attention he gives you that morning is the rough toss of his heavy coat—a cashmere pearl peacoat today—flung at your arms that nearly makes you tumble from its weight.

You quickly learn that working for Geto requires high demand and maintenance, as he is not one to skip over any details in his day. Not even three hours in your first day, you already have to plan out his future meetings, reschedule one with a rather feisty and insistent client, edit a forest of emails, finishing by dashing out five blocks on foot to the two michelin star restaurant to retrieve Geto’s weekly steak for lunch. Had this been your old corporate job, you only would’ve gotten half the tasks you had completed by the end of the usual eight hours, but you realized early on that you had barely scratched the surface of your future in Kaizen.

You think that after plating his steak with the shakiest of hands, you finally have time to relax during lunch time when you see the small hand of the clock finally hit 12:00 p.m. , especially since you and him were left alone in his part of the office together. But the moment that Geto saunters into the office again, he tends to you once again with a final task by himself.

“(Y/N),” he calls from the office, the scrape of his fork against ceramic cluttering your ears agonizingly. 

You fight the urge to cringe from the sound as you scurry to the doorframe, hands stiffly intertwined together. “Yes, Mr. Geto?”

“No need for such formalities,” he remarks with the dab of a napkin to his lips. “They make me feel old, and I’m surely not much older than you are…” you think that’s the longest he’s spoken to you since the day had started. “Did Leibovitz confirm?”

Blinking, you tilt your head ignorantly. “D-did who confirm?”

He pauses and does that taunting slow rise of his eyes from his steak to you. “Leibovitz. Did she confirm?”

Silence fills the office, much like the silence that drowned you back at the interview. He clicks his tongue and dismisses you with a disappointed shake of his head. “Just go on your lunch,” he mutters, sighing.

Manami, the savior that she is, is called into the office after her break and is asked the same task and you watch with humiliation whilst packing your things to go on your lunch as she picks up the telephone and speaks to someone over the line before confirming to Geto that, “I’ve got Annie!”

“He hates me, Taku!” you cry out whilst flopping onto the dinner table. It’s ten in the evening and you’ve just come home after what was supposed to be an 8-5 shift. You suppose you should be used to this already after two months of working for the Lucifer donned ritually in white in the building, but you don’t know how much your sanity (and body) can take. 

Normally, Geto is usually cold to those who he wasn’t familiar with, but you think that his distaste for you sours everyday. You notice that he’s beginning to pile you with the more urgent and busier duties and that he often stares you down more menacingly in the morning with those piercing purple eyes of his, like you were gum stuck on the bottom of his shoe. You thought it was just him being normal Geto Suguru, the man with the expectations higher than the clouds, and that you just were still adjusting to such a high-intensity environment, but it was today that your world came crumbling down when you overheard him muttering to his associates about you, tone icier than ever.

You were on the other side of the door, a fist going to rap on the glass with the other holding his afternoon coffee pick-me-up when you heard it.

“... can’t even do the most miniscule things right,” Geto had groaned. “I ask if Lanvin’s models are all good to go for next Thursday’s shoot and somehow, they have the nerve to ask ‘How do you spell Lanvin’? For fuck’s sake, I can feel my goddamn conscious just wither away by the second.”

You hadn’t heard Geto swear since you had started working there, but something about his venomous tone enunciating such words had made your blood run cold from the other side of the door. Not having the courage to face him after that, you left his coffee on Manami’s desk for her to tend to with a post-it note saying a sorry excuse for yourself before letting your eyes sob frustratingly in the bathroom, isolated from others.

The last time you had cried that hard was way back in childhood, where you had broken your arm from falling down a tree branch. But you think that Geto’s words had twisted through your skin and bone much harsher than that pain ever will. 

“It’s a miracle how I haven’t been fired yet… I don’t even know why he hired me!” you wail.

Ino sighs from across the dinner table and you can’t tell if it’s a sigh of pity or a sigh of criticism. You learn that it’s both when he rolls his eyes at you whilst simultaneously pushing a plate of much needed food towards you. 

“First off, you need to eat,” he presses, staring at your gaunt features. “The way your face is swallowing is making me feel like I’m living’ with a ghost. You’ve lost some weight, I’ve noticed.”

Awareingly, you touch your cheekbones and realize he’s right, for you feel the small disc of sharpness from them prick your fingertips. They’ve never been so cavern before. You suppose it’s because of the lack of proper meal time between your days and how you often eat small and very late dinners back at home, truly not enough needed fuel for you.

“Secondly,” Ino chews his tongue, wondering if he should really say what he’s about to say because of your current disposition but goes through with it anyway. He might as well rip the bandaid off now to let more time for the wound to heal. “You won’t like what I’m ‘bout to say, but you need to up your game. Severely.”

An aching body rises up from the table. You go to stare at Ino through glazed eyes and a pouty lip, asking him what he meant.

“Ah nope! Don’t give me that face and don’t play coy with me,” he hisses, looking away to not give in to your helpless puppy eyes. He can’t—he shouldn’t give you the easy way out and just say to quit—not when you’ve been earning so much bank that rent isn’t a problem for either of you anymore. He wonders, though, for a moment if so much money is worth your rationality.

He drags a hand down his face before placing his chin on it, examining your haggard appearance. “What I mean is that you need to see through Geto’s eyes. See what he sees when he looks at you. Tell me, if you had an assistant that showed up wearing things that looked like they were plucked from the clearance bin at a thrift store and didn’t show any respect for your brand, which just so happens to be a fashion magazine out of all things…” Ino eyes you with a raised brow. “You startin’ to follow me?”

Your fingers fiddle with each other. “... sorta.”

“Now listen,” he raises his hands up lazily in surrender. “I already know what you’re ‘bout to say about me not knowing’ how to dress in shit other than black and more black, but even I know that you should put in more effort into your appearance. That’s the first step.”

“But I have—!” you exclaim helplessly, “I-I swear, I’ve been trying to… but it’s not my fault that it isn’t up to his standards.”

Your roommate groans and rubs his forehead, not really knowing what else to do for your situation until an idea pops in his head. “Free up your weekend,” he demands with a sly grin that makes you a little uneasy. “I’m no fashion connoisseur, but you know who is?”

“And remember, we never touch anything with chevron on it, especially in today’s fashion world,” Yuki chimes as she slaps on a navy blue pageboy cap on your head and she prances about your bedroom that’s been littered with spare clothes from her very own closet she graciously gifted to you for the past weekend. “I’m so utterly relieved that the trend has dug its own grave.”

The past weekend had been filled with endless shopping trips and you shuffling in and out of clothes every minute, practicing how to pair items and colors together by Yuki’s teachings. Of course you should’ve known that Ino was going to contact the one person that he was within reach that was essentially a walking encyclopedia when it came to fashion. You’ve met Tsukumo Yuki before, found her to be quite delightful even, but you never anticipated she would be this giddy, especially about clothes of all things.

And she used her brain to good use for not only clothes, but the entirety of yourself. You never knew how much just a simple haircut could do your face along with small hints of makeup to emphasize the best parts of it. Dared not your hands go to a lash curler, but here you are now, making sure your powder compact and lipstick for the day was in your bag before you went out. 

“Uh, I don’t think I ever mentioned this before yet, but thank you for helping my wardrobe out, it really means a lot,” you say just before she slides on a pair of gold bangles on your wrist. “Are you sure you wanna give these clothes to me? I’m okay with just borrowing them.” 

“Nonsense, babe,” she wavers off before shuffling through your now-hearty closet, a closet that’s now bursting with many clothes given by her. “I needed space in my closet anyway, so take as much as you need.”

So (Y/N)’s closet is basically her trash can, a particular shaggy brunette thinks with a roll of his eyes. Ino fiddles with the piece of toast in his mouth as he leans on the doorway, watching as Yuki essentially treats you like her very own Barbie doll at such an odd morning hour. 

“(Y/N)’s not a doll, Yuki,” Ino lazily calls aloud through a tired yawn. “You better get ‘em out the door soon or else they’ll get late for work. Especially need that money since the landlord’s been on our ass about increasing our rent…” he mutters, sniffing. “Damn bastard.”

She snaps at Ino to be quiet and let her work before she shuffles on a regal blue overcoat over your shoulders that completes your look. When you look at yourself finally in the mirror, you almost think there’s a stranger in your house from the way you look so dignified compared to the you just three days ago. It’s a simple outfit with not much layering, but it’s still enough to ooze charisma and elegance to wandering eyes. You’re adorned in a white weaved sweater with flared, light-wash jeans and white boots to match. Over the outfit lies the coat that drapes almost like a king’s mantle behind you and the pageboy cap as your crown.

Yuki creeps up behind you, her manicured hands on your shoulders affirmingly. “How’re you feeling, hun?” she asks quietly as she shares the same sight with you in the mirror. “Don’t you look wonderful?”

You know that it was all her work, it was all her creativity that made you into the artwork that you are now, so breathlessly laugh with a smile on your painted lips and thank her quietly once more before whispering, “Yeah… yeah, I do.”

Her eyes study you for another minute, going to stare at the glasses still atop your face. Yes, they were new and much more modern considering she quite literally called your old pair atrocious, snapped them in half, and tossed them over her shoulder, but she was still quite dissatisfied when you told her about your hesitance about using contacts. “Are you sure you don’t want to give contacts another chance?” she sighs. 

You shake your head with a small smile, “I’ll feel completely naked without them,” you murmur, “Besides, I think they actually compliment this look, if I’m being honest.”

Her lips stretch out into a grin, too absorbed in her fashion education finally being used. 

“Well then!” she begins to drag you by the sleeve out your room. “We wouldn’t want you to be late then for your first day as the new you, right? Let’s get you a cab!”

Somehow, you think you really are at your first day at work again from the way you feel that same fluttering in your stomach and from how the people you’ve once grown accustomed to seeing in the early mornings are not merely passing you with mundane nods of their heads but instead, greeting you with wide-eyed gawks and open-mouthed smiles. Some of them, a few who you knew but never spoke a word to, even do a double take and compliment you aloud on the new look. Even the cute barista in the lobby that never bothered to spell your name right at last did after finally taking a good look at the holder of the card.

When you exit out of the elevator, Manami nearly drops the pile of magazines she’s holding when she spots a refined and refreshed you. You offer a bright smile to her and you watch as her gasp slowly forms into an affirmative grin when you round your desk.

She laughs softly. “And who might you be?” she asks with a tease in her voice. “‘Cause last time I checked, that’s my coworker (Y/N)’s desk.”

“I murdered them,” you shrug nonchalantly, earning another chuckle from her. You take it as a good sign, great even, considering up until now, Manami had been rather stoic and a little indifferent towards you because of your amateurism; but now, you suppose that ditching that Plain Jane from just two days ago is finally beginning to do you good by finally grounding a proper relationship with her. “Shame, isn’t it? Poor thing.”

“Truly,” she nods. Her eyes trail further down until they spot something that makes her gasp. “Don’t tell me those are—”

“—the new calfskin gold studded Louboutin boots?” you finish for her. You flex your ankle and show off the ravishing red bottoms of your shoes. “Oh yeah.”

Manami squeals in excitement and rushes over to your desk, begging to take a look at them. “How on earth did you manage to get your hands on these?! I’ve been looking for them fo—”

The elevator dings again but with a tone that makes you and Manami flinch. Both of you stiffen and straighten out your posture, falling into a thick silence when out comes Geto traipsing out like he usually did—his aura being nothing less than dominating. You and Manami chime out in sync a good morning to him as he saunters towards his office as he begins to shuffle off his coat as usual to toss to you until he looks up and catches you in his field of vision.

He stops all of a sudden with his eyes dancing about your figure, a stark contrast to the rest of his paralyzed body. Geto’s lips thin all of a sudden, and so do his eyes when they scan your outfit. He takes in a sharp breath and opens his mouth to say something to you, yet nothing comes out, even as your eyes glisten with anticipation.

It merely instead zips itself close and he finally whisks himself into his office, coat still on and briefcase still in hand, and slams the door shut. 

But not without glancing at you one last time.

Much has changed in the past month for the better.

Yuki was a godsend—she had been your guardian angel, your fairy godmother of sorts—because you swore your career life had taken a complete 180° the moment your closet was revamped. Ever since that makeover, you had felt so much more confident in your actions, so much lighter on your feet. The price of your efforts was beginning to pay off as well, as Geto began to slowly thaw his icier sense of self when you began to actually put effort into your appearance. His thrusts of his coat towards you began to become less aggressive, was significantly more lenient when it came to more of the impossible tasks, and had at one time actually muttered a ‘good morning’ to you and Manami after months of greeting with silence and judgemental glances.

She’d occasionally check up on you every once in a while, usually to offer new clothes that she didn’t want anymore. And by offer, it actually just meant packing them in a box from her place to yours with a post-it that’d usually read “With love, YT ❤” in neat cursive. Along with forming a close bond with Yuki, your relationship with Manami improved significantly, especially when you gave her those white Louboutins she was eyeing. She often invited you to lunch with her other friends, Larue and Remi. 

The iconic John Galliano once said that, “The joy of dressing is an art.” A month ago, you would’ve never believed what you would think is a rather tacky statement, but now, you can truly see it to believe it. It never occurred to you to actually look at your surroundings closely, but you often would sometimes take a few seconds out of your day to admire the many colors and materials that would adorn your coworkers. Whether it be admiration for their sense of style or mild jealousy over luxurious pieces, you were finally understanding what makes fashion, fashion.

And your epiphany was awarded today with the task that you thought would never come into the light of your days working for Geto—being tasked with dropping off The Book.

The Book was a collection of pieces that were needed for the upcoming edition of the magazine, regarding it as being the most important item in the entire company. It was a duty that usually Manami tended to, but she hypothesized that you managed to finally get on Geto’s good side after a while and congratulated you. Manami spoke to you briefly about how trivial The Book was to both Geto and Kaizen. She told you about how you must guard it and Geto’s key to his penthouse with your life, and that you were to remain absolutely invisible to him if he was in the apartment. Manami told you because it was usually the hour he needed most concentration—it was during the later hours of the day that he usually mended last minute edits to the edition or he was working on his latest fashion collection since he was only able to work on it during the weekends as Kaizen took too much of his time.

Manami told you he would most likely be found on the second floor of his penthouse, and you were to remain on the first floor at all costs. 

“The editors will finish The Book around 10:30 or 11:00 at night, wait in the office until then. Then, drop the book off at his penthouse at no later than 11:30 with his dry cleaning, too.”

Her words echo in your mind as you tiptoe out of the cab and look up to see a gleaming, glamorous building sitting in the heart of the city. It’s one you’ve passed a plenty of times—hell, you pass it on your way to work—but it never occurred to you that it’d be this antique white, Parisian-styled building that would be the abode of your boss. 

“Take the elevator to the top floor and enter his apartment. Do not call out his name, don’t wander around, don’t even make a single sound. You are nothing more than a ghost when you step foot into his house.”

The only doors that are on the very top floor of the apartment complex are two large metal doors that sit before you. You enter the key into the keyhole and push them open with controlled force, closing them as quietly as possible with Manami’s whispers still floating about your head. You knew that Geto was certainly a man of luxury, but to see that wealth exempt in a form other than fashion was a sight that you weren’t sure if your eyes deserved to feast on. Sculptures and paintings decorated the foyer and hallway, adding occasional splashes of color to the ivory-adorned apartment. After hanging the dry cleaning in the designated coat closet, the first room you enter - and perhaps the only one you’ll ever be in - is the said living room with the glass coffee table sitting in the center of it.

“Place The Book on the coffee table in the living room. That’s it. Do not toddle any longer in his house and get out immediately. Don’t let curiosity get the better of you and just simply go afterwards. It’s for your own good.”

But oh, how curiosity is just a little devil of temptation that sits far too easily on your shoulder. A house holds the most of a person, and Geto is just an all too mysterious enigma for you not to at least dip your toe in. The doors at the end of the hallway are waiting for you, but so are the picture frames that sit atop the TV stand. You suppose… maybe another minute wouldn’t hurt.

Your feet carry you slowly to the stand and you crouch, adjusting your glasses to get a better look at the pictures. There’s only two of them—six by fours, both in oak brown frames. The first one is a picture of a smiling young girl with short chestnut hair sporting a smile with a cigarette between her teeth. Beside her are two boys taller than her, both making similar faces at the camera. One of them, the one that’s a little taller with silvery snow hair and opaque black sunglasses, throwing a forced, all-too wide grin that almost looks maniacal. It doesn’t require much brain power to know the other figure in the photo is a younger Geto Suguru, his hair shorter in a tight bun with a rare, but soft grin on his face, his gaze affectionate to the others.

The other picture is of the same two boys arm in arm with each other. Both of them are grinning now, with the white haired boy still smiling a little more largely than the other. It doesn’t take long for you to assume who the other boy was considering that the shade of purple sheathing his twinkling eyes is unique to only one individual in your life. 

Best friends, you suggest in your mind as you study the pictures a little longer than needed. A minute, you thought, wouldn’t do much harm, but how utterly wrong your thoughts prove when you suddenly hear the slam of a door from the floor above. The crash of it makes you yelp and breaks you out of your trance from the pictures and your gaze suddenly snaps to the open stairs above you, as well as two voices echoing aloud. 

“Y-you can’t—” an unknown voice wheezes. “I’ve been your muse for years. You possibly can’t just abandon me out of nowhere…”

“You say that as if I’m not doing that right now,” a familiar one replies back boredly. It’s Geto, and his voice makes your nerves electrify in fear because it’s in that moment that you remember that you can’t get caught inside of his house. “This is the last time I’m telling you, Shigemo. Get out.”

The man that you assume is Shigemo heaves heavy breaths. “You need me,” he declares.

“Needed. Past tense,” Geto corrects as he almost forces Shigemo down the stairs with an invisible force surrounding him. You can see their figures above you, Shigemo slowly stepping backwards with each step Geto takes forward. “You’ve done me well these few years, I admit, and I do thank you for that. But I suppose your expiration date has finally come.”

“I’m not a food,” Shigemo snivels. “I’m a person. Most importantly. I’m the reason your fashion line flourished, I was the inspiration for almost all your works. We’re essentially a team.”

They’re towards the end of the staircase, towards where you are still present in plain sight. Your eyes scatter about a place to hide in the meantime, but there are seemingly no places to hide that would hide you well without the notice of Geto’s eyes.

“A team?” Geto barks out a sarcastic laugh, one that makes shivers run down your spine from both the rarity of the sound and how utterly intimidating it is. “I work alone and I always have. There is no point on relying on anyone of any kind when my independence obviously pays off.”

“Who will you have then?” Shigemo retaliates with a whimper in his voice. “You know that I’m the only one that will tolerate you. It’s not like you can go crawling to Goj—“

“Finish that sentence and see what happens,” Geto hisses, causing the other man to fall into a forced silence.

Your eyes finally land on the small space between the fireplace and a pillar. It’s a space large enough for you to fill and efficient enough to hide you from sight. Unsticking your feet from the ground, you make a run for the small space, only for you to forget about the obstacle that was the ottoman sitting spitefully on the floor.

The thud that comes from your body almost rivals the volume of the door slamming open moments earlier and just like the door, it attracts unneeded attention. Geto and Shigemo stop their bickering for a moment to search for the cause of the sound, only to see you humiliatingly face first on the floor. Geto narrows his eyes at the sight of you, an unwanted visitor in his home. 

A pained groan slips from your lips accidentally. You silently curse yourself for not taking the time to properly break into the tantalizing loafers Yuki bought you the day prior and wince at the pain blooming from your knees and chest. When you finally get up, you can’t help but notice that everything around you seems rather… hazy.

“Who is that…” Shigemo mutters.

Geto bites back a sigh and instead, pinches the bridge of his nose. He supposes that despite your improved mannerisms, your clumsiness still has yet to dissipate. Annoyed, he grunts out, “One of my new assistants.”

Shaking his head, Geto decides to deal with you later. His home is already suffocated with one individual, he doesn’t need another clogging the atmosphere up. He returns his attention back to Shigemo. “I thought I told you to leave,” he states, shoving his bag towards him.

Shigemo’s face paints a horrified expression once again. “Geto, please rethink this,” Shigemo pleads. 

He lets out a chain of pleads and excuses for himself as Geto essentially escorts him out with just walking towards him, his face still icy. Shigemo ends up on the other side of the door to his penthouse and it’s there where his patheticness exudes the most—he falls on his hands and knees like a beggar, claiming he’d do anything and everything just to be by his side. 

But his voice is suddenly cut short when Geto finally slams the door in his face, the thickness of them guarding him from Shigemo’s whines. He lets out another sigh and locks up the door securely before dealing with the other parasite in his house.

“I don’t think dropping off a book should take longer than thirty seconds,” Geto drawls as he saunters towards the living room, where you’re still on all fours on the floor, your hands tapping around. “So tell me, why are you still here?”

At the sound of his sharp tone, you freeze. You’re sure you looked utterly stupid and a mess right now, considering that you had just lost a fight to an ottoman out of all things, but you couldn’t let Geto see you in such a state. It didn’t take you long to realize that the reason why everything around you looked so blurry was because of your now-missing glasses that you attempted to look around for. But you pulled a Velma, and just like her, you can’t see without your glasses.

Everyone thinks it’s an exaggeration when you state that you felt utterly naked without them, but you truly did. You’ve been wearing glasses ever since childhood and you really didn’t appreciate the looks you had gotten when you were younger when at times you’d take them off. Some complained that your eyes were too small, too big—others mentioned you looked “off” and “weird” without them. Either way, comments from the other children stuck with you like scars, and ever since then, you refused to be seen without them. 

“I a-apologize,” you stutter, shuffling your body to hide behind the recliner so Geto wouldn’t see how much of a clutter you are. You’ve humiliated yourself too much already in the office and the last thing you truly need is for you to get fired merely because your curiosity got the better of you. “I was about to head out and th-then I heard your voice from upstairs and—”

Your words fall deaf on Geto’s ears. He lets out another groan while stretching the aching muscles in his neck as he closes in on your disorderedness. A hand goes to shield your face—you don’t want him to see the bareness of your face, especially since you didn’t bother wearing makeup today. You can’t even bear the thought of him looking at it. In a rushed state, you wander around for your glasses with your head tucked in, using the remnants of your hair to curtain your face.

A jumble of excuses tumble out of your quivering lip, but Geto is too preoccupied with the gleam of something catching his eye. Laying flat on the floor are a pair of glasses that doesn’t take Geto long to presume who they belong to. He plucks them from the ground and examines them for a brief moment before holding them above you. 

“I assume these are yours,” he asserts with a cocked brow.

Your head snaps up at the sound of his voice directly right above you and through your foggy field of vision is the seraphic figure of Geto holding what seems to be your glasses. Lips escaping a relieved gasp, you hurriedly scramble to your feet. Your eyes are too poor to see it properly, but Geto also shares surprise, but for an entirely different reason.

He doesn’t give you the sanity that is your glasses right away, because he’s much too preoccupied studying your face. It’s so… fresh. Your glasses were hiding such a view, like curtains to a window that unveiled the utmost rare and breathtaking sights. The way your eyes are wide open, pupils blown with a touch of singularity makes him even more intrigued because of how they’re uniquely placed onto your face along with the rest of your features. Your lips, plump with a natural sheen to them—your cheekbones, perfectly rounded. The slope of your nose fell just right. Geto studies it like an artist to a blank canvas, devoid of anything yet holding just the perfect amount of space—wanting, waiting to be filled with anything and everything.

When his eyes stare at you in what seems to be bewilderment, you swallow thickly and look away. But you can only glance at your surroundings for less than a second before Geto takes your chin between his thumb and forefinger, turning your face toward him again. It’s then that you realize that Geto isn’t staring at you, but your face as a whole. His eyes flick with small movements, dancing about as they go from eyebrow to lips, freckle to lash, examining each and every single particle that your face has to offer.

You feel a heat creep onto your cheeks. You’re not sure whether it’s because of the closeness you and him share or the fact that you can’t detect his opinions on the one thing you’ve been disclosed about for years, but either way, you feel weak in the knees; it only worsens when Geto’s thumb brushes over the entirety of your bottom lip, feeling the plushness of it on his the pad of his finger.

“Has your face always been this open…?” he murmurs softly as he studies the various angles of your face. 

You aren’t sure whether it’s a compliment or insult, either or neither. Geto’s tone always had a sort of bleakness to it, but in this very moment, you truly can’t tell what he’s thinking. 

“My glasses…” is all you manage to squeak out, fighting the urge to squirm in his grasp. Another gulp goes down your dry throat when Geto’s face contorts to an irritated confusion before he realizes his other hand holds the one thing dear to your heart. 

“Oh,” he mutters and hands them back to you. His opposing hand finally goes to release your face. “Right.”

Shaking hands go to put them back onto your face again. Sighing internally of relief of your now crystal-clear surroundings, you dust yourself off with your head once more, tucked into your chest. 

“I’m so sorry for this,” you whisper. The heat on your face has now spread to the entirety of your body, your nerves alight with the rush of adrenaline. “I-I’ll make sure this never happens again… good night.”

With that, you scurry yourself out before Geto has the chance to falter. All words to urge you to stay to either scold you or excuse you evaporate on his tongue. He can only watch in a strange silence as your figure rushes down the hall and out the doors, the click of them ringing out in his penthouse.

After moments of self-paralysis, an unknown feeling boils inside the pit of Geto’s stomach. He thinks he’s seen your face before with the familiarity of it unsettling him. The ghost of your face prances about in his mind as he slowly climbs the stairs to his sewing room, ignoring the shattered wine glass on the floor thrown by Shigemo. He instead, refills his own glass again with the nearby bottle of merlot wine and savoring the thickness of it running down his dry throat, embellishing in its warmth.

A single, large window faces the busy nighttime street and Geto walks and stills near it, watching carefully as the speck of your figure on the street below calls for a cab. He eyes how you turn towards the building one more time, doing your usual adjustment of your glasses (it’s a habit you often do in times of nervousness, he’s picked up) before you shuffle yourself into a cab that speeds off into the night.

Geto lets out an annoyed click of his tongue. Something about your face seems haunting and he doesn’t enjoy it. The last thing that he needed for today was even more plaguing thoughts in his head after the loss of his muse not even just ten minutes ago, but now with your face staining the back of his head, his jaw grits in irritation. In a poor attempt to take his mind off the excursion of today and the future, he shuffles about his many sketchbooks to look for any designs he could pluck out for his latest collection. 

It’s an hour in, two glasses of wine later, and somehow, he still hasn’t found a single piece to begin working on that fits into his theme. Miraculously, through the vast array of what is thought to be thousands of sketches, Geto hasn’t found one that stood out to him until he gets to the last sketchbook. It’s an early one—he thinks it dates back to his early college days, when he was just beginning to peek into the world of fashion. A pang of nostalgia hits him all of a sudden when he flips to a specific page that was the start of his history.

It’s the very design that had the attention of many designers. The sketch featured a gold and red embellished outfit, a sheen of glittering flickers adorning it. The shirt features a mosaic of gold and small flecks of color here and there, imitating the many church mosaics he’d often admired as a child. The skirt and collar of the shirt were the same shade of blood red, crimson gems bespeckling them. 

It’s not the outfit, however, that makes his eyes harden. Why would it? He’s seen it many times before. It’s been brought up over and over again—in interviews, in magazines. It’s one of the staples that made Geto the pillar that he is. He knows every detail of it, much like his other designs, so it isn’t the design of the outfit that made him appalled. It’s instead, the person that’s wearing it. 

Because somehow, the eerie sketch of the model’s face that he had drawn years ago…

… somehow replicates your own face perfectly.

a/n: first jjk fic in forever! wowie it's been much too long... also if u need a refresher on who shigemo is, he's the guy with the ponytail that nanami pulled kekeke

10.2k is hefty i know but i couldn't help myself my bad lolol T_T currently just a test run of what i hope to be is a series that some may be interested in because clearly this barely scratches the surface of what i want to embed haha so please let me know how you like it so far :))

continuing, i hope you enjoyed and thank you for taking time out of your day to enjoy my craft, whether it be your first time or your hundredth! once more, likes/comments/reblogs are always noticed and are always appreciated (´｡• ᵕ •｡`) ♡ !!!

[she-is-ovarit]

I'm over the term "gender equality", and the way in which it is being used and advocated for by the mainstream, status-quo left.

"Men and women are equal" operates under the bias that men are the default standard of equality, which women are then sometimes required or expected to meet. Usually statements like "women are just as strong as men", "women are just as capable as men in sports" act as support.

It intentionally is meant to be cheered on as liberating, but the reality is it's a derivative of "I don't see race I just see people", "no race but the human race", "not disabled just differently-abled", etc. It's a form of sexism that ignores sexism. It's "I am going to ignore biological differences based on sex" when the reality is being of the female sex shapes both my material and lived reality in extremely complex ways and can have dangerous consequences when ignored.

The average woman is not is strong as a man and it often takes a deliberate amount of persistence, training, and/or testosterone injections for us to come close to or meet the male default. "The muscle strength of women indeed, is typically reported in the range of 40 to 75% of that of men". The average man could easily kill and overpower me, and if I were an athlete a man who trained equally to me would defeat me in competition.

Women are 47% more likely than men to be injured in a car accident. Cars were designed for male drivers. In 2011 was when "female" crash dummies were introduced into measuring car safety in the US, however sometimes organizations in the US and UK just used "scaled down male dummies" to test car safety for women. As this article explains, we are not scaled-down men. We have different muscle mass distribution. We have lower bone density. There are differences in vertebrae spacing. Even our body sway is different. And these differences are all crucial when it comes to injury rates in car crashes. And what about pregnant women?

We have different needs and different experiences than males and the world around is us designed with males in mind - from housing to automobiles, to entire economic systems. 85% of women will eventually be mothers. When women take maternal leave to care for a newborn while the man continues to work (or returns shortly later), he effectively advances his career and over time earns more promotions and pay. His schedule is to focus on his career growth and then come home for a few hours in the evening to play with their child (or play videogames). Mothers pay a significant wage penalty for having children from being months out of the labor market.

This list could really go on.

"Gender equality" is utilized by men to distract women from focusing on only women's rights and needs to men's rights and needs. It's used to shoehorn in arguments of "men too" and sympathizing with men on "men's mental health" (while neglecting the fact that men are overwhelmingly and in shocking numbers responsible for violence done to both sexes - and are additionally unlikely to want to work on themselves mentally).

Reframing and enfolding "violence against women", "women's rights", "male violence", "female liberation", and "women's oppression" into the vague language of "gender equality" is a deliberate act of obfuscating the power dynamics between the sexes - in which men globally exploit and oppress women on the axis of sex.

And as vague language, carves a place for people to have the opportunity to shift the responsibility and blame onto women and girls for the suffering that men wield onto their own sex.

Women and girls do have advantages and strengths over men and boys due to our biological differences - yet this, too, goes ignored under the vague concept of "gender equality" and the cultural belief system it evokes, which treats man as the mold that women should fit.

[hazeltongzhi]

What's the reasoning behind the CCP blocking a lot of Western social media platforms?

Is it that they refuse to follow the local laws, are they wary of Western and liberal infiltration (more than it has already happened), is it just the collateral damage of the Firewall?

It's really a combination of those factors and another. The first and most important is that social media is one of the most powerful tools for overseas influence meddling and it's largely free. Facebook, for example, is well known to foster racial/religious/ethnic divides in many global south countries, making it easier for the west to pick their favorite guy. Given that, the CPC has chosen to strictly regulate or outright ban western social media sites. Many standard media sites are also blocked for similar reasons but also because of their largely bourgeois class nature.

If you want to operate in the PRC, you have to follow not just laws regarding censorship, but also labor. It's why many game studios, restaurant chains, and etc. have separate PRC offices and the reason is because the CPC mandates companies of a certain size must have CPC members on the board, and certain trades must be unionized (e.g., fast food). Most companies simply do not want to deal with that and especially over the past few years, regulations and enforcement have been getting harsher.

The last is that for the average citizen, if you really want to see the shit on like instagram or whatever, you can just get a VPN. However, most people choose to use domestic social media like Douyin, Bilibili, Weibo, and etc.. That's how I accessed the westnet when I was living in China.

Under socialism, redditors will be liquidated as a class. President Xi Jinping and the CPC is advancing class warfare against redditors!

Left unity win: PRC unblocks marxists.org despite the latter being trots!

[felassan]

Article: 'All unionized Dragon Age: Dreadwolf QA workers have been laid off'

The Keywords Studios workers were laid off in late September

Text:

"All of Keywords Studios’ unionized QA workers were laid off from the studio in late September after Dragon Age: Dreadwolf developer BioWare declined to continue its contract in August. The QA workers, who were contracted to assist with playtesting and quality assurance at BioWare Edmonton, won their union vote in June 2022. All 16 eligible voters said “yes” to joining United Food and Commercial Workers Canada Union, Local No. 401. It was a historic vote, making the group the first games industry union in Canada. Keywords Studios workers were in bargaining with the company when they were laid off following the news of 50 job cuts at BioWare itself. A UFCW representative told Polygon that 13 people were laid off — everyone supporting BioWare. Liz Corless, Keywords Studios’ global head of marketing, confirmed that 13 Edmonton-based QA workers were laid off. “We can confirm that regrettably the 13 Edmonton-based staff have now left the business following the end of a fixed term client contract,” Corless wrote in an email. The group of workers were laid off on Sept. 27. Russwurm added that Keywords Studios has “taken the position there is no more work available.” (Keywords Studios has several QA job postings listed on its website, in Canada and across the world. Many, but not all of these listings, are related to language localization and require specialties that the laid-off workers may not have.) Russwurm said the union filed an employment standards complaint against Keywords Studios this week. He added that Keywords Studios offered “minimal severance,” which the union is disputing. Severance has not yet been paid out, he said. (Several BioWare employees laid off at that time are currently suing the company for “adequate severance.” These are two separate issues with two separate companies, however, despite being linked to Dragon Age: Dreadwolf.) Though the unionized QA workers did not yet have a contract with Keywords Studios, they can attempt to negotiate better severance pay. Keywords Studios is headquartered in Ireland but has more than 20 worldwide offices. The studio was founded in 1998, and does not publish or develop its own games — instead, it provides art, QA, audio, and other development support for other studios, like BioWare."

[source]

(emphasis mine as there are two issues with two companies)

[actualarcanist]

It's Time to Have That Talk About Racism

It's no great secret that China has a colorism issue, where fair skin is considered attractive while dark skin is considered ugly. This beauty standard had influenced not only the Chinese diaspora in places like Taiwan or Hong Kong, but also vessel states of Old China like Japan or Korea. So when white people came along and offered these people honorary white status and helped them develop into industrialization, they assimilated into values of racism and white supremacy easily.

Of course Chinese players don't give any fuck about racism or brown people; they never have to suffer racism in their own country, and are in fact very often the perpetrators of racism against immigrants from South East Asia, Africa, and beyond. They are "developing" along one Western political ideology or another, and most of these ideologies involve exploiting labor from the Global South and other marginalized communities to shore up the work their own people don't wanna do.

When you consider how Brazil has its own problems with racism and colorism - where the white Brazilians take up all the spaces and leave nothing for the black and indigenous Brazilians - the reasons behind Bluepoch's decision becomes clear: better to appeal to the majority demographic of white Brazilians with money, instead of taking any chances with showing black or indigenous Brazilians at all. The same logic as the "white Australia" from Uluru Games, to be honest.

Of course, white Brazilians are NOT considered white enough by the standard of white Americans or white Europeans, but that had never stopped people from punching down. East Asians had never and will never REMOTELY look like or be considered white, but they do plenty of punching down against indigenous and black people. Just look at all the Japanese Trumpsters marching on the streets, or Taiwanese politicians stanning Donald while screeching for liberal democracy.

Yes, nationalism had never been anything more than a tool of control to align us with Western Imperialism and American Capitalism, by elevating SOME of us to the status of oppressors and slavers so we control our fellow people for the sake of our white masters. Yes, it is lamentable that such events happen in our time, but that is not an excuse. Even if we live in a era of white patriarchal capitalism, you still always have a choice, and you don't have to choose racism.

[molsno]

if your political stance is that people changing their bodies to be more attractive is wrong because it's "unnatural", you're wrong on all accounts. people have been modifying their appearances to be more attractive, including physically and permanently altering their bodies, since before the dawn of homo sapiens as a species.

the problem is not that women are choosing to undergo cosmetic procedures to better meet the beauty standards of the present day, and if you think that women (especially trans women) simply choosing not to do these things would accomplish anything, you're sorely mistaken.

the problem is that men hold institutional power in society, and they can use that power to punish women who don't conform. yes, this power they hold undoubtedly influences the decisions of women who undergo these cosmetic procedures, but those women are not all mindless drones bowing to the patriarchy because they don't know any better or they haven't liberated themselves. yes, some of them hold internalized misogyny and willingly uphold these standards, but most of the women who choose to modify their bodies understand that refusing to do so will materially harm them. they're making informed decisions to improve their well-being as much as they can under the conditions of the society they live in.

frankly, I find the idea that most women aren't intelligent enough to realize that they're "complicit in their own oppression" appalling and horrifically misogynistic. you can criticize "choice feminism" all you want, and there are very good reasons for doing so, but placing doubt on women's intelligence and agency, thereby blaming them for their own oppression, is not progressive. it has long been a radical feminist tactic, in fact. if that's who you want to align yourself with, then frankly I don't think you have anything interesting, insightful, or even true to say about feminism.

if, however, your problem is that women are being pressured into cosmetic procedures that they will be punished for not adhering to, then your goal must be to abolish the power structures that allow women to face these punishments in the first place. your targets should be the institutions of wage labor, private property, colonialism, police, the medical industry, organized religion, state marriage, and all of the other institutions that uphold the global system of capitalist exploitation. only when women can no longer be deprived of our individual human rights for failing to conform to the misogynistic expectations placed upon us will we truly be free to make decisions about our own bodies.

[fatehbaz]

The link between warfare and technological innovation has been well documented [...]. World War II was a particularly intense crucible of technological change, and the repurposing of military technologies and industries in the forging of a new post-war consumer [economy] is crucial [...]. Processes of technological bricolage turned the machines of war onto the natural world as global powers competed to cement their economic and imperial hegemony. In Great Britain’s post-war “groundnut scheme” in its East African territories (1946-51), this collision of nature, military hardware, and technical expertise was part of efforts to both produce more fats for the British diet and to demonstrate to the world (most importantly the United States) that, through a newly energized science-led developmentalism, British colonialism still had a “progressive” role to play in the postwar world.

The aim was to produce millions of tons of peanuts across Tanganyika using the latest methods of advanced scientific agriculture. The environmental conditions in the north, where the scheme was to begin, were known to be especially trying, not least the dry climate [...]. But faith in the power of mechanized agriculture was such that any natural limits were thought to be readily surmountable.

The groundnut scheme was to be, as its Director put it in an interview with the Tanganyika Standard, a “war” with nature, and an “economic Battle of Alamein” waged over some three million acres by an army of colonial technicians - many recruited from military ranks - and local laborers, for many of whom the scheme represented their first entry into the wage labor market.

But it wasn’t just the rhetoric of war that was repurposed.

Lancaster bombers were kitted out to survey and discover “new country” in East Africa for agricultural development. [...] [T]ractors and bulldozers from military surplus stores in Egypt proved unable to tackle the hard ground and tough vegetation, so the planners turned to a novel solution: repurposing surplus Sherman M4A2 tanks. The Vickers-Armstrong factory in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne set about rearranging key elements of the tanks’ construction [...]. The tractors, christened “Shervicks” for their hybrid origins, were [...] thought to be particularly suited to large-scale earth-moving and to the kind of heavy duty “bush clearing” that was required in Tanganyika.

Officials sought to dismiss concerns that large-scale bush clearing would have wider environmental consequences, using the well-worn colonial trope that any observed changes in local climate or erosion patterns were due to the “primitive” agricultural practices of the locals, not to the earth-moving practices of the colonists.  [...] As the plants continued to wilt in the sun, [...] [t]he stakes were high. As [J.R.] of the Colonial Development Corporation put it in a letter: “Our standing as an Imperial power in Africa is to a substantial extent bound up with the future of this scheme. To abandon it would be a humiliating blow to our prestige everywhere.” The only option left was to try and bend the weather itself to the scheme’s will, by seeding the clouds for rain. [...] “Balloon bombs” (photographic film canisters tethered to weather balloons) and a repurposed Royal Navy flare gun were used to target individual clouds [...]. The scheme itself has survived as a cautionary tale of governmental hubris, but it is instructive too as a case study of how technologies of war have been turned against other foes.

---

All text above by: Martin Mahony. “The Enemy is Nature: Military Machines and Technological Bricolage in Britain’s ‘Great Agricultural Experiment.’“ Environment and Society Portal, Arcadia (Spring 2021), no. 11. Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society. doi:10.5282/rcc/9191. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. Images and their captions are shown unaltered as they originally appear in Mahony's article. Public Domain Mark 1.0 License for images: creativecommons dot org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Netflix wants to chop down your family tree

Netflix has unveiled the details of its new anti-password-sharing policy, detailing a suite of complex gymnastics that customers will be expected to undergo if their living arrangements trigger Netflix’s automated enforcement mechanisms:

https://thestreamable.com/news/confirmed-netflix-unveils-first-details-of-new-anti-password-sharing-measures

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/2023/02/02/nonbinary-families/#red-envelopes

Netflix says that its new policy allows members of the same “household” to share an account. This policy comes with an assumption: that there is a commonly understood, universal meaning of “household,” and that software can determine who is and is not a member of your household.

This is a very old corporate delusion in the world of technology. In the early 2000s, I spent years trying to bring some balance to an effort at DVB, whose digital television standards are used in most of the world (but not the USA) when they rolled out CPCM, a DRM system that was supposed to limit video-sharing to a single household.

Their term of art for this was the “authorized domain”: a software-defined family unit whose borders were privately negotiated by corporate executives from media companies, broadcasters, tech and consumer electronics companies in closed-door sessions all around the world, with no public minutes or proceedings.

https://onezero.medium.com/the-internet-heist-part-iii-8561f6d5a4dc

These guys (they were nearly all guys) were proud of how much “flexibility” they’d built into their definition of “household.” For example, if you owned a houseboat, or a luxury car with seatback displays, or a summer villa in another country, the Authorized Domain would be able to figure out how to get the video onto all those screens.

But what about other kinds of families? I suggested that one of our test cases should be a family based in Manila: where the dad travels to remote provinces to do agricultural labor; the daughter is a nanny in California; and the son is doing construction work in the UAE. This suggestion was roundly rejected as an “edge case.”

Of course, this isn’t an edge case. There are orders of magnitude more people whose family looks like this than there are people whose family owns a villa in another country. Owning a houseboat or a luxury car makes you an outlier. Having an itinerant agricultural breadwinner in your family does not.

But everyone who is in the room when a cartel draws up a standard definition of what constitutes a household is almost certainly drawn from a pool that is more likely to have a summer villa than a child doing domestic work or construction labor half a world away. These weirdos, so dissimilar from the global majority, get to define the boxes that computers will shove the rest of the world into. If your family doesn’t look like their family, that’s tough: “Computer says no.”

One day at a CPCM meeting, we got to talking about the problem of “content laundering” and how the way to prevent it would be to put limits on how often someone could leave a household and join another one. No one, they argued, would ever have to change households every week.

I put my hand up and said, “What about a child whose divorced parents share custody of her? She’s absolutely going to change households every week.” They thought about it for a moment, then the rep from a giant IT company that had recently been convicted of criminal antitrust violations said, “Oh, we can solve that: we’ll give her a toll-free number to call when she gets locked out of her account.”

That was the solution they went with. If you are a child coping with the dissolution of your parents’ marriage, you will have the obligation to call up a media company every month — or more often — and explain that Mummy and Daddy don’t love each other any more, but can I please have my TV back?

I never forgot that day. I even wrote a science fiction story about it called (what else?) “Authorized Domain”:

https://craphound.com/news/2011/10/31/authorised-domain/

I think everyone understood that this was an absurd “solution,” but they had already decided that they were going to complete the seemingly straightforward business of defining a category like “household” using software, and once that train left the station, nothing was going to stop it.

This is a recurring form of techno-hubris: the idea that baseline concepts like “family” have crisp definitions and that any exceptions are outliers that would never swallow the rule. It’s such a common misstep that there’s a whole enre* called “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About ______”:

https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood

In that list: names, time, currency, birthdays, timezones, email addresses, national borders, nations, biometrics, gender, language, alphabets, phone numbers, addresses, systems of measurement, and, of course, families. These categories are touchstones in our everyday life, and we think we know what they mean — but then we try to define them, and the list of exceptions spirals out into a hairy, fractal infinity.

Historically, these fuzzy categorical edges didn’t matter so much, because they were usually interpreted by humans using common sense. My grandfather was born “Avrom Doctorovitch” (or at least, that’s one way to transliterate his name, which was spelled in a different alphabet, but which was also transliterating his first name from yet another alphabet). When he came to Canada as a refugee, his surname was anglicized to “Doctorow.” Other cousins are “Doctorov,” “Doctoroff,” and “Doktorovitch.”

Naturally, his first name could have been “Abraham” or “Abe,” but his first employer (a fellow Eastern European emigre) decided that was too ethnic and in sincere effort to help him fit in, he called my grandfather “Bill.” When my grandfather attained citizenship, his papers read “Abraham William Doctorow.” He went by “Abe,” “Billy,” “Bill,” “William,” “Abraham” and “Avrom.”

Practically, it didn’t matter that variations on all of these appeared on various forms of ID, contracts, and paperwork. His reparations check from the German government had a different variation from the name on the papers he used to open his bank account, but the bank still let him deposit it.

All of my relatives from his generation have more than one name. Another grandfather of mine was born “Aleksander,” and called “Sasha” by friends, but had his name changed to “Seymour” when he got to Canada. His ID was also a mismatched grab-bag of variations on that theme.

None of this mattered to him, either. Airlines would sell him tickets and border guards would stamp his passport and rental agencies would let him drive away in cars despite the minor variations on all his ID.

But after 9/11, all that changed, for everyone who had blithely trundled along with semi-matching names across their official papers and database entries. Suddenly, it was “computer says no” everywhere you turned, unless everything matched perfectly. There was a global rush for legal name-changes after 9/11 — not because people changed their names, but because people needed to perform the bureaucratic ritual necessary to have the name they’d used all along be recognized in these new, brittle, ambiguity-incinerating machines.

For important categories, ambiguity is a feature, not a bug. The fact that you can write anything on an envelope (including a direction to deliver the letter to the granny flat over the garage, not the front door) means that we don’t have to define “address” — we can leave it usefully hairy around the edges.

Once the database schema is formalized, then “address” gets defined too — the number of lines it can have, the number of characters each line can have, the kinds of characters and even words (woe betide anyone who lives in Scunthorpe).

If you have a “real” address, a “real” name, a “real” date of birth, all of this might seem distant to you. These “edge” cases — seasonal agricultural workers, refugees with randomly assigned “English” names — are very far from your experience.

That’s true — for now (but not forever). The “Shitty Technology Adoption Curve” describes the process by which abusive technologies work their way up the privilege gradient. Every bad technological idea is first rolled out on poor people, refugees, prisoners, kids, mental patients and other people who can’t push back.

Their bodies are used to sand the rough edges and sharp corners off the technology, to normalize it so that it can climb up through the social ranks, imposed on people with more and more power and influence. 20 years ago, if you ate your dinner under an always-on #CCTV, it was because you were in a supermax prison. Today, it’s because you bought a premium home surveillance system from Google, Amazon or Apple.

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/29/impunity-corrodes/#arise-ye-prisoners

The Netflix anti-sharing tools are designed for rich people. If you travel for business and stay in the kind of hotel where the TV has its own Netflix client that you can plug your username and password into, Netflix will give you a seven-day temporary code to use.

But for the most hardcore road-warriors, Netflix has thin gruel. Unless you connect to your home wifi network every 31 days and stream a show, Netflix will lock out your devices. Once blocked, you have to “contact Netflix” (laughs in Big Tech customer service).

Why is Netflix putting the screws to its customers? It’s part of the enshittification cycle, where platform companies first allocate surpluses to their customers, luring them in and using them as bait for business customers. Once they turn up, the companies reallocate surpluses to businesses, lavishing them with low commissions and lots of revenue opportunities. And once they’re locked in, the company starts to claw back the surpluses for itself.

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

Remember when Netflix was in the business of mailing red envelopes full of DVDs around the country? That was allocating surpluses to users. The movie companies hated this, viewed it as theft — a proposition that was at least as valid as Netflix’s complaints about password sharing, but every pirate wants to be an admiral, and when Netflix did it to the studios, that was “progress,” but when you do it to Netflix, that’s theft.

Then, once Netflix had users locked in and migrated to the web (and later, apps), it shifted surpluses to studios, paying fat licensing fees to stream their movies and connect them to a huge audience.

Finally, once the studios were locked in, Netflix started to harvest the surplus for its shareholders: raising prices, lowering streaming rates, knocking off other studios’ best performing shows with in-house clones, etc. Users’ surpluses are also on the menu: the password “sharing” that let you define a household according to your family’s own idiosyncratic contours is unilaterally abolished in a quest to punish feckless Gen Z kids for buying avocado toast instead of their own Netflix subscriptions.

Netflix was able to ignore the studios’ outraged howls when it built a business by nonconsenually distributing their products in red envelopes. But now that Netflix has come for your family, don’t even think about giving Netfix some of what it gave to the MPAA.

As a technical matter, it’s not really that hard to modify Netflix’s app so that every stream you pull seems to come from your house, no matter where you are. But doing so would require reverse-engineering Netflix’s app, and that would violate Section 1201 of the DMCA, the CFAA, and eleventy-seven other horrible laws. Netflix’s lawyers would nuke you until the rubble bounced.

When Netflix was getting started, it could freely interoperate with the DVDs that the studios had put on the market. It could repurpose those DVDs in ways that the studios strenuously objected to. In other words, Netfix used adversarial interoperability (AKA Competitive Compatibility or ComCom) to launch its business:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

Today, Netflix is on the vanguard of the war to abolish adversarial interop. They helped lead the charge to pervert W3C web-standards, creating a DRM video standard called EME that made it a crime to build a full-featured browser without getting permission from media companies and restricting its functionality to their specifications:

https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/the-end-of-indie-web-browsers/

When they used adversarial interoperability to build a multi-billion-dollar global company using the movie studios’ products in ways the studios hated, that was progress. When you define “family” in ways that makes Netflix less money, that’s felony contempt of business model.

[Image ID: A Victorian family tree template populated by tintypes of old-timey people. In the foreground stands a menacing, chainsaw-wielding figure, his face obscured by a hoodie. The blade of the chainsaw is poised to chop down the family tree. A Netflix 'N' logo has been superimposed over the man's face.]

[absolutebl]

Hello! In the latest EP of I Feel You Linger in the Air, Yai addresses Jom as Por Jom. Jom seems surprised but I have no understanding of what Por means so it's significance is lost on me. Perhaps you can help shed some light? Also, how was Yai addressing Jom before?

Por/phor honorific in Thai - I Feel You Linger in the Air

I'm glad you asked it so I don't have to.

I have not encountered it before in BL.

Any of the the Thai language spies still out there wanna weigh in?

I did some poking around - but I could be way off base. Still this what I discovered:

Por is a paternal honorific, luang por is used for respected monks.

So I am assuming this use is relatively old fashioned (the reason we don't hear it often in our normal BL) and either one step more intimate or, more likely, one step more respectful than no honorific. Possibly scholarly?

I'm thinking all this has to do with Jom's demonstration of education. Yai has figured out that one of the reasons Jom doesn't belong and cannot fit in with the servants is that he is more educated than a peasant, which adds up to him being originally from a high status and wealthy family, especially speaking English and having travelled (he has a non-Chang Mai accent).

There is very little Thai middle class at the beginning of the 1920s since trade is being dominated/dictated by the West, or Chinese merchant operations, and Siam is a monarchy. So for a nationalize Thai citizen it's either military, landed gentry with trade operations (like Yai), military, or... none of the above. This changes, especially in the south, throughout this decade (as it did in other parts of the world). So there is a rising bourgeoisie going on in the background but it's not that obvious in Chang Mai at this time.

What this means to Yai is that Jom's family either got wiped out or politically entirely disenfranchised possibly as part of the 1912 attempted coups (or even WWI)? This would be mystifying for Yai because Jom doesn't act like he comes from a military family at all. So his background and status is very confusing for Yai, but Yai does know one thing...

Jom is NOT lower class by the standards of Yai's temporal worldview and existence.

For a young man to be educated and yet entirely alone is very dangerous and suspicious. Also, let's be clear, Jom doesn't look or act like a laborer. He red flags "cultured" all over the place.

Yai is paternalistic and caring towards Jom out the gate because Yai has a big ol'crush but also because he recognizes "his own" is trying to survive while isolated and scared. Yai wants to rescue Jom.

Some Historical Context for I Feel You Linger In The Air

I love history and so here's some quick info that any Thai watcher would likely know, but you might not... ready?

Remember:

Burma (Myanmar) to the west is occupied by the British.

The French hold Vietnam to the east.

Everyone is bickering over what would become Cambodia & Laos.

China occasionally gets involved from the North (also, lots of immigrants from China at this time accounting for a large percentage of the merchant/middle class)

Eventually, Japan would invade during WWII.

In part, The Kingdom of Siam was kept a "neutral" party because none of the surrounding colonial powers wanted to risk offending any of the other players in the area.

Siam re-negotiated sovereignty in 1920 (from USA) and 1925 (France & Britain). But during the time of this show (mid to late 1920s) it was back to it's customary type-rope balancing act of extreme diplomacy with the allied western colonial powers that surrounded it. Recognizing that Thailand was never colonized, it's boarders were constantly nibbled at and it was "ambassador-occupied" off and on by Westerners whose military backing and exploitive business concerns simply outmatched the monarchy, especially in the technology department (as well as by reputation on the global stage at the time).

In other words, the farang in this show (James & Robert) are bound to be both the baddies and the power players of the narrative.

The king of Siam at the time (Vajiravudh AKA Rama VI) was initially somewhat popular but also regarded as overly extravagant since Siam was hit by a major postwar recession in 1919. It should be noted that King Vajiravudh had no son because he was most likely gay (which at the time did not much concern Siamese popular opinion, EXCEPT THAT it undermined the stability of the monarchy).

He "died suddenly" in 1925 (age 44) with the monarchy weakened and succession handed off to his younger brother.

In 1932 a small circle of the rising bourgeoisie (all of whom had studied in Europe, mostly Paris), supported by some military, seized power from the monarchy in a practically nonviolent Siamese Revolution installing a constitutional monarchy.

Siam would then go through: dictatorship, WWII, Japanese invasion, Allied occupation, democratic elections, military junta, the Indochina wars, communist insurgency, more democracy and popularization movements, multiple coups, more junta, more monarchy, eventually leading us to the somewhat chaotic insanity of Thai politics we have today. (Which is, frankly, a mix of monarchy, junta, democracy, egocentric popularism, and bribery.)

(source)

[communist-ojou-sama]

See I think that one reason why it's important not to get bogged down in seeing capitalism as a moral system rather than an economic one is that it warps in very fundamental ways what people's concept of communism is.

When one understands capitalism as bad-ism, as the transhistorical avatar of everything alienating about organized class society and about global imperialist capital expansion exemplified in capitalist labor relations and the indolent lifestyle of the upper classes, respectively, you get wrongheaded moralistic systems like FALC on the one end, and the twitter morons who like to say "If you're not excited to do hard labor you're not a communist" on the other. Both are perspectives built upon ressentiment aimed at the moral failures of capitalist society, when the moral failures of capitalist society are Not The Problem With Capitalism.

Capitalism has fundamental material contradictions. It has progressive elements unique from any previous societal organization, and it has regressive elements grandfathered in from previous societies in order to maintain the social hierarchy that makes capitalist development possible. These material contradictions lead to ideological contradictions. This is Why the result of the fall of capitalism is inevitably either fascism or communism (of which only communism may stand the test of time). Fascism is the sum-total of the regressive elements of capitalist society realized through the capitalist technologies of production, surveillance, measurement, et-cetera. And this helps us to understand what communism actually is: it is the societal organization by which we finally break ties with the vestigial regressive elements of the class societies of old and bring the progressive fruits of capitalist society into the future. Point being, tendencies like the measurement and standardization of production, the replacement of labor by capital, the large-scale organization of capital, these are all things that are by nature morally neutral and-- when not being used to engage in labor arbitrage and drive people into destitution-- good things actually. The job of a communist society is to make use of them correctly, not to reject any of them out of some abstract moral precept.

[mesetacadre]

What do you think of this excerpt?

https://www.tumblr.com/beguines/755310368521355264/what-the-theory-of-labour-aristocracy-tells-us

What [the theory of labour aristocracy] tells us is that there is not a monolithic working class and that achieving working-class unity is not merely a matter of getting beyond ruling-class maneuvers of "splitting" workers. Workers are not split because of an ideological conspiracy; they are split according to numerous structures that are built into the operations of global capitalism. Workers who experience a higher standard of living because of imperialist exploitation are materially invested in keeping this higher standard of living, just as a faction of workers who experience better working conditions because of race or gender or ability are materially invested in keeping these working conditions at the expense of those workers whose marginalization prevent them from getting the same jobs. Hence, if we follow the line of reasoning behind this theory, we will arrive at a notion of class that resists class essentialism. That is, to assert that there is a labour aristocracy, and that some workers who benefit from the exploitation of other workers are embourgeoisified, is to also assert that simply being a member of the working class is not enough to be, at root, akin to the proletariat of classical Marxist literature. Some members of the working class do not have "nothing left to lose but their changes," [sic] which means that being a worker does not mean having an inner revolutionary essence.

J. Moufawad-Paul, Politics in Command: A Taxonomy of Economism

While the reasoning is very agreeable and pretty uncontroversial among the people who find value in the concept of labor aristocracy (although the I think the mention of class essentialism is unnecessary), I find the conclusion a little bit exaggerated. It is true that workers of the imperial core benefit, (almost always indirectly), from the looting of imperialism. It is therefore in their immediate material interests to support imperialism. But regardless of how relevant the divide between workers on both sides of the imperialist system is, the relations that define it don't operate in a dissimilar way to other axes of privilege/oppression, such as misogyny or racism, and the author also shares this perspective, he uses the same in this excerpt. So I think it is a misstep to claim that «being a worker does not mean having an inner revolutionary essence», on two counts:

First, the set of privileges afforded to certain categories of workers does not make them less revolutionary, but rather tends to place the workers who suffer from more axes of oppression at the forefront of revolutionary struggle, exhorted by their generally worse material conditions and greater sensibility towards all kinds of oppression, such as class. Russian women were at the frontlines of both the February and October revolution, often among the very first to stress the necessity of a second revolution after the February bourgeois government revealed their inability to meet the workers' demands. In India, it was the workers at the lowest castes who often set an example in revolutionary consciousness, and it was the analysis of the caste system that developed the CPI in the years of stagnation following the intervention in Hungary.

Second, I think the author has misunderstood two elements of «classical Marxist literature». First, there is not a concept of «revolutionary essence» to be found in Marx's writings. If he has ever written such words, it's most probable he uses it more as a rethorical device or flourish rather than an actual argument of the existence of an «essence». The revolutionary potential of the working class springs from its objective relationship to the property of the means of production. There is no proletarian, platonic essence to speak of. Then, I think the author should also brush up on the two kinds of consciousness Lenin describes in What Is to be Done: economic-spontaneous consciousness and political-revolutionary consciousness. The first kind arises naturally from the worker's own experience with class antagonism, the kind manifested with non-revolutionary trade unions. The second arises from both a political education and an active participation in the class struggle within a revolutionary Communist Party.

Only that first kind of spontaneous consciousness is very vulnerable to the material benefits afforded by imperialism, and a proper education and construction of political-revolutionary consciousness will place any imperial core worker in anti-imperialist positions. The problem the author describes is real, don't get me wrong, but it's a problem that has been thoroughly described and solved more than a hundred years ago. We can debate about the degree to which imperialism makes this education difficult nowadays, but this main thesis the author expresses is wrong, or at least founded in opposition to a problem that is not relevant.

[albertserra]

I really think Americans need to learn more about other countries in the global south. Rather than replying with things like well our (us Americans’) government is awful and exploits the poor and persecutes racial and other minorities and we don’t have accessible healthcare and our infrastructure sucks and our militarized police kill and assault and harass people daily and on and on and on (all of which are of course true!)… instead take some time to understand where someone from the global south’s frustrations are coming from and look at the living standards, the government and police force, etc. Are for them.

Their governments can also treat them awfully *on top* of being colonized (in the traditional and neo- sense) and exploited and pillaged by america and other western countries. Thai student protestors being murdered by their right wing military government, indigenous Vietnamese peoples being persecuted by the Vietnamese government and military, Egyptians not being allowed to protest as just came up recently with brave people coming out to do so anyway in solidarity with Palestine. Read about what Bolsonaro did in Brazil while he was president. To name just a few examples. All while American/European hegemony and exploitation mean food is less accessible and what Americans consider “basic” technology costs multiple times as much relatively and their labor is constantly exploited etc.

Instead of countering with examples of life in America also sucking for a lot of us, learn about the conditions that people from the global south are living in that make them rightfully despise America